Defense spending has shrunk significantly
Medicaid, Medicare and other health services are the huge gainers here... Fifty years ago Medicare and Medicaid didn't even exist
Bonus Numbers! Federal spending has grown roughly as fast as the overall economy over the past 50 years. In 1962, federal spending was $707 billion and accounted for 18 percent of U.S. GDP. In 2011, federal spending was $3.1 trillion and accounted for 24 percent of GDP.
Please continue reading at: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/05/14/152671813/50-years-of-government-spending-in-1-graph
...none other than George Soros has just started a 3-month countdown to European the European D(oom)-Day.
From Reuters:
Germany and its central bank are unlikely to lead the way out of the euro zone debt crisis within three months time, after which it will be too late, U.S. billionaire George Soros said on Saturday.
Speaking at an economic conference in Trento, Italy, Soros said that the euro crisis - which he defined as a sovereign debt crisis and a banking crisis closely interlinked - threatened to destroy the European Union and plunge it into a lost decade like Latin America in the 1980s.
Reposted from “Haunting the Library” (and Watts Up With That? ), another clueless journalist combined with an artist/activist makes The Guardian look pretty darned stupid. Five minutes or less of checking would have prevented this blunder.
Guardian Goes “Full Stupid” on Arctic Ice, Contradicts Itself.
The Guardian managed to outdo itself in it’s latest foray into global warming, claiming that Arctic sea ice has declined by three quarters in the last three decades. In a series of “factoids” following an interview with pop celebrity and latest Greenpeace spokesperson for the Arctic ice, Jarvis Cocker, Lucy Seigle, the Guardian’s environment reporter, informed readers that:
Of the Arctic sea ice, 75% has been lost over the past 30 years. Last year saw sea-ice levels plummet to the second-lowest since records began. It is estimated that the North Pole could be ice-free in the summer within the next 10-20 years.
However, the problem with this was not just it’s total departure from both reality and common sense, but the fact that an article in the Guardian only a couple of weeks beforehand had pointed out that this simply isn’t the case.
Quoting the Met Office’s Chief Scientist, Julia Sligo, the article noted that such claims were simply “not credible” -
She also said that suggestions the volume of sea ice had already declined by 75% already were not credible. “We know there is something [happening on the thinning of sea ice] but it’s not as dramatic as those numbers suggest.”
Scientists in the School of Chemistry have developed a recyclable system for converting carbon monoxide (CO) directly into more complicated organic molecules using depleted uranium.The research, funded by the Royal Society and European Research Council, was led by Dr Stephen Liddle, an expert in inorganic chemistry. Details of the new procedure — which can return the molecule that performs the transformation back to its start point — have been published in the prestigious academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
Phthalates in PVC flooring materials can be absorbed by children's bodies, a new study shows.
These chemicals -- which are suspected to cause asthma, allergies and other chronic diseases in children -- can be ingested with food, by breathing and through the skin, according to the researchers at Karlstad University in Sweden.
Phthalates are softening agents found in construction materials and in many consumer products, including toys, cleaning solvents and packaging. PVC flooring contains phthalates, and research has shown that flooring is a significant source of indoor dust in homes.
In this study, researchers analyzed urine samples from 83 children, aged 2 months to 6 months, and found that levels of certain phthalates (MBzP, which is related to BBzP) were higher in babies that had PVC flooring in their bedrooms.
....But while fusion actually happened during that four-second window, the energy it took to get the reaction going was eight times more than the power that came out. And while experiments have also been done in England, Japan, South Korea and a few other countries, no one has yet reached so-called “breakeven,” where a reactor generates net power.
ITER is based on the 'tokamak' concept of magnetic confinement. The fuel, a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen, is heated to temperatures in excess of 150 million°C. Credit: ITER
The best bet for that milestone lies with a machine calledITER (for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), now under construction in southern France. The 100-foot-tall, 23,000-ton device is a joint project of China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the U.S., and will begin generating energy sometime in the late 2020’s.
It will, that is, if all goes well. The truth is that fusion still has some major problems that will have to be solved for ITER, and for any commercial-scale machine that follows. For one thing, the fusion reaction sends neutrons slamming into the reactor walls, making conventional materials such as steel brittle. Engineers have to find something better, and they haven’t done it yet. “Right now,” said Michael Zarnstorff, the Princeton lab’s deputy director for research, “we’re thinking tungsten. But we don’t know yet that it’s good enough.” Another issue is that the superheated gas inside the reactor (it’s known as a plasma, which explains the lab’s name) tends to be unstable. Keeping it under control for more than short time is very difficult.
Facilities subject to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Paint and Allied Products Area Source Rule will need to comply by Dec. 3, 2012. Facilities subject to EPA’s Chemical Manufacturing Area Source Rule will need to comply by Oct. 29, 2012.
