The real cost of 2008 is more than corruption in the banking system, it is actual lives.

It seems fairly obvious Europe needs to rethink austerity programs. It is not working and they are losing their countries' brain trust.

The USA has a great deal to be thankful for in the leadership of President Obama. He rescued us and upheld the dignity of the American people. He is a hero in every way.

In Veneto, Italy, Stefano Zanatta leads a support group for struggling business people. 

...The economic downturn that has shaken Europe for the last three years has also swept away the foundations of once-sturdy lives, leading to an alarming spike in suicide rates. Especially in the most fragile nations like Greece, Ireland and Italy, small-business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly taking their own lives in a phenomenon some European newspapers have started calling “suicide by economic crisis.

Many, like Mr. Tamiozzo and Mr. Schiavon, have died in obscurity. Others, like the desperate 77-year-old retiree who shot himself outside the Greek Parliament on April 4, have turned their personal despair into dramatic public expressions of anger at the leaders who have failed to soften the blows of the crisis.

A complete picture of the phenomenon across Europe is elusive, as some countries lag in reporting statistics and coroners are loath to classify deaths as suicides, to protect surviving family members. But it is clear that countries on the front line of the economic crisis are suffering the worst, and that suicides among men have increased the most... 

It doesn't end there. The violence against women has increased as well. I can't help but wonder if 'friends networks' that are globally connected help some people 'problem solve.'

Scale of abuse against women revealed (click here)

Wave of internal migration as 19,000 women are forced from homes by domestic violence while forty per cent of groups working with abuse victims have cut staff or services in past year.

The number of women and children across Britain being forced out of their homes by violent relationships is revealed for the first time today, raising fresh fears about the impact of council funding cuts on local refuges.

Almost 19,000 women aged between 15 and 88 sought state help to find emergency housing in 2008-09, showing the previously hidden scale of domestic-violence "migrants" forced out of their homes. Sixty per cent, or 11,300 victims, found shelter at a women's refuge – many of which are overstretched and facing unprecedented cuts.

A separate study, also being presented today, reveals for the first time the true level of cuts to frontline services for domestic-violence victims. Two-fifths of organisations working with victims of sexual and domestic abuse have laid off staff in the last 12 months, while 28 per cent have cut essential services such as outreach and children's workers to keep refuge beds open....

I have been watching this troposphere for the last half day or so.

US Drought Monitor 

April 10, 2012 

Noted the continued 'regrouping' of upper tropospheric turbulence is over droughted areas. The initial turbulence as it was injected with a strong heat system and formed the hammer shape (which is not an unusual shape by the way, it just happened on Friday the 13th. It is however, unusual to be over a continent. It often happens over ocean.) air mass was basically near droughted areas. It is moved east and the new system of turbulence is finding its voricity over droughted areas. I believe this is the case because it secures a heat pattern that allows the consolidation of a heat system with water vapor. I would not be surprised this pattern continues.

If one recalls, last year, when Irene carried a huge water vapor component into the lower troposphere we then saw subsequent storms form with the lingering water vapor and evaporating water from the hurricane rains. This seems to be having a bit of the same pattern. The initial injection from the trops provided yesterdays turbulence and with that still lingering in the lower troposphere a new system has sparked.

April 14, 2012

1830:00z

UNISYS Infrared Satellite of USA, 

Southern Canada and Northern Mexico (click title for 12 hour loop - thank you)

 April 14, 2012
1830:00z
UNISYS Water Vapor Satellite of the US, southern Canada and northern Mexico (click here for 12 hour loop)

In the 12 hour loop it is easy to discern the 'transition' of the water vapor component from the eastern system to the western system. 

The 'transition' occurs at 1430:00z, but, isn't visibly discernable until an hour later.

April 14, 2012
1530:00z
UNISYS Water Vapor Satellite of Central North America 


In this satellite photo the transition of 'water vapor' is noted to be dissipating in the east air mass and beginning to be accumulated in the western air mass.

Craigslist, Backpage, this is a larger issue. This isn't First Amendment, it is a crime.

Just because Craigslist reacted to pressure and now Backpage will probably do the same, doesn't mean the problem is solved. Where one webpage will shutdown the opportunity, another will be found. As distasteful as the idea is, this 'level of advertising' has to be regulated. There really is no other way and makes the merchant profiting from the ads as liable as the advertiser. Money talks, othewise, the entire community to end this criminal content will be chasing themselves forever in a circle. Either a moral society can impose their standards for treatment of children to protect them from crime or it can't.

Sold on Craigslist: Critics say sex ad crackdown inadequate (click here)

August 03, 2010|By Steve Turnham and Amber Lyon, CNN Special Investigations Unit

On a late afternoon in early June, undercover police officers circled a one-story highway motel north of Washington. Inside was a 12-year-old girl who told her mother she was being forced to work as a prostitute.

According to her mother, the girl had started running away from home earlier this year. She found out her daughter was in the sex trade when she saw her in an adult online classified ad. The girl was advertising herself as a 24-year-old with a bogus name. The next time she ran away, her mother reported her missing....


An international effort can and should be mounted, but, guess what, the Third World doesn't have the monies available and now that the First World is in fiscal struggles those monies will not be forthcoming. The fact of the matter is human trafficking works as an income to many in the third world. It is a way of economy, including, ridding the family of a DEPENDENT.

The Backpage Backlash: Nicholas Kristof on ‘Egregious Capitalism’ at The Village Voice (click here)

By Kat Stoeffel 3/27 2:39pm

...In a pair of columns, Mr. Kristof criticized the online classifieds site for maintaining an adult services section, which—like Craigslist’s before it—serves as a virtual agora for prostitutes and their handlers. The more recent piece, published March 17, included a first-person account from “Alissa,” who was sold into sex on Backpage.com starting at age 16.

“Nicholas D. Kristof was wrong about the most devastating ‘fact’ in his Sunday, March 18th, column in The New York Times,” the Village Voice wrote four days later. “According to Alissa’s court testimony, she was 16 in 2003. Backpage.com did not exist anywhere in America in 2003.”...

Unless there are supports to the Third World to facilitate a 'real economy' this will be impossible to stop. The ravages of the Third World have been profound including now the burden of the Climate Crisis that was never their problem in the first place. The human economy of the Third World is just as real as its starvation and drought. How is any country suppose to create a real economy for its people when it is chronically ravaged by First World sins?


Where is THAT morality written into the US Constitution, where Americans are required to address the problems they cause other nations in its consumer habits?

"...and about the legacy of debt we are going to leave our children..." Excuse me? Mrs. 14%

It is my opinion the efforts to save our country from racism is going to take more than Trayvon Martin.

The prejudice has been engrained in our society on many venues. Still today in entertainment for the Right Wing community, Black Men are the 'bad guys.'


What the gun culture has taught us in the USA is that where law enforcement is unavailable there are personal guns. The inner city is as dangerous as remote areas. The inner city has developed a gun culture whereby suburbia was always the place where safety existed.


With segregation obviously evident in the USA, the dynamics to moving the inner city to suburbia has been nearly impossible. So, if the Black Community of the USA wants to move out of the established gun culture of the inner city they have to set up their own segregated suburban communities.


Statistically, there is going to be more crime in neighborhoods with gun cultures and if that is the inner city then there will be criminals of color due to segregation. Segregation breeds this hatred and it is segregation that will foster it.


Crime exists. It is just a fact. The demographics follow incidence of a gun culture. With more guns on the street than ever before in the USA ,crime is going to be notable nearly anywhere. The issue is not skin color it is violence. It is violence at the end of a gun. Guns are not the law, unless a society deems them to be so and with laws now 'designed' to achieve that goal we are all entrapped in the stigma and it will grow like a cancer.


We will fear other now without exception. It is good for business.

Tulsa shootings stir up ugly memories (click title to entry - thank you)

The killings of three black men on Good Friday have locals recalling the race riots of 1921, when African Americans were violently targeted by their white neighbors. Residents say now is the time to make changes.

April 13, 2012, 9:17 p.m.

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times

April 13, 2012, 9:17 p.m.

TULSA, Okla. — In the wake of what locals are calling the Good Friday Shootings, dozens of worried residents from Tulsa's mostly black north side attended an NAACP meeting in the heart of their troubled neighborhood for some truth-telling.

Yes, they were relieved that two men had been arrested in the shootings that left three African Americans dead and two wounded.

They were pleased that the glare of the national spotlight was forcing local officials to work with black leaders. The mayor, local U.S. attorney and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson were present at the first funeral for one of the victims Friday at the north side's Crown Hill Chapel.

But those gathered at the meeting of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People noted that crime remained a serious problem. And just look at what else is happening in north Tulsa, they said. Shopping centers closing, schools folding and a cash-strapped city preparing to bulldoze three public parks, one named for a local black pioneer....