Month: December 2009

Six Quebec institutions including the Université de Montréal, Concordia University, Université Laval, McGill University and l’INRS-Institut Armand Frappier with specialists in pediatrics, endocrinology, cardiology, genetics, nutrition, biochemistry, vascular imaging, health psychology, social sciences, kinesiology, dentistry, epidemiology, biostatistics and public health, discover that childhood obesity is directly related to how close kids live to convenience stores.

Trail of Afghanistan’s drug money exposed:

A new report by the United Nations gives the impression that the Taliban are the main culprits behind Afghanistan’s drug production.

In fact, only 10-15% of Taliban funding is drawn from revenue generated by opiates.

Over 70% of drug money is captured by government officials, the police, local and regional powerbrokers and traffickers….

Some critics charge that President Obama and the 111th Congress generated the huge federal budget deficits that the nation now faces.

In fact, the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic downturn together explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.

Economist Mark Thoma says, “Notice the tiny contribution of Tarp, Fannie, and Freddie (red) and the stimulus package (just below the red) to the deficit from 2012 onward. These are not our long-term budget problems.”

Please note the 2019 Deficit without George Bush.

Jay Rosen: “President George W. Bush was a radical, not a conservative or traditional Republican. The press never took it seriously; in my view, that was a bad decision— if we can call it that.”

Pascal Bruckner:

The more alike we become, the more we hate each other, and it is only in opposition to others that we exist.

via Zo

Greg Linden:

From the early days of computers, people have speculated that computers would be used to supplement our intelligence.

Well?

“There are three types of bankers: those that can count, and those that can’t.” – Eddie George

Martin Taylor, former Barclays CEO:

Yet two years later the whole industry was bankrupt.

A simple reason underlies this: any industry that pays out in cash colossal accounting profits that are largely imaginary will go bust quickly.

Not only has the industry – and by extension societies that depend on it – been spending money that is no longer there, it has been giving away money that it only imagined it had in the first place.

Worse, it seems to want to do it all again.

Paying out 50 per cent of revenues to staff had become the rule, even when the ‘revenues’ did not actually consist of money.

How did the shareholders let them get away with this? They were sitting on the gravy train too, enjoying the views from the observation car. How did the directors let it happen?

While many argue about regulatory overreach in a nation of chaos, Yves Smith at NakedCapitalism sees very much fraud, “We all need to start using the F word a lot more, because a great deal of what went on was criminal and needs to be described in those terms.”

I wonder at times if our nation has entered a state of purgatory – all of us mulling around in the waiting room to Hell, anxiously counting the minutes until the grim reaper saunters through the door sickle in hand his mission to send us off to eternal damnation.

American Purgatory, by Greg Simmons and Brett Buchanan:

At our current rate of productive attrition we will soon be a nation of declawed housecats, possessing no skill-set whatsoever to survive in a world where the ability to produce real goods still reins supreme. Yet we remain the ‘entitled society’, when we are entitled to nothing.

Bad drives out good. This is a reality of which we should all be acutely aware but rather are immune to its possibility.

We dangerously believe we cannot fail. That, in fact, is the greatest gamble of all. A roll of the dice against history, a bet against all natural laws of the universe…

As we truly moan.

Seeds, another treasure stolen during our binge of unfettered markets.

Keywords: seed industry; consolidation; concentration; oligopoly.

Abstract: The commercial seed industry has undergone tremendous consolidation in the last 40 years as transnational corporations entered this agricultural sector, and acquired or merged with competing firms. This trend is associated with impacts that constrain the opportunities for renewable agriculture, such as reductions in seed lines and a declining prevalence of seed saving. Since the commercialization of transgenic crops in the mid-1990s, the sale of seeds has become dominated globally by Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. In addition, the largest firms are increasingly networked through agreements to cross-license transgenic seed traits.

To better characterize the current structure of the industry, ownership changes from 1996 to 2008 are represented visually with information graphics, Consolidation in the Global Seed Industry, Philip H. Howard, Michigan State University. [Large Pic]

Who knows what will come out of it, but for those of you concerned about taxpayer-funded knowledge being locked up by private journals, now is your chance to comment in a way where (hopefully) the government will pay attention.

Rules For Federally Funded Research

Is it for us or not for us? And if not, why not?

Chris Nelder:

We are not only lost in our illusions…we’re in love with them.

A better rant.

“We Project a $242 Billion Surplus for Medicare by 2020. Not a Deficit.”

Dr. Al Headen:

People are living longer and are retaining their ability to be productive members of society – they are able to work, pay taxes, consume goods and go on vacation.

But a lot of projections by the government of the future work force are not accounting for improved health and productivity of older Americans. People will be paying into government programs, such as Medicare, for a longer time while simultaneously delaying the point where they need to draw on those programs.

Mike Hanlon discussing a Foam Car:

If we’re going to have a more enlightened society for the good of all, maybe should we rethink our relationship with motorized transport?

The burden of road traffic injury is increasing dramatically each year in real terms.

The people who are getting killed are the most active, the young, the most productive members of our society, and the resultant mass misery from a global road death toll of 1.2 million human beings a year is worth contemplating.

The devastation of the news that a breadwinner won’t be bringing home the bread, that a child you’ve nurtured and loved to adulthood is dead or critically injured, that a brother or mother or father has been permanently incapacitated – we’ve only mentioned death until now, but there are another 50 million people seriously injured on roads every year…

The cost in societal terms is inestimable. How do we reconcile that the automobile wreaks such a massive toll and so little has been achieved in reducing it?

So polite.

Yale University researchers use nanosensors to measure cancer biomarkers in whole blood for the first time.

To overcome the challenge of whole blood detection, the researchers developed a novel device that acts as a filter, in this case catching the biomarkers for prostate and breast cancer on the order of picograms per milliliter, while washing away the rest of the blood.

This is the equivalent of being able to detect the concentration of a single grain of salt dissolved in a large swimming pool.

tip: Blood is filtered on a chip to detect cancer and other disease.

How Reagan and the Republicans bought popularity:

bellyaching along the way from plankton to pulsar

Gary Jones:

One of the reasons that heretics intrigue me is that the debilitating effects of staying inside the canon make one vulnerable to catastrophic failure as well as ordinary embarrassment: it makes one provincial. As an antidote I study weird science, the historical views of distant cultures and other alternative (contra-factual) histories including those found in speculative fiction. It ain’t necessarily so.

Still, one must resist every temptation to conclude that the search has been a success and that knowledge has at last been gained. Everything one knows is still wrong.

I find this comforting in an odd way. I never arrive but I wasn’t going anywhere in any event, I’m just out for a stroll.

another link

Paul Volker rolling:

Financial services in the United States had increased its share of value added from 2 per cent to 6.5 per cent, but he asked: “Is that a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?”

Mark Thoma:

…the Fed’s support of the financial market and financial institutions made it appear that it favored some markets and some firms over others, and that has been a problem. But I don’t think the Fed had a lot of choice.

It lacked the authority to dismantle large financial institutions outside the traditional banking system, it lacked the plans to do so even if it had the authority, and the fact that regulators allowed these institutions to become such a threat to the economy if they failed meant the Fed had to intervene.

That’s why, going forward, three things need to happen. Regulators need to reduce the threat these banks pose, they need to have plans ready if a threat develops anyway, and legislators need to give regulators the authority to take control of troubled institutions outside the traditional banking system.

But I have to admit that “the dysfunction of the political system” makes me wary of what will happen once the legislative process begins. Things could get worse rather than better, and reducing the independence of the Fed is but one of many ways that could happen. Even so, the need for reform of the financial sector is sufficiently strong to justify taking that chance.

Banking will never be boring. Banking is a risky business. They are going to have plenty of activity. They can do underwriting. They can do securitization. They can do a lot of lending. They can do merger and acquisition advice. They can do investment management. These are all client activities. What I don’t want them doing is piling on top of that risky capital market business. That also leads to conflicts of interest.

Paul Volker:

What complicates this situation, as compared to the ordinary garden variety recession, is that we have this financial collapse on top of an economic disequilibrium. Too much consumption and too little investment, too many imports and too few exports.

We have not been on a sustainable economic track and that has to be changed.

But those changes don’t come overnight, they don’t come in a quarter, they don’t come in a year. You can begin them but that is a process that takes time. If we don’t make that adjustment and if we again pump up consumption, we will just walk into another crisis.

What should I say? … We have not yet achieved self-reinforcing recovery. We are heavily dependent upon government support so far. We are on a government support system, both in the financial markets and in the economy.

Dave Pollard: How to save the world.

“I think you have to feel secure before you can feel anything else.”

Another major Cabinet-level policy shift.

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior:

“We’ve already done a U-turn from the place where the previous administration was taking the country with respect to climate change and energy.”

In addition to the 2,500 square kilometers that Interior is evaluating for solar power potential, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab estimates that wind farms off the east coast could ultimately produce 1,000 gigawatts of power.

“That’s more power from wind alone than is needed to power the entire electrical needs of the US.”

He called for generating at least 20 percent of U.S. power from such wind resources by 2030—following in Denmark’s footsteps—and noted that 5,300 megawatts of new renewable energy projects, including geothermal, refitted hydropower, solar and wind (on- and offshore), are currently being evaluated by his department for public lands, along with the transmission corridors to go with them.

Richard Rodriguez:

Something funny I have noticed, perhaps you have noticed it, too.

We will end up with one and a half cities in America—Washington, D.C., and American Idol.

We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus.

An obituary does not propose a solution.

Marisa Meizlish:

The list of heads of state that will be arriving to COP-15 on Wednesday is pretty impressive. Rudd, Netanyahu, Chavez, Kirschner, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Mubarak, Kibaki, Arroyo, Yudhoyono, more controversial figures such as Mugabe and Ahmadinejad and on and on to over 100.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke urged the 192 nations who sent representatives to the UN Climate Change Conference to

1. resist pressures from those with vested interests in the status quo,
2. eliminate incentives to the petroleum industry, and
3. design incentives to create jobs in the clean-energy industry.

Locke said unparalleled economic growth occurred in the 20th Century because of two factors:

1. access to cheap, abundant fossil fuels, and
2. ignorance or disregard for the fact that those fuels produced greenhouse gas pollution that caused global warming.

Both of those factors, he said, belong to history.

“Those days are over.

“What’s required is nothing less than completely redesigning the way we produce and consume energy….

“We’re talking about creating an entirely new model of economic growth.

“The world has spent a century investing in petroleum infrastructure, Locke said: refineries, pipelines, stations. That creates vested interests in keeping things just the way they are.

Notes Jeff Mcmahon, Locke urged nations to stop catering to ‘vested interests’.

Danah Boyd:

“Kids have always cared about privacy, it’s just that their notions of privacy look very different than adult notions.

“Kids don’t have the kind of privacy that we assume they do. As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space – it’s private because we have control over it. The thing is, for young people it’s not a private space – they have no control. They have no control over who comes in and out of their room, or who comes in and out of their house.

“As a result the online world feels more private because it feels like it has more control.”

Bruce Schneier:

“For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness.

“We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts.

“We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.”