Peter Gorenstein reports at Yahoo Finance:

As the deficit grows so does the national debt, which is currently more than $13.3 trillion, according to official figures.

But the situation is actually much, much worse, according to Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff.

“Forget the official debt,” he tells Aaron in this clip. The “real” deficit – including non-budgetary items like unfunded liabilities of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the defense budget – is actually $202 trillion, the professor and author calculates; or 15 times the “official” numbers.

“Congress has engaged in Enron accounting,” says Kotlikoff, who recently penned an op-ed for Bloomberg entitled: The U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don’t Even Know It.

Yet, the debt market continues to have an insatiable appetite for U.S. Treasuries; heading into Monday’s session, the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond (which moves in opposition to its price) was at its lowest level since April 2009.

Continue reading here.

Hat tip: G. Edward Griffin’s Unfiltered News.

That’s according to Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. From an article by Booker at The Telegraph back in March 2009:

And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, “the sea is not rising,” he says. “It hasn’t risen in 50 years.” If there is any rise this century it will “not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm”. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

Continue reading here.

Hat tip: G. Edward Griffin’s Unfiltered News.

In a fascinating interview with Kris Notaro at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Rutgers Professor Katalin Balog discusses some of the most fascinating philosophical issues related to the study of consciousness.

Leaving aside the crucial Brave New World argument, Balog nevertheless touches upon an issue that I find is also of critical importance for the discussion of the ethical desirability of transhuman immortality:

Aside from these issues about the desirability of immortality there is a larger perspective from which the very desire for immortality is questionable – irrespective of whether eternal life would be a good thing. The idea can be found in virtually all the religious traditions of the world including the most ancient, shamanic traditions; it is, to put it very succinctly, that striving itself is the source of suffering. The mentality, by now utterly dominant in the developed parts of the world, of seeking control and power in every sphere, of not putting up with any disruptions in the smooth routines of our lives (“Elevator doesn’t work? Unacceptable!”) is itself the problem. We are terrified of our vulnerability and impermanence and try to overcome it by increasing our power and efficiency. But in doing so, we lose connection to a deeper sense of ourselves. Our world, instead of a living presence, becomes an object to manipulate. You can get around if you are carried in a litter, or drive a car or plane but you are not going to make contact with the ground. It takes the fun out of things when you look at them merely instrumentally as we often do. The same thing applies to our own minds. If you give up striving, say these traditions, you’ll finally get to know yourself. Of course, the point is not to stop doing anything and drop dead. There is a middle way I suppose that steers between the extremes of asceticism and high-powered striving. So, yes, I’d like to live forever. But I shouldn’t allow my life to be driven by this wish.

“If you give up striving, say these traditions, you’ll finally get to know yourself.”

That’s the very key insight I gained during my Year of Nothing. And if that’s any guide, my two cents to these discussion would be that the insight is impossible to grasp from just reflecting upon the concept of non-striving. You have to live the process somehow, truly disconnect from striving, if not for a whole year as I did, for long enough for you to arrive at a spontaneous aha! moment that is perhaps impossible to achieve otherwise.

Hat tip: David Pearce.

An essential piece by Eric Holtz Gimenez at the Huffington Post summarizes the role of the Gates foundation as a key piece in the globalist agenda for totalitarian food control through GMO-spewing mega corporations.

The foundation’s recently announced purchase of 500,000 Monsanto shares for 23.1 million USD might dismay but not surprise anyone who has a clue about the eugenicist agenda that drives the power-hungry globalists behind the Allaince for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Hopefully, now that the links are becoming ever so blatant, more people will wake up to the reality of this mess.

Drew Halley reports at Singularity Hub:

Human gene patenting works on the logic that if a patent applicant has “isolated and purified” genetic material, it constitutes an invention on their part – even if the strand is identical to the DNA sequence found in nature. Proponents of gene patenting (i.e. generally, the companies or their patent lawyers) argue that patent protection is essential to retaining strong investment in genetic research, which speeds up progress in the field. It’s true that patents are important to the biomedical industry’s ability to attract capital – Myriad stock took a nose dive after the Supreme Count shot down their BRCA patents. But the claim that a world without gene patents would stifle genetic research (or even make it unprofitable) seems overstated at best, and disingenuous at worst.

For years, the logic of purification and isolation has held up legally as a justification for human gene patenting – that’s what made the Myriad case such a landmark decision. We recently interviewed Dr. David Koepsell, both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in Philosophy, about the fallout from Myriad, the ethics of gene patenting, and intellectual property. Koepsell is an author and educator whose work centers on how ethics and public policy are shaped in emerging science and technology. His book Who Owns You? is currently being adapted into a documentary film, including interviews with experts like James Watson and Tim Hubbard. Check out the preview:

Who Owns You? – A Documentary – Trailer from Taylor Roesch on Vimeo.

Continue reading Halley’s article here>.

Developed by U.S. defense contractor Raytheon, the device “shoots a beam of millimeter waves that penetrate the human flesh through clothing causing a sensation supposedly akin to being hit by scolding water, or the blast of heat when opening a really hot oven,” according to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

The thing goes by the Orwellian name of “Active Denial System,” and was sent to Afghanistan as a crowd-control device, but the military sent it back home. Apparently they didn’t see it as a useful tool in a war zone.

A smaller version, the “Assault Intervention Device,” is now “being tested” on prisoners.

Not that I shouldn’t have expected it from the sort of people that for years have banned the publication of official murder statistics in my country, but Hugo Chavez censoring this video, which so eloquently denounces the nightmare of Caracas’ ever-increasing street violence, is just too much of an insult to bear.

So here’s my contribution for spreading the word, and this humble blogger will wholeheartedly thank you for helping him do that.

Keith Olbermann, at his best, argues that there’s no “Ground Zero” Mosque.

I agree.

Giordano Bruno at Neithercorp Press has a brilliant essay that deconstructs six typical cliches people recur to for rationalizing the sheer insanity of the global economic system, despite the mountains of evidence in front of our eyes:

1. The economy is too complex to be controlled by just a handful of people.

2. Yes, international banks triggered the meltdown, but the “greed of Capitalism” is truly to blame (i.e. Its all the Republican Party’s fault).

3. Global banks would never engineer the collapse of the U.S. economy or the Dollar. It makes them too much money.

4. China would never dump U.S. Treasuries because it would hurt them as much as it hurts the U.S.

5. Ok, maybe the banks are causing a collapse, but to say the government is helping them is just crazy conspiracy theory.

For the actual deconstructing of each one of them, read Giordano’s essay here.