Author: Brian

Spengler gnarling at Asia Times:

What brought the banks down was not speculative bets in volatile markets but what appeared to be ultra-safe investments in the most conservative assets available, namely medium-term bonds rated Aaa/AAA by Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, the major rating agencies.

The US Federal Reserve agreed to allow the banks to put on more leverage (that is, allocate less of their own capital against prospective losses) than they had in the past. But the Fed agreed to do this only for assets that were supposed to be virtually default-proof. The ratings agencies “sold their soul to the devil”, as a Standard & Poor’s analyst admitted in an e-mail later brought to light by a congressional investigation, in order to rubber-stamp riskier assets with the AAA label.

But that’s because the banks couldn’t find enough prime assets in which to invest and had to find subprime assets to replace them.

…
There is nothing wrong in principle with Paul Volcker’s call for banking caution. But the problems of the banking system can’t be separated from the larger economic picture.

Without a way to match the aging savers of the industrial world with the young workers and entrepreneurs of the global south, banking problems will persist no matter what regulatory regime prevails.

Mark Anderson:

1. The last administration spent more money from current funds, and indebted us more deeply into the future, than any in history.
2. Called “starve the beast,” it is a much-discussed strategy of spending the US into oblivion while in power, so that the following party has no dry ammunition with which to carry out its programs.
3. Carried further, it suggests a gluttony of spending while in power, so that services, and the government itself, is forced into contraction.

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.

We have 1000+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance.

What’s sad is libertine disregard for the blood-pumping requirement to bring honor and integrity to every moment of leadership.

MSNBC: Nearly 3,000 pages of e-mails that the first gentleman, Todd Palin, exchanged with state officials draw a picture of his influence on policy in the Sarah Palin administration. Other e-mails are still being withheld by the state of Alaska.

• The governor coached her staff on how to disguise the amount of electrical work needed at the mansion to hook up her new tanning bed.

• Palin and her staff stewed over the refusal of the state Public Safety Department to provide a plane so the children could fly to Todd’s family’s home in Dillingham…

Todd Palin and senior officials reach into countless areas of state government and politics: potential board appointees, constituent complaints, use of the state jet, oil and gas production, marine regulation, gas pipeline bids, postsecondary education, wildfires, native Alaskan issues, the state effort to save the Matanuska Maid dairy, budget planning, potential budget vetoes, oil shale leasing, “strategy for responding to media allegations,” staffing at the mansion, pier diem payments to the governor for travel, “strategy for responding to questions about pregnancy,” potential cuts to the governor’s staff, “confidentiality issues,” Bureau of Land Management land transfers and trespass issues and requests to the U.S. transportation secretary.

Foolishly indebted Phoenix will now tax all fresh and basic food, yes, milk, meat, vegetables and other food.

J. Ritchie, a robot, i am not:

Understanding the motivations of the architects of the modern world reveals a startling picture of greed, callousness and ignorance.

Lord Macaulay in the British Parliament on 2nd Feb 1835:

Miles O’Brien:

We had all watched and marveled as Sullenberger and Stiles ditched that Airbus so deftly in the Hudson River. Continental/Colgan 3407 was the negative image of that event.

From Sully – to sullied.

The two crashes offer cases in point for the consequences of a fundamental change in the way we fly in this country that you probably have not noticed. Since deregulation in the late seventies, the large, legacy carriers have outsourced much of their flying…

The Washington DC firm of Murray Hill Incorporated is first to take the step of running for Congress.

Murray Hill Inc. has long held an interest in politics and sees corporate candidacy as an emerging new market. Filing to run in the Republican primary in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District, Campaign Manager William Klein said, “The business of America is business and now it’s the business of democracy too. It’s our democracy. We bought it, we paid for it, and we’re going to keep it.”

Murray Hill Inc. launched the campaign with a website, Facebook page and YouTube campaign ad.

Science Sez:
When complaining, smile. When complaining about something important, smile and snarl.

Read that post title, er, twice.

Chris Corrigan:

    We are just poor weak human beings,

    Resisting the call

    Because we cease and desist

    our belief in all we can offer

    Somehow we have created

    single places upon which everything hinges

    and when we are put in those spaces

    we confront our smallness, see it in

    perspective because none of us are

    big enough to be the change others expect

    and we have long stopped fooling ourselves.

    To confront our own smallness is terrifying

    especially when people project bigness on us -

    the scale of challenge, the scope of our capability.

    The I we are through other people’s eyes

    is never the me we see through our own.

    Know this - you have been chosen only to live.

    It is never over until you leave.

    the only line you ever cross

    is the one you choose to draw.

White Blood Cell Chases Bacteria.

“The white? blood cell stalks its prey tirelessly. It can consume more than three times its physical size in a single day.”

Just super!

I wondered about the creep factor if I’d seen this as a child and I’m in awe that kids now enjoy our world within.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnlULOjUhSQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

NASA posits that the universe ballooned from subatomic scale to the size of a soccer ball during its first 10^-33 seconds, “not a surprise, but it’s nice to have confirmation”.

On it’s way to 60% of our spending, already one half the world’s total, one newspaper editor steps up:

Our military budget is 13 percent higher than at the peak of the Korean War, 33 percent higher than at the peak of the Vietnam War, 12 percent higher than at the peak of the Cold War and 64 percent higher than the Cold War average.

Dwight D. Eisenhower:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Biggest US Defence Budget Since WW2

Fred Kaplan | Slate | 1 February 2010

At $708bn, 2011 defense budget 23% higher in real terms than Cold-War peak.

Jeremy Cherfas:

Like us, developing countries are simultaneously becoming obese and under-nourished, because the ‘diseases of affluence’ are not diseases of affluence at all but diseases of an over-simplified diet.

The actual lifetime-earnings advantage for college graduates is a mere $279,893. A college education may not be worth as much as you think.

Reagan and Republicans convinced us that favoring the wealthy, relying on trickle-down and untethered markets… you know the story.

Right now, we are in the worst period in 50 years. Personal income has fallen off the cliff. “So, when you see a pattern emerging in averaged rolling data over more than a few months, you can bet it will last.”

“In China, when you’re one-in-a-million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.” – Bill Gates

Michael Pettis replies:

If China indeed has the same distribution of geniuses, or talent, as other countries, the fact that it has so many people won’t make it richer.

Yes, some are saying China is undergoing a speculative bubble that makes it the equivalent of “Dubai times 1,000 – or worse”.

Chris Corrigan:

On the way into Manhattan today my cab driver, Bubu, asked me what my impression of Africa was. I admitted that it was limited – I had only spent a week there, most of it in a middle class suburb or on a safari ranch and all of it in the company of middle class people.

But I said that the overwhelming impression was that Africa differed from North America in a key way: in Africa, the truth is valued above everything else.

Here in North America we are quick to sacrifice truth at the alter of a happy ending but African stories would never do that.

Dave Pollard:

The cult of individualism – the bizarre worldview that holds that we have a ‘right’ to acquire, possess, ‘enjoy’ and refuse to others, anything (and, if we were to be honest, anyone) we can ‘afford’ (no matter how our money was acquired), including as much property as we choose, and that we have a responsibility to and for no one except ourselves and our immediate families.

The corollary of this cult worldview is that we have a ‘right’ to secure that property with guns and fences and locks, and that those who have no money or property have only themselves to blame and, in a sense, deserve to suffer illness, poverty, hunger and an early death.

The cult of individualism is likewise the cult of materialism and consumerism – our ‘value’ is a function of what we own and how much we consume.

Christine Hertzog:

There’s an amazing amount of lifestyle information that can be extrapolated with granular energy consumption data from any residence.

In the traditional electricity grid, we have always been data producers and utilities have always been the data consumers – gathering kilowatthour (KWh) data so it can charge us for our electricity use.

The Smart Grid delivers a richer data set and the potential for new commercial uses of personal energy consumption data. The pool of data consumers of our personal energy information may grow well beyond the traditional utilities, and we as the data producers need to consider these questions:

1. Who “owns” my personal energy consumption data?
2. What rules govern its availability, storage, and disposal?
3. Who makes these rules and how are they enforced?
4. What are potential commercial uses of my personal energy consumption data?

The rules about privacy of this new data need to be developed so that we as the data producers ensure smart management of its consumption.

John Naughton tethers closed v. open:

Aldous Huxley and the iPad

Watching Steve Jobs unveil the Apple iPad, what came to mind was something that Neil Postman, the most influential media critic since Marshall McLuhan, once said. Our future possibilities, Postman thought, lay on a spectrum bounded by George Orwell at one end, and by Aldous Huxley at the other: Orwell because he believed that we would be destroyed by the things we fear; Huxley because he thought that we would be undone by the things we love.

As the internet went mainstream, the Orwellian nightmare has evolved into a realistic possibility, because of the facilities the network offers for the comprehensive surveillance so vividly evoked in 1984. Governments everywhere have helped themselves to powers to read every email or text you’ve ever sent. And that’s just the democracies; authoritarian regimes are far more intrusive.

Until recently, the Huxleian nightmare seemed a more distant prospect…

For the implication of an iPad-crazed world – with its millions of delighted, infatuated users – is that a single US company renowned for control-freakery will have become the gatekeeper to the online world.

The iPad – like the iPhone – is a closed, tightly controlled device: nothing gets on to it that has not been expressly approved by Apple. We will have arrived at an Orwellian end by Huxleian means. And be foolish enough to think that we’ve attained nirvana.

I’ve come to think, as it happens, that the portrayal of ordinary Americans as helpless victims may be one of the most significant barriers in the way of the constructive changes we desperately need to make… the American assumption that all authority is illegitimate and all boundaries unreasonable… a bit about how the recent abandonment of community plays into the trajectory of decline our civilization is now following… a very awkward place to be… rejecting the system in their hearts while supporting it with their actions… forces that are tearing modern industrial civilization apart.

A top insight, perhaps of little use to most, but dynamite nevertheless.

forces nothing else in nature can match

 Remediation technologies never know crisis.