Category: interesting

Noticing the pain and noticing unions and activists increasingly noisy about being left out, Bitch PhD posted,

It will be improvised.

The last time American workers resisted mass layoffs this way, we ended up with a middle class.

Rant from PatriotBoy:

Everyone should have recognized that George W. Bush’s “ranch” in Crawford, Texas, was just a prop — window dressing to make him seem more folksy, down-to-earth, and of course manly.

Unfortunately, many took this faux ranch at face value — just as Bush assumed ignorant Republicans would — and assumed that Bush wasn’t really the spoiled, privileged rich kid. Now that he’s leaving elected office without any hope of ever having power again, he’s already leaving the ranch. Didn’t take him long, did it?

How long will it be before he sells it? He only bought it when he started running for president in 1999, so it’s not like there is any reason to waste time abandoning the former pig farm.

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… people will believe what they want to believe.

If they can make FDR the cause of the Great Depression, they can do anything. But one thing progressives can do is make sure that the story of the Bush administration is told, in all respects. There’s going to be huge pressure from the usual suspects to let bygones be bygones, to forget about everything from torture to reckless disregard of financial warnings.

But I want truth and reconciliation across the board, and progressives have to make it clear that it was an ideology, not an act of God, that made this crisis possible. – Paul Krugman’s depression economics

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Let us have madness openly.
O’ men Of my generation.
Let us follow
The footsteps of this slaughtered age:
See it trail across Time’s dim land
Into the closed house of eternity
With the noise that dying has,
With the face that dead things wear–
nor ever say
We wanted more; we looked to find
An open door, an utter deed of love,
Transforming day’s evil darkness;
but We found extended hell and fog Upon the earth,
and within the head
A rotting bog of lean huge graves. – Kenneth Patchen

To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower; hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour. – William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

The chief of the Armed Forces Information Service, Alison Barber, steered millions in public funds.

The Inspector General says she’s laundered millions of dollars to personal friends.

Donald Rumsfeld set up America Supports You in 2004 as a six-month effort to showcase public support for the troops and their families. “If you’re serving overseas, and you watch the mainstream media coverage, sometimes you can’t tell if America knows you’re there.”

In time, however, the program grew.

1. pro-troop rallies were organized.
2. wristbands and dog tags were made.
3. special comic books were printed up.
4. processions at the National Mall.
5. Sesame Street DVDs encouraging children.
6. a concert in Manhattan.
7. paying execs up to $662,691 per year.
8. a $500,000 website.
9. hiring Gary Sinise’s band.

America Supports You seemed like an umbrella group for all sorts of charity-related work for service members and military families, but instead was a money-laundering operation, spending millions but not to help the troops!

‘Do us a favor and take our money’. That’s investment sales nirvana and we’re vulnerable to it. I don’t think it’s greed that lures us to trust presentations, at least, not until we arrogantly believe we’re outwitting Ponzi. It’s the lack of information that fools us. Con.

Do we have rights that are never used? There’s a lack of information in our political system.

Given rational ignorance, this means that elections do not generate representative outcomes.

…voters in national elections are provided with a coping mechanism, a bit of publicly provided information, given to them directly at the moment of voting, the party label on the ballot.

…in local elections, voters given information too, but it is of a lower quality – very weak information at the local level – left largely adrift without the tools to provide much meaningful input in local elections.

There is a lack of information about finance and financiers ‘with the ability to con people into feeling they’re doing us a favor by taking our money‘.

…”money managers” are at this too both US and foreign, bank and sponsored funds with exposure to these frauds,

…hedge funds with the ability to move fast and effectively, moving money around, trades with insider parties and any vehicle that moves large amounts of money and hence obscures from view very large cash movements and hence frauds.

This is part of the financial and social cost beyond the current bank and other financial institution disasters – a result of lax, irresponsible, negligent and criminal conduct – non-enforcement of existing regulations and a refusal to add necessary new controls and regulations to the financial system to reflect new dimensions of the risk structure of markets and financial instruments over the past 10-15 years.

Accountable? Our President, our Vice President, this White House administration generally and our Congress, especially those who were supposed to be the knowledgeable and responsible watchdogs over the industry: the list includes Bush, Cheney, Paulson, Cox and the SEC, Pelosi, Frank, Dodd and a whole cast of characters right from the top to the bottom ranks of all of those who should have objected.

The ultimate blame falls on us for being too in love with feel-good, transitory satisfaction, greed/money/toys, self-centeredness, not being constructively critical, extreme cowardice for not speaking up, and allowing a design and implementation that encourage our passivity and hence downfall.

We are the fools for being made fools of.

We pay them to steal from us and we keep them on top. And afterward, do we demand accountability?

There’s so little criticism as our economy falls.

“The question is, What’s going to come of this, if there are going to be no villains?”

Who blew it up? Economists and pundits seldom name names, but Herbert Lash posted a story at Reuters:

A failure to prosecute the “villains” responsible for the financial crisis that brought the United States to its knees will leave the country without the moral compass needed to avert future crises, a Wall Street luminary said.

Pioneer hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt is angry that the bailout of America is eroding the nation’s capitalist ethos while those whose deeds crippled the U.S. economy suffer scant opprobrium, their names still untarnished.

“Something really went wrong here. We’re about to enter a period where our budget deficit will dwarf anything we’ve seen before,” Steinhardt told the Reuters Investment Outlook Summit in New York.

“What we really needed a long time ago was a recognition that there were villains apace. The evils of the financial system should have been recognized long before this,” said Steinhardt, who no longer manages billions of dollars but whose counsel is sought on Wall Street and among select politicians.

While scornful of the financial executives who should have known better, he also belittled Washington for its lack of leadership and for not spelling out what the future beholds.

What are the consequences of not being responsible and “holding the culprits up for contempt“?

The market since 1825.

Congressman Glenn Greenwald:

What you have is a two-tiered system of justice where ordinary Americans are subjected to the most merciless criminal justice system in the world. They break the law. The full weight of the criminal justice system comes crashing down upon them.

But our political class, the same elites who have imposed that incredibly harsh framework on ordinary Americans, have essentially exempted themselves and the leaders of that political class from the law.

They have license to break the law.

Toronto’s Globe & Mail ran a feature on China: China’s door has been open for 30 years, but the world’s perceptions remain skewed. …Read the full article

The newspaper opened the piece for comments.

Canadians must be a different species. Browsing several dozen posters, their points are cogent, far reaching, and of all things, civil.

Did you know some folks study the physics of walking?

Gilks and Hague have been studying the Active Walking Model and noticed a flaw.

(Submitted on 8 Dec 2008)

Abstract: We extend the active walker model to address the formation of paths on gradients, which have been observed to have a zigzag form. Our extension includes a new rule to simulate an aversion to falling, which prohibits direct descent or ascent on steep inclines.

Yes. The zigzag is now included in the Active Walking Model.

While zigzagging along the Internet, I noticed this grand addition to physics at Paul Kedrowky’s blog:

I’m fascinated by active walking models — how unconscious patterns emerge from people’s trail-use. There are many famous examples, some anecdotal, some research-driven (here and here), but they all share the characteristic patterns, with people demonstrating walking inertia, following paths of least resistance, etc. There, of course, some differences when walking on gradients.

People tend to want to walk in zigzags…

Is your neighborhood using?

Researchers from Oregon State University and the University of Washington have devised technology that analyzes what’s been flushed down the toilet to measure how many speed freaks and coke heads you’ve got living down the street.

[Scientific American]

If the read/write head of a disk drive were a Boeing 747 and the hard-disk platter were the surface of the Earth, the head would fly at Mach 800 at less than one centimeter from the ground and count every blade of grass.

No one can hide. The Pulpits of the Helliban shall tell on you, fornicator.

Dust off the Tin Foil hat. Machines can now see what you see and know what you imagine. Yes, it is now possible to capture and display what’s going on your head by mapping cerebral blood flow in the visual cortex.

Soon to be published in the journal Neuron, Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor.

1. The technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.
2. “In as little as 10 years, advances in this field of research may make it possible to read a person’s thoughts with some degree of accuracy”, says Dr. Cheng.
3. Kamitani says, “This technology can also be applied to senses other than vision. In the future, it may also become possible to read feelings and complicated emotional states.”

After the break up of USSR, to today’s rapid deterioration, what are Russians saying about economics and the rich?

1. “Oligarchy is a merger of the authorities and big business, corruption. Putin and his henchmen ARE such oligarchs, who have illegally seized power and violate justice with impunity — they indulge in bald robbery, extortion, unlawful persecution and so on.”
2. “Oligarchy is the usurpation of power (in our case monopolization of resources) in order to please foreign patrons. Oligarchy sprang up thanks to the ‘liberal’ reforms imposed on us by Washington.”
3. “The very existence of oligarchs is a slap in the face of all honest people in our country. The quicker they are imprisoned, the better.”
4. “As for ‘greater efficiency’ of private owners — if they rob the country — maybe it is better for this robbing to be ‘less efficient’? In fact, for so many years of the ‘free market,’ so much of the old has been stolen and so little new has been created.”

A bit more here, collected from the Moscow Times.

There’s something of the Bible in this photo – the parable of a house built on sand….

The Atlantic seaboard moves billions of tons of sand north and south in bars and humps carved by waves and currents. And over many decades, hundreds of jetty, groin and dredging projects have kept the sand where we want it.

It’s worked so far. For years, lots have been sold and banks have been happy to offer mortgages. The Army Corps of Engineers have built jetties to keep sand out of rivers for boats and fishing and built groin to trap sand along the coastline. But the jetties and groins are breaking down.

What’s a groin?
Sometimes the term jetty is misused. You see, many times people point to a jetty but they’re really pointing to a groin. A Jetty is a structure used at an inlet or to keep sand from flowing into a ship channel. A Groin is a wall built perpendicular to the shoreline that traps sand to keep the beach – to keep the sand under the house.

When a groin breaks down, the sand moves away and the coastline erodes. Massive sand humps are moving several hundred yards into the ocean. In this case, according to the Newburyport News, sand coming down the Merrimack River is no longer trapped and is being washed away. Tides are pushing water up and down the river, and the sand is migrating along the coast in a series of sand bars, basically sand humps that run roughly parallel to the shore deposited by Atlantic currents. The sand is migrating away.

Kicked in the groin
“I’m homeless. I have no home,” said Geraldine Buzotta, 78, who had lived in the home for 43 years.

The locals have had no luck convincing Congress to repair the groin. The Army Corps of Engineers has no money saying there are no funds in Washington.

Sand can be managed when the projects are funded. As times goes on and codes improve, of course we shouldn’t build on sand, but while we’re trading away huge tables of gold in Washington, who’s getting the money? That’s a story in the Bible too.

In defense of defending.

Jacques Vergès, defender of war criminals.

“If you meet a doctor who cannot look at blood, pus or open wounds, he is in the wrong profession. If you meet a lawyer who doesn’t like criminals or dictators, it’s the same thing.”

…
“I believe that everyone, no matter what he may have done, has the right to a fair trial. The public is always quick to assign the label of “monster.” But monsters do not exist, just as there is no such thing as absolute evil. My clients are human beings, people with two eyes, two hands, a gender and emotions. That’s what makes them so sinister.”

…
“The interesting thing about my clients is discovering what brings them to do these horrific things. My ambition is to illuminate the path that led them to commit these acts.”

[tip]

More on peccadillo, criticizing each other for too small things.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

embryonic snowflake growing on the end of an ice needle. A crystal forms before a flake.

Kenneth Libbrecht of CalTech designed a snowflake photomicroscope – a snowflake incubation chamber – to study the tiny, frozen crystals that normally would melt in a millisecond outside his lab.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16822703.600-designer-snowflakes.html

http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn16170-snowflakes/3

AP Science Writer Randolph E. Schmid wired this report showing that dogs have sense of fairness.

“Animals react to inequity,” said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, who lead a team of researchers testing animals at the school’s Clever Dog Lab. “To avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently.”

“The photo from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows the subject has not received food for giving the paw in the last trials and observing that the partner did receive food, the subject is refusing to give the paw and avoids looking at the experimenter.

No fair!

“What parent hasn’t heard that from a child who thinks another youngster got more of something.

“Well, it turns out dogs can react the same way. Ask them to do a trick and they’ll give it a try. For a reward, sausage say, they’ll happily keep at it. But if one dog gets no reward, and then sees another get sausage for doing the same trick, just try to get the first one to do it again.”

…the use of deceptive statistics has convinced many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is.

Some say numbers hurt some people and help others.

…corruption has tainted the very measures of the economy

The truth, though it would not exactly set Americans free, would at least open a window to wider economic and political understanding.

Readers should ask themselves how much angrier the electorate might be if the media, over the past five years, had been citing 8 percent unemployment (instead of 5 percent), 5 percent inflation (instead of 2 percent), and average annual growth in the 1 percent range (instead of the 3–4 percent range).

We might ponder as well who profits from a low-growth U.S. economy hidden under statistical camouflage. Might it be Washington politicos and affluent elites, anxious to mislead voters, coddle the financial markets, and tamp down expensive cost-of-living increases for wages and pensions?

From good ol’ Kevin Phillips: How we’ve been bamboozled with numbers.
[tip Justin Gardner [search at www.donklephant.com]]

Aeolus, king of the winds, lives in a magical place, a place where his free spirit can dwell. There, you can live in the shadow of a double emotion: feeling the fire under your feet and the sky above your thoughts.

From Alex Renton at Olives 101, “Oil pressed from the first green olives is a taste like no other. You wouldn’t put it in your mouth if it wasn’t so reassuringly expensive. …”

There’s a lot being said, and felt in the guts, while ending the ideological and greedy era of the Republicans and G. W. Bush. ProPublica has started to publish the numbers.

It’s an ongoing project. ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. To help build citizen journalism, when you see another pertinent set of numbers, please remember to pass them to ProPublica.

Bush By The Numbers

Nuts.

Ed Ring at EcoWorld goes around a few numbers.

There are going to eventually be not quite 10.0 billion people living on earth.

Currently in the U.S., each person consumes about 350 million BTUs of energy per year. In the European Union each person consumes about 250 million BTUs of energy per year. If there were 10 billion people on earth, each consuming on average only 100 million BTUs of energy per year, we would still have to double energy production on the planet, from 500 quadrillion BTUs per year to 1,000 quadrillion BTUs per year.

The point remains inescapable – energy production worldwide is going to need to increase significantly.

He continues:

Our position is we should use those trillions to build roads, hospitals, power plants, reforestation, aquifer replenishment, and medical (and other scientific) research.

We should nurture free trade, free markets, and entrepreneurship.

We should deliver to humanity the universal prosperity that is the destiny of our generation.

Then by sometime between 2025 and 2050, we will have created economic abundance, we will have advanced technology, and we will be well positioned to handle whatever the climate may throw at us.

In other words, ecologically speaking, what’s the market for a 1,000 quadrillion divided by 10 billion by 2025?

New Orleans goes on but is far from over. Food prices and economic turmoil, like we needed that, have pushed the number of hungry to almost 1 billion, a 7th.

The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2008.

For millions of people in developing countries, eating the minimum amount of food every day to live an active and healthy life is a distant dream. The structural problems of hunger, like the lack of access to land, credit and employment, combined with high food prices remain a dire reality.

But, but, oh, the banks, the cars, portents and war.