precarious abounding

Koran-burning stunt. “Elite media gatekeepers have abandoned their moral mandate to stigmatize uncivil discourse. Many outlets reward it.” —Rick Perlstein


“Obama is losing his grip on the country, because he’s too sane for these times.” —George Packer


Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend freely on political causes strengthens an ‘economy of corruption‘ in Congress. Extraordinary that this court could think otherwise. —Lawrence Lessig


“I know if I rest, I’ll slide downhill fast. I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. I just carry on.” —Lee Kuan Yew, the man who made Singapore

large awe spinning

I often think of centurys’ sailors having no bloody idea what power they’ll encounter. Click pics for a stunning view of Hurricane Earl from the Space Station and another of 1999’s Floyd via satellite.

crawl-onomics

Here’s the problem as economist Edward Harrison puts it:

1. The private sector (particularly households) is overly indebted. The level of debt households now carry cannot be supported by income at the present levels of consumption. The natural tendency, therefore, is toward more saving and less spending in the private sector (although asset price appreciation can attenuate this through the Wealth Effect). That necessarily means the public sector must run a deficit or the import-export sector must run a surplus.

2. Most countries are in a state of economic weakness. That means consumption demand is constrained globally. There is no chance that the U.S. can export its way out of recession

3. without a collapse in the value of the U.S. dollar. That leaves the government as the sole way to pick up the slack.

4. Since state and local governments are constrained by falling tax revenue and the inability to print money, only the Federal Government can run large deficits. 5. Deficit spending on this scale is politically unacceptable and will come to an end as soon as the economy shows any signs of life (say 2 to 3% growth for one year).

Therefore, at the first sign of economic strength, the Federal Government must raise taxes and/or cut spending. The result will be a deep recession with higher unemployment and lower stock prices.

Slog. Accept it. Shortfall, however sloppy, will be made up by the federal government.

We will not return to what failed. We will slowly reduce the bleeding of energy overhead and carve a new horizon of services and trade. Watch for it. Patiently.

an order of wrong

The problem with mass politics today is that we increasingly have no idea what is myth and theater, and what is really true.

[BBC’s essay on powerful modern myth.
It is the idea that underneath all the chaotic violence that marks the modern world there are hidden patterns, networks of terror that are orchestrated by America’s deadly enemies.]

The problem with mass politics today is that we increasingly have no idea what is myth and theater, and what is really true.

One day when hierarchy flattens to our nature, fools will be us all.

tans and appearances

Why are we vulnerable to con like this?

Some of the nation’s biggest businesses, including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Reynolds, Altria, MillerCoors, Coca-Cola, Zurich Financial, UPS and Google supply the dollars to his campaign. They’ve given him dozens of flights on corporate jets, dozens of stays at luxury resorts and waterfront bashes. He’s raised $36 million for Republicans recently, more than almost anyone else. Thereby, his rise. Thereby, his binding.

After new ethics rules, he’s forced to hide his perks in a political action committee.

In the last 18 months, it has spent at least $67,000 at the Ritz-Carlton Naples in Florida, at least $20,000 at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Virginia, and at least $29,000 at the Muirfield Village Golf Club in Ohio. $116,000. Golfing.

Palming is his scoring.

In public, he brushes it off. “I get lobbied every day by somebody. It could be by my wife. It could be the bellman. It goes on all day, everyday, everyplace.” He said he had broken no rules and was simply assisting his lobbyist friends. Or his wife, sure, or various hotel staff.

What’s Republican fraud?
Vote John A. Boehner. Get more than 100 industry lobbyists.
That’s Republican fraud.

Our media favors this charade; never tapes his days with lobbyists; always hosts his lectern and appearances. If Speaker, there’s no chance in hell he’s working for you.

religions have whackos

Michael Moore:

I am opposed to the building of the ‘mosque’ two blocks from Ground Zero.

I want it built on Ground Zero.

Why? Because I believe in an America that protects those who are the victims of hate and prejudice. I believe in an America that says you have the right to worship whatever God you have, wherever you want to worship. And I believe in an America that says to the world that we are a loving and generous people and if a bunch of murderers steal your religion from you and use it as their excuse to kill 3,000 souls, then I want to help you get your religion back. And I want to put it at the spot where it was stolen from you.

Besides, there already was a ‘ground zero mosque’ —on the 17th floor of the south tower and used by Muslim Americans who were murdered just like everyone else.

flaming our votes

Without governments as we know them, regions can become territories of the used. We struggle against tyranny and for that, over thousands of years, ladies and gentlemen, we have built charter and civility. But Gingrich emphasized today that not only did God ordain a limited role for government, God, and not the government, is the source of individual rights. “God gives you sovereignty,” said Gingrich, and “the government doesn’t define rights.”

The easiest way to lead people by the nose is through their morality. This speaks to danger greater than all others. We know by the al Qaeda and by Taliban, by all fervor in power, by graves of pain under our footsteps, there is no greater error. Uprising itself is terror. Well before wounds of war, our minds fill with blood. For that we built civil government.

Free you are to pray and ponder this awe of life, so declares our charters. Our charters!  Shudder over the lives made dead to make them. Oh yes, our dead truly did define our rights, and it was government they built to keep them.

Our government is not a ground for pulpits. We made this American government to end that terror. It may be convenient to make political demands moral demands, but it the cheapest use of history.

More greedy for stature than restrained to reasoned policy, Gingrich toys with votes. It’s clear the RNC is committed to heating and urgency. I’m ashamed they use this route to power. District by district it is extracting bias from ignorance and steering it to the polls. Opportunism. There’s pathology in that. There’s tyranny in that.

on a common platform

The death-knell of all fanaticism, not published in the USA where free belief is law and media sells its flames, but by the Mumbai Mirror, Saturday, September 11, 2010.

It was on September 11 in 1893 that the world’s first Parliament of Religions was convened in Chicago and lasted for more than two weeks. On that day, a famous monk began his speech as ‘Sisters and Brothers of America’ and received a deafening standing ovation.

“Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair.

Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.

But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.”

Entire speech here. Parliaments of the World’s Religions here.

rightness and beauty

From the earliest moments of human awareness, gravity, sunlight, night and day, were obvious.

As well:

That health is more important than disease, that life is more important than death, that honor is preferable to dishonor, that faith and trust are preferable to doubt and cynicism, that the constructive is preferable to the destructive – all are self-evident statements not subject to proof.

Paul Handover is saying, “Truth is not something external to us; it is within us, all the time.”

😉 Plus, of course, what we’re learning from dogs.

fringes and pits

“As Americans, we will not and never will be at war with Islam. It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda, a sorry band of men which perverts religion.” – US President Barack Obama

flaming the ignorance

Each of America’s great political crises have really been about the economy.

In our time it’s about energy coming from devices, as opposed to energy as resources. Resources have  to be transformed by fire to become energy. Devices harness energy from the environment.

There is, in fact, plenty of energy all around us — as much as we could ever use. Coming down from the sky, flowing under the Earth, blowing across our land. What we need are devices that can harness it.

Meanwhile we have a Stupid Economy.

It’s stupid because there is an economic force stifling growth we feel powerless to get past, because that force seems to control our politics. In this case, it’s energy billionaires like the Koch Brothers, the oil power, and to a lesser extent coal.

Look closely at who funds the Republican National Committee, all the ‘wingnut welfare’ groups and Tea Party arcades.

Follow the money where it doesn’t want you to go and it’s the same collection of names — energy men and their bankers.

But their economic time has passed.

Dana Blankenhorn

civilization spew

The outright ‘size’ of humans on Earth, the frenzy, the terrific effort of needs!

Biggest Threat Comes From Stuff We Haven’t Built Yet
With best management of ‘current and committed’ fossil-fuel infrastructure, we just might keep gas concentrations below 450ppm, 496 million tons, which will limit warming at or below 2 degrees C.

The trend is still fossil:
Since 2000 the world has added 416 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants, 449 gigawatts of natural gas–fired power plants and even 47.5 gigawatts of oil-fired power plants… new highways, millions of new cars, gas-fired factories… the U.S. still generates half of its electricity via coal burning, and so on.

Carbon-neutral is slow:
Including nuclear & hydro, all carbon-free sources of energy combined provide a little more than 2 of today’s total power of 15 terawatts.

Carbon-neutral must grow:
To keep gas concentrations at today’s level in 2030, we should have installed at least 10 terawatts years ago. To meet demand and keep concentrations near 450ppm by 2050, carbon-neutral sources must reach 30 terawatts.

We have a ‘terawatt challenge’, Mr. Jones.
“What if we never built another CO2-emitting device, but the ones already in existence lived out their normal lives?”

“We found that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would stabilize at less than 430 ppm and the increase of global mean temperatures since preindustrial time would be less than 1.3°C. In light of common benchmarks of 450 ppm and 2°C, these results indicate that the devices whose emissions will cause the worst impacts have yet to be built.”


Arrrgh… wars galore as populations shift, oceans acidify, food chains collapse, gloom and doom, gloom and doom, oh woe. We’re overwhelmed and a’that.

‘Complex Systems’ is a term to truly, truly ponder. Folks sift for dominance of one form or another, others imagine chaos, but tipping points are opposed by reactions, vigorous  reactions…. If we’re diligent, perhaps strong efforts worldwide will meet terrific upcoming challenges.

We’ll need optimism.

Many environmental authors and some scientists use a bully pulpit to thump opportunists and lunatics, already ill equipped to confront good science. We can scare cynics toward good sense, but it’s better to lead the rest of us toward a workable horizon. We’ll need pointers and working prototype.

I shouldn’t be so strong. But I think we’re well past the matter of excess gas; we should be. All slogging toward forward options, discovering our choices, is the premier mission.

boner rollbacks

There is no evidence that tax cuts leads to stronger job creation. Moreover, both the Reagan and Bush 43 tax cuts were accompanied by huge increases in government spending. Now they’re cutting Food Stamps. by John Keefe:

“I’m a reporter… I called Rep. Boehner’s press people, and they switched me over to his staff. (They call him ‘The Leader’.)

HA!

Paul Krugman:

It’s hard to overstate how destructive the economic ideas offered earlier this week by John Boehner, the House minority leader, would be…

Basically, he proposes two things: large tax cuts for the wealthy that would increase the budget deficit while doing little to support the economy, and sharp spending cuts that would depress the economy while doing little to improve budget prospects.

Fewer jobs and bigger deficits — the perfect combination.

More broadly, if Republicans regain power, they will surely do what they did during the Bush years: they won’t seriously try to address the economy’s troubles; they’ll just use those troubles as an excuse to push the usual agenda, including Social Security privatization. They’ll also surely try to repeal health reform, which would be another twofer, reducing economic security even as it increases long-term deficits.

our knitwork network

Ladies and gentlemen: the wonderful, and let’s not forget weird, World of Fungi.

At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of Twitter’s servers.


The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age is shifting control from bureaucracy to democracy. Based in UK, a strong agenda to loosen government’s grip on data.

“We shall soon see who is more powerful in this country, the elected government or the civil service.”


Alice Miller, a psychoanalyst who repositioned the family as a locus of dysfunction with her theory that parental power and punishment lay at the root of nearly all human problems. Her first book The Drama of the Gifted Child sold millions. She believed that the pain inflicted on children – for their own good – was unconsciously re-enacting trauma that had been inflicted on the parent when they were children.

The cycle of trauma continues down the generations. We do not need to be told whether to be strict or permissive with our children. What we do need is to have respect for their needs, their feelings, and their individuality, as well as for our own.

How do you define the term ‘cruelty’ with respect to children?
I use it to refer to situations where children are not shown the appropriate respect, where they are humiliated, confused, betrayed, and sexually abused. While hardly anyone disagrees with me on these points, I frequently fail to convince people that beating children is in fact a severe case of cruelty.

…someday we will regard our children not as creatures to manipulate or to change but rather as messengers from a world we have long since forgotten, who can reveal to us more about the true secrets of life, and also our own lives, than our parents were ever able to.

 


“Religion is what the common people see as true, the wise people see as false, and the rulers see as useful.” —Seneca

Archeology Magazine offers a concise, comfortable essay on the history of Man’s Best Friend. Things you did not know about God, er, Dog.

Quite a different interview of Bill Gates at MIT’s Technology Review. Personal. Thorough. Strong. Not offered by mainstream rags. I don’t know what t0 call tabloids and rags and demographics mongering if major media stops printing, but it’s words equally condemning.

Tracking Macondo’s undersea plume, yes that oil in the Gulf of Mexico, is like the summer clouds above the ship, constantly moving, expanding, and contracting. On the oil trail, the ship’s Conductivity Temperature Depth device relays real-time data measuring fluorescence, beam attenuation, and oxygen levels.

The reason we have God is that we didn’t invent police. People just don’t like to take the law into their own hands.

“Everywhere you look around the world, you find examples of people altering their behavior because of concerns for supernatural consequences of their actions. They don’t do things that they consider bad because they think they’ll be punished for it.”


Paul Raeburn at Knight Science Tracker:

I find myself at something of a loss to track the work of John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I’ve praised him before for stories on physicians’ conflicts of interest, and I’m reduced now to doing more-or-less what I did then: Let Fauber’s stories speak for themselves.

This is first-rate stuff. Read it, learn from it, and see if you can’t attempt something like it yourself. We and our readers and listeners would all be better off if more of us did this sort of thing. It isn’t easy, but it’s gratifying.

The stories, in my view, are textbook cases of investigative reporting–and writing. I can’t think of any higher or more sophisticated thing to say than that these stories are done exactly the way that such stories should be done–and Fauber’s doing them better than almost anybody else.


banners and hate

Margaret & Helen:

If you vote Republican today, what exactly are you voting for?  It’s certainly not smaller government.  If you vote Republican today you are telling “Pastor” Terry Jones that fifty religious fanatics are more important than any chance for world peace.  You are telling  Sarah Palin that when it comes to the presidency – pretty is more important than smart.  You are telling Glenn Beck that honesty isn’t really necessary if you have your own cable news show on Fox.  You are telling Michele Bachmann that hearing voices in your head isn’t cause for alarm.  Hell, if you vote Republican today you might as well just shove a few more dollars in Rush Limbaugh’s pockets and a few more pills in his mouth.  It’s all very entertaining, I’ll give you that.  But considering what they did when we gave them the keys to the car the last time, are you really ready to put them behind the wheel again so soon?  I’m just not sure there are that many more countries we can bomb, world religions we can vilify and oil wells we can drill before the rest of the world calls us on our bullshit.

Here’s a thought. If  Pastor Jones is so dead set on burning a book he should just wait until The George Bush Memoirs come out.

After all, everyone knows the only thing God loves more than a good book burning is a burning Bush.

HA!

changing sentiment

JeffreyGoldberg, The Atlantic, in a rare interview with Fidel Castro:

I’ve seen a lot of dolphin shows. I will also say this: I’ve never seen someone enjoy a dolphin show as much as Fidel Castro enjoyed the dolphin show.

This snippet:

“How do you train the dolphins to do what they do?”  I asked.

“That’s a good question,” Fidel said.

Garcia called over one of the aquarium’s veterinarians to help answer the question. Her name was Celia. A few minutes later, Antonio Castro told me her last name: Guevara.

“You’re Che’s daughter?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“And you’re a dolphin veterinarian?”

“I take care of all the inhabitants of the aquarium,” she said.

declining trust

You’re supposed to be the watchdogs over dubious actors. Why aren’t you an exception?

What is the biggest problem with the news media in America today?

Jay Rosen:

I do not think journalists should ‘join the team’.

Power-seeking and truth-seeking are different behaviors, and this is how we distinguish politics from journalism.

I think it does take a certain detachment from your own preferences and assumptions to be a good reporter. The difficulty is that neutrality has its limits. Taken too far, it undermines the very project in which a serious journalist is engaged.

Suppose the forces that want to convince Americans that Barack Obama is a Muslim or wasn’t born in the United States start winning, and more and more people believe it. This is a defeat for journalism—in fact, for verification itself. Neutrality and objectivity carry no instructions for how to react to something like that. They aren’t ‘wrong’, they’re just limited.

The American press does not know what to do when neutrality, objectivity, balance and ‘report both sides’ reach their natural limits. And so journalists tend to deny that there are such limits. But with this denial they’ve violated the code of the truth-teller because these limits are real. See the problem?

crashing while chewing

I was wondering if this matter would gain traction:

Snacking at the wheel can affect vehicle control to a similar extent as using a hands-free phone, and is actually a causal factor in more crashes. So far, though, there has not been a controlled empirical study of this problem.

Source: “Crash dieting: The effects of eating and drinking on driving performance”
Accident Analysis & Prevention, Vol. 40, Issue 1, January 2008, Pages 142-148

cynical favors

Oh the trouble with health care is liberal lawyers chasing personal injury clients, say the coffee shop ideologues of the Republican Party. Tort Reform. Tort Reform. Sloganeering to suck votes from the fired up and uninformed, and juice donations.

Republican tort reform would reduce total U.S. health care spending by only 0.5 percent but destroy liability as we know it. And forty percent of that meager trade-off is a reduction in clinic insurance costs —a cynical favor to well-heeled donors.

“Yes, 40% of the savings just lands in the pockets of docs via premium reductions. Good news for Jaguar dealers, not a lot of bend in the cost curve for anyone else.”

Texas was first to stall medical lawsuits. Gingrich and Republican pulpiteers of polling claimed health care would enjoy a boom. Results are in. Destroying redress fails.

“The Odd Logic of Tort Reform” by Aaron Carroll. “Do you see the increase in coverage? I ask, because I can’t. This claim is actually laughable, because Texas as a state has the highest level of uninsurance in the US.

“Some people believe – just know – that reducing malpractice awards will lead to fewer lawsuits which will lead to a reduction in premiums which will lead to a reduction in defensive medicine which will lead to a reduction in health care costs. It’s a matter of faith. It has to be, because there’s just not that much evidence it will happen.”


hijacked and wrecked

Republicans, at the same time that they are claiming that a $50 billion investment in America’s infrastructure is a budget-buster, are pushing to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans. That’s a Boehner.

Mark Thoma:

Would we be better or worse off today if the Bush tax cuts at the upper end of the income distribution had been used instead for a decade long program to rebuild infrastructure? My answer won’t be hard to guess.

A comment:

This is not an economic proposal at all. It is an ideological one disguised as an economic one.

Their proposal is based on conservative ideology to shrink government by cutting both government expenditure and revenue.

These are people that think that “government is the problem.” So their solution to governing is not governing and leaving it to ‘the invisible hand’  which is code for the hand in the till. You know, “to the victor belong the spoils.”

A comment:

Unfortunately, without the mechanism that is supposed to be the journalism profession, the public has no chance of getting a clue about the ‘why’ of ‘what’ is happening to them.

A comment:

The Democrats are the party of no ideas, the Republicans are the party of really crappy ideas.

kaboom visitors

NASA says today’s asteroids flying between the Earth and Moon are grazing us by merely 50,000 miles. The Catalina Sky Survey discovered both objects on Sunday.

This near-miss was not detected earlier because these two asteroids are too small for today’s equipment. But smaller asteroids, say just 100 feet across, are dangerous. They’ll explode in the upper atmosphere sending an intensely hot jet of superheated gas over a large area.

One asteroid, 2010 RX30, estimated by NASA to be between 10 and 20 meters across, passed within 248,000 kilometers of Earth at 10.51 am BST today. The second, 2010 RF12, estimated to be only 6 to 14 meters across, will pass within 79,000 kilometers at 10:12 pm tonight. Both were only discovered on Sunday, just three days before their time of closest approach. That is due to their small size; smaller objects are harder for telescopes to pick up.

:::Fireball::: The center of mass of an exploding projectile is transported downward in the form of a high-temperature jet of expanding gas.

The burst first descends at subsonic velocity, coupling its kinetic energy and internal energy to the atmosphere.

Blast waves and thermal radiation pulses from the hot jet of vaporized projectile impact the Earth’s surface where it expands supersonically at temperatures well above the melting point of glass.

Devastation at Tunguska in Russia in 1908 is now thought to have been caused by an asteroid just 100 – 150 feet across! Current equipment is designed to give us early warning of asteroids 500 feet across. There’s some healthy discussion about what’s adequate.

clouds ahead

The consensus among climate modelers is that global warming would lead to more evaporation, which would create more water vapor in the air and more clouds. Yet more water in the atmosphere may not lead to more clouds, because higher temperatures would require more water vapor to become saturated. This means that more water vapor would be needed to form clouds leading to a grand conundrum about upcoming clouds.

The study of clouds is ongoing.

oopsortunists

As if Tony Blair is a random number on a lottery ticket, his time in power seems more luck and circumstance than merit. We fail to test leaders against broad needs.

Voting isn’t enough if merely choosing winners during a carnival.

We know too little of politics, peer into its strange place, and must bring makers of our lives to better evaluation.

Gill Corkindale at Harvard Business Review:

In the UK, Blair appears not to be valued for his political legacy — his service to the UK his and international statesmanship — but rather as one of a new breed of self-serving politicians, who literally spun a web of power, duped the public on the grounds for going to war, blindly supported of George W. Bush, left a party in turmoil, and then attained fabulous wealth and faux-celebrity lifestyle after leaving office.