GOOD NEWS ON FRIDAY

With spots of bad weather here and there (it has been raining for a week in Hawaii, including even a twister), the usual deadlock in the U.S. Congress, almost boring Republican primaries, high petroleum prices, higher electricity prices (especially in Hawaii, for 77% our electricity is generated from oil), Syria in disarray, Israel waiting for the right moment to bomb Iran, the Euro Zone tanking (particularly as Greece just a minute ago was found to have defaulted) and our globe continuing to heat up, things, actually, are looking good for Planet Earth and Humanity.  For example:

1.  The Dow Jones Industrials have essentially doubled since the recent low exactly three years ago, 9March2009.

2.  North Korea's twenty something-ish (not sure of birth year) Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un, had the balls to make a concession.  Amazingly enough, rather than lash out with yet another belligerent gesture, he agreed to freeze nuclear tests and long-range missile launches, stop enriching uranium and, in addition, invited back nuclear inspectors.  All this just for 240,000 tons of biscuits (an exaggeration, but not far from the reality).  This happened on leap year day, 29February2012.

2.  Last month I reported on Abundance (Diamandis/Kotler) on why the world is becoming a better place.  A second publication by Eric Topol just released entitled, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, provides a glimpse of your future when you will wear a device (could well be your watch) to provide you real time monitoring of your body.  My car warns me when one of my tires loses pressure, or oil is below a certain level.  Medical science is getting close to the equivalent for you.

3.  For first time in history, poverty is being reversed.    The World Bank indicates that there are now fewer people living on $1.25/day, and this has occurred throughout the world.  If you look closely, though, this mostly because, since 1981, China took 660 million people out of poverty.  (If you can't read the bar graphs, just click on them, and there will be magnification.)

4.  Scientists this week predicted that the God Particle might well soon be detected, and probably at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.  My predictions for 2012 indicated that this would occur in August.  What exactly is this elusive thing?  Scientifically, the Higgs boson, which gave mass to a few particles soon after the Big Bang, triggered the formation of atoms, then stars, and now us.  Ergo the God Particle, for life was created.  So what?  Grown men and women in this field take all this seriously, and that Large Hadron Collider cost $10 billion, the most expensive scientific experiment ever.

5.  There is some good news here, but as now a critic of NASA, I feel compelled to inform you that two probes (launched last year) are now circling our Moon, primarily to learn how it got its shape.  Let's see now, the Moon is a sphere, so...  Okay, I'm being facetious, but do you realize this project cost $496 million, for two circling washing machines (the size)?  Speaking of God above, these two GRAIL (Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory) spacecraft are thusly appropriately named, although a fourth grade class from Montana won a national competition with Ebb and Flow.  Several thousand schools are following this mission.  Okay, I guess this is the good news.  But $496 million?

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The Dow Jones Industrials rose 14 to 12,922, with world markets also mostly up.  Gold increased $12/toz to $1712, while the WTI crude is at $107/barrel and Brent oil at $126/barrel.

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