WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama has declared 2009 H1N1 swine flu a national emergency, the White House said on Saturday.

The declaration will make it easier for U.S. medical facilities to handle a surge in flu patients by allowing the waiver of some requirements of Medicare, Medicaid and other federal health insurance programs as needed, the White House said in a statement.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday that swine flu has become widespread in 46 of the 50 U.S. states, a level comparable to the peak of ordinary flu seasons but far earlier and with more waves of infection expected.

Obama signed the statement on Friday night.

The White House statement said the declaration was intended to prepare the country in case of “a rapid increase in illness that may overburden health care resources.” It was similar to disaster declarations issued before hurricanes hit coastal areas.

“It’s important to note that this is a proactive measure — not a response to a new development,” an administration official said.

“H1N1 is moving rapidly, as expected. By the time regions or healthcare systems recognize they are becoming overburdened, they need to implement disaster plans quickly,” he said.

Seasonal flu normally peaks sometime between late November and early March and kills about 36,000 Americans in an average year.

Swine flu has hit young adults and children the hardest, while seasonal flu normally is more dangerous for people over age 65.

H1N1, declared a public health emergency earlier in the year, has killed more than 1,000 people in the United States and put more than 20,000 in the hospital since it emerged earlier this year, the CDC said. But health officials are quick to note that the actual number of cases cannot be measured.

The new declaration clears the way for waivers of federal requirements that, for example, could prevent hospitals from establishing off-site, alternate care facilities that could help them deal with emergency department demands, the White House said.

The Health and Human Services Department is trying to deliver vaccines against H1N1 but says production is falling short of projections because companies are having trouble making them.

HHS has also moved to make available stockpiles of antiviral drugs oseltamivir, made by Roche AG under the brand name Tamiflu, and zanamivir, an inhaled drug made by GlaxoSmithKline under the brand name Relenza.

On Friday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for an experimental new drug called peramivir, made by Biocryst Pharmaceuticals Inc and licensed to Shionogi & Co Ltd.

The authorization allows the intravenous drug to be used in hospitalized patients who cannot take pills or inhale Relenza or when Tamiflu or Relenza do not seem to be helping.

These four circles are perfectly round. Are you sure your view of reality isn’t skewed too?

Consider the following story…it’s real. Verified. Not an illusion or a hoax. How would this change things in your world view? Consider carefully. Change is coming.

In a modest building on the west side of Salt Lake City, a team of specialists in advanced materials and electrochemistry has produced what could be the single most important breakthrough for clean, alternative energy since Socrates first noted solar heating 2,400 years ago.

The prize is the culmination of 10 years of research and testing — a new generation of deep-storage battery that’s small enough, and safe enough, to sit in your basement and power your home.

It promises to nudge the world to a paradigm shift as big as the switch from centralized mainframe computers in the 1980s to personal laptops. But this time the mainframe is America’s antiquated electrical grid; and the switch is to personal power stations in millions of individual homes.

Former energy secretary Bill Richardson once disparaged the U.S. electrical grid as “third world,” and he was painfully close to the mark. It’s an inefficient, aging relic of a century-old approach to energy and a weak link in national security in an age of terrorism.

Taking a load off the grid through electricity production and storage at home would extend the life of the system and avoid the expenditure of tens, or even hundreds, of billions to make it “smart.”

The battery breakthrough comes from a Salt Lake company called Ceramatec, the R&D arm of CoorsTek, a world leader in advanced materials and electrochemical devices. It promises to reduce dependence on the dinosaur by hooking up with the latest generation of personalized power plants that draw from the sun.

Solar energy has been around, of course, but it’s been prohibitively expensive. Now the cost is tumbling, driven by new thin-film chemistry and manufacturing techniques. Leaders in the field include companies like Arizona-based First Solar, which can paint solar cells onto glass; and Konarka, an upstart that purchased a defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Mass., and now plans to print cells onto rolls of flexible plastic.

The convergence of these two key technologies — solar power and deep-storage batteries — has profound implications for oil-strapped America.

“These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewables,” said Daniel Nocera, a noted chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sits on Ceramatec’s science advisory board. “They will turn us away from dumb technology, circa 1900 — a 110-year-old approach — and turn us forward.”

Why not just upgrade to a so-called “smart grid” as President Obama has proposed in his economic stimulus package? There are complications, Nocera said.

“First you have to rebuild the grid because the one we have now is a creaky machine from the 1920s, and we keep trying to retrofit it,” he said. “Then you’re going to have computers trying to manage the energy, which brings up issues like security. You have to make it really secure so you don’t have people hacking into things. And then politics. Just wait until you try to run power lines through someone’s backyard.

“I can’t imagine anything more secure than generating my own energy with the sun at my house, and now I’ll have a way to store it. It’s the ultimate in security, and the ultimate in control.”

With small-scale electrical generation taking place at millions of individual homes — as opposed to today’s large-scale power generation from a handful of giant power plants — there would be less worry about what’s called “point failure” on the grid. That’s when a single component gets knocked out and shuts off power to a whole region. California-style rolling blackouts would be history.

The threat of terrorism has heightened the worry. But wide distribution of batteries in homes would virtually eliminate it.

***

Inside Ceramatec’s wonder battery is a chunk of solid sodium metal mated to a sulphur compound by an extraordinary, paper-thin ceramic membrane. The membrane conducts ions — electrically charged particles — back and forth to generate a current. The company calculates that the battery will cram 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy into a package about the size of a refrigerator, and operate below 90 degrees C.

This may not startle you, but it should. It’s amazing. The most energy-dense batteries available today are huge bottles of super-hot molten sodium, swirling around at 600 degrees or so. At that temperature the material is highly conductive of electricity but it’s both toxic and corrosive. You wouldn’t want your kids around one of these.

The essence of Ceramatec’s breakthrough is that high energy density (a lot of juice) can be achieved safely at normal temperatures and with solid components, not hot liquid.

http://www.heraldextra.com/news/article_b0372fd8-3f3c-11de-ac77-001cc4c002e0.html

At the moment, I am (obviously) figuring some things out. Getting some catharsis and looking at a generalized direction to go with career, life, and more. I’m in a good place to do that. The small ranch I am on is quiet and gives me the space to think, explore, and write. Not to mention, I like waking up and doing the chores.

I usually wake up around dawn, make coffee, then go feed the horses, feed the chickens, water the gardens, and maybe ride around the place on one of the quad wheelers. Not bad for a homeless guy, right? It’s one of those situations that just came up and I happened to be able to say yes to. That’s one of the reasons prefer to keep my options open, because when something like this comes up, I can say yes to it.

Don’t get me wrong, this is very temporary, probably two weeks at the longest and more likely a week or so. I’m just thankful to have it. Especially in August. It’s so funny, most of the truly traumatic experiences of my life have taken place during the 8th month. The universe sometimes seems to stack things up like that.

And so it goes. I’ve got several challenges ahead of me. Personal, professional, and spiritual. On the personal level, I’ve put on some weight since getting to the U.S., I want to shed those pounds. On the professional level, I really want this job in Indonesia and I need to figure out how to make my blogging more than just a hobby, and on the spiritual level, Ramadan starts very soon and I will be taking the Feeding the Spirit journey. The nice part is that I can see how these three goals line up and work together.

So yes, August is a difficult month, but in truth, the only times we ever actually learn anything are when we are suffering. I’m grateful to suffer so that I can learn not to suffer.

You don’t have to be Muslim to fast with me, all you need is to want to experience a greater connection with the source of all reality.

This will sound crazy to some of you and to others it will not. The Source has revealed itself to me. Call the Source what you will, God, Allah, Jehovah, or ten thousand other names. The bottom line is that I understand what it does and how the universe is set up.

Sadly this doesn’t grant me the ability to do miracles or magic. No special powers come with the knowledge. It doesn’t make me bulletproof or get rid of the necessities of eating, sleeping, or the other needs we humans share.

THE TRUTH has been revealed to me. I’m just not entirely sure what to do with it. The most incredible thing about it is that no matter your religion or belief system, you will be able to accept this. It’s one of those things that you never know but when you learn it you go ‘a-ha’ and it seems as if you have known it for all of your life.

Why me? Not because I am a saint or a prophet, that is for certain. I’m simply a man who has been asking these questions and sorting the data for as long as I can remember. I’ve not discarded any of the pieces because I found that some of the pieces were flawed or broken. It’s as if I’ve been buying thousands of used jigsaw puzzles at thrift stores and throwing all the pieces into a bin. Suddenly, the right pieces were all there to create a completed puzzle that no one really thought was possible.

I’ve seen it. It’s obvious. I’m just not real sure what to do with it now.

As a human, I’ve still got to figure out how to take care of my human needs. I still need to figure out how to return to my sweet Hanane with enough resources to begin our life together. I still need to figure out how I am going to provide for our family. I still need to figure out what I am supposed to do with this revelation that I’ve been blessed with.

It’s not enough to share it with my thousand friends or even with the 15,000 who have bought and read my books. Certainly there are aspects of this truth in all of my work, but the complete picture has not been shared yet. I want to share it, but I feel that I am supposed to share it in a way that provides me with the resources I need to begin a massive humanitarian project.

It is this project that consumes me now. It is a way to fix things that have been broken for far too long. I can tell you that the beginning is to create a home for orphaned children in Sefrou where they will receive food, shelter, education, and love. Look at these two boys, both of them homeless orphans, who scrabble for a daily existence and you will see that I am right.

These two boys spent the day hiking and hanging out with Hanane and me several months ago. They are boys with amazing potential who will most likely be sidetracked by their lack of guidance into miserable and horrid lives. These are only two orphans out of hundreds. And then there are the unwanted, the abused, the unloved, and the lost as well.

I don’t know why I am posting all of this. There is only so much I can reveal at the moment. I know that most of you are far too busy or overly committed to help with anything like this, or probably even to read what must appear to be nonsense.

I only know that it is the will of the source that I do so. Our cultures and societies have been derailed from the source and now it is time that we start to return to it. These are the bumps we are feeling. These are the wounds, wars, stress, diseases, and traumas.

I wonder if any of you can feel it as you read this. Do you feel that inner compass telling you that this is it?
Are you going to listen to it?

While it is true that a Muslim is a person who practices the religion of Islam, the problem with this particular definition is that it generalizes a diverse population that spans the world. There are Muslims of all ethnicities and most if not all nationalities. While it is true that a Muslim is a person who practices Islam, that is not the entire picture.

The events of September 11, 2001, however, caused people all over the world to look at Islam and Muslims with a more critical eye.

What is Islam?

The word “Islam” is derived from the Arabic root S-L-M (س ل م) سلم which means peace. The word Islam means follower of God or submitter to God. A Muslim (M-S-L-M or ( م -س -ل -م) مسلم is one who submits to the will of God or one who follows God. Islam is the second largest religion in the world with more than 1.6 billion adherents.

Followers of Islam believe that God revealed the sacred book of Muslims, called the Quran, to the Prophet Mohammad. The Quran, it is believed, is the exact replica of a sacred book in Heaven. The Quran was revealed to Mohammad in Arabic, which is considered a sacred language by Muslims. Non-Muslims are not allowed to touch Arabic versions of the Quran.

Muslims share reverence for the prophet Abraham with Christianity and Judaism. The three religions all spring from this one figure. All three also recognize Jesus as a prophet. Muslims, however believe that Mohammad was the last and greatest prophet.

In the year 610 C.E, Mohammad, a trader living in the city of Mecca was given the first in a series of revelations from the angel of God. Later, he was transported to Heaven and the rest of the Quran was revealed to him. In the year 622 C.E, Mohammad established the first mosque in Medina and the Muslim community, called the Ummah, was born. 622 C.E. is year 1i on the Muslim Calendar.

In the year 630 C.E. Mohammad conquered the city of Mecca with no bloodshed and moved his center of power there

Five Pillars of Islam
All Muslims order their beliefs on what are called the five pillars of Islam. The first pillar of Islam is the Shahada, a statement of faith. This is translated as “There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his Prophet”. Salat, the second pillar, is the act of prayer. Muslims pray five times each day facing Mecca. The third pillar is the Zakat which is charity. 1/40th of all wealth is given to the Ummah through the Mosque. The fourth pillar is the act of abstinence and fasting called Saum. All Muslims fast during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. This is referred to as Ramadan. Saum also applies to several permanent prohibitions such as the abstinence from alcohol and mind altering substances. The fifth and final official pillar of Islam is the Hajj. The Hajj is the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims must endeavor to take within their lifetimes. Those who have made the pilgrimage are referred to as Hajji or Hajja.

There is also a sixth unofficial pillar of Islam that is often misunderstood by non-Muslims. This is the concept of Jihad, which in Arabic means to struggle. There are two types of Jihad: the first is known as Greater Jihad, this is the struggle to overcome weaknesses within the self; the second is known as Lesser Jihad, this is the struggle to overcome weaknesses in society.

Mohammad and the Status of Women

While it is true that in much of Islam today women are oppressed, this was not necessarily the case during the time of Mohammad. In fact, one of the most revered figures in Islam is Khadija, the first wife of Mohammad who was also the first believer. When Mohammad doubted what was happening to him, Khadija supported him and encouraged him to believe.

Under the rule of Mohammad, women were given more rights than they had enjoyed previous to him. Mohammad prohibited marriage without the consent of the bride, allowed women to divorce, allowed women to keep property, banned female infanticide, and created rules to regulate polygamy. These rules included getting the permission of the first wife before marrying another, requiring that all wives were treated equally in terms of finance and affection, and setting a maximum number of wives.

Different types of Islam

Just as there are different sects within Christianity and Buddhism, there are also different sects within Islam. The major split in Islam arose after the death of Mohammad when his followers disagreed about who should succeed him.

One group, the Sunnis wanted the father-in-law of Mohammad, Abu Bakr, while another group, the Shiites, wanted the son-in-law of Mohammad, Ali. The two groups coexisted peacefully under Abu Bakr first and later under Ali. In 661 C.E. Ali was assassinated. That was when the split began.

The Shiites deify Ali and his two sons, Hussein and Hasan, while the Sunnis do not. To Shiites, Ali is known as the first Imam and is considered sinless. Interestingly, Ali was killed by Shiites who felt that he had betrayed the trust of Mohammad. His son Hasan was poisoned and Hussein was killed in battle. This early violence helped to create a strong sense of martyrdom among Shiites.

Shiites make up approximately 12% of all Muslims and the majority of Shiites are in Iran and Iraq. Sunnis make up 85% of all Muslims, the majority of whom are in Indonesia. Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party were part of a Sunni minority in an Iraq that had a majority of Shiites.

A third sect of Islam is known as the Sufis, a word which means ‘woolen ones’ in Arabic. Sufis were born as a reaction against the institutionalization of Islam and tend to focus on mysticism and asceticism. The whirling dervishes of Turkey are Sufis.

A more recent addition to the family of Islam is the Nation of Islam (NOI). Nation of Islam was born in Chicago in 1931 and is an organization which is based upon Islamic principles and favors political and economic independence for African Americans. Many non-NOI Islamic groups do not consider NOI members to be true Muslims because of radical differences in doctrine and teachings.

Since I’m carping about blogging the news, I figure I might as well do that a little. By the way, thanks to Paul Dylan for pointing out just how bizarre the collapsed shanty story has become, unbelievable that the guy was injecting people with his own concoctions, ran for mayor, and is obvously a complete nutter ala Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde.

And you had to wonder who Stephen Colbert would endorse…or how he would do it… And here is what al Queda has to say:

An al Qaeda leader has called for President George W. Bush and the Republicans to be “humiliated,” without endorsing any party in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, according to a video posted on the Internet.

“O God, humiliate Bush and his party, O Lord of the Worlds, degrade and defy him,” Abu Yahya al-Libi said at the end of sermon marking the Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr, in a video posted on the Internet.

Libi, one of the top al Qaeda commanders believed to be living in Afghanistan or Pakistan, called for God’s wrath to be brought against Bush equating him with past tyrants in history.

The remarks were the first comments from a leading al Qaeda figure referring, albeit indirectly, to the U.S. elections. Muslim clerics often end sermons by calling on God to guide and support Muslims and help defeat their enemies.

Also, never mind Dubai, check out the beautiful architecture that is emergeing in Kazakhstan.

And where do you go these days to see great art? Why not check out the public toilet in Munich?

And finally, are you a Phoenician?