friedmanist assault on peak oil theory...,

NYTimes | REMEMBER “peak oil”? It’s the theory that geological scarcity will at some point make it impossible for global petroleum production to avoid falling, heralding the end of the oil age and, potentially, economic catastrophe. Well, just when we thought that the collapse in oil prices since last summer had put an end to such talk, along comes Fatih Birol, the top economist at the International Energy Agency, to insist that we’ll reach the peak moment in 10 years, a decade sooner than most previous predictions (although a few ardent pessimists believe the moment of no return has already come and gone).

Like many Malthusian beliefs, peak oil theory has been promoted by a motivated group of scientists and laymen who base their conclusions on poor analyses of data and misinterpretations of technical material. But because the news media and prominent figures like James Schlesinger, a former secretary of energy, and the oilman T. Boone Pickens have taken peak oil seriously, the public is understandably alarmed.

A careful examination of the facts shows that most arguments about peak oil are based on anecdotal information, vague references and ignorance of how the oil industry goes about finding fields and extracting petroleum. And this has been demonstrated over and over again: the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil first claimed in 1989 that the peak had already been reached, and Mr. Schlesinger argued a decade earlier that production was unlikely to ever go much higher.

goldman's golden goose grab...,

NYTimes | “A geek who writes code — those guys are now the valuable guys,” Mr. Donefer said.

The spate of lawsuits reflects the highly competitive nature of ultrafast trading, which is evolving quickly, largely because of broader changes in stock trading, securities industry experts say.

Until the late 1990s, big investors bought and sold large blocks of shares through securities firms like Morgan Stanley. But in the last decade, the profits from making big trades have vanished, so investment banks have become reluctant to take such risks.

Today, big investors divide large orders into smaller trades and parcel them to many exchanges, where traders compete to make a penny or two a share on each order. Ultrafast trading is an outgrowth of that strategy.

As Mr. Aleynikov and other programmers have discovered, investment banks do not take kindly to their leaving, especially if the banks believe that the programmers are taking code — the engine that drives trading — on their way out.

This spring, Mr. Aleynikov quit Goldman to join Teza Technologies, a new trading firm, tripling his salary to about $1.2 million, according to the complaint. He left Goldman on June 5. In the days before he left, he transferred code to a server in Germany that offers free data hosting.

At Mr. Aleynikov’s bail hearing, Joseph Facciponti, the assistant United States attorney prosecuting the case, said that Goldman discovered the transfer in late June. On July 1, the company told the government about the suspected theft. Two days later, agents arrested Mr. Aleynikov at Newark.

After his arrest, Mr. Aleynikov was taken for interrogation to F.B.I. offices in Manhattan. Mr. Aleynikov waived his rights against self-incrimination, and agreed to allow agents to search his house.

He said that he had inadvertently downloaded a portion of Goldman’s proprietary code while trying to take files of open source software — programs that are not proprietary and can be used freely by anyone. He said he had not used the Goldman code at his new job or distributed it to anyone else, and the criminal complaint offers no evidence that he has.

Why he downloaded the open source software from Goldman, rather than getting it elsewhere, and how he could at the same time have inadvertently downloaded some of the firm’s most confidential software, is not yet clear.

At Mr. Aleynikov’s bail hearing, Mr. Facciponti said that simply by sending the code to the German server, he had badly damaged Goldman.
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The MSM has finally gotten around to narratizing the frontrunning fraud perpetrated by Goldman Sachs. This summer has already shown the issue to complex to be digested by the public at large. So justice, as with political leadership, is reduced to a lowest common denominator in which the people will get precisely what their effort and attention spans lead them to deserve.

the "fantastical and absurd" report...,

FinancialSense | Perhaps you've heard or read about the Maltese-flagged freighter named Arctic Sea, which recently disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean and was subsequently recovered after various contradictory reports. According to Filin, the Arctic Sea had been loaded with four X-55 cruise missiles while docked at the Baltic Sea port of Kaliningrad. The missiles were without warheads, as the warheads were shipped separately on another vessel . Filin alleges that the warheads were customized for carrying Soviet-produced biochemical material previously "shipped to Iran from Russia by air."

According to Filin, the contraband aboard the Arctic Sea was masked by timber loaded in Finland, and the ship's destination was Algeria, where representatives of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were waiting to take delivery. Filin wrote: "Russian specialists would arrive in Iran within the near future, who would prepare the aviation system of Iranian Su-24 aircraft to use the X-55 in combat conditions and train representatives of the Iranian armed forces in the operational use of the system." The reason for the transfer of biochemical material to Iran, along with modified warheads and missiles, is to give Iran a counterstrike potential in the event of an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear weapons facilities.

In this way Russia strengthens Iran while weakening the position of Israel and the United States. It goes without saying that Moscow envisions the destabilization of the Middle East and the disruption of its main centers of oil production and shipping. Should Iran unleash biochemical warheads against Israel, there would be a further escalation of violence with the result that oil prices would reach -- according to Filin -- $200-$300 per barrell. The consequences, of course, would be devastating for the oil-dependent Western economies, which are already suffering from widespread financial troubles.

On the Russian side, however, high oil prices would empower the Russian state while stabilizing the Iranian clerical regime under a defiant nationalist banner. Moscow also envisions the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, a massive mobilization of terrorists, and a fresh violence in Iraq. According to Filin, "Upon learning of the Arctic Sea and its cargo, a major Western state that favors a strategic partnership with Ukraine, was prepared to intercept the ship. But fearing this would cause a serious international scandal that would disrupt the 'reboot' of its relations with the Putin regime, the [aforesaid] state decided to act informally, which it did."

In other words, the pirates that siezed the Arctic Sea off the coast of Sweden were American special forces (disguised as Swedish police). This embarrassing episode, according to Filin, enraged the Kremlin which subsequently lashed out at the pro-American regime in Ukraine. For reasons unstated by Filin, the Kremlin believes that Ukraine was responsible for alerting the Americans about the Arctic Sea and its cargo. Consequently, Russian President Medvedev wrote a scathing open letter to Ukrainian President Yuschenko, calling his policies "deliberately anti-Russian." This resulted in heightened tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

before it slips down the memory hole...,

Jerusalem Post | Pirates recently gained control over a Russian ship off the shores of Sweden in order to prevent weapons smuggling to Iran on Israel's behalf, according to a report by Russian newspaper Nuvia Gueta.

According to Saturday's report, which Army Radio cited, the Russian ship was carrying a load of X-55 cruise missiles intended for Teheran. Several days after the pirates seized the ship, Russian navy forces gained control over the vessel off the coast of West Africa.

Army Radio said Russian authorities denied the report, saying "the allegations are baseless."

Dmitri Rogozin, Russia's ambassador to NATO, said the report was fantastical and absurd.

a crime story

countdown to dollar implosion

Financial Sense | Every few months a chart comes along that needs almost no follow-on paragraphs to make the point of the issue. The chart provided by CIGA Eric covers several important types of US$-based bonds, their inflow and outflow, and the aggregate GrandNet. The financial data is publicly available from the USGovt TIC Reports. The messages are clear. Inflows of foreign funds are dwindling. In the case of USAgency Mortgage Bonds and USCorp Bonds, the nation is witnessing something unprecedented, the net outflow of funds. This is outright rejection. This chart exposes the isolation problem of the USDollar in the bond world, clearly the most important market beneath the currency market. The printing press is the last option.

Ominous is a strong word. Abandonment is better, but disaster is better still. “I find this simple chart so ominous I had to send it. Decelerating year-over-year inflows and outflows across the board. Stick your head in the sand if you like, but string this trend out a little longer and you’re going to have flight from the dollar.” So wrote CIGA Eric. See the article that displays this graph and his few words on the JSMineset weblog (CLICK HERE).

The foreign creditors are moving away from the United States, plain and simple. The big bold red series shows the Grand Net US$-based bond reduction in net flow change from a high around $950 billion in early 2007 to a figure now approaching only $200 billion, thus a severe cut in net inflow. The greater alarm comes from the USCorporate Bonds in the yellow series, whose net flow change is down from a plus $600 billion high at the same time to a slight net outflow negative figure now. The USAgency Mortgage Bonds in chartreuse/mauve/pink have net flow change with peak of plus $300 billion at the same time to a net outflow of a frightening $150 billion now. Since the important peak for mortgage and corporate bonds, the USTreasurys in blue series have recovered from a $200 billion net positive inflow to a $400 billion net inflow. However, one should suspect that the USFed is purchasing the USTreasurys from convenient accounts bearing foreign names, using American funds, and laced with sinister motives founded in deception. Foreigners in all likelihood are not the primary purchasers.

The United States credit markets are losing their legitimate liquidity and increasingly are turning to the desperate reckless alternative, namely the dreaded MONETIZATION. Mortgages in the United States must maintain funding from the USFed and USGovt by direct purchase, no longer a market action. There are mainly sellers. The corporations in the US must maintain funding from a more desperate means. See the Samurai Bonds offered in Japanese Yen denomination, the ones growing in popularity. My view is that a good slice of USGovt Treasury Bonds will be denominated in foreign currency routinely within one year, if the US$ system survives in its current form that long. The conclusion is clear from the messages, both graphic and statistical, that THE US$-BASED BONDS OF ALL TYPES WILL RELY ON DIRECT MONETIZATION VERY SOON OR IMMEDIATELY.

the women's crusade

NYTimes Magazine | Bill Gates recalls once being invited to speak in Saudi Arabia and finding himself facing a segregated audience. Four-fifths of the listeners were men, on the left. The remaining one-fifth were women, all covered in black cloaks and veils, on the right. A partition separated the two groups. Toward the end, in the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience noted that Saudi Arabia aimed to be one of the Top 10 countries in the world in technology by 2010 and asked if that was realistic. “Well, if you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country,” Gates said, “you’re not going to get too close to the Top 10.” The small group on the right erupted in wild cheering.

Policy makers have gotten the message as well. President Obama has appointed a new White House Council on Women and Girls. Perhaps he was indoctrinated by his mother, who was one of the early adopters of microloans to women when she worked to fight poverty in Indonesia. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is a member of the White House Council, and she has also selected a talented activist, Melanne Verveer, to direct a new State Department Office of Global Women’s Issues. On Capitol Hill, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has put Senator Barbara Boxer in charge of a new subcommittee that deals with women’s issues.

Yet another reason to educate and empower women is that greater female involvement in society and the economy appears to undermine extremism and terrorism. It has long been known that a risk factor for turbulence and violence is the share of a country’s population made up of young people. Now it is emerging that male domination of society is also a risk factor; the reasons aren’t fully understood, but it may be that when women are marginalized the nation takes on the testosterone-laden culture of a military camp or a high-school boys’ locker room. That’s in part why the Joint Chiefs of Staff and international security specialists are puzzling over how to increase girls’ education in countries like Afghanistan — and why generals have gotten briefings from Greg Mortenson, who wrote about building girls’ schools in his best seller, “Three Cups of Tea.” Indeed, some scholars say they believe the reason Muslim countries have been disproportionately afflicted by terrorism is not Islamic teachings about infidels or violence but rather the low levels of female education and participation in the labor force.

all it's lacking is a spark

NYTimes | I have been writing about the simmering undertone of violence in our politics since October, when Sarah Palin, the vice-presidential candidate of a major political party, said nothing to condemn Obama haters shrieking “Treason!,” “Terrorist!” and “Off with his head!” at her rallies. As vacation beckons, I’d like to drop the subject, but the atmosphere keeps getting darker.

Coburn’s implicit rationalization for far-right fanatics bearing arms at presidential events — the government makes them do it! — cannot stand. He’s not a radio or Fox News bloviator paid a fortune to be outrageous; he’s a card-carrying member of the United States Senate. On Monday — the day after he gave a pass to those threatening violence — a dozen provocateurs with guns, at least two of them bearing assault weapons, showed up for Obama’s V.F.W. speech in Phoenix. Within hours, another member of Congress — Phil Gingrey of Georgia — was telling Chris Matthews on MSNBC that as long as brandishing guns is legal, he, too, saw no reason to discourage Americans from showing up armed at public meetings.

In April the Department of Homeland Security issued a report, originally commissioned by the Bush administration, on the rising threat of violent right-wing extremism. It was ridiculed by conservatives, including the Republican chairman, Michael Steele, who called it “the height of insult.” Since then, a neo-Nazi who subscribed to the anti-Obama “birther” movement has murdered a guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, and an anti-abortion zealot has gunned down a doctor in a church in Wichita, Kan.

This month the Southern Poverty Law Center, the same organization that warned of the alarming rise in extremist groups before the Oklahoma City bombing, issued its own report. A federal law enforcement agent told the center that he hadn’t seen growth this steep among such groups in 10 to 12 years. “All it’s lacking is a spark,” he said.

building better bacteria

The Scientist | Researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute have developed a technique for generating modified strains of bacteria with novel, genetically engineered properties, they report online today (August 20) in Science. The advance could help scientists tweak microorganisms to more efficiently produce biofuels, the researchers say.

"I think it's an important and interesting advance," said James Collins, a bioengineer at Boston University who was not involved in the study. "I suspect this will turn out to be quite important for bioengineering and bioenergy systems."

Last year, Venter, an author on the paper (and a member of The Scientist's editorial board), reported that he and his collaborators had created a synthetic bacterial genome and cloned it into a yeast cell. However, they were unable to transfer the genome into a cell that would use the genetic code to produce a functioning version of the organism. In the current paper, the researchers present a technique for doing just that.

The Venter team first cloned the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides into a yeast cell. They then altered the genome, using the myriad tools available for yeast gene manipulation. In the procedure's trickiest step, they transplanted the yeast-bound bacterial genome into a closely related bacterium, Mycoplasma capricolum, coaxing it to "take this bacterial genome and boot it up" and generate their mutant strain, said Sanjay Vashee, a synthetic biologist at the institute and the corresponding author on the paper.

The hurdle Vashee and his team had to overcome to achieve this feat involved bypassing the bacterial equivalent of an immune system -- essentially a collection of restriction enzymes. These enzymes, thought to have evolved to chew up the genomes of viruses infecting bacterial cells, were preventing the successful transplantation of the modified M. mycoides genome into wild-type M. capricolum. So the group developed two fixes, which together solved the problem: First, they inactivated M. capricolum's restriction enzymes. Then, they chemically modified their mutant M. mycoides genome where these enzymes typically cleave the genomes of intruders.

Decades of research on yeast genetics have yielded the know-how to do extensive genomic manipulations in yeast, but that capability doesn't exist for other microorganisms. "There are so many organisms in nature that we cannot manipulate," said Vashee. "If we can extend this -- and put those genomes into yeast, to manipulate them there -- we've got a new technology that can bring genomics to a wide host of organisms." (Vashee noted that the current study was conducted in a natural Mycoplasma genome -- not the synthetic genome the group assembled last year.)

virus benefits insect hosts

The Scientist | Bacteria-infecting viruses, generally thought to be harmful to their hosts, can also be surprisingly beneficial.

A bacteriophage infecting a bacterium living in the cells and body cavity of a small, plant-eating insect protects the insect from attack by a deadly wasp predator, reports a study published online in Science today (August 20). The discovery may help create more effective methods of pest control, the authors say.

"This is a wonderful paper," Christoph Vorburger, an ecologist at the University of Zurich, told The Scientist. "It is important because it shows clearly that genetic elements such as bacteriophages are vehicles for transmitting resistance to predators," added Vorburger, who was not involved in the study.

Small insects called pea aphids are parasitized by a species of wasp, Aphidus ervi. The wasp injects its eggs into the aphids, and the eggs develop, pupating and eventually killing the insects. Earlier work has shown that the symbiotic relationship between aphids and a species of bacteria called Hamiltonella defensa can keep the insect safe, but no one understood exactly how the bacterium offered protection.

Using genetic sequencing tests, Kerry Oliver from the University of Georgia and his colleagues determined that Hamiltonella harbors a bacteriophage. To find out whether the phage is what safeguards the insect, they then generated three aphid--lines one without the bacterium, one with the bacterium infected by the phage, and one with the uninfected bacterium. The team found that only aphids with the phage were protected from the wasps' egg.

swiss bunkers

Polarinertia | For over four years, I have developed a photographic documentary work on Swiss fortified constructions – bunkers. Each element of these photographs has a relation with Switzerland and particularly the mountain landscape that is an inherent part of our identity. The bunkers are a integral part of a finely developed popular defense military system in Switzerland, a military with historically strong links to the landscape.

After the cold war ended many of the bunkers became obsolete. The tendency is to forget them or even to renounce them, my approach on the contrary, aims to expose them from a new angle. This approach has led me to discover a great number of bunkers, some in remote areas, sometimes difficultly accessible, covering the whole of the Swiss territory. The relations between these basic shaped bunkers and the often-sumptuous landscape surrounds them became an essential part of the study. I looked for the most spectacular bunkers, notable for their camouflage devices, true theatre scenery made with the utmost care. A quality indeed fully Swiss.

open letter to the queen

Abundancy Partners | We live in tumultuous times. Many developed world citizens are losing their livelihoods. The effects on the world's poorest will, as ever, be dreadful. However we are surprised that the Academy has not addressed anything outside the narrow remit their letter covered. Far greater insecurities threaten the world's poorest due to our effects on the natural world.

The letter ignores the physical constraints which are central to this bubble and indeed most bubbles. It speaks of "the bigger picture" and of "individual risks being small" and "the system as a whole being vast", yet, for us has a limited horizon.

Our premise is that our current economic malaise is symptomatic of a far more serious systemic failure to acknowledge what Archbishop Rowan Williams has identified in saying "It has been said that 'the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment'. The earth itself is what ultimately controls economic activity because it is the source of the materials upon which economic activity works".

Energy underlies everything – Scylla and Charybdis of peak oil and climate change. The underlying cause of the current economic meltdown is a multi-generational debt-binge inextricably linked to a concomitant multi-generational energy-binge. The Academy's letter focuses on some "imbalances in the global economy". However, the key to addressing our current situation is to recognise the far more serious imbalances between our insatiable hunger for energy, its finite nature and the environmental pollution in its use.

Energy is the lifeblood of any economy. Our exponential debt-based money system is in turn based on exponentially increasing energy supplies. It is therefore clear that the supply of that energy deserves our very highest attention. That this attention doesn't appear in the Academy's analysis is deeply worrying.

The impending peaking of production of oil and other hydrocarbons, along with the resulting peak in food production and everything on which oil relies, is now widely accepted. Leading UK companies including Arup, Scottish and Southern Energy, Solarcentury and Virgin have warned that a peak in cheap, easily available oil production is likely to hit by 2013, posing a grave risk to the economy. On 2nd August 2009, the International Energy Association's Chief Economist, Dr Fatih Birol, warned of an oil crisis in 2010.

The letter refers to the "overheating economy" but gives no mention of the effect and cause of the overheating of planet Earth. Climate change is now recognised by the world's scientists, political and business leaders as the most serious threat to mankind and is described by Sir Nicholas Stern as "the greatest market failure of our times". On an almost daily basis we get increasingly urgent signals that unstoppable, runaway climate chaos is almost upon us.

natural gas not so sustainable

Examiner | It does not appear that Mr. Podesta's plan addresses the number one concern regarding the expansion of natural gas drilling domestically, and that is the over 300 compound chemical cocktail that is injected into the ground to force the gas to the surface. (for a list of 54 known chemicals in the fracking fluids and their effects, check HERE). His suggestion of public disclosure by gas producers does not go far enough. So what if gas developers disclose the chemical cocktail that they use; they still inject it into the ground where it seeps into our domestic freshwater supply. Even if the fracking goes on far below the groundwater table level, the tailing ponds on the surface have the potential to leak topdown into the water supply. Look at the map below where they want to drill (click for enlargement):

Do we really have the luxury of poisoning this much of our freshwater suply in the name of natural gas development? The question needs to be asked again: What do we value more, energy to run our machines or water to sustain human life?

Fracking processes are improving. There are best practices that use non-toxic cocktails, but these methods are employed in areas few and far between. Perhaps in the future, they will become standard.

What happens when the domestic natural gas wells run dry, though? Won't we simply be in the same position we find ourselves currently today? At least both Podesta and Chu refer to natural gas as a transition fuel (Pickens for that matter too), but our money, time, and effort could be better spent expanding clean energy in the form of wind, solar, biofuels, and geothermal as well as energy efficiency measures.

Drilling for more natural gas simply ruins more landscapes and runs the risk of poisoning our entire domestic freshwater supply. Is this the lowest level of risk our society can muster?

Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?

Guardian | The collapse of civilisation will bring us a saner world, says Paul Kingsnorth. No, counters George Monbiot – we can't let billions perish.

The root cause of all these trends is the same: a rapacious human economy bringing the world swiftly to the brink of chaos. We know this; some of us even attempt to stop it happening. Yet all of these trends continue to get rapidly worse, and there is no sign of that changing soon. What these graphs make clear better than anything else is the cold reality: there is a serious crash on the way.

Yet very few of us are prepared to look honestly at the message this reality is screaming at us: that the civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full speed, and it is too late to stop it. Instead, most of us – and I include in this generalisation much of the mainstream environmental movement – are still wedded to a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the present. We still believe in "progress", as lazily defined by western liberalism. We still believe that we will be able to continue living more or less the same comfortable lives (albeit with more windfarms and better lightbulbs) if we can only embrace "sustainable development" rapidly enough; and that we can then extend it to the extra 3 billion people who will shortly join us on this already gasping planet.

I think this is simply denial. The writing is on the wall for industrial society, and no amount of ethical shopping or determined protesting is going to change that now. Take a civilisation built on the myth of human exceptionalism and a deeply embedded cultural attitude to "nature"; add a blind belief in technological and material progress; then fuel the whole thing with a power source that is discovered to be disastrously destructive only after we have used it to inflate our numbers and appetites beyond the point of no return. What do you get? We are starting to find out.

megacities

Physorg | Charles Kolb, Ph.D., reports that the concept of urban metabolism has existed for decades. It views large cities as living entities that consume energy, food, water, and other raw materials, and release wastes. The releases include carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas; air pollutants, sewage and other water pollutants; and even excess heat that collects in vast expanses of concrete pavement and stone buildings. Humans directly produce a significant share of this waste, but emissions from industrial, power generation and transportation systems respire the largest quantities of greenhouse gases and other air pollutants. Other urban metabolizers include sewage systems, landfills, domestic pets and pests like rats, which in some cities outnumber people.

During the last five years, this body of knowledge has drawn into sharper focus the hazards of poor air quality in megacities, not just on the large local populations but also on population centers, agricultural activities and natural ecosystems located downwind from these sprawling areas, Kolb said. He is with the Center for Atmospheric and Environmental Chemistry and the Center for Aerosol and Cloud Chemistry of Aerodyne Research Inc. in Billerica, Mass.

"Carbon dioxide and other pollutants in megacities make them immense drivers of climate change," he said. "They impact climate on both a regional and global level because these long-lived greenhouse gases are dispersed around the world."

More than half the world's population today lives in cities, and the world's largest urban areas are growing rapidly. The number of megacities — metropolitan areas with populations exceeding 10 million — has grown from just three in 1975 to about 20 today.

Kolb said that the most highly polluted megacities are in developing countries. They include Dhaka, Bangladesh; Cairo, Egypt; and Karachi, Pakistan. Some megacities in less developed regions have recently mounted air quality management campaigns that have resulted in lower levels of pollution; they include Mexico City, Mexico; Beijing, China; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Even the cleanest megacities like Tokyo/Osaka in Japan and New York City and Los Angeles in the United States — all in the developed world — still have serious problems, Kolb said.

what's really wrong with american healthcare?

The Atlantic | After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.

How does a nation that might close down a business for a single illness from a suspicious hamburger tolerate the carnage inflicted by our hospitals? And not just those 100,000 deaths. In April, a Wall Street Journal story suggested that blood clots following surgery or illness, the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths in the U.S., may kill nearly 200,000 patients per year. How did Americans learn to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths from minor medical mistakes as an inevitability?

My survivor’s grief has taken the form of an obsession with our health-care system. For more than a year, I’ve been reading as much as I can get my hands on, talking to doctors and patients, and asking a lot of questions.

Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress the importance of sterility when its trash is picked up once daily, and only after flowing onto the floor of a patient’s room? Considering the importance of a patient’s frame of mind to recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a five-week stay brings an endless string of new personnel assigned to a patient’s care? Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations?

I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.

Before exploring alternative policies, let’s reexamine our basic assumptions about health care—what it actually is, how it’s financed, its accountability to patients, and finally its relationship to the eternal laws of supply and demand. Everyone I know has at least one personal story about how screwed up our health-care system is; before spending (another) $1trillion or so on reform, we need a much clearer understanding of the causes of the problems we all experience.

supreme post crowley-gates symbolic hack...,

Fist tap P6 and Plantsmantx

Carefully orchestrated, but from a symbolic perspective, this strikes me as an exceptionally well crafted piece of libertarian agitprop. So I take back my initial "bookerrising surrealism" critique.

"We worked with the Phoenix police department. They came down to our studio on Friday. We've gone through this with them for 15 years."

"They have a squad - used to be called the confrontation prevention squad, now called community service. We told them that we're going to come down, I'm going to do the radio show live, we're going to be broadcasting it, and I'm going to have a firearm. I had a 9 millimeter on myself..."

"It was Thursday that I called and talked to Al Ramirez, the representative from the Phoenix police department, and we were discussing - we've been around this rhetoric that was building up around William Kostric, who did this in New Hampshire. We knew this from 15 years ago when Janet Napolitano was a U.S. Assistant Attorney and prosecuted the Viper Militia out of Arizona, and how that was generated into something it wasn't. We talked to Al and we were like, look, we know where this is going and we want to make sure, we come down, we're peaceful, and we demonstrate the right of the people to carry their firearms. And the police protected our right."

"They wanted to help - they assigned him [a police officer] to me. He was never more than 4-5 feet away from me. We had law enforcement around us to protect our rights to protect this firearm."

why the tea tastes like pee

Fist tap BTx3.

NHS drawn into u.s. healthcare reform debate

Pro:


Con:

Corporate Health Insurance is damning Obama's attempt to extend health care to the poor. As the process of demonizing the president's attempts grow, it has spawned an opportunistic attack on the British National Health Service (NHS), as well.

oil industry backs protests of emissions bill

NYTimes | Hard on the heels of the health care protests, another citizen movement seems to have sprung up, this one to oppose Washington’s attempts to tackle climate change. But behind the scenes, an industry with much at stake — Big Oil — is pulling the strings.

Hundreds of people packed a downtown theater here on Tuesday for a lunchtime rally that was as much a celebration of oil’s traditional role in the Texas way of life as it was a political protest against Washington’s energy policies, which many here fear will raise energy prices.

“Something we hold dear is in danger, and that’s our future,” said Bill Bailey, a rodeo announcer and local celebrity, who was the master of ceremonies at the hourlong rally.

The event on Tuesday was organized by a group called Energy Citizens, which is backed by the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s main trade group. Many of the people attending the demonstration were employees of oil companies who work in Houston and were bused from their workplaces.

This was the first of a series of about 20 rallies planned for Southern and oil-producing states to organize resistance to proposed legislation that would set a limit on emissions of heat-trapping gases, requiring many companies to buy emission permits. Participants described the system as an energy tax that would undermine the economy of Houston, the nation’s energy capital.

when most powerful masquerade as grass roots...,

Washington Post | A petroleum industry trade group is asking oil companies to recruit employees and retirees to attend rallies attacking climate-change legislation, an approach to grass-roots politics that resembles strategies used recently by some opponents of health-care reform.

In a memo this month, American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard detailed plans for "Energy Citizen" rallies to be held in 20 states during the final two weeks of Congress's August recess. Gerard wrote that the intent was to put a "human face on the impacts of unsound energy policy," including a climate-change bill passed by the House in June.

"Please indicate to your company leadership your strong support for employee participation in the rallies," Gerard wrote in the memo, saying that contractors and suppliers should also be recruited.

Environmental groups on Saturday criticized the rallies, which they described as manufactured events intended to pass as organic assemblies of concerned citizens. Greenpeace activists said they saw parallels to the health-care debate, where opponents of reform -- including some organizations that receive heavy funding from industry groups and individuals -- have organized efforts to shout down lawmakers at "town hall" meetings.

"It's the most powerful among us, masquerading as grass-roots outrage to stifle debate on global warming," Michael Crocker, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said of the oil group's plans. "These are manufactured concerns, and the people who get involved in this are paid to put on this theater."

The memo, obtained by Greenpeace, was first reported on by the Financial Times Saturday.

cap and rage...,

Washington Post | The fight over health-care reform could hobble climate-change legislation. The rancorous debate over health reform has given voice to considerable uneasiness among Americans. Many are worried about how a new system will be paid for in an economy that has unraveled, and they are anxious about a kudzu-like expansion of an already unwieldy bureaucracy. Given the herculean effort it will take to get President Obama's vision of reform through Congress, we're not convinced that the Senate will have the stomach to tackle cap-and-trade legislation this fall. The growing agitation within the chamber over the creation of another complex system to buy, sell and trade pollution credits only adds to our doubts.

If Congress fails to pass cap-and-trade legislation, it will rapidly approach a fork in the road in addressing global warming. Members can sit back while unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency follow through on their moves toward regulating greenhouse gas emissions as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Or they can entertain a carbon-based tax designed to reduce emissions and give the money back to taxpayers in an equitable manner. A decision on which path to take is bearing down upon us. Not only are the global warming dangers facing the planet reaching the tipping point, but there will also be no climate agreement in Copenhagen without strong leadership in words and deeds from the United States. As the Senate forges ahead, nothing should be off the table.

the more things change.....,

Fist tap Denmark Vesey.

corporations co-opt craziness...,

Washington Post | Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.

So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."

The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news. (Internment camps for conservatives? That's the latest theory of tea party favorite Michael Savage.)
---------------------------------------------------
Rick Perlstein will be online today at 11:00am ET to discuss this article. Outlook: In America, Crazy Is a Pre-existing Condition
' ... the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy ...'

forgery...,

American Prospect | Before the big House vote on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), Rep. Tom Perriello had a tough choice to make. Perriello won his seat by a small margin and worried about attacks from Republicans campaigning against the bill. Ultimately, he voted for it, in part because he believes a sustainable energy industry is the future of his district's economy.

But even as he was considering how to approach the legislation, he received at least five letters from local constituency groups opposing the bill, including a local Hispanic advocacy organization and the area branch of the NAACP. There was just one one small problem: The letters were forgeries; at least one came from Washington, D.C.-based lobbyists Bonner & Associates.

“They stole our name. They stole our logo. They created a position title and made up the name of someone to fill it. They forged a letter and sent it to our congressman without our authorization,” said Tim Freilich, who sits on the executive committee of Creciendo Juntos, a nonprofit network that tackles issues related to Charlottesville’s Hispanic community. “It’s this type of activity that undermines Americans’ faith in democracy.”

For all the reprehensible shenanigans that lobbying firms involve themselves in, forging letters from civil-rights groups to oppose this legislation is still pretty outrageous -- in fact, the NAACP even supports the legislation. Members of Congress are already very skeptical of constituent communications in this day of Internet-organized communications blitzes; the possibility that they may take these messages even less seriously due to fraud is a very disheartening one. Hopefully the reporting on this story will spur an investigation by legal authorities and some serious punishment for the perpetrators.

surreal bookerrising moment...,

game over - payer profits prevail

Washington Post | The president has said that creating a nonprofit, government-sponsored insurance plan -- competing alongside private insurers -- would provide a lower-cost alternative for consumers and keep the industry "honest." In Colorado on Saturday, the tone was more conciliatory.

"The public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of health-care reform," Obama said. "This is just one sliver of it."

The proposal has become a lightning rod, particularly in the Senate, where Finance Committee members are seeking bipartisan consensus.

"The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option," said Conrad, one of six panel members involved in the talks. "There never have been. So to continue to chase that rabbit, I think, is just a wasted effort."

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said Democrats are moving toward a European-style, single-payer system. "And this public plan, this public government plan, don't think for a minute that that will not destroy the current insurance system," he said on ABC's "This Week."

Sebelius and other administration aides have said Obama is open to a nonprofit cooperative model as an alternative to the public option and the existing private plans. Finance Committee members have been studying utility co-ops as a possible model.

Liberal leaders reacted strongly to the idea that Obama would walk away from what they consider a central element of reform.

"I don't think this bill is worth passing without a public option," said Howard Dean, head of the grass-roots group Democracy for America.

mining the technosphere

Mining the Technosphere: a Solution for the Industrial Ecosystem? from Rembrandt Koppelaar on Vimeo.

world cement production

The Oil Drum | Cement is mainly used to make concrete, and is sort of the "active ingredient" in concrete - it is combined with sand and gravel in roughly fixed proportions. So cement production can be considered a rough proxy for the total amount of construction going on in a country.

The growth in China, from 1 GT to 1.3 GT in two years is mindboggling, even India and Russia are interesting...and there's more to think about under the fold. China's 2007 cement exports were only 33 million tons out of 1.3 billion tons produced. So, at least for China, production is a good proxy for demand/consumption.

Also interesting is the percentage of the world's production of cement that China took up in 2007 (50%) compared to 2004 (42.5%); some of this can no doubt be due to preparation for the Olympics, but that surely cannot not be all of that growth can it? Also note that other countries (perhaps the "developing world?") seems to be using less of the total proportion of cement used.

Some things we learned from the comment thread from Stuart's post a couple of years ago:

Remember, in China, oil isn't used in cement production. In the "clinker" stage, it's all coal. In the blending stage it's electricity (which is generated 80% from coal in China).

And cement production in China is inefficient. There are hundreds of small plants, both wet and dry processes, and the local environmental impact is severe.

Making a pound of cement releases a pound of CO2. And a Gigaton or two?

This also isn't a new phenomenon. This link shows data back to 1999 that illustrated that China has been at this for quite a while, but perhaps not to this extent.

To conclude, here is the percent change of production bar graph from 2005 to 2008. Think about what all that means in terms of energy. Also note the numbers from India, Russia, and the US.

copeland "revival" - harvesting reality casualties

NYTimes | Onstage before thousands of believers weighed down by debt and economic insecurity, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland and their all-star lineup of “prosperity gospel” preachers delighted the crowd with anecdotes about the luxurious lives they had attained by following the Word of God.

Private airplanes and boats. A motorcycle sent by an anonymous supporter. Vacations in Hawaii and cruises in Alaska. Designer handbags. A ring of emeralds and diamonds.

“God knows where the money is, and he knows how to get the money to you,” preached Mrs. Copeland, dressed in a crisp pants ensemble like those worn by C.E.O.’s.

Even in an economic downturn, preachers in the “prosperity gospel” movement are drawing sizable, adoring audiences. Their message — that if you have sufficient faith in God and the Bible and donate generously, God will multiply your offerings a hundredfold — is reassuring to many in hard times.

The preachers barely acknowledged the recession, though they did say it was no excuse to curtail giving. “Fear will make you stingy,” Mr. Copeland said.

But the offering buckets came up emptier than in some previous years, said those who have attended before.

gop seeks its revival in healthcare revolt

LATimes | Conservatives are calling it their August Revolt -- a surprising upsurge of activism against President Obama's proposed healthcare overhaul.

Spurred on by the success of their efforts to dominate the news at Democratic town hall meetings, conservative groups are reporting increases in membership lists and are joining forces to plan at least one mass demonstration in Washington next month.

But the conservative mobilization has also created an unusual dilemma for Republican leaders, who want to turn the enthusiasm into election victories next year but find themselves the target of ire from many of the same activists.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), chairman of the GOP's Senate campaign committee, was booed at a "tea party" rally in July for supporting the government bailout of the financial services industry.

And one of the GOP's most reliable conservatives, Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina, was shouted down at a recent town hall meeting when he criticized a conservative broadcaster and tried to counter claims that children would soon be forced to receive swine flu vaccinations.

"You cannot build a movement on something that is not credible," said a frustrated Inglis, referring to the vaccine issue and other false rumors being spread by more aggressive critics of the health bill.

obamagenics

foxes out of the chicken coop

Washington Post | The Department of Health and Human Services is almost certain to take on responsibility for creating the criteria used to decide what health records technologies qualify for billions of dollars in reimbursements to medical offices under a new stimulus program, officials said Friday.

The decision represents a significant restriction of the role played by a private certification group, begun several years ago by the technology industry, which until recently had served as the government's gatekeeper for endorsing systems designed to improve the sharing of medical records.

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology, or CCHIT, came under sharp criticism in May after a Washington Post story showed that it has close ties to a trade group whose members stand to receive billions as a result of the stimulus legislation.

The trade group, called the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, was a key force behind the Obama administration's decision to include $36.5 billion in the stimulus package for development of electronic health records networks.

Under the stimulus legislation, doctors and medical organizations can be reimbursed for buying equipment that is certified as meeting certain mandates, including that the gear provides "meaningful use" to improve information sharing.

The nonprofit certification commission was started in 2004 with support from the trade association and two other industry groups. In recent years, it has received funding through HHS, but it is run by a former executive of the trade association and one of its current trustees also is president of the association. Several board members work for technology companies.

Critics of the certification group have complained that apparent conflicts of interest would undermine the group's credibility in judging deciding what technology merited stimulus funding.

"There was an apparent conflict. . . . We don't want to spend the next several years on a sideshow," said Paul Egerman, co-chairman of the advisory group that recommended that the HHS, instead of the private group, should set the criteria.

"Our energies need to be focused on the substantial challenges involved in getting physicians to use these systems effectively while, simultaneously, earning the public's trust in the privacy and integrity of these systems."

The recommendations of Egerman and several others were endorsed by a government health information technology advisory board Friday. That development virtually ensures the recommendations will be formally embraced, after a public comment period, by the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the HHS.

obamageddon?

when did your county's jobs disappear?

Slate | The economic crisis, which has claimed more than 5 million jobs since the recession began, did not strike the entire country at once. A map of employment gains or losses by county tells the story of how those job losses first struck in the most vulnerable regions and then spread rapidly to the rest of the country. As early as August 2007, for example—several months before the recession officially began—jobs were already on the decline in southwest Florida; Orange County, Calif.; much of New Jersey; and Detroit, while other areas of the country remained on the uptick.

Using the Labor Department's local area unemployment statistics, Slate presents the recession as told by unemployment numbers for each county in America. Because the data are not seasonally adjusted for natural employment cycles throughout the year, the numbers you see show the change in the number of people employed compared with the same month in the previous year. Blue dots represent a net increase in jobs, while red dots indicate a decrease. The larger the dot, the greater the number of jobs gained or lost. Click the arrows or calendar at the bottom to see each month of data. Click the green play button to see an animation of the data. Fist tap Dale.

lunch with jared diamond

Financial Times | Jared Diamond is the guru of collapse. Collapse is the title of one of the books that have made him a world-famous academic. It is a theme that captures the Zeitgeist: markets have collapsed, banks have collapsed and confidence, even in the capitalist system itself, has collapsed.

Diamond’s celebrated book – which added to the reputation he earned through Guns, Germs andSteel, a Pulitzer prize-winner about why some societies triumph over others – sought to discover what makes civilisations, many at their apparent zenith, crumble overnight. The Maya of Central America, the stone-carving civilisation of Easter Island, and the Soviet Union – all suddenly shattered.

The question lurking in Diamond’s work is: could we be next? Could the great skyscrapers of Manhattan one day become deserted canyons of a bygone civilisation, a modern version of Ozymandias’s trunkless legs of stone?

language shapes thoughts

Newsweek | When the Viaduct de Millau opened in the south of France in 2004, this tallest bridge in the world won worldwide accolades. German newspapers described how it "floated above the clouds" with "elegance and lightness" and "breathtaking" beauty. In France, papers praised the "immense" "concrete giant." Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw beauty where the French saw heft and power? Lera Boroditsky thinks not.

A psychologist at Stanford University, she has long been intrigued by an age-old question whose modern form dates to 1956, when linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf asked whether the language we speak shapes the way we think and see the world. If so, then language is not merely a means of expressing thought, but a constraint on it, too. Although philosophers, anthropologists, and others have weighed in, with most concluding that language does not shape thought in any significant way, the field has been notable for a distressing lack of empiricism—as in testable hypotheses and actual data.

That's where Boroditsky comes in. In a series of clever experiments guided by pointed questions, she is amassing evidence that, yes, language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that "the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically," not only when they are thinking in order to speak, "but in all manner of cognitive tasks," including basic sensory perception. "Even a small fluke of grammar"—the gender of nouns—"can have an effect on how people think about things in the world," she says.

false "death panel" rumor has familiar roots

NYTimes | The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks.

Advanced even this week by Republican stalwarts including the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator, the nature of the assertion nonetheless seemed reminiscent of the modern-day viral Internet campaigns that dogged Mr. Obama last year, falsely calling him a Muslim and questioning his nationality.

But the rumor — which has come up at Congressional town-hall-style meetings this week in spite of an avalanche of reports laying out why it was false — was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists.

Rather, it has a far more mainstream provenance, openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement (and ultimately, New York’s lieutenant governor).

There is nothing in any of the legislative proposals that would call for the creation of death panels or any other governmental body that would cut off care for the critically ill as a cost-cutting measure. But over the course of the past few months, early, stated fears from anti-abortion conservatives that Mr. Obama would pursue a pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda, combined with twisted accounts of actual legislative proposals that would provide financing for optional consultations with doctors about hospice care and other “end of life” services, fed the rumor to the point where it overcame the debate.

interrogation inc.

NYTimes | In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists.

Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator, someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly obtain weapons, food, money — whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt, Germany, was strained by the spy agency’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment.

“It was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters,” he said in an interview. “I was proud to help my nation.”

With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth. They were kept in isolated cells.

The existence of the network of prisons to detain and interrogate senior operatives of Al Qaeda has long been known, but details about them have been a closely guarded secret. In recent interviews, though, several former intelligence officials have provided a fuller account of how they were built, where they were located and life inside them.

Mr. Foggo acknowledged a role, which has never been previously reported. He pleaded guilty last year to a fraud charge involving a contractor that equipped the C.I.A. jails and provided other supplies to the agency, and he is now serving a three-year sentence in a Kentucky prison.

The C.I.A. prisons would become one of the Bush administration’s most extraordinary counterterrorism programs, but setting them up was fairly mundane, according to the intelligence officials.

Mr. Foggo relied on C.I.A. finance officers, engineers and contract workers to build the jails. As they neared completion, he turned to a small company linked to Brent R. Wilkes, an old friend and a San Diego military contractor.

The business provided toilets, plumbing equipment, stereos, video games, bedding, night vision goggles, earplugs and wrap-around sunglasses. Some products were bought at Target and Wal-Mart, among other vendors, and flown overseas. Nothing exotic was required for the infamous waterboards — they were built on the spot from locally available materials, the officials said.

will health care slip on oil?

Miller-McCune | As the government, the media and citizen activists grapple with fixing our health care system, one three-letter word has been conspicuously absent from the president on down: oil. But it should be in there. Given medicine's dependence on fossil fuels and the prospect of higher oil prices — now double that of last December — dwindling oil supplies will likely give our health system a shock. Think massive heart attack.

One might not imagine oil and medicine would mix, but U.S. health care relies on cheap crude in multiple ways: from petroleum-derived pharmaceuticals (including such commonly prescribed drugs as aspirin, vitamin capsules, cortisone and many antibiotics, antihistamines, medicated skin creams and psychiatric medications), catheters and syringes to running and transporting high-tech machines and time-is-of-the-essence ambulance runs. This makes for great aseptic single-use equipment and complex, even heroic, surgeries, but it also leaves our medical system highly vulnerable to any disruptions to the oil supply — which experts say will undoubtedly happen, though no one knows exactly when.

"World crude oil production has not grown materially since 2005," said Gail Tverberg, a co-editor of The Oil Drum known to readers as "Gail the Actuary." "With the recession, world crude production has now dropped back below the 2004 level." Most agree that we are approaching or have approached the point where global oil extraction has peaked, meaning that petroleum will become more difficult and expensive to access.

"In light of these facts, it should become a priority for health care professionals and institutions to identify and take actions to reduce their dependence upon conventional oil," said U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md. One of three scientists in Congress — he has a doctorate in human physiology — Bartlett serves on the House Science and Technology Committee and co-founded the Congressional Peak Oil Caucus.

Using a medical analogy, he counseled against waiting for his peers to lead the way in avoiding future problems.

thousands line up for promise of free health care

NYTimes | They came for new teeth mostly, but also for blood pressure checks, mammograms, immunizations and acupuncture for pain. Neighboring South Los Angeles is a place where health care is scarce, and so when it was offered nearby, word got around.

For the second day in a row, thousands of people lined up on Wednesday — starting after midnight and snaking into the early hours — for free dental, medical and vision services, courtesy of a nonprofit group that more typically provides mobile health care for the rural poor.

Like a giant MASH unit, the floor of the Forum, the arena where Madonna once played four sold-out shows, housed aisle upon aisle of dental chairs, where drilling, cleaning and extracting took place in the open. A few cushions were duct-taped to a folding table in a coat closet, an examining room where Dr. Eugene Taw, a volunteer, saw patients.

When Remote Area Medical, the Tennessee-based organization running the event, decided to try its hand at large urban medical services, its principals thought Los Angeles would be a good place to start. But they were far from prepared for the outpouring of need. Set up for eight days of care, the group was already overwhelmed on the first day after allowing 1,500 people through the door, nearly 500 of whom had still not been served by day’s end and had to return in the wee hours Wednesday morning.

The enormous response to the free care was a stark corollary to the hundreds of Americans who have filled town-hall-style meetings throughout the country, angrily expressing their fear of the Obama administration’s proposed changes to the nation’s health care system. The bleachers of patients also reflected the state’s high unemployment, recent reduction in its Medicaid services for the poor and high deductibles and co-payments that have come to define many employer-sponsored insurance programs.

Many of those here said they lacked insurance, but many others said they had coverage but not enough to meet all their needs — or that they could afford. Some said they were well aware of the larger national health care debate, and were eager for changes.

“I am on point with the news,” said Elizabeth Harraway, 50, who is unemployed and came for dental care. “I think the president’s ideas are awesome, and I believe opening up health care is going to work."