big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
Machine to machine bits outnumber people to people bits:
Ireland has embarked on the DEPLOY project, a network of sensors that can be placed at strategic points along any river or lake to automatically analyze the water at regular intervals, whatever the weather and beam the results directly back to a laptop on a 24/7 basis… more
That’s customer growth.
Yo, I get pretty tired too, endless slog of it all, things that were easy seem gluey, but I remember the Cree story of a buck so sick and tired of his woman moaning about food for the kids he stomped out of the tent and found himself walking all alone in the endless grass until he started moaning too. He really wasn’t sure which direction to go. It was bloody cold. He’s been walking for days. His soul is pretty darn ragged. He’s sure the spirits have left him. He’s an idiot to go out there. The list of moaning and groaning goes on and on hour after hour day after day until one of the buffalo says to the other “I think I will shut that guy up” and walks across his path.
HA!
Alaska shamed for highest gas prices:
Last fall the State of Alaska initiated an investigation, and in January 2009 they concluded that oligopoly was to blame. No illegal acts were discovered, but the report suggested that with relatively few players involved competitive pressures can be weak and prices above the competitive level can be sustained for some time.
Even and especially for pulpit Republicans, shinnying up for favors seems unavoidable.
Good morning.
Well, this is not how I expected to wake up this morning.
After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday.”
And then Sasha added, “Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up”.
Obama’s transcript:
“Building a World That Gives Life to the Promise of Our Founding Documents”
Some of the work confronting us will not be completed during my presidency. Some, like the elimination of nuclear weapons, may not be completed in my lifetime.
But I know these challenges can be met, so long as it’s recognized that they will not be met by one person or one nation alone.
This award is not simply about the efforts of my administration; it’s about the courageous efforts of people around the world.
And that’s why this award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity; for the young woman who marches silently in the streets on behalf of her right to be heard, even in the face of beatings and bullets; for the leader imprisoned in her own home because she refuses to abandon her commitment to democracy; for the soldier who sacrificed through tour after tour of duty on behalf of someone half a world away; and for all those men and women across the world who sacrifice their safety and their freedom and sometime their lives for the cause of peace.
That has always been the cause of America. That’s why the world has always looked to America. And that’s why I believe America will continue to lead.
Thank you very much.
Let’s not rust this medal.
We know how eager we all are for true innovation and fair dealing. We accuse establishment leaders of stasis and new leaders of corruption, but it’s also very true that real change is a bitch.
People do not go to the facts and reason things out for themselves. They accept what they hear around them. Their thinking follows standard, conventional frames of reference.
This is even more true of congressional representatives, senators, and reporters. The process for success in those fields selects for conventional ideas, the demands of their professions leave little room for thinking, and, for the most part, they are employees of major corporations.
Thinking is the job of other people.
A difficult childhood reduces life expectancy by 20 years among adults who experienced six or more particular types of abuse or household dysfunction as kids, while those who suffered fewer types of trauma lost fewer years of life, a large-scale epidemiological study finds.
put a mark on the wall:
“In some of the Maya city-states, mass graves have been found containing groups of skeletons with jade inlays in their teeth – something they reserved for Maya elites – perhaps in this case murdered aristocracy.”
No single factor brings a civilization to its knees, but the deforestation that helped bring on drought could easily have exacerbated other problems such as civil unrest, war, starvation and disease.
The economy is so bad that:
And finally, Congress says they are looking into this Bernard Madoff scandal:
Thirty years under the jingo of laissez-faire seems to have become thirty years of destroying simple oversight.
Sue Sturgis:
An in-depth review of monitoring data from coal ash ponds located next to 13 coal-burning power plants in North Carolina has revealed that all of them are contaminating groundwater with toxic metals and other pollutants — in some cases at levels exceeding 380 times state groundwater standards.
The contaminants reported include arsenic, cadmium, chromium and lead…
Ethanol receives at least six times the subsidy per delivered BTU that domestic oil does, even though their energy security benefits per gallon are identical.
The US corn ethanol industry doesn’t need to grow further, because it is already within striking distance of the target set by the government, which also appears to represent the maximum prudent level of output for a fuel source that makes such heavy use of water and fossil energy sources in its production, and that ultimately competes with the consumption of corn as food or feed, here and abroad.
Geoff Styles:
The GAO report estimates the cost to the Treasury of the ethanol blenders’ credit at $4 billion last year, growing to $6.75 billion by 2015, if not sooner. Although at a time of trillion-dollar deficits that may look no more significant than a rounding error in the government’s books, continuing this outdated and unnecessary incentive sends a bad message to the developers of other, less mature alternative energy sources. It tells them that they don’t need to worry so much about making their technologies competitive with conventional energy, because the government is likely to subsidize them until the end of time–or until the Treasury runs out of money, a date that will surely arrive faster, the more unnecessary subsidies it hands out.
After having been extended by last year’s Farm Bill, the present Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit and the tariff on imported ethanol that mirrors it are due to expire at the end of next year.
After 30 years of assistance–spanning my entire career in energy–it’s time to find out whether this industry can either survive and compete on its own.
Read this twice:
More and more, important information about our crops and the food they produce is coming from companies that are interested in showing only the positive side of their products.
For many decades prior to genetic engineering, farmers relied on university agriculture extension scientists to perform tests comparing new and standard crop varieties.
But it is increasingly difficult for university scientists to conduct these important tests on GE varieties, because they are prohibited from doing research on GE crops without company permission.
And when scientists do receive permission to do research, it is usually with strings attached that restrict the usefulness of the studies for comparing crop varieties.
The Real Scoop by Doug Gurian-Sherman
While genetic engineering has so far failed to deliver drought-tolerant crops, modern plant breeders are successfully creating varieties that will help farmers in developed and developing countries alike.
On the pew of free-market doctrine, here are the members of just one agricultural policy committee:
American Meat Institute, American Seed Trade Association, American Soybean Association, Corn Refiners Association, Dairy Farmers of America, International Dairy Foods Association, National Association of Wheat Growers, National Corn Growers Association, National Cotton Council, National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, National Oilseed Processors Association, National Pork Producers Council, National Potato Council, National Renderers Association and Western Growers Association…
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked more questions in an hour than Clarence Thomas has asked “over the course of several years”.
Records he unearthed show that hamburgers can be “made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin.”
Some of the ingredients were treated with ammonia to kill bacteria.
Mashed meat scraps? Ammonia? If it weren’t for Moss, we might not know that.
The meat industry, Moss writes, treats “the ingredients in ground beef as trade secrets.”
tip Knight Science Tracker. Paul Raeburn says, “This is investigative reporting at its finest. Give it a careful read. And give it some thought. What other stories are crying out for the same treatment?”
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Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.
The Politics of Spite, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:
There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago’s bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.
“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.
So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement … has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.
But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth…: the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple.
If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.
Coal power is not base-load electricity by itself. To enable coal to reliably deliver electric power, it took the creation of an entire other national infrastructure; the trans-continental railroad system.
Without the unceasing rail-car-load delivery, every 12 hours, on the hour, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year, of every next 12-hour-supply of fuel for the fire; the fire would go out, the water wouldn’t boil, the steam wouldn’t rise, the turbine wouldn’t turn; the next 12 hours of electricity wouldn’t be made. The fire must never go out.
Coal plus railroad = base-load power.
Even today, a century later, every 12 hours in this nation a trainload of coal from Wyoming or Pennsylvania or Ohio, must arrive at an electric power station near your city, to make your coal power for the next 12 hours. No trainload of coal; no coal power. What does that have to do with wind storage?
Wind plus storage = base-load power.
Recent assertions from Rocky Mountain Institute:
“Getting off coal requires nowhere near all these steps, let alone the many other attractive options,” Amory Lovins said. “We just need to apply part of what we know.”
California’s political system is locked in paralysis and the two-term rule of former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger is seen as a disaster – his approval ratings having sunk to levels that would make George W Bush blush.
“Do you ever feel like you’re watching the end of the California dream?” asks the reporter.
Mental health disorders in this country has nearly doubled in the past 20 years.
Who is treating all of these patients?
Many of the training programs—especially some Doctorate of Psychology (PsyD) programs and for-profit training centers—are not grounded in science.
There is an increasing amount of evidence that corrupt politicians and businessmen, unethical lawyers, some radical activists and many others who may have reached positions of authority or power have psychopathic personalities.
And these are the psychopaths we are more likely to encounter or be affected by in our lives.
What is a psychopath?
Research is critical because few who have worked in this field doubt the enormous destructive power of the psychopathic personality, a personality that seems resilient to any known therapy or intervention.
It Takes a Pillage.
How we got here and where we went wrong.
Instead of the rapacious robber barons of the early 20th century, we have the debt peddlers from investment banks, insurers and megabanks gorging on the Bush-era anti-regulatory buffet.
Muckraking journalist Nomi Prins explains how Wall Street converted loans into assets that allowed it to borrow much, much more than it could afford.
James Woolley says:
Interesting to note that the chairman of the American Enterprise Institute is also the owner of the one of the largest hedge funds on the planet (was rated the largest for two years running) and individuals from that outfit are forever out pandering for the banksters!
Now that $1.5 trillion is leveraged to how many trillions? Nobody actually knows. The hedge funds and the private equity buyout funds are all about quick turnarounds and quick and dirty bucks — raping and pillaging companies and employees and the real creators of progress and wealth and social stability!
DailyKos is running a series: 1,000 Companies Attacked -> 1,200,000 Jobs Destroyed