l’agent provocateur

A very very sad day revisited with forensics:

“The Cleveland Plain Dealer is reporting today on new forensic analysis by audio scientists Stuart Allen and Tom Owen on a recently discovered audio tape from the Kent State shootings.

The analysis suggests that four shots from a .38-caliber pistol were fired 70 seconds before the National Guard opened fire on a crowd of student protesters, killing four and wounding nine others.

The alleged shooter, student Terry Norman, was hired by the FBI to take photos of the protesters. It has been known for some time that he had a .38-caliber pistol on his person the day of the shootings, but he has always claimed that the gun was not fired during the protest, a claim that was backed up in sworn testimony from authorities at the time.”

pro talk on peak oil

ASPO-USA. Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. The world’s leading experts. The future of oil, energy and the economy. When these folks meet to worry about peak oil, what are they saying?

“The Earth is not a factory.”

There is no business as usual.

October 7 – The ASPO Conference – afternoon | ASPO Conference – evening

October 8 – ASPO Conference – second day before lunch

The neo-classical economists and those who advocated different political theories had found it easier to justify their claims in an environment where oil became increasingly available to support GDP growth.

However we are now entering a period of oil supply decline, when perhaps the “biophysical economics” theories will gain more credence.

October 13 – ASPO Conference- last day.




tribes they are a’broiled

Lede from the New York Times:

A new study has come up with the monetary cost of a single murder: $17.25 million. Can we really afford not to invest in preventative measures?

Some snippets of reader comments:

“They could cut the cost a lot if they would just find him or her guilty in the morning and hang them in the afternoon.

“Don’t let Obama and the Dems take away your gun.

“If the ACLU had never come to the USA in the first place…

“They shoot mad dogs don’t they?

“Welfare leeches. More crime was perpetrated by such people, not less.

“Do away with radical liberal judges and you could reduce the cost by 99%.”

I freak when I browse troll comments on social and moral issues. My heart throbs. It’s beyond me how brutal and judgmental, the petty superiority, the tiny dominance, the… I don’t have the words.

There’s crime in the USA that stuns the world. There’s also a culture of bitter incivility with an extremely poor grasp. “Sufficient unto the day, is the evil thereof.”

By their estimates, more than 18,000 homicides that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded in 2007 alone will cost us roughly $300 billion.

That’s about as much as we’ve spent over nine years fighting the war in Afghanistan.

didn’t do it but confessed

Get this:

In recent years, the use of DNA evidence has allowed experts to identify false confessions in unprecedented and disturbing numbers.

In the past two decades, researchers have documented some 250 instances of false confessions, many resulting in life sentences and at least four in wrongful executions.

We used to call it nerves. It’s much more deeply wired in our brain than that.

When the polygraph man left the room at 10:45 p.m., Sterling began to panic. If he stayed, he feared, the police wouldn’t stop—but asking to leave or for a lawyer, he thought, would be as good as admitting he was a murderer.

Why do people confess to crimes they didn’t commit?

another political pledge

A Contract With America. A Pledge to America. Mission Accomplished. For goodness sakes how many times are we going to fall for this prank?

Margaret & Helen:

I pledge that I will actually read the Constitution before pledging to uphold it.  And I pledge that if I am too stupid to understand its intent,  I won’t become a politician.

I pledge not to start two wars, give tax breaks to millionaires, ruin the economy and then get mad when someone shows me the bill.

I pledge not to be a hypocrite or a Tea Party Republican – whichever comes first.

I pledge to remember that religious freedoms apply to all religions including the lack of a religion.  And I pledge to remember that no matter how much I believe in my religion, I will remember that my neighbor believes in his religion just as much.  And finally, I pledge that if I believe in my religion too much I will keep it to myself.

I pledge to stop calling Sarah Palin a stupid bitch when she finally admits that she is too stupid to run this country.  At that point I will simply call her a bitch and let the stupid speak for itself.

I pledge that I won’t hate gay people in public and then sleep with them in private.

I pledge to accept the fact that John McCain really can’t pull his head out of his ass at this point.  It’s in too deep.

I pledge not to be shocked when Rick Sanchez announces his new show on Fox News.

I pledge to remember that there are 6 billion people in the world and only 300 million of them live in the United States .  And with 300 million Americans to choose from, we can’t do better than John Boehner?  Really?

a country for sale

Robert Reich, former cabinet secretary, is on fire lately:

Not only is income and wealth in America more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years, but those hands are buying our democracy as never before – and they’re doing it behind closed doors.

Hundreds of millions of secret dollars are pouring into congressional and state races in this election cycle.


dying younger

Sloppy is just another extortion.

“It was shocking to see the U.S. falling behind other countries even as costs soared.”

“But what really surprised us was that all of the usual suspects—smoking, obesity, traffic accidents, and homicides—are not the culprits.

The U.S. doesn’t stand out as doing any worse in these areas than any of the other countries we studied, leading us to believe that failings in the U.S. health care system … are likely playing a large role in this relatively poor performance in life expectancy.”

known for tirades

These false people became rich ?

Moralist Dobbs…known for tirades against ‘illegal aliens’ and those who employ them has been found to have employed undocumented workers himself. The Nation discovers that Lou Dobbs has relied on undocumented labor for years for upkeep of vast and costly estates and horses he keeps.

Whitman’s truthfulness and character have taken a beating. She’s cluttered over her undocumented housekeeper by making excuses, not admitting it and blaming others. Saying illegal status isn’t a big deal, that’s why she didn’t bring it up. “She needs to go on eBay and buy a clue.” (CNN)

our tubes are dead last

Scientific American:

Why Broadband Service in the U.S. Is So Awful

The average U.S. household has to pay an exorbitant amount of money for an Internet connection that the rest of the industrial world would find mediocre.

Broadband in the U.S. is not just slower and more expensive than it is in tech-savvy nations such as South Korea and Japan, the U.S. has fallen behind infrastructure-challenged countries such as Portugal and Italy.

The consequences are far worse than having to wait a few extra seconds for a movie to load.

Our creaky Internet makes it harder for U.S. entrepreneurs to compete in global markets.

Broadband connections are the railroads of the 21st century, the  infrastructure to transmit information/products from seller to buyer.

As evidence, consider that the U.S. came in dead last in another recent study that compared how quickly 40 countries and regions have been progressing toward a knowledge-based economy over the past 10 years.

keywords: findings, Scientific American, exorbitant

not all the errors

Charles Hugh Smith and his Recipe for Collapse.

The ingredients for mixing up a batch of economic collapse are all present in both China and the U.S. If we wanted to increase the odds of financial/economic collapse to 95%, we would need to assemble the following ingredients:

1. Concentrate central-planning power in non-transparent State and quasi-State agencies. Placing the levers of central planning in a few hands who are unbound by pubic scrutiny greatly increases the odds of catastrophic policy mistakes being made, and guarantees that those policy mistakes will be pursued with bull-headed determination until collapse occurs.

Agencies that come to mind: The Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury, National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Bank of China, China’s Politburo and organs of Central Planning.

2. Encourage speculation by reducing the safe return on capital (interest paid) to less than inflation/zero. To mix up a really good collapse, we need rampant speculation which bubbles up to mania levels.

Excellent examples: Japan’s zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP), the Fed’s ZIRP, China’s interest rates being lower than its rate of inflation.


3. Increase the share of financial and real estate speculation so that the inevitable collapse in speculative real estate, stock, bonds and commodities bubbles will crush the entire economy.

Excellent examples: 65 million vacant speculative condos in China and 19 million vacant dwellings in the U.S.

4. Increase the dependency of the Power Elites on financial profits. As finance profits come to dominate total corporate profits, the economy and stock market becomes dependent on a continued expansion of what are in essence profits skimmed from churning.

The Power Elites will also become dependent on these profits, as they fund the Elites’ share of the swag/maintenance of power.

Excellent examples: Japan’s two decades of financial stagnation, China’s local Power Elites’ dependence on real estate development, the way banks watered down Congressional “financial reform” in the U.S.

5. Concentrate wealth and power in an opaque Elite. That way, the interests of the Power Elites will diverge sharply from the bottom 95% of the society assuring Elites will act to protect their interests at the expense of the nation/populace.

Excellent examples: extreme concentration of wealth and power in the U.S. and China.

6. Increase debt and leverage to the point that the economy cannot function without ever-rising levels debt and leverage.

7. Impoverish the Status Quo of any ideas outside the same stale ones which have guided the buildup to inevitable collapse. More stimulus, more stimulus, brawk!

8. Make corruption, embezzlement, crony capitalism, insider trading and fraud systemic. The labels “communist” and “capitalist” are meaningless screens for the same Power Elites-based system of skimming and masking the skim.

9. Concentrate the mainstream media in a few hands beholden to the Central State and its crony-capitalist partners. Six corporations control most of the “free enterprise” media. In a pinch, have the State own and operate the media directly.

10. Devote an increasing share of the national wealth to the National Security State (internal control) and global Empire/military. This diversion of wealth into unproductive “assets” increases the top-heavy size of the Central State, thereby increasing the odds of systemic collapse and/or catastrophic wars.

11. Make ever-greater numbers of laws and regulations so the entire productive class is either criminalized or forced into complicity with a rapacious Status Quo. I address this in Survival+, along with all the other points raised here.

12. Raise the expectations of the populace to absurdly unrealistic heights so their disappointment and anger will be equally boundless when the status quo implodes. Owning property will make you rich, you won’t even have to work! The “dirty work” will be performed by marginalized immigrants from the poverty-stricken West (China) or the poverty-stricken south (U.S.).

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this list is how it describes both the U.S. and China so accurately. Scrape away the misleading labels and obfuscating spin, and both nations possess equally vulnerable, intellectually sclerotic concentrations of wealth and power ever more dependent on debt, speculation and financialization for their own wealth and power.

the moose wars

Oh the sweat and labor required to be President.

CBSNews reporting from the Mudflats:

During a Sept. 19 appearance on Fox News Sunday with Neil Cavuto, Joe Miller was asked whether Palin was qualified to be president.

His response was less than enthusiastic, saying that there were “a number of great candidates out there.”

That apparently didn’t sit well with husband Todd who apparently sent a testy e-mail hours later to Miller, Tim Crawford, the treasurer of SarahPAC, and Thomas Van Flein, the personal attorney for both the Palins and Miller:

And imagine the diplomacy if this crowd is elected. Facebook couldn’t handle the traffic.

black ribbon

As a youngster. A sad story within my family. It was during the late 40s or early 50s if I recall, my great-uncle discovered a breakthrough method to cure road asphalt. Normally crews would hold back traffic for hours and days while newly laid asphalt hardened. He found that fitting water sprinklers on paving machines would dramatically accelerate curing. Evaporation cools and other reactions. Simple and important. Cost savings. Time savings. Better hardening. Demand for his services skyrocketed as he was heralded in the news and booked for consulting. One pre-dawn morning while driving to a meetup in Minnesota, his car careened off a curve and into a rural general store. Families never forget such sorrow, nor pride.

I remembered that because:

bioasphalt

Iowa State University’s Christopher Williams was just trying to see if adding bio-oil to asphalt would improve the hot- and cold-weather performance of pavements. What he found was a possible green replacement for asphalt derived from petroleum.

Created by a thermochemical process called fast pyrolysis, Bioasphalt can be mixed and paved at lower temperatures than conventional asphalt.

bioasphalt wiki

dam safety

In general, there are 100 ways dams can fail.

Of the more than 80,000 dams in the U.S., about a third pose a “high” or “significant” hazard to life and property… 27,000 sites in Potential Failure Mode.

A number of the things that we’re finding today are problems that occurred during design and construction 40 and 50 years ago.

I think risk assessments, at least in North America, are moving more and more toward probabilistic approaches to risk assessment. In the earlier days, we began looking at probabilistic hydrology issues. Nowadays, our seismic hazards are determined by probabilistic seismic hazard analyses. One of these days, we may put all of this together in some sort of logic tree and come up with probabilistic failure of the dam by overtopping, by seismic, by liquefaction and a number of other different factors.

The professionals are on it:

Q. What are the chief causes of dam failures in North America?

Paul: Overtopping.

Brian: Overtopping, seepage.

Dan: Statistically, I thought it was seepage.

Brian: I think overtopping is the highest.

Gus: I think overtopping is the high and seepage and piping is probably second.

Paul: Overtopping is something that’s avoidable. You can perform the necessary calculations and develop a “fix” to prevent it.

Gus: Overtopping might occur because the spillway was inoperable. That’s the type of thing that causes dams to overtop in general, other than extreme floods.

Warren: The chief causes are more programmatic in that whatever technically caused it, it probably had something to do with a lack of maintenance or lack of an oversight program. Some of that gets back into funding.

How many industrial sludge ponds might fail?
What are the expected ecological impacts and decontamination strategies?

How does the sludge get produced and how could it escape?

When aluminium is extracted from bauxite via the so-called Bayer process, red sludge forms as a by-product. The sludge is in large reservoirs of mud and water.

What caused the accident is yet unclear, but it is likely that heavy rain has caused the dam containing the reservoir to break.

It is also possible that the reservoir was just not large or strong enough to hold the sludge it was filled with.

What is the chemical composition of the sludge?

It contains mainly fluoride, sulphate and aluminate, but also chrome, nickel, manganese and heavy metals such as lead. Its arsenic concentration is at least a hundred times above the allowed threshold for drinking water.

How might contact with the toxic sludge affect human health?

The most dangerous thing about the stuff is that it is – to put it simply – a dilute solution of sodium hydroxide with an extremely alkaline pH value, between 11 and 12.

This means it cauterizes eyes and skin and attacks the lung when inhaled.

Scary

so great and most fortunate

Republicans claim US is now firmly center-right.

Third Way, an organization of centrist Democrats, produced a study showing that liberals are the smallest share of the electorate and not enough to keep Congress in Democratic hands.

Citing Gallup polling data, the study said self-described conservatives made up 42 percent of the electorate, compared with moderates who make up 35 percent and liberals who make up 20 percent, a shift of several points to the right in the last two years.

Washington is coin-operated, conducted largely in the shadows. Polls hide the issues. It’s neither right nor left except in ballot frenzy.

tone of our era

From the Volatility rant of the day:

The Rule of Rackets is that no one competes or otherwise acts as a textbook capitalist for one day longer than he has to.

As soon as possible and as much as possible, he leverages his market power and wealth into a monopoly position which he then aggressively exploits as a rent-seeking parasite.

This monopoly-creep is hard-wired into capitalism. He prefers slave labor, total socialization of costs and risks, and 100% extraction. That’s the logic in its entirety.

After all, as the apologists for the system never tire of reminding us, “the shareholders” would never settle for less, and they have a “right” to it, doggone it.

I know. Folks with ‘can do’ governed by extraction greed do not see the danger of what we’ve done or see the massive damage. It’s a stunning era.

There’s little good news on the science front and that’s an unstoppable osmosis into our heads and hearts. We’ll look back to see this era as history with a wollop. It’s a terriffic puzzle ahead. Sloppy is over.

risk of default

Firing up Americans to argue the shape and rules of markets merely to capture a seat in office is embarrassing opportunism.

Theory is broad brush and opinion more vague than that. The squawk about supply-side free markets versus oversight and restraint stretches our best experts and will never be repaired by balloteers with slogans.

Anatole Kalestky:

Instead of obsessing over China’s currency manipulation as if it were a unique exception in a world of untrammeled market forces, the United States must adapt to an environment where exchange rates and trade imbalances are managed consciously and have become a legitimate subject for debate in international forums like the Group of 20.

Market fundamentalists who feel that government interference with free markets is anathema should be reminded that, by today’s dogmatic standards, Ronald Reagan is one of the great manipulators of all time.

He presided over two of the biggest currency interventions in history: the Plaza agreement, which devalued the dollar in 1985, and the Louvre accord of 1987, which brought this devaluation to an end.

The fact is that the rules of global capitalism have changed irrevocably since Lehman Brothers collapsed two years ago — and if the United States refuses to accept this, it will find its global leadership slipping away. The near collapse of the financial system was an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment of revelation.

In this climate, the market fundamentalism now represented by the Tea Party, based on instinctive aversion to government and a faith that “the market is always right,” is a global laughingstock.

There’s a terrible challenge not about to be fixed by angry stories and myth.

In my view, a wise issue with far greater impact is determining how to dilute and prevent leaders for sale. After all, it’s a ‘representative democracy’ and why don’t we have it?

Evaluating honor is better than choosing sides.

no wolves, no water

LA Times:

When we exterminated wolves from Yellowstone in the early 1900s, we de-watered the land.

That’s right; no wolves eventually meant fewer streams, creeks, marshes and springs across western landscapes like Yellowstone where wolves had once thrived.

The chain of effects went roughly like this: No wolves meant that many more elk crowded onto inviting river and stream banks. A growing population of fat elk, in no danger of being turned into prey, gnawed down willow and aspen seedlings before they could mature. As the willows declined, so did beavers, which used the trees for food and building material. When beavers build dams and make ponds, they create wetland habitats for countless bugs, amphibians, fish, birds and plants, as well as slowing the flow of water and distributing it over broad areas. The consequences of their decline rippled across the land.

Meanwhile, as the land dried up, Yellowstone’s overgrazed riverbanks eroded. Spawning beds for fish silted over. Amphibians lost precious shade.

We’ve never seen Yellowstone.

health care fraud

What are the largest criminal fines ever imposed on corporations?

“For decades, antipsychotic drugs were a niche product. Today, they’re the top-selling class of pharmaceuticals in America, generating annual revenue of about $14.6 billion and surpassing sales of even blockbusters like heart-protective statins.

While the effectiveness of antipsychotic drugs in some patients remains a matter of great debate, how these drugs became so ubiquitous and profitable is not. Big Pharma got behind them in the 1990s, when they were still seen as treatments for the most serious mental illnesses, like hallucinatory schizophrenia, and recast them for much broader uses, according to previously confidential industry documents that have been produced in a variety of court cases.

Today, more than a half-million youths take antipsychotic drugs, and fully one-quarter of nursing-home residents have used them. Yet recent government warnings say the drugs may be fatal to some older patients and have unknown effects on children.

The new generation of antipsychotics has also become the single biggest target of the False Claims Act. Every major company selling the drugs — Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson — has either settled recent government cases for hundreds of millions of dollars or is currently under investigation…

Two of the settlements, involving charges of illegal marketing, set records last year for the largest criminal fines ever imposed on corporations….”  (NYTimes.com).

facts on stimulus spending

“Notice that when it comes to overall growth during an economic expansion, cutting spending produced worse outcomes than small increases in government spending, and large increases in government spending produced better results still. That fits very well with Keynesian theory of all stripes. On the other hand, it doesn’t fit with libertarian, Austrian, or conservative economic theory.”

cash seats

The Robert’s Supreme Court triggered by George Bush favors corporate influence. Election spending is up 500% from 2006. The trends amount to a spending frenzy conducted largely in the shadows. Favoring Republicans 7 to 1 in recent weeks.

Many sources are secret. But of all things, Murdoch and Fox News are spending $75 million on the midterm 2010 election while broadcasting right wing positions 24 hours a day. According to Bloomberg News, News Corp. is the “Republicans’ biggest corporate donor” this year.

Colonizing is such an old thing:

When the wealthy get into politics, it’s not about ideology, it’s about business.

So think of those paychecks to Sarah Palin and others as smart investments… “…a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.”

Mother Jones tabulates who owns Congress. It’s not pretty.

What if members of Congress were seated not by party but according to their major business sponsors? We gave it a try. —Dave Gilson