Category: interesting

A little recognition for Bill Moyers, but not enough, from The Ridenhour Prizes:

We journalists are of course obliged to cover the news, but our deeper mission is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.

Unless you are willing to fight and re-fight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take all of the slings and arrows directed at you by the powers that be – corporate and political and sometimes journalistic – there is no use even trying. You have to love it and I do. I.F. Stone once said, after years of catching the government’s lies and contradictions, “I have so much fun, I ought to be arrested.” Journalism 101.

So it wasn’t courage I counted on; it was exhilaration and good luck.

If you care about business, markets, and the impact of technology on them, then the following five paragraphs are truly mind bending.

It’s simple: orthodox strategy doesn’t stop at finance. Strategy as shadow-making, moral hazard, and market subversion is rife across the economic landscape, from food, to pharma, to autos, to media. It’s what the industrial-era firm has hardwired into its stale, tired DNA.

If you really want to see the bankruptcy of orthodox strategy in action, click those links – and spend a few minutes thinking about how those industries (and more besides) have spent the better part of a century and countless billions creating more and more elaborate shadows to hide behind.

As in finance, the victimizer is becoming the victim: as interaction accelerates, these industries are increasingly falling victim to the games orthodox strategy so earnestly taught them to play.

Orthodox strategy was made for an industrial massconomy. And that, I think, is the real root cause of the macro crisis: the exploding divergence between today’s economics, and strategy trapped in a distant, faded, rusting past – consigning firms to act out, like mute players on a stage, moves bereft of imagination, meaning, and purpose.

The macro crisis isn’t really just about Bear Stearns and a handful of banks: rather, as we’re all belatedly discovering, orthodox strategy itself is no longer sustainable. For society, for people, and most of all, for the corporation.

Musings of a VC in NYC, The Declining Power Of The Firm

To call Montana’s Governor Schweitzer a supporter of camelina production is an understatement. He calls it a “renaissance crop,” a “miracle crop,” and “the crop of the future in Montana.”

Running his hands through a bin of seeds, Schweitzer said he was excited about camelina because there is so much left to learn about its cultivation and uses.

“This is where we were in Montana in 1900 with wheat.”

Camelina flourished in Europe about 3,500 years ago and is on the way to becoming a major source of biodiesel on millions of acres of marginal farmland from eastern Washington state to North Dakota [previous post]. Camelina can grow in arid conditions and can produce more oil from its seeds for a lower price.

Roland Piquepaille keeps track of how new technologies are modifying our way of life at Technology Trends and found a new use for Virtual Reality in the lab.

What are paranoid thoughts? How is paranoia studied?

“Paranoid thoughts are often triggered by ambiguous events such as people looking in one’s direction or hearing laughter in a room but it is very difficult to recreate such social interactions. Virtual reality allows us to do just that, to look at how different people interpret exactly the same social situation. It is a uniquely powerful method to detect those liable to misinterpret other people.”

In this King’s College study using Virtual Reality to mimic social interaction, the results showed that 40% of us are paranoid.

Piquepaille reports, “If you don’t know how common are paranoid thoughts, here is an answer. “In one recent survey, 70% of people said that they had, at some time, experienced the feeling that people were deliberately trying to harm or upset them in some way.”

Think about this. If 40% of us are generally paranoid and 70% of us have ‘sensed’ others are attempting to harm us, how does this affect our daily lives, our society, and our political choices? It’s an important matter, very seldom admitted amongst each other, or for that matter admitted to ourselves. Day to day we pay attention to what scares us, but not to fear itself. Our fearful nature is poorly understood yet fuels the greater part of our budget and our human relations.

A short study of James Brown at metaFilter:

One night in the summer of 2001, after he’d slathered her in Vaseline (“He liked you all greased up,” she says. “Like a porkchop”) and wore her out trying to come, he gave up and left the room, and Gloria dozed off. When she woke up, Mr. Brown was standing at the foot of the bed in a full-length mink coat over his bare chest, a black cowboy hat, and silk pajama pants with one leg tucked into a cowboy boot and the other hanging out. He had a shotgun over his shoulder and a white stripe of Noxzema under each eye. “I’m an Indian tonight, baby,” he announced. “C’mon, let’s let ’em have it.” Then he dumped a pickle jar of change on the floor, told her to get a machete, and went out to the garage. He took the Rolls, drove ten miles to Augusta, weaving all over the road, clipping mailboxes, smoking more dope, and screaming about being an Indian. Gloria kept thinking she should flag down a cop, say she’d been kidnapped.

wood s lot points to Barbara Mor

What’s Left, literally, is The Sinister: the Body’s Left Side (Dark Side of the Mother, the Flesh & the Heart): the nagual. This realm which hyperrational males, positioned along all points of the ideological spectrum, have Dextrously (righteously) marked off as profane, errant, forbidden; or have worked to subordinate to some auxiliary category (Index under Politics: & Women). The patriarchal mind, from Bible to Bacon, Marx to Freud, Bookchin to – yes, sorry – Nader, does not escape its Inquisitional fascination with strict daylight dogmatism, which quickly collapses into anal-obsessiveness over correct practice and procedure, ritual observance, the absolute length of beard-hair or number of whip-strokes per minute per breath of Crime: the exact size shape & weight of stones collected fervidly to be used to stone the radical body to its Deserved Death.

When TSA screeners forced a woman to use pliers to remove her nipple rings before she could board a plane, I immediately thought we should all, all of us, purchase genital jewelery to put an end to this era of silly bullies and their thoughtless policies.

The NYTimes reports that 81% of us think the country is going in the wrong direction.

It’s our nation. We steer it.

Photo: Andy Hartmark

John Naughton makes an excellent comparison and notices that on this day

… in 1948, President Truman signed the Marshall Plan, which allocated more than $5 billion in aid for 16 European countries. [That’s upwards of $100 billion in today’s money.] It was an extraordinary act of enlightened self-interest which enabled a democratic, pluralist Europe to arise from the chaos and destruction of 1945. Nobody who was in Germany in 1945 could envisage that a prosperous liberal democracy could be built on such shattered foundations. And yet it was.

And the deliberations within the Truman government (especially the State Department) which led to the Plan provide an instructive comparison with the gibberings of the fanatical ‘war lite’ neo-cons who planned and executed the fiasco in Iraq. Marshall, Acheson, Kennan & Co were serious people.

And to think that — according to the Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz — Iraq has already cost upwards of three trillion dollars. Ye Gods!

Here’s an update to my previous post about geothermal power, Ultra-deep Power Plants.

Discover Magazine has wrapped a few extra links and is asking an important question.

If we could extract all the geothermal energy that exists underneath the United States to a depth of two miles, it would supply America’s power demands for the next 30,000 years.

Getting at all that energy is not feasible. There are technological and economic impediments. But drawing on just 5 percent of the geothermal wealth would generate enough electricity to meet the needs of 260 million Americans – producing 260,000 megawatts of electric power and reducing coal by one-third. Doable by 2050.

So what is holding us back?

Try to imagine this thrill!

Holding her breath for two minutes, wearing just a wet suit, mask and flippers, free diver Julia Petrik cut through the ice, ­descended into icy cold -2ºC (28ºF) water without an oxygen tank to 25m (82ft), and hitched a ride with a beluga whale.

Captured at Russia’s White Sea by British photographer Dan Burton. [link to Metro story]

I think this short essay stumbles, but I was struck by the contrast between the more rational outcome of a social and civilian approach to humanity’s challenges and today’s jingo of hostility where problems are framed by militians.

If the tools of state remain immature and confrontational, there’s conflict ahead that even war mongers haven’t imagined:

On September 11th, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on November 9th, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9th announced the “happy ’90s,” the Francis Fukuyama dream of the “end of history,” the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search is over, that the advent of a global, liberal world community lurks just around the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is over). In contrast to it, 9/11 is the main symbol of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border.

So what if the new proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in the new megalopolises?

The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, especially in the Third World megalopolises from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through Africa (Lagos, Chad) to India, China, Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times. It is effectively surprising how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are “free” in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic proletariat (“freed” from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, “thrown” into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-forms.

While today’s society is often characterized as the society of total control, slums are the territories within a state boundaries from which the state (partially, at least) withdrew its control, territories which function as white spots, blanks, in the official map of a state territory. Although they are de facto included into a state by the links of black economy, organized crime, religious groups, etc., the state control is nonetheless suspended there, they are domains outside the rule of law.

…
This is why the “de-structured” masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated in a non-proletarized urban environment, constitute one of the principal horizons of the politics to come.

The New York Times noticed:

The price of rice, a staple in the diets of nearly half the world’s population, has almost doubled on international markets in the last three months.

That has pinched the budgets of millions of poor Asians and raised fears of civil unrest.

Shortages and high prices for all kinds of food have caused tensions and even violence around the world in recent months.

Since January, thousands of troops have been deployed in Pakistan to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. Protests have erupted in Indonesia over soybean shortages, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs. Food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

TIME weighs in on Bush ethanol policies:

The environmental cost of this cropland creep is now becoming apparent. One groundbreaking new study in Science concluded that when this deforestation effect is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline.

Popular story in Europe today:

Earlier this year, the French government warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children. Germany also advises its people to minimize handset use, and the European Environment Agency has called for exposures to be reduced.

Dr Vini Khurana – a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, has published more than three dozen scientific papers – reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.

He admits that mobiles can save lives in emergencies, but concludes that “there is a significant and increasing body of evidence for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumours”. He believes this will be “definitively proven” in the next decade.

Noting that malignant brain tumors represent “a life-ending diagnosis”, he adds: “We are currently experiencing a reactively unchecked and dangerous situation.” He fears that “unless the industry and governments take immediate and decisive steps”, the incidence of malignant brain tumors and associated death rate will be observed to rise globally within a decade from now, by which time it may be far too late to intervene medically.

“It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking.” [story]

Enemies have been known to unite. Bush’s war has this strategic weakness too. Maybe we’ll see a very different Arab world soon.

Al Jazeera’s Middle East analyst, Lamis Andoni says: “Gaddafi says what many think, but do not say. His words reflect a prevailing sentiment in the Arab streets that is fed up with the failure of Arab leaders to rise up to challenges.

‘Your turn is next’

Gaddafi asked: “How can we accept that a foreign power comes to topple an Arab leader while we stand watching?”
He said Saddam had once been an ally of Washington, “but they sold him out”.

“Your turn is next,” Gaddafi told the Arab officials gathered for the conference, some of whom looked stunned while others broke into laughter at his frankness.

In his speech, the Libyan leader also criticised Arab disunity and inaction on the region’s multiple crises.

“Where is the Arabs’ dignity, their future, their very existence? Everything has disappeared,” he said.

“Our blood and our language may be one, but there is nothing that can unite us.”

Gaddafi also mocked a plan by the Arab League to start Arab cooperation on a joint nuclear programme.

“How can we do that? We hate each other, we wish ill of each other and our intelligence services conspire against each other. We are our own enemy.”

Safari Club International’s Sportsmen Against Hunger program donated 317,000 pounds of venison last year to the needy, said Doug Burdin, a lawyer for the Tucson, Ariz.-based group.

The meat donated by hunters was enough for more than 1.2 million meals, he said. “It’s provided a lot of free meals to a lot of people.”

BUT

Dr. William Cornatzer, a Bismarck physician and hunter, alerted health officials after he conducted his own tests on venison using a CT scanner and found lead in 60 percent of 100 samples.

SO

Officials in North Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa warn that the meat could be contaminated by lead from bullets, and North Dakota health officials told food pantries in the state to throw out donated venison.

1) Feed costs rose as much as 50% last year.
2) Feed represents about half the cost of raising a bird.
3) Poultry farms are beginning to close around the country.

The CEO of Pilgrim’s Pride, the world’s biggest poultry processor, says, “Our company and industry are struggling to cope with unprecedented increases in feed-ingredient costs this year due largely to the U.S. government’s ill-advised policy of providing generous federal subsidies to corn-based ethanol blenders.” [link]

The poultry industry isn’t alone. At SolveClimate, they’re asking, “In an age of peak oil, are we also reaching peak meat?”

National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders

“We made progress on virtually every aspect of race and poverty for about a decade after the Kerner Commission report and then, particularly with the advent of the Reagan administration and so forth, that progress stopped. And we began to go backwards…

“I think virtually everything [the Kerner Commission recommended] was right… one of the awfulest things that came out of the Reagan presidency and later was the feeling that government can’t do anything right and that everything it does is wrong. The truth is that virtually everything we tried worked. We just quit trying it. Or we didn’t try it hard enough. And that’s what we need to get back to.”

More at Bill Moyers

My friend Gary said, “Great story. Enjoyed every bit. Makes me feel useless living my simple life. That man knew how to live!”

From Discover Magazine, Inuit Knives Made of Feces, Wade Davis, a real-life Indiana Jones, describes the Inuit ‘shit-knife’:

“As the feces began to freeze in his hand, he shaped it into an implement. When the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. He used it to butcher a dog. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage and disappeared into the night.”

ScienceBlog found a thrilling talk on ethonsphere that Wade Davis, a National Geographic explorer, gave at TED – “the perils facing cultural diversity in this increasingly monocultural world”.

Our costly local armies are eager to purchase fleets of unmanned flying drones to fight crime.

“…law enforcement agencies across the United States have voiced a growing interest in using drones for domestic crime-fighting missions.”

The aerospace industry building these unmanned aerial vehicles is lobbying hard for what it calls a huge demand, but the FAA is worried.

The Federal Aviation Administration – the government agency responsible for regulating civil aviation – has been slow in developing procedures for the use of drones by police departments.

“You don’t want one of these coming down on grandma’s windshield when she’s on her way to the grocery store.”

Rather than spending where it matters, robot pork will soon be flying over our homes. Story at IHT

Barack Obama’s speech on the economy points to a number of truths that have corrupted our nation over the last decades. Describing Whitehouse proposals for dealing with the finance crisis, Obama says President George W. Bush is “completely divorced from reality.”

“Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practices.”

“The result has been a distorted market that creates bubbles instead of steady sustainable growth — a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street, but ends up hurting both.”

He said Washington shouldn’t be merely bailing out banks holding risky mortgages because that’s far too little for our deteriorating economy.

“While this is consistent with Senator McCain’s determination to run for George Bush’s third term, it won’t help families who are suffering.”

He said industry lobbyists and weak legislators have created a misshapen deregulated economy.

“Instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one.”

More at IHT

The numbers are getting warmer here too. One in three from time to time fails to control his or her temper.

“Angry young men and women suffering from arrogant bosses, rigid, oppressive class systems or sexual inadequacy, or laboring under thwarted ambitions, even if these have been inspired by grandiosity and unrealistic expectations rather than ability, have been destroying self-esteem and engendering fury since the Roman Empire.

Reporting a survey showing that people are becoming angrier, The Times reminds us that Jesus displayed commendable rage and that it’s stress that causes previously well-balanced personalities to crack.

On the other hand, maybe we choose to crack. Stanford University reports that more of us are willing to blow if we think our anger is useful. [story]

…people prefer to experience emotions that are potentially useful, even when they are unpleasant.

…what people prefer to feel at any given moment may depend, in part, on what they might get out of it.

It’s State vs. People, a condemning of our history in a frenzy of incompetence.

Criminal Code Modernization and Simplification Act.

“Unless otherwise provided by law, whoever attempts to commit an offense shall be punished as is provided for the completed offense.”

via Techdirt

Challenging thoughts, with advice for community organizing, i.e. how to enjoy meetings and how to progress locally.

“The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement.

Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.

It is not that the system has problems, rather the system itself is the problem.

Democracy isn’t merely power to the people, but power from the people too.