big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
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]
You only die once.
While one guard pointed his Kalashnikov at me, the other took my glasses, notebook, pen and camera. I was blindfolded, my hands tied behind my back. My heart raced. Sweat poured from my skin.
“Habarnigar,” I said, using a Dari word for journalist. “Salaam,” I said, using an Arabic expression for peace.
I waited for the sound of gunfire. I knew I might die but remained strangely calm.
David Rohde, NYTimes columnist held seven months as a Taliban prisoner:
Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.
My captors harbored many delusions about Westerners. But I also saw how some of the consequences of Washington’s antiterrorism policies had galvanized the Taliban. Commanders fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes, as well as the American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being charged.
America, Europe and Israel preached democracy, human rights and impartial justice to the Muslim world, they said, but failed to follow those principles themselves.
And tiny penalties for bad pundits.
‘There must be reputation effects that matter to the firm, some way of making media firms pay a cost for bad pundit behavior.”
Mark Thoma:
So I don’t know what the answer is.
It drives me crazy that, for example, people invited to appear on CNN will say something that is an outright lie, and the person saying it clearly knows it is a lie or misrepresentation, but yet they get invited back anyway due to their entertainment value.
Why isn’t the rule that if you lie once on the air, you can never come back again?
No matter what they say or how accurate they are, the line-up on the news, op-ed pages, etc., etc., is pretty much the same tired old group of people who have proven they will say controversial things that draw ratings. And that is what matters, never mind the accuracy.
Mark Liberman:
Pundit’s Dilemma — a game, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which the player’s best move always seems to be to take the low road, and in which the aggregate welfare of the community always seems fated to fall.
The Yes Men:
For all of us, what we try to do is just remember what the difference between right and wrong really is, and hold corporations accountable to that.
We happen to have a very, very great degree of freedom for corporations which erodes everyone else’s freedom.
Oh yay. Oh yay.
The times come and go.
Each begins with a plausibly bullish story: Japan as No. 1, the East Asian miracle, dotcom mania, how financial innovations eliminate risk – just to mention the latest four.
We magnify trust and scorn depending.
Get-Off-Your-But
Get-Off-Your-Butt
Our best energy is local production.
We coulda.
We shoulda.
We can.
We will.
Using just the resources that are currently commercially deployable; 31 of our 51 states, or 60% of US states could get 100% of their electricity from renewable sources in-state, and another 14 percent could generate 75 percent of their electricity in-state.
Please note, USA is permanent.
We do not depend upon crude oil nor natural gas nor coal nor nuke.
Energy is local.
Very local.
“Debts are subject to the laws of mathematics rather than physics. Unlike wealth, which is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, debts do not rot with old age and are not consumed in the process of living.
On the contrary, they grow at so much per cent per annum, by the well-known mathematical laws of simple and compound interest …
It is this underlying confusion between wealth and debt which has made such a tragedy of the scientific era.”
Nobel prize winner in 1926, Frederick Soddy at Wikipedia:
A farmer who raises pigs faces biophysical limits on how many pigs he can take to market. But if that pig farmer took on debt – a promise to repay at a future date – he would in effect be issuing a claim or lien on his future production of pigs. If he borrowed the equivalent value of 100 pigs, he could represent the loan on his balance sheet as ‘-100 pigs’
While debt as the farmer’s accounting entry is negative, negative pigs do not really exist. If the farmer should suffer a series of lean years and be unable to pay the interest, he might soon owe more pigs than could be raised on his farm. After a year, with interest looming, he’d show “-110 pigs”; in 5 years, “-161”; in 40 (assuming a patient bank), “-4526.”
When the bank finally came to call on the pig farmer to collect repayment of its loan, it could well find that most of the virtual wealth that had grown so appealingly on its books had to be written off as a loss.
A recent and much-discussed study showed decreased productivity in adults who were multitasking…you don’t really multitask, you just think you do; the brain can’t process two high-level cognitive things. What you are actually doing…is oscillating between the two.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.
The Rich Have Stolen the Economy
The political system is unresponsive to the American people. It is monopolized by a few powerful interest groups that control campaign contributions. Interest groups have exercised their power to monopolize the economy for the benefit of themselves, the American people be damned.
At NakedCapitalism’s thread on greed, Haigh says:
Blaming a financial crisis on greed is like blaming gravity for a plane crash. To prevent plane crashes engineers do not work on repealing gravity. Likewise, to minimize financial crackups market systems must strive through trial and error to build a better air-frame. Government systems, central banks and their ecosystems, including purchased politicians, have proven themselves unfit for the task.
yes, societies need a legal process to restrain predatory behavior that’s flexible enough to shift as the vultures do their inevitable best to work around those limitations.
Such a system requires loyal career government professionals for bureaucracies that can grow in expertise and size with budgets commiserate with changes in technology, societal growth and innovation. The opposite has occurred.
The Bush administration greatly accelerated the destruction of key bureaucracies, replacing loyal career professionals with cronies loyal to Bush and undermining and underfunding as much of the regulatory apparatus and the people’s safety net as possible, not only during the administration but far beyond.
They are traitors.
This paper explores certain legal acts and omissions that facilitated the over-leveraging and near collapse of the global financial system. These “Legal Enablers” fostered the boom that enriched a class of financial intermediaries who followed a storied tradition of gambling away “other people’s money.” These mechanisms also made the pain of the bust disproportionately felt by the middle class and poor while shielding the middlemen who created the problems. These Legal Enablers permitted the growth of a shadow banking system, without investment limits, transparency or government oversight.
In the shadows grew a variety of highly leveraged private investment pools, undercapitalized conduits of securitized loans and speculation in complex credit derivatives. The rationale for allowing this unregulated, parallel system was that it helped to create innovation and provide liquidity. The conventional wisdom was that any risks associated with a hands-off approach could be managed by the “invisible hand” of the market. In other words, instead of public police, it relied upon private gatekeepers. A legal framework including legislation, rules and court decisions supported this system. This legal structure depended upon corporate managers, counterparties, “sophisticated investors” and the market generally to prevent irrational conduct.
The hands-off approach was premised upon a series of beliefs or expectations. The first was that corporate managers would not sacrifice long-term shareholder value for short-term gains. The second was that trading counterparties would monitor each other closely and discourage excessive risk. The third was that “sophisticated investors” had the ability to select and monitor “private” unregulated investment options and that such decisions affected the direct owners, not underlying investors and market integrity. And, the catch-all fourth belief was that even if there were blips and bubbles, the market would quickly “heal itself” before causing any major disruption or harm to society.
Only after the global financial crisis struck and the government committed nearly $13 trillion and spent almost $4 trillion, to rescue the financial system and the economy, did many ministers of “private ordering” admit that these premises were faulty.
This paper contends that if we wish to restore investor confidence and sustain a stable financial system, we must stop enabling the excessive leverage and speculation that create cycles of irrational exuberance followed by financial panics.
Specifically, it recommends that we eliminate the loopholes that allow unregistered investment pools broad discretion to operate in the shadows, without transparency or supervision, to engage in self-dealing or related-party transactions, to inaccurately value and inadequately protect assets and to take on excessive leverage and illiquid portfolio holdings.
Josh Klein developed a machine that trains crows to trade coins for peanuts. Literally, for peanuts.
So you fill this thing with peanuts and set it out, say, in a public park, and the crows will scour the ground for loose change, carry it to the machine, and drop it in a slot in exchange for food.
The project, dubbed “CrowBox,” made a big splash when he unveiled it back in 2007.
Complete plans for the CrowBox freely available online so you can roll your own. Link to MakeZine.
The report, “Energy Self-Reliant States: Second and Expanded Edition” describes how 31 states have the capacity to independently meet their states’ electricity demands by using wholly renewable energy sources already at their disposal.
Several states, the report notes, could use their renewable energy resources to produce electricity that meets over ten times their statewide demands.
An additional ten states could generate enough electricity to meet well over half of their annual demands—again, solely from renewable sources.
The report’s analysis and projections only incorporates renewable energy resources that are currently commercially deployable. Link to WorldChanging.
On America’s news and networks:
I met a reporter who had been overseas for six years, opening an important foreign office for the Wall Street Journal. He was stunned when he came back in 1999 to see how much reporting had changed in his absence. He said it was impossible to get to the bottom of most stories in a normal news cycle because companies had become very sophisticated in controlling their message and access.
I couldn’t tell immediately, but one of my friends remarked in 2000 that the reporting was increasingly reminiscent of what she had grown up with in communist Poland.
Back to the main theme: the media dares not say anything too negative about financial services firms or their government operatives lest they lose access.
The private sector has learned the lesson of the Bush Administration, that the threat of freezing a reporter out is a powerful weapon.
nuisance barking: a dog that’s quietly melting in distress
We have only a few years to see our dreams.
You can work along the west, the east, the south or north of Africa, but will you find success? First, its people shoot winners and we’re not done with that. Second, they kill losers and have always. Third, there’s no law other than prizes that soon lure murder. Fourth, you already know 1,2,3.
Deals yes, but primitive is seldom in the news. Then I think of Afghanistan and our boys given only weapons. I wonder if battle is done well or if argument is ever between the eyes.
The atmosphere is charged with moisture, a huge fresh water reserve; approximately 13,000 km3, 3200 cubic miles!
Eole Water utilise simplement l’énergie du vent pour liquéfier cette vapeur d’eau. Aeolus Water simply uses wind energy to liquefy the water vapor.
L’humidité de l’air est aspirée puis condensée pour en extraire son eau. The humidity of the air is sucked then condensed to extract its water.
Un phénomène de pluie est ainsi créé à l’intérieur de l’éolienne. Rain is created inside the turbine.
The nuclear power industry is busily hunting capital and permits while coloring itself green. But nuke plants are costly, save 2 to 20 times less carbon per dollar, are 20 to 40 times less effective than investing in efficiency and renewable power.
New nuclear power plants’ deepest flaw is their economics. They cost too much to build and incur too much financial risk. Nuclear expansion therefore can’t deliver on its claims.
Taking into account federal income tax, payroll tax, state income tax, property tax, and various other local taxes, everyone pays between 27% and 32.2% in taxes.
No burden on the rich. The group that pays the largest percentage in taxes is the 90-95% percentile. The 400 highest income Americans paid an effective rate of 17.2%.
House Minority Leader John Boehner clarifies position on hate crimes legislation:
“You were born a Christian, not born gay. Religion is not a choice.”
