Category: interesting

Rant at the Economic Populist:

We need a new economic system because the old has failed. American Capitalism has failed so many people in so many ways.

We need to transform our economy to one that works for the most people possible.

We need a new form of capitalism.

What is the state of American capitalism today? As Professor James Galbraith has stated American capitalism is not what we are told by politicians, media or textbooks: benign competition leads to a greater good for most people. We are far from that.

The defining feature of American capitalism today is predation – where a class of people – the oligarchs – feed off the demise of people not within this class. This oligarchy, or as Professor Galbraith calls them the predatory class, has control over the government and the capital in our economic system.

Christopher Locke commemorating Cluetrain’s 10 years:

Did we fall asleep? Just for a little while.

We only have a little while to live. Such a precious time to be here. Wherever here is. To see each other and this awesome, incredible world. So let us not talk falsely now. Let us be what we truly are, which is human, and try to get our heads and hearts around what that might conceivably mean.

UK’s Telegraph caught art and defiance in Mexico City.

Earmarks policy evolves under Obama:

The list of difficult issues on our human agenda seems to increase, wot?

Q&A on swine flu with virus hunter Nathan Wolfe:

“We’ve created a perfect storm for viruses”

“For most of our history, we lived in geographically disparate populations. So viruses could enter from animals into humans, spread locally and go extinct. But the human population has gone through a connectivity explosion.

“All humans on the planet are now connected to each other spatially and temporally in a way that’s unprecedented in the history of vertebrate biology.

“Humans — as well as our domestic animals and wild animals we trade — move around the planet at biological warp speed.

“This provides new opportunities for viruses that would have gone extinct locally to have the population density fuel they need to establish themselves and spread globally. … we’ll continue to see … a whole range of new animal diseases as outbreaks in human populations. …

“Right now, global public health is like cardiology in the ’50s — just waiting for the heart attack, without understanding why they occur or the many ways to monitor for them, detect them early and ultimately prevent them.”

How did swine flu enter into the human population?

Swine flu has been known since at least the early part of the 20th century, since the 1930s. It was originally a virus of bird origin — all influenza viruses were originally bird viruses — and it probably spread to humans before it was in pigs.

Charlie Rose asks Bill Gates, “Do you have a role model?”

He answers, “I’d have to say Warren Buffet.” Charlie asks, “Why?”

Bill answers, “Because of his thoughtfulness, integrity, and joy.”

President Barack Obama pledged Monday to return the United States to a “high water mark” of scientific achievement, announcing a goal to commit three percent of GDP to research and development. [physorg]

“At such a difficult moment, there are those who say we cannot afford to invest in science, that support for research is somehow a luxury at moments defined by necessities.

“I fundamentally disagree. Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been.

Citing a plunge in federal funding of physical sciences over the past 25 years, Obama warned that US achievement, particularly science and math study, dramatically lagged in the late 20th century — and threatened to fall even further behind other rapidly advancing nations.

“I believe it is not in our American character to follow, but to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again.”

Obama also declared a need to end the politicization of scientific research, a charge he has leveled at the Bush administration.

“We are restoring science to its rightful place.

“Under my administration, the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.”

The term swine flu is wrong.

The World Organization for Animal Health said the virus is of swine, avian and human components… in fact, a cocktail of four different strains.

“The virus has not been isolated in animals to date. Therefore, it is not justified to name this disease swine flu.

“The avian strain is of American origin, and of the two swine strains, one is American origin and the other appears to be Asian. The human strain is American.

“There is no proof that this virus, currently circulating among humans, really is of animal origin. There is no element to support this.”

The strain may further mutate as it is transmitted among humans, and, in addition, humans may infect pigs rather than the other way round.

Greg Linden:

Whoever manages to change the nature of content display on the Web from a ‘search problem’ to a ‘recommender problem’ will reap tremendous rewards.

The NYPost studied five years of mutual fund performance:

Scores of piggish mutual-fund managers got wealthy over the last five years but delivered investors poor results, an analysis of fund performance records by The Post reveals.

The fund managers pocketed the high management fees — adding to the funds’ losses while investors were slammed in their 401(k)s and in other fund accounts — but delivered results that didn’t even beat the S&P 500 Index.

That means investors would have been better off ignoring the professional stock pickers…

Update:
Level 4 on Monday, meaning the global health body feels the virus causing the swine flu outbreak can easily transmit between people.

Swine Flu is a moving target, of course.

A ‘pandemic’ isn’t at this time, but there is a true emergency, and teams are gearing up worldwide.

Human to Human? Only in close quarters and limited circumstance.

Phase 3
…sporadic cases or small clusters of disease in people, but has not resulted in human-to-human transmission sufficient to sustain community-level outbreaks.

Limited human-to-human transmission may occur under some circumstances, for example, when there is close contact between an infected person and an unprotected caregiver.

However, limited transmission under such restricted circumstances does not indicate that the virus has gained the level of transmissibility among humans necessary to cause a pandemic.

Crof’s blog is a layman’s reporting site held in high regard, News and Resources about Avian and Swine Flu.

“We hack disaster novelists know one big truth: When you stress people, you find out what they really are.

“I hope this stress shows that we’re strong enough to deal with this H1N1 outbreak, and with anything else following it that may be far, far worse…like H5N1.”

Doc Gurley is a certified Internist physician and Harvard Medical School graduate.

Here is a list of ten practical steps you can take to prepare and protect yourself and your family.

Now that America has declared a state of swine flu public health emergency, you may be asking yourself – what am I supposed to do?

Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly.

Monopoly is an evil.

For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil;
but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good. – Thomas Babbington Macaulay

Bertrand Russell, originally published in 1930:

Fear of public opinion, like every other form of fear, is oppressive and stunts growth.

It is difficult to achieve any kind of greatness while a fear of this kind remains strong, and it is impossible to acquire that freedom of spirit in which true happiness consists, for it is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.

At Google Books, The Conquest of Happiness

“We’re confiscating shampoo from carry-on luggage at airports while at the same time handing out high-powered weaponry to criminals and psychotics at gun shows.” – bob herbert

Alyssa Peterson was one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq.

Peterson, a devout Mormon, had graduated from Flagstaff High School and earned a psychology degree from Northern Arizona University on a military scholarship. She was trained in interrogation techniques at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, and was sent to the Middle East in 2003.

Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff, Ariz., native, served with C Company, 311th Military Intelligence BN, 101st Airborne. Peterson was an Arabic-speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at our air base in troubled Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq. According to official records, she died on Sept. 15, 2003, from a “non-hostile weapons discharge.”

Peterson Killed Herself After Refusing to Take Part in Torture

There’s a story about Yogi Berra going into a pizza shop, and he orders a pie. As they pull his pie out of the oven, they ask him whether he’d like it cut into six wedges or eight. Six, he decides. He’s not hungry enough to eight pieces of pizza.

found at Canthook

The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free

Matthew Yglesias says about this book, “…our over-large military establishment isn’t just a waste of money, but actually harmful to our security.

“The reason is that it spawns a self-justifying ideology about the appropriate American role in the world that leads us to repeated foreign policy blunders.

“If we had much less military capacity, we would have a much narrower definition of the strategic purpose of our military—to defend the country against threats—and would find that we were happy with that equilibrium.”

The Kremlin outlined the objective of achieving and maintaining an average annual pace of economic growth in the decades ahead on the order of nearly 7 percent a year: on this path, according to Russian officials, GDP will quadruple in the next two decades.

The Russian Federation seeks to emerge as the world’s fifth largest economy by 2020, but history offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline.

Paul Saffo:

We got into this mess because we created a society that sacrificed the long-term good for the many on the altar of short-term profits for the few.

If we can just shake off the illusion of the quick fix, we may discover that more than the current financial crisis can be surmounted for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our children’s children.

Digest this:

1. It has been projected that 75% of US adults will be overweight or obese by 2015.
2. Weight gain and obesity are more linked to sweetened beverages than solid food.

Here’s a ‘we haven’t heard this before’ speech at DOE offices:

“Finally, this plan will begin to end the tyranny of oil in our time,” President Obama said.

“Washington may not be ready to get serious about energy independence, but I am. And so are you. And so are the American people.

Inaction is not an option that is acceptable to me and it’s certainly not acceptable to the American people – not on energy, not on the economy, and not at this critical moment.”

CEO of CAT:

“I’d rather be President Hu than President Obama,” Jim Owens, chief executive of Caterpillar, told a Council on Foreign Relations gathering in Washington, D.C., today, referring to China’s Hu Jintao.

Hu’s task is to tell the thrifty Chinese people: “Enjoy a little more.” The Chinese, he said, need to save less and spend more so their country imports more. In contrast, Obama “is going to have to encourage Americans to save more” — once the current recession is over, of course.

“We are going to have to have a little less conspicuous consumption,” said Owens, who happens to have a Ph.D. in economics. “I’m not sure we can afford to be buying 17 or 18 million cars a year and then throwing them away every three or four years.”

China to be World’s Largest Economy in about a Decade, says Deutsche Bank.

The forecast is dramatically stepped-up from two years earlier.

Ten years is not enough time to imagine how this will reshape the world.

Learn something new every day!

Non-golfers sometimes treat the terms ‘golf course’ and ‘links’ as synonymous, but they’re not.

“Linksland is a specific type of sandy, wind-sculpted coastal terrain — the word comes from the Old English word blinc, ‘rising ground’ — and in its authentic form it exists in only a few places on earth, the most famous of which are in Great Britain and Ireland”.

Links are always dry — even in the depths of winter — because of the way water drains through the sandy base. So the ball always bounces on the fairway, and never ‘plugs’ in the way that it will on a sodden inland course. And because links are always, by definition, by the sea, to the challenges of the terrain must be added the complications of wind.

See John Naughton’s Memex for more on Missing Links.

Jorge Cham, author of PhD Comics, offers us a few pearls in these panels, such as,