BREAKING: Famous Global Warming Alarmist No Longer Alarmed

MSNBC reports that the lack of temperature rise in the last 12 years has convinced environmentalist James Lovelock ( The Gaia Hypothesis) that the climate alarmism wasn’t warranted.

By AMIR EFRATI

The riddle of the space asteroid start-up has been solved.

On Tuesday, Planetary Resources Inc., a company whose goals have been shrouded in secrecy, will outline a plan to convince governments that the technology exists to snare an asteroid and pursue space mining in the near future.

The company hopes to pressure the U.S. and other governments to lasso an asteroid and put it into a lunar orbit, setting up a competition to have private space companies do the mining, said John S. Lewis, a University of Arizona planetary-science professor who said he is an adviser to Planetary.

The approach faces budget and political challenges, both in the U.S. and overseas. National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been pulling back from unmanned missions amid budget cuts by Congress. Money from any government for such an ambitious robotic proposal that is rife with technical questions and uncertainties is likely to be difficult.

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via LifeHacker

Ever wondered if you respond to emails too slowly, or what kinds of email you receive most often? Gmail Meter is a simple script designed for Google Docs that can get to the bottom of how you communicate, statistically speaking.

What will Gmail Meter uncover? How many emails you’ve received and sent, what your email traffic looks like each day, your various categories of email, word count, and—my favorite—how long it takes you to respond to a message (on average). It’s pretty easy to set up. Just watch the video above or follow these instructions:

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Jamie Sturgeon

Long coveted by consumers, the iPhone has come to be quietly begrudged by some partner wireless operators, who, owing to the device’s overwhelming popularity, pay Apple Inc. far higher prices per unit than they do on other smartphones.

Yet some say a shift is afoot that could restore a degree of power to carriers and in the process deliver to their investors a cut of the windfall now enjoyed by Apple shareholders.

Analysts at BMO Capital Markets said in a note Monday they believe unit costs for Apple devices are coming under pressure as new competitors nip at the iPhone’s heels and changing demographics in the smartphone market start to favour lower-cost handsets.

Read the rest here.

To the envy of its New York neighbours, a once sleepy dairy enclave in Pennsylvania has been completely revitalised by shale gas fracking. But the farmers of Troy tell the FT’s Christopher Booker that even if drilling is allowed in New York, problems remain ahead.

Japan’s stock market, hobbled by more than a decade of deflation, is showing companies will stage a full earnings recovery from the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, pricing in the biggest increase in profits compared with other countries since 2001.

Income in the Nikkei 225 Stock Average (NKY) will rise by 69 percent in 2012, after plunging 31 percent last year, according to more than 2,600 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. At 24.5 times reported earnings, Japanese equities are the most expensive among the world’s 60 biggest markets, trading so high that only by meeting analysts’ forecasts will ratios come back in line with global stocks, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

“The worst is over for Japan in terms of earnings,” Masafumi Oshiden, an investment manager at ING Mutual Funds Management Co. (Japan) Ltd., said in a telephone interview on April 18. The firm oversees about 1.5 trillion yen ($18.4 billion). “Consumer spending is improving and corporate earnings are rebounding. The cautious mood following the quake is gone.”

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via Lightspeed Active Trading Blog

April 20th, 2012 – Volume is the lifeblood of active traders. It’s the ocean in which market transactions are completed easily, quickly and without slippage. Sufficient volume provides traders the ability to move quickly in and out of securities without delay. Volatility and volume generally move in the same direction, with higher volumes usually combining with higher volatility and vice versa. Unfortunately, traders are currently facing a low-volatility, low-volume stock trading environment.

Volume has been plummeting for the last three years. Things are worse now than they were even after the great crash of 1987 and the dot-com bust of 2000. What’s happening to the volume and how can active traders find profits in the current low-volume, low-volatility market?

Read the rest here.

Let’s get something straight: we did not have a housing “bubble”, in the usual sense of the word. The mainstream narrative of crazed, greedy, irresponsible homeowner-wannabes driving prices unsustainably high, causing the still ongoing crash is wrong. Yes, we had a housing “bubble” in one sense; prices soared way beyond reality because excess demand fueled irrational bidding wars. The lie deals with why we had a housing bubble. The lie matters because like all problem-defining narratives, it shapes the policy solutions offered. So let’s take a look at the lie.

Joe Weisenthal on why no one should worry…

By Angela Moon and Doris Frankel

(Reuters) – The wild ride in Apple shares this year could get even more interesting when the company reports quarterly results after the bell on Tuesday.

Judging by trade in the options market, investors expect Apple shares to jump or fall by about 7.5 percent, a much greater swing than the average post-earnings move of about 4.25 percent in the past four quarters.

Read the rest here.

Earlier this month, President Obama signed into law the Jobs Act, short for Jumpstart Our Business Startups. This Act won bipartisan support because it purports to create jobs by making it easier for small businesses to raise capital. However, the Jobs Act will also significantly loosen the regulatory requirements on hedge funds – whether or not this was the intent of Congress.

Read the rest here.

“North Carolina State Senator Eric Mansfield was born in 1964, a year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed the right to vote for African-Americans. He grew up in Columbus, Georgia, and moved to North Carolina when he was stationed at Fort Bragg. He became an Army doctor, opening a practice in Fayetteville after leaving the service. Mansfield says he was always “very cynical about politics” but decided to run for office in 2010 after being inspired by Barack Obama’s presidential run.

He ran a grassroots campaign in the Obama mold, easily winning the election with 67 percent of the vote. He represented a compact section of northwest Fayetteville that included Fort Bragg and the most populous areas of the city. It was a socioeconomically diverse district, comprising white and black and rich and poor sections of the city. Though his district had a black voting age population (BVAP) of 45 percent, Mansfield, who is African-American, lives in an old, affluent part of town that he estimates is 90 percent white. Many of his neighbors are also his patients.

But after the 2010 census and North Carolina’s once-per-decade redistricting process — which Republicans control by virtue of winning the state’s General Assembly for the first time since the McKinley administration — Mansfield’s district looks radically different. It resembles a fat squid, its large head in an adjoining rural county with little in common with Mansfield’s previously urban district, and its long tentacles reaching exclusively into the black neighborhoods of Fayetteville. The BVAP has increased from 45 to 51 percent, as white voters were surgically removed from the district and placed in a neighboring Senate district represented by a white Republican whom GOP leaders want to protect in 2012. Mansfield’s own street was divided in half, and he no longer represents most of the people in his neighborhood. His new district spans 350 square miles, roughly the distance from Fayetteville to Atlanta. Thirty-three voting precincts in his district have been divided to accommodate the influx of new black voters. “My district has never elected a nonminority state senator, even though minorities were never more than 45 percent of the vote,” Mansfield says. “I didn’t need the help. I was doing OK.”

Mansfield’s district is emblematic of how the redistricting process has changed the political complexion of North Carolina, as Republicans attempt to turn this racially integrated swing state into a GOP bastion, with white Republicans in the majority and black Democrats in the minority for the next decade. “We’re having the same conversations we had forty years ago in the South, that black people can only represent black people and white people can only represent white people,” says Mansfield. “I’d hope that in 2012 we’d have grown better than that.” Before this year, for example, there were no Senate districts with a BVAP of 50 percent or higher. Now there are nine. A lawsuit filed by the NAACP and other advocacy groups calls the redistricting maps “an intentional and cynical use of race that exceeds what is required to ensure fairness to previously disenfranchised racial minority voters.”

And it’s not just happening in North Carolina. In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans — to protect and expand their gains in 2010 — have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats. “What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.” The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.

The consequences of redistricting in North Carolina — one of the most important swing states in the country — could determine who controls Congress and the presidency in 2012. Democrats hold seven of the state’s thirteen Congressional seats, but after redistricting they could control only three — the largest shift for Republicans at the Congressional level in any state this year. Though Obama won eight of the thirteen districts, under the new maps his vote would be contained in only three heavily Democratic districts — all of which would have voted 68 percent or higher for the president in 2008 — while the rest of the districts would have favored John McCain by 55 percent or more. “GOP candidates could win just over half of the statewide vote for Congress and end up with 62 percent to 77 percent of the seats,” found John Hood, president of the conservative John Locke Foundation….”

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Corexit 9500 was not the way to go. Unfortunately, the sheeple of the world went with it when there was a natural enzyme alternative.

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A great story in light of earth day….

Superpacs are democracy killers imo…

The ocean is vast and seemingly limitless when it comes to our dietary needs; but their may be a tipping point coming soon  due to our gross negligence.

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The 400-year-old “Beau Sancy,” one of the world’s oldest and most storied diamonds in private hands, is up for sale at Sotheby’s auction house. Weighing in at 34.98 carats, the sparkling gem with a rare pear cut is expected to fetch up to $4 million.

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In light of the Walmart fiasco i thought it might be of interest to see other instances of bribery involved with business. The funny thing is it is treated as if the action is few and far between, but the reality is common place. In addition to bribery you can add threats, intimidation, black mail, and in some cases murder.

Documentary- Black Money 

Threatens to reduce S Korea to “ashes” in less than 4 minutes.

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A clear beat….