Doom North is having a hard time getting its head around this one (cute picture, but we hope that’s a clip-on tie!): CBC (2/13 ’12): “Community reaction to Harper’s China visit and panda pact” Prime Minister Stephen Harper has completed his relationship-building trip to China, during which he brokered agreements worth an estimated $3 billion dollars and secured the loan of two giant pandas. Here’s the other shoe: CBC “The Current” (2/13 ’12): “Where to Sell Alberta Oil” (with link to 25m audio) Prime Minister Harper has returned from China where he was greasing the path for more Canadian trade….
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A headline worthy of the Halifax Chronicle-Herald’s Bill Smith, circa 1975 … CBC News (1/12 ’12): “Same-sex divorce options explored by Harper government” The mind boggles.  Meanwhile, the foreign central banks continue to steadily reduce their holdings of US obligations … more on this in due course

Well, well, well.  After years of hearing how different it is north of the border, it looks like the Vancouver housing market is finally starting to crack.  [T]he latest home-sales figures point to a slowdown. The number sold dropped 21 per cent in July from June, and prices edged 0.1 per cent lower to $630,251 for a typical detached house, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. Listings of properties for sale in the city are increasing, while bidding wars are becoming less common. The slowing real estate scene in Vancouver is adding to concerns that the rest…
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We’ve been hearing for years that the dramatic rise in home prices in Canada did not mean that the housing market was “bubbly”.  Now there’s evidence to the contrary: Canada’s housing market may have peaked after prices soared in the second quarter, according to a survey by real estate giant Royal LePage. “In many of Canada’s regional markets, we saw house prices appreciate at a significantly faster rate than wages and salaries, and this trend cannot continue indefinitely,” observed Phil Soper, president and chief executive, Royal LePage Real Estate Services. Soper may not exactly say “pop”, but this sounds close…
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… because they can no longer afford the membership fee.  Igor thinks the Association should waive the fee, seeing as the utility has suddenly become world-class on failure Bloomberg (6/20 ’11): “Tepco Leaves Group Founded By Fukushima Probe Chief to Cut Costs” The utility known as Tepco notified the Association for the Study of Failure in April it won’t renew its membership for the year ending March 2012 because of financial constraints, Kenji Iino, executive director of the research group, said by telephone from Tokyo today.

One Romeo’s meltdown may be getting most of the attention in the ten ring circus, but the most ominous part of this narrative is that neither the authorities nor the MSM will confirm or deny whether Fukushima No. 4 has developed a lean since the Ides-of-March blast nearly three months ago.  However, this latest update, if you read / listen between the lines of the brief article and its must-see embedded video, clearly shows that the engineers’ dramatic race against gravity is the most important news story presently happening in the world. NHK World (6/7 ’11): “Work continues to support…
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This would be funny if it weren’t so serious. More than a week later and our intrepid journalists still haven’t figured out the problem at No. 4 is not the reactor but the pool, although the more serious condition now at No. 3 seems to have inspired them to heat up the rhetoric just a bit. The blogosphere’s been all over this one for a couple of weeks, but it’s still nice to get (re-)confirmation, if only in a short inside paragraph.  Doomers will recall that the spent fuel pool in this building has over a thousand assemblies, many really…
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Reuters (5/17 ’11): “Q+A: What’s going on at Japan’s damaged nuclear power plant?” Officials are also concerned about the slow pace of cooling at the No. 3 reactor and the No. 4 reactor was so badly damaged by a hydrogen explosion that workers will have to try to shore it up with steel beams and concrete to prevent a collapse. Not the reactor, guys, it’s the spent fuel pool (Four Romeo’s not even in service). And still no definitive confirm or deny on whether that “badly damaged” resulted in a lean. UPDATE: hat tip to HuffyPo for digging up this…
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I believe this is called Thinking Outside The Box … Voice of America (4/16 ’11): “Japan Still Struggling to Control Crippled Nuclear Plant” The operator of the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima has begun dropping into the Pacific Ocean sandbags filled with an absorbent to try to reduce the danger from radiation. The bags are filled with zeolite, better known as the active material sprinkled in cat litter boxes to absorb odors. In this case, zeolite is meant to take up cesium that has been detected at high levels along the Fukushima coast. Reuters (5/12 ’11): “UPDATE 2-Fukushima reactor…
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Not that the building was leaning, or anything IAEA (5/13 ’11): “Fukushima Nuclear Accident Update Log: Updates of 4 – 11 May 2011″ To protect against potential damage as a result of future earthquakes, TEPCO started work on 9 May to install a supporting structure for the floor of the spent fuel pool of Unit 4. If not indulging in  a bow, alternatives and bloggers can at least rest easy they weren’t too far off on this one. UPDATE: about seven minutes into the embedded video in this post Arnie Gundersen is also asserting a lean in building No. 4….
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Looks like a real-life domino effect may on the table at Fukushima Dai-ichi, as there’s speculation the hydrogen explosion at reactor building #3 may have slightly destabilized building #4. Hawaii News Daily (5/11 ’11): Fukushima #4 Reactor Leaning; High Radiation Beyond Exclusion Zone … Dr Robert Jacobs and his colleagues at the Hiroshima Peace Institute observed what could fearfully prove to be the most serious crisis escalation since the March 11 catastrophe began. “This began for us as speculation, but on the web cam you can watch the four reactors. It began to get obvious that building Number Four was…
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Few Americans would have noticed Canada’s recent election (the show in Pakistan was a tough act to follow), but the country ended up radically (and I do mean radically) changed.  In the map at the link above have a look at the blue dagger at the bottom.  That’s Ontario’s “golden triangle,” and it just sent a whole lot of government members to Ottawa.  This is the heart of the country’s auto industry, and borders on Detroit and Michigan. Now Canada produces a lot of key commodities, including oil, uranium, potash and precious metals, which has sent the C$ “loonie” soaring…
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The Christian Science Monitor has these compelling still pictures but there’s lots of text and video coming out for this ongoing triple disaster. South African commentator Michael Trapido briefly addressed the event as ’3/11′ on the day, but he appears to have been unique in Google’s news-world. Doom really doesn’t have anything further to say … UPDATE: HuffyPo (3/14): Japan Satellite Photos: Before & After 3-11 Earthquake

A half-finished office skyscraper dominates the skyline.  It was built during the construction boom, but was abandoned during the bust.  It sat empty for years before squatters decided to move in.  The location?  Caracas, Venezuela. The U.S. is also now dotted with partially completed construction projects. The partially completed Centerpoint Condominium project in downtown Tempe, AZ was home to squatters for several years, although there the construction has resumed.  While squatting is not currently common in the U.S. commercial buildings, it’s become very common in residential ones: [There are] units occupied by squatters who have long since stopped paying their…
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Hat tip to my brother on this one. The now-abandoned mining town of Pine Point, NWT is featured in a fascinating 2011 interactive documentary by Canada’s National Film Board (NFB). This northern community on the south shore of Great Slave Lake only existed for about a single generation, starting in the early 1950s. Could this also be the future for parts of California’s Inland Empire and other bubbly American towns and developments?