Author: Brian

A thoughtful exposition worthy of your read.

“We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer,” Holbrooke said in an interview. “We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him.”

Washington Post:

The reaction to Hoh’s letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay.

He wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter [pdf].

A user wears a head-worn display, and the system provides assistance by showing 3-D arrows that point to a relevant component, text instructions, floating labels and warnings, and animated, 3-D models of the appropriate tools. Touchscreen controls attached to the wrist cue the next sequence of instructions.

A fossil-powered future is no longer necessary and may not even make economic sense.

A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables by Stanford civil and environmental engineering Professor Mark Z. Jacobson and University of California-Davis researcher Mark Delucchi:

1. Technologies needed for 100 percent clean power are already working (or close to working) today.
2. Cost of generating and transmitting these renewables would be less than the projected cost per kilowatt-hour for fossil-fuel and nuclear power.
3. Shifting from conventional to clean power would lead to a 30 percent decrease in global power demand.

25 percent clean energy by 2025.
100 percent by 2040.

Sean Carroll:

It is kind of a mystery. Why is it a heinous crime for one individual to act directly against another, but business as usual for a powerful politician to act knowingly in ways that will bring harm to the nation or the world?

Is it just that one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic?

Zo:

Where were we. Taking delight in oneself. A damn sight easier if them what gave birth to you felt the same way, if delight in one’s presence filled one’s infancy and childhood. The rest of us brokens gotta limp toward the finish line, making art of it, if we’re lucky.

There is no greater investment than taking delight in your children, for they will absorb that good feeling as if coming from the universe itself and their pleasure in being alive will spread, generationally, long after you are gone.

In a capitalist, consumerist society, this is a revolutionary act.

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” – Ernest Hemingway

Economic Populist: The real reason for the economic crisis

So what does this all mean? It means that the reason for the economic crisis was the asset bubble that preceded it. The ‘wealth effect’ was a lie.

The reason for the asset bubble was monetary inflation that got directed almost entirely to the wealthy. They naturally used it to become wealthier, which means stocks, bonds, and real estate. The trickle-down theory is a lie.

The reason why the monetary inflation was directed to the wealthy is because free trade agreements which gutted the income of the working class and left the nation suffering from economic disparity. The promises made by free trade proponents was a lie.

In essence, the economic crisis that we are suffering from, and will continue to suffer from, was caused by too much concentration of wealth in the upper class.

The country will continue to suffer from these bubble and bust cycles until either the nation addresses the income disparity, or the rest of the world stops offering to buy our debt.

The 2009 American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy reveals States Wasting The Most Energy Are Republican.

Scientific American:

On election night last year, testosterone levels dropped rapidly among male voters of losing parties.

After the outcome of the U.S. presidential election was declared, neuroscientists at Duke University found that although male voters for Barack Obama, the winner, had stable levels of testosterone, the hormone’s levels rapidly dropped in males who cast ballots for John McCain…

No significant effects were seen in females.

Capitalism might or might not work only if and when you could keep corporations out of the government.

Steve Ludlum:

The greatest amount of all the debt is banks lending back and forth to each other to create balance sheet entries. Much of the debt is old- rolled over and over; its point long forgotten.

Allowing investment banks and securities firms access to taxpayer deposits, ref: the 1999 Glass-Steagall repeal (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act), and liberating the derivatives trade, ref: the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act, are the two pieces of law that directly led to a situation in which banks were allowed both to 1) become as big as they are now (too big to fail) and 2) to leverage their bets as much as they have (which wiped out their capital).

And you don’t really have to be all that smart to realize that both acts are de-regulatory, and made the markets more, not less, free.

Don’t worry so much about salt:

Humans naturally regulate their sodium intake, rendering government intervention useless.

It’s a study that has angered nutrition policy advocates, but adjunct UC-Davis nutrition professor said it is backed by sound data and that he expects such a left-field finding to get heat.

The study concluded that the human body makes sure sodium levels remain within a certain range at all times, similar to maintaining body temperature.

“Our sodium intake is regulated by the brain, and your brain won’t let you go very far outside of that boundary.”

Young girls are far more prone than boys to getting stuck in the role of bullying victim.

Among the girls, the 44 who were victims of so-called “direct bullying” (physical and verbal abuse) at baseline, were two and a half times more likely than their classmates to also be a victim of direct bullying at follow up. Boys who were victims of direct bullying at baseline were no more likely than their classmates to be a victim at follow up.

The researchers said that girls’ “tightly knit” friendship networks could make it difficult for them to “escape the victimization role”.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. – H. L. Mencken

Mick Arran:

These numbers did not get this bad overnight or in the 10 months of the Obama Administration.

It took the right wing fully 25 years of dedicated effort and a full two terms of unrestricted ‘free market’ economic policy to bring us to the worst depression since the ’29 crash.

Even if Obama and his ex-Goldman Sachs advisors did a complete 180 and killed trickle-down in favor of an FDR-style NRA – which they’re not even thinking of doing – it would take years to get out of the mess conservative movement free market ideologues have got us into.

The price for the Bush Economy is turning out to be a lot higher than anyone but pessimists like me thought it was. That’s the reason Bush hid the numbers in the first place.

Arthur Cutten:

The US financial crisis is always and everywhere caused by the triumph of short term greed in support of Ponzi schemes and frauds, perpetrated by a handful of Wall Street bankers and their accomplices in the political process and the media, facilitated by the wholesale weakening of the American mind and character along with European and Asian greed and gullibility.

Bob Herbert, NYTimes:

We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow.

We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they’ve wanted.

And we still don’t seem to have learned the proper lessons.

Steve Ludlum’s Economic Undertow:

The economists’ assumptions limit the idea of ‘markets’ to America and Canada and a few of those ‘Frenchy’ Euro-countries w/ their own (limited) imagination, demands and aspirations.

Believe it or not, we needed six or eight or fifteen extra Saudi Arabias ten years ago. We need twenty-five or so now. It’s not enough to supply ‘we’ the wonderful, special, gifted creative us, the end of evolution us. NO!, its for the starving and car-less masses in Peru, Haiti, Belize, Guinea- Bissau, Cote- d’ Ivoire, Yemen, etc. They deserve as many tract houses, TV’s, fridges and A/C’s as we do and if you don’t believe me, there are plenty of Kalashnikovs and RPG’s that say otherwise.

Nature has never cooperated and the hubristic idiots who call themselves economists. And policy makers have made webs of lies and deceits that have calcified over the decades into a belief system that is more Orwellian than either Orwell or Kafka could have possibly imagined.

Ronald Brownstein:

Is The American Dream A Myth?

In the generation after World War II, the median income roughly doubled, increasing faster for those on the lower rungs of the ladder than for those at the top. Since 1979, the median income has advanced much more slowly overall, and it has grown much faster for the affluent than for those below them. Today,… family incomes are higher than in the 1970s almost entirely because women are working…; men in their 30s today earn less than their fathers did at the same age.

NY Times, Bob Herbert:

Two-thirds of the entire income gains of the nation between 2002 and 2007 went to the top 1% of Americans.

From The Tyee: James Hoggan’s book — and website DeSmogBlog.com — are really about how a vast conspiracy has been undertaken by energy corporations to influence the media and public.

Hoggan and co-author Richard Littlemore provide reams of evidence from around the world about the conspiracy — and it is not an understatement to call it that — that provided tens of millions of dollars to shadowy organizations to fight climate change regulations.

Bracken Hendricks:

Too often in the United States today, we are having the wrong public debate about global warming.

We are asking important questions about pollution caps and timetables, carbon markets and allocations, but we have lost sight of our principal objective: building a robust, prosperous clean energy economy.

This is a fundamentally affirmative agenda.

Moving beyond pollution from fossil fuels will involve exciting work, new opportunities, new products and innovation, and stronger communities. Our current national discussion about constraints, limits, and the costs of transition misses the real excitement in this proposition.

Greg Simmons:

No one is to be trusted with your money.

Not Wall Street, not the banks, not the government – nobody is to be trusted!

Does the investing public not realize that Wall Street almost lost every penny of American wealth?

Now we’re supposed to believe they’ve saved the day? I beg to differ. Those parasitic liars nearly took us to zero. Who knows? They still might.

New Scientist wrote, “It’s official: Your bullying boss really is an idiot”.

But the truth of the research is more nuanced.

Fast and Chen actually showed that it is self-perceived incompetence, not actual incompetence, that can provoke a person in power to abuse their authority.

The chimpanzee can settle conflicts of interest over resources in mutually satisfying ways. [link]