Former Vice Presidents don’t receive Secret Service protection beyond six months after leaving office. Except Dick Cheney. USNews reports that threats against Cheney haven’t lessened since his term expired.
Plastic Ocean
Oceanographic Research Vessel Alguita
The crew is all in good spirits and working in full gear to document the debris state of the Pacific.
Only at decks edge, 3 feet off the water, can you see the small fragments drifting by, at a rate of 10 pieces per minute … and the all too typical ingredients of the plastic bottles, buoys, fragments of plastic bags and hard plastics.
The crew was shocked by the amount floating by….
“No matter how hard we tried, we just couldn’t pick up all the trash we see…it is impossible!”
Feed Eight Billion
The key to China’s success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production teams, and replaced them with family farms.
In each village, the land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China’s rural population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986.
With its fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing, and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger in less than a decade—in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter period of time than any country in history.
While hunger has been disappearing in China, it has been spreading throughout much of the developing world, notably sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent.
As a result, the number of people in developing countries who are hungry has increased from a recent historical low of 800 million in 1996 to over 1 billion today.
Part of this recent rise can be attributed to higher food prices and the global economic crisis.
In the absence of strong leadership, the number of hungry people in the world will rise even further, with children suffering the most.
Yes, a banker’s banker
In describing the failure of the markets as far back as 1998, White wrote that it is naïve to assume that markets behave in a disciplined way.
But Greenspan, the champion of free markets, remained impassive.
White was losing his patience. Was there no other option than to regularly allow the economy to collapse? Didn’t the policy of operating without a safety net border on stupidity? And wasn’t it written, in both the Bible and the Koran, that it was important to provide for seven years of famine during seven good years?
This time, White didn’t just want to discuss his views behind closed doors. …an assault on everything Greenspan had preached and, as everyone knew, he was not fond of being contradicted.
Thinking Along The Way
Only six percent of America’s scientists are Republicans. nuff sed.
Vanity Trumps Greed
All Job Gains Gone
What better marks eight years under Bush-Cheney and jingo Republicans?
Visual paycheck
e-waste FAIL
On electronic recycling:
We’ve created a system whereby only one third is recycled in any sensible manner, the rest burnt over open fires by Third World children. Which kills them.
One Against White Collar Crime
Sonia Sotomayor typically handed out tougher prison sentences than her colleagues in the federal courthouse in Manhattan, especially to white-collar criminals.
Wrong about pain
Distorting research over the years, men consistently report less pain when talking to female researchers thus it’s likely incorrect to believe women feel pain more than men. Well?
Finance, therefore
Pope Benedict pipes up on bankers:
Finance, therefore — through the renewed structures and operating methods that have to be designed after its misuse, which wreaked such havoc on the real economy — now needs to go back to being an instrument directed towards improved wealth creation and development.
Insofar as they are instruments, the entire economy and finance, not just certain sectors, must be used in an ethical way so as to create suitable conditions for human development and for the development of peoples.
It is certainly useful, and in some circumstances imperative, to launch financial initiatives in which the humanitarian dimension predominates. However, this must not obscure the fact that the entire financial system has to be aimed at sustaining true development.
Above all, the intention to do good must not be considered incompatible with the effective capacity to produce goods.
Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers.
Right intention, transparency, and the search for positive results are mutually compatible and must never be detached from one another. If love is wise, it can find ways of working in accordance with provident and just expediency, as is illustrated in a significant way by much of the experience of credit unions.
Smile on Michael Jackson
A young boy and his mother are walking down the street and the boy turns to his mother and says, “When I grow up I want to be a musician.” His mother replies, “Now now son, you can’t do both!”
We are all both sexes
Each of us is more or less both male and female.
Gerald N. Callahan, Colorado State University:
“When I started doing research on the biology of sex development, one of the things that I realized is that the process is controlled by a series of enzymes and the reaction may be more or less complete.”
“Just like with every other human trait, there are an infinite number of possibilities.”
So in essence you’d like for people to think of [male or female] sex in the same way that we think of hair color, or eye color, or other sorts of physiological traits.
Exactly. We might say two people have brown eyes but that doesn’t mean that they’re brown in exactly the same way, or what is seen through those eyes is the same.
Abounding Stories
Economists are never wrong, only early; traders are often wrong, but never in doubt.
Economists look at interest rate differentials, growth differentials, current account positions, and other fundamental factors. It doesn’t always help much, but it is a defensible place to start. Traders, on the other hand, cognizant or not, focus not on the fundamentals, but on the “fundamental story”.
These stories typically emerge to fit recent price action and are then coupled with what economists refer to as stylized facts.
Unlike facts, stylized facts are not stubborn things.
Some stories turn out to be true, others false, but whether they are true or not the most powerful ones share two characteristics: they are easy to explain and intuitively appealing.
And once a good story takes root it can be very difficult to dislodge it—irrespective of how untrue it may be.
just everyday pollution
Premature births have increased by more than 30 percent since 1981 and by 18 percent since 1990. In 2004, premature births accounted for 12.8 percent of live births nationwide and one third of infant deaths.
University of Michigan School of Public Health found that women who deliver prematurely have, on average, up to three times the phthalate level in their urine compared to women who carry to term.
Phthalates are commonly used compounds in plastics, personal care products, home furnishings (vinyl flooring, carpeting, paints, etc.) and many other consumer and industrial products.
Australia Without Rain
It’s awhile yet, decades, but catch this:
The climate of Melbourne and parts of Tasmania will become more Mediterranean with a hot dry season and more rain in winter, until the mid-latitude jet stream moves further south and rainfall misses Australia’s landmass altogether.
any of the people any of the time
Thomas Pynchon refreshes our understanding of King Ludd:
It may be only a new form of the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer’s ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good.
With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk — realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.
The word “Luddite” continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines.
As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D.D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way.
We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time.
The New York Times Book Review
28 October 1984
“The sky is open to the stars”
What I meant was that human beings are in direct contact with the infinite — in a real, tangible and very much NON-metaphysical sense.
All Rank Are Can Stink
Oh, just a bit of this and that about the best of here and there:
- “USA #114“
- “Happy Planet Charter”
Hotel Dead-On
OMG. Cockroaches also get fat on junk food.
to do the work of it
In order to discover the line of our duty rightly:
As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight. — Thomas Paine
Quit on a holiday
If resigning from the governor’s office is a path to the White House, why didn’t George Bush do it?
Popular Alaska blogger FireDogLake says, “What we are seeing here is either a preface to some indictment, or the final chapter in the career of what has been the biggest political joke of the 21st century. She is so obviously a combination of extreme narcissism and even more extremely bad advice by really, really pathetically bad advisors.”
Even more popular Alaska blogger MudFlats says, “It’s become more and more apparent that what she likes is the crowds, the attention, and the advocacy for her beliefs.
“But the day to day running of the state doesn’t seem to have much appeal anymore. Palin has discovered, through her travels, that you don’t have to be a politician to get attention.”
Rumors are rampant.
Law enforcement sources in Alaska say Palin is in trouble: “a criminal indictment is pending authorization”, but the LA Times reported that the FBI had no investigation into Palin. [link]
Mudflats wraps it up: “Yes, she draws crowds, but so does Brittany Spears, and I sure wouldn’t vote for her to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Addendum: Joe the Plumber has decided not to run for Congress for now.
“You know, I talked to God about that and he was like, ‘No’.”
An ember in the pipe
Something that should annoy western leadership to the core.
Majority of Eastern Germans Feel Life Better under Communism
Do Never Feel
Tom Clark:
All manner of experiences can cause PTSD–rape,murder, disasters like Katrina, but exposure to combat is overwhelmingly the primary cause of this acute and often untreatable disorder.
Notwithstanding the bogus precision of the DSM and its list of PTSD symptoms, I would argue that combat-induced PTSD remains both poorly understood and under-diagnosed. No one has a clue about the actual incidence of PTSD in either of the two world wars, partly because it was not yet a bonafide psychiatric diagnosis, and partly for the same reason it remains woefully under-diagnosed to this day: that is, if the scrofulous old men who cause wars and declare wars allowed the citizenry to fully comprehend what actually happens–psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually–to the legions of young men they send off to fight their unjust wars, there might be a true anti-war movement, based not on politics but on horror and revulsion against war.
From Turgenev’s 1861 novel, Father’s and Sons, a line which is lamentably appropriate to the whole PTSD tragedy:
“The true horror, gentleman, is that there is no horror.”
Indeed.