Here Comes The Sun
Solar and renewable tech has gone exponetial, this is from 2008 and quite a bit behind some of the recent developments. Props to Geoff Olson for finding this one….
Obama's Junk Economics by Michael Hudson & Cornel West to Obama: ŒHow deep is your love for poor and working people?¹ & Matt Taibbi & Malcolm X
Obama’s Junk Economics
By MICHAEL HUDSON
http://www.counterpunch.com/hudson02012010.html
The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway
MATT TAIBBI
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout/print
With Obama’s discredit among his base spreading like wildfire, liberal plantation Momma Hillary is waiting in the wings…….to activate FemiNazis and Jewish and evangelical Christian Zionists for the next round of crusades against the Muslim world and possibly China too.
]
By MICHAEL HUDSON
http://www.counterpunch.com/hudson02012010.html
[I omitted the parts where he details the AIG bailouts, other shenanigans, and the bogus justifications at every step, which may be too complex for some to follow, but if you’re interested the whole thing is quite good. Hudson’s writings are perfect companion pieces to Matt Taibbi’s.]
……Obama’s Big Sellout
In fact what the economy needs is to recover from the Bush-Obama supposed cure, i.e., from the mushrooming debt overhead. It needs to recover from the enrichment of Wall Street. It doesn’t need more credit, but a write-down for the unpayably high debts that the banks have imposed on American families, businesses, states and localities, real estate, and the federal government itself.Instead of helping debtors, Obama has moved to heal the creditors, at public expense. If debtors cannot pay, the Treasury and Fed will take their IOUs and bad casino gambles onto the public sector’s balance sheet. The financial winners must come first – and it seems second and third, too. The rationale is that unless the government gives the large financial institutions what they want and saves them from taking a loss, their “incentive” to protect the economy from devastation will be gone.
Knuckling under to this protection racket is not the change that most people voted for in November 2008. So on Thursday afternoon, most Republican senators opposed a second four-year term for Bernanke. By leading the effort to re-confirm him, the Corporate Democrats (but not most of their colleagues who had to face voters this autumn) removed this albatross from the Republican neck and put it around their own.
…..
Wall Street – and most business schools – promote the myth that the “real” economy of production and consumption cannot function without making Wall Street’s insiders immensely rich. There seems nothing to be done about banks impoverishing people by extortionate credit card rates, junk securities and a debt burden so heavy that it will require one bailout after another over the next few years. Present policy is based on the assumption that the U.S. economy will crash if we don’t keep the debt overhead growing at past exponential rates. It is credit – that is, debt – that is supposed to pull real estate out of its present negative equity. Credit – that is, debt leveraging – that is supposed to raise stock market prices to enable pension funds to meet their scheduled payments. And it is credit – that is, debt –is supposed to be the key to employment growth.Credit means giving Wall Street what it wants. Regulating it is supposed to interfere with prosperity. Truth-in-lending, for example, will increase the “cost of production” by “making” banks charge consumers even more for creating credit on their computer keyboards.
This Stockholm syndrome when it comes to Wall Street’s power-grab is junk economics. Wall Street is not “the economy.” It is a superstructure of credit and money management privileges positioned to extract as much as it can, while threatening to close down the economy if it does not get its way. High finance holds the economy hostage not only economically but also intellectually at least to the extent of having captured Obama’s brain – and also the federal budget, as money paid to Wall Street has crowded out spending on economic recovery. It has re-defined “reform” to mean putting Wall Street even more in power by making the Fed the sole regulator of Wall Street. Under these conditions, saving “the system” means saving a mess. It means saving a debt dynamic that must grow exponentially at the economy’s expense, absorbing more and more federal bailout funds and hence crowding out the spending needed to revive the economy.
……
“Saving the economy” has become a euphemism for the policy of keeping bad debts on the books and saving high finance from writing them down to reflect the realistic ability to pay. Wall Street has used its bailout money to lobby Washington, back its political nominees to hold Congress hostage, and blame the downturn on any regulator or president who does not yield to its demands.The resulting program is not saving the economy; it is sacrificing it. What has been saved is the debt overhead – the wrong side of the balance sheet.
A bipartisan compact between Corporate Democrats and Republicans is not the change voters expected in November 2008. Confronted with the “Obama surprise” – an absence of change – the only option that many voters believe they have is to change the existing party. Republicans are setting their eyes on Pres. Obama’s former Senate seat in Illinois, Vice Pres. Biden’s seat in Delaware, and Majority Leader Reid’s seat in Nevada. Losing these and other seats would create a political standoff giving Obama further excuse for not changing course.This kind of standoff normally would enable a popular president to ask voters to elect a majority large enough to legislate the program he outlines. But instead of a program, Obama has simply appointed the leading Bush-era administrators and brought back the Clinton “Rubinomics” team from Wall Street. His spending freeze in a shrinking economy is a Republican program, his modest “stimulus package” is over, and he has dropped the Consumer Financial Products Agency under Wall Street pressure. So if we are to look at what the administration actually is doing, its program is simply a blank check to the Fed and Treasury (under Bush-era management) to revive Wall Street fortunes – in a nutshell, more Rubinomics.
Convergence between the two parties reflects the privatization of politics by political lobbying and campaign contributions. Paybacks to corporations with fiscal favors, sell-offs and bailouts promises to increase in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision that corporations are virtual people when it comes to freedom of speech and the purchase of media time.
…….
So a political realignment may be in the making. Financial and fiscal restructuring issues span left and right, progressive Democrats and populist Republicans. So far, their sentiments are reactive rather than being spelled out in a policy program. But there is a widening realization that the economy has painted itself into a financial corner.What is needed is to explain to voters how financial and tax policies are symbiotic. The tax shift off finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) onto labor and industry since 1980 has polarized the economy between a creditor class at the top of and an indebted “real” economy below. Unless this tax favoritism is reversed, more and more revenue will be diverted away from spending on consumption and investment to pay debt service and “financialize” the economy even more.
It is natural that the world’s most debt-ridden economies – Latvia and its Baltic and post-Soviet neighbors, and Iceland – are the first to perceive the problem. They may be viewed as an object lesson for a dystopian future of debt peonage. New Europe’s debt strains are threatening to break up the core euro-currency area (aggravated from within by the Greek, Spanish and Irish public debt problems). The British economy is likewise financialized, weakening sterling. And Europe lacks the U.S. financial safeguard that enables mortgage debtors here to walk away from properties that have fallen into negative equity. Insolvent homeowners in Europe face a lifetime of literal debt peonage to make the banks (even foreign banks, which dominate Central Europe’s post-Soviet economies) whole on their bad debts as the continent’s real estate prices are plunging even more steeply than those in the United States – some 70 per cent in Iceland and Latvia.
The only silver lining I can see is that perception will spread that the financial sector is an intrusive dynamic subjecting the economy to debt deflation. But at present, lawmakers are acting as if the economy is an albatross around Wall Street’s neck. (“How are we wealthy people to bear the cost of healing the sick and employing the masses?” the financial sector complains. “The cost is eating into our ability to create wealth.”) Libertarians have warned that our economy is going down the Road to Serfdom. What they do not realize is that by fighting against government power to check financial hubris, they are paving the road for centralized financial planning by Wall Street. They have been tricked into leading the parade on behalf of the financial, insurance and real estate sector – down the road to debt peonage in a monopolized and polarized economy.
The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway
MATT TAIBBI
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout/print
The Great American Bubble Machine
From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they’re about to do it again
MATT TAIBBI
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine
Cornel West to Obama: ‘How deep is your love for poor and working people?’
http://trueslant.com/matthewnewton/2010/02/01/cornel-west-to-obama-how-deep-is-your-love-for-poor-and-working-people/
Is Obama’s best gift to Africa two speeches?
http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/Insight/-/688338/852480/-/7dx2hl/-/index.html
[
Cornell West and many other thought leading African-American and African progressives are learning the ugly truth of the con. That it was really Goldman Sachs, the banksters behind the Federal Reserve, Zbigniew Brzezinski, George Soros, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, the Google guys, Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, and other leading billionaires completely separated from the physical production of anything, living solely on rentier wealth extracted through finance, insurance, and real estate (including IT intellectual property and entertainment), who carefully vetted, selected, created, financed and propagandized for Obama so that America could try to rebrand itself by painting a black face on a parasitic and decadent empire. And thereby persuaded the most downtrodden sections of the US population and oppressed people around the world to hold their fire against someone who looked more like them than the Bushies, and who was able to speak in complete sentences and paragraphs when assisted by the teleprompters and captive media, thereby making them feel a momentary sense of pride and confidence in a better future.
That moment has passed. With each week that passes, Obama is revealed to be the Black Bush; the third term of Bush II.
]
MALCOLM X: THE HOUSE NEGRO AND THE FIELD NEGRO
Fannie, Freddie, and the New Red and Blue
MATT TAIBBI
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/01/04/fannie-freddie-and-the-new-red-and-blue/
…….[
For what we’ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.That is a terrible story and it is also sort of a taboo story, since we don’t really have a system of media now that is willing or even able to digest that dark and complicated truth. Instead, our media — which has always been at best an inadvertent accomplice to these messes — is basically set up to take every revelation about the underlying truth and split it down the middle, feeding half to one side of the political spectrum and one half to the other, where the actual point is then burned up in the useless smoke of a blame game.
The essentially complicit nature of the two ruling political parties was in this way covered up for decades, as the crimes of the Democrats were greedily consumed as entertainment by the Limbaugh crowd while the crimes of the Bushies became hot-selling t-shirts and bumper stickers for the Air America listenership. The abiding mutual hatred the red/blue groups shared consistently prevented any kind of collective realization about the structure of the overall scheme.
What worries me is that we’re now reverting to the same old pattern with the financial crisis story. We’re starting to see fault lines develop, where one side blames the government while another side blames Wall Street for the messes of the last two decades. The side blaming the government tends to belong to the free-marketeer class and divines in safety-net purveyors like the GSEs and in the Fed’s money-printing fundamental corruptions of the capitalist ideal, while the side blaming the bankers tends to belong to the left-liberal tradition that focuses on greed and seeming absence of community conscience among the CEO class as primary corruptors of the social contract.
In the former view the government is to blame for punting on its oversight responsibilities and for corrupting the financial bloodstream with market-altering guarantees, while in the latter view the bankers are at fault for lobbying the politicians to make exactly the same moves. The antigovernment folks like to focus on the irresponsible (and typically low-income or minority) home-borrower and their political allies in Washington as chief villains, while the anti-banker crowd looks at the massive personal profits and outsized influence of the executive class and waves the Cui bono? stick in that direction.
Both sides are right and both sides are wrong. I know that sounds like pox-on-both-their-houses pundit sophistry. But the point is that if you focus on one side and not the other, you miss the entire point.
…….
With Obama’s discredit among his base spreading like wildfire, liberal plantation Momma Hillary is waiting in the wings…….to activate FemiNazis and Jewish and evangelical Christian Zionists for the next round of crusades against the Muslim world and possibly China too.
]
Clinton misses speech, but not as security holdout [Right…….?]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/27/AR2010012703925.html
Deer and Rabbit, Bambi and Thumper :)
May you always have
Love to Share,
Health to Spare,
And Friends that Care.
What's that smell? Oh, it's the IPCC.
The optics are so bad, even a leading climatologist feels compelled to
condemn the IPCC leadership…
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/body+tainted+advocacy+critics/2488836/story.html
A senior Canadian climate scientist says the United Nations’ panel on
global warming has become tainted by political advocacy, that its
chairman should resign and that its approach to science should be
overhauled.Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of
Victoria, says the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) has allowed it to advocate for action on global
warming, rather than serve simply as a neutral science advisory body.
Skin cells turned into Brain cells; "could probably turn any cell in your body into any other cell"
Mice Tail Turned Into Brain Cells in Feat Possible for Humans
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=a4jmJgrha3Y4
……
The research, published today in the journal Nature, is the latest demonstration that cells’ basic functions can be transformed by inserting or turning on the right genes in their DNA. In this case, that was accomplished without first turning the skin cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells before they were changed into different kinds of body cells.
The work provides a more efficient way to make neurons from the skin of people with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases than a method developed four years ago by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan. Yamanaka’s breakthrough showed that skin cells from mice or humans could be made into stem cells and manipulated again to become any cell in the body. The paper “might be a landmark,” said Jeanne Loring, director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California. “There’s a long history of failure in this field. Researchers tried for 30 years to convert a common cell type into neurons. People published papers, but no one ever made a real neuron.”
…….
After a month, a few of the skin cells showed signs of having turned into brain cells. The team then used a trial-and- error process to identify three genes from among the 19 that could do the job on their own. Using the three, Wernig’s team found that in just two weeks, 20 percent of the skin cells had morphed into neurons.
“That means reprogramming doesn’t only go backward, but can occur in any direction,” Wernig said in a Jan. 22 telephone interview. “If you extrapolate from this, you could probably turn any cell in your body into any other cell if you just know the right factors. A year ago, I would not really have believed this was possible.” Wernig and his colleagues are trying to do the same thing with human cells and Stanford has applied for a patent on the process. If it works in human cells, researchers could use the method to turn skin cells from a patient with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease, for example, into neurons with the genetic defects that cause the condition.
…….
Before the cells have practical use, they’ll have to be shown to be true neurons, Loring said in a Jan. 25 e-mail. “The question now is how these genetically engineered neurons stack up against real neurons in a real test — can they be used to repair the brains of mice that have experimentally induced Parkinson’s disease, for example?” she said. “There’s a lot of work to do but it’s exciting.”
…..
Movie "Sleep Dealer" Injects Sci-Fi Into Immigration Debate
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/2008/01/sleep_dealer
…….
Set in a futuristic world of have-nots, where 21st-century gadgetry sucks resources from the world’s poor and channels them to its wealthy, the film premiered to enthusiastic response Friday at the Sundance Film Festival. In Rivera’s film, Mexican villagers are forced to buy water for their crops from an armed, English-speaking robot. Most of the village’s healthy men have bolted for Tijuana to look for work in cyberfactories. And the multinational imprint is seen almost everywhere. It’s a timely message, deftly delivered by a self-described “digital media worker” and immigrant’s son who has become a fixture on the experimental video scene.
……
Sleep Dealer tells the story of a young campensino named Memo whose DIY radio draws unwanted attention from a U.S. military contractor. Fleeing to Tijuana, Memo has implants placed in his body in order to become a “node worker” — a Mexican laborer who, from south of the border, taps into a vast network that operates robots located in the United States.
Memo’s robot welds girders on a skyscraper. Other node workers perform housework, watch the kids and keep the yard neat. The film’s title refers to the node workers’ exhaustion as they work 12-hour shifts to build, clean and maintain cities they’ll never visit. In Tijuana, Memo becomes entwined with a Latino military contractor, who operates drones around the world from his base in San Diego, and an aspiring journalist who sells her memories — the blogs of the future — online. Rivera said the inspiration for the film came from a Wired magazine article about the emerging “global village.” It was published around the same time that the U.S. government began building walls along the country’s border with Mexico. That ironic juxtaposition started Rivera thinking: What if technology could extract the life force from the Mexican population and send it north? “The problem is that the worker comes with a body,” Rivera said. “That body needs health care, and gives birth to children that need to go to school. So keep the body outside of the United States. Suck its energy and leave the cadaver or the problematic shell out of the picture.”
[eg. Indian call center workers, Eastern European videochat girls, Mexican remote camera monitoring security guards?]
…….
Sleep Dealer is remarkably topical for a film set in the future (albeit one described by Rivera as taking place “five minutes from now”). Central themes include outsourcing, corporate ownership of water, remote warfare, confessional internet diaries and military contractors who are accountable to no one. It’s the rare political film without any reference to contemporary politics; like Blade Runner and other big-brained sci-fi flicks, it’s about ideas, not selling merchandise.
…….
MORE Vitamin D!
Compiled by SpiralMan
Study Links Hypertension with Vitamin D Deficiency
http://www.naturalnews.com/027176_Vitamin_D_health_blood.html Vitamin D guards against bowel cancer, research suggests
People who have more vitamin D in their blood are less likely to develop bowel cancer than those with low levels, researchers claim.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7048340/Vitamin-D-guards-against-bowel-cancer-research-suggests.html Higher Blood Vitamin D Levels Are Associated With Significantly Decreased Colon Cancer Risk In European Populations
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/176910.php Cancer, Heart Disease, Stroke, Diabetes, Chronic Pain and Depression Share a Major Pathology Factor
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cancer-heart-disease-stroke-diabetes-chronic-pain-and-depression-share-a-major-pathology-factor-81957722.html Vitamin D supplements reduce falls in nursing homes
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20100120/falls_100120/20100120?hub=Health Low Vitamin D Levels Associated With Greater Risk of Relapse in Childhood-Onset Multiple Sclerosis
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121093635.htm Vitamin D shortage linked to bone fractures
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6988872.ece Low vitamin D levels in blacks may explain higher rates of heart disease
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2010/01/low-vitamin-d-levels-in-blacks-may-explain-higher-rates-of-heart-disease.html Study: Vitamin D could help fight hepatitis C
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1142539.html Vitamin D supplements for asthma patients
http://www.6minutes.com.au/articles/z1/view.asp?id=509536 Low Vitamin D Levels Linked to MS, Lupus, and Fibromyalgia
http://newsletter.vitalchoice.com/e_article000728662.cfm?x=b76GVyV,b1kJpvRw,w Benefit Of Vitamin D In Diabetes And Other Chronic Diseases
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/135257.php Vitamin D deficiency linked to high risk of dementia
http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Nutrition/vitamin_d_deficiency_linked_to_high_risk_of_dementia_0101100619.html Alzheimer’s Disease: Vitamin D, Curcumin May Help Clear Amyloid Plaques
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/157764.php Lack Of Vitamin D Linked To Parkinson’s Disease
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081013171503.htm Can Vitamin D a Day Help Keep a Stroke Away?
http://www.politicalcortex.com/story/2009/12/29/144121/01 Do Statin Drugs Cause Vitamin D Deficiency?
http://www.naturalnews.com/027897_statin_drugs_vitamin_D.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/027176_Vitamin_D_health_blood.html Vitamin D guards against bowel cancer, research suggests
People who have more vitamin D in their blood are less likely to develop bowel cancer than those with low levels, researchers claim.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7048340/Vitamin-D-guards-against-bowel-cancer-research-suggests.html Higher Blood Vitamin D Levels Are Associated With Significantly Decreased Colon Cancer Risk In European Populations
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/176910.php Cancer, Heart Disease, Stroke, Diabetes, Chronic Pain and Depression Share a Major Pathology Factor
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cancer-heart-disease-stroke-diabetes-chronic-pain-and-depression-share-a-major-pathology-factor-81957722.html Vitamin D supplements reduce falls in nursing homes
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20100120/falls_100120/20100120?hub=Health Low Vitamin D Levels Associated With Greater Risk of Relapse in Childhood-Onset Multiple Sclerosis
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121093635.htm Vitamin D shortage linked to bone fractures
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6988872.ece Low vitamin D levels in blacks may explain higher rates of heart disease
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2010/01/low-vitamin-d-levels-in-blacks-may-explain-higher-rates-of-heart-disease.html Study: Vitamin D could help fight hepatitis C
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1142539.html Vitamin D supplements for asthma patients
http://www.6minutes.com.au/articles/z1/view.asp?id=509536 Low Vitamin D Levels Linked to MS, Lupus, and Fibromyalgia
http://newsletter.vitalchoice.com/e_article000728662.cfm?x=b76GVyV,b1kJpvRw,w Benefit Of Vitamin D In Diabetes And Other Chronic Diseases
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/135257.php Vitamin D deficiency linked to high risk of dementia
http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Nutrition/vitamin_d_deficiency_linked_to_high_risk_of_dementia_0101100619.html Alzheimer’s Disease: Vitamin D, Curcumin May Help Clear Amyloid Plaques
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/157764.php Lack Of Vitamin D Linked To Parkinson’s Disease
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081013171503.htm Can Vitamin D a Day Help Keep a Stroke Away?
http://www.politicalcortex.com/story/2009/12/29/144121/01 Do Statin Drugs Cause Vitamin D Deficiency?
http://www.naturalnews.com/027897_statin_drugs_vitamin_D.html
Another shoe drops on IPCC: Natural disasters not linked to global warming
Compiled by SpiralMan
Natural disasters not linked to global warming?
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Natural-disasters-not-linked-to-global-warming/articleshow/5496259.cms
UN climate science panel incorrectly linked global warming to rise in natural disasters
The United Nations’ climate science panel is facing further embarrassment after claims it incorrectly linked global warming to a rise in natural disasters.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/7066720/UN-climate-science-panel-incorrectly-linked-global-warming-to-rise-in-natural-disasters.html IPCC’S HIMALAYAN GLACIER ‘MISTAKE’ NOT AN ACCIDENT
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/55556/title/IPCCs_Himalayan_glacier_mistake_not_an_accident [
This is getting kind of sad……and I suspect there will be more.
Email-gate. Glacier-gate. Disaster-gate. Prophets and Nihilists masturbate. Yes, I know I stated this same stuff going back several years that most of the specifics alleged by IPCC to be manifestations of climate change were not so, and probably more likely the result of observation bias (seeing an something occurring because now you are looking for it), local causes (eg soot, deforestation, farm runoff, and overfishing) and cyclicality (eg. El Nino/La Nina, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Atlantic MultiDecadal Oscillation), which are invisible in crude and sparse proxy data over millions of years from inconsistent, non-normalized sources. In other words, climate modeling suffers from the same types of problems that have made molecular cellular physiological modeling so difficult, with which I am painfully familiar.
In this most recent Disaster-gate however, the various experts on hurricanes, and other disasters broke from IPCC and the media hype over precisely this issue over the last 4 years. And as the Glacier gate is unfolding, the glacier specialists also voiced their dissent and were systematically muted. How did I so quickly come to my judgment about the IPCC’s reports?
I read them.
In 2003, I read the 2001 report.
In 2004, I read the 2004 report.
In 2007, I read the 2007 report.
They all acknowledged that they didn’t model oceanic biota, yet the world is 3/4 covered by oceans, all kinds of microorganisms that rapidly evolve, change their relative proportions and symbiotic partners exist throughout, and oceans are where a great deal of carbon and heat cycles occur.
They all acknowledged that they didn’t model clouds or water flows in the atmosphere, and yet water vapor is the most important carrier of heat.
They thought that soot and aerosols were minor contributors, yet I intuited from growing up in Los Angeles, that albedo effects from smog and soot were serious business.
I had trouble picturing that an imbalance in a major input for photosynthesis, CO2, wouldn’t somehow be utilized; nature tends to evolve towards efficiently utilizing food sources, and microbes and symbiotic relationships can evolve quickly. Most importantly, the report’s assumptions of the best case scenarios appeared ridiculous to me.
Their scenarios showed straightline growth rates of CO2 emissions with no interruption from economic crises, yet looking at the historical data you can clearly see that the Depression, World War 2, the collapse of the USSR or even the 1970’s Arab Oil Embargo and Iranian Revolution all led to significant slowdowns and/or temporary reductions of either global or regional CO2 emissions. 
As I have tirelessly argued, the capitalist overproduction crisis inevitably means a significant decline, or at best stagnation, in industrial production including utilization of the status quo energy systems.
Meanwhile leading multinational corporations which are large customers of energy, and who rely on stable affordable energy sources, have stampeded into investments in energy efficiency for their operations, and the unrelenting propaganda on all mainstream media as well as all alternative media, whether right wing or left wing, preaches about the urgency of energy conservation. Finally, the ultimate solutions to our current energy- and food- related environmental problems are dropping in price exponentially, far faster than the problems are even increasing. And as noted this week by Germany’s Environmental Minister, solar power will be the cheapest source of energy on the planet by 2013. I have referred to this epochal process of one system dying and other being born as going through roughly 4 phases:
Spike, Crash, Streamline, Replace
So why do I say this latest string of exposures of the IPCC is sad? It’s sad because the environment is extremely complex and anything we do, whether unconsciously or consciously, with either profit or environment as objective, whether increasing or decreasing CO2/CH4 emissions or farm runoff or overfishing, etc. still can have gigantic non-linear impacts, and we need to get a handle on these, and not have scientists time wasted in the house of mirrors of groupthink.
It’s sad because I really do believe in the principle of iteratively making and testing scientific models about this stuff.
It’s sad because I believe in the value of cross disciplinary, international scientific teams building and testing these models.
It’s sad because science should be able to be relied upon by the public to understand, predict and control our world; and shoddy science like this, hyped and politicized to such levels could discredit the scientific method. (This is why as a scientist with no ties to the status quo energy systems, who has previously had a ‘dark horse’ impact on biological sciences, I felt it important for me to represent a scientifically-based dissent to the orthodoxy.)
It’s sad because so many people of good intentions have had their emotions played with by the excessive disaster fear mongering, the ‘green’ equivalent of Bush II’s WMD’s.
It’s sad because very important efforts for environmental destruction rehabilitation have been justified almost completely by this singular story of impending disasters. It is positive however, in that those who still want to think and act globally, who still want to improve the planet’s environment, will now be more open to the real reasons why our current systems of energy, water, and food have to be revolutionized.
And these reasons, don’t rely on invoking imagination about a horror yet to come decades or centuries in the future, but the already existing horrors that destroy millions of people’s lives today and everyday for centuries all around the world. These reasons don’t require boycotts of low income (per capita) oil and gas producing countries.
They don’t call for regressive taxation of poor people’s energy consumption.
They don’t call for stampeding into nuclear power…..or corn based, (water-sucking) ethanol. Instead they call for: Equal Watts!
Sunny Side Up!
Stop Soot, South First, North Pays!
Tax Sprawl Not Energy!
]
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Natural-disasters-not-linked-to-global-warming/articleshow/5496259.cms
UN climate science panel incorrectly linked global warming to rise in natural disasters
The United Nations’ climate science panel is facing further embarrassment after claims it incorrectly linked global warming to a rise in natural disasters.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/7066720/UN-climate-science-panel-incorrectly-linked-global-warming-to-rise-in-natural-disasters.html IPCC’S HIMALAYAN GLACIER ‘MISTAKE’ NOT AN ACCIDENT
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/55556/title/IPCCs_Himalayan_glacier_mistake_not_an_accident [
This is getting kind of sad……and I suspect there will be more.
Email-gate. Glacier-gate. Disaster-gate. Prophets and Nihilists masturbate. Yes, I know I stated this same stuff going back several years that most of the specifics alleged by IPCC to be manifestations of climate change were not so, and probably more likely the result of observation bias (seeing an something occurring because now you are looking for it), local causes (eg soot, deforestation, farm runoff, and overfishing) and cyclicality (eg. El Nino/La Nina, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Atlantic MultiDecadal Oscillation), which are invisible in crude and sparse proxy data over millions of years from inconsistent, non-normalized sources. In other words, climate modeling suffers from the same types of problems that have made molecular cellular physiological modeling so difficult, with which I am painfully familiar.
In this most recent Disaster-gate however, the various experts on hurricanes, and other disasters broke from IPCC and the media hype over precisely this issue over the last 4 years. And as the Glacier gate is unfolding, the glacier specialists also voiced their dissent and were systematically muted. How did I so quickly come to my judgment about the IPCC’s reports?
I read them.
In 2003, I read the 2001 report.
In 2004, I read the 2004 report.
In 2007, I read the 2007 report.
They all acknowledged that they didn’t model oceanic biota, yet the world is 3/4 covered by oceans, all kinds of microorganisms that rapidly evolve, change their relative proportions and symbiotic partners exist throughout, and oceans are where a great deal of carbon and heat cycles occur.
They all acknowledged that they didn’t model clouds or water flows in the atmosphere, and yet water vapor is the most important carrier of heat.
They thought that soot and aerosols were minor contributors, yet I intuited from growing up in Los Angeles, that albedo effects from smog and soot were serious business.
I had trouble picturing that an imbalance in a major input for photosynthesis, CO2, wouldn’t somehow be utilized; nature tends to evolve towards efficiently utilizing food sources, and microbes and symbiotic relationships can evolve quickly. Most importantly, the report’s assumptions of the best case scenarios appeared ridiculous to me.
Their scenarios showed straightline growth rates of CO2 emissions with no interruption from economic crises, yet looking at the historical data you can clearly see that the Depression, World War 2, the collapse of the USSR or even the 1970’s Arab Oil Embargo and Iranian Revolution all led to significant slowdowns and/or temporary reductions of either global or regional CO2 emissions. 
As I have tirelessly argued, the capitalist overproduction crisis inevitably means a significant decline, or at best stagnation, in industrial production including utilization of the status quo energy systems.
Meanwhile leading multinational corporations which are large customers of energy, and who rely on stable affordable energy sources, have stampeded into investments in energy efficiency for their operations, and the unrelenting propaganda on all mainstream media as well as all alternative media, whether right wing or left wing, preaches about the urgency of energy conservation. Finally, the ultimate solutions to our current energy- and food- related environmental problems are dropping in price exponentially, far faster than the problems are even increasing. And as noted this week by Germany’s Environmental Minister, solar power will be the cheapest source of energy on the planet by 2013. I have referred to this epochal process of one system dying and other being born as going through roughly 4 phases:
Spike, Crash, Streamline, Replace
So why do I say this latest string of exposures of the IPCC is sad? It’s sad because the environment is extremely complex and anything we do, whether unconsciously or consciously, with either profit or environment as objective, whether increasing or decreasing CO2/CH4 emissions or farm runoff or overfishing, etc. still can have gigantic non-linear impacts, and we need to get a handle on these, and not have scientists time wasted in the house of mirrors of groupthink.
It’s sad because I really do believe in the principle of iteratively making and testing scientific models about this stuff.
It’s sad because I believe in the value of cross disciplinary, international scientific teams building and testing these models.
It’s sad because science should be able to be relied upon by the public to understand, predict and control our world; and shoddy science like this, hyped and politicized to such levels could discredit the scientific method. (This is why as a scientist with no ties to the status quo energy systems, who has previously had a ‘dark horse’ impact on biological sciences, I felt it important for me to represent a scientifically-based dissent to the orthodoxy.)
It’s sad because so many people of good intentions have had their emotions played with by the excessive disaster fear mongering, the ‘green’ equivalent of Bush II’s WMD’s.
It’s sad because very important efforts for environmental destruction rehabilitation have been justified almost completely by this singular story of impending disasters. It is positive however, in that those who still want to think and act globally, who still want to improve the planet’s environment, will now be more open to the real reasons why our current systems of energy, water, and food have to be revolutionized.
And these reasons, don’t rely on invoking imagination about a horror yet to come decades or centuries in the future, but the already existing horrors that destroy millions of people’s lives today and everyday for centuries all around the world. These reasons don’t require boycotts of low income (per capita) oil and gas producing countries.
They don’t call for regressive taxation of poor people’s energy consumption.
They don’t call for stampeding into nuclear power…..or corn based, (water-sucking) ethanol. Instead they call for: Equal Watts!
Sunny Side Up!
Stop Soot, South First, North Pays!
Tax Sprawl Not Energy!
]
Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?; Haiti, the Chicago of the Caribbean?
Compiled by SpiralMan
http://open.salon.com/blog/ezili_danto/2010/01/22/did_mining_and_oil_drilling_trigger_the_haiti_earthquake
At Fault: Does Drilling Cause Earthquakes?
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/06/25/at-fault-does-drilling-cause-earthquakes/ DECEMBER 30, 2009 7:09PM
Obama’s empty promises: Change did not come
[Now bitter, Ezili Danto had endorsed Obama for the election]
http://open.salon.com/blog/ezili_danto/2009/12/30/obamas_empty_promises_change_did_not_come TRAVESTY in Haiti (book review by Ezili Danto)
A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking, a book by Timothy T. Schwartz
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/law/travesty.html#bookreview
In a power-point presentation to attract “smart, optimistic business partners and investors,” one of the mining companies currently digging quarries in Haiti, wrote: [actually recently defunct because of lawsuits]
Haitian quarries can…
Dominate this industry in northern Caribbean
Provide a springboard to Cuba when timing is right
Most promising quarry areas in Cuba”
“are on SE coast, adjacent to NW Haiti
Haiti is built of…
High-grade limestone, still rising from the Caribbean seafloor
Plus other important rock types
“old African’ crustal rock, like Colorado Rockies
later volcanic rocks, basalts and granites
in great demand for US and Caribbean engineering projects
“Remarkably Pure”
Famous American geologist Wendell Woodring, USGS
surveyed Haiti in 1923-24 on foot and with donkeys
wrote most authoritative study to date on geology of Haiti
described certain Haitian limestone as “remarkably pure.”
Sent lignite samples to US for testing
Limestone?
Basic industrial commodity
Construction aggregates
Cement production
Industrial and agricultural minerals
Virtually inelastic demand, even during recessions
Demand is function of population: ~9 tons/person/year in USA (according to USGS)
Steady increase due to new industrial, agricultural, medical uses
China growth affecting all commodities markets; commodities prices rising
Important for infrastructure development in Haiti and elsewhere in Caribbean
Haiti has formidable advantages:
Proximity to dynamic markets
Hard-working, tenacious people anxious for jobs
Special US legal and tax considerations under CBERA/CBI, new HERO act
Haiti: 38% more coastline than Dominican Republic
Haiti has 1,771 km of coastline vs. DR’s 1,288 *
Haiti’s 2nd most important resource: Location
Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, DR, Cayman Islands, Lesser Antilles
Cuba in a few more years?
Most comparable US location: Chicago
************************ False Stereotype 1: “tiny island nation’
Reality: Haiti, with 27,560 sq km of land mass, is 3rd largest nation in the Caribbean
Haiti: Big Country for the Caribbean
La Selle massif rises 2700 meters above sea level Port-au-Prince
(almost 9000 feet)
Compares to 14,300 ft Mt. Evans above “mile-high’ Denver
(~ 9000 ft)
************************ False Stereotype 2: “Haiti is so overcrowded’
Reality: Low population density compared to her crowded neighbors
Large rural areas are virtually unpopulated “Haitian Outback’
Neither barren nor lifeless as hysterical news stories claim!
*********************** False Stereotype 3: “Haiti has no resources’
Truth: Important natural resources are largely undeveloped:
Facts: Haiti has better long-term prospects than much of the West Indies”
where over-dependence on tourism limits opportunity
Strong opportunities for diversified natural resource development”
“and modern, environmentally sound, industrialization
Local value-add, e.g. precast & prestress concrete
Agro-chemicals and industrial minerals manufacture.
(See, Matraco-Colorado Haiti Venture -A Power-Point Presentation.)
At Fault: Does Drilling Cause Earthquakes?
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/06/25/at-fault-does-drilling-cause-earthquakes/ DECEMBER 30, 2009 7:09PM
Obama’s empty promises: Change did not come
[Now bitter, Ezili Danto had endorsed Obama for the election]
http://open.salon.com/blog/ezili_danto/2009/12/30/obamas_empty_promises_change_did_not_come TRAVESTY in Haiti (book review by Ezili Danto)
A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking, a book by Timothy T. Schwartz
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/law/travesty.html#bookreview
Quelle Surprise! Obama Administration's Proposed Restrictions on Proprietary Trading are a Joke
By SpiralMan
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/01/quelle-surprise-proposed-restrictions-on-proprietary-trading-are-a-joke.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29
You can drive a supertanker though the loopholes in this proposal, which are: 1. If a firm does not own a bank, it can do proprietary trading 2. Trades with customers are not proprietary trades
These are so silly that I’m astonished anyone is treating this proposal seriously. Let’s dispatch them in order. Whoever thinks that proprietary trading is just swell as long as the firm does not own a bank (meaning the kind that takes deposits) must have slept through the entire credit crisis (note I am not saying prop trading cause the crisis, but I guarantee there will still be reader who demonstrate in comments that reading comprehension is not one of their strong suits). The implicit idea is that government backstops extend just to deposit-taking firms. That is patently ridiculous and is an attempt to hide from the public the reality of how the financial system works. Thanks to thirty years of deregulation, a very large portion of credit intermediation (finance speak for the process of providing loans) has shifted from banks to the capital markets. As most readers know, many types of loans are originated by a bank, combined with other loans, turned into bonds, and sold to investors.
For reasons too long to go into now, bonds are traded over the counter (this is not a nefarious plot; there are legitimate reasons why). Over the counter markets have economies of scale, and in particular, network effects. So trading of credit market instruments, over, time, is dominated by a comparatively small number of very large firms.
Credit is critical to the functioning of any economy beyond the barter stage. As economic activity became larger in scope and scale, and banks increasingly became the dominant credit providers, bank panics became a serious threat, and so various safety nets have been deployed under traditional banks, the biggest being deposit insurance and access to the central bank discount window. The quid pro quo was that banks were subject to strict limits on their activities and intrusive supervision. But those were eroded over time while the safety nets, if anything, became more extensive (consider unofficial support activities, such as Greenspan engineering a steep yield curve after the savings and loan crisis). But now we have a world in which the credit markets are crucial to modern commerce, more so than banks. It would not be all that hard to break up the traditional commercial banking operations of Bank of America up. By contrast, once you get past hiving off non-capital-markets operations like asset management and commodities trading, it would be much more difficult to break up Goldman Sachs. And perhaps more important, absent regulation, it would tend to re-evolve back into its old format. A set of oligopolies, with information synergies among them to boot, is an extremely attractive business proposition. So any capital markets player of reasonable heft WILL be backstopped. That was the big lesson of the crisis just past and is not lost on the industry incumbents. Does anyone with an operating brain cell believe that if BofA divested Merrill and Merrill hit the wall again that it would be allowed to collapse? Look, we have twice had rescues of major non-banks, first LTCM, then AIG, due to the impact their failures would have ON CAPITAL MARKETS, not on depositors!
But the second one is even more of an insult to the intelligence, that proprietary trades and customer trades exist in neat, tidy boxes and a trade with a customer is therefore a pure act of mere passive order taking. When Goldman went net short subprime, was that not a proprietary position? And who do you think was on the other side of that trade? Hint: for the most part, not other dealers. Why do you think institutional salesmen entertain clients so lavishly? Read Tetsuya Ishikawa’s How I Caused the Credit Crunch and find out how CDOs were sold. When a firm has a big position it needs to unload because it see market conditions change and it needs to change course, it will push it out to investors. The idea that putting on and unwinding prop trades takes place only with other dealers (which is what this is effectively saying) is bizarre.
………
Clusterstock tells us how little impact the prop trading proposal will have (and it ran the very day the new proposals were announced): Big banks have already begun poking the holes in Obama’s new rules—holes they expect their banks to pass through basically unchanged. The president promised this morning to work with Congress to ensure that no bank or financial institution that contains a bank will own, invest in or sponsor a hedge fund or a private equity fund, or proprietary trading operations unrelated to serving customers for its own profit. But sources at three banks tell us that they are already finding ways to own, investment in and sponsor hedge funds and private equity funds. Even prop trading seems safe. A person familiar with the operations of one big Wall Street bank said it expects that new regulation will affect less than 1% of its overall business.
And that’s before Congress waters the legislation down further. So much for change you can believe in….
…….
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