XIAM007

Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Wednesday 24 April 2013

America The Fallen: 24 Signs That Our Once Proud Cities Are Turning Into Poverty-Stricken Hellholes -


America The Fallen: 24 Signs That Our Once Proud Cities Are Turning Into Poverty-Stricken Hellholes - 


What is happening to you America?  Once upon a time, the United States was a place where free enterprise thrived and the greatest cities that the world had ever seen sprouted up from coast to coast.  Good jobs were plentiful and a manufacturing boom helped fuel the rise of the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the planet.  Cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Baltimore were all teeming with economic activity and the rest of the globe looked on our economic miracle with a mixture of wonder and envy.  But now look at us.  Our once proud cities are being transformed into poverty-stricken hellholes.  Did you know that the city of Detroit once actually had the highest per-capita income in the United States?  Looking at Detroit today, it is hard to imagine that it was once one of the most prosperous cities in the world.  In fact, as you will read about later in this article, tourists now travel to Detroit from all over the globe just to see the ruins of Detroit.  Sadly, the exact same thing that is happening to Detroit is happening to cities all over America.  Detroit is just ahead of the curve.  We are in the midst of a long-term economic collapse that is eating away at us like cancer, and things are going to get a lot worse than this.  So if you still live in a prosperous area of the country, don't laugh at what is happening to others.  What is happening to them will be coming to your area soon enough.

The following are 24 signs that our once proud cities are turning into poverty-stricken hellholes...

#1 According to the New York Times, there are now approximately 70,000 abandoned buildings in Detroit.

#2 At this point, approximately one-third of Detroit's 140 square miles is either vacant or derelict.

#3 Back during the housing bubble, an acre of land in downtown Phoenix, Arizona sold for about $90 a square foot.  Today, an acre in downtown Phoenix sells for about $9 a square foot.

#4 The city of Chicago is so strapped for cash that it is planning to close 54 public schools.  It is being estimated that Chicago schools will run a budget deficit of about a billion dollars in 2013.

#5 The city of Baltimore is already facing unfunded liabilities of more than 3.2 billion dollars, but the city government continues to pile up more debt as if it was going out of style.

#6 Today, the murder rate in East St. Louis is 17 times higher than the national average.

#7 According to USA Today, the "share of jobs located in or near a downtown declined in 91 of the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas" between 2000 and 2010.

#8 Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Michigan were lost.

#9 There are more than 85,000 streetlights in Detroit, but thieves have stripped so much copper wiring out of the lights that more than half of them are not working.

#10 The unemployment rate in El Centro, California is 24.2 percent, and the unemployment rate in Yuma, Arizona is an astounding 25.6 percent.

#11 It has been estimated that there are more than 1,000 homeless people living in the massive network of flood tunnels under the city of Las Vegas.

#12 Violent crime in the city of Oakland increased by 23 percent during 2012.

#13 If you can believe it, more than 11,000 homes, cars and businesses were burglarized in Oakland during 2012.  That breaks down to approximately 33 burglaries a day.

#14 As I have written about previously, there are only about 200 police officers assigned to Chicago's Gang Enforcement Unit to handle the estimated 100,000 gang members living in the city.

#15 The number of murders in Chicago last year was roughly equivalent to the number of murders in the entire country of Japan during 2012.

#16 The murder rate in Flint, Michigan is higher than the murder rate in Baghdad.

#17 If New Orleans was considered to be a separate nation, it would have the 2nd highest murder rate on the entire planet.

#18 According to the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center,  Mexican drug cartels were actively operating in 50 different U.S. cities in 2006.  By 2010, that number had skyrocketed to 1,286.

#19 Back in 2007, the number of New York City residents on food stamps was about 1 million.  It is now being projected that the number of New York City residents on food stamps will pass the 2 million mark this summer.

#20 The number of homeless people sleeping in the homeless shelters of New York City has increased by a whopping 19 percent over the past year.

#21 As I noted yesterday, approximately one out of every three children in the United States currently lives in a home without a father.

#22 In Miami, 45 percent of the children are living in poverty.

#23 In Cleveland, more than 50 percent of the children are living in poverty.

#24 According to a recently released report, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

As I mentioned at the top of this article, the decline of the city of Detroit has become so famous that it has actually become a tourist attraction.  The following is a short excerpt from an article in the New York Times...

But in Detroit, the tours go on, in an unofficial capacity. One afternoon at the ruins of the 3.5-million-square-foot Packard Plant, I ran into a family from Paris. The daughter said she read about the building in Lonely Planet; her father had a camcorder hanging around his neck. Another time, while conducting my own tour for a guest, a group of German college students drove up. When queried as to the appeal of Detroit, one of them gleefully exclaimed, “I came to see the end of the world!”

For much more on the shocking decline of one of America's greatest cities, please see my previous article entitled "Bankrupt, Decaying And Nearly Dead: 24 Facts About The City Of Detroit That Will Shock You".

So are there any areas of the country that are still thriving?

Well, yes, there are a few.  In particular, those areas that are sitting on top of energy resources tend to be doing quite well for now.

One example is Texas.  In recent years people have been absolutely flocking to the state.  There are lots of energy jobs, the cost of living is low and there is no state income tax.

But overall, things are really tough out there.  Over the past decade America has lost millions of good jobs to offshoring, advancements in technology and a declining economy.

Last year, the United States had a trade deficit with the rest of the world of more than half a trillion dollars.  Overall, the U.S. has run a trade deficit with the rest of the world of more than 8 trillion dollars since 1975.

All of that money could have gone to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers.  In turn, taxes would have been paid on all of that income which could have helped keep our cities great.

But instead, our politicians have stood idly by as we have lost tens of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs.  If you can believe it, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities have closed down permanently in the United States since 2001.

We have allowed our economic infrastructure to be absolutely gutted, and so we should not be surprised that our once proud cities are turning into poverty-stricken hellholes.

And this is just the beginning.  The next wave of the economic collapse is rapidly approaching, and when it strikes unemployment in this country will eventually rise to a level that is more than double what it is now.

When that happens, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near our rotting, decaying cities.

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CNBC Viewership Plunges To Eight Year Lows -


CNBC Viewership Plunges To Eight Year Lows - 



By now it is well known that the ubiquity of central planning (not to mention the persistent threat of HFT flash crashes as exhibited by yesterday's twitter-driven #Hash crash) in capital "markets", has made trading stocks in a rigged casino a sucker's game - one that retail investors have decided to shun, and nearly 5 years after Lehman have still to come back in any size to the stock market.

One of the main, unintended consequences of this development to prop up markets at all costs, even if it means removing all logic and reliance on fundamental data, has been the complete evaporation of interest in any finance-related media, forcing the bulk of financial outlets to rely on such cheap gimmicks as slideshows, pictures of kittens, trolling and generally hiring liberal arts majors straight out of school to copy and paste articles while paying them minimum wage, and providing absolutely no insight (and then wondering why the Series ZZ preferred investors will never get their money back, let alone the A round).

However, nowhere is this more obvious than in the relentless imploding viewership of once financial media titan, CNBC, which lately has become a sad, one-sided caricature of its once informative self, whose only agenda is to get the most marginal Joe Sixpack to dump his hard-earned cash into 100x P/E stocks, and where according to data from Nielsen Media Research, the total and demographic (25-54) viewership during the prime time segment (9:30am - 5:00 pm) just tumbled to 216K and 40K - the lowest recorded viewership since mid 2005 and sliding.



So why the relentless collapse in CNBC viewers, which in turns leads to plunging ad revenues (aside from our observations from last summer on just this topic) and which has forced the station to even resort to muppets as a cheap ratings-boosting gimmick? Perhaps it has something to do with outbursts like this, where 13 minutes into the clip, one Jim Cramer tells the camera point blank when discussing daily market gyrations, and with absolutely no remorse, that "i want everyone to play that game at home by recognizing that fraud is part of the equation and the government cannot stop it."

That's right: on one hand CNBC's most overcaffeinated anchor admits that the market is nothing but uncontrollable fraud, and on the other he beckons viewers and listeners, usually with the assistance of assorted bovine sounds, to "buy, buy, buy."

Perhaps the greater fool is truly dead, or simply the embedded hypocrisy of the CNBC stock "infomercial" is so transparent that nobody really cares what the Comcast subsidiary's paid entertainers have to say any more.





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Virgin America flights allow mile-high flirting - Passengers can send drinks, texts to others -


Virgin America flights allow mile-high flirting - Passengers can send drinks, texts to others - 


Tired of striking out at the singles bars? Then you might want to try a Virgin America flight.

The airline has launched a new service that allows passengers to send a drink to someone on the plane who's caught their eye.

It's done through the airline's in-flight entertainment system. Passengers pinpoint their designated hottie with Virgin's digital seat map, browse the menu and have a drink, snack or meal sent over.

Passengers can also follow up with a text through the seat-to-seat messaging system.

Virgin launched the service this week to mark the start of its Los Angeles to Las Vegas service, but it's available on all of its U.S. flights.

Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson introduced the new feature in a video. He said the chances of deplaning with a plus-one are at least 50 percent.

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Scientists Find Way to Turn Stem Cells Into Brain Cells -


Scientists Find Way to Turn Stem Cells Into Brain Cells - 


Scientists have discovered an antibody that can turn stem cells from a patient's bone marrow directly into brain cells, a potential breakthrough in the treatment of neurological diseases and injuries.

Richard Lerner, of the Scripps Research Institute in California, says that when a specific antibody is injected into stem cells from bone marrow—which normally turn into white blood cells—the cells can be triggered to turn into brain cells.

"There's been a lot of research activity where people would like to repair brain and spinal cord injuries," Lerner says. "With this method, you can go to a person's own stem cells and turn them into brain cells that can repair nerve injuries."

Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that the immune system uses to help identify foreign threats to the body. They bind to foreign invaders in the body in order to alert white blood cells to attack harmful bacteria and viruses. There are millions of known antibodies.

Lerner and his team were working to find an antibody that would activate what is known as the GCSF receptor in bone marrow stem cells, in order to stimulate their growth. When they found one that worked, the researchers were surprised: Instead of inducing the stem cells to grow, they began to form into neural cells.

"The cells proliferated, but also started becoming long and thin and attaching to the bottom of the dish," which is reminiscent of behavior of neural cells, Jia Xie, a research associate on Lerner's team, said in a released statement. Further tests confirmed that they were neural progenitor cells, which are very similar to mature brain cells.

Lerner says that scientists have "an awful lot of experience injecting antibodies" into stem cells and that the process is not "inherently dangerous." The team plans to start animal tests of the technology soon.

"We're going to collaborate with people who are trying to regenerate nerves in the eye," Lerner says. "We will team up with a couple people strong in that area of research."

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72,000 Ladybugs Released Inside Mall of America On Earth Day In Place Of Pesticides -


72,000 Ladybugs Released Inside Mall of America On Earth Day In Place Of Pesticides - 


What sounds like an April Fools’ Day prank was actually intentional -- The Mall of America celebrated Earth Day on Monday by voluntarily releasing 72,000 ladybugs into its indoor shopping facility.

The ladybugs were released in the Minneapolis mall in an effort to protect the large amounts of the mall's greenery, which are usually plagued by aphids.

Mall of America (MOA) Senior Manager of Environmental Services Lydell Newby told Kare 11 that the bugs take the place of commonly used pesticides to control pests that would otherwise eat away at the mall's tropical plants.

“Ladybugs are what I like to call, sort of a biological defense system,” said Newby, who added that ladybugs are a great and natural alternative to pesticides.

“You can release some ladybugs in your own garden," he said. "And in an outside climate, once the conditions are right, they can live in your garden forever.” 

A third-grade class was on hand to release the bugs, and many appeared to enjoy the experience.

“Before I got to hold these ladybugs, I was pretty scared of them,” said student Sheriya Wentzlaff. “I overcame my fear and helped the ladybugs.” 

Some shoppers took to the mall’s official Facebook page this week to complain about the possibility of the bugs infecting the mall's food court, but according to an MAO spokesperson, the bugs only live on the plants for their two-week life span and are maintained by staff.

“We’ve been doing this for years," the spokesperson said. "No ladybug takeover yet. Chances are, you’ve visited the mall during this short period and have never noticed them. They are completely harmless.” 

According to the Mall of America’s blog, the shopping mall currently houses 30,000 live plants that act as natural air purifiers for shoppers. Since its opening in 1992, the facility has been using environmentally friendly procedures such as passive solar heating and an extensive recycling program.

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