Independence Day Weekend

Sunday July 5, 2009

. . . . .Gooood Morning! Welcome to the second half of the year, and to the annual weekend birthday celebration that we call Independence Day.

. . . . .Hope you've enjoyed a barbecue or two, some sun and some time with friends and family.

. . . .Take the time to catch up on the last few columns, they're all down below. There's all the normal exploration of the current news around politics, the economy, the national electrical grid, some work on human evolution and A.I. the normal eclectic mix.

. . . .The most important news of the day isn't Caribou Barbie, though that's near the top. The most important news comes out of Iran. The Mullahs have declared the election "illegitimate", a very serious setback for Ahmadenijad and Ayatollah Khameini.

. . . .The second most important news, that of North Korea firing seven missles off on July 4th, may on the surface seem important. But really it isn't. (1) Their missles have the annoying habit of basically just falling into the Sea of Japan and (2) anyone, anyone at all who thinks that if China believed that North Korea was about to piss in the pool, considering China's stature as the world's largest economy, and it's growing strenth and it's positioning itself to become the world's dominant superpower, (watch, the Yuan will replace the U.S. Dollar as the International Reserve Currency this month) is truly a mouth-breathing idiot. Follow the money, that's what counts. So, no, North Korea will never present a true threat, China's not gonna let that happen.

. . . .On ABC's "This Week with George Stephanolous Vice-President Joe Biden made an admission that will probably, bar the last item below, be one of the most discussed statements of the week: "We misread how bad the economy really was". My question is - how could you? Nobel Prize winning economists tried telling them before the stimulus package was presented just how large in size it had to be, and tried telling them afterwards that the package just plainly wasn't large enough to jumpstart the economy.

Host George Stephanopoulos pointed out that "a lot of people were saying that you needed to do something bigger and bolder" when it came to the stimulus package. He named New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as one example. There are many others.

The prize-winning Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz not only warned that the stimulus was too small during its construction, the day after Obama signed it into law he predicted how its shortcomings would make themselves apparent.

"I think there is a broad consensus but not universal among economist that the stimulus package that was passed was badly designed and not enough. I know it is not universal but let me try to explain. First of all that it was not enough should be pretty apparent from what I just said: It is trying to offset the deficiency in aggregate demand and it is just too small," Stiglitz said. "The shortfall in state revenue [is] probably in the order of 150 to 200 billion dollars a year. And the states have balanced budget frameworks so if you follow the newspaper you know the drastic problems that California and New York are in, these are really serious problems and because of their balanced budget frameworks they have to reduce their spending... if their income comes down. So that would be a negative stimulus of 150 to 200 billion unless there is federal aid. And the stimulus package there was a little of federal aid but just not enough. So what we will be doing is we will be laying off teachers and laying off people in the health care sector while we are hiring construction workers. It is a little strange for a design of a stimulus package. You ask, why do you want to hire construction workers and fire teachers. I don't know what is the rationale behind that."

Stiglitz was joined by a whole host of liberal economists -- from the University of Texas' James Galbraith to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research -- who warned that the stimulus package inexplicably underestimated the size of the crisis.

Several weeks after the stimulus passed, economist Nouriel Roubini, known affectionately as Dr. Doom, made the case that the administration's approach to stabilizing the economy lacked an effective international component.

"You have to have a set of concerted, coherent policies done not just by the U.S. but by Europe, Japan, China and everyone else," he said. "The credit crunch is just massive. One thing that's needed is much more aggressive monetary easing. The second dimension is that you need much more fiscal stimulus -- in the countries that can afford it -- that is front-loaded. The U.S. [stimulus package] is $800 billion, but only $200 billion is front-loaded. Of that $200 billion [in stimulus] this year, half of it is tax cuts. That's going to be a waste of money, because people are not going to spend it."

In mid-June, weeks before the latest round of poor job numbers came out, U.C. Berkeley professor and former Clinton administration official Brad DeLong was arguing that "the Obama administration's federal fiscal stimulus programs are on the low side of what is appropriate by a substantial margin."

"This is the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression and the standard tools of expansionary monetary policy are tapped out and broken right now," he wrote.

The day that June's job numbers came out, meanwhile, Nassim Taleb, principal of Universa Investments and author of 'The Black Swan,' offered a far more grim interpretation of what was transpiring, though one relatively consistent with what he had said in the past.

"We're in the middle of a crash," said Taleb during an appearance on CNBC. "So if I'm going to forecast something, it is that it's going to get worse, not better."

Certainly Krugman himself has aired his share of skepticism. In late June, he reminded his readers that his early concerns had not been misplaced.

"[S]ome of us warned about what might happen: if unemployment surpassed the administration's optimistic projections, Republicans wouldn't accept the need for more stimulus," he wrote in the Times. "Instead, they'd declare the whole economic policy a failure. And that's exactly how it's playing out. With the unemployment rate now almost certain to pass 10 percent, there's an overwhelming economic case for more stimulus. But as a political matter it's going to be harder, not easier, to get that extra stimulus now than it would have been to get the plan right in the first place.

This past week, meanwhile, he declared once more that the Obama stimulus plan, while "better than nothing" needs to be supplemented with something more.

To be fair, the process of economic forecasting is, as Taleb noted in his CNBC segment, an inherently tricky proposition. In October 2008, for instance, Roubini was arguing that the government needed a $400 billion stimulus package, which ended up being just more than half of what the Obama White House settled on.

But among those who were sounding the loudest alarms about the potential inadequacies of the economic recovery plan, the consensus seems to be emerging that more now needs to be done. Later in his ABC segment, Biden - who is responsible for overseeing the stimulus - was asked if a second package was in the offing. No, he replied, without dismissing the possibility outright. "I think it's premature to make that judgment. This was set up to spend out over 18 months. There are going to be major programs that are going to take effect in September, $7.5 billion for broadband, new money for high-speed rail, the implementation of the grid -- the new electric grid. And so this is just starting, the pace of the ball is now going to increase."

. . . .All it takes is the barest recollection of freshman year college Econ 101 to remember that to keep an economy moving, when private investing bottoms out or dries up, then public investing has to take up the slack. It didn't take a genius to look at what was occurring when the false bubbles created by Reagan's signing of Garn-St. Germain back in 1982, creating the first false bubble, and his breaking of the first union, PATCO; the artful and deceitful Clinton recrafting of Bush 1's North American Free Trade Agreement which further gutted American manufacturing and hastened outsourcing, and began the largest transfer of wealth in history as money began flowing out of the United States to China & Venezuela, then the Bush 2 years of Paulson completely deregulating the banking industry to allow them to buy into AIG's Joseph Cassano's craps table bid with heretofore unknown derivative securities to see what was going to happen. There was no money, there never was any money, it was built on a pile of sand and once the first part of the foundation went, it was easy for the remainder of it to keep on sliding.
. . . The stimulus package needed to be much, much larger. On a percentage basis, it needed to be equal to the WPA or CCC, back in 1933-1939 in order to do much good. Instead, the idiots who want to see this nation destroyed started their fucking "tea parties", much to the delight of all those rich elites around them who make $250,000 a year or more. The incoming President Obama signs into law the largest tax cut in history, asks those criminals who have been moving their money offshore and into tax havens to start ponying up for what this Nation has given them, what they stole from working people, and those who got the tax cuts take to the street to protest it. God, no wonder the rich think everyone is a sheeple, they got Joe the Plumber, and mind slaves just like him, to do their dirty work for them again.

. . . .On CNN's State of the Union with John King this morning, one of this country's most decorated soldiers, and respected Republican elder statesman, Colin Powell stated very clearly and factually that Rush Limbaugh's comments, both past and recent, demonstrate very clearly and "are evidence that the Republican Party still has a problem with race."

. . . . .So, back at it. And of course, you know the Angel just is going to dig right into Sarah Palin, and her surprise resignation as the Governor of Alaska.

. . . . .Let me start right off by saying that, in my opinion, the estimable Ms. Palin has done more to set the image of women in American politics back singlehandedly than any other woman in recent history. She reinforces the stereotype of being erratic and unable to handle pressure, and not being suited for a top job.

. . . .Bear in mind that we are talking about someone who couldn't even complete a full term as the Governor of a State that has essentially the same number of citizens as Columbus, Ohio.

. . . . .It's like the mayor of Albuquerque quitting their term early to help spread their message on a "national stage". WTF????

. . . ..Her resignation letter was a long-winded, rambling piece; grammatically incorrect, random punctation and capitalization throughout. Her resignation speech was the same, and her Facebook message yesterday was the same, rambling and incoherent. So typical of the extreme fundamentalist Right wing of her party; no facts, no substance, no coherent logical argument. All ephemeral hyperbole, with the issuer of the same a victim of some nefarious liberal source. Cognitively dissonant. All 3 can be checked at the links provided. In each case, she tied her resignation to a "higher calling". We'll talk more about that later.

. . . . . . There have been a number of reaction pieces in the last 24 hours; so. . .on to some of those first:

. . . . . .Geoffrey Dunn:

Anyone who is in any way surprised by Sarah Palin's announcement today that she will not be seeking re-election, and, even more significantly, is stepping down as Governor of Alaska, has not been paying close attention. The signs have been everywhere.

Palin has absolutely zero interest in running the State of Alaska. She steadfastly refused to live in Juneau after her first year there, had the gall to charge the state for residing at her home in Wasilla 600 miles away, and she basically mailed in her performance as the state's top administrator during Alaska's most recent legislative session. She has alienated virtually all the key legislators in her own party -- that's right, Republicans -- and had failed to move any key legislation forward since her return to Alaska from the national campaign trail last November.

In fact, her bizarre appointment for Attorney General, Wayne Anthony Ross, was rejected nearly unanimously by the state legislature -- a first in Alaskan history. Even in respect to energy policy, her supposed bailiwick, she has been categorically ineffective. When I asked those in-the-know what role Palin had played in putting together the recent pipeline deal between TransCanada and Exxon, their response was simple: "None."

None. That about sums up Palin's accomplishments as Governor of the Last Frontier.

The evangelical right can wallow in denial all they want about Palin being victimized by liberals or Democrats or even George Soros (some illiterate wingnut recently tried to link me to him), but the fact is that most of the people with really bad things to say about Palin -- from John McCain's staff to conservatives in Alaska -- come from the Republican Party. The charges of a left-wing conspiracy are so ridiculous as to be absolutely absurd.

Some pundits have said that Palin's resignation is out of character. Hardly. Don't forget that she resigned from her last statewide office -- that as chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Sarah Palin is a quitter. She fancies herself something else. But, in the end, she quit her position at AOGCC and she has now quit her governorship. That's two-for-two at the statewide level. In Wasilla, there was nearly a recall launched against her as mayor. Trouble and turbulence have followed her everywhere.

More importantly, there are rumors in Alaska that more Ethics Act charges are in the works and that there is also a more serious Federal investigation focusing on Palin during her tenure as mayor in Wasilla and the building of her home and a sports complex in Wasilla, long speculated to have been linked. It's the one very touchy subject whenever you bring it up in the MatSu Valley. As someone who is writing a book on Palin, I can attest to the fact that there are always rumors flying about her, not all of them true, but this seems like a real possibility, especially given the timing of her announcement today.

Palin also has a multi-million dollar book project for Rupert Murdoch that she needs to complete in time for a spring release. That's some serious cabbage, and there were grumblings in Alaska about the book deal as well. There will be other lucrative, high-visibility media options for her shortly down the road. Don't be surprised to hear of one of those popping up soon. This frees her up to reach for the gold ring without her minions being able to register any complaints. In that respect, it's a logical move.

All of the recent public donnybrooks have taken their toll: First the article by Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair and then the even nastier revelations of emails leaked by the McCain campaign which showed her to be an utter liar regarding her husband Todd's membership in the Alaska Independent Party. Even the seemingly innocuous interview in Runner's World, with its bizarre, braggadocio boast of her having more endurance than Obama, revealed her penchant for duplicity at every turn: the assertion that an injury she had sustained while jogging in Arizona had been kept top-secret, a contention thoroughly disputed by the inimitable Mudflats.

One of my favorite lies spewed by Palin today in yet another poorly scripted speech was that she campaigned for governor "four years ago...," when she, in fact, ran for governor three years ago and held her position for little more than two-and-half years. It's the little lies she always tells, the twists of truth, the distortions. Four years sounds like nearly a full term; three feels incomplete. So why not just call it four?

For all her projected toughness, Palin loves to play the victim. "Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt," she whined, implying that her problems are from out-of-state (yet another big lie). "Over the past nine months I've been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations..." It wasn't quite Richard Nixon's "Checker's Speech," but it was close. In her own awkward vernacular, the Governor was essentially saying to Alaska, "You won't have Sarah Palin to kick around any more."

. . . . .Read the rest of the piece here.

. . . . . .Paul Begala, well-known CNN contributor and analyst:

I wish Hunter S. Thompson had lived to see this.

As Hunter said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Sarah Palin makes Mark Foley, the congressman who sent filthy emails to pages look almost normal. She makes David Vitter, the senator who was hanging out with hookers, look almost boring. She makes Larry Craig, caught hitting on a cop in a men's room, look almost stable. She makes John Ensign, the senator who was having an affair with a staffer, look almost humdrum (and compared to the rest of the GOP whack-jobs, he is). And she makes Mark Sanford, the governor with the Latin lover, look positively predictable.

It was an almost impossible mission, but in resigning from office with 17 months to go in her first term, Sarah Palin has made herself the bull goose loony of the GOP.

Let's stipulate that if there is some heretofore unknown personal, medical or family crisis, this was the right move. But Gov. Palin didn't say anything like that. Her statement was incoherent, bizarre and juvenile. The text, as posted on Gov. Palin's official website (here), uses 2,549 words and 18 exclamation points. Lincoln freed the slaves with 719 words and nary an exclamation; Mr. Jefferson declared our independence in 1,322 words and, again, no exclamation points. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1,796 words -- still no exclamation points. Gov. Palin capitalized words at random - whole words, like "TO," "HELP," and "AND," and the first letter of "Troops."

Gov. Palin's official announcement that she is resigning as chief executive of the great state of Alaska had all the depth and gravitas of a 13-year-old's review of the Jonas Brothers' album on Facebook. She even quoted her parents' refrigerator magnet. (Note to self: if one of my kids becomes governor, throw away the refrigerator magnet that says: "Murray's Oyster Bar: We Shuck Em, You Suck Em!") She put her son's name in quotations marks. Why? Who knows. She writes, "I promised efficiencies and effectiveness!?" Was she exclaiming or questioning? I get it: both! And I don't even know what to make of a sentence that reads:

*((Gotta put First Things First))*

Ponder the fact that Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins publishing house is paying this, umm, writer $11 million for a book. Ponder that and say a prayer for Ms. Palin's editor.

I'm no latter-day Strunk & White, just a guy who was struck by Palin's spectacularly rambling and infantile prose. It bespeaks a rambling and infantile mind. But perhaps not. Perhaps this is all a ruse. Perhaps Gov. Palin wants us to believe she's an intellectual featherweight who is slightly shallower than an actor on High School Musical. Maybe she's trying to throw us off the trail.

Naah. A lot of people thought that about George W. Bush. He couldn't be so block-headed, they said. He couldn't be as childish and churlish as he came off. Oh yes he could. And so, too, might Ms. Palin be as vapid and puerile as her inane statement suggests.

. . . .Read the rest of the piece here.

. . . .Cenk Ugyur, of the Young Turks:

There is a lot we don't know about Sarah Palin's decision to resign. But there is one thing we do know: She thought it was politically damaging.

No one announces good news late on Friday before Fourth of July weekend. That is someone who is trying to bury bad news as much as possible. With Michael Jackson and Mark Sanford stories still lingering around, everyone on vacation, and as little reporters working as possible, she releases this bombshell. That's someone who obviously thinks what she is doing is not going to help her, at least in the short term.

. . . .Read the rest of that piece here.

. . . . . From Michelle Goldberg, conservative blogger and commentator, and especially insightful into Sarah's ties to Alaskan Independence Party, a violent secessionist group. (For me, personally it was her two keynote addresses to their convention that provided the proof for me that she is a traitor, guilty of treason, and should now be in Leavenworth and not in the Governor's mansion in Alaska).

On the face of it, it seems preposterous that Palin might think she could maintain any political credibility at all after walking away from her job simply because she has her eye on bigger things. But Palin has long had an almost dementedly inflated sense of her own destiny. In one of the most quoted passages of Todd Purdham’s eviscerating Vanity Fair profile of Palin, he writes that, in traveling through Alaska, several people told him that, in trying to understand their governor, “they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” Said disorder, Purdum points out, is marked by “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”

As a description of Palin, that sounds about right. It also sounds about right as a description of Newt Gingrich, Mark Sanford, John Edwards, and maybe even Bill Clinton. There is nothing new about politicians who are staggeringly egotistical and heedlessly dishonest, politicians with fantastic reserves of self-righteousness and self-pity but a shriveled capacity for loyalty. But we don’t usually see this particular kind of craziness in women. Palin is the rare female politician who is as much a megalomaniac as her male peers. Maybe more.

By the time she’d emerged on the national stage, her confidence—had had a unique chance to grow and flower.

But it also metastasized into deluded arrogance. Palin’s public statements have been full of petty, easily refutable mendacity, delivered with the vehemence of a compulsive liar. Purdum’s piece reveals one tiny but telling incident, in which Palin told McCain aides that she and her husband had been without insurance of any kind in the early years of their marriage. “Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along,” Purdum writes. “This sort of slipperiness—about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered—persisted on questions great and small.”

On Thursday, CBS News had a small scoop revealing a similarly cavalier attitude towards the truth. After McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, rejected a request by Palin to reply to a report that her husband, Todd, has been a member of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, Palin came forward with a preposterous excuse, like a teenager trying to explain away the incriminating smell of liquor—or a governor trying to cover up a mysterious jaunt to Buenos Aires. Secession, she insisted—despite all available evidence—is not part of the party’s platform, and besides, Todd “was only a 'member' bc independent alaskans too often check that 'Alaska Independent' box on voter registrations thinking it just means non partisan. He caught his error when changing our address and checked the right box. I still want it fixed." A clearly exasperated Schmidt wrote back that secession is the AIP’s “entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the website shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the web site. Our records indicate that todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be inaccurate.”

The Alaska governor shares the personality flaws of many of her male peers, but by all accounts she doesn’t express them via the preferred method of politicians like John Edwards or Mark Sanford—by being sexually reckless. The United States has grown more blasé about sex scandals post Bill Clinton, but they remain more damaging than, say, dishonesty, greed, or naked incompetence.

Her seemingly irrational faith in herself might not be totally misplaced, especially if other Republicans keep self-destructing at their current rate. That’s because while Palin is unhinged, so is much of her competition. Politics has always attracted the deeply screwed up, but our current political system seems to do so more than most. Perhaps that’s because healthy people looking to make their mark on the world don’t want to subject themselves to the inquisitorial media attention or crushing vapidity of modern campaigning. The gloriously sane Barack Obama is the exception that proves the rule—watch people wonder at his unfeigned affection for his family, the fact that he doesn’t seem desperate for praise. Success in our politics often requires a voracious, antinomian egotism, a sense that rules are for others.

The Alaska governor shares the personality flaws of many of her male peers, but there’s no evidence she express them via the preferred method of politicians like John Edwards or Mark Sanford—by being sexually reckless. The United States has grown more blasé about sex scandals post Bill Clinton, but they remain more damaging than, say, dishonesty, greed, flakiness or naked incompetence.

Palin may have gone rogue on John McCain, had public feuds with her grandson’s teenage father, turned on loyal aids, flubbed interviews, spent tens of thousands of other people’s money on clothes, told countless lies and now walked away from her responsibilities, but as far as we know she hasn’t cheated on her husband. If congenital narcissists dominate our politics, Palin may still be just the narcissist the GOP needs.

. . . .Over at the conservative Daily Beast, they rounded up the 11 most popular theories circulating for her resignation. Find 'em here.

. . . .Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski positively ripped her in a statement released from her office, telling her "You abandoned our State" read it here,

. . . .Karl Rove, the Architect (love him, or hate him, he is a political genius) had this to say on Sunday morning on the official Republican Mouthpiece station, Fox News:

"I think it hurts. It's also unclear what her strategy is. Again, she said she wanted to lead effective change outside of government. Well, now people will be saying what is it you mean by that and how are you demonstrating effective leadership for change around America? I'm like Governor [Mike] Huckabee. I'm a fan of Sarah Palin's, but the effective strategies in politics are ones that are so clear and obvious that people can grasp it."

. . . . It was very apparent throughout the interview that Karl Rove was no fan of this move of Palin's and was quite cold about it.

. . . .The rumors from inside her camp are that it's been potential Republican rival Mitt Romney and his camp who have been circulating the rumors about her ethics problems, and not the "liberal bloggers".

. . . .As well, another Republican potential candidate, Mike Huckabee, had this to say on the Right wing appartus Sunday morning entertainment revue "Fox News Sunday":

"In a primary this is going to be an issue she'll have to face. Will she be able to withstand the pressure?"

. . . .Here's what I know about Sarah Palin. She's a hypocrite and a liar, she's a completely self-absorbed, venal, narcissistic, mean personality. She gave the keynote address, twice, to a group that advocates for the secession of the state of Alaska from the United States, by violence. Her husband was a member for 7 years. She is a member of a church who welcomes in a man who proclaims himself a "witch doctor", a human being claiming the ability to do what other humans cannot, a human being who claims god-like powers, and she belives him. She consistently attacked Barack Obama on a personal level, tying him to terrorists, casting doubt on his citizenship, and consistently implying that he was a Muslim, on the campaign trail, whilst he did not, and allowed her to demonstrate her complete and utter inability to grasp the job of Vice-President during her televised debate and she now has turned into a a pathetic whiner, a thin-skinned loser who can throw it out there, but isn't willing to take it, with the most direct criticism of her coming from within her own party, her own State, and from within the group of people who were attempting to inform her and help her with the information and facts she needed while she was running for Vice-President of the United States. Her lawyer says that she is exploring legal action against bloggers and the media. This from a wing of the party that screams about the Fairness Doctrine. Her particular brand of Fascism, her Christian Nationalism is a complete betrayal of the sacrifices of millions of men and women who have fought and died for the ideal that is the American Experiment, still grandly and successfully moving along after 234 years. This is a country that embraces diversity of opinion and viewpoint, as the Founding Fathers intended and Palin is the antithesis of that, a narrow-minded, not very bright bigot, who will use position and power to punish if the offender hasn't acted in accordance with her restricted belief system. Just ask her ex-brother-in-law or her daughter's Baby Daddy, or his family. She's not very bright, and I don't want someone like that anywhere near the nuclear launch codes. Her particular brand of Christianity calls for Armageddon and the Rapture, neither of which I want for my children, and there is, per the United States Constitution, absolutely no place in the structure of our government for the mixture of religion and politics, no place whatsoever. The Constitution guarantees that.

. . . .Outta here

. . . .Got your back

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one gets out alive, no one. We don't get to dictate terms and circumstances around how the ticket gets punched, and we don't know when it's coming. This ain't no dress rehearsal. Change your world, change yourself and change the world at large.

The Desolation Angel

Independence Eve

Friday July 3, 2009 Independence Eve

. . . .Told you there'd be new music! (grin!!)

. . . .Today's column is in two parts: This morning's comes first.

. . . The jobs numbers are dismal. Period.

. . . .Krugman, in the New York Times this morning:

O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?

Let’s do the math.

Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.
And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?
Wait — there’s more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further.
So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3 ½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.
All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.
So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.
Just to be clear, I’m well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted.
There won’t be any cooperation from Republican leaders, who have settled on a strategy of total opposition, unconstrained by facts or logic. Indeed, these leaders responded to the latest job numbers by proclaiming the failure of the Obama economic plan. That’s ludicrous, of course. The administration warned from the beginning that it would be several quarters before the plan had any major positive effects. But that didn’t stop the chairman of the Republican Study Committee from issuing a statement demanding: “Where are the jobs?”
It’s also not clear whether the administration will get much help from Senate “centrists,” who partially eviscerated the original stimulus plan by demanding cuts in aid to state and local governments — aid that, as we’re now seeing, was desperately needed. I’d like to think that some of these centrists are feeling remorse, but if they are, I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect.
And as an economist, I’d add that many members of my profession are playing a distinctly unhelpful role.
It has been a rude shock to see so many economists with good reputations recycling old fallacies — like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment — and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)
Also, as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms.
So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.
Obama administration economists understand the stakes. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” — the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.
What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.
So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.

. . . .The most important piece you'll read all year comes to you this morning from Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone magazine, it's found in print issue 1082-83 and on the web at their site and it's been copied all over the Web, the following are excerpts from it. I need to make sure that credit is given where, in this case, mountains of credit are due. I'd like you to read the following piece in full, and attempt to digest it. This one goes way, way beyond conspiracy theories, and puts some solid fact behind what's been happening to your money, not just this year, but for a very, very long, long time, and is probably the most controversial article written in a couple of years:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.
It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.
Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.
And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.
The history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman.
But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.
Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliché that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy — a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline the committee to save the world. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy — beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.
After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.
It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.
Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.
Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.
The collective message of all of this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."
Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

. . . .You can read the same piece here, but there's also a series of videos and interviews with Matt as well.

It never rains where you need it to

Mid-week updates

. . . . . So, the new Wilco album came available on Tuesday. If you ordered it from their website, it was most likely delivered yesterday too, and you can download the entire album as an MP3 too, for free, for placing the order. The demand was so high yesterday, that it crashed their server for 12 hours. When I get back into a position to, I'll put a couple of the tracks in the playlist.

. . . . .You have to be from the Midwest and from the era of the '70's to remember the Michael Stanley Band. Well, Michael is still at it, and there's still a lot of members of the old MSB, in his new backing band. Michael was just as good as Bob Seger, or John Mellencamp, and still is, he just never got the breaks they did, and we all know how much I love those two. They worked their ass off night after night on the road, and in the studio and did it their own way. Michael worked just as hard, it just didn't lay out that way for him. After all, how many people out there can say that their first backing band on their first studio album was a then unknown Joe Walsh and the James Gang? Anyhow, at Michael's website, you can order his new album, along with one from Bob Pelander, his keyboard player, and Jonah Koslin, his guitar player. I'll put a couple of those up too.

. . . .'S matter of fact, I've taken it far too easily on all of your ears. It's time for music that you've not heard, from people that may or may not have heard from, with track that you're guaranteed not to have heard. Look out, next week is the mid-summer tracks you've never heard festival!

. . . .Jeez, I love it when the ever-so-studious, intelligentsia on the Right forms it's normal circular firing squad. The squabble now is over the article in Vanity Fair on Sarah Palin. The epitome of being a Republican apologist and hack, Bill Kristol, accuses Steve Schmidt, the McCain campaign manager of being one of the top McCain aides who questioned Palin's mental stability during the campaign. Schmidt, firing back immediately; "I'm sure that John McCain would be President today if only Kristol had been in charge. After all, his management of Dan Quayle's public image as his former chief of staff still takes your breath away."

. . . .OK, OK, get over it, Al Franken got seated today. It was a constitutional process, and it's over now. What's also over is every one of Harry Reid's excuses with a full 60 seats now. Every damn excuse is gone, it's time for them to get busy. It's not the President's job to vote, pass legislation, craft it. That's their job, now get it done Harry, it's the Dems turn now, let's see what you can do.

. . . .It really doesn't matter in the end. It was a Republican majority House and Senate during the Bush administration that ran up the largest deficit in history that we're now dealing with.

. . . In the end, that doesn't matter anymore either, here in the land of short attention span theater and complete lack of knowledge of even history from 5 years that people stunningly present every day.

. . . .The most fun about it? Fox News and it's cast of entertainers has become absolutely insane over it. Talk about writhing in agony, these guys are doing a better job of acting than a 4th grader that really doesn't want to go to school today. You lost, it runs in cycles, the Repubs will have their chance to continue screwing all of us, and they were doing such a good job of it, again.

. . . .Even more fun than that is when the cast of drooling morons actually puts themselves on tape proving what kind of fascists they are. Check this one here, where Rupert Murdoch's CEO for News Limited, the holding corp for Fox News, Roger Hartigan, labels writers, columnists and bloggers like me "political extremists" and laments the fact that we aren't rounded up and thrown in prison like in China and Burma. Too bad bitch, this is America, not your Fourth Reich.

. . . .I will freely admit to being a drooling fanatic for Rescue Me on FX networks with Denis Leary as Tommy Gavin. Last night's episode, from the moment that Tommy was sitting alone, drinking, and talking to his dead son, his dead brother, his dead cousin and his dead Dad was from that point on, one of the finest stretches of acting and television that I'd seen in a long, long time. It was absolutely brilliant, and impossible to explain. If you've never watched it, check out the rerun of this week's episode on Friday night at 11 PM.

. . . .Dept. of truly weird shit: Check this video of a weird alien blob out here from a cam that was mounted on a sewer snake down in North Carolina. Yes, it's real, and it's not faked. The alien freaks came out of the woodwork on this one, since it so much resembles the blob from the movie "The Blob", and the Utilities Department down there has their own explanation. I'll let you watch it first, and I'll tell you what their explanation was further down.

. . . .Dept. of even truly weirder shit: Scientists have discovered a mega-colony of ants, a species called Argentinian ants. When I say mega-colony, I'm talked about an inter-related colony that extends to every continent on Earth; like the a 3,700 mile long colony in Europe along the Mediterranean; one that extends 560 miles up the California coast; one that runs the entire coast of Japan. And, genetically, they're all interrelated. What that means is that they're not aggressive towards one another, and won't kill another colony, they're all basically one colony. They're growing. Catch the whole story here at the BBC.

. . . .The world's 8th largest economy shut down this morning and is bankrupt. I'm talking about the state, that by itself, was the world's 8th biggest economy, larger than most countries on Earth. California is bankrupt, and out of business. Guess what? Poof! It's gone.

. . . . .Geez! Enough already. I mean, it's pretty obvious that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford got the fuck of his lifetime from this Argentinian woman, he's waxed poetic about it enough. Can we move on? Please. Either divorce your wife and go back to getting great blowjobs, or not, but get back to governing. What does getting laid have to do with being a Governor? Hunh? After all, the Republican Party is full of Mark Sanfords, and has a long history of them:
Newt Gingrich -two affairs, two divorces
John McCain - affair on disabled first wife, followed by a divorce, then marrying Miss Moneybags
Rudy Guiliani - divorced from his first wife, married, an affair, then a truly nasty divorce
Fred Thompson - affair, divorce
Rush Limbaugh - too many marriages to mention, (4 total), but there weren't affairs, he's the exception to the rule. No one wants to bang the sweaty windbag, methinks there's a lot of dollar signs in women's eyes when they meet him.
And let us not forget, the most famous South Carolinian of them all, Strom Thurmond, who was absolutely the kinkiest of the lot - The "affair" with his black maid, which resulted in a daughter for one of the most famous foes of integration and a true Son of the South. Oh, by the way, the word "affair" is in quotes since the maid was 15 at the time. Or there was his mistress, who was on Death Row, in a South Carolina peniteniary.

Now, between those gems and Sanford, 2006 to 2009 gets really confusing, what with Vitter, Larry Craig, Ensign, et al. One of TPM's readers sent in this helpful flow chart.

. . . The point here is simple. It's pretty damn hypocritical of the Republican Party to call for him to step down.

. . . .And no, I haven't forgotten Bill Clinton's sexual hijinks in the White House with Monica Lewinsky, the First BBW, but we are talking about a man that Paula Jones wouldn't screw. Nor can I leave the other Democrat, John Edwards, out. His shit stinks on that one big, but, these two compared to the above list? It makes the lot of them calling for Clinton's impeachment look, like what it was, sheer hypocrisy.

. . . The rest of the world's attention and the media's focus may be on Michael Jackson, but mine isn't. Mir Hossein Mousavi has asked Iran's protestors to keep going, and called Ahmadenijad's and Khameini's government "illegitimate", to continue to defy an "unlawful Iranian regime" in defiance of the High Cleric, who stated that no more opposition to the election results, or questioning of them, will be allowed. Coverage here.

. . . .Farewell Karl Malden, see you on the other side. If all you remember of Karl is him and Michael Douglas in The Streets of San Francisco you're missing it. Try renting On The Waterfront and watch he and Marlon Brando together.

. . . .In the Congressional investigation that is ramping up to probe the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch deal that Paulson pushed through last September, a very suprising internal GOP memo is being circulated that directly takes on George W Bush and attacks his handling of the economy. The folks at WhoRunsGov have obtained copies of the memo, and you can read the whole piece at the jump here.

An internal GOP memo prepared to brief some House Republicans as part of an ongoing probe into the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch deal takes direct aim at an unlikely target: Former President George W. Bush.

The memo directly blames Bush’s handling of the economic meltdown,. . . . .
“The financial crisis of 2008 had its roots primarily in ill-conceived government policies,” reads the memo. It was prepared by Republican staffers to advise GOP members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on how to handle a recent hearing on the government’s role in Bank of America’s purchase of Merrill Lynch.

. . . .Krugman the Nobel prize winning economist who,along with Noriel Roubini and Mark Zandi called all of this right as far back as 2006, and were derided and laughed at then, on economic recovery, on ABC News, and the same thing that he's reiterated all along, that the Obama Administration got it wrong, and needed to go for a much, much larger stimulus package the first time around to jumpstart the economy:

"The fact of the matter is that the unemployment rate is much worse than the administration contemplated or that most people expected," Krugman told ABC News. "So the economy is much weaker than we thought it'd be, meaning, in fact, it could use more stimulus."
"I'm trying to move the public debate in a better, more sensible direction," Krugman said. "There were not a whole lot of voices at least in the public eye saying what a lot of economists had concluded, which was that the Obama stimulus plan was, if anything, too small."
"The last two recessions were both followed by prolonged jobless recoveries when industrial production and GDP rose, but the unemployment rate continued to rise," he said, "We're almost certainly headed for another patch like that this time around which means that we need the economic support more than ever."

. . . . . How bad is it? The map below from the United States Dept. of Labor shows it.

. . . .For more in-depth investigation of the roots of the economic crisis, and the current political scene, you can't beat Matt Taibbi's work in Rolling Stone. Check out this week's print edition for a great piece on Goldman-Sachs and their contribution to the fiasco. It's not in the web edition yet.

. . . .Watch your credit card statements closely. In anticipation of the sweeping Credit Card Reform Bill that was passed, signed into law and will take effect next January, credit card issuers are screwing you, the holders. Interest rates are being raised, fees are being put on them that never existed and credit limits are being lowered. Chase, Citi and Bank of America being the worst offenders right now.

. . . . On my everlasting topic of upgrading the grid; the cheapest, fastest, best thing we could do right now to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and put some money back in our pockets and get some jobs going now for people who need them. It's also what we need to do, and it's a fundamental need, before we ever think about other energy sources, of changing the grid around, of trying to integrate "green" or "new energy". It's that fragile, it's in that bad a shape, and it's the weak link in the whole plan, from Matthew Wald at the New York Times:

Adding electricity from the wind and the sun could increase the frequency of blackouts and reduce the reliability of the nation's electrical grid, an industry report says
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation says in a report scheduled for release Monday that unless appropriate measures are taken to improve transmission of electricity, rules reducing carbon dioxide emissions by utilities could impair the reliability of the power grid. The corporation is the industry body authorized by the federal government to enforce reliability rules for the interlocking system of electrical power generation and transmission.

. . . .And on the future of us, human beings, this one in from Wired. Up in Canada, they're starting to sell a "second generation" biofuel. An ethanol made from agricultural residue that would otherwise be discarded or trashed. There's still a lot of advances to be made in biofuel, and if we'd only smarten up and get our vehicles switched over to biodiesel, which would make for a great use for old french fry oil, or get ourselves switched over to natural gas powered vehicles. We lead the world in natural gas fields. Otherwise, we participate willingly and gladly every day in the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, gladly lining the pockets of countries who would gladly see us gone the day we can't buy their oil anymore.

. . . . Outta here

. . . .Got your back

. . . . Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one, no one gets out alive. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched, so it's not about yesterday, or tomorrow. It's not about regret and guilt, or hopes and dreams. This ain't no dress rehearsal, it's about right fucking here, right fucking now.
Change your world, change yourself, and change the world at large. This is the sight, the sound, the words and the record of me changing my life. What have you done for yourself lately?

The Desolation Angel

Beginning of a new week (Monday/Tuesday)

Monday/Tuesday (the end of June)

. . . . .No one gets it, unless you work the kind of job like I do, how difficult it is to be and stay isolated for weeks at a time. It's not like there's no contact with the outside world, but it's the sheer limitation of that, only phone calls, TV, the internet and the same people and the almost tease of being in some true contact.

. . . .In a lot of ways, everyone thinks the job is exciting, but you have to have a certain mentality to get through the day, to get through your time, and I don't think everyone has it.

. . . . The tease is watching the rest of the world. Ships in the shipping lanes, other platforms, helos.

. . . . .I"m gonna start a Dead Pool - the rules; the names you have to pick can only be celebrities between 50 and 60 years old that no one is expecting to die. That automatically leaves out Joan Rivers and Keith Richards, both of whom are immortal and will be the only two people on Earth, besides the cockroaches, to survive a Nuclear Holocaust, or an outbreak of Solanum and the attendant Zombie takeover.

. . . .OK, let's go over the rules again.
(1) Fox News - Prime offender. They aren't a "news" station, nor are they "newscasters" of any sort. We live in a capitalist, media driven economy. They are a branch of News Corp. just like their sister stations, FX Network and Fox TV. They are as dependent on ratings to keep their audiences, so they can get advertisers to pay their salaries. They are entertainers and actors, that's all, and very, very highly paid ones at that. They are owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is Australian by birth, and more importantly, a sworn business enemy of George Soros. Their playing field, their battleground is your mind. They don't respect you, they don't care about you. You are a number, and they are counting on you to be one of their sheeple and buy their advertised products and their line of bullshit.
(2) Their cast of entertainers and actors is (a) far wealthier than you, (b) more educated then you and went to a better college and (c) based in New York City. By definition then, they are the "wealthy East Coast elite". By definition, then they are the "mainstream media" they rail against.
(3) They outright lie, and they have an agenda. The examples are numerous, all you have to is read this column, all you have to do is catch yourself up on the last 10, or 15, or 20 or so columns, all below, to find example after example. Glenn Beck lies, Bill O'Reilly lies & Sean Hannity lies. Ann Coulter lies, Michelle Malkin lies. They're not patriots, they are the farthest thing from it.
All definitions from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary
- Traitor - One who commits treason
- Treason - The offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the state to which the offender owes allegiance
- Sedition - Incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.

. . .It is pure and simple logic. Put two and two together for yourself, stop letting the media think for you, and start doing some research into fact. Idiots like Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and O'Reilly are laughing at "the rubes" behind their backs, snickering at them. Fact, the truth and logic are the only things that will defeat the efforts they're making to see you fail. Yes, you. They want the country to fail, they want you to fail, and you, your kids and your grandkids to fail. And they want to continue to get rich, off of you.

- Scheuer tonight on Beck's show - "The only chance we have as a country right now" is for bin Laden to "detonate a major weapon in the U.S."

- FactCheck.org, here's where to check the lies and distortions that Limbaugh and Fox News spread in an attempt to bring the government down.
- OpenSecrets.org, here's where you can track the money that owns your Representatives and Senators. It's not you, and they don't work for you. They work for the lobbyists and special interests that have enough money to buy them.
- OpenCongress.org, here's where you can track a bill, any bill that has gone through, is working it's way through, is still in committee in either the House or the Senate. Here's where you get the truth, not the distortions that the conservative media consistently lays out on you.

(4) The duly elected President of the United States is an American-born citizen, the Supreme Court of the United States, a conservative court installed by George W. Bush, the same court that ruled to put Bush in office, read the birth certificate and declared it. The President of the United States was elected by due Constitutional process in an overwhelming public majority and mandate and an overwhelming electoral majority.
(5) The best one. The President of the United States does not have a vote. He does not enact or pass laws. That would be the Congress; the House of Representatives and the Senate. They vote, they enact laws. They are the ones who are working on legislation for health care, bailouts and stimulus packages, bailouts and stimulus packages and do the voting.

. . . Good example, right here, in The Hill. It's been more than a month since the President signed into law the bill that Congress passed to create a commission to investigate the roots of the financial crisis (see below, it's actually a pretty clear cut path). Democratic and Republican leaders have yet to nominate one single person to the commission.

. . . .I said it yesterday, I reference a lot of rock and roll music, TV and movies here in this column. It's for a reason, the images and impressions that are in our minds from a movie scene, a good TV show, a great song are far more long-lasting then anything a politician has ever said.

. . . .By the way, a tip here during these hard times. If you're using a debit card at the gas pump, you're screwing yourself, big time. Gas stations, when a debit card is swiped, have no idea how much gas you're going to pump. So, the agreement between the gas stations and your debit card holder is that they place anywhere from $100 to $150 dollar hold on your card, and that true amount that you put in doesn't get posted until the gas station sends in their batch transactions, sometimes up to 3 days later. If your account is low, it's a good way to bounce transactions and cost yourself even more in overdraft fees. If your debit card is a Visa or Master Card backed debit, use the the credit option, it's immediate and it's for the exact fee.

. . . .So Madoff gets 150 year sentence, at 71 years old, which will be appealed. He pleaded guilty and had no trial, and accepted the sentence. His wife paid the lawyer in cash, up front. The bulk of the money is missing. Anyone other than me think there's a lot more here other than the kids and wife have the cash and are hiding it? Knowing the feds are watching them? And always will be watching them? AS in there's someone, or more than one someone who's really far back in the shadows on this one that had enough leverage to convince Madoff to take the fall, keep quiet and finish out the rest of his life in jail?

. . . .But more so, why is Joseph Cassano of AIG's London office being allowed to walk around a free man when he bilked the 5 largest banks in the world out of $50 billion dollars in one day and punched an unhealable hole in the fabric of the universe? Yes, that was back in late summer of '08, and precipitated the financial crisis that the Bush White House put this country in and walked out and left the incoming President with. It was the Bush White House that de-regulated even further the Reagan's signing of Garn-St. Germain over 30 years ago that laid the groundwork for this entire bubble to pop and fail.

. . . . . .I can betcha that real quick now, Michael Jackson will be spotted at the Burger King in Kalamazoo, Michigan on West Michigan and Stadium that Elvis and Tupac have been spotted at for years. Jeesus, what people will focus on in order to avoid the real world.

. . . .Over at The Daily Beast, a good one, about 5 important things you missed over the weekend that occurred in Iran, a country that is at most 1 year away from being nuclear capable while you were busy either obessessing over Michael Jackson's death, or busy trying to diss it to prove how much you didn't like him. Either way, it's a waste of time, and a takeaway from the real world, and a country of people who were attempting to overthrow their hardline government, while everyone was busy, the vote recount got trashed, and the government cracked down even harder on the protestors, killed more people.

. . . .My personal favorite right now, when a member of the above-mentioned conservative media says the President should "do something" about Iran. This, when the best neoconservative Middle East experts, and the leading Senate Middle Eastern and foreign affairs expert, Senator John McCain all say that he's handling it perfectly and doing the right things.

. . . .Hey! Great mirth and dancing! Norm Coleman was finally told what a loser he was by the Minnesota Supreme Court and got sent home. Franken will be seated. It only took 8 months for the courts to make a decision on a political process that was decided by the people and the votes of Minnesota.

. . . Outta here, for now

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. This rodeo is a one-way ticket,and no one gets out alive, so it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, it's not about regret or guilt, it's not about hopes and wishes. It's about right damn here, right damn now. This ain't a dress rehearsal. Go change yourself, go change your own world and the world changes around you. This is the the sound and the words or me changing my own life. What have you done for yourself lately?

. . . . .Got your back

The Desolation Angel

Saturday (hot, summer, Saturday night, mmmmm!)

Saturday/Sunday June 28, 2009

. . . . .On this weekend in rock and roll history:
- In 1954, Sam Phillips, after several fruitless, disenheartening recording sessions, paired his new young singer, Elvis Presley, with Scotty Moore and Bill Black at Sun Studios in Memphis.
- In 2002, The Who's bassist, John Entwhistle, died of a heart attack in Las Vegas

. . . . .It's the weekend, so it must be time to catch the week up, so relax, grab a cup of coffee, or something cold, sit back, listen to the tune and catch up on your week. We've got another round of Truth/Lies, exposing the traitors and liars over at Fox News and on Rush's radio show, some reflections on deaths this week that really did count, some news for your own health and how you're killing yourself right now if you have a Diet Coke or diet soda of any kind in your hands, some things you can do right now that (a) can help your personal energy efficiency (b) put some money back in your pocket and (c) you can easily do. I'll start bringing together some of the disparate postings and thoughts that have been up here this week (which you can catch up on down below) and hopefully bring some understanding about that it really is all related.

. . . . On this weekend in history:
- The confrontations between police and demonstrators on the weekend of June 27-29, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New York City mark the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States and were the first instance where members of the homosexual and lesbian community worked in a concerted action to protest a municipal, state and Federal system that persecuted people based on sexual orientation.

. . . .From Frank Rich this morning in the New York Times: 40 Years After Stonewall, Still Second Class Citizens:

. . . . .Then again, I didn’t know a single person, student or teacher, male or female, in my entire Ivy League university who was openly identified as gay. And though my friends and I were obsessed with every iteration of the era’s political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not hard to do, really. The Times — which would not even permit the use of the word gay until 1987 — covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized articles, one of them but three paragraphs long, buried successively on pages 33, 22 and 19.

But if we had read them, would we have cared? It was typical of my generation, like others before and after, that the issue of gay civil rights wasn’t on our radar screen. Not least because gay people, fearful of harassment, violence and arrest, were often forced into the shadows. As David Carter writes in his book “Stonewall,” at the end of the 1960s homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois. It was a crime punishable by castration in seven states. No laws — federal, state or local — protected gay people from being denied jobs or housing. If a homosexual character appeared in a movie, his life ended with either murder or suicide. . . . . .
. . . . After the gay liberation movement was born at Stonewall, this strand of history advanced haltingly until the 1980s. It took AIDS and the new wave of gay activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay people all around them. But that tardy and still embryonic national awareness did not save the lives of those whose abridged rights made them even more vulnerable during a rampaging plague. . . .

. . . .The cultural climate is far different today, besides. Now, roughly 75 percent of Americans support an end to Don’t Ask, and gay issues are no longer a third rail in American politics. Gay civil rights history is moving faster in the country, including on the once-theoretical front of same-sex marriage, than it is in Washington. If the country needs any Defense of Marriage Act at this point, it would be to defend heterosexual marriage from the right-wing “family values” trinity of Sanford, Ensign and Vitter. . . . .

. . . . .No president possesses that magic wand, but Obama’s inaction on gay civil rights is striking. So is his utterly uncharacteristic inarticulateness. The Justice Department brief defending DOMA has spoken louder for this president than any of his own words on the subject. Chrisler noted that he has given major speeches on race, on abortion and to the Muslim world. “People are waiting for that passionate speech from him on equal rights,” she said, “and the time is now.”

Action would be even better. It’s a press cliché that “gay supporters” are disappointed with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places. . . . .

. . . . . .Read the entire piece here.

. . . . . .I'm fortunate in that, very seriously, I do see both race and sexual orientation. There's plenty of plastic progressive/liberal people who use the phrase "I just don't see race/orientation". I am a tattooed, pierced black wearing Irish asshole, who is as hetero as they come. I'm also not stupid, and realize that genetic differences are not something that just can't be "seen", they are obvious and overt. What I make a very adult choice to do is to understand that those things have not one fucking thing to do with a person's worth, value or character! They are things that just are, period, and don't have one damn thing to do with my friendship or relationship with them. The other thing that I strive to do is not to be insulting and say that I "understand" or that I "empathize". I can't, I don't have the genetic make-up to be a minority, I was born with white privilege, (yes, it does exist); I was born heterosexual, and don't have the genetic make-up for homosexuality, so I can't understand what it is to be in that minority group either, so I've never experienced that kind of discrimination. All I can do is what I do, love my friends and be willing to take a bullet for them, or walk down any dark alley with them to face the unknown. That's all I know how to do.

. . . . .I won't pretend to minimize the grief of Michael Jackson's family, his children, his brothers and sisters, his father. I've lost a family member myself, and no one, no one can tell anyone else how it feels, or minimize it. I will say that I don't understand the public hysteria, or the wall-to-wall 24/7 coverage of it by every news station. I don't understand breaking into broadcasts to tell the world that the autopsy results were inconclusive, or about his financial problems. There were other deaths this week. Deaths just as notable. Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Neda the young woman in Iran shot while getting out of her car, and for me, two more deaths just as important, if ranking death in significance is something that can be done.

. . . .There was another death this week. A significant one. Dr. Jerri Nielsen died early Tuesday. Don't remember her? Name doesn't sound familiar? It should, she captivated the American public's attention for a hot 15 minutes back in 1999 when she was trapped in the Antarctic winter, diagnosed herself with breast cancer, (gave herself a needle biopsy, try doing that to yourself), and gave herself chemotherapy with supplies parachuted in by the U.S. Air Force.
That's a hero, that's someone who demonstrated bravery, courage and who didn't know the meaning of the word quit.

. . . . .There was another death this week. Kaveh Alipour, a 19 year old Iranian who was engaged to marry his fiancee next week was leaving an acting class and got caught in the crossfire of the Revolutionary Guard, who were firing on protestors in downtown Iran. When his family went to the morgue to collect his body, they were told that there was the equivalent of a $3,000 U.S. "bullet fee" to collect his body. The family's earthly possessions don't amount to that much. When the morgue waived the fee, they told that family that Kaveh could not be buried in Tehran, and would have to be buried outside the city as retribution for being so poor as to not have the fee.

. . . I speculated yesterday, the very unintentionally, and quite by the nature of our society and it's short attention span, that Michael Jackson's death would inadvertently and wind up helping the Mullahs, the High Cleric and Ahmadenijad. It happened just that way. In the last 24 to 48 hours there is almost no information coming out of Iran, except that of the state-run media. No phones, no Facebook, no Twitter. The ray of hope is that as of Sunday, thousands had taken to street anyhow, and there are reports that the British Embassy staff has been arrested. That would be a huge, huge mistake.

. . . .I hope, desperately hope, that the world now sees, in Ahmadenijad and the High Cleric just what they are dealing with. Monsters, who only wanted to show the world the appearance of civil rights, the appearance of open elections. Tyrants who only want to keep their power, and keep their people under their thumb.

. . . .Only one problem with that. Their people have started something that will eventually, even if it takes decades, become a movement. Ahmadenijad and the High Cleric did something, started something that will be their undoing. They gave the people a purpose and passion, a belief and a movement. It will be their downfall.

. . . . And please people, educate yourselves. Start to understand the difference between the Taliban and Shariiyah law and Al-Quaeda. The Taliban, wherever they are located, wherever they live, want their province or their country, people who are already Islamic and living there, under Shaariya law. It doesn't make them Al-Quaeda. Al-Quaeda are far more dangerous, they are cosmic warriors, people who want an impossible goal, and know it's impossible, but are willing to die for it, that of a world, and entire planet as one Caliphate, and they understand that it can't be done, but are willing to die for it. They are like an infectious virus, that's the best way to think of them, that uses the Taliban as a host body.

. . . .If you remember one of the best and most brilliant shows to ever be cancelled from network television, Firefly, and the movie it spawned, Serenity:
Operative: "You've done remarkable things, but you're fighting a war you've already lost."
Mal: "Yeah, well, I'm known for that."

. . . .I have readers that get it, and readers that don't. Yes, there's always a lot of popular culture references in here. Lot's of rock and roll references, lots of Bruce, Bob Dylan, Hendrix et al. Lots of movie references. Lots of television references; Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Rescue Me, Deadwood, The Wire.
. . . It's simple, popular culture; rock and roll, TV, movies reflect who we are, who we really are, they're our reflections, and not our shadow selves, either. They're most of the time a reflection of who we aspire to be. It's cool, just relax, you'll get it. It's all part of the flow, all part of the web, the matrix.
. . . .There's nothing wrong with the fine arts, with culture, it's just that somehow, here in America, we seemed to get it and understand that the supposed "fine arts" were, are, the rock and roll and television of their time.

. . . .Fox News Lies vs. Truth alert! More Faux News lies. Let's get something straight, ACORN is not taking the census. They're one of more than 30,000 groups promoting the census. It's like I keep telling the Faux News sheeple all the time, check your facts!!!! Not the lies and distortions that Glenn Beck and Michelle Bachmann were spreading the other night, not the distortions that Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Malkin, Coulter and Limbaugh spread daily. The most reliable source? I use Fact Check.org

. . . .Fox News Lies vs. Truth alert! The President has not proposed a government-run health care plan, and in fact straight out on the White House's Health Care page, says straight up that government run health care is wrong. That would be the "single payer" option that was brought up, discussed and dropped. The crew at Faux News has very deliberately used the phrase "government-run" health care over and over, and it's simply not true. The proposal on the table is the public option, which is the exact same health care plan that members of Congress and their families have. (See why they don't want you to have it? It's a pretty good deal). That obnoxious ad from the Conservatives for Patient's Rights and Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity on the media side and Cantor and Boehner on the Congressional side have deliberately mischaracterized the public option as a Canadian style government run plan. Again, check the facts, and quit letting Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck do your thinking for you, they're laughing at you behind your back.

. . . . .And yes, it's been over 100 years since President Teddy Roosevelt, that's Teddy folks, called for health care reform.

. . . You know, I'm thinking right now that I could use listening to some old Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, and some Derek and the Dominos.

. . . .Let's see. . .what else has the merry band of idiots been up to this week? Besides conveniently ostracizing Gov. Rick Sanford of S. Carolina for his impossible, romance novel style affair. Oh, that's right, John McCain had an affair on his first wife and got divorced to marry Miss Moneybags. Newt Gingrich, that would be twice he did the exact same thing, oh, and Senator Ensign, who got caught this week too! He was the one during the Clinton flap that stated that kind of moral perfidy had no place in Government. Soon, soon the band of idiots that is the Republican Party and their extreme Right wing media machine will completely self-destruct as they form up that circular firing squad. These guys really couldn't get installing a freezer in the Arctic right, really they couldn't. What gets these folks in trouble is their sanctimonious, hypocritical, holier-than-thou self-righteousness. Seriously, under their Brooks Brothers suits, these folks are kinkier and more twisted than any leather-wearing, spanking freak Victorian could hope to be, and everyone knows it. The only ones who don't see it are them! And greedy and corrupt? Do they think we just have conveniently forgotten Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff, these idiots come cheap - that's a well-established fact.

. . . .Next up on the "Oh shit, we've got to start campaigning someone now for 2012, right now" GOP merry-go-round of mouthbreathers - Haley Barbour and Tim Pawlenty. Don't these fools get it? You're sacrificial lambs, having your throats cut at the altar of Newt Gingrich, by your own people!

. . . .Rush Limbaugh Lies vs. Truth Alert! Third hour of Rush on Friday - "There isn't any global warming." Alright, you sweaty, lying, traitorous Oxycontin-addled gasbag, here are the numbers ( I love numbers. Numbers are numbers, not opinions, they just are):
- From the report prepared for Congress by an interagency group and requested by the Bush Administration:
- Winter temperatures have increased by 4 degrees since the 1970's in the Northeast
-Spring rainfall down 30 percent since 1970 in the Southeast
- Overall ice cover on the Great Lakes has plummeted since the 70's, and winter temperatures have increased by an overall 7 degrees since then in the Midwest.
- Water levels have dropped by over 150 feet in the Great Plains
- Snowpack is down by 60% in the Pacific Northwest
- Alaska is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the U.S. Winter temperatures have risen over 6 degrees since the 70's.

. . .An Arctic ice melt of over 2 trillion tons has occured since 2003.

. . .From the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - The Arctic air surface temperature change between 2005 - 2008 was 5 degrees Celsius higher than expected. This change wasn't expected to occur until the year 2070.

. . . And the report no one is talking about, because it scares the shit out of them, Republican and Democrat alike, ordered by the Bush Administration, issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration on January 19th, and left on Obama's desk for him:
"Climate change is likely irreversible"

. . . Short form - "We're fucked".

. . . . .Understand that the previous administration, the Bush White House, in truth and in secret understood the serious challenges that irreversible climate change presented. When Obama took office, he kept the same National Security Advisor. Who still, as he did for Bush every day for two years, prepares a daily National Security briefing for the President on climate change, which right now is ranked #2 in the listings of threats to National Security. The short answer on that is simple, a loss of water and a loss of arable land pose threats to food supplies. A rise in coastal sea levels means a loss of habitable land, since that's where most of ours, and the worlds, populations live, within 100 miles of coasts. Large migrations of hungry, thirsty people in search of a place to live means one thing - war. That's what all wars are fought about in the end; land, money or religion. Can you see a perfect storm coming?

. . . .What you need to ask yourself are some questions: (a) If the Bush White House knew it, and asked for the reports daily, why did they deny it's reality? (b) Why aren't your media heroes; Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly not talking about it when they're supposedly "smarter" than you ( that is why people listen to these raving maniacs isn't it, to have their world spoon fed to them by an "expert" so they don't have to think for themselves? Hmmm?) and able to absorb the pure dispassion and non-opinions of numbers? Numbers don't have an opinion, they're either a 1 or 0, either black or white, there's no opinion involved. (Psst! Here's a clue to the answer to b, it's because they do know, and they don't give a shit about you, or your kids, or your grandkids) (c) If those numbers are staring you in the face, why do you deny their logical conclusion?

. . . . Sheer idiotic Republican alert! Joe the Plumber, nee Samuel Wurzelbacher who is not a plumber by any stretch of the imagination, of the Toledo, Ohio area (Thank God, if you're from Michigan, you understand the Toledo reference, given his area of residence, he's pretty typical!) on Thursday at one wingnut rally or another in reference to Senator Chris Dodd - "Why hasn't he been strung up?"
. . . .This follows a March appearance at another conservative rally where he told his audience that they "were making him horny".

. . . .Attn.!!! Would the aliens who used to abduct people on a regular basis, seemingly, at least, please return and start again? We have a list for you, with names and addresses.

. . . . .Sheer unmitigated fly-in-the-face of reality Republican gall alert! Sen. John Boehner this week on the economy and stimulus packages. "Where are the jobs?". Uh, John, dude. It's only been 4 months, and the money is tied up in Senate committees whilst hypocrites like you, who said you didn't want it, fight like starving mongrels over bigger and bigger pieces of it. At this rate, it won't start getting parceled out this Presidential term, much less before the end of the fiscal year, thanks to you all.

. . . .OK, so as long as we're on a roll at getting your mind cleared up, let's work on your body. If you're sitting there with a Diet Coke in your hand, or a Diet drink of any kind, you're killing yourself. It's that simple. Aspartame, a sweetener developed by Monsanto, was originally developed as a pesticide. It was decided, by Monsanto, that it had better uses as a sweetener. There has been an extensive Internet war over whether or not Aspartame (Equal, Nutrasweet, etc.) was safe or unsafe. I'm not going to go there. What I will do, is run the numbers, and let you decide for yourself:
Aspartame, approximately 10% by mass, breaks down into methanol while in your body, which in turn, due to metabolic processes in the body, breaks down into formaldehyde, which is absorbed into the soft tissue of the intestinal tract. which leads to a build-up of formic acid, again due to natural, normal body processes. Understand, that I'm saying that the metabolic processes are natural and normal. The presence of methanol, formaldehyde and formic acid aren't. Now you know, use your own mind, and make a decision. Do your own fact checking, at Fact Check.org, or at any reference website as to numbers and processes I used above. Then go ahead pour yourself another Diet soda of some kind.

. . . .While you're at it, do your own investigation on Bing or Google on the phrase "asparagus and cancer". Get some information, I think you'll be surprised, pleasantly, and make your own mind up.

. . . .While we're on the human body and mind, let's stop back in at KurzweilAI.net and continue the series that we started a couple of days ago on the continuing leaps in the evolution of the human consciousness:

Nanotechnology and the Human Brain

The most important and radical application particularly of circa-2030 nanobots will be to expand our minds through the merger of biological and nonbiological, or “machine,” intelligence. In the next 25 years, we will learn how to augment our 100 trillion very slow interneuronal connections with high-speed virtual connections via nanorobotics. This will allow us to greatly boost our pattern-recognition abilities, memories, and overall thinking capacity, as well as to directly interface with powerful forms of computer intelligence. The technology will also provide wireless communication from one brain to another.

In other words, the age of telepathic communication is almost upon us.

Our brains today are relatively fixed in design. Although we do add patterns of interneuronal connections and neurotransmitter concentrations as a normal part of the learning process, the current overall capacity of the human brain is highly constrained. As humanity’s artificial-intelligence (AI) capabilities begin to upstage our human intelligence at the end of the 2030s, we will be able to move beyond the basic architecture of the brain’s neural regions.

Brain implants based on massively distributed intelligent nanobots will greatly expand our memories and otherwise vastly improve all of our sensory, pattern-recognition, and cognitive abilities. Since the nanobots will be communicating with one another, they will be able to create any set of new neural connections, break existing connections (by suppressing neural firing), create new hybrid biological and computer networks, and add completely mechanical networks, as well as interface intimately with new computer programs and artificial intelligences.

The implementation of artificial intelligence in our biological systems will mark an evolutionary leap forward for humanity, but it also implies we will indeed become more “machine” than “human.” Billions of nanobots will travel through the bloodstream in our bodies and brains. In our bodies, they will destroy pathogens, correct DNA errors, eliminate toxins, and perform many other tasks to enhance our physical well-being. As a result, we will be able to live indefinitely without aging.

In our brains, nanobots will interact with our biological neurons. This will provide full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses, as well as neurological correlates of our emotions, from within the nervous system. More importantly, this intimate connection between our biological thinking and the machine intelligence we are creating will profoundly expand human intelligence.

Warfare will move toward nanobot-based weapons, as well as cyber-weapons. Learning will first move online, but once our brains are fully online we will be able to download new knowledge and skills. The role of work will be to create knowledge of all kinds, from music and art to math and science. The role of play will also be to create knowledge. In the future, there won’t be a clear distinction between work and play.

The Robotic Revolution

Of the three technological revolutions underlying the Singularity (genetic, nano-mechanical, and robotic), the most profound is robotic or, as it is commonly called, the strong artificial intelligence revolution. This refers to the creation of computer thinking ability that exceeds the thinking ability of humans. We are very close to the day when fully biological humans (as we now know them today) cease to be the dominant intelligence on the planet. By the end of this century, computational or mechanical intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human brain power. I argue that computer, or as I call it nonbiological intelligence, should still be considered human since it is fully derived from human-machine civilization and will be based, at least in part, on a human-made version of a fully functional human brain. The merger of these two worlds of intelligence is not merely a merger of biological and mechanical thinking mediums, but also and more importantly, a merger of method and organizational thinking that will expand our minds in virtually every imaginable way.

Biological human thinking is limited to 10 to the 16th power calculations per second (cps) per human brain (based on neuromorphic modeling of brain regions) and about 10 to the 26th power cps for all human brains. These figures will not appreciably change, even with bioengineering adjustments to our genome. The processing capacity of nonbiological intelligence or strong AI, in contrast, is growing at an exponential rate (with the rate itself increasing) and will vastly exceed biological intelligence by the mid-2040s.

Artificial intelligence will necessarily exceed human intelligence for several reasons.

First, machines can share knowledge and communicate with one another far more efficiently than can humans. As humans, we do not have the means to exchange the vast patterns of interneuronal connections and neurotransmitter-concentration levels that comprise our learning, knowledge, and skills, other than through slow, language-based communication.

Second, humanity’s intellectual skills have developed in ways that have been evolutionarily encouraged in natural environments. Those skills, which are primarily based on our abilities to recognize and extract meaning from patterns, enable us to be highly proficient in certain tasks such as distinguishing faces, identifying objects, and recognizing language sounds. Unfortunately, our brains are less well-suited for dealing with more-complex patterns, such as those that exist in financial, scientific, or product data. The application of computer-based techniques will allow us to fully master pattern-recognition paradigms. Finally, as human knowledge migrates to the Web, machines will demonstrate increased proficiency in reading, understanding, and synthesizing all human-machine information.

The Chicken or the Egg

A key question regarding the Singularity is whether the “chicken” (strong AI) or the “egg” (nanotechnology) will come first. In other words, will strong AI lead to full nanotechnology (molecular-manufacturing assemblers that can turn information into physical products), or will full nanotechnology lead to strong AI?

The logic of the first premise is that strong AI would be in a position to solve any remaining design problems required to implement full nanotechnology. The second premise is based on the assumption that hardware requirements for strong AI will be met by nanotechnology-based computation. Likewise, the software requirements for engineering strong AI would be facilitated by nanobots. These microscopic machines will allow us to create highly detailed scans of human brains along with diagrams of how the human brain is able to do all the wonderful things that have long mystified us such as create meaning, contextualize information, and experience emotion. Once we fully understand how the brain functions, we will be able to recreate the phenomena of human thinking in machines. We will endow computers, already superior to us in the performance of mechanical tasks, with lifelike intelligence.

Progress in both areas (nano and robotic) will necessarily use our most-advanced tools, so advances in each field will simultaneously facilitate the other. However, I do expect that the most important nanotechnological breakthroughs will emerge prior to strong AI, but only by a few years (around 2025 for nanotechnology and 2029 for strong AI).

As revolutionary as nanotechnology will be, strong AI will have far more profound consequences. Nanotechnology is powerful but not necessarily intelligent. We can devise ways of at least trying to manage the enormous powers of nanotechnology, but superintelligence by its nature cannot be controlled.

The nano/robotic revolution will also force us to reconsider the very definition of human. Not only will we be surrounded by machines that will display distinctly human characteristics, but we will be less human from a literal standpoint.

Despite the wonderful future potential of medicine, real human longevity will only be attained when we move away from our biological bodies entirely. As we move toward a software-based existence, we will gain the means of “backing ourselves up” (storing the key patterns underlying our knowledge, skills, and personality in a digital setting) thereby enabling a virtual immortality. Thanks to nanotechnology, we will have bodies that we can not just modify but change into new forms at will. We will be able to quickly change our bodies in full-immersion virtual-reality environments incorporating all of the senses during the 2020s and in real reality in the 2040s.

. . . . .OK, now that we've stretched waaay out, let's come back in a little bit and take a look at what we can today, right now to improve our own energy efficiency, right at home. I harp constantly on upgrading the national Electrical grid, which still remains the biggest waste of energy that we have, and a constant drain on our wallets, our bank accounts and the system overall. I'm damn sick and tired of hearing the phrase "transfer of wealth" come out of the extreme Right's and neoconservative's mouths, while they participate, daily, hourly in the largest transfer of wealth in human history as we continue to pay for our dependence on foreign oil. Every time, they, you, any one of us, fills a tank up , pays an electric bill, turns on a computer, turns on a TV, we are contributing to that transfer of wealth, putting a few more dollars of our own in it, and putting it in the bank accounts of people in countries that aren't friendly to us, and don't have our long-term national interests at heart. So. . . .
. . .Like I've said over and over, we absolutely have to reinvent/upgrade/modernize the grid, otherwise everything else we do in terms of new energy sources, harvesting solar, wind, water powered turbines will be for naught. From Popular Science, by David Roberts:

The American electric grid is an engineering marvel, arguably the single largest and most complex machine in the world. It's also 40 years old and so rickety that power interruptions and blackouts cost the economy some $150 billion a year. The idea of building a connected "smart" grid that can route power intelligently is beyond daunting, no matter how much stimulus money gets thrown at it. But if we want to cut carbon, we have no choice. Today's grid simply cannot handle a large-scale rollout of the clean-energy sources outlined in this series. In part that's because we need new high-voltage power lines to connect parts of the country where renewable resources are abundant (the sunny Southwest deserts, the windy Great Plains) to the cities and suburbs where more people live. But the more fundamental problem is that most renewable power sources don't behave like fossil-fuel sources — they can't be turned on and off on demand. Wind farms produce power only when the wind blows; solar, only when the sun shines. This is problematic, because power demand is twofold: We need "baseload" power that's predictable and steady, and "peak" power for daily spikes in demand (when, say, everyone arrives home and turns on their air conditioning). Intermittent renewables are not well suited to either. But with more power lines connecting power sources over a broader geographical area, renewables can simulate baseload power. (The wind is always blowing somewhere.) And a smarter grid cleverly shifting power demand around can redirect enough clean electricity to handle it when demand increases suddenly.

. . . .Read the entire article here.

- Get an energy audit done by your utility company, or someone who is either a licensed electrician, a licensed HVAC tech or a licensed Builder. It'll be worth what it costs you to do, in terms of the dollars you'll save on your energy bill, and the $1500 tax credit you can get for making your home more energy efficient. Use someone like me, or my bro Tom. Now, if you live out of state, paying us to come is kind of self-defeating, due to the gas we'd use, but if you want us to come that bad and have a cup of coffee, I suppose one of us would!

- Check out Hohm from Microsoft, which will be Beta-released next week. It's a software application that will be a web-based service for keeping that is a home power management software tool.

- And in the most exciting news for a closet geeky fan-boy like me, the Canadian duo, Cold Fusion, who hope to deliver a cold fusion reactor for about a tenth of the estimated cost of other such projects just got a grant for $12 million to continue research.

. . . .Outta here for today, hope you had a good weekend, have a good start of the week.

. . . . .Got your back, somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids and tell them you love them out loud. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one, no one, gets out alive. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched, no one does. So it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, about guilt or regret or worry, it all is what it is, and it's today. This ain't a dress rehearsal, the curtain's gone up and it's showtime, right here, right now. This is the sights, the sounds, the words of me changing my life. Change your life, change the world around you, that's the way it works.

The Desolation Angel

Friday - only just another day to me

Friday June 25, 2009

. . . . .Today in rock and roll history, The Beatles released A Hard Day's Night in 1964, and in 1971, the Fillmore East in New York City closed after it's final show, preserved forever as The Allman Brothers Live At The Fillmore East.

. . . .And in 1963, President John F. Kennedy visited West Berlin and, in front of the Berlin Wall, proclaimed "Ich bin ein Berliner".

. . . .H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which in it's final form was H.R. 2998 passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 219 to 212. The version that passed was nothing like either the Progressives or the extreme Right media have been portraying it, more on that later in the column. Now it moves on to the Senate.

. . . .The news of the day? Of course, Michael Jackson's death. Yes, he was a transcendent entertainer and a pop culture icon. Yes, he did have a troubled mind and a twisted soul, that can't be left out of the equation either. What is being left out of the equation is fact that Farrah Fawcett died yesterday too. Or that Ed McMahon died this week too. What troubles me the most, is that last week, a young woman named Neda was shot in the face in Tehran in a square while parking her car to attend a rally in support of the protestors of the tyrannical Khameini-Ahmadenijad regime. What troubles me is the number of Iranians who have worn green in support of overthrowing this government, of exposing it's rigged elections who have been killed, hacked to death, shot. What troubles me is knowing the eventually Mir Mousavi and his wife will be killed. What troubles me is that President Obama and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel stood shoulder to shoulder today in the East Wing of the White House and declared to Ahmadenijad that "The violence perpetrated against them [the protestors] is outrageous, we see it and we condemn it." and scoffed at Ahmadenijad's demand that Obama "stop interfering", and the headlines tonight are about Michael Jackson's autopsy. What troubles me is the transparent hypocrisy. Michael Jackson went from child superstar, to the King of Pop, to a very troubled man, whose every breath and word were scutinized, to an object of derision, to somehow, overnight, someone whose death was earthshaking. What troubles me is the short attention span theater of the American public's mind. What troubles me is this. If we truly believe that we are all related, all interconnected as a family of humanity, why is one person's death, someone whose ticket was punched and it was his time, not his call; why is his death any more important than the death yesterday afternoon of a protestor in Iran, a child dying of hunger in an American city who lacked the strenth to fight off an illness and couldn't afford health care or a victim of genocide or AIDS in Africa? If we admire John Kennedy so much for that one reminder, his statement that he was a Berliner too, an expression of solidarity, then why can't we remember what that means.

. . . .Maybe I'm a hypocrite, maybe I'll feel the same way when Bruce dies, or Bob Dylan, or Bono. I hope not, I hope I'll mourn their passing, be thankful for the gifts they gave us while they were here, and hope I learned enough from the words, poetry and song they give us to know that they would want me to mourn that child's or that person's death just as much as theirs.

. . . .Essentially, in the end, Michael Jackson's death, helps the Mullahs, the Cleric and the High Council as the world turns it's attention away from Tehran to spectate at a new tragedy.

. . . .I knew it! Even Republican Representative Michelle Bachmann of Anoka, Minnesota can be too weird even for fringe folks. I re-watched the clip of Bachmann on Glenn Beck's show in which she proclaimed that the census will be used by the Obama Adminstration to "put us all in internment camps". Even Glenn Beck, Dr. Doom himself, the master of Fear in the afternoon with his own version of Shock Theater had had enough of her. You can see him in his facial expression and his very firm cutting her off. Man, the day that Glenn Beck finds someone too whacked out for even him . . .???

. . . .Personally I'm good with her refusing to fill out her census form, and I hope she urges her entire district not to. That way, her district won't exist anymore, and be absorbed into a neighboring district, she'll be out of a job and have to spend her days in Anoka, which won't receive any State or Federal services anymore, since no people will be counted to live there. Then they'll have to put up with her insane rants on a street corner somewhere Anoka. I'm good with that.

. . . . .The traitor Limbaugh today on his show - "Obama is more African in his roots than American". Obama is an "African colonial"
- I remind you, he is the sitting President of the United States of America, elected through due Constitutional process. Before you decide to debate with me, look up the legal definitions of the words treason, traitor and sedition. Rush Limbaugh is a traitor, guilty of treason and sedition.

. . . .Do I believe that the bill that passed the House today is the answer, as in The Answer to global climate change? No, I don't. In order to get it to pass, the authors, Waxman and Markey, reduced the goals for carbon emissions and threw some big, big favors to the big agribusiness and coal industries. Do I believe in the fairytale of clean coal technology? Absolutely not, the very process of burning coal to convert it to energy, inherently, by it's chemistry, cannot and is not a clean process. Do I think that cap-and-trade is an answer? Not in any way. Making polluting emissions a tradable commodity I personally think is insane. All one has to do is look at oil, which is a tradable commodity and the way it gets manipulated for the profit of the speculators and to the misery of the consumer to have the answer to that. Why do I think it's landmark legislation? Simple, Washington, the Beltway, Congress, the Senate, the House and the White House are, with this vote, finally admitting that something is wrong, drastically wrong and we need to do something.
Still don't believe in global climate change? I'm a numbers guy, someone who believes that the Universe and the Earth itself are run by the numbers, by the laws of Physics, of Thermodynamics, by Mathematics itself, and here's the situation, right here in the United States, from a report issued by the interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program required on a regular basis by Congress and just recently compiled and released:
In the Northeast, winters have increased in average temperature by 4 degrees since 1970, and in the near future, even warmer winters, a maple syrup industry that is forced to Canada, and extreme heat and very polluted air in the summer in the densely packed urban areas up there.
In the Southeast, spring rainfall is down 30% since 1970, and they can look forward to even more extreme heat, drought and stronger hurricanes.
In the Midwest, ice cover on the Great Lakes is increasingly thinner and thinner during the winter and average winter temperatures have risen 7 degrees since 1970. In the near future, Great Lakes water levels will drop by 2 feet, and increased drought, insects and migrating plant species will continue to impinge on farming ability.
In the Great Plains, water levels have already dropped by more than 150 feet in some places. The far North of the Great Plains can expect rainfall levels to increase by more than 40%, leading to devastating flooding, while the Southern Great Plains can expect a 40% decrease, adding to the drought.
In the Southwest, Droughts, fires and rainfall off by as much as 40%, while in the Pacific Northwest, snowpack is down by as much as 60%, and soon the last 40% of snowpack in the Cascades will be gone.
By the way, I've kept it simple, and does any of this sound like the truth? As in the weather patterns this year? It's not theory, it's happening, just watch the news.
Notice how much of this involves water? Water will be a more precious commodity than oil soon. If we don't get some handle on water reclamation technology, and desalinization processes, it's going to be a disaster. A human being can only live 3 days without water.
600 U.S. neighborhoods have air that could cause cancer.
So, do I think the Waxman-Markey bill is the answer? Absolutely not, but it's finally a public admission by the members of Government that there's a problem, and we need to act.

. . . By the way, guess who's changed his tune on climate change? None other than Newt himself.
Check it here.

. . . .Continuing the series I started yesterday from KurzweilAI.net on the Singularity and the evolution of humanity:

The first half of the twenty-first century will be characterized by three overlapping revolutions—in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. These will usher in the beginning of this period of tremendous change I refer to as the Singularity. We are in the early stages of the genetics revolution today. By understanding the information processes underlying life, we are learning to reprogram our biology to achieve the virtual elimination of disease, dramatic expansion of human potential, and radical life extension. However, Hans Moravec of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute points out that no matter how successfully we fine-tune our DNA-based biology, biology will never be able to match what we will be able to engineer once we fully understand life’s principles of operation. In other words, we will always be “second-class robots.”

The nanotechnology revolution will enable us to redesign and rebuild—molecule by molecule—our bodies and brains and the world with which we interact, going far beyond the limitations of biology.

But the most powerful impending revolution is the robotic revolution. By robotic, I am not referring exclusively—or even primarily—to humanoid-looking droids that take up physical space, but rather to artificial intelligence in all its variations.

Following, I have laid out the principal components underlying each of these coming technological revolutions. While each new wave of progress will solve the problems from earlier transformations, each will also introduce new perils, but each, operating both separately and in concert, underpins the Singularity.

The Genetic Revolution

Genetic and molecular science will extend biology and correct its obvious flaws (such as our vulnerability to disease). By the year 2020, the full effects of the genetic revolution will be felt across society. We are rapidly gaining the knowledge and the tools to drastically extend the usability of the “house” each of us calls his body and brain.

Nanomedicine researcher Robert Freitas estimates that eliminating 50% of medically preventable conditions would extend human life expectancy 150 years. If we were able to prevent 90% of naturally occurring medical problems, we’d live to be more than 1,000 years old.

We can see the beginnings of this awesome medical revolution today. The field of genetic biotechnology is fueled by the growing arsenal of tools. Drug discovery was once a matter of finding substrates (chemicals) that produced some beneficial result without excessive side effects, a research method similar to early humans’ seeking out rocks and other natural implements that could be used for helpful purposes. Today we are discovering the precise biochemical pathways that underlie both disease and aging processes. We are able to design drugs to carry out precise missions at the molecular level. With recently developed gene technologies, we’re on the verge of being able to control how genes express themselves. Gene expression is the process by which cellular components (specifically RNA and the ribosomes) produce proteins according to a precise genetic blueprint. While every human cell contains a complete DNA sample, and thus the full complement of the body’s genes, a specific cell, such as a skin cell or a pancreatic islet cell, gets its characteristics from only the fraction of genetic information relevant to that particular cell type.

Gene expression is controlled by peptides (molecules made up of sequences of up to 100 amino acids) and short RNA strands. We are now beginning to learn how these processes work. Many new therapies currently in development and testing are based on manipulating peptides either to turn off the expression of disease-causing genes or to turn on desirable genes that may otherwise not be expressed in a particular type of cell. A new technique called RNA interference is able to destroy the messenger RNA expressing a gene and thereby effectively turn that gene off.

Accelerating progress in biotechnology will enable us to reprogram our genes and metabolic processes to propel the fields of genomics (influencing genes), proteomics (understanding and influencing the role of proteins), gene therapy (suppressing gene expression as well as adding new genetic information), rational drug design (formulating drugs that target precise changes in disease and aging processes), as well as the therapeutic cloning of rejuvenated cells, tissues, and organs.

. . . .Now, as to the Smart Grid, the series that I've been putting up here for a couple of months now. Upgrading the outdated, antiquated, inefficient national electrical grid is vital. It's the cheapest, fastest, smartest thing we can do to (1) improve the grid's efficiency. Realize that on average, 50% of the power needed at your house, for a light bulb, for a computer, for a television, for anything, is lost in the grid from the point of generation to it's point of delivery at your house, and in some areas of the country, the grid's so bad, it's a 96% loss. (2) it will reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Consider the incredible transfer of wealth that occurs everyday in this country as we use gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and hydrocarbon based products all dependent on foreign oil. The wealth is getting transferred to countries that are not allies of ours, and wouldn't care one bit if we fell, yet we pay them for that privilege, gladly, without thinking.
- Cisco Systems, the absolute architects of smart networks has been diving into this (you didn't think they'd let General Electric have all of it, did you?) and they're of the belief that once the grid is upgraded with smart meters and computer interfaces in homes into a smart grid, it could be 1,000 times bigger than the Internet. Personally, as someone who has worked and lived in the grid his entire life, I don't believe that hype, it'll be big, but not that big. However, the work they're doing on the home interface devices will be invaluable.

Home use of the Smart Grid represents and enormous opportunity for Cisco and other companies, who may develop devices that attach to home appliances to connect to the Smart Grid. Hatar noted:

"Our expectation is that this network will be 100 or 1,000 times larger than the Internet. If you think about it, some homes have Internet access, but some don't. Everyone has electricity access--all of those homes could potentially be connected."

Clearly, the Smart Grid will not dwarf the Internet in that way. I can't blame her for her enthusiasm about the technology -- I share it as well. But 1,000 times larger than the Internet? Don't expect that to happen.

. . . Outta here

. . . Got your back

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell them that you love them. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one gets out alive. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched, no one does. So, it's not about yesterday, or tomorrow, it's not about regret or guilt, it's not about should've or could've, it's about right frakkin' here and now. Go change your world, change yourself and it will change the world I promise.

The Desolation Angel

Thursday (and it's still HOT!!!)

Wednesday June 25, 2009

. . . . . My bad, I forgot yesterday while tweaking my inner fan-boy nirvana up and talking about movies opening and on the screen.. . . .and realistically, how could I? . . . .I forgot G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is coming to screens soon too. Quoting any number of science fiction movies - "I am complete"

. . . . .Alright, I knew she wouldn't be able to resist and would weigh in quickly here. My favorite Right wing nutjob, Republican Representative Michelle Bachmann of Anoka, Minnesota just absolutely couldn't stand the rest of the fruitcakes in her party getting all the spotlight for their inanities lately, so she weighed in yet again with another Bachmann-ism. Did you know that the U.S. Census is merely preparation for the Obama administration rounding us all up and putting us in internment camps? Hmmm? Did you? Well, she does, she has the inside scoop (probably been talking it over with Glenn Beck and his insider info on FEMA preparing concentration camps as part of Obama's "Master Plan"). To quote the ever logquacious and profoundly weird Bachmann from her appearance on Faux, err, I mean Fox News this morning:

If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I’m not saying that’s what the Administration is planning to do. . . . . . but?

. . . .I absolutely love that woman, when I get down, she reminds me that the fact of the matter is, health care in America truly must suck, and the mental health care system is completely broken, and prescription drugs must truly be far too expensive. Go Michelle!

Think Progress picked the story up here as well, and Media Matters has it here.

. . . .Let's go back to last summer and Sarah Palin's claim that then-candidate Obama was "pallin' around with terrorists" and Bachmann's claim that he was "unAmerican" and the entire Republican narrative that somehow President Obama would be welcomed by terrorism-supporting governments like Iran and dicatators like Ahmadinejad. . . . . .OK, enough nostaligia, let's skip forward to today and Ahmadenijad's pronouncement on Obama. Referencing the President's press conference on Tuesday, Ahmadenijad said "Do you think this kind of behavior will solve any of your problems? It will only make people think you are someone like Bush". (shudder, little bit of vomit at the back of the throat). I wouldn't call Obama and Ahmaedenijad BFF's exactly. Complete story here, on CNN.

. . . .From the continuing coverage of Iran being carried here and here, from the BBC's John Simpson:

For reasons best not explained, I've come to know a former member of the Revolutionary Guards really well. He's done some pretty dreadful things in his life, from attacking women in the streets for not wearing the full Islamic gear to fighting alongside Islamic revolutionaries in countries abroad.

And yet now, in the tumult that has gripped Iran since its elections last week, he's had a change of heart. He's become a backer of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist candidate who alleges fraud in the elections. He's saved up the money to send his son to a private school abroad, and he loathes President Ahmadinejad. He's not the only one.

I had to leave Iran last Sunday, when the authorities refused to renew my visa. But before I left, another former senior Revolutionary Guard came to our hotel to see us. "Remember me," he pleaded. "Remember that I helped the BBC." I realised that even a person so intimately linked to the Islamic Revolution thinks that something will soon change in Iran.

. . . .R.I.P. Farrah Fawcett, who succumbed to the symptoms of her cancer today at age 62. Another celebrity that I'll miss. Yes, I was a teenager who had her poster on his wall.

. . . .R.I.P. Michael Jackson, may his tortured soul finally find some rest.

. . . .I can't joke or be a smartass about either one. Between these two and Ed McMahon last week, three huge touchstones of popular culture, interestingly enough, from 3 consecutive decades all have gone. It seems to be the hallmark of my generation, the tailend of the babyboom to want to make wiseass comments when one of these goes, probably due to our own inability to grasp our own mortality and our unshakeable belief that somehow the rules don't apply to us and that we're going to find out that we're immortal.

. . . .Face it folks, I say it every day at the close, and I'll say it again today, this rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, no one, gets out alive.

. . . .You may not remember one of the great shows of television, Babylon 5. If you do, you're my kind of guy or gal. The Ranger Creed: "We live for the One, We die for the One. We walk in the dark places that no one will enter. We stand on the bridge and no one may pass."


. . . .New jobless claims last week alone are at 627,000. That's over half a million. It's grim, and getting grimmer.

. . . .Paul Krugman, in his blog in the New York Times this morning:

Back in March, when I was lamenting the inadequate size of the Obama stimulus, I made this prediction:

Republicans are now firmly committed to the view that we should do nothing to respond to the economic crisis, except cut taxes — which they always want to do regardless of circumstances. If Mr. Obama comes back for a second round of stimulus, they’ll respond not by being helpful, but by claiming that his policies have failed.

And I laid out the following scenario:

So here’s the picture that scares me: It’s September 2009, the unemployment rate has passed 9 percent, and despite the early round of stimulus spending it’s still headed up. Mr. Obama finally concedes that a bigger stimulus is needed.

But he can’t get his new plan through Congress because approval for his economic policies has plummeted, partly because his policies are seen to have failed, partly because job-creation policies are conflated in the public mind with deeply unpopular bank bailouts.

It’s only June, but Republicans are already claiming that the Obama economic plan has failed. (Yes, that’s insane — hardly any of the money has flowed to the economy yet — but this was predictable.) Meanwhile, unemployment is already above 9 percent. And the green shoots are looking browner by the week, especially on the jobs front: new claims for unemployment insurance are stubbornly running at more than 600,000 a week, far above the 350,000 or so that would be consistent with a stable unemployment rate.

We really do need a bigger stimulus. But it’s going to be hard slogging.

. . . .I'm keeping track this week, on Open Congress, of:
- H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy And Security Act, which will probably come up for a vote on Friday.
- H.R. 45, Blair Holt's Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009. For God's sake, quit sending me e-mails talking to me about tracking ammo, engraving it, etching it, pulling primers off the shelves, whatever. Use your common sense, quit listening to Fox News, and quit reading every e-mail your friends send you. That part of the bill never made it out of committee, it just got dropped. Do your research people, think for yourselves. Use a resource like Open Congress
to do some actual reading and research and find out for yourself what it says or doesn't say.

. . . .I spent some time over the last few days talking about how first Google, and then Facebook and Twitter were profoundly changing how we interact with one another here on the web, in the matrix, coming closer to approximating how we interact in the "real" world socially and in networks of friends. To some people, it's intimidating. They're used to the anonymous interaction of Google, well, they think it's anonymous. Remember that your IP address and keystrokes are recorded, and in a few nanoseconds, the servers at Google are putting your search up for auction and advertisers and websites are competing to be the ones who fit your tastes. The fact is, Facebook and Twitter "act" more like we interact, are closer to the vision of the Wachovski brothers in "The Matrix".
. . . .William Gibson, starting back in 1984 when he started writing was eerily prescient about where the Web would go, and how we would begin to interact with it and come to depend on it.
. . .From over at KurzweilAI, where futurist Raymond Kurzweil holds court, this one then from Kurzweil himself, wherein he sees the "great leap forward" in evolution that the human race will take in the next 40 years based on our human-machine interaction. I'll run this one in parts over the next few days:

We stand on the threshold of the most profound and transformative event in the history of humanity, the “Singularity.”

What is the Singularity? From my perspective, the Singularity is a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so fast and far-reaching that human existence on this planet will be irreversibly altered. We will combine our brain power—the knowledge, skills, and personality quirks that make us human—with our computer power in order to think, reason, communicate, and create in ways we can scarcely even contemplate today.

This merger of man and machine, coupled with the sudden explosion in machine intelligence and rapid innovation in the fields of gene research as well as nanotechnology, will result in a world where there is no distinction between the biological and the mechanical, or between physical and virtual reality. These technological revolutions will allow us to transcend our frail bodies with all their limitations. Illness, as we know it, will be eradicated. Through the use of nanotechnology, we will be able to manufacture almost any physical product upon demand, world hunger and poverty will be solved, and pollution will vanish. Human existence will undergo a quantum leap in evolution. We will be able to live as long as we choose. The coming into being of such a world is, in essence, the Singularity.

How is it possible we could be so close to this enormous change and not see it? The answer is the quickening nature of technological innovation. In thinking about the future, few people take into consideration the fact that human scientific progress is exponential: It expands by repeatedly multiplying by a constant (10 to times 10 times 10 and so on) rather than linear; that is, expanding by repeatedly adding a constant (10 plus 10 plus 10, and so on). I emphasize the exponential-versus-linear perspective because it’s the most important failure that prognosticators make in considering future trends.

Our forebears expected what lay ahead of them to resemble what they had already experienced, with few exceptions. Because they lived during a time when the rate of technological innovation was so slow as to be unnoticeable, their expectations of an unchanged future were continually fulfilled. Today, we have witnessed the acceleration of the curve. Therefore, we anticipate continuous technological progress and the social repercussions that follow. We see the future as being different from the present. But the future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change is itself accelerating.

Exponential growth starts out slowly and virtually unnoticeably, but beyond the knee of the curve it turns explosive and profoundly transformative. My models show that we are doubling the paradigm-shift rate for technology innovation every decade. In other words, the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to today’s rate of progress; its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about 20 years of progress at the rate of 2000. We’ll make another “20 years” of progress in just 14 years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express this another way, we won’t experience 100 years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of 20,000 years of progress (again, when measured by today’s progress rate), or progress on a level of about 1,000 times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.

. . . .I'll continue this piece throughout the upcoming few days.

. . . .The one thing that I am afraid many people around me fall into is what I call being an "unconscious Luddite", that is someone who is unconsciously wary of technology and are at the core, very, very stuck on the idea of humanity being able to fix or evolve itself. The technology we use today is a natural outgrowth of the expansion of human intelligence and the ability to adapt tools, so, it only makes sense that we leverage those tools to expand and evolve ourselves.

. . . The sweaty, gassy, drug-addled traitor Limbaugh today on Republican Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina:
"Society needs hypocrisy"
- This one is classic traitor Limbaugh talk - in the first hour of his radio show today he suggested that President Obama is the root cause of Sanford's affair (which has been going on for a year now) because somehow he "sapped Sanford's spirit" and that's why Sanford did what he did, to "regain his spirit".
-In his second hour today "You ever think people go to the doctor too much. The whole thing is a rigged scam."
. . . .In his third hour today, he said that if I, or you, or anyone cares about the environment, then they "have pony-tailed fathers and mothers with armpit hair."
. . . The sooner this gasbag drops of a heart attack caused by his own inability to control his appetite, the better off this society will be.

. . . .You read it here a few months ago. I opined then that Darth Cheney's motives for "speaking out" and being so visible and critical of the Administration had absolutely nothing to do with his sense of patriotism, or his belief in Republican values, that instead it was motivated by the one crass, material, earthly thing that's always motivated Cheney, money and that he was setting the stage for big book deal. Cheney signed a deal today for $2 million dollars for his book. See, . . .told ya.

. . . . .More from the Wired magazine series on fixing/upgrading/improving the national electrical grid, again, the cheapest, fastest, most efficient thing we can do to (a) reduce our dependence on foreign oil (b) make it more efficient and cheaper and (c) reduce the damage to the environment from coal-fired plants:

Problem A smart grid requires smart electric meters that let households track and manage their power consumption in real time. The Obama administration wants 40 million homes to have technology like this installed within the next three years. But smart meters require smart consumers—or at least attentive ones—and most people don't think about their energy use until it's time to pay the bill or until the lights go out.

Smart Grid Customers

1 Average Consumer Most customers simply replace their old meter with a smart one. Then they enter some basic preferences—do you care more about cost or reliability?—and input data on their house size and appliances. The system tracks usage and will eventually be able to suggest changes to help users achieve their energy goals. Special vacation settings can be programmed in. Call centers will be ready to help the tech-averse.

2 Energy Donor Some homes with solar panels on the roof—or a plugged-in hybrid in the garage—will be able to funnel power back into the system, choosing when and how much they send. A homeowner could, for example, arrange to shoot solar power to the grid, instead of to their air conditioner, when the price rises above a certain threshold. That would boost the system's supply precisely when it's most needed.

3 Electricity Geek By inserting special plugs into their electrical outlets, creative consumers can turn almost anything into a smart appliance—even mundane stuff like hall lights, pool pumps, and garage doors. With a bit of tinkering on the grid program's Web site, savvy users can then manage the power flowing to each appliance and rank them according to the order they should be shut down when prices rise.

Solution Make the meters as easy to use as a TiVo. Then, make them interesting—and worth real money—to folks who like to fiddle. For the $100 million SmartGridCity project in Boulder, Colorado, Xcel Energy and a group of partners are building a system that lets customers manage home electricity use through a Web page that shows energy burned, carbon footprint, and ways to save cash.

. . . .This administration came into office, I believe, truly believing in their mantra, "Change", and I still believe that we need change, top to bottom. I also think that this administration is running into what every Presidential administration runs into; K Street. Don't for a minute think that the reforms on the financial and banking regulatory system, health care reform or energy policy reform will look anything at all like what the White House envisions them by the time the lobbyists get done pouring money into your Senator's or Representative's pocket. Remember, they don't work for you, they work for the lobbyists and the money. You can keep track of the money, the heroin that is how Washington flows and works, that lobbyists pour into members of Congress here at Open Secrets.org. Click the link and see just who owns your Congressperson.

. . . . . .On this day in music history: Paperback Writer by The Beatles was in it's 2nd week on top of the charts in 1966.

. . . . .Outta here for today

. . . .Kiss your kids and tell them you love them. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, no one, gets out alive. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. So, it's not about yesterday, tomorrow, regret or guilt. It's about right here, right now. To quote Maximus in Gladiator: "What we do in life echoes in eternity". Go change yourself, go change your own world and in so doing, change the world around you.


The Desolation Angel

Wednesday - Geez, it's hot!

Wednesday June 24, 2009

. . . . .Holy cineplex orgasm! Let's see Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen opens today, and Terminator:Salvation, Star Trek, and X-Men Origins:Wolverine are all already there. Just what is a fanboy to do? Hmmm?

. . . .Well, I could geek out over the fact that Marvel has decided to resurrect Captain America. I'm sure most of you don't know, and probably don't care, but Cap, or rather Steve Rogers, was killed in 2007 in an editorial decision by his writers and producers. Steve Rogers as Cap will return in Captain America: Reborn on July 1st.

. . . .Stupids for the day (trust me you'll need them after getting to the bottom):

- If that little black box is indestructible, how come the entire plane isn't made of the same stuff?

- Driving up in a car to an ATM that has a braille keypad? Hmm?

- Do sheep stink in the rain?

- Why are they called apartments when they're all crammed together?

- A double cheeseburger, fries and a Diet Coke? Only in America!

. . . In Iran early today, the government was reporting that all is quiet. The power of the Internet destroyed that illusion early. Full coverage here and here. It looks like now the Cleric and the High Council are setting up Mousavi to take the fall for every death and murder of a protestor committed by the secret police and the paramilitary according to Reuters.

- In the meantime, feminist leader Zahra Rahnavard, the wife of opposition rallying point candidate Mir Mousavi is getting word out that "Iran is under martial law" according to the AP.

Why do I keep covering this? Mitakuye Oyasin. It's that simple, we are all related, all of us.

. . . .I cannot take credit for this, nor will I. I have written over and over on how Twitter is keeping the world informed and is keeping the revolution alive, but it is Andrew Sullivan on his blog in the Atlantic that is "following" the Tweets coming out of Iran. One read of the list will pull you in, and show you, first and foremost, a people desperate to get the real story out, and second, make it very real and immediate, very "present" to you. From this morning's bloody crackdown, Andrew picked up the following Tweets and published them, it's what's called live Tweeting folks, and it's how they're bravely getting the word out, no matter the cost to themselves.

we must go - dont know when we can get internet - they take 1 of us, they will torture and get names - now we must move fast

they pull away the dead into trucks - like factory - no human can do this - we beg Allah for save us -

Gunshots Being Heard From Aazadi St.

Lalezar Sq is same as Baharestan - unbelevable - ppls murdered everywhere

they catch ppl with mobile - so many killed today - so many injured - Allah Akbar - they take one of us

in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher - Allah Akbar

Everybody is under arrest & cant move - Mousavi - Karroubi even rumour Khatami is in house guard

Karoubi: I do not accept this election' result & don't find this administration legitimate.

Possibility of Mousavi being guarded is increasing. While sources close to him deny this, other sources confirm it.

About 10 special forces vans are manoeuvring in Sharak-e-Gharb.

Huge number of arrests in Baharestan. They avoid any stoppage & arrest on the spot.

Military forces were present in Baharestan from hours before not letting a rally to form.

Apologies, the journalist friend didn't stay long enough to see the tear gas.

A journalist friend, just back from Baharestan, said this was the first time tear gas was not used to disassemble ppl

There are reports a young woman is shot in Baharestan.

Urgent: memorial ceremonies for the martyrs, who was to be held tomorrow has been canceled

rumour they are tracking high use of phone lines to find internet users - must move from here now

phone line was cut and we lost internet - #Iranelection - getting more difficult to log into net

all shops was closed - nowhere to go - they follow ppls with helicopters - smoke and fire is everywhere

so many ppl arrested - young & old - they take ppl away - #Iranelection - we lose our group

ppl run into alleys and militia standing there waiting - from 2 sides they attack ppl in middle of alleys

saw 7/8 militia beating one woman with baton on ground - she had no defense nothing - #Iranelection sure that she is dead

Heavy Clashes at Jomhori St, Many People Injured.

Reports: Young Girl Who Shoted in to chest Near Jomhori St. By Army Forces, Died In The Hospital (not conf.)

Reports: At least 2 ppl was shot incl. 1 young girl at Jomhori St. (not conf.)

they were waiting for us - they all have guns and riot uniforms - it was like a mouse trap - ppl being shot like animals

Army Helycopters flying over Enghelab Sq. Army Vans moving toward Azadi St with heavy Machine Guns.

About 5,000 Protesters gatherd at Sadeghieh Sq, Bassij and Hezbollah attcking them.

I see many ppl with broken arms/legs/heads - blood everywhere - pepper gas like war

Reports: Police shoting Teargas at Ppl at Baharestan Sq.

just in from Baharestan Sq - situation today is terrible - they beat the ppls like animals

Reports: Gunshot being heard at Baharestan Sq.

All shops and Passages are closed at Baharestan SQ, Gunshot being heard from Jomhori St.

Clashes at Baharestan SQ, Jomhori and Vanak SQ.

Metro at Baharestan Sq is closed, Army Helicopters flying over,about 1000 ppl gathering at Vanak Sq.

The streets, squares and around BAHARESTAN (Approx. South-eastern of Tehran) is swarming with military forces, civilian forces, the security motorists

Reports: Army Helycopters flying over Baharestan and Vali Asr Sq.

More than 10.000 Bassij Milittias get position in Central Tehran, including Baharestan Sq.

More than 1000 detaniees family members gatherin infront of Islamic Rev. Court, in Tehran.

Third Story: Today's Demo is divided in 6 diffrent places around central including Baharestan.

Reports: Karoubi May Appear at Rally Today! (not conf.)

Karoubi's FB: today Rally will start 16.30 (NOW) infornt of Parliment and 5 other places.

Some of those who hit people are hired on a daily basis for about $200. Some are foreigners who get paid more

Mohsen Rezaiee has dropped his complains.

an idea of symbolic act becoming hotter: simultaneously releasing many green balloons at crowded areas from cars

"It always seems impossible until it's done" -- Nelson Mandela

Rajanews exhibited its insurmountable malice again claiming #Neda was murdered by MKO not Basij

There are protests planned for 4pm today in Baharestan Sq. in Tehran

. . . . .These are not just 1's and 0's, not just words. They are the voices of a people who want a voice in their own goverrnment, and are willing to do anything to be self-determining of their destiny.

. . . .Think about it, something you're doing right now, reading a blog, getting on Twitter, checking your Facebook page, is punishable by getting shot right now in Iran. Ask yourself one question - If it was important not to your future, but to future generations, that you somehow get the word out, would you risk getting on the Internet? These people are. Sadly, I don't think most Americans would these days.


. . . .One brave young Iranian is using Google Maps to track the sites of the protests and map as many killed protestors as he can. Wednesday's map is here.

. . . Will Khameini, Ahmadenijad and the paramilitary put down the attempted coup? Probably. Will most of the protestors be killed, along with Mousavi? Probably. Will the attempted revolution go away? No. It will probably simmer along under the surface and eventually break out. This will be only the beginning shot in it, just as Tianamen Square was a couple of decades ago. China at least smartly moved along and is controlling it's democratization and it's growth. Iran's mullahs and the Shariiya law of the Taliban probably won't, but will eventually be overthrown. Tyranny essentially is a limited term type of government, and once the people under it's thumb find out that their masters are made of straw, and must use muscle, guns and blades to keep order, eventually they will be toppled.

. . ..Just think, we didn't have to send one young American in uniform in under fire to do it. No one, at least so far, will get sent home in a flag-draped coffin. A people, self-determining and willing to act and sacrifice are now setting a future, different course for their country and their generations to come. There aren't any "Americans" involved in the attempted coup and overthrow to blame and wax stentorian about on Al-Jazeera. (Despite the fact that Khameini and Ahmadenijad are doing just that right now).

. . . .And no, the White House isn't inviting the Iranian delegation to the White House for the 4th of July festivities.


. . . . . And by the way, just something to think about the next time you're in the market for buying something electronic; Nokia and Siemens are the two companies helping the Iranian hard-line government track the Internet users.

. . . .On one I posted yesterday, an alert young intern named Isabelle over at Open Congress. org let me know that the State Sponsored Secrets Act of 2009 that I referred to in yesterday's post (see below) can, in fact, be found over on Open Congress as H.R. 984

. . . .As much as I detest the Republican Party and the mockery that it's become; as much as I know that they completely subverted the party of Lincoln, a party born of opposition to the slavers; a party that once represented everyone, and hadn't yet done a George Orwell's 1984 with the word "conservative" that Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush did with it; a party that has become a fringe, third party of wackos, weirdos and discontent angry old men. The party that started this entire economic free-fall with Reagan's signing of the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982 and was brought to it's denouement by Paulson and Bush with the 8 years of completely deregulated credit derivative creation trading and the complete nadir of it all last September when Joseph Cassano's craps table move with derviatives brought the biggest 5 banks to their knees as something that was "never supposed to happen" happened and the 5 banks "too big to fail" failed. As much as the Republicans wrong-headedly went into Iraq on a complete lie and cost us 4,000 of our finest young men and women while allowing Osama bin-Laden to roam free and grow stronger in Afghanistan and Pakistan; the whole time that Adminstration cozied up to Saudi Arabia, making money behind our backs with them. As much as Bush 43 suspended 9 of the first 10 Amendments for 7 years of his Administration by Executive Order; As much as Reagan started the decline of the American manufacturing industry with his breaking of PATCO, followed by the Bushes complete dismantling of American manfacturing and the breaking of the American automotive industry. As much as I detest them for all that and their cheapening of the political process in this country by Rove's harvesting of the Religious Right and his damn "values voters" system and process. . . . . This. . . . .this. . . . is all. . . .well. . . .funny.
. . . Just watching them self-destruct has become a completely enjoyable spectator sport.
. . . If it wasn't so hilarious to watch after the damage and destruction they've wreaked on this country and it's economy and it's people with their arrogant imperialism for the last 8 years, (well, really 30), it'd be sad. This many clueless, bumbling idiots in one place. The true omen? Dick Cheney shooting his "best" friend in the face while bird hunting. Should've said everything right then.

. . . After the total disasters of Bobby Jindal as "Kenneth the Page" and Sarah Palin deciding the a late-night comedian (who gained 700,000 viewers in a week while she garnered 15 supporters) was a worthy political sparring partner, I thought to myself, "who or what can top that?"
. . . .Well, let's start with Nevada Republican Senator Ensign's affair
. . . But the capstone has to be, absolutely has to be, South Carolina Governor Sanford with this afternoon's press conference and his admission of an affair with an Argentine woman.
. . . .Up till then he was one of the top 3 contenders for 2012 for the Grand Old Party of Cranks.
. . . ."I've spent the last 5 days of my life crying in Argentina."????? Puhleeze, c'mon!


. . . . Another Faux News commentator in training, Hal Turner, a well-known white supremacist radio host was finally arrested today for urging that judges be killed and giving their names and addresses out.

. . . .OK, I know that Faux, err, I mean, Fox News isn't really a News Station, that is is an entertainment arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. just like it's sister channels FX Network and Fox TV, but do you think that possibly they could do a little basic research? Identifying the above named Republican Governor of South Carolina Sanford as a Democrat? C'mon, your stripes are showing morons.

. . . And speaking of the traitors at Fox News and in the media who spread sedition and treason; Limbaugh, Coulter, Beck, Hannity, Malkin et al.
Ann Coulter - "The Left hates America so much that they assume the rest of the world does too"
Sorry, Ann, we love our country, much more than you do, because we understand that a true patriot and an American citizen realizes that the Constitution says that the man sitting in the chair was elected under due process and it's now an American citizen's job to support that sitting President. To not support him is treason, and to spread your type of fascism is clearly sedition.
Limbaugh - What Mark Sanford did is different than Clinton because "Republicans like sex too". Enuff said. Rush, guaranteed your sweaty, large drug-addled butt ain't gettin' any.

. . . .Late Night with Bill Maher is one of my "don't miss" programs for the week. This last week, Meghan McCain was on. I do like Meghan. She's one of the brighter young minds on the Conservative side who is absolutely disgusted with and has no affinity with idiots like Limbaugh, Gingrich, Rove and Cheney. However, at 24 years old, she's a bit inexperienced. Going up against Paul Begala, who's spent a lifetime in politics showed she was a little out of her depth. Paul Begala absolutely took her to school. Check the link here.


. . . . .From Wired magazine again, more on ways to improve the national electrical grid. This is the cheapest, fastest, most efficient way to start marching away from foreign oil dependence, and get ourselves some money savings right away:

Problem It's high noon in July. At 90-plus degrees outside, the masses are jonesing for AC. But it's seriously expensive to keep the juice flowing when demand crests. Firing up turbines that sit idle 360 days a year can multiply electricity costs by a factor of 10. How to keep cool without stressing the grid?

Solution Pay big users to cut consumption when the need arises. Many utilities already do an ad-hoc version of this, an emergency practice known as demand response that has lately been promoted by Jon Wellinghoff, acting chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Now there's an alternative: Call EnerNOC, a Boston-based company that gangs commercial users who are willing, for a quarterly payment, to trim back operations on 30 minutes' notice. EnerNOC micromanages consumption at 3,400-plus locations from Maine to California. Between dimming lights, adjusting thermostats, and suspending industrial activities, the potential cuts top the output of a large nuclear reactor. And the savings can be huge. EnerNOC's cofounder, Tim Healy, points out that 10 percent of all US generating capacity exists to meet the last 1 percent of demand. Utilities paid EnerNOC $100 million last year simply to stand at the ready—insurance, in effect, against the inevitable days when every AC unit is humming.

. . . .If you've not checked out Raymond Kurzweil for his thoughts and ideas as a futurist, but instead only remember him for his contributions to the music world (think keyboards, synthesizers, etc.) you're missing out. Kurzweil is a brilliant futurist, and is willing to go out on the fringe of things to explore them. His website KurzweilAI.net and we'll explore it further this week and go into his concept of the Quantum Singularity and especially in light of how Facebook and Twitter are changing how we interact with one another and with the matrix.

. . . .Outta here

. . . .Got your back

. . . . .Kiss your kids, tell 'em you love 'em. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one gets out alive, and we don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched, so it's not about yesterday, or tomorrow, or somewhere else. It's about right here, right now. Change your life, and change the world

The Desolation Angel

Tuesday - deep in and tunnelling through

Tuesday June 23, 2009

. . . .Oh dude, we're in it now, deep and heading waaay out to sea.

. . . .From listening to the playlist in the podcast, you're probably under the assumption that my musical tastes do not include rap or hip-hop. You're wrong, real, real wrong. I really do love it, and understand it as a form of poetry. That said, there are some genres within those two that I don't listen to and can't stand, gangster and thug rap being two of those. (If you don't know the difference, do yourself a favor a take a listen sometime on HBO to Def Poetry or Brave New Voices, that's where the true art form starts.) All that is a prelude to my saying that Mos' Def is coming out with his first CD in a long time, and it'll be worth wait. Mos' is a great actor, Golden Globe and Emmy nominated, a community supporter of the arts, a very vocal political and social activist, and made his start in rap. Check out the latest issue of Rolling Stone for more details. (Psst!! He's a huge Rage Against the Machine fan, automatically puts him up the ladder in my book)

. . . .In other culture news, the Oscar-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth, has put together another one, that I'd heard about and was waiting for. It Might Get Loud  is hours of footage of putting three master guitar gods of three generations together in a studio and seeing what happened. Jimmy Page of Led Zep, The Edge of U2 and Jack White of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs and countless other projects were all put together and told to play. I can't wait to see this one.

. . . . .They had to do it, they just had to. . . .Republican Congressman Representative Dana Rohrabacker of California said today on MSNBC's "Ed Show" that President Obama was "responsible for the violence in Iran". So what the hell is with these morons?

. . . .In Iran, Mousavi is now under house arrest, but the protests continue and are actually ratcheting up.
. . . .Of greater interest to me is that fact that some mullahs are now joining in the protests, and the footballers (soccer players) that wore green in support of the protesters have now been dropped from the football team and banned from playing (that's huge stuff).
. . . . The question earlier today was whether or not Mousavi was leading the protests or just taking his cue from them. The answer lies in his house arrest, it's the people. They want their country, and they want to determine their own destiny and not leave it in the hands of the Cleric and the High Council. How interesting, a people who don't believe that they need an intermediary to talk to God for them.
. . . .Of course, it truly was Mousavi's use of Facebook early on in the protests that organized them, and the continued use of Twitter that allows them to continue.

. . . Continued coverage of Iran here, here , here and here.
. . . .There is a truly interesting article in Wired magazine in the current issue on Facebook and why it's basic structure and premise outstripped MySpace, and how their allliance with Microsoft will allow them to be the real player that may finally challenge Google for the dominance of the matrix. (It's not affectation, the web has gone far beyond it's original parameters and now truly exists as a matrix). Check it out here. It details some of the future plans for Facebook, and it's plans for expansion beyond it's present platform and it's planned future apps and alliances.
. . . .Over on the Daily Beast, the same subject comes up, but in a financial context. It details how Rupert Murdoch completely blew it by snapping up MySpace and doing his normal number on it (think Fox News) and completely destroyed it. The CEO of Facebook may only be 25, but he completely screwed Murdoch, which delights me, and outfoxed Google on their initial offer. The kid's alright with me.

. . . .On that entire subject, I truly get it. I have a couple of friends who are nerved out about Facebook and how it operates. Think of Google as a completely structured anonymous environment, much like the society that we live in. You search for information, it gives you info, anonymously, you think. You make your choices out of the list it gives you, again, the appearance of anonymous, autonomous choice. Not so. The second you request a search result, the secret of Google's success goes to work, in nanoseconds faster than you can react to. Those ads that appear on the side of a Google page when you search? They went up for auction the second you hit enter on the search, based on your IP address' keystroke and search history, different advertisers and different webpages are competing to be seen by you, all behind the scenes, but tailored to your computer's patterns.
. . . . .Facebook is quite different. It drops the veneer of anonymity and acts like what it is. A great big block party or barbecue made up of your family, your closest friends, your acquaintances and some folks you don't know, but were invited. In other words, people of similar tastes, people who would be friends, neighbors or members of groups or communities in the real world. Everyting is shared, from photos, to stories, to interests, and links to other web pages, to political, religious and social leanings. In other words, it strengthens the community and the bonds. It reinforces the connections and connectivity.
. . . .Using the same analogy, Twitter is like stopping at the bar after work for happy hour. It's a quick drop-in and check-in with some people you know, a quick wave to some others and a "hey, isn't that. . . .?"

. . . .I absolutely love Rescue Me, regular readers know that. I can't figure out if Tommy Gavin is me, or if I'm Tommy Gavin. The show can be jaw-droppingly stunning at times. Jaw-dropping. Tonight's ending scene with Tommy being forced back to his roots and saying the Lord's Prayer in the hospital room with Sean's mother was one of those "oh, shit" TV moments.

. . . .The President today at his press conference gave a great answer when talking about the broad context of health care reform. I recommend you check the link out here for the entire conference. In short, his answer to the question of the "public option" was simple and logical. If, as the private insurers claim, the private marketplace for insurance provides an economical, sound plan that people would choose based on it's costs and options, then the choice of a "public option" should provide no threat. Those people who like their coverage and belive it to be the best value for the money would no doubt then keep their insurance. The marketplace will decide. For those on the Right who are free market capitalists, who then can argue that point?

. . . .OK, so what's up with Republican Governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford? If he truly did just take off for the weekend and go hiking on the Appalachian Trail, kudos to him for taking some time out for himself. It's been nothing if not difficult for him, since he truly was, on principle, opposed to taking Federal stimulus money, whilst his State legislature hammered him, wanting the cash. If, as facts are coming out now, he was tracked through the Atlanta airpost and he was Twittering all weekend, where the hell was he? Looks like just another fruitcake from the Right.

.. . . . Speaking of which, did  Ohio Republican John Boehner actually say today that "being in Congress is like being in front of machine gun"? Yes, he did. Check it out here. He feels that he's a victim of Congressional abuse.

. . . .I've said all along that we don't need to go searching for exotic new forms of energy and just standing around holding our hands on our butts until some miraculous new discovery comes along. From reader Dave, the article from RigZone via the Wall Street Journal, that details the amounts of Natural Gas available to us right now:

The amount of natural gas available for production in the United States has soared 58% in the past four years, driven by a drilling boom and the discovery of huge new gas fields in Texas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, a new study says.
The report, due to be released Thursday by the nonprofit Potential Gas Committee, concludes the U.S. has more than 2,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas still in the ground, or nearly a century's worth of production at current rates. That's a 35.4% jump over the committee's last estimate, in 2007, of 1,532 trillion cubic feet, the biggest increase in the committee's 44-year history.
The report comes as rising oil prices have again made energy a hot topic in Washington. On Wednesday, a Senate panel voted 15-8 in favor of an energy bill that would, among other things, open up new areas to offshore drilling. The House of Representatives may vote as early as next week on a new climate-change bill that would cap emissions of the gasses that contribute to climate change. The Senate must also approve the measure. The natural-gas industry has promoted gas as a more environmentally friendly, domestically produced alternative to coal and oil. Industry supporters said the new report could bolster their case by showing that the U.S. can rely more heavily on gas without running out.
"Natural gas is right now. The resource is here. The ability to develop it is here," said Chris McGill, managing director of policy analysis for the American Gas Association, an industry group.
The new study represents an authoritative confirmation of other recent estimates, including an industry-backed report last summer that concluded the U.S. could have as much as 2,247 trillion cubic feet of gas. Unlike that report, which was based on company estimates, the Potential Gas Committee's study was prepared by industry geologists who analyzed individual gas fields using seismic imagery and production data provided by gas producers. The surge in gas resources is the result of a five-year-long drilling boom spurred by high natural-gas prices, easy credit and new technologies that allowed companies to produce gas from a dense kind of rock known as shale. The first big shale formation to be discovered, the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth, Texas, is now the country's top-producing gas field, and companies have made other huge discoveries in Arkansas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. Together, the shale fields account for roughly a third of U.S. gas resources, according to the Potential Gas Committee.
The sudden increase in supplies, combined with a drop in demand due to the recession, has led to a gas glut, pushing prices to about $4 per million British thermal units down from more than $13 per million BTUs last July. 

 . . . .The trick is to start getting people to put money into converting their wonderful stoves and water heaters over to Natural Gas, which is a cleaner, cheaper alternative to electric appliances that rely on coal-fired plants.

. . . .R.I.P. Ed McMahon, the original sidekick and best buddy. You'll be missed, Ed. 

. . . . . .The ACLU has their teeth into a good one right now. It's sending out information on the State Sponsored Secrets Act of 2009:

The CIA's rendition and torture program is not a "state secret." It's a national disgrace.

On Friday, the Justice Department asked the 9th District Court of Appeals to rehear its argument to throw out our extraordinary rendition lawsuit on the basis that it cannot be tried without revealing "state secrets."

We must not protect torturers and their enablers from accountability for their actions. And we must not let the government hide behind the overly-broad use of state secrets.

The ACLU’s extraordinary rendition lawsuit was filed by five men who were forcibly kidnapped and secretly transferred to U.S.-run prisons where they were tortured. The case targets Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing that provided crucial support services to the CIA for illegal torture flights.

The Bush administration initially had the case thrown out by improperly asserting the "state secrets" privilege. The ACLU appealed and in May, won the right to move forward with the case.

Now the government is trying to throw the case out again. On Friday, the Justice Department asked the appeals court to rehear the decision and uphold its bogus "state secrets" claim.
 The government has asserted the "state secrets" claim with increasing regularity in an attempt to throw out lawsuits and justify withholding information from the public.

Let’s be clear -- no one is interested in taking away the government’s legitimate right to protect sensitive national security information. But, the Bush administration expanded the definition of "state secrets" dangerously beyond its previous limits and set a dangerous precedent that has continued.

In addition to extraordinary rendition, the claim of "state secrets" has also been made about illegal wiretapping, torture and other breaches of U.S. and international law.

Supporting this bill will have an impact on countless civil liberties cases in the months and years ahead.

 . . . The State Sponsored Secrets Act of 2009 can't be found on Open Congress yet, it still needs to be sponsored and brought into committee.
. . . .However, the American Clean Energy and Security Act can be tracked there, as H.R. 2454, on Open Congress, as it should be ready for a floor vote on Friday.

. . . . Outta here for the evening. I'll update tomorrow. Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they slip through your hands. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one gets out alive. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. So it's not about yesterday, tomorrow or might have been. It's about right here, right now. It's about friends and family. Go change yourself, go change your world and it changes the larger world.

. . . .Got your back

The Desolation Angel

Monday - Tall in the saddle

Monday June 20-whatever, 2009

. . . .Been off the airwaves and out of the net for a few days, a well-deserved break, but it's been long enough and there's enough folks now asking where it is, so it and I am back.

. . . . .So, anyone other than me notice that Neil Patrick Harris has actually turned into a rather cool caricature of himself as he's grown older as an actor? Kind of an anti-Doogie Howser?

. . . .Iran - OK, let's do the catch-up. Millions protesting, they won't go away, the military now is opening fire and killing civilians. More outrageous is the fact that the military is now charging a "bullet fee" to families of protesters killed or wounded by the police.
- Internal to Iran, and of vital interest to the entire region, this one from Eurasianet, a project of George Soros' Open Society Institute:

Looking past their fiery rhetoric and apparent determination to cling to power using all available means, Iran's hardliners are not a confident bunch. While hardliners still believe they possess enough force to stifle popular protests, they are worried that they are losing a behind-the-scenes battle within Iran's religious establishment.

A source familiar with the thinking of decision-makers in state agencies that have strong ties to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said there is a sense among hardliners that a shoe is about to drop. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani -- Iran's savviest political operator and an arch-enemy of Ayatollah Khamenei's -- has kept out of the public spotlight since the rigged June 12 presidential election triggered the political crisis. The widespread belief is that Rafsanjani has been in the holy city of Qom, working to assemble a religious and political coalition to topple the supreme leader and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"There is great apprehension among people in the supreme leader's [camp] about what Rafsanjani may pull," said a source in Tehran who is familiar with hardliner thinking. "They [the supreme leader and his supporters] are much more concerned about Rafsanjani than the mass movement on the streets."

. . . . .That same opinion is being expressed here on the Daily Beast by Reza Aslan, one of the savviest Middle Eastern analysts around.

. . . .Remember, this is a revolution being fueled by Twitter, which is important in and of itself. It's the true worth of social networking software, truly a virus in it's actions, but being used to build and fuel a community with up to minute news and updates. More on that later this week, and we'll spend some time exploring exactly how vital Facebook and Twitter are and will be in the future towards building community.

. . . .Just as well, this is a revolution that is being fueled by YouTube. I urge you to click the link and watch the death of Neda, the young woman shot to death by the Iranian paramilitary while she was protesting. Not for the shock value of watching someone being shot, but for the understanding of what a young woman was willing to give to have a voice for freedom for her people. Click the link here.

. . . .Remind me, next winter, when it's 20 below and I'm bitching about it, that I complained about working in and traveling around in this 100 degree heat.

. . . .I'm still trying to figure out what the morons on the Right are doing when criticizing the President and the Administration for not "doing more" in Iran. What lunacy! Stepping into Iranian internal politics or the revolution occurring right now would only reinforce the stereotypes of America that the Taliban and Al-Queada consistently push down people's throats as they spread their own propaganda. Staying out and letting them settle it, while keeping a watchful eye on who the power eventually shifts to, and it's effect on their nuclear program is the way to go at present.
. . .In that same vein, Joe Scarborough, a former Republican senator took Republican Senators McCain and Graham to the woodshed on his show Monday morning, calling them "outrageous and stunning" for expressing those very sentiments and laid it out plainly for people that staying out and destroying those stereotypes are in out best long-term interest.

. . . .Leslie Gelb, over on the Daily Beast on "Leave Iran to the Iranians":

Iranian hardliners just can’t wait for President Barack Obama to raise high the protesters’ green banner so they can turn it red, white, and blue and unleash a bloodbath against “American agents.” And American hardliners and foreign-policy gurus just keep pushing Obama toward precisely that rhetorical abyss, hoping either to topple the mullah dictatorship—which they know to be a very long shot—or to ensure what they see as the benefits of an American-Iranian confrontation.
The hardliners and gurus might, for once, trouble to inquire as to the wishes of the Iranians who are risking their lives in the streets of Tehran. They might have noticed that these brave people have not been clamoring for Obama’s open support. Iranians know the consequences of that support. They also know that Obama and all Americans are with them. They are quite sophisticated and are much more aware of American politics than even the learned gurus are of Tehran’s. For many years now, virtually every Iranian who talks to an American says we should stay out of their affairs, that when we try to help them, we hurt them. Do you hear Iranians twittering their thanks to Charles Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, Joe Lieberman, and John McCain? Does that silence mean anything to those Americans urging them on to spill their blood for freedom and democracy? Oh, of course, our moralists and seers of “a historical turning point” are not so crude as to blatantly call the protesters to freedom’s barricades or for Obama to urge a bloodbath for democracy. But they walk right up to that line.

Charles Krauthammer doesn’t hesitate to proclaim his real goal: “regime change” as the only way to solve future nuclear threats. “Our fundamental values demand that America stand with demonstrators opposing a regime that is the antithesis of all we believe.” He then asks, “Where is our president? Afraid of meddling.” And how does this brilliant pen of the right propose to meddle effectively? Like his neoconservative brethren, he offers nothing besides moral condemnation.

A large number of Iranians, quite sophisticated people, are struggling to loosen the bonds of a terrible dictatorship. The dictators have a monopoly of force on their side. So far, there have been no cracks in Iran’s army and police, and until there is, only death awaits the protesters. The protesters have unhappiness and contempt of the government on their side, and their numbers are growing well beyond students and businessmen in Tehran. Iran will never be the same after the last weeks. Most likely, the near-term effects will be greater repression and government control. But the genie of discontent is now out of the bottle, and time and politics will be on the side of the dissidents. Let us give them that chance—and look and listen very carefully for their voice for what Washington can do that will help them more than harm them.

. . . .Read the entire piece at the jump here.

. . . .Eric Alterman sees much of this as a sign that finally, finally, the neoconservative movement and it's experts and pundits might finally be on their way out.

One characteristics that ideologues of both the left and right share is a commitment to what might be termed the “Great Leap Forward.” In the Marxist case, the GLF always implied a transformation in the fundamental character of humankind. Just as soon as we get rid of capitalist exploitation by virtue of a communist revolution and a “new man” would emerge who would cease the selfish, self-destructive behavior that had characterized every state’s behavior since the end of feudalism.

Revolutions notwithstanding, the right wing’s version of the GLF is not so different, except that it is much easier to put in place. What is needed to transform tyranny into freedom, according to the arguments of its most esteemed ideologues, is the American-inspired overthrow of this or that Islamic regime, usually, it turns out, whose country’s name begins with letters “Ira…”.

Perhaps I’m an inveterate optimist, but I think we are finally seeing the neocons pass into history just as the Marxists did. After all, do you know anyone who does not have a regular column in The Washington Post or Wall Street Journal editorial page—not including crazy cable hosts—who is clamoring for American intervention in Iran? Can they really expect us to believe that a) the Iranian protesters don’t know that America supports them and b) that our president’s saying so would not provide the Iranian regime with exactly the excuse they need to stamp the opposition as disloyal pawns of enemies and infidels? Do these people really not know the difference between words and deeds?

. . .God, I hope that the day of the Neocons is passing. Let's see . . .we have Michelle Malkin calling Michelle Obama "First Crony"??? Yup, she did. I don't know that the First Lady has done ot raise Malkin's ire, other than being married to a President she loathes, so I guess Ms. Malkin figured she'd start her Monday out by insulting the President's wife for unknown reasons.

. . . .And yet another of my favorite Right wing fear mongering media lunatics, Glenn Beck, whose razor sharp focus now appears to be on ACORN showed a chart on his show of "the really big people in ACORN". Only one problem, the chart also included a picture of Silas from the movie "The DaVinci Code".

. . . .Don't get too excited about health care reform yet. This is one that both parties appear to be working in concert on, however appearances can be deceiving. The health care lobbyists, the pharmaceutical lobbyists and the medical association lobbyists have been laying plenty of money out to ensure that the voting goes the way they want it too. The boys over at FiveThirtyEight have done the odds on the possibility of the public option surviving. Hint: it's a long shot.

. . . The folks over at Open Secrets are keeping track of the lobbying money, and it's painting an ugly picture. Click the link to see what kind of money your Senator and/or Representative is getting and from whom it's coming.

. . . .Froma Harrop urging the President to strike now, on health care, at least while there is still some momentum.

. . . Well, at least he got some push on prescription drug pricing today.

. . . .More on upgrading the national electrical grid, the smartest, cheapest, best thing we can do in a hurry to get more energy efficient and greener, from Wired magazine:

Problem Regional brokers are responsible for getting enough electrons to their designated areas. At times of peak usage, that means firing up an old, dirty generator (not exactly green) or importing more juice from outside the region (not exactly cheap). Eventually, someone has to build more power plants and infrastructure (wickedly expensive).

Solution Treat electricity like a commodity—something for which you can gauge demand and set a price in advance. That's what New England's independent system operator started doing last year. In its Forward Capacity Market, the ISO projects how much power the region will need three years ahead and then runs a descending-clock auction for the right to provide it. The ISO doesn't care whether it gets its power from increased production of megawatts or from efficiencies added to the system, so-called negawatts. The agency simply sets the starting price. Result: money saved in power plants and wires, more stable electricity bills, and a homegrown incubator for getting bright green ideas off the drawing board.

$15 The independent system operator announces its need for 32,305 megawatts. Hundreds of wannabe providers—generators and conservers—offer 6,850 MW more than the ISO wants. The auction opens at $15/kW-month.

$9With excess supply, the ISO brings the price down to $9/kW-month, then $8, and so on, shedding bidders—and surplus power—with every round.

$4.50 End of the auction: The ISO reaches $4.50 ... and still has excess electricity, which it offers to take off the providers' hands as well.

. . . Ah well, back into the groove, upcoming this week; more on the Iran, Faux News, the Right Wing neocon's attempts to destroy this country, the culture wars, more on the grid, a whole lot on global climate change, the fact that it's already too late and the efforts we need to make now to be able to live with it.

. . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do, this rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one gets out alive, so it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, it's about right here, right now. Go change your life, and change the world in doing so.

The Desolation Angel