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  • Quotes About Italian Food

    “Everything you see I owe to pasta.” – Sophia Loren

    “I do love Italian food. Any kind of pasta or pizza.” – Jennifer Love Hewitt

    “I love pasta with the homemade marinara sauce I had as a kid.” – Bernadette Peters

    “Life is a combination of magic and pasta.” – Federico Fellini

    “You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.” – Yogi Berra

    “The perfect lover is one who turns into a pizza at 4:00 a.m.” – Charles Pierce

    “Life is too short, and I’m Italian. I’d much rather eat pasta and drink wine than be a size 0.” – Sophia Bush

    “We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police.” – Jeff Marder

    “No man is lonely eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.” – Christopher Morley

    “And I don’t cook, either. Not as long as they still deliver pizza.” – Tiger Woods

  • Japanese Confidence Improves, But Nikkei Is Heading Lower Amid Uber-Low Capex Outlook

    Fresh data on corporate sentiment out of Japan is mixed — basically confirming that the country remains mired in an anemic zombie state.

    Bloomberg: The Tankan index of sentiment among big makers of products including cars and electronics climbed nine points to minus 24 in December, the Bank of Japan said in Tokyo today. The median forecast of 19 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was minus 27. A negative number means pessimists outnumber optimists.

    Stocks fell as the report showed large companies planned deeper spending cuts to protect earnings that are under threat from a currency that climbed to a 14-year high against the dollar last month. Sony Corp., forecasting a second straight annual loss, said last month that it will eliminate jobs, close a factory and transfer some touch-panel production to China.

    You can find the complete survey results at the BoJ, in English, here.

    nikkei

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  • Newly Diagnosed 11-25-09 Questions

    As stated in the subject, I was diagnosed the day before Thanksgiving. Went to doctor to get some antibiotics for an infection in my foot. Stepped on a nail. No tetanus, just an infection. Bg was 248. Doctor freaked and sent me directly to the hospital. On IV 4 hours later then in surgery 1 hour after that. 1.5 CM incision on bottom of foot. Bg was as high as 251 at check in time at hospital. A1C of 8.0. Endocronologist came in and told me I have type II diabetes. No tests other than the Bg and the A1C. I have done tons of research since then and now know at least something about the disease. Was sent home on 20 units of lantus in morning and 20 again at night. Went back to doctor with Glucose meter in hand, doc looked at the numbers and cut me back to 10 units at night. Also prescribed Metformin, one AM and one PM, no idea of the dosage. The entire time I have been home from the hospital, my morning readings are between 76 and 85. Every Morning. Readings befor each meal between 80 and 90. I have entirely changed my diet. Believe me I was not eating close to healthy before this.

    I am sure my Bg was high at doc and at check in at hospital because I had eaten just before I went to the doctor. Drank a soft drink with the meal and another on the way to the doctor.

    I know that an A1C of 8 is high. My question is, could my A1C have been that high just because of my BAD eating habits? I think my doctor is just quick to prescribe medication. I have taken myself off of both medicines and have seen no changes in my BG readings. He told me that there is no way I can control this with diet. I have read otherwise. Just wondering if I am crazy for wanting to control this beast by eating right. Thanks for reading and any replies, positive or negative.

  • When It Comes To Applying for Grants, Size Doesn’t Matter (Usually)

    Faithful readers will know that I’m very fond of what used to be called “B movies,” so it should be no surprise that I also love movie trailers. The otherwise forgettable 1998 remake of Godzilla featured one of the best theatrical trailers I’ve ever seen: old guys are fishing off a East River pier in Manhattan, one hooks something big, his pole bends, the camera moves to the water where a huge wake is forming, and Godzilla’s head emerges. Fade to black with this in gigantic type across the screen: “SIZE DOES MATTER.” The theater audience went wild. Too bad the actual movie was awful, but I still remember the trailer!

    The question of size in grant writing was posed by one of our readers in a comment on Health Care Reform Means Green Grass & High Tides for Grant Writers. Michael Leza wrote:

    I’ve seen you say before that a good way to get into grant writing is to volunteer to write grants for small local non-profits. Do these kind of non profits have a realistic chance of getting funded or is this more of an exercise in going through the motions and learning the process? Would some of these big health care reform/stimulus bills be a more likely source of grants for these kinds of organizations, or would it be easier to try and apply for a more established grant (be it federal or otherwise)?

    Michael is wondering if it is worth volunteering to write proposals for a small nonprofit in hopes of becoming a paid grant writer. Since only small nonprofits are likely to take him up on his offer, he probably doesn’t have any choice. But his question suggests the larger issue of whether the size of the applicant organization, and by extension the age and experience of the applicant, matters in applying for grants. While, like most questions regarding grant writing, quantum effects cloud the answer, in most cases size doesn’t matter, and it often helps if the applicant for a grant program is new and/or has no track record, as long as the applicant meets basic eligibility criteria. How is this possible?

    Let’s take a real world example of a tiny faith-based nonprofit organization in Watts that came to us about 10 years ago for help in writing a LA County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) proposal to provide services for students at Jordan High School, which more or less is the definition of a high-risk high school. What made this interesting is that DCSF was re-bidding a contract it had had for years with an extremely well-known and very large nonprofit in Watts that has been scooping up city, county, federal and foundation grants since the Watts Rebellion in 1965 (those readers who know South Central will know which agency I’m writing about).

    Our prospective client, a minister, asked if I thought he could compete for this grant against the local heavyweight champ of nonprofits. I told him that he was man of faith, and if he had faith in his organization, so did we, and we could write a competitive application that would put him in the ring, a nonprofit Rocky against a nonprofit Apollo Creed. Like Rocky, our client won the grant. While we wrote a great proposal (shameless plug here), the most likely reason it was funded was that the incumbent large organization probably thought they had the grant in the bag and threw together a lame proposal. Also, DCFS may have been tired of funding the same organization. Over the years, grantees that get repeated grants often end up becoming lazy, don’t file reports on time and/or start fighting with the funding source. In other words, they act like a typical teenager. This opens up opportunities for new and frisky applicants to successfully compete for grants. The punch line is that once this small nonprofit got their DCFS grant, they used our grant writing skills to develop into a large, multi-program agency with lots of grant funds.

    The same principle that size doesn’t usually matter in applying for grants is also true regarding small public agencies. Two examples will demonstrate this. I’ve already mentioned one before in Blue Highways: Reflections of a Grant Writer Retracing His Steps 35 Years Later, which involved us writing a funded $250,000 Department of Education Goals 2000 proposal for a tiny school district with just over 100 students in rural Oklahoma. We were able to make the client competitive against giant applicants like Chicago Public Schools by emphasizing the oddity of their situation: the District wanted to implement bilingual education because of an avalanche of immigrant workers arriving in the community for jobs at an about to open industrial-sized hog farm.

    This year, we wrote a funded $1,500,000 HUD Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control (LBPHC) program grant for a small, rural city in California that caters to thousands of seasonal tourists. We usually write LBPHC proposals for much larger cities like Boston, but HUD apparently bought our argument that this city, although small in comparison to most LBPHC grantees, has a big lead problem and could implement a believable abatement program. We amped up the proposal by tying the lead problem to the current foreclosure mess (it never hurts to play up any related media-inspired hysteria you can find in a proposal). It also helped that our client had never before had a direct HUD grant, since all of their previous HUD awards were passed through the California Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Small Cities Program. I think HUD is always looking to fund new applicants for LBPHC and other long-in-the tooth grant programs and was pleasantly startled to get a credible proposal from an unlikely applicant.

    As long as your organization meets basic eligibility for a given grant competition and avoids the “silly factor” that Jake wrote about last week in So, How Much Grant Money Should I Ask For? And Who’s the Competition?, get busy and write. As with many things in life, it doesn’t much matter how big the applicant is, as long as the grant writer knows how to use his skills to craft a compelling argument. With luck, the funder will see the application as an opportunity to fund someone new, while using grant funds to meet a real local need.

  • Holiday Cookies: Thumbprints with Pumpkin Marmalade

    We love to play with the fillings in our favorite thumbprint cookies (membrillo, anyone?) This time, we tried one of the recipes from our 10 things to do with a can of pumpkin roundup – pumpkin marmalade with apricots and ginger.

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  • Governor Paterson Goes Hoover: Delays Payments To Local Schools To Keep State Solvent

    As Paul Krugman put it, states that cut spending in a time of recession are like 50 little Herbert Hoovers.

    Well, welcome to New York State, whose governor just slashed payments to schools and local authorities in a bid to keep the state solvent.

    DailyNews: New York City will lose at least $84 million in funding under Gov. Paterson‘s plan to withhold  payments to keep the state afloat this month.

    Saying the “day of reckoning” for cash-strapped New York state is here, Paterson announced Sunday   he is unilaterally withholding 10% of nearly $1.9 billion in school and municipal aid funding that was to be paid Tuesday.

    For the city that means its school aid payment will be about $60 million short and its municipal assistance payment $23.9 million lower than expected, Paterson’s budget office said.

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  • Desperate Greece May Pull Argentina’s “Kitchen-Sink” Move To Break Out Of Its Death Loop

    ambrose evans pritchardAmbrose Evans-Pritchard explores some of the options for Greece:

    Mr Papandreou faces circumstances (akin) to those of Argentine leaders in 2001, when they tried to cut wages in the mistaken belief that ditching the dollar-peg would prove calamitous. Buenos Aires erupted in riots. The police lost control, killing 27 people. President De la Rua was rescued from the Casa Rosada by an air force helicopter. The peg collapsed, setting in train the biggest sovereign default in history.

    Economists waited for the sky to fall. It refused to do so. Argentina achieved Chinese growth for half a decade: 8.8pc in 2003, 9pc in 2004, 9.2pc in 2005, 8.5pc in 2006, and 8.7pc in 2007.

    London bankers were soon lining up to lend money (our pension funds?) to the Argentine state – despite the 70pc haircut suffered by earlier creditors.

    In theory, Greece could do the same: restore its currency, devalue, pass a law switching internal euro debt into drachmas, and “restructure” foreign contracts. This is the “kitchen-sink” option. Such action would allow Greece to break out of its death loop.

    Read the whole thing >>

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  • What Do You Only Eat At Restaurants (or Only at Home)?

    2009_12_14-Restaurant.jpgLast night we headed out to a special dinner at a Sichuan restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown. We don’t review restaurants here at The Kitchn, so we’ll move on with just a brief note on the experience (it was awesome) and shift to a question that the meal inspired. What do you only eat out at a restaurant and, vice versa, what do you only eat at home?

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  • Caption Contest: Giving the gift of green against our better judgement

    Filed under: , , , ,

    The move to electric-powered vehicles is still in its fledgling stages, but there are plenty of signs that the next few years will finally start ushering in battery-powered transportation for the masses. But there’s one class of vehicle that has almost always been powered by batteries: R/C cars. Slap in a couple of 9-volt batteries and a slew of AA cells, and kids of all ages get to pretend they’re Ken Block in the backyard until mom says it’s time to clean up for supper.

    Now that full-sized rides are finally “catching up” to their scaled-down counterparts, it appears that at least one toymaker, New Bright, has decided to take the next step: an R/C car that needs no batteries. It’s called the Ecomobile, and it looks like a solar-powered freehand interpretation of a Smart ForTwo mated with a Toyota Prius. As you can see by its packaging, the Ecomobile takes great pride in the fact that it’s ecopowered, economical and ecofriendly. It’s even packaged in recyclable materials. It’s $29.95. Al Gore can’t stop smiling.

    But how does it run? Well, you have to leave it out in the sun for one hour for every five minutes of play time. It’s reportedly slow, too, and much like the EVs we’ve experienced in the real world, reviewers have said that the solar-powered toy doesn’t quite run as long as its OEM-promised times state. Sound like fun? We don’t think so either. So, in the spirit of the holidays, we’ve decided to come up with some of our favorite captions and/or headlines for this eco-tastic (or is that eco-tragic?) new toy. Here are some of our not-so-hilarious efforts:

    • You traded in your sports car for a Prius? Now you can limit your children’s fun too!
    • The Ecomobile: Because your kids aren’t teased enough already
    • The perfect toy for the kid who likes to wait to have fun
    • Now mom can’t bitch about leaving toys in the backyard
    • Sweet! A toy that kids north of the Mason-Dixon line can’t play with until May

    As you can plainly see, we need your help. Head for the comments section and give us your best headlines for this not-so-fun-looking toy. You won’t win anything for trying, but your efforts could help a misguided parent choose a different (and cooler) toy for their kid.

    Caption Contest: Giving the gift of green against our better judgement originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • On Shelves This Week: December 13 – 19, 2009

    The line-up this week isn’t as flashy as the list a couple of weeks back, but maybe there’s still something you can pick up here to while away the Christmas wait. Most of these games are actually

  • upcoming surgery, will it influence type 2

    I need to have a hysterectomy. Now my diabetes is under control but I walk everyday & if my numbers are high I walk.

    I do notice if my blood pressure is ok, my sugars are OK. Anyone experience difficulty keeping numbers regulated after surgery?

    thanks
    Diane

  • News Roundup:December 2009 2nd Edition

    Miscellaneous

    The New Horizons document has been published and Professor Dinesh Bhugra, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists has commented here. At the recent American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) conference there was a discussion of positive findings in the treatment of gambling disorders with agents including memantine and naltrexone and different agents were used according to features such as inhibition.

    Research in Dementia

    On the Alzforum site there is a discussion of the not-for-profit organisation PAD2020. The goal of this organisation is to develop a method for preventing Alzheimer’s Disease by 2020. The goal of prevention was a topic at the recent Leon Thal symposium and the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease conference.

    DSM-V

    The date for release of DSM-V has been postponed to 2013. The planning for DSM-V began a decade ago*

    Psychiatry 2.0

    MindHacks has another Spike Activity update in which he mentions amongst other items the recent Archives in General Psychiatry paper on antidepressant effects on personality. Mental Nurse has another weekly round-up including a link to a blog post on the Approved Mental Health Professional. The Somatosphere blog reports on the medical anthropology awards which includes a book about people with dementia in nursing homes. They also have a round-up of journal articles including a paper on the relationship between the clinical investigator and the subject. In the Clinical Cases and Images blog there is a round-up of recent news articles including a link to a piece on the use of social media by healthcare professionals. Neuroanthropology has another weekly round-up which includes amongst others a link to a Diffuse Tensor Imaging study  on the effects of remediation training in 8-10 year old children. Psych Brown Bag has a review of a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggesting that 50% of cases of hoarding are heritable on the basis of findings in a twin study.

    Evolutionary Psychiatry

    A recent analysis of suggests that speciation occurs in ‘bursts’ following ‘rare event’s which opposes the view that speciation results from the gradual accumulation of small adaptations to the environment. There is a review of a new book on ‘why we cooperate’ here including the significance of the sclera in humans for detecting gaze direction.

    * ICD-11 is due out in 2014.

    Twitter

    You can follow ‘The Amazing World of Psychiatry’ Twitter by clicking on this link

    Podcast

    You can listen to this post on Odiogo by clicking on this link (there may be a small delay between publishing of the blog article and the availability of the podcast).

    TAWOP Channel

    You can follow the TAWOP Channel on YouTube by clicking on this link

    Responses

    If you have any comments, you can leave them below or alternatively e-mail [email protected]

    Disclaimer

    The comments made here represent the opinions of the author and do not represent the profession or any body/organisation. The comments made here are not meant as a source of medical advice and those seeking medical advice are advised to consult with their own doctor. The author is not responsible for the contents of any external sites that are linked to in this blog.

  • VIDEO: Borat-class “Rolls-Royce” actually looks good

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    Not a Rolls-Royce Phantom – Click above to watch the video

    Right, so this isn’t really a Rolls-Royce. We know, we know — you thought it was. And that’s understandable. But no, it’s a fake, a phony, a fraud, etc. And with the owner spending at least, say, $3,000 to turn an old Mercedes-Benz E-Class into a Roller, we understand why you were duped. We aren’t surprised, however, that this car exists in a former Soviet Bloc country (supposedly Kazakhstan).

    All joking/sardonic comments aside, we always wonder why people bother with stunts like this. The other day we saw a BMW E39 525i with a M5 badge. Now, the only people that will be impressed by an M5 badge are the exact same people who will notice that the E39 is missing the requisite four tail pipes. So, who exactly are they fooling, besides themselves? This Phantom conversion’s one redeeming quality is that the finished product (somehow) looks pretty good. Make the jump to watch the video. A tip of the Kalpak to Pasi for the tip!

    [Source: YouTube]

    Continue reading VIDEO: Borat-class “Rolls-Royce” actually looks good

    VIDEO: Borat-class “Rolls-Royce” actually looks good originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • Audio Report on Thom Mason’s Fall 2009 Commencement Address

    Press “play” to listen to the report or click here to download the file

    Fall 2009 Commencement Report Transcript

    Runtime: 2:06

    ANNOUNCER: Our world has big problems, and we need intelligent, educated people to solve them. That was the message shared by Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to students and their families at the Fall Commencement Ceremony at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. More than a thousand undergraduates and graduates participated in the ceremony, held Sunday at Thompson-Boling Arena. Mason said times might be difficult, but having a college degree can make all the difference.

    MASON: Some of you are headed to graduate school, others to new jobs and still others to military service. And I expect that some of you are still looking for jobs in a very tough economic climate. But history shows that your education provides you with an overwhelming advantage.

    ANNOUNCER: Mason said that history shows that hard times often spur individuals to invest in education, which pays tremendous dividends.

    MASON: In 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first Sputnik satellite, the United States responded with a massive investment in science, technology and education. The return on that investment includes the personal computer with its graphical user interface, global positioning systems or GPS, the laser printer, the cell phone, and a lot of other electronic gadgets that we use every day that underpin our economy. Today, we need a new set of skilled workers to tackle the challenge of transforming our energy system.

    ANNOUNCER: Mason went on to detail a global energy problem, where development and population growth are causing increased energy demands. Mason encouraged graduates in all disciplines to work toward a solution to this problem.

    MASON: Whatever you choose to do, I suggest that you look for challenging problems to solve. Work that demands your best effort is a great deal more rewarding than something that is trivial or easy.

    ANNOUNCER: Oak Ridge National Laboratory director Thom Mason. A slideshow of photos and the archived Web cast of the commencement ceremony can be found at our Web site, www.utk.edu/commencement. Charles Primm reporting.

  • 5* Review For The TIMEX Ironman Race Trainer System Watch

    By Randall Radic

    Timex Ironman Race Trainer System: Digital Heart Rate System

    Once upon a time, athletes trained by going as hard as they could for as long as they could.  When that method proved to be inefficient, the athletes began training regimens based on how they felt on any given day.  If they felt good, they trained hard.  If they felt tired, they trained easy.  In other words, they were guessing.

    Then things changed.  Science entered the picture.  Science is a wonderful thing.

    For science determined that the human body has five distinct energy systems:  aerobic, anaerobic, maximum oxygen uptake (VO2max), lactate tolerance, and phosphates.  And any athlete who wants to be all he or she can be needs to train each energy system the right amount of time at the correct time.  Failure to do so results in what is commonly called ‘overtraining.’  Which is a fancy way of saying you trained too hard, too much and for too long. 

    Overtraining is bad.  Why?  Because you can’t go fast and have no endurance.  Undertraining is bad too.  Why?  Because you can’t go fast and have no endurance.

    The good folks at TIMEX have just what you need to avoid overtraining and undertraining.  It’s called The TIMEX Ironman Race Trainer.  It’s a heart rate monitor.  And it works like this:  there’s a chest sensor that straps neatly and comfortably around your chest, along with a watch you wear on your wrist.  A signal goes from the chest sensor to the watch.  By simply glancing at the watch, you know what your heart rate is.  Which means you know if you’re in the correct ‘zone’ or not. 

    Which means no more guessing.  Which means your training is doing what it’s supposed to do – making you faster and improving your endurance. 

    The TIMEX Ironman comes with all sorts of snazzy functions.  It remembers your last ten workouts for you and lets you download them into a training log on your computer.  Which means you can adjust your training based on where you are in your season.  It also has an intensity timer, which allows you to train at the correct effort level for the correct amount of time.  But that’s not all.  In addition, it tells you how many calories you burned and it has an automatic heart rate recovery function.  The latter function tells you how long your heart is taking to recover to normal.  Which means you KNOW your conditioning level is improving.

    Great, you say.  But how hard is it to use?  Do you have to have doctorates in engineering and systems programming to make it work?  Nope, you don’t.  All you have to do is touch a button or two and you’re ready to rock n’ roll.  And get this!  The TIMEX Ironman comes with an instruction booklet that was written by real, live human beings.  Not by technical writers who have lost touch with reality and only know how to communicate in some arcane lingo having no resemblance to any known language on the face of the earth.

    In other words, TIMEX has made the thing easy to use, because you can understand the instructions.  Thank goodness!

    And don’t let the name – Ironman Race Trainer – scare you off.  It’s not just for super-serious athletes training for the Ironman Triathlon or the Tour de France.  It’s for anyone who trains on a regular basis.  Even people who jog around the neighborhood want get in better shape.  And the TIMEX will help them do it for two reasons:  they’ll be aware of how hard they are training, and because the TIMEX is simple to operate.

    Super-serious athletes can purchase software and a USB device, which allows the transfer of data to the watch without a ton of button pushing.  Which means they can train for a marathon without having to first endure a button pushing marathon, while they try to program the watch.

    The TIMEX Ironman does a bunch of other cool stuff too.  Like recall your heart rate for the last 50 laps.  It gives you your average heart rate and peak heart rates.  It even has a countdown timer and alarms that let you know when you’re either training too hard or slacking.

    All in all, the TIMEX Ironman is a wonderment.  Because it does everything you could ever want – and more!  And because it’s reasonably priced, which means you won’t have to miss a payment on your BMW to buy it.  And – the big kicker! – it’s user friendly, which is techno-jargon for it’s so easy anyone can do it.  The reviewer – who is a technological idiot – is well aware that many manufacturers misuse the phrase “user friendly.”  More often than not, what it really means is that you will never – ever – figure this thing out, but buy it anyway.  Not in this case. 

    The TIMEX Ironman is so friendly it gives kisses.

    So if you want to be faster and stronger for longer, race out and get one of these puppies.  You’ll love it.  On the Rate-O-Meter, which ranges from 1 star (don’t bother) to 5 stars (can’t live without it), the TIMEX Ironman wins 5 stars.   

    This product was provided by Timex to the reviewer.

    Amazon

    Randall Radic is a former Old Catholic priest. After a midlife crisis, he spent time behind bars. Today, he has emerged a changed man.  As the author of  Gone To Hell: True Crimes of America’s Clergy (ECW Press/ Oct 2009), Radic aims to warn the public of the sins committed behind the walls of churches every day.  Randall Radic is also author of A Priest in Hell: Gangs, Murderers and Snitching in a California Jail.

    5* Review Of EAS Myoplex Strength Formula Nutrition Bars And Shakes

    More Reviews From Randall Radic

    Copyright © 2006-2010, Basil & Spice. All rights reserved.

  • Happy Birthday RobiJo

    :birthday: :birthday: :birthday: :birthday: :birthday:

    Happy Birthday RobiJo

    :flowers: :flowers: :flowers:

    :party: :party:

  • Hi from central Canada

    Hi everyone –

    My husband was just diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and angina. He is 55. I hope to learn a lot here so I can help him with diet, healthy lifestyle and exercise (when he loses some weight. It’s tough because his job has him travelling a lot, eating in hotels where the food is rich.

    About me, I am going to try to model good behaviour for him and provide nutritious appropriate meals. I am retired but spend most of my time volunteering for dog rescue and looking after my own 6 dogs.

    Glad to be here.

  • Gold, Lithium, REE and Twelve Trillion in Debt – Macro View on Micro Caps. TNR.v, CZX.v, BVG.v, SGC.v, RMK.v, AMM.to, ASM.v, MAX.v, RVM.to, KTN.v,

    Our Gold Bull market is intact after recent short term Sell signal and will consolidate before next Leg Up. Retest of 1000 USD/oz break out level is possible, but do not bet on it.
    This is the Treasury Bubble Burst we were writing about from last year.

    This is the world’s largest Lithium producer SQM with only part of its revenue from the Lithium.

    CS. Debt of the United States has surpassed Twelve Trillion a few days ago – it is time to put a few lines about destiny of US Dollar, Gold and pockets of Growth. This debt, which is so dangerously close to be a 100% of GDP is a small shadow of U.S. total obligations which could be as high as 114 Trillion dollars.
    Recently we gave a Signal:
    “We promised to give you an update on Gold Big Picture. First of all we will refer to the Chart above and will tell you that we see a Sell signal short term in the making.”
    Gold is in a healthy correction now: our Sell signal is confirmed. Things are not rising parabolically, if it is not the last phase of the Gold Bull. We do not think so and now it is time to buy and accumulate positions again. Gold could retest strong support of previous consolidation pattern at around 1000 USD/oz to throw you the number, but do not trade it if you do not have to.
    Jim Puplava is talking this week about Gold doubling from here and Mr Gold Corp – Rob McEwen still throws his 5000 figure and makes a Junior Gold mining index. We are in agreement that it is time to rotate into Junior mining sector. After this consolidation, once investment public will realise that Gold will stay above 1000 USD/oz and it was not a final blip, money will go into Juniors, which still lack as a sector previous excitement of Bull Legs Up. Silver moves will be more dramatic, as usual, with double drivers of Inflation and Commodity High Tech Recovery play.
    Economy is not rosy at all, but it is our ticket to the Growth. There is always Bull market somewhere. Debts could be only inflated away, do not bet on the Green Fellow – that this counter rally is for real. Orderly decline for Us Dollar is the name of the game.
    Gold recent top coincided with Chinese calling for a Gold Bubble – they will be the buyers and keep it above 1000 USD/oz in a few months from now. Central banks become a Buyers in the Gold market with China, India and Russia now increasing positions. It will be the new driver.
    For US Dollar to sustain any meaningful rally now means a strict monetary policy and rising rates to curb coming inflation. With elections in 2010, Job picture and real state of economy – it is not possible. We do not expect now Crash in stock markets either – system will not survive another Stress Test like last year, financial system is still insolvent as U.S. itself – if all obligations will be called now – they will never be met. Economy will be in this quazy living state for years to come unless there will be a default as Mark Faber tells us or shock from mortgage mess and derivative losses will be inflated away, taxed and absorbed by the system, as we think. We will live during Kondratieff Winter and will be waiting for the Spring. Any thought about Double Dip will be met with sound of printing press and Quantitative Easing full scale. Stimulus package was in the total amount close to 1.2 Trillion (Jim Puplava) and now Obama talks if not about Second stimulus package, but about Jobs Creation Program.
    It is not us: political life is cynical – voters in their majority do not travel to Paris for a weekend and do not hold Gold, be it in physical form or in shares of Majors or Juniors. They will not notice, or complain for that matter, that price of French croissant with morning coffee doubled in US Dollar terms, but they will be not happy with closing schools, lost jobs or refused medical care. They will not be happy with oil above 100 USD/barrel and will freeze to death during Kondratieff Winter with oil above 200 USD/barrel as some analysts are suggesting.
    Here we should talk about one Macro Event, which will be crucial for all our Micro Caps, we are writing here about: Burst of the Treasury Bubble. Governments, Institutions and people are holding them now exactly for the wrong reason: To Be Safe. It was important last year, when everybody moved into Treasuries for safety to eliminate Agency problem with collapsing banks, now when all governments back stop banking system Elvis moment for Treasuries is gone.
    According to Jim Puplava next year U.S. Treasury will have to roll out 2 Trillion dollars of debt in maturity and finance another estimated 2 Trillion dollars of budget deficit in 2010. When more and more paper is coming into the market, prices are going down. Puru Saxena talks with Jim Puplava this week about FED buying 82-85% of all newly issued treasuries – we do not know, but will not be surprised. Once Treasury market Bubble will start bursting, where all these money will go?
    Inflation is a function of printing press, credit expansion. Higher prices will come as a result of created money chasing the same amount of goods. Here is our Gold and Silver play as a store of value.
    If these liquidity flood will find its ways into one tiny, but very important sector with Trend starting factors in place we will have our Elvis moment there. It will be pockets of Growth and magic word here is “Low Base”. Growth from this place is Explosive by definition. We call it Next Big Thing – Bull market, when “Cool Factor” is multiplied by “Big If“.

    Tiny sector is Lithium and REE, Trend is Electric Cars and “Low Base” – there is no mass market for them yet, but they are ready and going into production (picture gallery Cool Electric Cars). We will throw few words and couple of figures to get you started:
    Words: China, Oil, Jobs (for that unhappy guy at the pump with oil over 100 bucks)
    Figures: 2.4 billion cars in the future – UN estimation, from today’s 600 million, 12 cent is the cost of mile on gas vs 2.5 cent for Electric Car, 80 percent of Americans do not travel more then 40 miles per day.

    We have promised you: Gold, Lithium, REE and Twelve Trillion in Debt – Macro View on Micro Caps – we are almost there.
    Just a few more numbers to get you focus Macro into Micro:

    114,000,000,000,000 Total US Governmet Obligations
    265,040,000,000 Microsoft Market Cap
    208,230,000,000 Walmart Market Cap

  • Energy Efficiency is the Solution, Not Coal

    Climate change and what to do about it has been a contentious topic for some time now. Although Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, did a terrific job of telling the story about the threat of global warming, too many people don’t believe they can or should do anything about it.

    A recent controversy comes from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s new book, Superfreakonomics, where they posit that we should stop bothering with weaning ourselves off a fossil fuel economy. They quote Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, as saying: “coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity without it would be economic suicide, especially for developing countries.” And, “They [the environmentalists] want to divert a huge amount of economic value toward immediate and precipitous anti-carbon initiatives, without thinking things through. This will have a huge drag on the world economy.”

    But Myhrvold and others who believe we must use coal plants to produce energy are looking at the problem the wrong way. They see the problem as a supply-side problem: because the planet has more people, we need to find more energy to keep up with demand which means we need to build more power plants and drill more oil.

    Yet today, experts driving energy planning understand the problem is a demand-side problem: the reason we need so much energy is because we waste so much. This insight comes from recognizing that we aren’t looking for energy as an end-product, but for the services we get from it: warm water for our showers, light for our homes, the ability to get to where we need to go.

    Even better, by getting more out of the energy we use, we have more to invest elsewhere. Art Rosenfeld, winner of the Enrico Fermi award for his innovation and leadership regarding energy efficiency in California, says that through energy efficiency programs put in place in California between 1976 and 2004, California families saved over $1000 per year by not having to build new power plants.

    Amory Lovins, founder of Rocky Mountain Institute, has been preaching the benefits of energy efficiency for decades and he says that if the United States used energy as efficiently as the top ten states did 4 years ago, we would eliminate our need for 62.5% of the coal powered energy produced today.

    A big fallacy around energy conservation is that it has to be hard, expensive and, as former Vice President Dick Cheney said, dependent on someone’s personal commitment to using less energy. But realistically, using energy efficiently comes from regulation-driven product designs that deliver more for less. In the 1970s, California set rigorous energy usage targets for refrigerators and the result is that since 1975, refrigerators are 75% more energy efficient than they used to be.

    The biggest impediment to a more energy-efficient economy is the lack of a smart regulatory environment that creates the right market incentives to engage manufacturers and utilities in helping their customers save energy. After all, for an energy utility following the traditional profit model of charging their customers for the amount of energy they use, selling less hurts their bottom line.

    When a state doesn’t get the incentives right, utilities and their customers can find themselves working against each other. In October Ohio’s FirstEnergy sent CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs) to their customers, and then charged them significantly more than the market price for the bulbs. FirstEnergy’s reason for charging more for the energy efficient lightbulbs was that they had to recoup what they would lose when their customers used less electricity. Other states which have had more success, have put in place regulations that “decouple” the profits from the amount of energy delivered, and divide the savings between the utility and its customers.

    Bottom line: we know how to make our American economy more energy efficient. And for the developing world this works better in providing enough energy for their needs than building more coal power plants.

    Of all the excuses for not strongly pursuing energy efficiency and alternative renewable energy resources, concerns about bankrupting our economy and condemning the poor to an energy-starved future by not exploiting coal has to be one of the dumbest.

    [I wrote this originally for the Commonweal Institute Progressive OPED program.]

  • FCC OK’s Verizon Pixi with WiFi

    verizon palm pixi webosEngadget has spied a new FCC recordset containing some details on a yet to be announced Verzion branded Palm Pixi. The FCC reports go on to show a new CDMA based Pixi variant with the addition of WiFI to the standard feature set. The reports were originally issued on November 12th and mostly contain various technical analysts and related reports. Device photos and technical schematics have been withheld for the time being. The newly approved Pixi carries a model number of P121EWW, with the FCC ID of 08F-PIXEW.

    With this regulatory hurdle out of the way, the path is now set for Verizon to begin offering its first webOS based device sometime in early 2010. The company previously made its intentions well known with a number of choice quotes from VZW’s CEO and even big red’s Twitter account gave some kind of confirmation it would at least offer the Palm Pre.