Many Girls Now Begin Puberty at Age 7, 8
August 10th, 2010See: Child Diabetes Blamed on Food Sweetener:
Scientists have proved for the first time that a cheap form of sugar used in thousands of food products and soft drinks can damage human metabolism and is fueling the obesity crisis.
Fructose, a sweetener derived from corn, can cause dangerous growths of fat cells around vital organs and is able to trigger the early stages of diabetes and heart disease.
It has increasingly been used as a substitute for more expensive types of sugar in yoghurts, cakes, salad dressing and cereals. Even some fruit drinks that sound healthy contain fructose.
Experts believe that the sweetener — which is found naturally in small quantities in fruit — could be a factor in the emergence of diabetes among children. This week, a new report is expected to claim that about one in 10 children in England will be obese by 2015.
Previous studies of the potentially adverse impact of fructose have focused on rats, but the first experiment involving humans has now revealed serious health concerns.
Over 10 weeks, 16 volunteers on a strictly controlled diet, including high levels of fructose, produced new fat cells around their heart, liver and other digestive organs. They also showed signs of food-processing abnormalities linked to diabetes and heart disease. Another group of volunteers on the same diet, but with glucose sugar replacing fructose, did not have these problems.
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Fructose bypasses the digestive process that breaks down other forms of sugar. It arrives intact in the liver where it causes a variety of abnormal reactions, including the disruption of mechanisms that instruct the body whether to burn or store fat.
Via: Health Day:
The onset of puberty is continuing to drop among American girls, with many girls as young as 7 and 8 now showing the beginnings of breast development, new research shows.
Rising rates of childhood obesity — long linked to earlier sexual development — may be to blame, experts say.
In the study, more than 1,200 girls ages 6 to 8 from Cincinnati, East Harlem, N.Y. and San Francisco were examined on two occasions between 2004 and 2006 by two different female pediatricians or nurse practitioners who felt for the presence of breast tissue.
“We wanted to be careful not to mistake fatty deposits for actual breast tissue,” explained study author Dr. Frank Biro, director of adolescent medicine at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital.
Among 7-year-olds, about 10.4 percent of white girls, 23.4 percent of black girls and almost 15 percent of Hispanic girls had started developing breasts, the team report in the September issue of Pediatrics. Among 8-year-olds, 18.3 percent of white girls, about 43 percent of black girls and just under 31 percent of Hispanic girls showed evidence of breast development.
The figures suggest a rise in early-onset puberty compared to similar studies conducted earlier.
For 7-year-old white girls, especially, they show a doubling of the rate from as recently as a decade ago, Biro said. One study found that about 5 percent of white 7-year-old girls and 10.5 percent of 8-year-olds were showing breast development.
For black girls, the rate of breast development in that study was 15.4 percent for 7-year-olds and 36.6 percent for 8-year-olds.
The earlier data did not include information on Hispanic girls.
Experts called the findings alarming. In terms of women’s health, early puberty, including younger ages at menarche, or first menstrual cycle, is associated with a higher risk of breast cancer throughout the life span, Biro said.
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What’s driving the earlier maturation? Increasing weight at a young age seems to be a main culprit, Biro said. Girls who developed breasts early tended to have a higher body-mass index (BMI) than those who didn’t. Though much is still unknown about how high BMIs kick start puberty, fat cells produce leptin, a hormone involved in the onset of pubertal maturation, Biro noted.
Related: Many Foods Consumed by Poor People Cause Brain Damage
U.S. to Sell $30 Billion Worth of Fighter Jets to Saudi Arabia
August 9th, 2010Via: Wall Street Journal:
The Obama administration plans to sell advanced F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia but won’t equip them with long-range weapons systems and other arms whose inclusion was strongly opposed by Israel, diplomats and officials said.
The proposed $30 billion, 10-year arms package, which would be one of the biggest single deals of its kind, has been a source of behind-the-scenes tension during months of negotiations. Israeli officials have repeatedly conveyed their concerns in private that the U.S. risks undermining its military advantage by equipping regional rivals with top-flight technologies.
U.S. officials say they provided “clarifications” in recent weeks about the deal to help damp Israel’s qualms. Two officials close to the negotiations said Israel still had some reservations, but that the country isn’t expected to challenge the sale by lobbying Congress, which can hold up the deal or push for assurances of its own. The administration is expected to formally notify Congress of its plans as early as next month.
Goldman Sachs Involved with Despicable Bucket Shop Education Scams
August 9th, 2010Via: Bloomberg:
Carrianne Howard dreamed of designing video games, so she enrolled in a program at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, a for-profit college part-owned by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Her bachelor’s degree in game art and design cost $70,000 in tuition and fees. After she graduated in December 2007, she found a job that paid $12 an hour recruiting employees for video game companies. She lost that job a year later when her department was shuttered.
These days, Howard, 26, makes her living in a way that doesn’t require a college diploma: by stripping at the Lido Cabaret, a topless club in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she says. “I’ve got a worthless degree. It’s like I didn’t attend school at all.”
Like many investors, Goldman, owner of 38 percent of the Art Institute’s parent, Education Management Corp., was drawn to for-profit colleges by their rapid growth and soaring stock prices, reports Bloomberg Businessweek in its Aug. 9 issue. Now Goldman, which recently agreed to pay $550 million to settle U.S. civil-fraud charges related to the subprime mortgage meltdown, is invested in an industry under attack from Congress, the Obama Administration and dissatisfied students.
The Senate held a hearing Aug. 4 featuring a Government Accountability Office undercover probe that found recruiters at EDMC’s Argosy University in Chicago and 14 other for-profit colleges misled investigators posing as potential students about the cost and quality of their programs.
Germany: ‘Radioactive Boars’
August 9th, 2010Via: AFP:
Radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is still poisoning Germany’s boars nearly 25 years on, with authorities fighting to keep toxic meat off the market as the wild boar population rockets.
The boars feed off mushrooms, truffles and wild berries which still contain high levels of caesium-137, carried in the radioactive cloud that spread across Europe following the 1986 accident at the Ukrainian nuclear plant.
“In some regions, especially in the south, the radioactivity found in boars is 10 times higher than normal,” Florian Emrich, spokesman for the Federal Agency for the Protection Against Radioactivity, said on Saturday.
A sharp increase in wild boar numbers has meant more boar meat — prized as a delicacy in Germany on a par with venison — is ending up on diners’ plates, raising concerns for human health.
“The U. S. patent code was never meant to cover your genes, your cells, your blood, or the marrow in your bones. But it does.”
August 9th, 2010Via: Esquire:
Like, for example, the gene called BRCA1. There’s a chance you have that gene. There’s an even better chance your wife has it, or your sister or your mom, because that’s the gene for breast cancer. If you could test yourself for BRCA1 right now, or if you could test your wife or your sister or your mom, you probably would, right? Just to be on the safe side. But you can’t test yourself because you don’t know how, and your doctor can’t test you because he’s not allowed–at least, not without permission from the person who owns the gene. And that person isn’t you. It might be in your body, but it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to a company called Myriad Genetics in Salt Lake City. So if you want to know whether you have the gene for breast cancer, you’re going to have to call somebody for permission. Then you’re going to have to pay for the cost of the doctor’s visit, plus a $2,500 fee to Myriad Genetics just to access its gene, the gene inside your body. Those are the rules of the patent game. That’s what a patent means: exclusive access. And the last time somebody broke those rules, the last time somebody ran a test for BRCA1 without permission, Myriad Genetics went after them. And Myriad Genetics made them stop. And that was a university.
And that’s just BRCA1. There are about a thousand other human genes that have been patented. Some of them are in your body, and many of them are important, like the one for Alzheimer’s disease and the one for epilepsy and the one for brain cancer. If you happen to have one of those genes , it might interest you to know that researchers are paying to access them, too, sometimes millions of dollars just to continue the work of looking for a cure.
It’s not just genes , either. There’s a patent on the blood inside every human umbilical cord. So if, by chance, your newborn baby needs that blood, don’t expect to get it for free. There’s also a Swiss company called Novartis that has a patent on the stem cells in your American bone marrow. Don’t expect to access those cells if you ever need a transplant, either, unless you’re prepared to pay.
Some companies have patents on entire species of animals, like the species of mice and pigs that belong to DuPont. You can patent people, too, and not just John Moore. These days, you can get a patent on just about anybody; a patent issued in 1995 to the U. S. Department of Health covered the cell line of an unsuspecting member of the Hagahai tribe in Papua, New Guinea, whose resistance to certain diseases made him valuable to researchers. Other patents filed by the U. S. government at around the same time covered indigenous people from the Solomon Islands and from the Guaymi tribe in Panama.
As a matter of constitutional law, all of this is highly suspect. There’s never been a vote by Congress to approve the patenting of human or animal life, there’s never been an executive order by any president, and there’s never been a decision by the U. S. Supreme Court on the patenting of any animal larger than a microorganism. In fact, just twenty-five years ago, you couldn’t patent any of it: genes , cells, blood, marrow, even a clipped fingernail. Back then, the U. S. patent code looked a lot more like the code Thomas Jefferson wrote, the code that was designed to protect inventions–think cotton gins, whoopee cushions, Twinkies!–made on American soil. But that hasn’t slowed down the patent code, which not only applies to U. S. soil but now lays claim to ninety foreign countries, and even to “any object made, used, or sold in outer space.”
If you’re starting to get the impression that the U. S. patent laws have gotten out of hand, if you’re starting to wonder how they got that way, how they stretched so wide so quickly without any public debate or government approval, the first question you ought to ask yourself is why you never thought about it before. The answer, most likely, is that you didn’t know. You didn’t know because nobody knew. Nobody knew because nobody cared. Life went on, oblivious.
And that’s how it happened.
Appeals Court Rules Against Secret Police GPS Tracking
August 9th, 2010Via: Wired:
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the police can’t covertly track a suspect’s car using a GPS device for an extended period of time without getting a warrant.
The ruling in the D.C. Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of a suspected cocaine dealer, saying that the use of a secret GPS tracking device on the man’s vehicle for two months violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a friend of the court brief supporting the challenge.
Flywheel Power Grid Storage Project
August 9th, 2010Via: Cnet:
Beacon Power on Monday said it has closed a $43 million loan guarantee with the Department of Energy for a project to use flywheels to buffer 20 megawatts of power on the grid.
The loan covers 62.5 percent of the estimated $69 million needed to construct the flywheel storage plant in Stephentown, N.Y. The New York Energy Research and Development Authority is also providing $2 million in funding for the plant which is now under construction.
Once done, Beacon Power said that the plant will be the only one of its kind in the world. Rather than use a large battery, it will use a network of flywheels to store electricity from the grid as kinetic energy and disperse it in quick bursts of up to 15 minutes.
Right now, grid operators typically use natural gas power plants to maintain a balance between supply and demand and keep a steady frequency of 60 cycles per second. The Stephentown project, expected to be completed by the end of the first quarter next year, will be able to provide 10 percent of the frequency regulation services in New York needed on a typical day.
The project is significant step up for the technology, which so far has been used in smaller-scale installation of about one megawatt of power.
Matt Simmons Dead “Of An Apparent Heart Attack”
August 9th, 2010Update: Reader Email
F writes:
You probably want to avoid wild speculation but do you have any possible insights into this, assuming it’s not “natural causes” or an accident?
All along, I never really knew what to make of Matt Simmons. I didn’t post the Bloomberg video below because (no offense intended to family and friends of the man) I started to think that he was using his media access to play his BP short position.
But now… Hmm.
My guess is that, if he was assassinated, it was because of this:
There is no doubt at all that governments have access to exotic, covert assassination methods. I’ll briefly get into some material that might be relevant here.
This is ancient history, of course, but there’s the CIA’s heart attack inducing dart gun that emerged in the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s. This is from Secrets of the CIA:
The atrocities of the apartheid era regime in South Africa included covert assassination projects. Inducing heart attacks was an area of interest. This is from Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme by Chandré Gould and Peter Folb. RRL is Roodeplaat Research Laboratories:
According to Goosen, the objective was to develop the ultimate murder weapon—a lethal poison that could not be traced during an autopsy (or, if traced, could not be traced back to RRL or the military).
Some RRL research reports appear to support Goosen’s claim that RRL was single minded in this objective. The reports demonstrate an obsession with finding substances that would be impossible to trace post-mortem. A report headed: Product information about botulinum toxin informs the reader that the toxin is soluble in tap water, dam water, milk, beer and wine and warns that mixing the toxin with strongly alcoholic substances such as whisky and gin should be avoided.248 Research done into ionophore antibiotics showed that RRL was “investigating the substances for clandestine use” because “the advantage is that if it can cause acute or subacute heart failure, the ionophore will not be traceable”. Overdoses of antibiotics were also investigated through animal experiments. Overdoses of the veterinary antibiotic monensin was known to attack the heart muscles in ruminants. A horse used in an RRL experiment had nearly died of heart failure. These findings, according to the report, had led RRL to investigate the possibility of using the drugs for covert operations against human beings. To this end, tests had been done on baboons. When mixed with alcohol and administered intravenously, the antibiotics killed the baboons within six hours. No damage to the heart muscle could be found during autopsy, and the substance was undetectable in the post-mortem toxicology results.
I haven’t been able to tell, with any degree of certainty, how closely foreign intelligence agencies worked with the Project Coast-Wouter Basson-RRL octopus, but there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that this thing was connected to several foreign governments. See Gould and Folb (linked above) as well as Did this man ‘kill blacks big time’? In short, I strongly doubt that Wouter Basson thought it all up on his own.
So, do governments carry out covert assassinations that are made to look like heart attacks?
Yes, without any doubt.
Was Matt Simmons assassinated?
I have no idea. That’s the point of covert assassination.
Finally, keep in mind that the methods above are probably stone age relics compared to what is likely available now. I don’t reference them because I think that these methods were used here (maybe, maybe not), but rather to demonstrate what these regimes were doing decades ago.
—End Update—
Update: Drowned?
A former energy adviser to president George W. Bush from North Haven died Sunday.
Matthew Simmons drowned at about 10 p.m. Sunday at a home on Salt Marsh Road, according to a press release from the Knox County Sheriff’s Department. The release did provide any details and the sheriff’s office did not immediately return calls Monday morning.
—End Update—
Via: Houston Business Journal:
Matt Simmons, founder and former head of Simmons & Co. International, died on Aug. 8 at his home in Maine of an apparent heart attack. He was reportedly in his hot tub.
John Williams: Times That Try Our Souls
August 9th, 2010This is a good piece and I’ve clipped some of the passages that I felt were the best. I’d recommend clicking through and reading the whole thing.
The advice given is in line with what you’ve been seeing on Cryptogon for years. With regard to the speculation about private property being outlawed: The federal government might try, but they would be dealing with running gun battles at that point. There are a lines in the sand that the government can’t cross, unless it wants open warfare with the states. Mass confiscation of private property would do it, so I doubt that the feds will go down that dead end path. See Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo on threatening BLM with armed responses to stop illegal BLM activities. If those types of incidents start to rise, watch out, the failed state reality show could be coming to a town near you.
Via: The Energy Report:
When Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke admits to seeing an “unusually uncertain” economy ahead, it’s pretty terrifying to imagine what he’s really thinking. What John Williams envisions—and he’s by no means looking to the far horizon—is a systemic collapse, a hyperinflationary great depression and the cessation of normal commerce.
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I expect an accelerating pace of downturn in the next couple of months. The numbers will turn sharply worse. Consensus estimates are already moving in that direction and most everything will follow. Industrial production is still up but retail sales have been falling. Payroll numbers have been flat when you take out the effects of the census hiring. Those employment numbers will turn down in the next month or two, providing an important indicator of renewed economic contraction.
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The popular press will describe it as a double dip, but we never had a recovery. Actually, this is just a very protracted, very deep downturn that has had a pattern of falling off a cliff, bottoming out, having a little bit of bump due to stimulus and then turning down again. Sort of shaped like the path of a novice skier going down a jump for the first time. Speeding sharply down the hill, he goes up in the air and starts spinning wildly as he tries to figure out which end is up with his skis. Then he takes a pretty bad tumble. We’re beginning to spin in the air.
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Most of the growth we’d seen in the last decade prior to this downturn was due to debt expansion. The debt structures have pretty much been put through the wringer and consumers are not expanding credit, generally because it’s not available to them. Absent debt expansion and/or significant growth in income, no way can the consumer expand personal consumption. You have to address employment, quality of jobs.
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The government is effectively bankrupt. Using GAAP accounting principles, the annual deficit is running in the range of $4 trillion to $5 trillion. That’s beyond containment. The government can’t cover it with taxes. They’d still be in deficit if they took 100% of personal income and corporate profits. They’d also still be in deficit if they cut every penny of government spending except for Social Security and Medicare. Washington lacks the will to slash its social programs severely, to change its approach to ever bigger government. The only option left going forward is for the government eventually to print the money for the obligations it cannot otherwise cover, which sets up a hyperinflation.
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We’ve been talking about an economic recession, but we are headed for something far worse. I define a depression as a 10% peak-to-trough contraction in the economy. In terms of the broad economy, we’re not down 10% in GDP yet. So while we’re not formally in depression, we’re certainly seeing it in a number of indicators and I think we’ll be in a depression, with GDP down 10%, in the near future.
A contraction greater than 25% peak-to-trough puts you in a great depression. That is what I envision, but we’ll be taken there by hyperinflation and a resultant cessation of normal commerce.
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My definition has been and will remain very simple. When the largest-denomination note in circulation—the $100 bill in the case of the U.S. dollar—has the same value as toilet paper, you have a hyperinflation. You saw that in the Weimar Republic. People papered their walls with money.
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When people don’t have food, you end up in very dangerous circumstances.
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I think a barter system is where it will go until the currency system is stabilized, but the currency system can’t stabilize until the government’s fiscal house is in order.
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When hyperinflation starts to break, it can unfold in a matter of weeks, months. You’ll need to be able to handle things rapidly. Frankly I think the system will tend to break down. It’s not a happy circumstance. How will a small company get its goods to people? There might be blackouts. Who’s going to get the fuel to the power plants?
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I think the odds are extremely high that we’ll see it break within the next year. I would put it six months to a year, outside. We’re getting extraordinary protestations from other central banks about the U.S. finances, its solvency, risk of the dollar. Before the current crisis you never would have heard any central banker making such comments. As this breaks, it’s going to be obvious that the U.S. is moving to debase its dollar. It’ll have no option to do otherwise. I would fully expect some foreign holders looking to dump the Treasuries. With the dollar plunging, the Treasury won’t be able to get the funding that it needs from a practical standpoint in the open markets.
The Fed will come in to salvage that situation, becoming the lender of last resort to the Treasury—literally monetizing the Treasury debt. The Fed might have a couple different ways to address the dollar situation, from raising interest rates to direct intervention, slapping on currency controls. I can’t tell you exactly how it’s going to go. But you’ll have an environment that’s effectively creating a perfect storm for the U.S. dollar. I hate to use the term but it’s a good one.
Heavy dollar selling will be exceptionally inflationary. Oil prices will spike in response to the weakness in the dollar. Oil is a primary commodity that drives consumer inflation; that’s how you can have inflation in a recession. The traditional wisdom is that strong demand against limited supply causes inflation, but you can also have inflation due to commodity price distortions, which is what we had back in ’73 and what we’ve seen over the last year or so.
Research Credit: pookie, tochigi
Fed Set to Downgrade Outlook for U.S.?
August 9th, 2010Additionally, Bloomberg is running some chatter about the Fed possibly having to buy up more debt directly:
Gold may climb in London on increased demand for a protector of wealth as the dollar weakens and on speculation that the Federal Reserve will step up buying of bonds to prop up the U.S. economy.
Via: Financial Times:
Although Fed policymakers still believe the basic trajectory of the economy remains one of moderate expansion, there may be more attention given to heightened dangers of a sharp slowdown. “The FOMC will have to tone down its assessment of the economy in view of recent weak indicators on real growth, real consumption spending and employment,” said Brian Bethune and Nigel Gault, economists at Global Insight.
The latest poor reading came in Friday’s monthly employment report, which showed the US private sector creating only 71,000 jobs in July – not enough to keep up with population growth, let alone bring down the unemployment rate. That followed news a week earlier that growth in US gross domestic product slowed from an annualised rate of 3.7 per cent in the first quarter to 2.4 per cent in the second quarter.
“Given how low inflation already is, and given the potential for the recovery to falter, we expect Fed officials will highlight downside risks and signal a bias to ease in the FOMC statement,” said Jim O’Sullivan, chief economist at MF Global.
