Month: February 2009

What bugs me much more than dealing with smoke in the sky from old technologies such as coal is the smoke in our eyes from arrogant politicians and execs that assume we are naive.

“Clean Coal” was bundled into a package of bumper stickers during the McCain-Palin campaign, paraded as a moral and strategic initiative that required loose government and loose controls to protect us from desert empires. Winking for votes.

Dusty business plans were re-circulated as if Sarah Palin would or could create Bulwark America, as if Alaska drains its one year of crude to be followed by so-called clean coal from the Prairies to Virginia. How many bought this capricious junk? Too many.

Now without McCain’s slipshod back-room incentives, execs and investors are retreating from new plants.

For one example of hundreds, NV Energy, Inc. will not move forward “until the technologies that will capture and store greenhouse gas are commercially feasible, which is not likely before the end of the next decade.”

There will not be 100, 200, 300 new coal-fired power plants. American Electric Power projects have been placed on hold. AES Corporation with almost $14 billion in revenues will withdraw applications to build coal-fired power plants as Obama’s EPA has effectively put a moratorium on all coal-fired plant projects in order to confront CO2.

China has erected several hundred new coal plants. Many Americans should worry. The particulates are carried eastward over North America. Made darker by pollutants, dirty ice melts faster, exposing tundra and putting us at risk of atmospheric methane. The ash by-product from burning coal for power contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste. And we haven’t truly understood the damage that fine particulates can cause in our bodies.

Whether or not flue scrubbing or hi-tech burn become effective, the coal industry has much to answer for. The Clean Air Act has been gutted, especially under Bush, but recently set new targets to reduce particulates.

We no longer spill solvents into rivers. Diesel soot is finally under regulation. It’s time we notice that tiny particles are potentially dangerous and too common.

Incidentally, did you know that almost one third of laser printers emit large numbers of ultrafine particles that can penetrate deep into our lungs.

Did you know the world’s longest word describes black lung disease common in the coal industry? [ wiki ]

Is there such a thing as merely a little bit of fascism?

Finished with his camera, Mr. Taylor, 30, was about to board the train when a police officer called to him. He stepped back from the train.

“The cop wanted my ID, and I showed it to him,” Mr. Taylor said. “He told me I couldn’t take the pictures. I told him that’s not true, that the rules permitted it. He said I was wrong. I said, ‘I’m willing to bet your paycheck.’ ”

…
“I said, ‘According to the rules of conduct, we are allowed to take pictures,’ ” Mr. Taylor said. “I showed him the rules — they’re bookmarked on my BlackBerry.”

Rule 1050.9 (c) of the state code says, “Photography, filming or video recording in any facility or conveyance is permitted except that ancillary equipment such as lights, reflectors or tripods may not be used.”

Then a police sergeant arrived.

Mr. Taylor said. “I tell him, ‘If you feel I’m wrong, give me a summons and I’ll see everyone in court.’ The sergeant told them to arrest me.”

In handcuffs, Mr. Taylor was delivered to the Transit District 12 police station, and a warrant check was run. “They were citing 9/11,” said Mr. Taylor, whose encounter was described on a blog by the photographer Carlos Miller, Photography Is Not A Crime.

The general rule in the United States is that anyone may take photographs of whatever they want when they are in a public place or places where they have permission to take photographs. Absent a specific legal prohibition such as a statute or ordinance, you are legally entitled to take photographs.

“Of course, 9/11 is serious. I said: ‘Let’s be real. We’re in the Bronx on the 2 train. Let’s be for real here. Come on.’ ” [story at NYTimes]

Dog owners were asked how they dealt with aggressive behavior:

– 43% hit or kick dog for undesirable behavior

– 41% growl at dog

– 39% force an item from a dog’s mouth

– 31% roll the dog onto its back and hold

– 30% stare at or stare down

– 29% force the dog down onto its side

– 26% grab dog by jowls and shake

A year-long University of Pennsylvania survey found that confrontational or aversive methods will likely increase aggression.

Meghan E. Herron, lead author of the study, said. “Our study demonstrated that many confrontational training methods, whether staring down dogs, striking them or intimidating them with physical manipulation does little to correct improper behavior and can elicit aggressive responses.”

Bullies are also fools.

HousingCrisis blog:

Now, you might say we’re convulsing through the beginning of the end of the era of the fossil fuel economy. It’s not an easy passage, and weaning $40-or-so-trillion of global gross domestic product from the planet’s oil supply doesn’t bode well for a very comfortable next 50 years or so.

So Americans’ cars and Americans’ houses are not ever going to mean what they have meant.

If who we are is not what we drive and where we live, then what happens?

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty. – Thomas Jefferson

Bristol Palin was on Fox News saying her mother’s views on abstinence are ‘not realistic at all because it’s not the 19th Century any more, not even in Alaska’.

James Hansen is director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. He was the first scientist to warn the US Congress of the dangers of climate change:

Coal-fired power plants are death factories. Close them

The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.

Simon Caulkin: Inside every chief exec, there’s a Soviet planner

“Managers miscalculated risk, misallocated resources & created incentives of such outstanding perversity that they brought the entire global financial system crashing down around them.

How could this happen?

…
The truth is that much conventional management is central planning in western disguise. This is why most companies are zombie-like in their structural and strategic similarity. This is why, too, they are unable to learn.

With their faces toward the CEO and their arses towards the customer… the Zimbabwe school of change management – altering course only after ruin, by coup d’état.

Paul Krugman:

The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation … since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.

At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. …

Why should we have expected our net worth to go up?

Yet until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing. … Then reality struck… The surge in asset values had been an illusion — but the surge in debt had been all too real.

So now we’re in trouble — deeper trouble, I think, than most people realize… For this is a broad-based mess. Everyone talks about the problems of the banks… But the banks aren’t the only players with too much debt and too few assets; the same description applies to the private sector as a whole.

…
If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression.

Since nothing like that is on the table…

Joe Bagent:

Whether the final American collapse takes four years or forty years is anybody’s guess.

But it’s gonna take a passel of behavioral management experts, whether in psychological institutions, university research centers, or on Madison Avenue, to keep the lid on this puppy when she blows.

However, I’m not ruling out the possibility that they just might help do that — keep the lid on — because they are state authorized and accredited to do so. The infrastructure of industrial strength administration of psychology is there. And has been ever since sheepskins were issued to “industrial psychologists.”

Nobody in the Western World seems to see the irony and conflict in that term. But the fact is that even if 50 million Americans exploded tomorrow, they would have “snapped” alone, particulated and atomized in a very large and spread out country, and ultimately be administered treatment or institutionalized as “individuals.” Of course, if they were more concentrated, which would put them in a situation to act in unison, then god help ‘em because they would then be a national security problem, the last thing you want to be in a security state.

…
We got there partly through our weakness, shallow greed and mindless consent, but more so by the orchestrated world machinery benefiting powerful elites, both corporate, governmental and financial (is there a difference?) which have always been among us, though never in such strength.

…
Still, it is only a system. Systems can be changed.

Robert Patterson:

I am not talking about communism, I am talking about nature’s law. The worst thing in nature is a system with too little diversity. We have allowed the most important parts of our lives to be captured by a tiny self serving elite.

Google Trends on lipstick and unemployment from Mahalanobis.

Take A Seat on an 18,449 mile bike ride.

Who am I?

Dominic Gill, 28 years old, Climber, Videographer, Adventurer, Jack of all trades (hopefully master of one, one day…)

Where did I go?

From Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, approximately 29,519 kilometres / 18,449 miles down the west coast to Ushuaia, the most southerly city in South America.

What was my mode of transport?

A tandem bicycle. Sometimes on my own, sometimes with one of the approximately 270 people I picked up for company on the back!

How long did it take?

I arrived at the Southern tip of Patagonia 2 years and 2 months after rolling away from Prudhoe Bay.

There’s heaps of issues snarled here.

A conversation with the estates unit at Bank of America:

Paul: Yes, I’m calling to inform you that my mom died on the 24th of January.

Bank of America Estates representative: I’m sorry. Oh, it looks like she never even missed a payment. That’s too bad. Well, how are you planning to take care of her balance?

Paul: I’m not going to. She has no estate to speak of, but you should feel free to just go through the standard probate procedure. I’m certainly not legally obligated to pay for her.

BOA: You mean you’re not going to help her out?

Paul: I wouldn’t be helping her out — she’s dead. I’d be helping you out.

BOA: Oh, that’s really not the way to look at it. I know that if it were my mother, I’d pay it. That’s why we’re in the banking crisis we’re in: banks having to write off defaulted loans.

[link]

Notstalgia:

Lehman Brothers: “Where vision gets built”

AIG: “The strength to be there”

Wachovia Bank: “We’re Wachovia, and we’re here”

Bank of America: “Bank of opportunity”

Merrill Lynch: “We’re bullish on the future”

Citigroup: “Citi never sleeps”

Washington Mutual: “Whoo hoo”

IndyMac: “You can count on us”

Capital One: “What’s in your wallet?”

via AdAge

The auction of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Some items here.

It’s our money.

Bill Moyers has been thinking about these issues for a long time.

“Oligarchy is an un-American term.”

The blood we walk upon knew that. But what have we done?

Since Nixon, since Reagan, we’ve been sold a bill of goods and we tolerate still more. Coddled insiders are celebrated by coffee shop consorts while the unbridled ambitious prove Game Theory has run amok.

Simon Johnson, Professor of Economics at MIT and an International Monetary Fund chief economist, worries we will not be tough enough on the politically powerful banking lobby.

“Weakening the big banks and their bosses should not be seen as an unfortunate side effect of beneficial medicine. It is exactly what we need to do under these circumstances.

Unless and until these banks’ economic and political influence declines, we are stuck with too many people who know exactly what they can get away with….

“We should change the leadership of the major banks.”

Shades of Argentina!

Tell me what ideas need additional explanation or substantiation to convince people on the depth of our predicament and to further the debate regarding a real exit strategy.

Average full-time workers made $41,198 in 1973 and $37,606 in 2008, adjusted for inflation. CEOs make more than 300 times as much.

The top tax rate was 70 percent in 1973 and just 35 percent now. The top rate for capital gains was 36.5 percent in 1973 and 15 percent now.

The richest 1 percent have increased their share to the second-highest level on record. The only year higher was 1928 – on the eve of the Great Depression.

The richest 400 average more than $5 million a week, are taxed under 17 percent, and cheat more on their taxes by understating incomes an average of 21 percent.

Republican tax cuts for the top 1 percent in 2008 was more than the budgets of the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency combined. McClatchy-Tribune News Service

“And what did I learn?

“I learned that if I was to survive in life, I should take care not to involve myself in any activities that I would not want The Nun to know about!

“If something would make me ashamed, were anyone I loved or respected to find out about it, then it’s probably something I shouldn’t be doing in the first place. So I don’t.”

Some are saying the World’s Most Luxurious Coffin: Flat-panel television, a telephone… carpeting, shoes!

I don’t know what to say, but the Little Pharaoh on my shoulder is whispering gravely.

It’s not an easy task for architects and builders. The engineering is daunting. The liability is a Pandora’s Box in an insurance market already burdened with litigation and institutionalized avoidance. Delivering adequate water during a firestorm is nearly an impossible challenge for public agencies.

Australia’s Calair Pipe Systems makes a variety of nozzles for outside or external sprinklers to protect homes and buildings from wildfire. Their Fire-Pro System includes heat engineered polymer pipe, nozzles and activation sensors.

The intense heat of a storm of fire may overwhelm any system, but risk is most often from embers flying through miles of neighborhoods not merely proximity vegetation.

An automatic sprinkler system might be the breakthrough homeowners are looking for, but there’s much work ahead. Wet helps, but winds of fire at 50 or 70 miles per hour can boil water away in mere seconds.

Extensive Flash slide shows are here at LA’s CBS TV and another at LATimes.