Category: interesting

The combined average global land and ocean surface temperature for July 2009 ranked fifth-warmest since world-wide records began in 1880.

Atlantic hurricane activity is highest in last 1500 years.

The global average temperature jumped 0.41 C from June to July, the largest one-month jump in the 31-year global temperature record and the second hottest July on record. Full Story

The planet’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for July, breaking the previous high mark established in 1998. Full Story

No worry. It’s all triggered by the Earth’s various tilt: Obliquity.

You can visit the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, search by state or zip code, and find out what you were inhaling last year, (although Jeff McMahon noticed the presentation is tough).

“EPA’s job is to ensure an open and transparent flow of information between Americans and their government, and today’s unprecedented step represents the agency’s commitment to doing just that,” EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, said in a press release.

“While we are still analyzing this information, we hope this raw data will be reviewed and used responsibly by stakeholders and the public to help them make informed decisions.”

There are currently about 1.2 billion humans between the ages of 10 and 19. What do we want to be when we grow up?

There comes a time in almost everyone’s youth when those remarkable human traits, self-awareness and empathy, catch up with potency, when you pause and reflect, when you first look back at the muddy tracks you just left across a floor and conclude that you are the person who needs to mop things up.

Most people go through this transition successfully and become responsible citizens.

Most of us would not leave the scene of an accident.

An eloquent essay while we roll our rocks uphill.

NYTimes:

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva.

They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.

I don’t want to think about this.

“We are all responsible for everything and everyone in the face of everybody, and I more than the others.” – Dostoyevski

“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.” – Will Rogers

Is advertising an industry fundamentally fueled by deception? Or is advertising better understood as a stream of information that, if well directed, can help people?

Comment?

1. Seafood aquaculture now accounts for nearly 50 percent of the world supply.
2. For 20 consecutive years China is #1, producing 70 percent of the world’s total output.

There are three trends in USA fisheries. The first is aggressive management to stop catastrophic damage and depletion, including the industrial forage of 90% of the world’s small fish ground up as animal feed. The second is open ocean aquaculture such as captive tuna aquaculture, with the hope that the challenges of disease, concentrated pollutants and genetics will be mastered. The third are new efforts to erect massive inland fish farms.

Ninety-five percent of the currency in Washington, D.C. is contaminated with cocaine.

Americans use 500 tons of cocaine each year.

In eighteen cities tested, cocaine is on 90 percent of the bills.

Cocaine on paper money ranged from .006 micrograms to more than 1,240 micrograms—the equivalent of 50 grains of sand.

PNNL said that aerosols in China’s polluted skies has led to the formation of rain droplets that are up to 50 percent smaller than rain droplets in clean skies.

The smaller droplets do not as readily form rain clouds, pointing to upcoming food shortages that would effect 1.5 billion people in China, India, and Pakistan.

Mark Hanson:

As long as foreclosure and foreclosure pipeline housing supply makes up such a large percentage of total sales the housing market will never be on the mend because supply is effectively infinite.

Well?

Another current review: The Coming Foreclosure Wave

For a portent on the future of energy, Blacklight is just like a novel.

One billion birds die each year colliding with windows!

Collisions are usually ground level during daylight when birds mistake window reflections for habitat.

Habitat loss and colliding with glass are the chief causes of bird mortality.

Ornithologist Daniel Klem Jr. has developed a low cost film – a lattice of UV-reflecting and UV-absorbing patterns – that can save billions of birds.

If religion is the opiate of the masses, fundamentalism is crack cocaine. Rob Boston, associate editor for Church & State magazine examines the top ten power brokers of the religious right and efforts to style America under their narrow agenda.

1. Pat Robertson – $246,986,289
   Christian Broadcasting Network
2. Southern Baptist Convention – $205,716,834
3. James Dobson – $156,972,266
   Focus on the Family
4. Jay Sekulow, Pat Robertson – $42,658,159
   American Center for Law and Justice
5. Alan Sears – $31,674,124
   Alliance Defense Fund
6. Donald Wildmon – $22,547,087
   American Family Association
7. Tony Perkins – $11,783,971
   Family Research Council
8. Tim & Beverly LaHaye – $10,640,810
   Concerned Women for America
9. Jerry Falwell Ministries – $4,208,989
10. Steve Baldwin – $1,680,914
    Council for National Policy

There’s also our pew of demagogues in politics and media. Dick Armey, for instance, who said, “Let me just be clear about something. I have no problem with Medicare. I was talking to my minister just last night about it”. Exactly.

Prior to the Internet, America’s media moguls sought to seize even more control of the hearts and minds of Americans in order to satisfy the needs of their financial sponsors and political agendas. And they were successful.

Disgraceful? Yes. Surprising? No.

Today, America’s mainstream media machine is primarily owned by a small group of men. And they don’t just own television networks or newspapers. They own television networks AND newspapers AND radio stations.

This is why you get the same bull regardless where you turn.

This carefully guarded control has created a very dangerous form of censorship that few realize because America’s media industry puts out the same messages and rarely allows an open platform for the exchange of opposing viewpoints by credible experts.

Mike Stathis at SeekingAlpha:

I have a mission that, in my opinion is much higher and more rewarding than money. I want to end the exploitation of Main Street by the financial industry.

The mainstream media no longer holds complete control of media distribution.

We the people now have a say in distribution through the Internet. As a consequence, the truth is coming out.

But they will only lose if you wake up and realize how you’re being fooled.

Keith Eubanks:

My background is in the field of system dynamics — a modeling technique developed at MIT that applies concepts from feedback control engineering to studying social systems such as markets or the general economy.

My observation is that what we generally term as the ‘economy’ (national or world economic activity) is far, far too complex for any individual to understand or forecast simply by thinking about it. Hence, we have all of these idealogical conflicts.

Mental models are not sufficient to sort out these issues and I doubt there are currently any mathematical models that are sufficient either. Hence, we are left with arguing.

I often notice that people talk the most about what they know the least about. We must discover how to manage ourselves. Endless arguing won’t do it.

“Until conservatives once again hold Republicans to the same standard they hold Democrats, they will have no credibility and deserve no respect.” – David Frum

Reagan to Cheney: behavioral psychology and the trickle-down economy.

Advanced Directives are in the news.

Figures are thrown about and studies are rare, but it’s not life-preserving technology that explains the ‘end of life’ share of billings, although dying in an ICU might.

What else is going on? Seventy percent of Medicare’s budget is spent on 10 percent of its patients. Why is dying in Miami four times more costly than Minnesota?

A doctor met with a 90 year old, a “100 pound guy who glowed yellow. He looked skeletal. His skin was paper thin, like cellophane wrapped around a chicken breast”. The doctor recommended hospice for the old man and went home.

When he returned the next shift:

I stared at the chart for a while. I was a little tired and foggy brained. But I couldn’t believe it. The poor guy was zonked out in his bed, exhausted from all the tests and procedures that had been administered that day.

In the interval, an astounding amount of medicine had been practiced. Consults had gone out to GI, oncology, and nephrology (creatinine 1.9). The GI guy had ordered an MRCP and, based on some mild distal narrowing of the common bile duct, had scheduled the patient for a possible ERCP in the morning. A stat CT guided biopsy of the liver lesions had also been done. The oncologist had written a long note about palliative chemotherapy options and indicated he would contact the son about starting as soon as possible. The nephrologist had sent off a barrage of blood and urinary tests.

That’s fee-for-service in a nutshell.

An insider’s view, 27 years in the enforcement division of the SEC.

Much of the problem arose from decades of deregulation dating back to the beginning of the Reagan administration. Elected deregulators appointed their own kind to head regulatory agencies and they, in turn, removed career regulators from management positions and replaced them with appointees who had worked in or represented the regulated industries. These new managers and, in many cases,the people they recruited and promoted, advanced or adhered to a regulatory scheme that, at least with respect to the most important issues, advanced the interests of regulated.

…the industry “captured” the regulators and the regulatory system.

But not in the passive sense that true regulators over time came to identify too closely with the interests of the regulated. This is not a case of financial regulators falling victim to the Stockholm syndrome. The vast majority of capture resulted from intentional efforts by the finance industry to advance their narrow interests at all costs and defeat meaningful regulation.

Unfortunately, we live in a country that can be bought from the top down and the finance industry exploited the situation very successfully. But do not blame the regulators. Career regulators are as much the victims of these events as the public’s economic welfare.

As Frank Rich wrote in the NYTimes,

“What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media.”

David Foley:

I have a graduate degree in economics. I never used it professionally, because I think it’s mostly bunk: sophistry masquerading as science. Economics provides few insights that wouldn’t be obvious to a reasonably bright 16-year-old with a grasp of calculus.

To diagnose and solve our current situation, sure, take a look at economics – but then consider the insights of systems science, the structure of networks, futurism, ecology and forms of whole-systems thinking.

Otherwise, we’re going to blow it.

Once they bought America. Now they buy its lies.

Dana Blakenhorn, “Nixon used scorn — his nattering nabobs of negativism.”

President Obama has a problem. His thesis is based on consensus, yet he must overthrow the Nixon Thesis of Conflict.

They refuse to join. They refuse to deal. They would rather lie, they would rather bully, they would rather kill The Other. This is what the last generation of American politics has taught them. It’s the only way they know to behave.

Outrage over corporate politics reached a high point in 1904. What’s next? In all the hate and worry, there’s very little election reform.

The founders were wary of corporate influence on politics — and their rhetoric sometimes got pretty heated.

In an 1816 letter, Thomas Jefferson declared his hope to “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Jefferson offers encouragement too:

“I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.”

But as Senator Dick Durbin once said, “They own the place”.

CEOs in America pull in the big bucks because there’s a shortage of people willing to destroy the lives of many other human beings.

Thom Hartmann

Over time, balance and democratic oversight will always produce the best results.

An “unregulated” marketplace is like an “unregulated” football game — chaos. And chaos is a state perfectly exploited by sociopaths, be they serial killers, warlords, or CEOs.