big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
We are just barely beginning to appreciate the impact of losing our top predators.
I’ve read that when Gen. George Armstrong Custer came into the Black Hills in 1874, he noticed a scarcity of coyotes and the abundance of wolves. Now the wolves are gone in many places and coyotes are killing thousands of sheep all over the West.
This won’t be the last bad rap on green projects and it hurts the industry. Read it when you can because it won’t be forgotten in Africa, extra hurdles for new proposals that will now require frank discussion and costly assurances.
The problem is, none of those promises came to be. “It was a combination of international hype and local organizations who were … selling seeds at very high prices claiming that they were special certified seeds when really they were just seeds collected from old trees in the wild,” Newman says. The plants also did not do well in arid conditions. “[The plant] was more fragile, especially in its initial establishment phase, than we thought,” says Jan Van den Abeele, executive director for Better Globe Forestry, a Nairobi-based group that studies optimal conditions for planting trees in dry areas. And many farmers had no buyers for their seeds.
An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions
Andy Worthington:
(The Intelligence Daily) — In four years of researching and writing about Guantánamo, I have become used to uncovering shocking information, but for sheer cynicism, I am struggling to think of anything that compares to the revelations contained in the unclassified ruling in the habeas corpus petition of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti prisoner whose release was ordered last week by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
In the ruling, to put it bluntly, it was revealed that the US government tortured an innocent man to extract false confessions and then threatened him until he obligingly repeated those lies as though they were the truth.
Midnight Oil, whose frontman Peter Garrett is now Australia’s Environment Minister, is joined on the new soundtrack by Serena Ryder, Lily Allen, Andre, Fergie, the Scorpions, and close to 40 other musicians, plus the voices of Annan and Desmond Tutu.
Their new refrain:
The time has come to take a stand,
It’s for the Earth, it’s for our land.
The time has come, a fact’s a fact.
The heat is on, no turning back.
How can we dance when our Earth is turning?
How can we sleep while our beds are burning?
Atlantic Online – Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s former chief campaign strategist, said today that if former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin were to be the Republican nominee, it would be “catastrophic” for the Republican Party. …
Washington Post – Speaking at the First Draft of History conference at the Newseum in Washington on Friday morning, former John McCain chief strategist Steve Schmidt took some none-too-subtle swipes …
Washington (CNN) — The man who ran John McCain’s presidential campaign warned Friday that Sarah Palin could lead to a ‘catastrophic’ election …
Heaps of coverage at Google News. Schmidt selected and promoted her. Now he’s worried.
It’s more basic than that. It’s in their attitude toward problem-solving.
Conservatives think it’s simple. Liberals insist it’s complicated.
Conservatives have one answer. Every liberal has their own answer.
TV prefers the simplicity. The Internet embraces the complex. That’s the difference between the mediums of the past and the future.
When liberals claim to be part of the “reality-based community,” what they’re really saying is that life is complex but conservatives won’t admit it.
Ideology, by its nature, is simple and appealing.
It boils down problems to enemies, and solutions to slogans. The great struggles of the 20th century were against ideologies that saw simple solutions to every problem. Communist ideology extolled the proletariat. Fascist ideology extolled the nation.
But in the process of defeating these enemies we created our own ideology, American Conservatism, and it is this force we must fight now. Like Communism, like Fascism, it says simply that if we get rid of some ‘other’, then run everything by simple rules imposed from the top, paradise would result.
Paradise never results from ideology, whether that ideology is religious, allegedly scientific, or frankly nationalistic.
Gwen Wright, History Detective, PBS:
One in three cowboys were black.
Our media is not saying much about bankers either.
Pilots worry Airbus computers may not be smart and Boeing’s reluctance to automate cockpits is wise. I recall anti-lock brakes buggered my first day on slick ice until I found out my car was going into a straight stop no matter what I was doing as a seasoned winter driver.
Engineers in Japan say they are a step closer to developing technology they hope will avoid crashes — by mimicking fish.
I often say to folks, “What if they gave a depression and nobody came?”
In the ’30s there were a few hundred large firms and 20 major cities. A glitch had extreme impact. The ’60s, our Cold War between NATO and COMECON, was pulling 25 outpost nations like taffy. By the end of the ’70s there were 18 buzzing banking centers, 75 huge global ports and 250 fused metropolis. Don’t check my count, get my point. Now it’s 900 important biz centers and 3,000 busy population centers that each have built infrastructure and extreme get-up-in-the-morning.
If you divide any annual percentage increase into 70 you get the doubling rate.
A population increase of 2% per year doubles the size of nation in 35 years. An inflation rate of 5% doubles the price of bread in 14 years.
The IMF forecast today that China’s economy this year grew 8.5 percent with few restraints on its future rate of expansion. The USA moans about 3%. In both cases, the doubling is well inside one lifetime, no? Can you conceive what this globe will be like soon? There’s so much going on, every minute.
I remember Jimmy Carter suggesting during his campaign loss to Reagan that a smart society could figure out happy quality living at 1% growth, a comfortable rate for humans, he thought.
The IMF World Growth Forecast is 3.5%, much more robust than most pundits are chewing and a great deal of activity, a very great deal of activity, that will double the world’s handshakes and deal-making in just 20 years.
Obviously, yes, obviously there is a great deal going on, even in the USA. What’s missing is that most of our leaders and politicians, especially local leaders and politicians, have no bloody idea where to look to bring activity and solvency home.
They’re listening to Limbaugh and reading Palin, no?
Ardipithecus is so rife with anatomical surprises…
the more we dig the more we find.
In 2008, salaries of the top 10 banks reached $75 billion (up from $31 billion in 1999), while cash dividends to shareholders were only $17.5 billion.
If really compensated according to the value they create, wouldn’t bank managers owe us money?
The most important point is that where we are now is intolerable. Today’s concentrations of state-insured private wealth and power must surely go.
At present, the official sector believes tighter regulation, particularly higher capital requirements, can contain these risks. But this is likely to fail. If it does, we will need to be radical. Yet narrow banking would still not be enough. We would need to rule out quasi-banking. Otherwise, we would soon return to the world of fragility and bail-outs. Funds that replace banks would have to pass the risks directly on to the outside investors.
The authorities will not entertain such radical ideas right now. But the financial system is so inherently fragile that radical reform cannot be pronounced dead. It is only dormant.
Wired Science regularly runs informative articles telling us what’s in products, what’s safe, what’s harmful, what’s silly profiteering. For example, analyzing superfoods.
Salon’s The Good Life by Bill Bunn adds to our knowledge:
What’s really in your shampoo?
Sure, a couple ingredients clean your hair.
But the rest are a veritable toxic dump on your head.
Do you recall mainstream media taking the trouble to protect us? Phooey on them.
“Anyone who feels an earthquake last for more than 10 seconds, by definition, should expect a tsunami. It’s nature giving you a warning.”
A child born in the U.S. or Europe will contribute thousands of times more CO2 emissions than a poor child in Africa.
Population growth and CO2 emissions from 1980 to 2005:
Rising populations in sub-Saharan Africa and other poor regions have had a negligible impact on global warming.
For even more lies, check out the “Truth-O-Meter” to debunk false claims repeated by Sarah Palin, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the others on FOX.
two and a half cents per kilowatt-hour
We pay five times that for electricity.
For instance, in 2008 coal costs between 7 and 14 cents per kWh; natural gas between 7 and 10 cents per kWh; and wind between 4 and 9 cents per kWh. In terms of new nuclear, some estimates put its price at 15 cents per kWh or more.
A whopping 25 billion online videos were watched during the month of August — in the United States alone.
laugh out loud: You have the power to change history. But first, check out this really cute baby video!
In any given week, the most-watched videos are nearly always void of meaningful information.
Nearly 82 per cent of all U.S. Internet users watched videos online in August, with an average viewing time amounting to 9.7 hours, according to industry tracker comScore. The duration of a typical video was slightly less than four minutes.
- Behavioral economics, a hybrid of psychology, is in. The efficient market hypothesis is widely viewed as an embarrassing example of primitive fundamentalism.
- To state the bloomin’ obvious, unless the private sector expands to create jobs and generate tax revenues, we’re going to be considerably poorer for years.
- But how on earth can that happen if the state has to employ a growing army of officials to prevent the private sector ripping us off?
This essay asks a British-bent but critical question: “If markets don’t work, what will?“
UK’s Robert Peston is asking us all if we want to revive an intrusive government we knew years ago as we try to repair the hands-off and weak government that George Bush and Schwarzenegger and Palin, for example, with decades of free-market pundits were proud to starve and destroy.
In an earlier post, toward reasonably optimal behavior, I pointed out that our belief in so-called free markets and embedded game theory is both unfounded and lazy. I’ve resented this jingoism since Reagan and I’m sad for its effects.
The foist of laissez-faire arrived in the stagflating late 1970s and grew through the 80s while we first shrunk under multinational globalism, the still unsolved specter of exponential human demand, and the great challenge of hoping to invigorate both leadership and ourselves.
But as Greenspan apologizes for over reliance on the false magic of self-interest and we see that few if any had tested Milton Friedman’s assertions that trial and error is our best government, we’re proving what we’ve known, that nests of fools and thieves are entrenched in business and politics, too many of whom we’ve elected.
What’s next? We’ve seen tremendous innovation and growth. I believe more the result of the generations than witty policies – increased knowledge and ease of relations, building out finance and services, checking incessant and arrogant pathology, pushing ourselves forward in myriad projects that we encourage each other to fruit, and as well, due to Volker perhaps, firm monetization of economies without a staid oligarchy or cruel presidium.
Giving credit where it’s due, agencies and officials told to back off have been more agreeable over the years than post-war, except the local armies dressed as police or those roping unkempt poverty. Did we know smiles and handshakes were hiding ineffectual oversight and backroom alliances?
We must re-purpose.
We must repair sectors we’ve neglected to oversee. We know for certain we will restrain trickery and massive exploitation. Stop the rude lie that the weak will not hurt us if we ignore them. It’s not only government that can do that. A better tolerance is needed and much better intolerance too.
Robert Peston wants a revivalist turn, I think, criticizing one bench while sitting too close to its sister. I’d want vital change instead, where we realize we can steer government, we own it, to execute important duties without daring in any way to harm its people or waste the nation’s holding.
I think we’ll continue to purge unpublic representatives coddling libertine and vicious contributors, including the tiny fiefdoms nearby. Second we will at least re-set broad rule making and grant civil power to intervene. But this time, with immediate transparency easily obtained by the public. We want to bite fraud and crime but watch our watchdogs.Current media truly failed here.
It’s not just Wall Street on my mind. Food safety is an example of weakened agents overdue for a lift. Favors and habits in our military budget? The list is too long, but there’s our prize.
Another Franklin Roosevelt stuck in this 21st Century crash might hire millions of us to fix our ragged institutions, photographers and artists coming along to offices and halls. We’ll sweep away what’s crooked in our generation as the prairie was planted. No new Hoover Dam, but we’ll vacuum away nonsense. We’ll swat those taking comfort from the weary. We’ll audit the execs at the golf course.
Our trust will return. With or without that, it’s our future and we make it.
The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting confidence in capital markets, “animal spirits” are driving financial events worldwide. In this book, acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller challenge the economic wisdom that got us into this mess, and put forward a bold new vision that will transform economics and restore prosperity.
Akerlof and Shiller reassert the necessity of an active government role in economic policymaking by recovering the idea of animal spirits, a term John Maynard Keynes used to describe the gloom and despondence that led to the Great Depression and the changing psychology that accompanied recovery.
Like Keynes, Akerlof and Shiller know that managing these animal spirits requires the steady hand of government–simply allowing markets to work won’t do it. In rebuilding the case for a more robust, behaviorally informed Keynesianism, they detail the most pervasive effects of animal spirits in contemporary economic life–such as confidence, fear, bad faith, corruption, a concern for fairness, and the stories we tell ourselves about our economic fortunes–and show how Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and the rational expectations revolution failed to account for them.
Man can’t afford USA: An illegal immigrant entered a police station and asked to be deported because he could no longer make ends meet in America.
New Income Inequality Data: Surprising and Frightening
Experts had anticipated that the declines in income of the rich would lead to a reversal in this group’s ever–widening share of our national income. Instead, the Census reported that the 2008 income losses by the top 10% of Americans were offset by larger losses among middle class and poorer Americans.
Not all the unemployed found careers in literature, music, and film, of course, but, even for those who didn’t, the idea of choosing to do something other than make money—the idea of being like Cary Grant—was more than a rationalization or a fantasy.
Jeff McMahon at Scorched Earth:
…and hope that it truly is the case that the mass of men no longer live lives of quiet desperation.
I feel united in work and art myself, but I worry about generalizing that feeling for two reasons: 1) I feel I’ve gotten there by veering left whenever the traditional career path indicated a right turn ahead, sometimes at great financial cost (turning down editing jobs, for example, in order to keep writing), and 2) It might be a trick of capitalism.
I recall seeing some very smart person lecture on the Bourgeois Bohemian phenomenon, suggesting that people were buying drafting tables or desks called “The Walden” at Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel because the capitalism of the information age wants us to believe our work is our art so that we work happily all day and night.
So, let’s hope but be wary.
Robert Oak:
Now, if only the Federal Reserve and Congress would ban the new big brother game of behavioral profiling.
Literally, credit card companies are lowering credit limits, raising your rates based on if you shop at Wal-Mart or go to a bar too much. Now, not only is this a massive invasion of privacy, we’re sorry but credit scores should be limited to…..uh, how well you pay your bills and that’s it!
Datamining 1984
The side he picked in economics was an odd one. A 1975 issue featured a pair of articles: “The Social Pork Barrel” launched the career of a young Michigan Congressman, David Stockman, who would become budget director for Ronald Reagan; and “The Mundell-Laffer Hypothesis – a New View of the World Economy,” by Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski, introduced the world to economists Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell, and their newly-invented brand of ‘supply side economics’.
Widely known as ‘the Godfather’ of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol explained:
Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists…. This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems.
The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority – so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government…
For power, stump lies.
Professor John Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, one of the key advisors to the German government, suggested that North Americans know less about climate change than just about anyone else in the world.
Scientific illiteracy is not a badge of honor.
Yet there’s already a great shift occurring. Recent market analysis show that biomass-sourced fuels are expected to take 25% of the US gasoline market by 2030.
The science is increasingly clear that holding the global average temperature increase to no more than 2 degrees Celsius is likely to be essential for keeping climate change to a manageable level. It is likewise clear that having a good chance of meeting this goal requires that global emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants should level off by about 2020 and shrink thereafter to something like 50 percent of the current levels by 2050, with continuing declines after that. Economic and political realities, including recognition that emissions from the industrialized countries have caused the largest part of the problem up until now, suggest that the United States and other industrial nations should take the lead in this effort, reducing our emissions to well below current levels by 2020.