Next step for the Fed weasels – petitioning the Supreme Court in an attempt to completely trample America’s constitution

What is the Fed hiding? They’re like the Catholic Church when it comes to stonewalling and refusing to release information.

Asked if Wachovia knew it was drug money, [DEA Special Agent] Trouville said, “I don’t think I can comment on whether Wachovia knew it was drug money. There were no effective procedures in place to be able to tell them that.”

If this happened in in a third-world country, we’d say their banking system is just completely corrupt, right?

It is an obscenity that no one is being criminally prosecuted. Do we even have rule of law in this country any more?

Time Magazine says maybe our schools are pointless and if your kid drops out, maybe he has a better idea of what to do. Seriously.

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy

Glendale Stewart is already doing this in Detroit. He bought a vacant lot there, put a fence around it, lives in a trailer. He has bicycle-powered electricity, gets water from rain, do a few odd jobs, doesn’t really need money, and has no bills.

Urbanophile profiles him and his blog, Detroitblog, which is a must-read.

My news and Weather iPhone screen

This is my iPhone News / Weather screen.

Sue says my arranging iPhone screens by category then alphabetizing them is a symptom of geek obsessiveness. Hmmm.

The Vindicator fiber optic laser wind sensing system measures real-time horizontal and vertical wind speed and direction at varying ranges out to 300 meters ahead of the sensor. When mounted on a wind turbine nacelle, this forward-looking information facilitates smarter turbine control for increased power output and reduced turbine stress.

Firedoglake thinks so

The generals are firing on their own troops in the trenches for their unwillingness to go on a suicide mission.

There are currently 36 resolutions in states across the country to ban the mandate which forces people to buy private insurance, or face a penalty of up to 2% of their income that the IRS will collect — the very thing that Obama campaigned against. It will become a rallying cry for the right.

Plus, much of the bill doesn’t take effect until 2014. That’s absurd. People need help now.

Fess Parker, megadeveloper and destroyer of paradise,as well as all around lying scumbag — HE DEAD!!

“We have to make sure that these people, particularly if they’re on the unemployment line, have the ability to go back to work, and one of the things that’s preventing them from having that opportunity is the fact that they can’t get past the drug test,” says co-sponsor Rep. Jimmy Pruett (R-Eastman).

How bad is it? “Unacceptable.” And it’s going to keep being unacceptable for a long, long time.

Today, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner called the unemployment rate in the United States “unacceptable by any metric.” Of course, he then warned that it would likely go up before it goes down, so it’s unacceptable, but it will continue to occur. But the real question for many unemployed Americans — or Americans entering the workforce — is when unemployment might be back down to pre-recession levels. Geithner didn’t answer that, but we can do the math….

Ten Bears on “The climate change movement is dead. Al Gore killed it” (promoted from the comments)

Sixty-five degrees today on The High Desert, a four thousand feet above sea-level and but a metaphoric stones’ throw from what were once prolific glaciers close enough to the forty-fifth parallel to call it half way to the north pole. Crocuses have been pushing through since the end of last month, and Dawn and I’s stroll this afternoon through a backyard state park (Smith Rock) yielded an unexpected double pockets full of fresh mesquite, sage and rabbit brush, and California Wood Ducks on the river… a couple of hundred miles north, hundred or so east and a couple of thousand feet in elevation out of where they would traditionally be found this time of year. With ducklings.

We had no snow to speak of this past winter… an early wet snow that did hundred of thousands of dollars to all the ornamental trees before melting off by noon that was more the likely a combination of an early season cold inversion and the pall of the late burning forest fire burning out of control fifty miles to the north. The snow pack in the Coast Range is zero percent of ‘normal’. The snow pack on The High Cascade is either as measured by the perkypants-on-teevee ski-bunny bunch at fifty percent of a twenty year running ‘normal’ or to my four generations of memory fifteen to seventeen percent of ‘normal’, take your pick. Next week I’ll four-by in to the headwaters of the river we were born on to send my uncle on his last trip down the river, and show my grand-children the whitebark pine… for time immemorial its sub-alpine winter temperatures leaving then immune to the cyclic ravages of the pine-bark beetle now predicted to be extinct around here by as early as 2013.

Over seventy thousand square miles of the Eastern pine forests of the Northern Rockies and the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest stand dead and waiting to burn and it is anticipated we will lose up to eighty percent of our pine forests before this is over, perhaps as early as 2013. In time immemorial the bark beetle’s one to three year re-generation cycle was held in check by zero and sub-zero winter temperatures, a generation cycle now seen at two or three a year, and by the aggressive fires both natural and ‘prescribed’ that the beetle itself is an integral part.

Turns out fightin’ fires wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Two years after launching the Meth Project in Montana, adult Meth use has declined by 72% and Meth-related crime has decreased 62%

They did this by mass advertising and most importantly, by listening to what teenagers told them.

Our first campaign focused on the impact Meth has on the individual—the user. Our latest ads show the collateral damage that occurs to users’ family and friends. This new concept is based directly on input from teens.

Is the video here melodramatic? Yes. It also gets the point across in unmistakable manner. Don’t do it. Not even once. I haven’t done drugs in a long time and could care less if you smoke marijuana. But meth nearly took me down. I managed to escape with no lasting damage to my teeth and brain cells. Others are not nearly so lucky.

The Meth Project is at NotEvenOnce.com