You know that supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park?

It descends 500 miles below the town of Wisdom, Montana. travels an inch a year to the northeast, and possibly reaches all the way to the Earth’s core.

It’s tilted because the Earth’s mantle is moving. Like smoke in the wind, the hot material is caught in an eastward mantle “breeze” that moves two inches a year.

Yellowstone blows about every 650,000 years. There’s been three giant eruptions – two million years, 1.3 million and 640,000 years ago – plus many eruptions much bigger than Mount St. Helens. The next event would bury much of the West in ash.

Readable article at Jackson Hole News and another at The Salt Lake Tribune. National Geographic offers a virtual dive down Yellowstone’s plume. Hat tip to MIT Science Tracker

Interview: Professor Robert Smith at NPR.

Abstract: “Geodynamics of the Yellowstone hotspot and mantle plume: Seismic and GPS imaging, kinematics, and mantle flow”

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” – Oscar Wilde

The Economist: Three hundred million niches.

America is a uniquely attractive place to live: a lifestyle superpower.

Because America is so big and diverse, immigrants have an incredible array of choices. The proportion of Americans who are foreign-born, at 13%, is higher than the rich-country average of 8.4%. In absolute terms, the gulf is much wider. America’s foreign-born population of 38m is nearly four times larger than those of Russia or Germany, the nearest contenders. It dwarfs the number of migrants in Japan (below 2m) or China (under 1m). The recession has dramatically slowed the influx of immigrants and prompted quite a few to move back to Mexico. But the economy will eventually recover and the influx will resume.

Economic growth depends on productivity, and the most productive people are often the most mobile. A quarter of America’s engineering and technology firms founded between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder…

Kedrosky and Feld, Wall Street Journal:

Foreign-born residents made up just 12.5% of the U.S. population in 2008. But nearly 40% of technology company founders and 52% of founders of companies in Silicon Valley.

The U.S. remains one of the most attractive countries for entrepreneurs. It has a culture of risk taking, capital formation, and an economic dynamism that is the envy of the world. This gives us a competitive edge that we should not let slip through our fingers.

Of course, there were warning signs: Osama banned fridges and air-conditioning. Jokes and toys were forbidden. Omar’s childhood was marked by regular beatings and survivalist training; the army of ruffians and retainers who called his father “Prince”; and that mullah who had given his father an entire mountain in Tora Bora.

Omar bin Laden – fourth son turned peace-loving refusenik of Osama – is reliant on the good graces of a number of easily offended people. The person he can afford to offend, doing so with intelligence and insight, is his father.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director, International Monetary Fund:

In the annals of economic crises then, where do we find ourselves?

Indeed, the work needed to build a more robust, stable, and safe global financial system has only just begun.

Remember, economic stability lays the groundwork for peace, while peace is a necessary precondition for trade and sustained economic growth.

What needs to be done? Global economic governance, including at the IMF, must be reformed to reflect the realities of the current era, and global financial-sector supervision and regulation need to be strengthened.

Simon Johnson:

The details will turn your stomach. The arrogance, lack of self-awareness, and overweening pride are astonishing.

They won:

The Wall Street executives kept their jobs, their bonuses and their pensions; they benefited from unprecedented rule changes and unlimited monetary and fiscal support; and their firms became even bigger and more dangerous to the economic health of society.

NASA’s AIRS project… the transport of carbon dioxide around the world… the data have shown that, contrary to prior assumptions, carbon dioxide is not well mixed in the troposphere, but is rather “lumpy.”

AIRS data reveal a never-before-seen belt of carbon dioxide that circles the globe. More carbon dioxide is emitted in the heavily populated northern hemisphere than in the southern. As a result, the south is a recipient, or sink, for carbon dioxide from the north.

Several graphics and animations help bring ‘feel’ to the numbers.

Gallup Christmas Poll:

The number who believe religion is out of date and has no answers for today’s problems has jumped to 29%.

The number with no religious preference has grown from a level of around 8% to 13%.

The number for whom religion is not very important has climbed from just over 10% to 19%.

Most of these changes occurred during the Bush years, since 2000.

“It is the largest thing we have ever built, and we have assembled it from transistors—the smallest things we know how to make.

“It is a chrysalis we are forming around the planet…a table where we sit to gossip, a suq where we buy and sell; a shadowy corner for planning mischief; a library holding the entire world’s information; a friend, a game, a matchmaker, a psychiatrist, an erotic dream, a babysitter, a teacher, a spy….

The best and worst and most ordinary of us reflected—and perhaps distorted—in a silvery fog of bits.” via humorzo

Conservatives are a bunch of Hummer-driving, meat-eating, gun-toting, hard-drinking, Bible-thumping, black-and-white- thinking, fist-pounding, shoe-stomping, morally hypocritical blowhards.

Liberals are a bunch of hybrid-driving, tofu-eating, tree-hugging, whale-saving, sandal-wearing, bottled-water-drinking, ACLU-supporting, flip-flopping, wishy-washy, namby-pamby bed wetters.

Jonathan Haidt and his University of Virginia colleague Jesse Graham surveyed the moral opinions of more than 110,000 people from dozens of countries and have found why liberals and conservatives differ.

Liberals can feel the pain of others, giving rise to the virtues of kindness, gentleness and nurturance, a reciprocal altruism, fairness, a sense of justice.

Conservatives tend toward tribalism, patriotism, authority, respect, tradition, hierarchical social structures, and disgust related to disease and contamination of bodily purity.

Deric Bownds suggests you can take the survey yourself.

How do human beings decide when to be selfish or selfless?

The Center for Neuroeconomics Studies:

We gave testosterone to 25 men who then became 27% less generous towards strangers….

We also found that men with elevated testosterone were more likely to use their own money punish those who were ungenerous toward them.

We conclude that elevated testosterone causes men to behave antisocially.

“We’re a nation of people working harder and harder for less and less, and the merest suggestion that we should do anything other than work 9 hour days without pause until we drop dead is met with cries of socialism and accusations of malingering.”

Ed says, “We work too goddamn much in this country, and whether it’s for Christmas or Zoroastrian New Year it would be nice if our ruling class would grant us a few days to see our families or, you know, enjoy our lives.

“As most of us are painfully aware, employers are not required to provide paid vacation in this country. And contrary to popular belief, they are not required to give you time off, either paid or unpaid, for Federal holidays.

“It truly is depressing to see how we stack up to our cousins across the Atlantic or to the south.”

The market is your God, and you shall put no other value before the market. If that means children starve, God gave us free will precisely so we can follow the market and watch children starve.

Jonathan Chait on Republican Nihilism:

The question isn’t whether the Republican Party has any ideas. The question is whether the party has any relevant ideas.

Read about the history of conservatives opposing insane progressive ideas, such as women’s suffrage and child labor laws.)

“Woman suffrage would give to the wives and daughters of the poor a new opportunity to gratify their envy and mistrust of the rich. Meantime these new voters would become either the purchased or cajoled victims of plausible political manipulators, or the intimidated and helpless voting vassals of imperious employers.” —Former Republican President Grover Cleveland

Endless right-wing visions of apocalypse…

Whence the Deficit? by James Kwak.
“When told that the recent change in our overall debt position is primarily due to lower tax revenues, not higher spending, even some people who really should know better are surprised.

“Many will be surprised to learn that our trillion-dollar deficits are not due to increased spending under the Obama administration, and that the stimulus spending dwindles away quickly.

“And where’s health care? It’s not there because it isn’t in the CBO’s baseline projections yet, but in any case the CBO projects it as net deficit-reducing over ten years (and beyond, for the Senate bill).”

Republicans backed by business will blame Obama. Electioneering requires no truth.

Kleptocracy in America?

…most successful modern societies are, in fact, kleptocracies. The key is to gain popular support in order to re-distribute as much wealth to the ruling class as the populace will support.

Edward Harrison says, “Not only is the freshwater view of rational economic agents and efficiency completely ignorant of the role of fairness, it also disregards the very real tendency for power to consolidate over time and to lead to crony capitalism. This is what I refer to as “deregulation as crony capitalism.” I see it as central to the causes of the crisis.”

Appropriately, Japanese toymaker Bandai sells 100-dollar Ben Franklins that dissolve in water. A pack of 10 notes is a steal at only 250 yen ($3.90).

Slate’s Daniel Gross asks, “If billionaires don’t feel guilty about walking away from their debts, should homeowners?”

Companies strategically default all the time.

Mark Lynas:

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room.

Scathing.