Month: January 2010

This yo-yo dared to run for President of the United States of America:

Pat Robertson claims the reason for Haiti’s misfortunes is that the nation “swore a pact to the devil” two centuries ago.

“They were under the heal of the French… And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you will get us free from the French… And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other…”

Robert Frost on the fate of Man on Earth:

We’ll be all right if nothing goes wrong with the lighting.

Step right up. Reset your daily doom here:

Human caused detonation of the Sun !

We don’t really know what lies over the horizon, Financial Times:

The world is now headed towards economic conditions that will entail not only cyclical but structural change: a damaged financial sector, an overstretched consumer base, rising energy prices, and shortages of food, water and other natural resources so severe that they could heighten global and regional tensions. These factors, combined with new external ones like carbon pricing, all point to one thing: a crisis of confidence in growth.

Although resource scarcity will have severe effects, it will also herald a period of creative destruction in which new policies and new entrepreneurs will radically transform the vast complex of energy-related industries.

The Morning After – Earthquake Haiti 2010.

The sun is about to come up. The aftershocks continue. Some more noticeable than others.

There is no way to even begin to share the things we’ve heard and seen since 5pm yesterday. To do so would take hours that we don’t have to give right now. Some of them feel wrong to tell. Like only God should know these personal horrible tragedies.

The few things we can confirm – yes the four story Caribbean Market building is completely demolished. Yes it was open. Yes the National Palace collapsed. Yes Gov’t buildings nearby the Palace collapsed. Yes St Josephs Boys home is completely collapsed. Yes countless countless – countless other houses, churches, hospitals, schools, and businesses have collapsed. There are buildings that suffered almost no damage. Right next door will be a pile of rubble.

Thousands of people are currently trapped. To guess at a number would be like guessing at raindrops in the ocean. Precious lives hang in the balance. When pulled from the rubble there is no place to take them for care Haiti has an almost non existent medical care system for her people.

I cannot imagine what the next few weeks and months will be like. I am afraid for everyone. Never in my life have I seen people stronger than Haitian people. But I am afraid for them. For us.

Kevin Kelly:

This waking dream we call the Internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online.

For some people the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the Internet: It is the high-priced waster of time. It breeds trifles. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity, but more importantly I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one the greatest things the Internet has done.

Knowing that this large thing is there, and that I am in constant communication with it, has changed how I think.

As you all know, American universities are run and staffed by Marxists, hippies, beatniks, queers, and Frenchmen. From Sarah Lawrence to MIT, higher education is a hotbed of Blame-America-Firstism, Deleuzian rhizomatics, and quasi-pornographic ruminations on the Lesbian Body.

One American institution, however, has always served as a hard, rigid, jutting bulwark against the feminine softness and decadence of post-rationalist academia: The University of Chicago.

During the interminable anti-capitalist Bacchanalia of the Cold War era, UChi stood out like a gleaming, sanitary thermos in a yurt strewn with handmade wineskins.

No matter how disgustingly carnivalesque other schools became, with their toga parties and their human-rights petitions and their pleas for responsible condom use, UChi wasn’t afraid to “rock the boat” by providing serious, nicely dressed white men with a place to speak authoritatively about money.

And we’re all better for it.

If it hadn’t been for these nonconformist visionaries, and the countless political, industrial, media, and military leaders who worshiped them as gods, Jimmy Carter might well have made Ram Dass chairman of the Fed, and today’s currency values would be based on something totally intangible, like karma.

Stuart Staniford, report on Chinese transportation growth, “To avoid injury, I strongly recommend that you first arrange for ample clearance below your lower jaw…”

The Chinese vehicle fleet will surpass the US about 2017 at a compound annual growth rate of 31% in private passenger vehicle ownership.

It’s as if the US borrowed money from China in order to fight an oil supply war in Iraq in order that China could become the greatest industrial power the world has ever seen.

…
Will China Rule the World?, by Dani Rodrik

Electoral success for Republicans appears to be to fool people into believing things that aren’t true.

Mark Thoma:

Economic growth?

It’s been dismal under Republicans, especially if you look at the growth in underlying factors such as wages and jobs (and net growth from the housing bubble).

Personal liberty? Tapping phones, body searches at airports, etc., etc. under Republicans have decreased, not increased freedom and liberty. And that doesn’t even touch upon social issues where their authoritarian instincts also reduce freedom and liberty for some segments of the population.

Spending restraint? Look at the Bush years.

Failure to set and meet strict targets for greenhouse gas emissions cuts over the next 40 years could put long-term goals – such as limiting planetary warming to 2ºC by 2100 – permanently out of reach.

Models over long horizon lose urgency, but still…

People who watch the most TV die younger.

“People who watch four or more hours of television a day have a 46% higher risk of death from all causes and 80% increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease.”

The increased risk of premature death was independent of other risk factors like smoking, blood pressure, cholesterol, diet or exercise.

The mobile phone and not the Personal Computer, has become the device which democratizes information and communication and liberates much of mankind from poverty.

With 4.6 billion connections from 6.8 billion people, the mobile phone now touches two thirds of humanity, and as Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in his keynote at CES, “for the majority of the world’s people, their first and only access to the Internet will be through a mobile device, not a PC, and this access is spreading very, very fast.

In China, every month more than 7 million people gain access to the Internet for the first time, and mostly on mobile devices.

This trend shows no signs of slowing. The mobile device has become a necessity for upward mobility.” Kallasvuo used his platform to announce the “Nokia Growth Economy Venture Challenge” – a USD 1 million fund to encourage developers to come up with innovative software to accelerate development in these growth markets.

Here’s ten pages of fun lunchtime exposé, an excerpt from the book Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

“Edwards reveled in being inside the bubble: the Secret Service, the chartered jet, the press pack, the swarm of factotums catering to his every whim. And the crowds! The ovations! The adoration! He ate it up.”

Wait, there’s more.

“Game Change,” the 2008 deconstruction, says the stress of vaulting onto the national stage caused Sarah Palin to have wild mood swings.

Palin went into a tailspin. She stopped eating or sleeping, and drank only a half a can of diet soda a day…

Jeff Vail:

All identity politics presume hierarchy.

Without a hierarchal power structure, there is no ability to enforce the definition of “in-group” vs. “out-group” and the concomitant preferential treatment of the in-group.

It simply won’t do, for example, for white nationalists to have the Italians, or heaven forbid the Jews, to presume that they qualify as “white”! This same hierarchy that enforces the group definition, however, necessarily produces peer-polity competition between it and other such hierarchies (because the “out-groups” will form their own “in-groups” in response–creating competing hierarchies), and these groups must then grow and intensify to avoid being out-competed….

Before his 1936 election, here’s what he actually said:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs.

We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.

FDR’s full speech

You are not in power.
Stop acting like you ever were.

You want better leaders.
Find them, follow them, funnel money, time, and media to them.

Get off the President’s back.
You prefer Bush? President Palin? What you have is infinitely better.

Organize, organize, organize.
Build networks around the country.

Think action.
Stop looking to Washington for answers.

Remember the enemy.
It’s the Haties, the Cheneyites, the entire Nixon-Reagan-Bush Era.

Cost of Capitalism, by Robert Barbera, an economic seminar that everyone will ‘get’.

Over the course of 2008, Americans confronted breathtaking Wall Street bankruptcies, unprecedented home foreclosures, and rapid deterioration of the overall economy.

In response, a Republican administration engineered the greatest Washington bailout in America’s history. [full chapter here]

Review at Asia Times:

The last five major global cyclical events were the early 1990s recession – largely occasioned by the US Savings & Loan crisis, the collapse of Japan Inc after the stock market crash of 1990, the Asian crisis of the mid-1990s, the fabulous technology boom/bust cycle at the turn of the millennium, and the unprecedented rise and then collapse for US residential real estate in 2007-2008. All five episodes delivered recessions, either global or regional. In no case was there a significant prior acceleration of wages and general prices. In each case, an investment boom and an associated asset market ran to improbable heights and then collapsed.

From 1945 to 1985, there was no recession caused by the instability of investment prompted by financial speculation – and since 1985 there has been no recession that has not been caused by these factors.

On the free market’s greatest failure since the 1930s, Portfolio review.

What happens when the economy prospers is that people expect more prosperity.

They lower their guard and stop worrying about risk, especially in financial markets—where, after all, risk is priced.

1. A long period of healthy growth encourages people to take bigger risks, and
2. When many people assume more risk, even a small disappointment can have devastating consequences.

The Bush-Cheney legacy and the astounding calmness of America.

As Bill Gross says, “The fact is that American citizens have never been as divorced from their representatives – and if that description fits the Democrats now in control – then it applies to Republicans as well…. So you watch Fox, or is it MSNBC? O’Reilly or Olbermann? It doesn’t matter. You’re just being conned …by lookalike coaches on different sidelines.”

Daily Weekly Monthly job reports drive me nuts

See here.

Job losses since Reagan Republicans ever downward:

I guess I’m paraphrasing Churchill, but my tendency is not to attribute to malevolence what can be more easily attributed to incompetence.

Raghuram Rajan:

You know the argument: Typically, the private sector will have the right incentives.

Why would they blow themselves up? Regulators aren’t that capable: They’re less well-paid and less informed than the private sector, so what can they do? And finally, if worse comes to worst, the Fed will pick up the pieces.

I think there are three things wrong with this argument, one for each of those elements. Private sector—yes, it can take care of itself, but its incentives may not be in the public interest; may not even be in the corporate interest if corporate governance is problematic. So the trader could fail the corporation, could also fail society. That’s one problem.

Second, the public sector has different incentives from the private sector, and that’s a strength of the public sector. When we’re talking about regulators, because they’re not motivated in the same way as the private sector, they can stand back and say, “Well, I don’t fully understand the risks you’re taking, but you are taking lots of risk—stop.” So I think we’ve made too little of the incentive structure of regulators which should be different, can be different, which gives them a role in this, rather than saying they’re incompetent and they can’t do it. I think they can.

But the third aspect was that I think we overestimated the ability of monetary policy to pull us out of a serious credit problem.

…
I think the most damaging statement the Fed could have made was the famous Greenspan doctrine: “We can’t stop the bubble on the way up, but we can pick up the pieces on the way down.”

Orville Schell:

These days, everyone has experienced a little moment of shock when the unimaginable became American.

Care to add anything?

The federal government, essentially busted; Congress, increasingly paralyzed and largely incapable of delivering solutions to the country’s most pressing problems; state government, largely broke; the Interstate highway system and our infrastructure of bridges and tunnels, melting away like a block of ice in the sun because maintenance and upgrading is so poor; dikes, water systems, and many other aspects of the national infrastructure which keeps the country going, similarly old and deteriorating; airlines, some of the sorriest in the world with the oldest, dirtiest, and least up-to-date planes and the requisite run-down airports to go with them; ports that are falling behind world standards; a railroad passenger system which, unlike countries from Spain to China, has not one mile of truly high-speed rail; the country’s financial system whose over-paid executives not only ran us off an economic cliff in 2008, but also managed to compromise the whole system itself in the eyes of the world; a broadcast media which — public broadcasting and aspects of a vital and growing Internet excepted — is a grossly overly-commercialized, broken-down mess that has gravely let down the country in terms of keeping us informed; newspapers, in a state of free-fall; book publishing, heading in the same direction; elementary education (that is, our future), especially public K-12 schools in big cities, desperately under-funded and near broke in many communities; a food industry which subsidizes sugar and starch, stuffs people with fast-food, and leaves 60% of the population overweight; basic manufacturing, like the automobile industry, evidently headed for oblivion, or China, whichever comes first; the American city, hollowing out and breaking down; the prison system, one of America’s few growth industries but a pit of hopelessness.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar criticizing G. W. Bush:

In 2008 roughly 40 percent of federal decisions to permit or deny drilling rights were challenged in court by one or more parties, compared with only 1 percent in 1998.

He’s saying lax leasing policies “ran afoul of communities, carved up the landscape, and fueled costly conflicts that created uncertainty for investors and industry.”

US fee-for-service healthcare costs are off the chart.

Various comments on the cost of healthcare by National Geographic:

1. This is a masterpiece of succinct communication showing clearly how extravagantly ineffective the US healthcare system really is. There are 14 single payer universal government plans that are not only one half the cost, but support a healthier population.
2. This graph is dramatic, and I do not doubt its message.
3. I wish this message could get to everyone, but most people belive that most of those countries with universal health care do not get as good of care as we do in the US.
4. This graphic is a clear illustration of not only a broken health care system, but of a broken political system as well.

Regardless the advertising: A study of 30 years of antidepressant-drug treatment data published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that the benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo may be minimal or nonexistent in patients with mild or moderate symptoms.

While we’re at it, why do the pro sports leagues, from the NFL to the WNBA, get to make billions while using the NCAA as a free developmental minor league?

Farhat Taj:

I have been discussing the issue of drone attacks with hundreds of people of Waziristan.

They see the US drone attacks as their liberators from the clutches of the terrorists into which, they say, their state has willfully thrown them.

Are drones sloppy or is our own media?

The Pakistani government and media take the figure appearing in the American media as an admission by the American government.

US media does not have the access to produce numbers.

Moreover, the area is simply not accessible for any kind of independent journalistic or scholarly work on drone attacks. The Taliban simply kill anyone doing so.

The reason why these estimates about civilian ‘casualties’ in the US and Pakistani media are wrong is that after every attack the terrorists cordon off the area and no one, including the local villagers, is allowed to come even near the targeted place.

The militants themselves collect the bodies, bury the dead and then issue the statement that all of them were innocent civilians. This has been part of their propaganda to provide excuses to the pro-Taliban and al Qaeda media persons and political forces in Pakistan to generate public sympathies for the terrorists.

Communication has roots too.

James Gillooly:

“Our results indicate that, for all species, basic features of acoustic communication are primarily controlled by individual metabolism, which in turn varies predictably with body size and temperature.

So, when the calls are adjusted for an animal’s size and temperature, they even sound alike.”

Commonalities, yes, in the sounds of hundreds of species of insects, birds, fish, frogs, lizards and mammals.