Justices extend gun owner rights nationwide
Posted on June 28, 2010
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From the Washington Post. This is big news folks.
“WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court held Monday that the Constitution’s Second Amendment restrains government’s ability to significantly limit “the right to keep and bear arms,” advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.
Writing for the court in a case involving restrictive laws in Chicago and one of its suburbs, Justice Samuel Alito said that the Second Amendment right ‘applies equally to the federal government and the states.’
Two years ago, the court declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess guns, at least for purposes of self-defense in the home.
The Supreme Court already has said that most of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights serve as a check on state and local, as well as federal, laws.
Monday’s decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws, ordering a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that they would eventually fall.”
Clayton
A very interesting Map from Forbes.
Posted on June 20, 2010
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This is a very interesting interactive map of the movement of the population by county in the USA. Click on any given county to see the migration of the populace for that area.
Clayton
The National Inflation Association release of its 2010 U.S. Inflation Report.
Posted on June 18, 2010
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http://inflation.us/2010inflationreport.pdf
This should be a “must read” for anyone with a brain. Here are a few snippets from this report:
“The official U.S. national debt has just surpassed $13 trillion. This does not include the debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are now backed by the Federal Government. Once you include Fannie/Freddie’s debts of $6.3 trillion, our real national debt is now $19.3 trillion. The U.S. also has $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which bring our total obligations to $79.3 trillion or about 5 1/2 times our gross domestic product (GDP) of $14.6 trillion.”
“Total U.S. tax receipts in 2009 were only $2.105 trillion, less than the $2.112 trillion Americans received from the government last year in the form of transfer payments for Social Security, unemployment compensation, welfare, and other entitlement programs.”
“Today, the average American’s net worth (adjusted for real inflation) is down to year 1970 levels. In terms of income, average hourly earnings in the U.S. is now at a record nominal high of $18.99; but adjusted for real inflation, hourly earnings is now about half of what it was in the early 1970s.”
“If you also include long-term discouraged workers who haven’t looked for a job in over one year, 21.7% of Americans are now unemployed.”
“After the U.S. government interfered in the free market with bailouts and artificial stimulus bills, the savings rate plummeted in half to 3.1% in March of 2010. 43% of Americans now have less than $10,000 saved for retirement.”
“During the years 1912-1913 in Weimar Germany before hyperinflation occurred, the average household spent 30.2% of their monthly expenditures
on rent. By the third quarter of 1923, rents fell to just 0.2% of the average household’s monthly expenditures.”
“No matter how inflation is created, it always transfers wealth from the unprepared middle class to already rich bankers.”
Clayton
ROV films oil leak coming from rock cracks on seafloor.
Posted on June 15, 2010
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The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Waning Days of Cheap Oil
Posted on June 9, 2010
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I was hesitant at first to publish this new blog. But on the strong recommendation of my dear friend Ed Maskevich, I am moving ahead with this posting.
As I contemplate the long term affects of the BP Oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and I take into account the other critical issues with oil facing the world today, I am reminded of how I deal with rabbits here on my farm in Michigan. I have a decent garden and orchard on my farm and varmints of all types have been a problem over the years. Typically, I will shoot the varmints that threaten the garden and for years this included rabbits. But I noticed something after a time. The best I could do on the rabbit population, despite my best vigilance, was simply to keep them under control. I was never able to fully keep them out of my garden.
So I tried something new one year; I ignored them. In a couple of years, the rabbit population on my farm exploded and there were rabbits everywhere. Then one year, there were none. All the rabbits had disappeared as if by magic. Slowly they came back over the next couple of seasons and then I had another year with rabbits everywhere. It was at this stage it occurred to me what was happening. With my best efforts, I was only able to keep the local rabbit population under a minimum control. But if I left them to their own devices, they would over-populate and get some disease that would literally wipe them out for a few years. Left on their own, they would always self-destruct.
As I contemplate what we humans are doing to ourselves with oil today, I realize we are about to do the same thing as the local rabbits here on my farm. The world population is getting close to hitting 7 billion people sometime in the year 2011. Every human being born consumes some piece of world energy and resources. The primary resource consumed is oil as it is not only used for fuel, but also fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides for food production. The great human strides in being able to generate more food (in yield per acre) as well as being able to transport that food to the areas that need it is based exclusively upon cheap oil.
I put together a graph that shows world oil production compared to world population growth in billions of people.
I made a basic assumption that the oil output required to support the world population would be the same going down as it was going up. On the graph I show a blue line for world population and the projection for future growth. I show a red line for oil production based on peak oil theory from http://people.hofstra.edu. Then I show a green line to show the actual world population losses that should occur as oil availability drops off. Very simply, this shows a reduction of world population of about 3 billion people worldwide over the next 30 years.
For those who doubt peak oil theory or question if there is to be a drop off consider this latest graphic from the US Department of Energy, http://www.eia.doe.gov.
To be honest, as I think about this information, my knees get weak and my heart starts to palpitate. I expect no one of the 7 billion humans currently living on this planet will go quietly into the night. I suggest that not only is everyone going to fight for these diminishing resources, the battles in fact have already begun thus hastening the inevitable. While the USA has been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq for lots of foolishly stated reasons, it has really always been about oil. If the USA goes to war in Iran, it will also be about oil. The reason why we stupidly risk drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico at 23,000 feet below sea level causing dramatic environmental disasters is also because of diminishing oil.
Since 1998, an estimated 5 million people have died in wars in the Congo. Yet we have no troops there and we are not trying to stop the WWII level death rates. At the same time we never hear of this war in the Main Stream Media or the western press. It is a forgotten war. Why is this? I submit because there is no oil yet found in the Congo.
As a species, I think we as humans are about to self-destruct. The environmental impact of the gulf oil disaster is at this stage immeasurable. Billions of cubic feet of methane have leaked into the atmosphere from this disaster. Meanwhile, the volcano like oil flow from the BP leak site has turned the corner around Florida and is now heading out into the Atlantic Ocean via the Gulf Stream. Cracks in the seabed around the drill site have also now formed and more oil is gushing out on top of what is coming from the destroyed BP drill pipe. This means that even if they managed to stop the one leak, these others from the ocean floor cracks will continue to do their damage. It would not surprise me if the BP oil leak was still continuing to spill oil into the ocean well into the summer of 2011 doing its ongoing damage to the lowest level of our world food chain. Add to this the fact that national economies are staggering and collapsing all around the world with no end in sight and the obvious results of all this will be more war as nations struggle to keep what is left to them.
Just like the rabbits on my farm, I think we are about to witness a massive die off. Except instead of rabbits, it will be our own demise. Three billion people have to be removed from this planet because we do not have the energy and resources to support them any longer. This demise will clearly occur in a calamitous fashion as I suspect most people will fight for life. My knees are buckling again at this thought.
When this world explodes into revolution, starvation, disease and war, our downfall will not have been caused by any conspiracy theory or master plan set in motion by elites to control the masses. It will come about due to our own stupidity and shortsightedness as a species. We have over populated ourselves and have spent our time poorly as we consumed our cheap, non-replaceable oil energy. Now time has run out and we have no good alternatives to present to save ourselves. I am fearful the evidence says the time has arrived for our own mass die off and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
Though I am not an overly religious person, a prayer comes to mind at this late juncture:
Eph 6: 13-17 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
Clayton
Another Oil Spill Graphic That Will Ruin Your Day
Posted on June 8, 2010
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Clayton
Visualizing Obama’s budget cuts.
Posted on June 4, 2010
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I liked this, so I decided to post it.
Clayton
Live BP Oil Disaster Feed
Posted on May 29, 2010
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New NASA Image of Gulf Spill Moving Towards Atlantic Ocean
Posted on May 22, 2010
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This is the latest image from NASA of the Gulf oil disaster. This makes me sick to my stomach to look at, but it is important. So I am posting it.
As a quick reference, here is a picture of what the Gulf Stream looks like.
Clayton
Mathmatics and the Gulf Oil Spill - A One Time in History Event
Posted on May 19, 2010
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It has now been nearly a month after the April 20th Deepwater Horizon disaster that has resulted in the largest oil spill in history and the “Gusher in the Gulf” continues unabated. I decided I was tired of the lies I that have been feed to me by the MSM and have put a pencil to paper to figure out how big this oil spill really is. Get ready, this is pretty scary stuff.
I started with the premise that the underwater spill is likely the most telling of the size of this disaster. Most experts agree that the underwater plume is now 10 miles long and 300 feet deep. Width estimates of the spill vary. NPR estimates the width at its thickest to be four to five miles wide. “What I can tell you is what we know about their size and their extent. It looks like they are, at the most, four or five miles wide, and they are roughly 10 or 15 miles long.”
We know that the spill is not in a straight line and it does taper end to end. So I took a conservative estimate of saying the underwater spill is ribbon in shape and averages the same in width as it does in depth, 300 feet. It takes 7.48051945 US gallons to make a cubic foot and there are approximately 42 gallons of crude oil to a barrel. One mile is 5,280 feet. My formula then is:
10 miles X 5,280 feet X 300 feet deep X 300 feet wide. This equals a whopping 4,752,000,000 cubic feet. Yes, that is 4.752 billion cubic feet.
At 7.48 gallons per cubic foot, that puts the spill today at 35,547,428,426 gallons. That is 35.5 billion gallons or 846 million barrels of oil!
Compare that to the measly 10.8 million gallons or 250,000 barrels of oil from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and you get a picture of how bad this disaster really is, with no end in sight.
This spill is expected to get into the “Loop Current” leading to the Gulf Stream any day now if it hasn’t already done so. “This Loop Current has generally been sitting about 100 miles south of the site of the crippled Deepwater Horizon oil rig, where thousands of gallons of oil are gushing daily into the Gulf of Mexico. But that could change at any time. ‘Just how far to the north it extends varies,’ according to oceanographer Robert Weisberg of the University of South Florida, who studies ocean water circulation. ‘Sometimes it makes it as far as the wellhead.’” www.onearth.org
People are worried about this up the east coast of the US as far as Maine. “That’s a lot of oil in the sub-surface, and the concern is that it might have a better chance of getting into the Gulf of Maine. We don’t have much experience with that.” www.bangordailynews.com
“Officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) told reporters Tuesday that the so-called loop current, a fast-moving underwater current from the Caribbean has the potential to pick up oil from the south end of the slick and rotate it into the direction of the western coast of Florida, where it will be picked up by the Gulf Stream and taken in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean.” www.csmonitor.com
So the bottom line is this. We have been lied to about the size of the spill from BP, the US Government and the MSM who I am sure have calculators that work just as well as mine does. 35.5 billion gallons of oil is a pretty big mistake to hide, but it is underwater so it is not easily seen. We just get pictures of the spill from the surface. Crude oil kills just about any life that comes into contact with it and it is heading for the Atlantic as sure as freight train on track.
“As the presentation seems to show, this theory predicted that the released oil/gas might not immediately rise to the surface but would instead become trapped, at least temporarily in large plumes below the ocean surface level, suspended at a ‘neutral buoyancy point’ defined by the oil/gas characteristics, the pressure and temperature and the rate at which it became associated with sea water. The expected plume would drift with the current, but small droplets would gradually break off and rise to the surface where it would be observed there.” seminal.firedoglake.com
For what it is worth, 846 million barrels of oil divided by 30 days is an average of 28 million barrels per day of oil is gushing from those three open tubes at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. I am so tired of being lied to.
Clayton
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