Month: March 2009

Australia Broadcasting Science:

Israeli scientists have devised a technique to prevent plutonium produced in nuclear power plants from being used in nuclear bombs.

Adding the element americium, a synthetic compound used in commercial smoke detectors and industrial gauges, to nuclear power plant fuel generates higher-than-normal concentrations of a particular plutonium isotope, rendering it useless for armaments without additional processing.

You know what? This makes the sale of nuclear power easier, but it’s good news nevertheless.

Michael Winship at PBS:

America wasn’t founded as a nation where winner takes all but over the last couple of decades, that’s the way it has turned out.

The central vision of “We, the people” has been distorted and manipulated by the powerful and privileged doing their damnedest as they wage class war to sustain their way of life at the expense of everybody else, even in this current crisis.

Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America

Nonetheless, they lash out, flailing madly, saddling up straw horses and conjuring memories of McCarthy-like witch hunts, desperate to point the finger at anyone but themselves.

One in seven teens is vitamin D deficient reports the Pediatric Academic Societies.

Michael Fellman at Canada’s Tyee:

The rich who made this mess are too greedy to be grateful we’re saving their hides.

Once again, as during the New Deal, liberal Democrats will save the capitalist economy from the grips of the plutocracy, who are too stupefied with greed to understand that they will be the chief beneficiaries of the economic reconstruction.

During the previous 30 years, the political economy of the United States was rigged on their behalf and now they will be rescued from the consequences of that re-rigging on which they were choking themselves.

The massive Reagan/Bush tax cuts for the wealthy wildly enriched the top five per cent of the populace (most especially the top one per cent), while the other 95 per cent stagnated, and in the case of the poor, declined.

The tiny wealthy minority accumulated so much money so fast by the fleecing Republican tax policies enacted in their behalf that they did not know where to park their funds.

And now, Meltdown 101, Rescuing the Wealthy Idiots

In case media merely argues rather than provide details, this is the interim policy on earmarks:

When somebody is allocating money to those public entities, there’s some confidence that there’s going to be a public purpose. When they are given to private entities, you’ve got potential problems. You know, when you give it to public companies — public entities like fire departments, and if they are seeking taxpayer dollars, then I think all of us can feel some comfort that the state or municipality that’s benefitting is doing so because it’s going to trickle down and help the people in that community. When they’re private entities, then I believe they have to be evaluated with a higher level of scrutiny.

Furthermore, it should go without saying that an earmark must never be traded for political favors.

And finally, if my administration evaluates an earmark and determines that it has no legitimate public purpose, then we will seek to eliminate it, and we’ll work with Congress to do so.

A little while ago the President signed an Executive Order to ensure there is always an eye kept on how every government agency is addressing the challenges confronted by women of all ages.

“Opportunities their mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers never dreamed of…” And why not?

The average American spends almost 20% of their income and about 20% of their work week sitting behind the wheel in order to earn 20% of their income to pay for their car. Well?

Webfrastructure is so new and has so many potholes.

Fake job ads that are fronts for identity theft are up 345% over the last three years.

W. Trexler Proffitt Jr. has hit the big time.

The Franklin & Marshall College professor, who announced his proposal in October for a seven-county, regional stock exchange, was recognized last month for his brainstorm by The New York Times Magazine’s eighth annual Year in Ideas issue.

Proffitt, who was interviewed for the piece, said he just finished a research study on the stock exchange and plans to spend the coming year trying to get local business and political leaders on board so the project can move forward.

He calculates the exchange would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the regional economy, creating thousands of jobs in the process.

The Lancaster Sustainable Stock Exchange, or LanX, would cover Lancaster, York, Berks, Dauphin, Lebanon, Cumberland and Perry counties.

“Small businesses need funding options more than ever in today’s recessionary climate,” Proffitt told the magazine.

“Globalization has been advantageous, but we’re starting to see the sacrifices we’ve made,” he continued. “People are interested in figuring out how to connect to their local communities again.”

OK. Why not stock and commodity exchanges in every city, for every city?

“He helped set the agenda,” says Karl Rove. “Dear Rush, Thanks for all you’re doing to promote Republican and conservative principles,” wrote Ronald Reagan.

The nation is poorer since Rush Limbaugh.

• Used to terminate bad call-ins with “The Caller Abortion” — the sound of a vacuum cleaner and a woman’s scream.
• ?Has five houses on one piece of Florida property. His main house is 24,000 sq. feet and has a guest suite designed to look exactly like the presidential suite in the George V Hotel in Paris.

Rude is not smarts. “Before it’s all over, it’ll be called the Ted Kennedy memorial health care bill,” Limbaugh pipes.

NYTimes: Who has surfaced as the saviors of the Republican Party? Bobby Jindal, Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh, otherwise known as the axis of drivel.

NYTimes: Miracles Take Time, The renegade clowns who ruined this economy, the Republican right in alliance with big business and some feckless Democrats, have no basis for waging war against efforts to get us out of their mess.

The study followed nearly 47,000 US men from 1986 to 2006.

The researchers found that every 500 milligram increase of vitamin C produced a 17% decrease of gout, 1500 milligrams a day had a 45% lower risk. An orange has about 70 milligrams of vitamin C. Steady though, because adults should not consume more than 1000 milligrams of vitamin C each day.

Bill Maher taking on Rush Limbaugh:

“I think it’s interesting that he is now the undisputed leader of the Republican Party. It shows how clueless they are. They went looking for the future and they found radio.”

Michael says neither the White House nor the Congress can get the attention of the banks as easily as you can.

If you keep your money in one of the zombie banks, start today on the process of relocating it to a strong, community-based bank or a local credit union. Every city and town has small local or regional banks and credit unions that provide all of the same services as the multi-nationals. True, there may not be an ATM on every corner, but look where that capability has gotten us.

Michael’s proposal might be an easy AND radical proposition that just might wield Democracy’s tools AND rejuvenate power where we can see it. Plato’s revenge.

Drew Peterson’s step-brother Morphy.

From the Herald News, Joliet, Illinois:

Then Peterson started asking strange questions.

“How much do you love me?” Morphey said Peterson asked him, and Morphey answered that he did love him, a lot.

Peterson then asked, “Enough to kill for me?” “No, I couldn’t live with myself,” Morphey said.

Peterson pressed on, asking, “Could you live with knowing about it?”

Morphey replied, “Yeah, I guess. We always figured you killed Kathleen.”

Morphey said Peterson then drove him to a storage facility and asked him to rent a unit, using his own name. Morphey had not brought along his required state identification. Peterson, fearing that leaving to get it and then returning would attract undue attention, dropped Morphey at home, Morphey said.

A few hours later, Morphey said, he called Peterson and told him this was something he couldn’t get involved with. Peterson, he said, replied, “OK, I can respect that.”

Morphey said he feared a life was at stake, but did not know where to turn because Peterson was a police officer.

“It’s just something I have to live with,” Morphey said. “I grew up Catholic. I believe if you take another life, you go to hell.”

Looks like it’s happened again — a large quantity of wet coal ash has spilled into the Potomac River according to the Maryland Department of the Environment.

A ‘dime sized’ hole developed Sunday and was discovered at 6:00 a.m. Monday.

Workers on Tuesday were cleaning up the spill on the Potomac which contains high concentrations of selenium, sulfate, arsenic, iron, manganese….

Fly ash is now on the way to Capitol Hill where there’s a ‘dime sized’ hole in too many noggins.

One of every 50 American children become homeless.

Where are kids out in the streets? Most often in Texas.

As Texans say they want a proud nation.

Least often in Connecticut.

George W. Bush issued 161 signing statements in which he cast doubt on more than 1,000 provisions in legislation and essentially stated his intention to ignore those parts of the law.

From The Buffalo News: Bush’s signing statements were viewed by many critics, Republican and Democratic alike, as an attempt to expand the scope of presidential power.

Bush didn’t publicize them, and for much of his presidency, the public was largely unaware of the practice.

Obama ordered the Executive Branch not to use them to do end runs around Congress and will ignore the previous administration’s signing statements.

Polling in Poland, users said they downloaded movies and media because Hollywood and Nashville won’t deliver. They wait years for CDs and DVD and they resent it.

In the UK, a worker unwittingly used his cellphone to download a dozen films and was sent a $52,000 bill. A child inadvertently racked up $14,000 for his mother to pay. In the USA, headlines no longer bother to tell us about too many seizures and lawsuits… but millions download.

Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, senior economists at the Washington University in St Louis point out that what goes by the name ‘Intellectual Property’ is in fact “an intellectual monopoly that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps.”

“From a public policy view, we’d ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether.”

From Mother Jones. Irrefutable.

From 2000 to 2006, the real earnings of 93 million production and nonsupervisory workers rose by $15.4 billion. That is, 93 million workers received about $3 billion a year in pay increases, most indexed for inflation.

In 2007 alone, Wall Street bonuses – not their pay but merely bonuses – was $33 billion. In 2008, bonuses totaled $18.4 billion.

Wall Street and the financial system (we ought not forget that more money moves through the futures markets in Chicago than through the stock market in New York) have been sucking wealth out of the real economy.

The resulting financial pressure on non-financial companies shows in a number of ways: cutting corners on safety and environmental regulations; holding down wages, lack of capital investment, deferred maintenance, raiding pension funds, or simply offshore manufacturing.

New Rules, Bill Maher – Hang the Bankers – Feb 20, 2009

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NDoNFXOcmA&hl=en&fs=1]

Warren Buffet on bickering:

People–when you have a Pearl Harbor, you have to know the nation is going to be united on December 8th to take care of whatever comes up. And we have little squabbles, otherwise we put them aside and everybody goes to work on defense plans, we start building planes, we start building ships, even though they’re not going to be ready tomorrow, people join. The Army doesn’t blame the Navy because there were too many ships in Pearl Harbor, and it shouldn’t have happened. The Army doesn’t say, `Well, it was your fault, so we’re not going to send our troops.’ None of that sort of thing.

We got united, and we really need that now.

The President said that a false choice has often been presented between science and faith, and that corrupting, shielding, or shying away from the facts science lays bare benefits nobody:

That is why today, I am also signing a Presidential Memorandum directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making. To ensure that in this new Administration, we base our public policies on the soundest science; that we appoint scientific advisors based on their credentials and experience, not their politics or ideology; and that we are open and honest with the American people about the science behind our decisions. That is how we will harness the power of science to achieve our goals – to preserve our environment and protect our national security; to create the jobs of the future, and live longer, healthier lives.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Am I saying that capitalism is going to have to change or else we will have an environmental catastrophe? Yes, I am. … The main reason I believe capitalism is not up to the challenge is that it improperly and systemically undervalues the future.

…the promise of capitalism was always that of class mobility—the idea that a working-class family could bootstrap their children into the middle class. With the right policies, over time, the whole world could do the same.

There’s a problem with this, though. For everyone on Earth to live at Western levels of consumption, we would need two or three Earths.

Looking at it this way, capitalism has become a kind of multigenerational Ponzi scheme, in which future generations are left holding the empty bag.

tip to WorldChanging

“The contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education.”

The Food and Drug Administration spends $8,000 to inspect a plant, but the fashion of weak government allows outsourcing at $1,000, too often merely to divert liability. People are dying and more are sickened.

“It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question,” Obama said to the New York Times from the Oval Office.

“It wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks,” Obama said. “And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement, the prescription drug plan, without a source of funding.”

He added, “We’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles, and some of the same folks who are throwing the word socialist around can’t say the same.”

“By the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system,” he said, adding, “The fact that we’ve had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk-taking has precipitated a crisis.”