In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia’s nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country’s plight, Nepal’s top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.

But the claim was rubbish, and the world’s top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.

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His work has led him, along with an increasingly alarmed army of international scientists, to a controversial conclusion: The “electrosmog” that first began developing with the rollout of the electrical grid a century ago and now envelops every inhabitant of Earth is responsible for many of the diseases that impair — or kill — us.

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Claims on behalf of authorities that naked body scanner images are immediately destroyed after passengers pass through new x-ray backscatter devices have been proven fraudulent after it was revealed that naked images of Indian film star Shahrukh Khan were printed out and circulated by airport staff at Heathrow in London.

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In the summer of 1932, presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised, “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”

Today, it is time not for a “New Deal,” but a “New Mission.”

America’s schools need to take a page from the businesses that have been created by entrepreneurs over the past decades. Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page have all given us the road map, but the path toward entrepreneurship is often the road less traveled America’s schools.

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An unnatural economic and psychological disaster has struck America. Five contributors, each interacting with and shaping the others, have devastated the American moral, economic, psychological, and social landscape. Each is fed by related streams, but each contributes its own force to the disaster. The American dream in which each generation surpassed the previous generation in real wages has all but disappeared, along with dreams of an intact family, a steady job, a home, and an honest supportive community.

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It appears that this time China’s posturing is for real. Following up on our earlier post that Chinese military officials want to “punish” America by selling Treasuries, Asia Times Online is reporting that an explicit directive by the Chinese government has notified reserve managers to sell all risky US assets, including asset backed and corporates, and just hold on to explicitly guaranteed Treasuries and Agency debt. And from following TIC data we know that China’s enthusiasm for MBS/Agencies over the past year has been matched solely by that of one Bill Gross.

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A Chinese proverb known by Americans as the “Chinese curse” says: “may you live in interesting times”. Boy do we live in interesting times. This is a veritable golden age in economic evolution. New theories are being crafted as we speak and old theories that have stood the test of (our short) economic time are being torn down. No theory has come under fire in recent years like Keynesianism. After decades of success, Keynesianism doesn’t appear to be having the same magical effect. Economic theorists are confused. To their dismay (and with all apologies to Sir John Templeton, to whom I promised I would never utter these words) – it’s different this time. Literally.

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We said in early December that the Euro breakup would be the story of 2010, and just over a month in that prediction has shown to be right on. It’s even overshadowing (by far) concerns over a China bubble, or at least a China slowdown.

A piece in Der Spiegel highlights the real problem that Europe faces. It’s not just debt. It’s politics.

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When the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took office last year, they ended nearly a half century of unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party, and also broke the unwritten rule of Japanese politics: not to question America.

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I doubt there has ever been a time in financial history when there has been challenges of this magnitude.

This is not business as usual in any form.

When have financial meetings been so top secret?
When has the military cordon off financial meetings?
When have F-18s, F-22s and French Rafales provided air support (as the Swiss did for the Davos seminar) for two central bank meetings in the last few weeks as the USA and Australia did?

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