the driving force II

Video - Excerpt from Chronos.

Acceleration of change sweeps us away. One week recently, I passed a yellowed, run-down, student-infested house on the main street of town while bicycling to the campus as usual. A week afterward the view past the house across to the neighboring schoolyard was splendid. For the first time in living memory, it was unobstructed.

Mountains framed the distant backdrop. The house was gone. No sign that any house hade ever been there remained, except newly raked soil in the footprint of a simple ground plan. Such dramtic changes in our immediate surroundings are commonplace. Burger King, Toys "R" Us, Wendys, McDonalds, and bank branches sprout in our cities and towns. Mom-andpop shops, wheat fields, and old oaks disappear like coins dropped into the sand. Native Americans thrive if they form gambling liasons, graduate students receive stipends when they change from studying the habits of beavers inside their lodges to the search for genes in the human genome.

1. Why do the forces of change always seem to prevail over the quiet and uneventful habits of the past?
2. Why does the evolution of life seem to accelerate as we move into the present and out toward the future?
3. Is evolution just random change?
   
4. Does the evolutionary process itself, the origin and diversification of life from common ancestors, seem to be directed?

When we ask evolutionary biologists and other scientists if the evolution of life is going in some direction, they adamantly deny it. But our everyday experience suggests that our social environment grows more complex. Our natural green and watery environment seems to shrink to be locally augmented with metallic solids. Neon lights, traffic signals, and other aspects of urbanization replace woodlands and open streams at an ever-increasing rate of change. People crowd out foxes and antelope, pigeons and sparrows replace orioles and woodpeckers. Digital tools supplant simple mechanical devices at alarming speeds. Evolution of life does seem to have a direction. Life's peculiarities and human technologies do seem to expand at an accelerating rate of change as we come from the past toward the present. Darwin's Dilemma Acquiring Genomes Lynn Margulis.

nature abhors a gradient

"Streaming Gradient" by Jen Stark from Jen Stark on Vimeo.

A gradient is defined as a difference across a distance.

Evolution is a science of connections, and connection does not stop with ties of humans to apes, apes to other animals, or animals to microbes. Life and nonlife are also connected in very fundamental ways. The organization of life is material and energetic.

Life exists in the very real thermodynamic difference between 5800 Kelvin of incoming solar radiation and 2.7 Kelvin of outer space. It is this gradient upon which life's complexity feeds. This thermodynamic idea connects life to nonlife.

Life is one of a class of systems that organize in response to a gradient.

it's not the size that matters, it's how you use it

Life After Growth - Economics for Everyone from enmedia productions on Vimeo.

the imminent crash of the oil supply

ICH | This graph was prepared for a DOE meeting in spring, 2009. Take a good look at what it says, assuming it to be correct:

1. Conventional oil will be almost all gone in 20 years, and there is nothing known to replace it.

2.. Production of petroleum from existing conventional sources has been dropping at a rate slightly over 4% per year for at least a year and will continue to do so for the indefinite future.

3. The graph implies that we are past the peak of production and that there are750 billion barrels of conventional oil left (the areas under the "conventional" portion of the graph, extrapolated to the right as an exponent ional). Assuming that the remaining reserves were 900 billion or more at the halfway point, then we are at least 150 billion barrels, or 5 years, past the midpoint.

4. Total petroleum production from all presently known sources, conventional and unconventional, will remain "flat" at approximately 83 mbpd for the next two years and then will proceed to drop for the foreseeable future, at first slowly but by 4% per year after 2015.

5. Demand will begin to outstrip supply in 2012, and will already be 10 million barrels per day above supply in only five years. The United States Joint Forces Command concurs with these specific findings. http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf , at 31. 10 million bpd is equivalent to half the United States' entire consumption. To make up the difference, the world would have to find another Saudi Arabia and get it into full production in five years, an impossibility. See The Oil Drum, http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5154

5. The production from presently existing conventional sources will plummet from its present 81 mbpd to 30 mbpd by 2030, a 63% drop in a 20-year period.

6. Meeting demand requires discovering, developing, and bringing to full production 60mbpd (105-45) of "unidentified projects" in the 18-year period of 2012-2030 and approximately 25 mbpd of such projects by 2020, on the basis of a very conservative estimate of only 1% annual growth in demand. The independent Oxford Institute of Energy Studies has estimated a possible development of 6.5mbpd of such projects, including the Canadian tar sands, implying a deficit of 18-19 mbpd as compared to demand, and an approximate 14 mbpd drop in total liquid fuels production relative to 2012, a 16% drop in 8 years.

7. The curve is virtually identical to one produced by geologists Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere and published in "The End of Cheap Oil," in Scientific American, March, 1998, twelve years ago. They projected that production of petroleum from conventional sources would drop from 74 mbpd in 2003 (as compared to 84 mbpd in 2008 in the DOE graph) and drop to 39 mbpd by 2030 (as compared to 39 mbpd by 2030 in the DOE graph!).http://www.jala.com/energy1.php . Campbell and Laherrere predicted a 2003 "peak," and the above graph implies a 'peak" (not necessarily the actual peak, but the midpointr of production of 2005 or before.

So here we are, if the graph is right, on the edge of a precipice, with no prior warning from either the industry, which knows what it possesses, or the collective governments, which ostensibly protect the public interest. As Colin Campbell, a research geologist who has worked for many large oil companies and studied oil depletion extensively says, "The warning signals have been flying for a long time. They have been plain to see, but the world turned a blind eye, and failed to read the message. The world was completely transformed by oil for the duration of the twentieth century, but if the graph is right, within 20 years it will be virtually gone but our dependence upon it will not. Instead, we have;

• zero time to plan how to replace cars in our lives
• zero time to plan how to manufacture and install millions of furnaces to replace home oil furnaces, and zero time toproduce the infrastructure necessary to carry out that task
• zero time to retool suburbia so it can function without gasoline
• zero time to plan for replacement of the largest military establishment in history, almost completely dependent upon oil
• zero time to plan to support nine billion peolple without the "green revolution," a creation of the age of oil
• zero time to plan to replace oil as an essential fuel in electricity production
• zero time to plan for preserving millions of miles of roads without asphalt.
• zero time to plan for the replacement of oil in its essential role in EVERY industry.
• zero time to plan for replacement of oil in its exclusive role of transporting people, agricultural produce, manufactured goods. In a world without oil that appears only twenty years away, there will be no oil-burning ships transporting US grain to other countries, there will be no oil-burning airlines linking the world's major cities, there will be no oil-burning ships transporting Chinese manufactured goods to the billions now dependent on them.
• zero time to plan for the survival of the billions of new people expected by 2050 in the aftermath of ":peak everything."
• zero capital, because of failing banks ansd public and private debt, to address these issues.

strong biology

Be careful never to use either "cooperation" or "competition" to describe biological or other evolutionary phenomena.

These words may be appropriate for the basketball court, computer industry, or financial institutions, but they paint with too broad a brush. Far too often they miss the complex interactions of live beings, organisms who cohabit. Competition implies an agreement, a set of actions that follow rules, but in the game of real life, the "rules" - based on chemistry and environmental conditions - change with the players. To compete, people - for example on opposite teams - must basically cooperate in some way. "Competition" is a term with limited scientific meaning, usually without reference to units by which it can be measured. How does the green worm or the lichen fungus assess its competitive status? By the addition of points in its score or by dollars, or Swiss francs? No. Then what are the units of competition? If you ask what are the units of biomass we can tell you in grams or ounces. If you ask how light or biotic potential is to be measured, we answer in lux or foot-candles or numbers of offspring per generation. But if you ask "what are the units of competition" we reply that yours is not a scientific notion.

Vogue terms like "competition" "cooperation" "mutualism" "mutual benefit" "energy cost" and "competitive advantage" have been borrowed from human enterprises and forced on science from politics, business, and social thought. The entire panoply of neodarwinist terminology reflects a profound philosophical error, a 20th century example of a phenomenon aptly named by Alfred North Whitehead; the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The terminology of most modern evolutionists is not only fallacious but dangerously so., because it leads people to think they know about the evolution of life when in fact they are baffled, ignorant, and confused. The "selfish-gene" provides a fine example. What is Richard Dawkins's selfish gene? A gene is never a self to begin with. A gene alone is only a piece of DNA long enough to have a function. The gene by itself can be flushed down the sink; even if preserved in a freezer or a salt solution the isolated gene has no activity whatsoever. There is no life in a gene.

There is no self. A gene never fits the minimal criterion of self, of a living system. The time has come in serious biology to abandon words like competition, cooperation, and selfish genes and replace them with meaningful terms such as metabolic modes (chemoautotrophy, photosynthesis), ecological relations (epibiont, pollinator), and measurable quantities (light, heat, mechanical force). So many current evolutionary metaphors are superficial dichotomizations that come from false clarities of language. They do not beget but preclude scientific understanding.

Would not society be better served, then, if we adopted symbiotic metaphors instead of competitive ones? No. Society will be better served by more accurate scientific understanding, and this is not to be gained by substituting one pole of oversimplified metaphors for another. But of course organisms do vie in various ways with each other for space and food. Such vying however, (or competition) among members of the same species does not in itself lead to new species; a source of genetic novelty-usually symbiogenesis-is needed. excerpted from Darwinism not NeoDarwinism Acquiring Genomes Lynn Margulis.

exemplar...,

Video - Lynn Margulis discusses her love of science.

colleague disputes case against anthrax suspect

NYTimes | A former Army microbiologist who worked for years with Bruce E. Ivins, whom the F.B.I. has blamed for the anthrax letter attacks that killed five people in 2001, told a National Academy of Sciences panel on Thursday that he believed it was impossible that the deadly spores had been produced undetected in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory, as the F.B.I. asserts.

Asked by reporters after his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had carried out the attacks, the microbiologist, Henry S. Heine, replied, “Absolutely not.” At the Army’s biodefense laboratory in Maryland, where Dr. Ivins and Dr. Heine worked, he said, “among the senior scientists, no one believes it.”

Dr. Heine told the 16-member panel, which is reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the investigation, that producing the quantity of spores in the letters would have taken at least a year of intensive work using the equipment at the army lab. Such an effort would not have escaped colleagues’ notice, he added later, and lab technicians who worked closely with Dr. Ivins have told him they saw no such work.

He told the panel that biological containment measures where Dr. Ivins worked were inadequate to prevent the spores from floating out of the laboratory into animal cages and offices. “You’d have had dead animals or dead people,” he said.

The public remarks from Dr. Heine, two months after the Justice Department officially closed the case, represent a major public challenge to its conclusion in one of the largest, most politically delicate and scientifically complex cases in F.B.I. history.

Asked why he was speaking out now, Dr. Heine noted that Army officials had prohibited comment on the case, silencing him until he left the government laboratory in late February. He now works for Ordway Research Institute in Albany.

Dr. Heine said he did not dispute that there was a genetic link between the spores in the letters and the anthrax in Dr. Ivins’s flask — a link that led the F.B.I. to conclude that Dr. Ivins had grown the spores from a sample taken from the flask. But samples from the flask were widely shared, Dr. Heine said. Accusing Dr. Ivins of the attacks, he said, was like tracing a murder to the clerk at the sporting goods shop who sold the bullets.

“Whoever did this is still running around out there,” Dr. Heine said. “I truly believe that.”

SDO

Video - First images from the new solar observatory.

BBC News | NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has provided an astonishing new vista on our turbulent star.

The first public release of images from the satellite record huge explosions and great looping prominences of gas.

The observatory's super-fine resolution is expected to help scientists get a better understanding of what drives solar activity.

Launched in February on an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, SDO is expected to operate for at least five years.

Researchers hope in this time to go a long way towards their eventual goal of being able to forecast the effects of the Sun's behaviour on Earth.
“ It's like looking at the details of our star through a microscope ”
Richard Harrison, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

Solar activity has a profound influence on our planet. Huge eruptions of charged particles and the emission of intense radiation can disrupt satellite, communication and power systems, and pose a serious health risk to astronauts.

Scientists working on SDO say they are thrilled with the quality of the data received so far.

"When we see these fantastic images, even hard-core solar physicists like myself are struck with awe, literally," said Lika Guhathakurta, the SDO programme scientist at Nasa Headquarters.

SDO is equipped with three instruments to investigate the physics at work inside, on the surface and in the atmosphere of the Sun.

The probe views the entire solar disc with a resolution 10 times better than the average high-definition television camera. This allows it to pick out features on the surface and in the atmosphere that are as small as 350km across.

The pictures are also acquired at a rapid rate, every few seconds.

In addition, the different wavelengths in which the instruments operate mean scientists can study the Sun's atmosphere layer by layer.

A key quest will be to probe the inner workings of the solar dynamo, the deep network of plasma currents that generates the Sun's tangled and sometimes explosive magnetic field.

It is the dynamo that ultimately lies behind all forms of solar activity, from the solar flares that explode in the Sun's atmosphere to the relatively cool patches, or sunspots, that pock the solar disc and wander across its surface for days or even weeks.

"The SDO images are stunning and the level of detail they reveal will undoubtedly lead to a new branch of research into how the fine-scale solar magnetic fields form and evolve, leading to a much, much better understanding of how solar activity develops," said co-investigator Richard Harrison from the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).

"It's like looking at the details of our star through a microscope," he told BBC News.

what links the banking crisis and the volcano?

Video - ashy Icelandic volcano.

Guardian | Man proposes; nature disposes. We are seldom more vulnerable than when we feel insulated. The miracle of modern flight protected us from gravity, atmosphere, culture, geography. It made everywhere feel local, interchangeable. Nature interjects, and we encounter – tragically for many – the reality of thousands of miles of separation. We discover that we have not escaped from the physical world after all.

Complex, connected societies are more resilient than simple ones – up to a point. During the east African droughts of the early 1990s, I saw at first hand what anthropologists and economists have long predicted: those people who had the fewest trading partners were hit hardest. Connectivity provided people with insurance: the wider the geographical area they could draw food from, the less they were hurt by a regional famine.

But beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a hazard. The longer and more complex the lines of communication and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the greater the potential for disruption. This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impoverished mortgage defaulters in the United States – the butterfly's wing over the Atlantic – almost broke the global economy. If the Eyjafjallajökull volcano – by no means a monster – keeps retching it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect.

We have several such vulnerabilities. The most catastrophic would be an unexpected coronal mass ejection – a solar storm – which causes a surge of direct current down our electricity grids, taking out the transformers. It could happen in seconds; the damage and collapse would take years to reverse, if we ever recovered. We would soon become aware of our dependence on electricity: an asset which, like oxygen, we notice only when it fails.

As New Scientist magazine points out, an event like this would knacker most of the systems which keep us alive. It would take out water treatment plants and pumping stations. It would paralyse oil pumping and delivery, which would quickly bring down food supplies. It would clobber hospitals, financial systems and just about every kind of business – even the manufacturers of candles and paraffin lamps. Emergency generators would function only until the oil ran out. Burnt-out transformers cannot be repaired; they must be replaced. Over the past year I've sent freedom of information requests to electricity transmitters and distributors, asking them what contingency plans they have made, and whether they have stockpiled transformers to replace any destroyed by a solar storm. I haven't got to the end of it yet, but the early results suggest that they haven't.

There's a similar lack of planning for the possibility that global supplies of oil might soon peak then go into decline. My FoI requests to the British government reveal that it has made no contingency plans, on the grounds that it doesn't believe it will happen. The issue remains the preserve of beardy lentil-eaters such as, er, the US joint forces command. Its latest report on possible future conflicts maintains that "a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity".

It suggests that "by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10m barrels per day". A shortage of refining and production capacity is not the same thing as peak oil, but the report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under "the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand". A global oil shortage would soon expose the weaknesses of our complex economic systems. As the cultural anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown, their dependence on high energy use is one of the factors that makes complex societies vulnerable to collapse.

man-up moment in the senate...,

Video - Sen. Blanche Lincoln driving derivatives transparency.

NYTimes | This was Wednesday at the Senate Agriculture Committee, which was considering the regulation of derivatives. These are extremely complicated financial instruments, and they are under the control of the agriculture committee because, really, when you get right down to it, everything is a crop.

“Members of this committee check their partisan politics at the door,” boasted the chairwoman, Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat of Arkansas. Then, in between compliments, the members approved Lincoln’s bill on derivatives in a series of party-line votes.

Except for Charles Grassley, a Republican of Iowa, who sided with Lincoln. Truly, this was a day for the record books. Somebody finally got a Republican to vote for something.

And perhaps a sign of things to come. As President Obama prepared to make his big financial reform speech near Wall Street on Thursday, the G.O.P. seemed increasingly eager to find a way to work this one out.

“We probably generally agree on 90 percent,” said the agriculture committee’s ranking minority member, Saxby (“I golf, therefore I am”) Chambliss. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, took credit for forcing bipartisan negotiations with his innovative threat-of-a-filibuster tactic. Chris Dodd, the chairman of the banking committee who has been negotiating with the Republicans for months, said it was like a rooster taking credit for the sunrise.

The Republican leadership originally seemed to believe that financial reform could be a replay of health care reform, with a political payoff for total obstruction. They’re discovering that the only real similarity is that both are almost impossible to explain. People love their doctors, but they tend to hate their bankers. Nobody is going to scare voters by predicting that if the Democratic bill passes, they may not be able to keep seeing the same hedge fund manager.

It’s a sign of the shift that Blanche Lincoln has gone to the front of the populist pack. She was one of the weakest reeds on the Democratic side of the health care reform debate. Before that, she was obsessed with trying to cut the estate tax. Before that — well, let’s be frank. We have no idea what she was up to.

Given her record, people had expected a weak, boring package from her committee. But Lincoln came up with rules that were tougher than anyone had expected, requiring derivatives to be traded on public exchanges so investors could compare prices. The banks hate this idea, possibly because it will drive down their profits.

For sure because it will drive down their profits.

chess, not checkers (continued)......,

Video - Bill Black on Goldman Sachs derivatives fraud.

WaPo | Even before the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman last week, accusing it of creating a complex financial product designed to fail and selling it to unknowing investors, the firm had become a frequent target of investigators. In courts and in Congress, Goldman has been accused of a range of misdeeds, including manipulating oil prices and using taxpayer money for handsome bonuses.

The company has maintained that it did nothing improper in any of those cases. In the Massachusetts settlement, it admitted to no wrongdoing, and a spokesman said Goldman was never a leading issuer or underwriter of residential mortgage-backed securities. Yet, to many Goldman critics, the SEC lawsuit underscores their worst image of the firm as a cold bank that places its profit before anything else -- client interests, customer needs and its obligation to society as a leading American corporation.

Although Goldman quickly agreed to settle the Massachusetts case, it is gearing up for a court battle with the SEC. The case, analysts said, challenges the heart of Goldman's motto -- "Our clients' interests always come first" -- and could set off a new wave of lawsuits against the firm.

"Anyone who's ever done any investment through Goldman who's lost a significant amount of money all the sudden starts to say, 'Gee, I wonder if there was something else out there that they were doing, which they didn't tell me about, which would have made me not want to invest?' " said Richard L. Scheff, chairman of the law firm Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads. "If I'm a person who's lost money, why would I think it's limited to this? You're talking about someone's duty to their clients. That's the principle at issue here."

we live in a kleptocracy

Video - Michael Hudson explained the kleptocracy some time ago.

Alternet | Kleptocracy -- now, there’s a word I was taught to associate with corrupt and exploitative governments that steal ruthlessly and relentlessly from the people. It’s a word, in fact, that’s usually applied to flawed or failed governments in Africa, Latin America, or the nether regions of Asia. Such governments are typically led by autocratic strong men who shower themselves and their cronies with all the fruits of extracted wealth, whether stolen from the people or squeezed from their country’s natural resources. It’s not a word you’re likely to see associated with a mature republic like the United States led by disinterested public servants and regulated by more-or-less transparent principles and processes.

In fact, when Americans today wish to critique or condemn their government, the typical epithets used are “socialism” or “fascism.” When my conservative friends are upset, they send me emails with links to material about “ObamaCare” and the like. These generally warn of a future socialist takeover of the private realm by an intrusive, power-hungry government. When my progressive friends are upset, they send me emails with links pointing to an incipient fascist takeover of our public and private realms, led by that same intrusive, power-hungry government (and, I admit it, I’m hardly innocent when it comes to such “what if” scenarios).

What if, however, instead of looking at where our government might be headed, we took a closer look at where we are -- at the power-brokers who run or influence our government, at those who are profiting and prospering from it? These are, after all, the “winners” in our American world in terms of the power they wield and the wealth they acquire. And shouldn’t we be looking as well at those Americans who are losing -- their jobs, their money, their homes, their healthcare, their access to a better way of life -- and asking why?

If we were to take an honest look at America’s blasted landscape of “losers” and the far shinier, spiffier world of “winners,” we’d have to admit that it wasn’t signs of onrushing socialism or fascism that stood out, but of staggeringly self-aggrandizing greed and theft right in the here and now. We’d notice our public coffers being emptied to benefit major corporations and financial institutions working in close alliance with, and passing on remarkable sums of money to, the representatives of “the people.” We’d see, in a word, kleptocracy on a scale to dazzle. We would suddenly see an almost magical disappearing act being performed, largely without comment, right before our eyes.

u.s. military warns of massive shortages by 2015

Guardian | The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.

The energy crisis outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command, comes as the price of petrol in Britain reaches record levels and the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel.

"By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day," says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.

It adds: "While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India."

The US military says its views cannot be taken as US government policy but admits they are meant to provide the Joint Forces with "an intellectual foundation upon which we will construct the concept to guide out future force developments."

The warning is the latest in a series from around the world that has turned peak oil – the moment when demand exceeds supply – from a distant threat to a more immediate risk.

The Wicks Review on UK energy policy published last summer effectively dismissed fears but Lord Hunt, the British energy minister, met concerned industrialists two weeks ago in a sign that it is rapidly changing its mind on the seriousness of the issue.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency remains confident that there is no short-term risk of oil shortages but privately some senior officials have admitted there is considerable disagreement internally about this upbeat stance.

Future fuel supplies are of acute importance to the US army because it is believed to be the biggest single user of petrol in the world. BP chief executive, Tony Hayward, said recently that there was little chance of crude from the carbon-heavy Canadian tar sands being banned in America because the US military like to have local supplies rather than rely on the politically unstable Middle East.

But there are signs that the US Department of Energy might also be changing its stance on peak oil. In a recent interview with French newspaper, Le Monde, Glen Sweetnam, main oil adviser to the Obama administration, admitted that "a chance exists that we may experience a decline" of world liquid fuels production between 2011 and 2015 if the investment was not forthcoming.

it's impossible to "get by" in the u.s....,

Video - Talib Kweli Get By.

ZeroHedge | While the market cheers on the fantastic job “growth” of March 2010, the more astute of us are concerned with a growing tide of personal bankruptcies. March 2010 saw 158,000 bankruptcy filings. David Rosenberg of Gluskin-Sheff notes that this is an astounding 6,900 filings per day.

This latest filing is up 19% from March 2009’s number which occurred at the absolute nadir of the economic decline, when everyone thought the world was ending. It’s also up 35% from last month’s (February 2010) number.

Given the significance of this, I thought today we’d spend some time delving into numbers for the “median” American’s experience in the US today. Regrettably, much of the data is not up to date so we’ve got to go by 2008 numbers.

In 2008, the median US household income was $50,300. Assuming that the person filing is the “head of household” and has two children (dependents), this means a 1040 tax bill of $4,100, which leaves about $45K in income after taxes (we’re not bothering with state taxes). I realize this is a simplistic calculation, but it’s a decent proxy for income in the US in 2008.

Now, $45K in income spread out over 26 pay periods (every two weeks), means a bi-weekly paycheck of $1,730 and monthly income of $3,460. This is the money “Joe America” and his family to live off of in 2008.

Now, in 2008, the median home value was roughly $225K. Assuming our “median” household put down 20% on their home (unlikely, but it used to be considered the norm), this means a $180K mortgage. Using a 5.5% fixed rate 30-year mortgage, this means Joe America’s 2008 monthly mortgage payments were roughly $1,022.

So, right off the bat, Joe’s monthly income is cut to $2,438.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, the average 2008 monthly food bill for a family of four ranged from $512-$986 depending on how “liberal” you are with your purchases. For simplicity’s sake we’ll take the mid-point of this range ($750) as a monthly food bill.

This brings Joe’s monthly income to $1,688.

Now, Joe needs light, energy, heat, and air conditioning to run his home. According to the Energy Information Administration, the average US household used about 920 kilowatt-hours per month in 2008. At a national average price of 11 cents per kilowatt-hour this comes to a monthly electrical bill of $101.20. Fist tap Dale.

school districts warn of deeper teacher cuts

NYTimes | School districts around the country, forced to resort to drastic money-saving measures, are warning hundreds of thousands of teachers that their jobs may be eliminated in June.

The districts have no choice, they say, because their usual sources of revenue — state money and local property taxes — have been hit hard by the recession. In addition, federal stimulus money earmarked for education has been mostly used up this year.

As a result, the 2010-11 school term is shaping up as one of the most austere in the last half century. In addition to teacher layoffs, districts are planning to close schools, cut programs, enlarge classes and shorten the school day, week or year to save money.

“We are doing things and considering options I never thought I’d have to consider,” said Peter C. Gorman, superintendent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina, who expects to cut 600 of the district’s 9,400 teachers this year, after laying off 120 last year. “This may be our new economic reality.”

Districts in California have given pink slips to 22,000 teachers. Illinois authorities are predicting 17,000 job cuts in the public schools. And New York has warned nearly 15,000 teachers that their jobs could disappear in June.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan estimated that state budget cuts imperiled 100,000 to 300,000 public school jobs. In an interview on Monday, he said the nation was flirting with “education catastrophe,” and urged Congress to approve additional stimulus funds to save school jobs.

“We absolutely see this as an emergency,” Mr. Duncan said.

transit cuts protested in atlanta

NYTimes | When Danielle White boarded her bus to go to work on Tuesday morning, it was emblazoned from top to bottom with a giant, painted red X. Ms. White knew what that meant.

“This is one of the buses that’s getting cut,” said Ms. White, a security guard at the Georgia Aquarium. “I’m going to have to figure out how to get there.”

On Monday night, workers and officials at the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority volunteered to paint the X’s on a third of the system’s buses and trains to symbolize the 30 percent cut in service the agency is facing because of a decline in sales tax revenue and a Republican-dominated Statehouse that has been slow to help.

On Tuesday morning, with a parade of X’d-out buses stopping on the street behind them, more than 200 public transit workers and riders gathered at the system’s main hub, Five Points. They were kicking off a week of rallies, telephone campaigns and other events in 11 cities across the country coordinated by the Transportation Equity Network, an advocacy group based in St. Louis, to protest transportation cuts and fare increases.

“We are just crawling out of a recession,” said Sam Massell, a former mayor of Atlanta, “but we will be knocked back into another one if the salespersons are not behind the store counters, if the restaurant workers are not in the kitchens, if the office staff are not behind their desks.”

About 46 percent of the more than 100,000 people who use Marta to get to work each day say they do not have access to other forms of transportation.

More than 80 percent of the nation’s transit systems are considering or have recently enacted fare increases or service cuts, including those in Kansas City, Mo., Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., according to a survey released this month by the American Public Transportation Association.

But Marta, the ninth-largest system in the country, faces a particular difficulty because it is the only major system that does not receive any dedicated money from the state. Instead, it depends on fares and a one-cent sales tax in only two of metro Atlanta’s 28 counties, Fulton and DeKalb. While Atlanta chokes on traffic, Georgia ranks 49th in per capita government spending on transportation, according to a report commissioned by Gov. Sonny Perdue.

georgia chips ban the microchip

AJC | We often say that insanity reigns at the state Capitol.

But when we do, we do not literally accuse the people inside of letting their grip on reality slip. We simply mean that our ability to fathom their motives, or their ability to express them, has fallen short.

Referring to a politician as delusional is simply entertaining hyperbole. But it is something that becomes much less funny when a truly tortured soul bears her torment.

Last Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee entertained SB 235, the bill sponsored by Sen. Chip Pearson (R-Dawsonville) to prohibit the involuntary implantation of microchips in human beings.

In Gov. Roy Barnes’ stump speech, the bill has become a routine example of the Republican tendency to attack problems that don’t exist, and ignore the ones that do. Besides, Barnes argues, if someone holds him down to insert a microchip in his head, “it should be more than a damned misdemeanor.”

Three states have instituted bans, and others have considered the legislation. In Virginia, a bill supporter declared microchips to be the “666″ mark of the beast referred to in the Book of Revelation.

Pearson has said his motivation isn’t biblical or religious – that he is simply working in advance of technology’s next assault on personal privacy. Not unlike limiting the uses of DNA testing by health insurance companies, he argues.

At the House hearing, state Rep. Ed Setzler (R-Kennesaw), who is shouldering the legislation in the House, spoke earnestly for better than a half hour on microchips as a literal invasion of privacy.

He was followed by a hefty woman who described herself as a resident of DeKalb County. “I’m also one of the people in Georgia who has a microchip,” the woman said. Slowly, she began to lead the assembled lawmakers down a path they didn’t want to take.

Microchips, the woman began, “infringe on issues that are fundamental to our very existence. Our rights to privacy, our rights to bodily integrity, the right to say no to foreign objects being put in our body.”

She spoke of the “right to work without being tortured by co-workers who are activating these microchips by using their cell phones and other electronic devices.”

She continued. “Microchips are like little beepers. Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission,” she said.

It was not funny, and no one laughed.

“Ma’am, did you say you have a microchip?” asked state Rep. Tom Weldon (R-Ringgold).

“Yes, I do. This microchip was put in my vaginal-rectum area,” she replied. Setzler, the sponsoring lawmaker, sat next to the witness – his head bowed.

“You’re saying this was involuntary?” Weldon continued.

The woman said she had been pushing a court case through the system for the last eight years to have the device removed.

Wendell Willard (R-Atlanta), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, picked up the questioning.

“Who implanted this in you?” he asked.

“Researchers with the federal government,” she said.

“And who in the federal government implanted it?” Willard asked.

“The Department of Defense.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

The woman was allowed to go about her business, and the House Judiciary Committee approved passage of SB 235.

dangerous elderly firmly opposed

AP | Most Americans still oppose legalizing marijuana but larger majorities believe pot has medical benefits and the government should allow its use for that purpose, according to an Associated Press-CNBC poll released Tuesday.

Respondents were skeptical that crime would spike if marijuana is decriminalized or that it would lead more people to harder drugs like heroin or cocaine. There also was a nearly even split on whether government spends too much or the right amount enforcing marijuana laws. Almost no one thinks too little is spent.

Marijuana use — medically and recreationally — is getting more attention in the political arena. California voters will decide in November whether to legalize the drug, and South Dakota will vote this fall on whether to allow medical uses. California and 13 other states already permit such use.

The balloting comes against the backdrop of the Obama administration saying it won't target marijuana dispensaries if they comply with state laws, a departure from the policy of the Bush administration, which sought to more stringently enforce the federal ban on marijuana use for any purpose.

In the poll, only 33 percent favor legalization while 55 percent oppose it. People under 30 were the only age group favoring legalization (54 percent) and opposition increased with age, topping out at 73 percent of those 65 and older. Opposition also was prevalent among women, Republicans and those in rural and suburban areas.

Some opponents worried legalization would lead to reefer madness.

"I think it would be chaos if it was legalized," said Shirley Williams, a 75-year-old retired English teacher from Quincy, Ill. "People would get in trouble and use marijuana as an excuse."

Those like Jeff Boggs, 25, of Visalia, Calif., who support legalization said the dangers associated with the drug have been overstated.

"People are scared about things they don't know about," said Boggs, who is married and works for an auto damage appraisal company.

xalisco boys...,

LATimes | A lethal business model targets Middle America. Sugar cane farmers from a tiny Mexican county use savvy marketing and low prices to push black-tar heroin in the U.S.

Immigrants from an obscure corner of Mexico are changing heroin use in many parts of America. Farm boys from a tiny county that once depended on sugar cane have perfected an ingenious business model for selling a semi-processed form of Mexican heroin known as black tar.

Using convenient delivery by car and aggressive marketing, they have moved into cities and small towns across the United States, often creating demand for heroin where there was little or none. In many of those places, authorities report increases in overdoses and deaths.

Immigrants from Xalisco in the Pacific Coast state of Nayarit, Mexico, they have brought an audacious entrepreneurial spirit to the heroin trade. Their success stems from both their product, which is cheaper and more potent than Colombian heroin, and their business model, which places a premium on customer convenience and satisfaction.

Users need not venture into dangerous neighborhoods for their fix. Instead, they phone in their orders and drivers take the drug to them. Crew bosses sometimes call users after a delivery to check on the quality of service. They encourage users to bring in new customers, rewarding them with free heroin if they do.

In contrast to Mexico's big cartels -- violent, top-down organizations that mainly enrich a small group -- the Xalisco networks are small, decentralized businesses. Each is run by an entrepreneur whose workers may soon strike out on their own and become his competitors. They have no all-powerful leader and rarely use guns, according to narcotics investigators and imprisoned former dealers.

Leaving the wholesale business to the cartels, they have mined outsize profits from the retail trade, selling heroin a tenth of a gram at a time. Competition among the networks has reduced prices, further spreading heroin addiction.

"I call them the Xalisco boys," said Dennis Chavez, a Denver police narcotics officer who has arrested dozens of dealers from Xalisco (pronounced ha-LEES-ko) and has studied their connections to other cities. "They're nationwide."

thug life internationale...,

Video - If only Richard Barnbrook had had a flashy armband.

Guardian | Billy Bragg was engaged in a finger-pointing row with a senior member of the British National party during a day of action in London, telling him his "racist fascist" politics offered no help to voters.

Bragg was leafleting in Barking and Dagenham, one of the BNP's top target areas in next month's elections, when he bumped into the BNP's London assembly member, Richard Barnbrook, who has attacked the singer on his blog.

Bragg, who was born and raised in Barking, told Barnbrook: "You do not represent the people of Barking and Dagenham," as the pair became embroiled in a heated argument. "You are exploiting the genuine concerns of people here and you are making the problems worse."

Barnbrook, who was elected to the London assembly in 2008, accused Bragg of "mouthing away" and said the "ballot box will determine what happens".

The exchange came during a day of action against the BNP which saw 541 volunteers deliver 91,000 Hope Not Hate newspapers.

The BNP is due to launch its manifesto this week and has claimed it is on the verge of causing a "political earthquake". It claims it has a chance of taking control of Barking and Dagenham council and of gaining two MPs – in Stoke Central and Barking.

However, the far-right party's campaign has been beset by problems, and it appears to be floundering in the polls. Internal criticism over Nick Griffin's leadership came to a head earlier this month when publicity director Mark Collett was arrested on suspicion of threatening to kill him.

In Stoke, the party's number two target, Alby Walker, who led the BNP on the local council for four years, is standing as an independent in the general election.

Walker said he was leaving the BNP because of a "vein of Holocaust denying within the BNP that I cannot identify myself with."

Meanwhile Griffin, who is standing in Barking, has been forced to change the BNP's whites-only membership policy following a legal battle with the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. Last week the Electoral Commission announced it was launching a formal investigation into the party's 2008 accounts.

These difficulties appear to have hit the party's ability to stand candidates in next month's local elections.

the great unreasoning

ClubOrlov | Doesn't it seem laughable that the entire edifice of modern political science rests on mere opinion? Some mornings I entertain up to a dozen mutually contradictory opinions, and that's before even getting off the toilet! It is a flaw of the English language that when someone is convinced of something, the result is said to be a change of opinion. If one is indeed convinced, wouldn't that change one's convictions? But it's easy to see why nobody bothers to conduct "conviction surveys," because the results would be quite boring. Convictions hardly ever change, because they are generally not amenable to persuasion or argument. Convictions tend to form as a result of actual experiences, not from listening to pundits or experts or from reading the popular press. They form part of who we are, not what we might be thinking at any given moment.

It is almost impossible to change someone's convictions through persuasion or argument, and it is equally difficult to cause someone to form convictions through these same means. That is why the most difficult subjects of our time—ones involving hard issues such as overpopulation, natural resource use and depletion, global climate destabilization, looming national bankruptcy and the like—are more or less left out of public discourse. They are of no consequence as matters of opinion, while as matters of conviction they are political dynamite. Plus, just how many people are there whose lives have provided them with the experiences they would need to form convictions on these subjects? These subjects are avoided for the same reason one doesn't leave coiled hoses lying around a slaughterhouse: the sheep might think that they are seeing snakes, stampede and ruin your whole work-shift. It is much better to just let them move smoothly along and cast their vote for "Baah!"

The relatively few people who do have firm convictions are often regarded as "unreasonable" because their convictions cannot be reasoned away as mere opinions can. That to me seems exactly as it should be. Humanity is in the process of demonstrating that it can successfully reason its way into a cul de sac. But is there any reason to believe that it can also reason its way out of it? Perhaps it is high time to start being unreasonable, to decide for ourselves that we do not like the cul de sac into which our reason has steered us, and to refuse to go into it any deeper. Perhaps we could even find a way out of it. And perhaps a few of those people whose minds you can sometimes almost read will almost be able to read our minds as well, and will choose to follow us out. And the rest will just stand around and argue about it: "Baah!" Fist tap Dale.

packing on the potomac

WaPo | Daniel Almond, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, is ready to "muster outside D.C." on Monday with several dozen other self-proclaimed patriots, all of them armed. They intend to make history as the first people to take their guns to a demonstration in a national park, and the Virginia rally is deliberately being held just a few miles from the Capitol and the White House.

Almond plans to have his pistol loaded and openly carried, his rifle unloaded and slung to the rear, a bandoleer of magazines containing ammunition draped over his polo-shirted shoulder. The Atlanta area real estate agent organized the rally because he is upset about health-care reform, climate control, bank bailouts, drug laws and what he sees as President Obama's insistence on and the Democratic Congress's capitulation to a "totalitarian socialism" that tramples individual rights.

A member of several heretofore little-known groups, including Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and Oath Keepers -- former and active military and law enforcement officials who have vowed to resist laws they deem unconstitutional -- Almond, 31, considers packing heat on the doorstep of the federal government within the mainstream of political speech.

Others consider it an alarming escalation of paranoia and anger in the age of Obama.

"What I think is important to note is that many of the speakers have really threatened violence, and it's a real threat to the rule of law," Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said of the program for the armed rally. "They are calling health care and taxes that have been duly enacted by a democratically elected Congress tyrannical, and they feel they have a right to confront that individually."

On the lineup are several heroes of the militia movement, including Mike Vanderboegh, who advocated throwing bricks through the windows of Democrats who voted for the health-care bill; Tom Fernandez, who has established a nationwide call tree to mobilize an armed resistance to any government order to seize firearms; and former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, who refused to enforce the Brady law and then won a Supreme Court verdict that weakened its background-check provisions.

Those coming to the "Restore the Constitution" rally give Obama no quarter for signing the law that permits them to bring their guns to Fort Hunt, run by the National Park Service, and to Gravelly Point on the banks of the Potomac River. Nor are they comforted by a broad expansion of gun rights in several states since his election.

The brandishing of weapons is "not just an impotent symbol" but "a reminder of who we are," said Almond. "The founders knew that it is the tendency of government to expand itself and embrace its own power, and they knew the citizenry had to be reminded of that."

Countered Horwitz: "Our founders thought they got rid of political violence with the Constitution. That was its point. The basic idea of America is one person, one vote, equality."

Vanderboegh and Horwitz both said: "We have a fundamental difference in worldview."

April 19 is the anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and the government's final confrontation in 1993 with the Branch Davidian cult members in Waco, Tex. But Almond said he chose the date to honor the anniversary of the 1775 battles at Lexington and Concord that began the Revolutionary War, "and that is the only reason."

mcveigh tapes

Rachel Maddow previews the McVeigh Tapes on tonight at 9:00pm.

WaPo | Fifteen years ago today, Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder truck filled with explosives and ammonium nitrate fertilizer in front of the Oklahoma City federal building and detonated a bomb so strong it sheared off half the building and killed 168 people. History is still puzzling through the event's lingering effects.

McVeigh is dead (he was executed in 2001) and yet very much with us, in an eerie vibe that rolls around every April 19. At least he is for MSNBC talk-show host Rachel Maddow, who has been having 1990s flashbacks with the anti-government vitriol that most recently accompanied the health-care reform debate.

"Nine years after his execution, we are left worrying that Timothy McVeigh's voice from the grave echoes in the new rising tide of American anti-government extremism," Maddow says at the outset of her MSNBC special Monday night called "The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist."

She's talking, of course, about the latest news about militias, weapons stockpiling, "tea party" anger and the perception of rising unrest in those who seek to reclaim an America supposedly lost to federal control: "On this date, which holds great meaning for the anti-government movement," Maddow says, "the McVeigh tapes are a can't-turn-away, riveting reminder."

What MSNBC has here are 45 hours' worth of cassettes containing prison interviews McVeigh gave to Lou Michel, a reporter from the Buffalo News. The interviews formed the basis of Michel's 2001 book "American Terrorist" (with co-author Dan Herbeck), and they are probably the most comprehensive discussion McVeigh ever had after the bombing, about his life, views and motives.

In Maddow's special, the tapes get a chilling new listen, in which a clear-voiced, unrepentant McVeigh talks how those 168 deaths made him feel: "I had no hesitation to look right at [the victims' families, in court] and listen to their story. But I'd like to say to them: 'The specific details may be unique, but the truth is you're not the first mother to lose a kid, you're not the first grandparent to lose a granddaughter or a grandson.' . . . I'll use the phrase -- and it sounds cold, but I'm sorry I'm going to use it, because it's the truth -- get over it."

froth and scum

Bill Clinton Says Rush Limbaugh Response "Does Not Make Any Sense"

Conservative Talk Radio incites Domestic Terrorism & Hate

everything else is conversation...,

Samurai Trilogy - Duel at Ganryu Island.

social insects inspire human design

RoyalSociety | Humans have long looked to nature for practical inspiration; after observing paper wasps, Réaumur (1719) suggested that people, too, could make paper from wood fibre, without cotton or linen rags. However, the formal use of biology as a design tool, known as biomimicry or biomimetics (Benyus 1997; Vincent et al. 2006), is a recent and rapidly accelerating enterprise in academia (Hesselberg 2007) and industry (Bonser 2006). Biomimicry approaches the biological world as a catalogue of successful designs, honed by natural selection, that can be imitated or translated to solve human problems. The conference ‘Social Biomimicry: Insect Societies and Human Design’, hosted by Arizona State University, USA, 18–20 February 2010, explored how social insects can serve as models for biomimetic design, and asked what general lessons can be learned about biomimicry.

Social insects (ants, bees, wasps, termites, etc.) are uniquely qualified to inform human design. They have evolved tightly integrated societies with up to millions of members, and have solved many problems inherent to social organization (Wilson 1971). Individual social insect workers exhibit relatively simple behaviours, but collectively, colonies can perform complex functions such as routing traffic, allocating labour and resources and building nests that provide physical and social services. Unlike most human operations, social insects accomplish such feats without a supervisor or centralized control; instead, colony-level patterns self-organize, or emerge, from local interactions that elicit positive and negative feedback responses (Camazine et al. 2001). These interactions are often mediated by stigmergy, a form of indirect communication through modification of the environment. Self-organization and stigmergy motivate the field of swarm intelligence, which designs algorithms for the solution of optimization and distributed control problems (Bonabeau et al. 1999).

The realization of social-insect-inspired design, and biomimicry more broadly, requires communication and collaboration across disciplinary and professional boundaries. ‘Social Biomimicry’ provided a forum for exchange between biologists, designers, engineers, computer scientists, architects and businesspeople.

cilantro haters...,

NYTimes | FOOD partisanship doesn’t usually reach the same heights of animosity as the political variety, except in the case of the anti-cilantro party. The green parts of the plant that gives us coriander seeds seem to inspire a primal revulsion among an outspoken minority of eaters.

Culinary sophistication is no guarantee of immunity from cilantrophobia. In a television interview in 2002, Larry King asked Julia Child which foods she hated. She responded: “Cilantro and arugula I don’t like at all. They’re both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.”

“So you would never order it?” Mr. King asked.

“Never,” she responded. “I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.”

Ms. Child had plenty of company for her feelings about cilantro (arugula seems to be less offensive). The authoritative Oxford Companion to Food notes that the word “coriander” is said to derive from the Greek word for bedbug, that cilantro aroma “has been compared with the smell of bug-infested bedclothes” and that “Europeans often have difficulty in overcoming their initial aversion to this smell.” There’s an “I Hate Cilantro” Facebook page with hundreds of fans and an I Hate Cilantro blog.

Yet cilantro is happily consumed by many millions of people around the world, particularly in Asia and Latin America. The Portuguese put fistfuls into soups. What is it about cilantro that makes it so unpleasant for people in cultures that don’t much use it?

Some people may be genetically predisposed to dislike cilantro, according to often-cited studies by Charles J. Wysocki of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. But cilantrophobe genetics remain little known and aren’t under systematic investigation. Meanwhile, history, chemistry and neurology have been adding some valuable pieces to the puzzle.

The coriander plant is native to the eastern Mediterranean, and European cooks used both seeds and leaves well into medieval times.

Helen Leach, an anthropologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has traced unflattering remarks about cilantro flavor and the bug etymology — not endorsed by modern dictionaries — back to English garden books and French farming books from around 1600, when medieval dishes had fallen out of fashion. She suggests that cilantro was disparaged as part of a general effort to define the new European table against the flavors of the old.

Modern cilantrophobes tend to describe the offending flavor as soapy rather than buggy. I don’t hate cilantro, but it does sometimes remind me of hand lotion. Each of these associations turns out to make good chemical sense.

Flavor chemists have found that cilantro aroma is created by a half-dozen or so substances, and most of these are modified fragments of fat molecules called aldehydes. The same or similar aldehydes are also found in soaps and lotions and the bug family of insects.

Soaps are made by fragmenting fat molecules with strongly alkaline lye or its equivalent, and aldehydes are a byproduct of this process, as they are when oxygen in the air attacks the fats and oils in cosmetics. And many bugs make strong-smelling, aldehyde-rich body fluids to attract or repel other creatures.

exposing glenn beck as a dangerous fraud

Glenn Beck interviews Sarah Palin.

HuffPo | Orson Welles, one of Glenn Beck's broadcasting heroes. In fact, the name of Beck's production company, Mercury Radio Arts (officially known as Glenn Beck, Inc.), is based on Welles' CBS radio show -- the radio show that famously aired one of broadcasting's most legendary hoaxes: The War of the Worlds.

Unlike the various Glenn Beck shows and publications, the Mercury performance of the H.G. Welles classic featured a disclaimer at the end (quoted above), formally noting the fictitious nature of the broadcast. Imagine if, unlike Beck, Welles had never broadcast a monologue postscript revealing that what had unfolded on the radio was purely theater. It's not a stretch to suggest that the ensuing hysteria during and after the show would've been far greater.

Every day, for four hours a day, Glenn Beck is playing out a Welles fantasy -- leaping out from behind an array of Carrot Top-meets-Gallagher props and gizmos while shouting BOO! at his audience without taking the slightest responsibility for the ensuing hysteria. In Beck's case, the "boo!" comes in the form of Joe McCarthy style red-baiting and Lee Atwater style race-baiting -- insisting with wildly incomprehensible chalkboard scribblings that Marxists and communists are lurking under our beds waiting to steal our money. Money that's better served feeding Glenn Beck's empire of fraud. I mean, just look! Those random words on the chalkboard spelled out the acronym "OLIGARHY!" Run for your lives, and all that. It's an OLIGARHY!

No disclaimers letting the audience off the hook like Beck's hero, the vastly more responsible performer Welles did. Beck, like several other Fox News Channel actors in Roger Ailes' ratings-at-all-costs strategy, presents his show as an honest assessment of the truth without any sort of in-show sign that it's almost entirely farcical.

One of the most common e-mail responses I've received from Beck supporters so far has been, simply: "Prove it." Suffice to say, I never would have started down this road without some sort of confirmation that my theory about Beck was on the right track. So prior to typing a single word, I spoke with some sources close to and within Fox News Channel and they confirmed exactly what I suspected: Glenn Beck is "a bullshit artist." A faker. A phony.

But don't take their word for it. After all, these are anonymous sources and their words ought to be evaluated accordingly.

For proof, I've tracked down an on-the-record source who says Glenn Beck could give a flying crap about the political process. Glenn Beck himself from last week's Forbes profile:

"I could give a flying crap about the political process." Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. "We're an entertainment company," Beck says.

And there you go. "I could give a flying crap about the political process." Given the hyperkinetic poo-flinging on his show every day, Glenn Beck knows flying crap. There's really no gray area here. It's all about the entertainment value inherent in ginned-up controversy. And right now, anger and insanity sells with Beck's white, conservative, Christian audiences.