you send them there

True Slant:

Congressmen spend between 5 and 7 hours a day on the phone begging for money. And by the way, when you’re a freshmen, you have to fill out sheets of everybody you call, and how much money per hour, and they have coaches that teach you how to get more money from each one of your phone calls, and who to call, and what data points to have on them to tickle them to make them more apt to give you money.

It is out of control. And it’s legalized.

more quakes?

AP's Science Writer says, "Not more quakes, just more people in quake zones".

"Tectonically, the Earth is up to no particular mischief", says MIT's Charlie Petit.

thinmk about this

If Obama can enact health reform, at least it will restrict how premium dollars can be spent on profits and overhead by requiring health insurance companies to spend 80-85% of the money they take in on care. "That’s worth keeping in mind."

two stories

1. High net worth families -- those with at least $5 million -- grew 17 percent last year to 980,000. The 7.8 million with a net worth of $1 million or more, excluding their primary residence, jumped 16% last year.
   
   
2. For employees, 27 percent say they have less than $1,000 in savings, up from 20 percent last year, while 54 percent of Americans now have less than $25,000, excluding their primary home.

link

outsourcing footprints

Around a third of industrialized nations' carbon emissions are exported to developing nations and then imported as products.

disgusting crimes

Mike Stathis submits:

I have discussed the financial industry on numerous occasions. My sentiment has not changed.

I can tell you that I have NEVER personally invested in banks and I don't ever plan to because I feel they are parasites. I could go on and on how criminal this industry is, but I don't have the time to write volumes of books.

But let’s have a look at what they’ve been up to lately.

Despite raising fees and credit card interest rates while paying out essentially nothing for deposits, these criminals have not been satisfied.

where it's better

Opportunism is often pathology.

Sarah Palin -- who has gone to great lengths to hype the supposed dangers of a big government takeover of American health care -- admitted over the weekend that she used to get her treatment in Canada's single-payer system. "We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada", Palin said

infection alert

Why vitamin D is crucial:

T cells rely on vitamin D to become active. Or they'll remain dormant and unaware of an infection if vitamin D is lacking in the blood.

"This means the T cell must have vitamin D or activation of the cell will cease. If the T cells cannot find enough vitamin D in the blood, they won't even begin to mobilize."

Almost half of the world has low levels of vitamin D. The problem increases as people spend more time indoors. No daily dose studies are definitive, but experts say 25 - 50 micrograms.

gold medal flushing

A Canadian water utility published a graph of water consumption during the gold medal Olympic hockey game. About 80% of the country had tuned in.

histrionics and hats

Gin and Tacos:

I am familiar with the lonely feeling of being in a crowded room and realizing that everyone around you is absolutely out of their goddamn mind.

And I strongly suspect that a lot of conservatives look at the carnival freakshow that is the Tea Party and know exactly what that feels like. The conservative movement has always had an image problem.

Pre-Gingrich and 'Contract with America', a conservative conjured up images of old, well-heeled white men in a country club sipping 40 year scotch in cashmere sweaters. The ideological faces of the movement were people like Safire and Buckley, pretentious stuffed shirts who fancied themselves intellectuals. True, there was a lunatic fringe – the Birchers, McCarthy – but mainstream conservatism tried to keep it at arm's length.

Now the driving intellectual force of a conservative is a gaggle of AM radio nutbars...

The new image of the average conservative has less to do with country clubs than with trailer parks, NASCAR infields, and barely literate adults in histrionics and stupid hats.

a loan shark society

Iceland's national referendum was the first opportunity for the people of any nation to vote directly on who pays when the financial elite fail.

Michael Collins:

Who cleans up the mess when ignorant, greedy bankers rack up massive debt then go broke? The people of Iceland made a strong statement Saturday. The sins of big bankers and government regulators shouldn't fall on the citizens. By a 93% to 2% margin, they voted down a proposal requiring them to cover bad debt incurred by one of the nation’s oldest and largest banks.

Covering the debt would have cost Iceland's 317,000 citizens around $17,000 each.

a primitive capitalist past

Enough Already: Venting Over Four Decades of Right-Wing Activism:

Today, Richard Nixon would be considered a flaming liberal. In Nixon’s day, Barack Obama would have passed as a typical conservative...

All this right-wing nonsense might be somewhat understandable if it were necessary to provide for a good life; however, the economy is becoming as dysfunctional as the ridiculous political system.

Watching people rebel politically or in the streets in Iceland and Greece, while people in the United States express their frustrations with the tea party, makes me noxious.

local swaps

As counties, cities and towns linger toward default:

Now it is fair to say that municipal finance has long been an ugly nexus of incompetence, chicanery, and greed.

But even when you don’t combine venal officials to the underhanded financier, you routinely find kissing cousins, chump officials hire venal advisor in cahoots with underhanded financier.

“The basic problem is the swap adviser gets paid only if there is a transaction — an unbelievable conflict of interest,” he said. “It’s the adviser who is supposed to protect you, but the swap adviser has a vested interest in seeing something happen.”

And that is as good as it gets.

Remember, there is no penalty for screwing up in a conventional manner.

again and again we go

Way-y-y before the web, there's letterhead.
For example, the suitable header of Nikola Tesla, circa 1900.

just go ahead and teleport

JP Rangaswami says:
Building things is a human instinct. Taking things apart is a human instinct. Rebuilding things is a human instinct. When you see battles, don’t assume that the battles are about them. The battles are about you. Your right to build things and unbuild them and rebuild them. The right of your children to build things and unbuild them and rebuild them. Battles are about generations that follow you and me.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com.

Oops. My muddy boots are in the kitchen.

Blogger is changing and I am too. I started with Blogger in 1999 but in the next days, er, weeks, I will be leaving Blogger. I hope I'll achieve this without bugs, glitches, downtime or the odd excess rant.

Many posts and probably all comments will be lost. Each time Blogger changes its service, it's sloppy. After several days of study, I think I can save most posts beyond 2006 and some as far back as 2003 while moving to the Wordpress dashboard.

without you knowing

The free market was unleashed.

Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. - Donald Rumsfeld

The inherent problem with the social sciences, as opposed to the physical sciences, is that it is difficult to do experiments, especially real world experiments. But in 2003, such an experiment was actually undertaken—an attempt to create a free-market utopia.

After the invasion of Iraq, control was given to the Coalition Provisional Authority run by Paul Bremer III. Bremer set out the following conditions:

1. Taxes were set at a flat rate of 15%, down from 40% on corporations.
   
   
2. No restrictions to take all profits out of the country.
   
   
3. Tariffs, duties and fees were abolished.
   
   
4. State-run companies would be privatized.

When looters broke into museums, factories, power plants, schools, businesses and homes, military law and order stood aside and let it happen.

Bremer, the people who worked under him, and his bosses in Washington apparently believed that this was 'creative destruction' - one of the most wonderful forces of the free market, a thing that clears away the old and the worn to make room for the fresh and innovative.

In addition, the Coalition Provisional Authority took Iraq’s oil revenue, tax revenue, its frozen bank accounts, and Saddam Hussein’s $21 billion—without any supervision, regulation, or accounting.

Larry Beinhart’s bottom line:

1. Free markets do not create civilization, they only create wealth.
   
   
2. Wealth creates the opportunity for civilization, because wealth can be taxed and spent on the public interest.
   
   
3. Taxes, well spent, create the possibility of even more wealth creation, and taxes, wisely spent, create civilization.

trouble making numbers

Pauline, writing down the words:

I must confess, numbers baffle me. They’re mysterious.

They multiply and divide with impunity, they add up to something else or take themselves away.

When they are statistics, they lie. And when they are money, they disappear.

As for fractions, they make me fractious.

kill the bill

Habits:
Foreign Policy.

“The U.S. military spends $1.75 billion every day, much of it on big ships, big guns, and big battalions that are not only not needed to win the wars of the present, but are sure to be the wrong approach to waging the wars of the future.”

control daylight

Switch windows on or off to radically reduce energy use.

Sage Electrochromics, Inc, a Minnesota-based inventor of an international breakthrough glass innovation – a window that can be switched on or off to reject up to 98% of the sun’s heat and light on demand – has received a financial shot in the arm from the Department of Energy for a total of $103 million to mass produce energy-saving glass.

“This investment will help cut utility bills, reduce carbon pollution, and create jobs our economy needs,” said Energy Secretary Chu in granting the loan guarantee.

Breakthrough technology. Glass switched from clear to dark at the push of a button.

climate astrology

The South Dakota legislature has declared, by majority vote:

That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect (sic) world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative. [link]

rats clear landmines

Bart Weetjens, a rodent enthusiast, realized he could train rats to sniff out land mines. The rats run along wires between two handlers. When they smell a landmine, they stop, sniff the ground and begin to dig, signaling an explosive.

Next? Smuggled drugs and medical screening. Cheaper than dogs.

re-engineer the web

A former director of national intelligence says:

"We need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment -- who did it, from where, why and what was the result -- more manageable."

In other words, we need to spy on everyone.

Oh. It's important to know he now works for a spy firm.

sick or not sick

A person in whom the social feeling is at all developed, conscious as a being,
of course pays regard to others, and cannot want all the rest defeated.

Let's try another.

One day this era will be known as the period of dishonesty.

this is looting

About the way a phrase, 'free market', was turned into profoundly destructive behavior.

It’s been a long time a-comin’, this Crisis.

Invisible hand?
Free market?

What's really going on is scams, rip-offs and brazen looting.

Absurd complacency and happy talk.
Worthless cheer from the glossy clueless.

Travesty speculation.
Cooked figures and oblivious economists.

The outcome of this pseudo-scientific botching is an imposing corpus of pretentious quackery that somehow elevates unregulated 'free markets' into the sole mechanism of the spoils of economic activity.

We are supposed to believe that by some alchemical process, maximum indulgence of human greed results in maximum prosperity for all.

Officially Sanctioned Thievery On An Epic Scale.

tiny box of one

A: Existence of community allows communities to organize.

B: Lack of community prevents communities from organizing.

C: America was once where people could self-organize. Now it isn’t. Once there were strong communities which could bring pressure to bear on their elected officials. But no longer.

D: There are no strong, cohesive communities.

And so… they can’t organize because there is nothing for them to organize.

to cure reality

Our civilization is collapsing. Why shouldn’t we feel bad?

We’ve exhausted the natural resources our planet took a billion years to store up, we live in suffocating, overcrowded, polluted, horrifically stressful conditions, and we have launched the planet into the 6th global extinction.

Gary Greenberg: "What’s happened is that the diagnosis has gotten increasingly detached from any sense of where it might come from."

More than 14 million suffer from major depression, and more than 3 million suffer from minor depression longer than two years. These numbers are ridiculous — not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.

"Well, if people are encouraged to think of external circumstances, then they may be more empowered to take action."

Of course, as Mind Hacks points out, "One difficulty with their proposal, however, is that while they admit that social problems are one of the most common triggers for depression, they miss out the many studies that have found depressed people and, especially depressed people who ruminate, are reliably worse at social problem solving."

do we ask?

Larry Beinhart:

What is civilization?

Is it doing business? Exxon, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs? Or is it the rule of law, social order, clean water, sewers and waste disposal, a reliable food supply, literacy, mathematics, science and technology, art, architecture, public spaces and public forums?

family values

I wonder when America will confront pathology and be done with it?

California state Senator Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield), a fierce opponent of gay rights and top organizer of anti-gay marriage rallies is arrested for DUI after leaving a gay nightclub with an unidentified man in a state vehicle.

As Jon Stewart points out, "Jim Bunning didn't block the extension of unemployment benefits as a principled stand against fiscal responsibility -- he's just a dick."

universe is slacking

C'mon! Get going, rest of the universe!

who is poor?

In all, 47.4 million Americans lived in poverty last year, or 7 million more than official poverty reports.

The official measure, created in 1955, does not factor in rising medical care, transportation, child care, housing, utilities or geographical variations in living costs.