But worse still, said Black, Timothy Geithner, President Barack Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury, is currently engaged in a cover-up to keep the truth of America’s financial insolvency from its citizens.

The interview, which aired Friday night, is carried on the Bill Moyers Journal Web site.

Black’s most recent published work, “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One,” released in 2005, was hailed by Nobel-winning economist George A. Akerlof as “extraordinary.”

“There is no one else in the whole world who understands so well exactly how these lootings occurred in all their details and how the changes in government regulations and in statutes in the early 1980s caused this spate of looting,” he wrote. “This book will be a classic.”

But that book only covers the fallout from the 1980s Savings & Loan crisis; Black’s later first-hand involvement in that scandal being the ensuing liquidation of bad banks.

“A single bank, IndyMac, lost more money than the entire Savings and Loan Crisis,” reported PBS. “The difference between now and then, explains Black, is a drastic reduction in regulation and oversight, ‘We now know what happens when you destroy regulation. You get the biggest financial calamity of anybody under the age of 80.’”

That financial calamity, he explained, was brought about not by mishap or accident, but only after a concerted effort to undermine and remove all regulations, allowing a creditor free-for-all that hinged on fraudulent risk ratings for bad loans.

“[T]he way that you do it is to make really bad loans, because they pay better,” he told Moyers. “Then you grow extremely rapidly, in other words, you’re a Ponzi-like scheme. And the third thing you do is we call it leverage. That just means borrowing a lot of money, and the combination creates a situation where you have guaranteed record profits in the early years. That makes you rich, through the bonuses that modern executive compensation has produced. It also makes it inevitable that there’s going to be a disaster down the road.

“…This stuff, the exotic stuff that you’re talking about was created out of things like liars’ loans, that were known to be extraordinarily bad,” he continued. “And now it was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk. That’s why it’s toxic. And you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody looking, during the Bush years. So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a Congressional investigation of some of these rating agencies, and it’s scandalous what came out. What we know now is that the rating agencies never looked at a single loan file. When they finally did look, after the markets had completely collapsed, they found, and I’m quoting Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, “the results were disconcerting, in that there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined.”

He equated the entire US financial system to a giant “ponzi scheme” and charged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, like Secretary Henry Paulson before him, of “covering up” the truth.

“Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?” asked Moyers.

“Absolutely, because they are scared to death,” he said. “All right? They’re scared to death of a collapse. They’re afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we’ll run screaming to the exits. And we won’t rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it’s foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, ‘We just can’t let the big banks fail.’ That’s wrong.”

Ultimately, said Black, the financial downfall of the United States in the wake of the Bush years is due to “the most elite institutions in America engaging in or facilitating fraud.”

“When will Americans wake up and hold the real criminals – Banksters – accountable for their actions, and pressure the government to enact systemic changes to prevent future abuses?” asked Huffington Post blogger Mike Garibaldi-Frick.

You see there is an American Automotive company which I feel should be getting the investments that these Detroit dinosaurs are currently getting. That company is Tesla Motors and they have an amazing new Sedan which is 100% green technology and could beginning of the future for electric cars. With the right investment that is.

Why don’t we take a huge chunk of those BILLIONS we are throwing at GM et. al. and throw them to a company which is at the forefront of design and technology which could wean us away from foreign oil, and move us in the Green direction?

Lets take a look at Tesla’s newest offering:


Tell me this is not a sexy car that you wouldn’t be proud to own and sport around town? Its range before recharge? 300 miles!

I remember when I was working as an advertising executive for a small yellow pages firm back home, I used to have to travel all over the county meeting clients and making sales pitches. I dont think I EVER drove more than 300 miles in a day.

How long to recharge? 4 hours on a regular 220V plug. If you get a home 480V outlet you can charge this baby up in just 45 minutes.

The current cost? That is the part that would need serious government and private investment to bring down (the former would encourage the latter):
around 50,000 dollars.

If the US Government was serious about “going Green” and building a 21st century transportation infrastructure why not invest in a company which could be scaled UP right now, creating high paying manufacturing jobs and helping the environment in one fell swoop?

Seriously now: This is seriously fraked up. The ISS is almost as big as a Corellian corvette and it’s up there defenseless, floating peacefully, sitting like a dinosaur-sized duck, waiting for one of the 18,000 pieces of tracked space debris to crack it open and take it down in a fiery ball of junk.

Sure, they have a escape spaceship for astronauts. In case things go bad—like they almost did today—they can jump in there and fly away before the worst happens. However, after all the money and effort put in the only human post in space, do we want to send everything to hell for a piece of orbiting crap? Wouldn’t it be better to install defense mechanisms against space debris—or, ah, hmmm, alien ships!—to preserve the ISS?

Technically, there are already weapon systems that may be altered to perform this task, but this is not an easy task. We know it is not as easy as firing a laser and taking down the incoming chunk of metal with a Star Wars explosion.

There’s a lot of things to be taken into account. First, you will need to detect the threat and fire from a very long distance, so the resulting effect doesn’t cause any harm to the ISS itself. Then, the method to take down the object will change depending on its nature. Is it a big satellite or just a big chunk of metal from a previous collision? Does the incoming object have explosive elements inside? If the object is too big and can’t be obliterated in a single shot, perhaps it would be better to have some kind of rocket that may approach the object and change its orbit by exploding near it? Perhaps some kind of emergency tug that can attach to the object and take it down?

We don’t know. Whatever NASA and its international partner can come up with, they need to do it as soon as possible. Things are getting complicated up there, and this doesn’t conflict with the international protocols against the militarization of space—which, in any case, are being constantly violated by the US, Russia, and China.

This will be a defense mechanism against space threats, and that’s exactly what the ISS needs. It is just too valuable to be left there with no protection. NASA, it’s time to get some pew pew action going on up there.

Lithium-iron-phosphate particles.

This appears to be one of those cases where applications badly lagged theory. Since lithium ions are the primary charge carriers in most batteries, the rates of charging and discharging the batteries wind up proportional to the speed at which lithium ions can move within the battery material. Real-world battery experience would suggest that lithium moves fairly slowly through most types of batteries, but theoretical calculations suggested that there was no real reason that should be the case—lithium should be able to move quite briskly.

A number of recent papers suggested that, in at least one lithium battery class (based on LiFePO4), the problem wasn’t the speed at which lithium moved—instead, it could only enter and exit crystals of this salt at specific locations. This, in turn, indicated that figuring a way to speed up this process would increase the overall performance of the battery.

To accomplish this, the authors developed a process that created a disorganized lithium phosphate coating on the surfaces of LiFePO4 crystals. By tweaking the ratio of iron to phosphorous in the starting mix and heating the material to 600ТАC under argon for ten hours, the authors created a material that has a glass-like coating that’s less than 5nm thick, which covers the surface of pellets that are approximately 50nm across. That outer coating has very high lithium mobility, which allows charge to rapidly move into and out of storage in the LiFePO4 of the core of these pellets. In short, because lithium can move quickly through this outer coating, it can rapidly locate and enter the appropriate space on the LiFePO4 crystals.

The results are pretty astonishing. At low discharge rates, a cell prepared from this material discharges completely to its theoretical limit (~166mAh/g). As the authors put it, “Capacity retention of the material is superior.” Running it through 50 charge/discharge cycles revealed no significant change in the total capacity of the battery.

But the truly surprising features of the cell came when the authors tweaked the cathode to allow higher currents to be run into the cell. Going from a rate of 2 Coulombs to 200 dropped the total capacity down to about 110mAh/g, but increased the power rate by two orders of magnitude (that’s a hundred-fold increase) compared to traditional lithium batteries. Amazingly, under these conditions, the charge capacity of the battery actually increased as it underwent more charge/discharge cycles. Doubling the charge transport to 400C cut the capacity in half, but again doubled the power rate. At the 400C rate, the entire battery would discharge in as little as nine seconds. That sort of performance had previously only been achieved using supercapacitors.

At this point, the authors calculate, the primary limiting factor is no longer storing lithium in the battery; instead, getting the lithium in contact with an electrode is what slows things down. The electrodes also become a problem because they need to occupy more of the volume of the battery in order to maintain this rate of charge, which lowers the charge density. That’s a major contributor to the halving of the battery’s capacity mentioned in the previous paragraph.

A more significant problem is that these batteries may wind up facing an electric grid that was never meant to deal with them. A 1Wh cell phone battery could charge in 10 seconds, but would pull a hefty 360W in the process. A battery that’s sufficient to run an electric vehicle could be fully charged in five minutes—which would make electric vehicles incredibly practical—but doing so would pull 180kW, which is most certainly not practical.

Until now scientists thought that the Desert Ant Cataglyphis fortis, which makes its home in the inhospitable salt pans of Tunisia, was a pure vision-guided insect. But Kathrin Steck, Bill Hansson and Markus Knaden from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Gera number of used gas chromatography to verify that desert microhabitats do have unique odour signatures that can guide the ants back to the nest.

After having identified some odours of these signatures the scientists trained ants in field experiments to recognise these odours pointing to a hidden nest entrance. Ants learned to associate their nest entrance with a single odour and discriminated the training odour against non-training odours. They even picked out the training odour from a four-odour blend. The ants were less focused when faced with a blend rather than the pure scent of home, but still performed better in their search than those tested with the solvent control.

The use of environmentally derived olfactory landmarks has been shown for pigeons, while most ants rely rather on self generated pheromone trails. However Cataglyphis roams for over 100 meters in search for food in a habitat where high temperatures and changeable food locations make pheromone trails ineffective. This might be the reason, why these ants better go for stable olfactory landmarks that they learn at the nest entrance.

“We are amazed to discover that while keeping track of the path integrator and learning visual landmarks, these ants can also collect information about the olfactory world,” said Knaden, who hopes to investigate the interaction between visual and olfactory information in future research.

Males Ben and Jerry live in the bird sanctuary in West Sussex in the UK. Employees of the Reserve had hoped that they will be able to restore the bird populations, as well as a third of New Zealand blue duck was female Cherry. However, when it was placed in an aviary with Cherry, Ben showed no interest. Jerry also refused to mate with females.

Reserve Officers noticed that the males show a typical marital behavior in relation not to Cherry but to each other. Ben and Jerry lived in an aviary, where they co-exist perfectly together.

New Zealand’s blue duck H. malacorhynchos – species, endemic to New Zealand. Currently, populations of these birds are in danger, as well as imported into the country the animals compete with blue ducks for food, and gradually replacing them with the occupied territories.

With its soaring, arched ceilings, 20-story bell tower, and gilded frescoes, the Gare de Lyon rail station in Paris feels like a kind of church. This cathedral of transport was built for the World Exposition of 1900, a Belle Époque celebration of the achievements in science and technology that had given birth to the Industrial Revolution a century earlier. Coal soot and dark halos of steam billowed in the rafters, symbols of the original builders’ faith in eternal progress.

Today, sunlight streams through the roof, layers of caked-on coal grime having long since been scrubbed from the latticework of glass and steel. Gleaming silver-and-blue trains glide noiselessly in and out of the station, pushed and pulled at both ends by electrical “power units” that nuzzle the concrete platforms with aerodynamic, space-shuttle-like noses. These supertrains, which shoot through the countryside at almost 200 miles an hour, have transformed the Gare de Lyon from a sooty monument of the revolution that brought us global warming into something quite different. Now it’s a temple to high-speed rail, a technology that some experts say is essential to helping us get out of our climate fix.

One day last fall, I stood next to a 30-foot-tall palm tree in the Gare de Lyon waiting to board a TGV-train à grande vitesse, or high-speed train-to Avignon. Fifteen minutes before my train was scheduled to leave, its platform number flashed up on the station’s black-and-yellow departures board. I ambled to my assigned car and found my seat-no waiting in line for check-in, security, or boarding. The train, a double-decker with a capacity of 545 passengers, was about two-thirds full. Even then, it was carrying as many people as a Boeing 747, yet with far greater comfort and freedom of movement than any commercial airplane in my experience as a frequent flier.

The doors whooshed shut at the appointed minute and the train started moving-slowly at first, then gathering speed as it approached the southern outskirts of Paris. At some point during the transition from city to country, I looked out the window and realized that the train had accelerated to a speed roughly twice as fast as I had ever moved before at ground level. Trees, bridges, and electric poles appeared and disappeared before my eyes could focus on them. Trains rushed by in the opposite direction, producing a violent sonic jolt that would have been annoying had it not lasted less than two seconds. Inside the brightly decorated cars, however, the only sensation of movement was a gentle swaying. The train pulled into the Avignon TGV station exactly on schedule, having covered 463 miles in 2 hours and 40 minutes (average speed: 174 miles per hour, including slowdowns for several miles at each end of the trip). My ticket cost $75-about the same as the cheapest available airfare from Paris to Marseille (the major airport nearest to my destination), yet sans the hassle of getting to and from distant airports, not to mention the possibility of maddening air-traffic delays.

An hour after arriving in Avignon, I relaxed in the medieval quaintness of the village that was my final destination and reflected on my journey. It was not only as fast as air travel, but incomparably more pleasant. It is also safer than any other form of transportation. France’s TGV service has carried 1.5 billion passengers since it started in 1981, without a single fatality during high-speed operations. (There have been fatal accidents in urban areas, where the TGV shares the track with conventional trains and moves at the same speed.) And, while the TGV runs on steel rails just like its slower-moving predecessors, my trip that day was as different from conventional train travel (average speed: 40 mph, charitably reckoned) as driving a car is from taking a horse-drawn buggy. With its speed and convenience, high-speed rail could revolutionize travel in the United States by offering an attractive alternative to cars and airplanes for regional trips.

Several states are improving existing rail lines with the goal of offering “medium-fast” (around 110 mph) service within the decade (see “Slow, Slow, Quick-Quick, Slow,” this issue), but California has pulled into the lead as the probable site of America’s first true high-speed (top operating speed: 220 mph) system. Supporters hope it will be whizzing passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2020. Once the technology has a foothold in the United States, its rapid spread will become more and more likely as the economic, environmental, and practical benefits sink in. State-of-the-art high-speed rail systems don’t come cheap, but the price of not building them will be astronomical, in both economic and environmental terms. As far as the planet’s climate is concerned, high-speed rail can’t come fast enough.

Trains, even painfully slow ones powered by diesel engines, are inherently efficient compared with other ways of moving people and cargo. The reasons have to do with basic physics. Steel wheels on steel tracks have much lower rolling resistance than rubber tires on pavement. One train uses less energy to overcome wind resistance than the number of trucks or cars that would be needed to haul an equal load the same distance. A single freight train can take as many as 280 trucks off the highway and uses a quarter as much fuel as an average truck to move a ton one mile. Amtrak passenger trains, hardly paragons of up-to-date technology, consume on average 18 percent less energy per passenger mile than airplanes and 27 percent less than cars. So policies that encourage and expand rail transport will yield net reductions in both oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions.

These problems are mostly accepted as a given, but not by a group of researcher­s at Intellectual Ventures, an invention and investment company in Bellevue, WA. The scientists there have come up with a preliminary design for a reactor that requires only a small amount of enriched fuel–that is, the kind whose atoms can easily be split in a chain reaction. It’s called a traveling­-wave reactor. And while government researchers intermittently bring out new reactor designs, the traveling-wave reactor is noteworthy for having come from something that barely exists in the nuclear industry: a privately funded research company.

As it runs, the core in a traveling-­wave reactor gradually converts nonfissile material into the fuel it needs. Nuclear reactors based on such designs “theoretically could run for a couple of hundred years” without refueling, says John G­illeland, manager of nuclear programs at Intellectual Ventures.

Gilleland’s aim is to run a nuclear reactor on what is now waste. ­Conventional reactors use uranium-235, which splits easily to carry on a chain reaction but is scarce and expensive; it must be separated from the more common, nonfissile uranium-238 in special enrichment plants. Every 18 to 24 months, the reactor must be opened, hundreds of fuel bundles removed, hundreds added, and the remainder reshuffled to supply all the fissile uranium needed for the next run. This raises proliferation concerns, since an enrichment plant designed to make low-enriched uranium for a power reactor differs trivially from one that makes highly enriched material for a bomb.

But the traveling-wave reactor needs only a thin layer of enriched U-235. Most of the core is U-238, millions of pounds of which are stockpiled around the world as leftovers from natural uranium after the U-235 has been scavenged. The design provides “the simplest possible fuel cycle,” says Charles W. Forsberg, executive director of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Project at MIT, “and it requires only one uranium enrichment plant per planet.”

Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), one of the world’s largest chip foundries, just announced a marketing collaboration involving Intel’s Atom processor. Atom is Intel’s effort to downsize its processor chips to fit into the realm of emerging smart devices below the Personal Computer space. TSMC will work closely with Intel to port some of the Atom processors to its own process and design flows. TSMC will also have the ability to do engineering on the chip to build customized versions for the large number of existing TSMC customers. However, Intel will have ownership of the final device and the customer, as Intel will be selling the custom designed chips that TSMC designs and builds in its foundry.

As PC sales wane, and their chip revenues along with them, Intel looks to additional sources for revenues. Consumer products represent a massive potential market, though at clearly lower margins and price points. But, Intel’s cost of operations makes it a supplier at too high a price to go after the cut-throat and highly price sensitive consumer market. And Intel is not set up for customized, System On Chip (SOC) solutions the market demands. Enter a partner that can bring all of this capability to Intel – TSMC.

This is a direct attack by Intel on competing processors, especially the ARM processor, which is trying to move upstream from the smart phone and embedded gadgets market it currently dominates, while Intel is trying to move downstream with Atom into this overlapping space. The battleground in the middle will be aggressive and likely bloody, with huge potential returns. And while Intel’s attack is primarily on ARM, it also has profound effect on other players – AMD, Qualcomm (Snapdragon), Nvidia, TI, and even Marvel to whom Intel sold off its own ARM-based processor (XScale).

A win-win for Intel and TSMC

Intel gets a vast new market potential for Atom since TSMC has connections to many consumer and lower end PC-type products (e.g., MIDs, webtop devices, netbooks, media servers/set-top boxes, etc.), especially in the important Far East markets (Taiwan, Japan). TSMC gets to offer a high performance processor it did not have to design, but that it can customize for the clients who will take volume products. It also adds the ability to merge the work TSMC is doing on WiMax enabled devices and couple it with Atom processors.

Intel gets to have customized designs done by TSMC for a number of volume customers, a service which Intel does not generally do all that well, and is not set up to do efficiently. What Intel gets is a large potential for embedding chips in products they might not otherwise be able to reach, and generating revenues from the chip sales.

This is a very symbiotic relationship. Intel brings the core Intel Architecture-based Atom. TSMC brings knowledge of SOC creation and customization for specific customers, high volume production at low cost, and a customer base of many consumer oriented vendors. It’s a win-win. One thing to note is that this is not an outsource of the Atom per se. Intel will continue to build standard Atom chips in its own fabs for its mainstream customers while TSMC will only build customized silicon in high volume.

Extending Intel’s chip business while staying in control

Intel gets to own all of the customers that come out of this relationship, requiring that all chips sold come from Intel. That means Intel gets to set price, choose who the clients are and what they can build with Atom, and make the margins it wants and needs. TSMC brings customers to Intel from its vast installed base, while giving its customers potential new and powerful chips for the increasingly complex consumer electronics devices coming to market. However, there could be some potential conflict if TSMC brings a customer and Intel says no, or wants to charge too much, since Intel has ultimate control. Further, there may be some conflict over ultimate ownership of the customization components. And there is a small risk that Intel may not easily be able to combine what TSMC builds in its fabs as the processes are not identical. Overall, however, these risks seem minimal and manageable.

Bottom Line

This is a smart move by Intel, and a win for TSMC as well. Unless something is inherently flawed with the architecture or Intel is too controlling of the relationship (or tries to charge too much for the finished goods), it is almost certain that Atom will be successful and permeate a large swath of consumer devices territory – an area in which Intel has previously not been a major player.

Such women, ages 18-59, experience sexual dysfunction with lack of sexual interest called hypoactive sexual desire disorder, known as HSDD.

Bruce Arnow and Dr. Leah Millheiser of Stanford Hospital & Clinics said the trial involved 16 women diagnosed with HSDD, along with 20 normal control subjects, who took part in the study involving brain scans. All subjects identified themselves as heterosexual.

Subjects were shown erotic video segments interspersed among footage of female sporting events. The segments were separated by intervening tranquil sequences of such subjects as flowers, mountains or ocean waves to bring the women’s brains to a resting state between more active segments.

The subjects’ brain activity was monitored by functional magnetic-resonance imaging. The women also reported their subjective levels of sexual arousal throughout the viewing, while the researchers collected objective measurements of the women’s level of genital arousal.

The findings, published in the journal Neuroscience, found activity patterns throughout most of the brain were more or less identical among the HSDD and normal groups, but with a few notable exceptions. There was a bigger jump in relative activity in three brain areas of HSDD women — the medial frontal gyrus, right inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral putamen — compared with the control subjects when shown the erotic clips.