Author's posts
Dec 17 2009
How Many Democrats To Become ‘Pre-Existing Conditions’ In 2010?
Olbermann’s Special Comment, Wednesday December 16:
“They must now not make the defeat worse by passing a hollow shell of a bill just for the sake of a big-stage signing ceremony. This bill, slowly bled to death by the political equivalent of the leeches that were once thought state-of-the-art-medicine, is now little more than a series of microscopically minor tweaks of a system which is the real-life, here-and-now version, of the malarkey of the Town Hallers. The American Insurance Cartel is the Death Panel, and this Senate bill does nothing to destroy it. Nor even to satiate it.”
“It merely decrees that our underprivileged, our sick, our elderly, our middle class, can be fed into it, as human sacrifices to the great maw of corporate voraciousness, at a profit per victim of 10 cents on the dollar instead of the current 20. Even before the support columns of reform were knocked down, one by one, with the kind of passive defense that would embarrass a touch-football player – single-payer, the public option, the Medicare Buy-In – before they vanished, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the part of this bill that would require you to buy insurance unless you could prove you could not afford it, would cost a family of four with a household income of 54-thousand dollars a year, 17 percent of that income. Nine thousand dollars a year. Just for the insurance,”
“That was with a public option.That was with some kind of check on the insurance companies. That was before – as Howard Dean pointed out – the revelation that the cartel will still be able to charge older people more than others; will – at the least – now be able to charge much more, maybe 50 percent more, for people with pre-existing conditions – pre-existing conditions; you know, like being alive.”
Part 2 on the flip…
Dec 17 2009
Water Covered Earth-Like Planet Discovered
The science journal Nature reported in a study published Wednesday that a new Earth-like planet that is larger than Earth and appearing to be more than half covered with water, and possibly with conditions allowing the existence of life, has been discovered by graduate student Zachory Berta, a co-author on the paper submitted to Nature with David Charbonneau, head of the MEarth Project of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory.
The UK’s Guardian has the story:
A giant waterworld that is wet to its core has been spotted in orbit around a dim but not too distant star, improving the odds that habitable planets may exist in our cosmic neighbourhood.
The planet is nearly three times as large as Earth and made almost entirely of water, forming a global ocean more than 15,000km deep.
Astronomers detected the alien world as it passed in front of its sun, a red dwarf star 40 light years away in a constellation called Ophiuchus, after the Greek for “snake holder”.
The discovery, made with a network of amateur telescopes, is being hailed as a major step forward in the search for planets beyond our solar system that are hospitable to life as we know it.
[snip]
The latest planet is only a stone’s throw away in astronomical terms, meaning scientists will be able to turn the Hubble Space Telescope towards it and analyse its atmosphere, potentially revealing signs of life. Charbonneau’s team has already requested time on the space telescope.
“Using the Hubble, we can look at the atmosphere and say not only whether it’s habitable, but whether it’s inhabited,” Charbonneau told the Guardian. “If we find oxygen in the atmosphere things will get really interesting, because on Earth all the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from life.”
Dec 17 2009
Water Covered Earthlike Planet Discovered
The science journal Nature reported in a study published Wednesday that a new Earth-like planet that is larger than Earth and appearing to be more than half covered with water, and possibly with conditions allowing the existence of life, has been discovered by graduate student Zachory Berta, a co-author on the paper submitted to Nature with David Charbonneau who heads the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.
The UK’s Guardian has the story today:
A giant waterworld that is wet to its core has been spotted in orbit around a dim but not too distant star, improving the odds that habitable planets may exist in our cosmic neighbourhood.
The planet is nearly three times as large as Earth and made almost entirely of water, forming a global ocean more than 15,000km deep.
Astronomers detected the alien world as it passed in front of its sun, a red dwarf star 40 light years away in a constellation called Ophiuchus, after the Greek for “snake holder”.
The discovery, made with a network of amateur telescopes, is being hailed as a major step forward in the search for planets beyond our solar system that are hospitable to life as we know it.
[snip][
The latest planet is only a stone’s throw away in astronomical terms, meaning scientists will be able to turn the Hubble Space Telescope towards it and analyse its atmosphere, potentially revealing signs of life. Charbonneau’s team has already requested time on the space telescope.
“Using the Hubble, we can look at the atmosphere and say not only whether it’s habitable, but whether it’s inhabited,” Charbonneau told the Guardian. “If we find oxygen in the atmosphere things will get really interesting, because on Earth all the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from life.”
Dec 16 2009
America, Where Are You Now?
We can’t fight alone against the monster…
John Kay and Steppenwolf: The Monster
Dec 15 2009
Mainstream Media Comments On Itself
Hand me one of those airsick bags, will you please? Seriously. Things like this worry me.
The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room reported yesterday that “Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is among the seven finalists chosen for Time magazine’s annual “Person of the Year,” according to media reports on Monday. Other finalists in the realm of politics include last year’s winner President Barack Obama, Afghanistan commanding Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.”
Time’s managing editor Richard Stengel in an appearance on NBC’s Today show praised Pelosi as “the strongest Speaker of the House in decades”, said that she had “piloted what is probably the most important legislation in decades through the House” and called her “a really, really pivotal lawmaker”.
In other news, Police in Panama City, Florida tasered a man who was choking to death on a baggie of pot, apparently calling his flipping and flopping “resisting arrest”:
Dec 14 2009
American Casino & Let The Pitchforks Do Their Job
Well known Irish journalist, author and filmmaker Andrew Cockburn talks with The Real News about his documentary film exposé of the subprime mortgage crash and scandal, how the system works, and corruption both in politics and on Wall Street: “American Casino”.
Real News Network – December 13, 2009
American Casino
Andrew Cockburn co-producer of the documentary “American Casino” talks about the sub-prime crash
IMDB Synopsis: a look at how the Wall Street meltdown has affected the working class.
We All Lost
I don’t think most people really understood that they were in a casino says award-winning financial reporter Mark Pittman. When you’re in the Streets casino, you’ve got to play by their rules. This film finally explains how and why over $8 trillion of our money vanished into the American Casino. For chips, the casino used real people, like the ones we meet in Baltimore. These are not the heedless spendthrifts of Wall Street legend, but a high school teacher, a therapist, a minister of the church. They were sold on the American Dream as a safe investment. Too late, they discovered the truth. Cruelly, as African Americans, they and other minorities were the prime targets for the subprime loans that powered the casino. According to the Federal Reserve, African-Americans were four times more likely than whites to be sold subprime loans.
We meet the players. A banker explains that the complex securities he designed were fourth dimensional and sold to idiots. A senior Wall Street ratings agency executive describes being ordered to guess the worth of billion dollar securities. A mortgage loan salesman explains how borrowers incomes were inflated to justify a loan. A billionaire describes how he made a massive bet that people would lose their homes and has won $500 million, so far.
Finally, as the global financial system crumbles and outraged but impotent lawmakers fume at Wall Street titans, we see the casinos endgame: Riverside, California a foreclosure wasteland given over to colonies of rats and methamphetamine labs, where disease-bearing mosquitoes breed in their millions on the stagnant swimming pools of yesterdays dreams.
Filmed over twelve months in 2008, American Casino takes you inside a game that our grandchildren never wanted to play.
Part 2, and transcript of Part 1, on the flip…
Dec 13 2009
Contest: This Essay Needs A Title
Something a little more creative than “Caption This Essay” which was the best that I could think up would be good.
If you’re any good at thinking up the best the you can think up please do your best to think of the best title you can think up, and leave it in a comment below if you want ponies. Ponies are good, so I’m told.
Rec’s are even better.
There is no prize, btw. Except just ponies that you’ll get a huge ego boost from and get to walk around feeling deservedly smug and superior for awhile.
There are no rules either.
And that’s only rule number 1. Rule number 2 is you must follow all the rules or the local gang of purity trolls will make your life hell for 5 seconds. So it’s good to follow the rules.
Rule number 3 is that I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about here, and neither do you by now, and if you think you do then you’re probably as delusional as me and you probably really need to read Schizophrenia and You instead of this stupid essay:
Barky Obama
He died for our sinsFor those who can master it, it’s a fine way to see the world. You get secret messages from the radio, TV, and most movies. You know God personally (so you don’t need Jesus as a go-between). The best ones can maintain their powers despite medication. Did you ever wonder about the existence of ghosts and angels and demons? Somebody had to have seen them, right? Now you know.
It begins for some when the trees start telling you their names. The flowers sing an inane little song like a children’s song that threatens to drone on indefinitely. There is another world, and it may contain well-organized squirrels. That famous karate guy doesn’t exist in the other world. But there’s plenty of paranoia to go around.
Gratuitous Image: And he went ‘WAP!’ with a bat on the head of the baby puppy after it had looked at him with those big adorable eyes.
Just because you think there’s a conspiracy or someone’s out to get you doesn’t mean it’s not true. But there are peculiar psychic fields around hospitals that keep conspirators and murderers out for the most part. The maintenance of this field is the reason you’re not supposed to use cell phones in the wards themselves. Why don’t people figure this out? Because unlike in the movies, murderers and conspirators are stupid.
You would think that the ability to see angels, demons, and ghosts would give you special powers. Well, it doesn’t. You can’t usually talk to them. I prefer the plants. They speak clearly and use small words so the slower ones among us can follow. Unfortunately, most people aren’t even listening.
And that’s the overarching problem of the human condition in 2009 as I see it.
Most people not only aren’t even even listening, but most people weren’t even even listening, and I keep running into this problem where I don’t have any idea (again) what the hell I’m talking about.
And if you think you do then you’re in for a nasty shock, because so far this has been the best part of this title-less essay.
It’s get much worse on the flip.
Dec 12 2009
The Considerate Taliban
A military affairs blogger has posted a bit of media research with some rather, shall we say, unlikely(?) results, RawStory reported Friday.
It seems that for at least this year, and probably for a few years previously, the Taliban have been playing their assigned role in the great war on terror to the letter and have been considerate enough to stand around in standardized production groups to be attacked and killed by unmanned aerial drones and US and Afghan ground troops.
Groups of not odd numbers like 29 or even 31 of them, but standing there waiting for their martyrizing missile strikes in groups of exactly 30.
Citing the Moon of Alabama blog, which made a similar argument this spring, Security Crank linked to 12 news reports of separate air strike incidents since the start of the year in which the number of Taliban or insurgent casualties was reported to be 30, in most cases citing US military officials.
Not 29, not 31. Thirty.
Dec 11 2009
Michelle Obama’s Garden, & Transition To A World Without Oil
Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition movement, a radically hopeful and community-driven approach to creating societies independent of fossil fuel.
From his bio at Ted.com:
Hopkins leads a vibrant new movement of towns and cities that utilize local cooperation and interdependence to shrink their ecological footprints. In the face of climate change he developed the concept of Transition Initiatives — communities that produce their own goods and services, curb the need for transportation and take other measures to prepare for a post-oil future. While Transition shares certain principles with greenness and sustainability, it is a deeper vision concerned with re-imagining our future in a self-sufficient way and building resiliency.
Transforming theory to action, Hopkins is also the co-founder and a resident of the first Transition Initiative in the UK, in Totnes, Devon. As he refuses to fly, it is from his home in Totnes that he offers help to hundreds of similar communities that have sprung up around the world, in part through his blog, transitionculture.org
Hopkins, who’s trained in ecological design, wrote the principal work on the subject, Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, a 12-step manual for a postcarbon future.
Hopkins website is “Transition Culture: An evolving exploration into the head, heart and hands of energy descent“, where he asks “How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations” One of the posts I found most thought provoking on his site is Your Free Guide to Setting Up Local Currencies, available in .pdf for download on that page. He discusses in the video below some communities setting up their own currencies and local economies.
Here is Hopkins giving a talk for Ted.com, filmed this past July and posted there in November this year…
Dec 10 2009
Afghanistan Transparent
Paul Jay of The Real News interviews F. William Engdahl, economist and author of the best selling book “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order” who explains US Geopolitical objectives in Afghanistan, in terms clear and simple enough even for US mainstream network television audiences – which is probably why you never see him on television.
Based in Germany, Engdahl has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock in the early 1970s, and is a regular contributor to a number of publications including Asia Times Online, Asia, Inc, Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine, and Freitag and ZeitFragen newspapers in Germany and Switzerland.
Real News Network – December 9, 2009 – 14 min 35 sec
Why is the USA in Afghanistan?
Engdahl: Key objective is a permanent military presence in Asia
Dec 08 2009
Help, I’m Surrounded
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RawStory this morning:
More Americans believe in angels than humans’ role in global warming
More Americans believe in guardian angels than humans’ role in global warming, according to recent polls.
A Pew poll released late last month found that just 36 percent of Americans believe humans are responsible for accelerating global climate change, which scientists say mushroomed after the industrial revolution due to humans’ dependence on carbon-based fuels.
Carbon dioxide, which is produced by the combustion of oil, coal and other fuels, was ruled a “dangerous” threat to public health by the Environmental Protection Agency Monday. It increases the propensity of the earth’s atmosphere to retain heat.
But a near-consensus from scientists doesn’t have Americans convinced. The Pew poll found that while
57 percent believe that the earth’s climate is changing, just 36 percent believe that humans are responsible. 77 percent believed that global warming existed in Pew’s poll conducted in 2007.The 36 percent who believe in human-caused climate change is fewer than the number of Americans who apparently believe they’re protected by guardian angels, some 55 percent, according to a poll published in 2008.