Month: July 2009

Robert F. Kennedy, 18 March 1968

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.

Our gross national product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but that GNP – if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity or our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. It can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

The real CIA assassination program:
The CIA spent seven years trying to assemble teams capable of killing the world’s most wanted terrorists but could never find a formula that worked.

He heard himself thinking:

Here I am driving along on the biodiesel from about 100 million pigs, 35 million cattle, 1.6 billion turkeys, and 8 billion chickens and the ethanol in that ugly car in the lane next to me is just from dirty ol’ bushels of corn!

Yeh but, current corn ethanol converts a bushel of corn which weighs about 54 pounds into about 18 pounds of ethanol, 18 pounds of carbon dioxide, and 18 pounds of distillers grain of which 2 pounds is fat.

Marines say pain is weakness leaving the body:
This is what happens when a functional social contract goes bust (the one that we had, unwritten and unstated, that people will share in the additional wealth generated by improvements in productivity).

Bush’s border policy:
It was not always like this; migrants and drugs once occupied separate worlds. But tougher border enforcement has pushed both groups into the same obscure parts of the desert.

Oxford University:
Parasites reduce their harmfulness to the host so as not to run out of hosts BUT parasites become more harmful as they increasingly disperse.

BTW:
I was talking to one of Paulson’s schoolmates a couple of weeks ago… and his only response was to start talking about the French Revolution and Lenin.

I think a lack of sufficient cynicism can lead to undue pessimism.

We don’t really need more hear; we need more see.

I think you grossly underestimate the degree to which the government has become addicted to the substance of the people.

John Mauldin:

Thirty times leverage means that if you lose 3.3%, you wipe out all your capital.

In the first few years of the G.W. Bush administration, the banking authorities decided it would be OK to allow five banks to increase their leverage from 12:1 up to 30:1. Which five banks, you ask? Bear Stearns, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs.

How did that work out, just five years later? Three are gone and two survived with large dollops of taxpayer money.

Is it really any surprise that Goldman and JPMorgan are making record profits on the underwriting and trading side of the business? Hell, if I could eliminate 50% of my competition, my profits would grow too!

Richard E. Tremblay, professor of psychology, pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of Montreal:

The more intense the help given by the juvenile justice system, the greater was its negative impact.

Our findings take on even greater importance given that the juvenile justice system in the province of Quebec has the reputation of being among the best.

Most countries spend considerable financial resources to fund programs and institutions that group deviant youths together in order to help them. The problem is that delinquent behavior is contagious, especially among adolescents.

Putting deviant adolescents together creates a culture of deviance, which increases the likelihood of continued criminal behavior.

Seth Godin noticed Walter Cronkite acted as if he had a responsibility to his audience.

Walter Cronkite:

What do I regret? Well, I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn’t make them stick. We couldn’t find a way to pass them on to another generation.

If every state had a building code as tough as California’s, energy consumption in a typical new home could be cut as much as 75 percent. That’s a lot of cash.

Community is the resource development operation in the group development process of survival. Community is the frontier of sense, the territory of common, the geography of hello. Community sidesteps jargon, confounding the literate, frustrating the aggressive, annoying the credentialist, proving the politician, offering undreamt rewards to the victor while subjugating the right to deny the loser.

Community is instruction kinked in the catalyst of freedom. Community is the micro of the macro, the HQ of the milieu, debugging order and chaos in the miracle that can do that.

Community is the inescapable onus on the individual to participate in the benefit of the whole and the requirement upon the whole to manage itself for the individual.

Community is divergent seeds in the water of dreams, the agriculture of hope.

Community is the ideal shrunk real.

What was Rodrigo Corral thinking?

…it’s all relative to your sense of scarcity.

Joe Nocera:

I had watched the first two hearings with a growing sense of bewilderment.

It always seemed obvious to me that if the Bank of America-Merrill deal hadn’t gone through, Merrill Lynch would have been in a horrible position, akin to Lehman Brothers or the American International Group. The government very likely would have had to spend an awful lot more than $20 billion to save it.

Surely, the end result was worth whatever arm-twisting and additional government aid was required.

So why the anger?

Why the suggestions of “cover-up” and “lies”? On Thursday, as I watched Mr. Paulson being castigated, it dawned on me.

Seven months later, with the palpable fear of a financial collapse largely subsided, it really all boils down to how you view what happened last year. Was it, as Mr. Towns believes, a bailout of a handful of unworthy but too-big-to-fail institutions? Or was it, in the eyes of Mr. Paulson, a rescue of a teetering financial system? My vote is for the latter.

how deep our crawl

Obama:

Now, I realize that the last few miles of any race are the hardest to run, but I have to say now is not the time to slow down, and now is certainly not the time to lose heart. Make no mistake, if we step back from this challenge at this moment, we are consigning our children to a future of skyrocketing premiums and crushing deficits. There’s no argument about that. If we don’t achieve health care reform, we cannot control the costs of Medicare and Medicaid and we cannot control our long-term debt and our long-term deficits. That’s not in dispute. So we’re going to have to get this done.

Doublespeak isn’t a term used since the ’60s. Regretfully. Outright distortion is much more common.

Water is an industry, folks, funded by murky taxes and exploited by layers of underwriters and services near every airport business park, on the shoulder of riparian law, the unfinished rights of our first rights.

Riparian. Utilities use tremendous volumes of water long before piped to our penny pinching showers and guilty lawns.

I remember SecState George Schultz declare in the early ’90s that water costs will jump 500%. Hold your breath: 1,000% is the new horizon. Today, desalination is a bargain, much to Bechtel’s chagrin.

But let’s not worry. Industry will rescue us, observes the segment lobby Lux Research issuing a crafted if not reasoned policy statement. Why is it crafted? Because it’s revenue riding on green.

Unshackling Carbon from Water:

…while new energy sources and extraction methods may reduce carbon intensity, they often impose increased water usage.

On a planet where only 0.008 percent of the water is renewable, such tradeoffs will become an increasingly important consideration for executives and policymakers.

1. Retrofits and upgrades will make coal and natural gas electricity sources more water and/or energy efficient. Representative solutions include boiler water treatments, like electrocoagulation, advanced ion exchange and membrane electrolysis, as well as dry condensers and cooling tower water recapture.
2. New and improved extraction technologies will be employed. Exploitation of oil sands and improved deep sea extraction will continue to make oil the cheapest, if dirtiest, source of energy for automotive drivetrains. But water recycling technologies like desalination and hydrocarbon recovery could reduce the water- and carbon-intensity of oil extraction from new sources like the tar sands.
3. The slow roll-out of transcontinental high-voltage DC transmission lines will hinder low-carbon, low-water energy sources like solar and wind. Biofuels use far too much water and are capable of providing too little energy to make up more than a few percent of global needs.
4. Nuclear is the only low-carbon, low-cost energy source that can reliably meet future electricity needs, but water is its Achilles’ heel. However, advanced designs promise to increase efficiency and reduce water intensity, while placing plants on the coasts decouples them from increasingly scarce fresh water sources.

Well Hell. Now you know

1. yes, utility execs truly, truly watch your back
2. tundra and oceans must be industrialized
3. power towers are the real 401K recovery, screw bio
4. our coastlines are wide open, note, and lucrative

Carbon or no carbon, on and on we go funding shackles.

Janet Tavakoli on what Wall Street owes you:

Wall Street’s “financial meth labs,” including Goldman’s, massively pumped out bad bonds and credit derivatives that have melted down savings accounts, pension funds, the municipal bond market and the American economy.

Risky assets, leverage and fraud led to acute distress in the global financial markets.

The biggest crime on the American economy may go unpunished with no consequences to the perpetrators.

The biggest crime was not predatory lending, but predatory securitizations, packages of loans that did not deserve the ratings or prices at the time they were sold. They ballooned what should have been a relatively small problem into a global crisis.

Wall Street owes the American public for its key role in bringing the global economy — and in particular, the U.S. economy — to its knees.

Harvard’s new and thorough analysis of the power of wind power changes our long held perception that wind is a minor option.

NYTimes GreenBlog post here.
[pdf link here, a few page report]

In the big picture, this is important news.

Climate Olympics And The Industrial Age!

Attempting to tackle climate change by trapping carbon dioxide or switching to nuclear power will not solve the problem of global warming, according to energy calculations published in the July issue of the International Journal of Global Warming.

Total Energy Emissions during the industrial revolution circa 1880 and the modern era at 2000 adds up to almost three quarters of the earth’s accumulated heat.

Although we outgas billions of tons, CO2 is a minor culprit, because heat in the atmosphere is causing a mere 6.6% of global warming.

The far, far more important machine factors that are warming our climate are:

1. Heat that’s accumulated in the ground at 31.5%.
2. Melting ice that has absorbed 33.4%.
3. Increased heat in warming sea water holding at 28.5%.
4. And 26% trapped by our old friend, the greenhouse effect.

Switching to nuclear is no help. A nuclear plant produces three times more heat than the use of all the electricity it generates.

Report at Science Daily by Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden.

World’s first fully contained, land-based, indoor production fish farm.

#1) This article in Baltimore Sun summarizes a new way to farm fish and feed the world.

#2) Behind much breakthrough in recent aquaculture science is Yonathan Zohar, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Marine Biotechnology:

and incidentally, news flash #3) “Commercially, the path is now open to revolutionize the tuna industry and see captive tuna aquaculture grow to a multibillion dollar sector.”

New Scientist reports on two studies released last week that seem to indicate that the real problem in human population isn’t really overpopulation and overuse of the world’s resources- but rather mere politics.

Senate conniving alters one word in the upcoming climate legislation so that forty three new coal plants on American soil in the next five years will escape performance standards.

All will be grandfathered without managing emissions.

“I’d definitely call it a bubble,” said Erik Shuster, the author of the report, who works in NETL’s Office of Systems Analysis and Planning.

A bubble wrapped atmosphere!

Much remains hidden, and if hidden it won’t be fixed.

Michael Lewis put some fine work into this Vanity Fair article, The Man Who Crashed The World.

Almost a year after A.I.G.’s collapse, despite a tidal wave of outrage, there still has been no clear explanation of what toppled the insurance giant. The author decides to ask the people involved—the silent, shell-shocked traders of the A.I.G. Financial Products unit—and finds that the story may have a villain, whose reign of terror over 400 employees brought the company, the U.S. economy, and the global financial system to their knees.

“On A.I.G.,” a journalist asked Obama at a press conference, “why did you wait—why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage? It seems like the action is coming out of New York and the attorney general’s office. It took you days to come public with Secretary Geithner and say, Look, we’re outraged. Why did it take so long?”

“It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak,” Obama said testily. “All right?”

It’s unlikely that he actually did know what he was talking about, except in the broadest outlines. Nor, for that matter, did the people who had engineered the bailout. How could they?

At no point did anyone from the U.S. Treasury or the U.S. Congress, or any of the various New York State authorities that had gotten involved, call them up, much less visit A.I.G. F.P.—as, say, someone might who was genuinely curious to know what, exactly, had happened there. Not even A.I.G. C.E.O. Ed Liddy had bothered to make the drive from Manhattan to Wilton, Connecticut, where many of the offending trades had been done, and most of the offending bonuses were being paid, to ask questions of the people still on the scene—people who could have told him a great deal about what had happened and why.

Everyone seemed to be operating on whatever they read in the newspapers—and the people inside A.I.G. F.P., who had the best view of the action, did not appear to be talking to reporters.

Depending on which account you read, you thought they had lost $40 billion, or $100 billion, or $152 billion. They had done this by selling credit-default swaps on subprime-mortgage bonds—which is to say they had insured Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, and the rest against Americans with weak credit histories defaulting on their mortgages. But why? Apparently, because they were greedy: the premiums they took in from the insurance allowed them to pay themselves big bonuses, which they’d grown so accustomed to that they now were reduced to stealing from the U.S. taxpayer.

And that, it seemed, was that.

Some say we can’t blame one man. Of course. But also say this Vanity Fair piece is an amazing story.

They made bad decisions, they essentially blew up all of AIG, and they required an enormous taxpayer-funded bailout to limit the collateral damage. But holding them responsible for the bad decisions at all the Wall Street investment banks seems a bit much.