Author: Brian

America going broke?

It’s not merely that we’re exploited like a feedlot of demographic cattle, but also our inability to demand much from each other, not unlike fat Britain during the edge of its Empire, where our habits are congratulatory and self-preserving rather than challenging and insistent.

I trust America’s great longing to offer important works. I look for grand change coming through today’s bewilderment and noise. Our new day is not yet. I can barely tolerate the whining or the bravado or how the wicked shift blame and shinny up to whatever is winning at the moment. We might oscillate like crazy for awhile.

For me, change will show itself when, just one example, a firm such as GE is trumpeting truly exciting and life-enhancing and prosperous engineering rather than saving itself by green-toggling our stimulus funds.

Lobbyists are employees, not the leaders that hired them, and we haven’t yet taken these guys to the woodshed for making some of the biggest blunders of all time.

A Womb of One’s Own

Hurricane Katrina: It was not an act of God

Martin Melaver:

Years ago, when we started down the road of our first green mixed-use development (one of only two or three LEED HUD projects in the nation), we felt pretty good about ourselves and spoke in the language of “giving back to the community.” Such hubris. What I realize now is that the community has given back to us in ways almost impossible to enumerate.

We convened and then became enveloped by a vast array of community stakeholders who have taught us, among other things, that our very viability as a business is inextricably linked to the community we’ve helped make more vibrant.

Oh, and by the way, the only real estate stuff really getting funded out there in any substantive way are projects that hit the Venn-diagram intersection of green, job creation, energy efficiency, and affordable housing. It’s a lesson not lost on the very largest companies around, as GE seeks to retool itself by tapping in to federal stimulus funds.

In the early days of the American republic, a company needed a charter to conduct its business. It was a charter limited both in scope and duration. A business could only continue on to the extent that its practices lent itself to the enhancement of the general polis. My company’s recent experiences in the green affordable housing arena is testament to the rightness of such a charter. It forces us to earn our stripes every day.

Perhaps… we real estate enterprises simply need to mothball our operations for a good long time. Alternatively, rather than wait around for the next wave of high-rollers to come knocking on our doors, we might consider rolling up our sleeves, addressing needs our social order is clamoring for, and make ourselves relevant for a change.

Bush to start a free market think tank.

Anthony Gregory:

So the guy who began the auto bailouts, whose federal “Ownership Society” was key in creating the biggest speculative bubble in memory, who had bragged in 2004 for having “passed the strongest corporate reforms since Franklin Roosevelt”, who trashed the Bill of Rights, inflated the welfare state and expanded government faster and in more directions than any president since Vietnam, if not since World War II — this guy is now promoting free markets and criticizing big government?

Trauma patients without insurance are almost twice as likely to die in the emergency room. [link]

World’s best and most acerbic review of Going Rogue.

Two of the most rational links I’ve found on Obama’s Asia tour.

Already our media is smudging the story. Maybe these two Asia Times summaries will provide a more mature peek into several new and top-notch changes in the American-Asian position.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KK19Ad02.html

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KK20Ad01.html

The Royal College of Psychiatrists:

To our knowledge, this study is the first to show a brain abnormality in people who lie, cheat and manipulate others.

Liars had increased prefrontal white matter volumes and reduced grey/white ratios compared with normal controls.

The effect size was substantial, with group membership explaining 28.2% of the variance in prefrontal volume.

These findings provide the first evidence of a structural brain deficit in liars, they implicate the prefrontal cortex as an important (but not sole) component in the neural circuitry underlying lying and provide an initial neurobiological correlate of a deceitful personality.

What will the Tea Party do when they discover the firms they defend are the Big Brother they fear?

Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s privacy commissioner, has co-authored a new report that highlights the potential privacy breaches that could result as we move toward a smart grid infrastructure…

Roughly 54 million people have been bullied at work, primarily having been sabotaged, yelled at, or belittled by their bosses.

When and why do power holders seek to harm other people?

The present research examined the idea that aggression among the powerful is often the result of a threatened ego.

Four studies demonstrated that individuals with power become aggressive when they feel incompetent…

Aggressiveness was eliminated among participants whose sense of self-worth was boosted.

Fact sheet on U.S-China clean energy announcements.

Meeting in Beijing, the two presidents agreed to a seven-point plan designed to speed the development of renewable energy and improve energy efficiency.

1. Establish a U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center;
2. U.S.-China Electric Vehicles Initiative – a joint program to develop electric vehicles that will include pilot projects in more than a dozen cities;
3. U.S.-China Energy Efficiency Action Plan – to collaborate on improving the energy efficiency of buildings, factories, and consumer appliances;
4. U.S.-China Renewable Energy Partnership – establish a renewable energy partnership to promote alternative energy technologies, including ‘advanced grid’ and programs to promote cooperation between states and regions in the two countries;
5. 21st Century Coal – joint research into developing methods of capturing CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants as well as storing carbon dioxide underground;
6. Shale Gas Initiative – share U.S. expertise in extracting natural gas from underground shale deposits.
7. U.S.-China Energy Cooperation Program – a private sector project initiative to include collaborative projects on renewable energy, smart grid, clean transportation, green building, clean coal, combined heat and power, and energy efficiency.

Scientific American:

Smaller than a virus and used in more than 200 consumer products, silver nanoparticles can kill and mutate fish embryos, new research shows.

Tiny particles of silver – potent anti-microbial agents that can kill bacteria on contact – are becoming increasingly popular in consumer goods, including washing machines, refrigerators, clothing and toys.

“I think we jumped the gun” by creating such large volumes of nanoparticles, said University of Utah researcher Darin Furgeson. “We should take more time and really look at these new nano-systems before we start to throw them into personal products and shoot them into these ecosystems.”

Wenjuan Yang is studying nanosilver risks:

Food storage material silver nanoparticles interfere with DNA replication fidelity and bind with DNA

Chris Corrigan:

Improv of course is all about living the life of invitation in every second. It is about making offers and accepting offers. It is about building on the best of others and contributing something to help them look good. It is a world that works when generosity and attention are activated.

Malcom Gladwell:

Quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top ten.

One: Men and women with more testosterone like to be in charge. Indeed, they can find it stressful and uncomfortable when denied the status that they crave.

Two: Similarly, people low in testosterone find it uncomfortable to be placed in positions of authority.

Three: Teams made up of out-of-sync testosterone tend to be less effective.

Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?

“We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”

Money invested in protecting nature can bring huge financial returns – a hundredfold return on capital.

Pavan Sukhdev, Deutsche Bank economist:

“We have now evaluated 1,100 studies ranging across different countries and different ecosystem services.

“And we find that with protected areas, for example, no matter how you slice the figures up you come up with a ratio of benefits to costs that’s between 25-to-one and 100-to-one.

“Now we can say quite confidently that there is a solid benefit from investing in protected areas.”

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity study is the first attempt to evaluate the economic value of ‘ecosystem services’ – things that parts of the natural world do for free, such as purifying drinking water.

Some governments are on board already: Germany – which initiated the project in 2007 – Norway, and the UK. [BBC]

The AP is tracking Sarah Palin errors. Wonkette is citing various poor writing and silly quotations.

“A month of diapers cost as much as a truck payment, and it was always a gut wrenching decision: ‘keep the big new truck or let Trig stay in a wet diaper for an extra few days’”

Return to Sender casket looks like a shipping crate. Biker, Trucker and Hunter models available. $2600 delivered.

Withdrawal from intense exercise can produce effects that parallel, chemically, heroin withdrawal. The opiates the body produces naturally during exercise can have similar effects to externally administered opiates such as heroin; it also implies that endurance activities such as ultrarunning might be of use in helping drug addicts replace a “negative” addiction with a “positive” one.

Many, many psychological and sociological studies rely on college students, but:

“The findings suggest that members of WEIRD [Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic] societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans”.

Mind Hacks

Obama is pacific:

“I know there are many who question how the United States perceives China’s emergence. But, as I have said, in an interconnected world, power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another. Cultivating spheres of cooperation — not competing spheres of influence — will lead to progress in the Asia Pacific.

“So . . . I want everyone in America to know that we have a stake in the future of this region, because what happens here has a direct effect on our lives at home. This is where we engage in much of our commerce and buy many of our goods. And this is where we can export more of our own products and create jobs back home in the process.”

Full speech here.