can education research be divorced from politics and economics?

AERA-L | ABSTRACT: In response to my post "Keynes & Hayek (was 'Re: History of regulation of finance')" [Hake (2011c)], PhysLrnR's William Robertson (2011) wrote (paraphrasing):

"I keep misreading the title 'PhysLrnR' of this list, because I could have sworn the word physics is there but the words politics and economics clearly are not. Must be another of my silly non-sequiturs.""

I think Robertson's misperception is due more to *non-cogito* than *non-sequitur*. According to the statement on the PhysLrnR archive page , one of the issues upon which PhysLrnR is intended to focus is "Political Policy and Social Impacts on Physics Education Research and the Teaching of Physics."

If Physics Education Research (PER) hopes to affect any change in the current educational system IT CANNOT DIVORCE ITSELF FROM POLITICS AND ECONOMICS - witness the baleful effects on teaching and student learning of NCLB and RTT (Race to the Top) in K-12 as discussed in e.g., "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education" [Ravitch (2010, 2011)].
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In response to my PhysLrnR post "Keynes & Hayek (was 'Re: History of regulation of finance')" [Hake (2011c)], PhysLrnR's William Robertson (2011) wrote:

"I keep misreading the title of this list, because I could have sworn the word physics is here but the words politics and economics clearly are not. Must be another of my silly non-sequiturs."

I think Robertson's misperception is due more to *non-cogito* than *non-sequitur*. According to the statement at the top of the CLOSED!:-( PhysLrnR archive page .
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Robertson evidently rejects issue "e" above: POLITICAL POLICY AND SOCIAL IMPACTS ON PER AND THE TEACHING OF PHYSICS" as a legitimate issue of concern for PhysLrnR and (presumably) Physics Education Research. I wonder if he would care to explain his rejection?

In "G.O.P. Anti-Federalism Aims at Education" [Hake (2011a)], I wrote: "I agree that my post 'G.O.P. Anti-Federalism Aims at Education' is "somewhat political. But IMHO if Physics Education Research (PER) hopes to affect any change in the current educational system it cannot divorce itself from politics and cannot stick only to what Marx (2011) regards as 'teaching and learning' - both teaching and learning are heavily influenced by politics. . . . .[[and economics, see e.g., 'Re: Evaluations Ignore Education Factors,' (Hake, 2011b)]]. . . . . - witness the baleful effects on teaching and student learning of NCLB and RTT (Race to the Top) in K-12 as discussed in e.g., "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education"[Ravitch (2010, 2011)]."

In my opinion, PER's need to take a "systems approach" to physics education, consistent with the eloquent phrasing of Howard & Elisabeth Odum (1981), pointed to by PhysLrnR Bud Nye (2011):

"'Basic scientists,' who define *basic* as 'looking to the parts,' need to learn that putting parts together to understand whole systems is equally basic. The scientist who says that synthesis is 'applied,' as if it were an inferior activity, must ask which is intellectually more difficult and ultimately more basic, reductionism or synthesism. Surely both are necessary, but we have had too little synthesis, and our science curricula in schools have failed to fulfill their promise because of this. The scientist who uses his discipline to learn more and more about less and less must connect his specialty to the real world as an entirety. Anyone who sets boundaries to his field of interest is limiting his capacity to grow. An old discipline has already yielded what it can; now knowledge must be arranged in different ways and given different names...." Howard T. & Elisabeth C. Odum (1981)

Howard Odum is a "systems thinker" as evidenced in e.g., "Ecological and General Systems: An Introduction to Systems Ecology" [Odum (1994)] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_T._Odum. For more on "systems thinking" see "Over Two-Hundred Annotated References on Systems Thinking" [Hake (2009)] and "General Systems Theory" [Urner (2011)].

the dark side of science?

The Scientist | Within the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, teams of biologists and engineers are making great strides in understanding the cell and its functioning. (See The Scientist’s recent feature on the topic.) However, there is more that should be discussed than the triumphs. There are also the dark purposes to which science (and synthetic biology in particular) can be put. Worries range from the development of pathogenic bioweapons to the potential contamination of native gene pools in our environment. The question is, are scientists responsible for the potentially negative impacts of their work?

Some have argued that the answer to this question is no—that it is not researchers’ responsibility how science gets used in society. But that is sophistry. Scientists are responsible for both the impacts they intend and some of the impacts they do not intend, if they are readily foreseeable in specific detail. These are the standards to which we are all held as moral agents. If I were to negligently throw a used match into a dry field (merely because I wanted to dispose of it), for example, I would be responsible for the resulting wild fire. In contrast, Einstein was not responsible for the use of his E=mc² equation to build an atomic bomb and its use in wartime, though the scientists at Los Alamos were.

Of course, impacts (whether harmful or beneficial) are not solely scientists’ responsibility—others involved will also bear responsibility for their actions. If scientific knowledge is used in a biological attack, the terrorists are first and foremost responsible for their heinous act. But the researchers who generated the knowledge may be also partly responsible. Consider, for example, the knowledge of how to build a virus like smallpox from the ground up or how to create other pathogenic, tailored organisms—targeted either to humans or the foods on which we depend. If it is readily foreseeable that such knowledge could be used for nefarious purposes, the scientists who introduce such new technological capacities are partially responsible for an attack that could ultimately cause millions of deaths.

Scientists can no longer hope naively that people will only use science for the public good. The world will always have the mentally unbalanced, the delusional, the vicious, and the sociopathic members of society, some of whom will also be intelligent enough to use the results of science. Recognizing this should be part of the everyday backdrop of science, the assessment of its potential, and the desirability of the pursuit of a particular project.

pennsylvanian pederasty and procurement...,

Video - The People Under the Stairs trailer

Eurweb | The case was broken by one of Sandusky’s victims, cited as “Victim Number 1” who reported Sandusky to authorities.

Reports are also leaking out that the eight victims may have been poor inner city black boys.

Edward Wyckoff Williams, a columnist for the Grio, points out that many sex abuse cases in recent years have involved high profile leaders and victims of sexual abuse, who have been young black males.

Within the grand jury’s findings was an incident in 2002, when assistant coach Mike McQueary, the team’s wide receiver coach, witnessed Sandusky allegedly raping a boy, estimated to be about 10 years old, in the shower of Penn State’s locker room.

According to the Washington Post, McQueary told Paterno—and Paterno told athletic director Tim Curley and senior vice president for finance Gary Schultz, who, in turn, reported it to university president Graham Spanier. None took allegations to police.

The Pennsylvania Statewide Investigating Grand Jury stated that Sandusky selected the eight boys from the populations served by the Second Mile Foundation.

Poor children became easy prey for Sandusky, who would start with mentoring, then move on to hosting the boys for overnights in the bedroom at his home and then initiate copulation, anal sex, according to the grand jury report.

The report indicates that Sandusky may have raped and molested at least 8 young boys between the ages of 10 and 15 from 1994-2009. He is free on $100,000 bail and is awaiting his first hearing on Dec. 7. He has been charged with 40 counts of abuse, but maintains his innocence, according to his attorney.

If convicted, he would face a maximum punishment of life in prison.

Unbelievably, Sandusky, 67, was twice investigated on charges of sexual assault. Neither investigations resulted in either organization terminating Sandusky’s employment or access to facilities.

Investigators are also looking into rumors that Sandusky may have been procuring at-risk youth for foundation donors. The foundation raises millions of dollars a year from corporate and individual donors in Pennsylvania.

profound and pervasive perpetration in pennsylvania...,

Loop21 | As news unravels around the grand jury report revealing charges against former Penn State football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky for raping and sexually molesting underage boys, some former black Penn State students are now painfully reliving a scandal that occurred at their university ten years ago. In 2000, the year a janitor witnessed a boy younger than 13 (“Victim 8” in a grand jury report) “pinned against a wall” while Sandusky performed oral sex on him, black students and football players on Penn State’s campus began receiving hate mail.

The hate mail sent to black students had nothing to do with Sandusky’s proclivities, but the two incidences shared something in common: both were ultimately covered up by the university, even as both chain of events grew worse. Sandusky went on to molest and possibly rape more boys, according to a grand jury report (Sandusky denies foul play), and hate mail against black students became death threats.

Ultimately, a black man’s dead body was found by police near Penn State as one of the death threats said it would. And some black students had to attend their graduation the following May with bulletproof vests on in fear of their life.

But few know about the death threats because Penn State and Joe Paterno were not willing to allow bad publicity to ruin the university’s image, say some of the black students at the center of the tragic events.

LaKeisha Wolf was president of Penn State’s Black Caucus ten years ago, and she received the lion’s share of life-threatening letters. Today, she watches the news about Sandusky’s rape charges, the firing of Joe Paterno and Penn State president Graham Spanier, and the student riots that ensued, and it takes her right back to her days dealing with the university.

In fact, Wolf and other concerned black students met with Paterno back in 2001 because of information circulating that black football players, like then-quarterback Rashard Casey, had been receiving death threats. Wolf recalls Paterno as almost emotionless.

coordinated crackdown with presidential plausible deniability?

firedoglake | Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC (excerpted on The Takeaway radio program–audio of Quan starts at the 5:30 mark), casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. “I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . .”

Mayor Quan then rambles about how she “spoke with protestors in my city” who professed an interest in “separating from anarchists,” implying that her police action was helping this somehow.

Interestingly, Quan then essentially advocates that occupiers move to private spaces, and specifically cites Zuccotti Park as an example:

In New York City, it’s interesting that the Wall Street movement is actually on a private park, so they’re not, again, in the public domain, and they’re not infringing on the public’s right to use a public park.

Many witnesses to the wave of government crackdowns on numerous #occupy encampments have been wondering aloud if the rapid succession was more than a coincidence; Jean Quan’s casual remark seems to imply clearly that it was.

Might it also be more than a coincidence that this succession of police raids started after President Obama left the US for an extended tour of the Pacific Rim?

OWS has learned why we call'em "one-time"...,

Video - riot police pull hair, punch, and use truncheons on Berkley students.

zunguzungu | At about 11:30 a.m. yesterday, a police officer told me and about eight other students that, and I quote, “the grass is closed.” We were going to sit under a tree and discuss things, and two police officers were watching us vigilantly to make sure we didn’t suddenly do something violent like try to put up tents. As we moved towards the tree, the first police officer stepped up and informed us that we could not walk from the broad concrete steps of Sproul Hall, where about a hundred people were sitting and talking, and sit on the grassy area just to the north of it. “The grass is closed,” she said.

If you meditate on these words until they become a mantra, you will learn some profound things about how police authority works. What could it possibly mean to declare that “the grass is closed”? Who could have the authority to say so? I had always considered that stretch of grass to be public; I’ve often been among the hundreds of students who eat their lunch there, every day, and 11:30 a.m. is a time of day when it is common to eat lunch. I have had conversations with other students sitting on that very grass, many times. Why was it that I could not do so now? Why had this stretch of grass suddenly become un-public and closed off? No signs said so, and no police tape marked it off. At the far end of that grassy area, in fact, several people were actually sitting on the grass. But those people were sitting there eating lunch. Because we were part of the group which was sitting on the steps of Sproul Hall, clearly, the grass had been declared off limits to us.

To make things more interesting, it immediately transpired that the other police officer had, in fact, already given them permission to sit on the grass. And in an instant, the arbitrariness of the rule was made evident and undeniable. Two different students indignantly asserted that that police officer right there told us we could sit here. When the second officer said nothing to contradict them, when he failed to back her up on the closed-ness of the grass, she wordlessly stepped back, keeping her face expressionless behind her sunglasses. She didn’t apologize or take back what she said. She simply stopped trying to enforce a rule after its utter and complete arbitrariness had been made clear. To put this as simply as possible, she elected not to use force in defense of a rule which had just been shown to have no basis other than the momentary decision of a police officer accustomed to telling people where they can and cannot stand.

As part of my ongoing private project to be less scared of police — because I am scared of police — I said to her, in as level and direct a tone as I could manage, “This is why we don’t trust you.” And she again elected to say nothing. She didn’t have to. The truth of power, in this situation, is that the policy is what the police will use their force to enforce. They don’t have to have a legitimate reason, nor are they embarrassed when it is shown that the “grass is closed” only because someone with authority said so. And the grass only became open because someone with more authority said so. Such people are not to be trusted.

This was a very modest lesson in how power works. On Wednesday, several thousand UC Berkeley students learned a much bigger lesson, but in many ways it was exactly the same lesson: the rule is what the people with the force to enforce it say it is. And it becomes the rule when you either obey it, or when they use their force to make you obey it. Fist tap John.

occupy where: what's in it for black and brown people?

Video - Main St. report Occupy the Hood/Detroit.

BAR | Those that initiated the early occupations in most cities were white. They have re-established the long-lost right of the poor to comngregate in public and express their discontent. If this is not to be a right which only whites enjoy, it's time for us to step up too. There will be race and class tensions, with the increased participation of black and brown people in the occupation movement. But these are growing pains, and necessary. It's time, as Glen Ford has said, to claim our place in the 99% and spell out what that looks like.

Occupation Where? What's In It For Black and Brown People?

The answer is plenty, and we need to hurry up and claim it.

The tactic of “occupation” has reclaimed is the right of poor and jobless, even homeless, people to congregate, to assemble and to be discontented in public. That's no small thing, and it's surely not a thing that could have been accomplished if the first occupiers had been young, jobless and black or brown instead of white.

If the first occupiers in Zucotti Park had been young and black, they'd instantly have been branded a street gang and arrested en masse, with or without violence, but certainly with little media play or sympathy. If the first occupiers were black, and blathering about the ravages of finance capital and how neither of the two parties were worth a damn, they certainly would not have been endorsed by what passes for the preacher-infested local leadership of black communities. Tied as they are to corporate philanthropy, corporate financing, the corporate-run Democratic party and its corporate-friendly trickle-down black president, our black misleadership class would have run, not walked away from black occupiers who failed to identify as staunch pro-Obama Democrats.

What if the occupiers had been brown? Here's a clue. In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of immigrants at a time have stayed away from work in near general-strike proportions to march on May Day, no less, for their human rights. The anecdotal evidence is that ICE agents raided many workplaces in California, Texas, New York, Arizona, Illinois and elsewhere, and that without much notice in the corporate media, a wave of retaliatory harrassment, jailings and deportations ensued. Certainly, the Obama administration is on track to deport a record 400,000 immigrants for the third year in a row, already far outstripping Bush's eight year total. There are in fact, gang injunction-type laws in many states which make it a criminal offense for young people in designated (black and brown) neighborhoods to assemble in groups in public places for any reason.

Make no mistake about it, reclaiming the right of the poor, jobless and discontented to peaceably assemble, while politically paralyzing mayors and police forces used to cracking heads and dispersing malcontents is a project only white protesters could have accomplished without police violence and massive arrests. Fist tap Nomad.

you can't evict an idea

aljazeera | Bloomberg News was standing by as its founder Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered his Cossacks in riot gear to “cleanse” Zuccotti Park in the middle of the morning to replace one group of occupiers with another.

No doubt emboldened by earlier evictions in Oakland and Portland, and with a sound truck emitting noise to disorient protestors and add to the chaos, Bloomberg's office was saying, “protesters can return after the park is cleared”.

Until this point, the mayor had gone back and forth with threats to clear the park in the name of preserving public safety, of course, and upholding the wishes of the huge Brookfield Realty group, which owns the “public” park and on whose board Bloomberg's girlfriend sits.

For weeks, the Murdoch press had been baiting Bloomberg as weak and a wuss for not getting tough as they focused on any act of depravity they could find or invent. But now, the park is gone - for now - but the Movement says it will go on.

As the cops and the Sanitation Department dismantled tents and occupied the area, keeping pedestrians out, the Occupy Wall Street media team was issuing a statement that began, ”You can't evict an idea whose time has come”.

The statement continued: “This burgeoning movement is more than a protest, more than an occupation, and more than any tactic. The 'us' in the movement is far broader than those who are able to participate in physical occupation. The movement is everyone who sends supplies, everyone who talks to their friends and families about the underlying issues, everyone who takes some form of action to get involved in this civic process.

"Such a movement cannot be evicted. Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces - our spaces - and, physically, they may succeed. But we are engaged in a battle over ideas. Our idea is that our political structures should serve us, the people - all of us, not just those who have amassed great wealth and power. We believe that is a highly popular idea, and that is why so many people have come so quickly to identify with Occupy Wall Street and the 99 per cent movement.”

The mayor acted after authorities in Oakland, California and Portland, Oregon evicted occupation activists from camps there. In both cities, activists have seized new parks and areas to use as launching pads for more protests.

a tactical note to OWS from culture jammers HQ...,

AdBusters | Hey you creatives, artists, environmentalists, workers, moms, dads, students, malcontents, do-gooders and aspiring martyrs in the snow:

The last four months have been hard fought, inspiring and delightfully revolutionary. We brought tents, hunkered down, held our assemblies, and lobbed a meme-bomb that continues to explode the world's imagination. Many of us have never felt so alive. We have fertilized the future with our revolutionary spirit … and a thousand flowers will surely bloom in the coming Spring.

But as winter approaches an ominous mood could set in … hope thwarted is in danger of turning sour, patience exhausted becoming anger, militant nonviolence losing its allure. It isn't just the mainstream media that says things could get ugly. What shall we do to keep the magic alive?

Here are a couple of emerging ideas:

STRATEGY #1: We summon our strength, grit our teeth and hang in there through winter … heroically we sleep in the snow … we impress the world with our determination and guts … and when the cops come, we put our bodies on the line and resist them nonviolently with everything we've got.

STRATEGY #2: We declare "victory" and throw a party … a festival … a potlatch … a jubilee … a grand gesture to celebrate, commemorate, rejoice in how far we've come, the comrades we've made, the glorious days ahead. Imagine, on a Saturday yet to be announced, perhaps our movement's three month anniversary on December 17, in every #OCCUPY in the world, we reclaim the streets for a weekend of triumphant hilarity and joyous revelry.

We dance like we've never danced before and invite the world to join us.

Then we clean up, scale back and most of us go indoors while the die-hards hold the camps. We use the winter to brainstorm, network, build momentum so that we may emerge rejuvenated with fresh tactics, philosophies, and a myriad projects ready to rumble next Spring.

Whatever we do, let's keep our revolutionary spirit alive … let's never stop living without dead time.

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

occupy foreclosures: the next logical step after park camping ends...,

NewDeal 2.0 | As people think a bit more critically about what it means to “occupy” contested spaces that blur the public and the private and the boundaries between the 99% and the 1%, and as they also think through what Occupy Wall Street might do next, I would humbly suggest they check out the activism model of Project: No One Leaves. It exists in many places, especially in Massachusetts — check out this Springfield version of it — and grows out of activism pioneered by City Life Vida Urbana. It is similar to activism done by the group New Bottom Line and other foreclosure fighters. Here is PBS NewsHour’s coverage of the movement.

The major goal of Project: No One Leaves is to mobilize as many resources as possible to protect those going through foreclosure and keep them in their homes as long as possible in order to give them maximum bargaining power against the banks. For those focused on “weapons of the weak,” this moment — with banks and creditors using state power to conduct massive amounts of foreclosures, thus impoverishing poor neighborhoods through a financialized rationality — is a crucial opportunity for resistance.

nypd begins clearing zuccotti park...,

Video - NYPD midnight raid on Zuccotti park.

NYTimes | Hundreds of New York City police officers began clearing Zuccotti Park of the Occupy Wall Street protesters early Tuesday, telling the people there that the nearly two-month-old camp would be “cleared and restored” before the morning and that any demonstrator who did not leave would be arrested.

The protesters, about 200 of whom have been staying in the park overnight, resisted with chants of “Whose park? Our park!” as officers began moving in and tearing down tents. The protesters rallied around an area known as “the kitchen” near the middle of the park and began building barricades with tables and pieces of scrap wood.

The officers, who had gathered between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and then rode in vans along Broadway, moved into the one-square-block park shortly after 1 a.m.

As they did, dozens of protesters linked arms and shouted “No retreat, no surrender,” “This is our home” and “Barricade!” At least a couple of arrests were reported just outside the park, but details were not immediately available.

The mayor’s office sent out a message on Twitter at 1:19 a.m. saying: “Occupants of Zuccotti should temporarily leave and remove tents and tarps. Protesters can return after the park is cleared.”

The police move came as organizers put out word on their Web site that they planned to “shut down Wall Street” with a demonstration on Thursday to commemorate the completion of two months of the beginning of the encampment, which has spurred similar demonstrations across the country.

the eviction of occupy oakland emboldened mayor bloomberg..,

Video - Police cleared out the Occupiers from Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland.

koch-blocked; occupy the koch bros...,

Video - Creative agitation and guerilla drive-in against a Koch 1% gala.

crypto-anarchism: occupy movement makes sense to ron paul...,

Video - Ron Paul on OWS at the last GOP debate

RT | While Republican attitudes towards Occupy Wall Street protesters have been largely negative, GOP hopeful Ron Paul aligned himself with those participating in the movement during last night’s televised presidential debate.

­In support of the agenda of the thousands of Americans participating in the Occupy movement, Texas Congressman Ron Paul said Wednesday night, “if you’re going after crony capitalism, I’m all for it.”

According to Paul, crony capitalists are those “that benefit from contract from government, benefit from the Federal Reserve, benefit from all the bailouts. They don’t deserve compassion. They deserve taxation or they deserve to have all their benefits removed.”

“But crony capitalism isn’t when someone makes money and they produce a product,” added the candidate. “That is very important. We need to distinguish the two. And unfortunately I think some people mix that.”

why hustler culture is doomed to fail...,

Video - Morris Berman, Part 1. Why America Failed


Video - Morris Berman, Part 2. Why America Failed

A Redux Request: Hakim Bey on Money

Black Sun Gazette | Peter’s talk was on money, specifically, a long historical view of money viewed through magickal / hieroglyphic lens. Like a lot of people I know and a lot of people I hear, he claims that he saw the whole economic collapse coming about a year ago. This is either an example of 20/20 hindsight on a massive scale or the collapse was that obvious to see coming over the horizen. I tend to believe the latter. Mostly because of something that Mr. Wilson himself said. “An important key to understand reality is economics.” People that tend to understand reality tend to understand economics- at least in the larger strokes. Still, I think it will forever confuse me why people like Mr. Wilson don’t do something with this knowledge. He claims that if he had a million dollars last year he could have twelve millions today. It’s not so much that I doubt the veracity of this claim so much as I lament it staying in the stage of the unverifiable. Money may not be wealth, but it can get you some very useful commodities like cigarettes, guns, food, land, housing, etc.

Mr. Wilson points out that “the Stone Age knows starvation but it does not know poverty.” In other words, there might be a famine, your village might get raided, there might be crop blight, but the village will either thrive together or starve together. The Stone Age knew starvation, but it did not know a parasitic ruling class gorging itself while masses outside starved to death. Money, Mr. Wilson says, begins as Sumerian clay tokens shaped into the tradable commodities (oxen, barrels of wheat, bars of silver, etc.). Records of debt (at usurious interest rates up to 33.3% annually) were kept by (who else?) the scribes and priests of the temples who at that time monopolized the art of writing. This kept not only the peasantry and laboring classes in debt peonage, it also kept the merchant class in thrall to the temple. Peter has considered the anthropological facts about money alongside the more mytho-poetic evidence existing from the time, such as the Babylonian creation myth of the war between Tiamat and Marduk, and the legends of Staghorn and Gilgamesh.

Clay tablets existed in ancient Mesopotamia. Specie, that is coinage, did not. This is an invention of the ancient peoples of Asia Minor and the Greek Islands. Here we see money gaining a more explicit religious and magickal quality. Gold was plentiful in this area, and is also a malleable metal easy to imprint with both words and images. When temple sacrifices of the local bull cults became so popular that not everyone could get a piece of bull, an ingenius method was reached to give every pilgrim a symbol of involvement in the ritual- the temple token. Rather than a piece of bull, pilgrims were given a small piece of gold with a bull impressed on one face. The two sided coin comes later with an image on one side and a caption on the other. Money becomes qualitatively more magickal with this step, uniting the image and the word into a talismatic object which has a value unrelated to its real value as commodity. It is no longer simply a magickal document recording debt and / or wealth. It is a magickal object whose value comes from belief. As Peter points out: All money is fiat money. Gold has no inherent value. It’s shiny, and makes cool jewelry and all that, but it is not what the anarcho-capitalist types will have you believe, a universal medium of exchange. Sure, it holds value over millenia (particlarly with regard to silver), but there is not reason to use gold more than say, diamonds or uranium or coal or any other commodity in limited supply. Quoth Mr. Wilson: “Money is proof that magick works, it is perhaps the only proof.”

corporations will eat your soul...,

Video - The Corporation documentary trailer

Yurica Report | Joel Bakan's book tells of a chapter in American history I was never taught in school. It involves a Marine Corps General named Smedley Butler, one of WWI's most heavily decorated soldiers. On August 21, 1931, Butler had stunned an audience at an American Legion convention in Connecticut when he had said:

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

"I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. The record of racketeering is long.

"I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three districts. The Marines operated on three continents."

Given that speech, and Butler's disgust with the role the military played, not in serving democracy but in serving the greed of large corporations, what happened three years later is truly stunning.

Franklin Roosevelt was president, and he was bringing government regulations in to stop the disastrous greed of the wealthiest corporations and individuals. Big business hated him. In fact, big business was in love with fascism at the time. In 1934, Fortune magazine had a cover story extolling the virtues of fascism and the economic miracles Mussolini had achieved in lowering wages, crushing worker unions, and creating greater profits for the corporations.

On August 22nd of 1934, General Butler was approached in a hotel room in Philadelphia by a messenger of a group of wealthy businessmen, who opened a large suitcase of $1000 bills and dumped it on the bed, explaining that this was only a down payment. The business interests wanted General Butler to assemble a volunteer army, take over the White House, and install himself as the fascist dictator of the United States, with the financial support of big business [see so-called Business Plot also known as the White House Putsch]. Some observers believe that if they had picked a different general, it may well have worked. Butler refused, and told the story.

In 1934, the business interests believed they would have to use military force to take over the government, dismantle democracy, and install a form of fascist government doing the will of the richest corporations and individuals in America, to the degradation or destruction of everyone else. This was the invasion of the body snatchers, coming closer than we can know to succeeding.

"Today, seventy years after the failed coup, a well-organized minority again threatens democracy. Corporate America's long and patient campaign to gain control of government over the last few decades, much quieter and ultimately more effective than the plotters' clumsy attempts, is now succeeding. Without bloodshed, armies, or fascist strongmen, and using dollars rather than bullets, corporations are now poised to win what the plotters so desperately wanted: freedom from democratic control." (p. 95)

And their reach is now worldwide. The World Trade Organization, which Clinton had created in 1993, has already sued or threatened to sue nations, including ours, for safety or environmental laws that cut into the corporation's profits. In 2005, their full power will come into effect, enabling them to prevent governments from enacting environmental or health regulations that would unduly impede their profits. (Bakan, p. 23)

NAFTA, another Clinton creation, was an investor protection plan enabling corporations to use cheap labor to force American wages down, break unions, and steal jobs from the U.S. society by the hundreds of thousands, "out-sourcing" them to cheap labor markets around the world in order to let rich corporations and individuals get richer by destroying the lives of American and other workers, gutting entire societies, then leaving their husk and blowing on to drain the life from another society, exactly like the invasion of the body snatchers.

There are many more details, and the picture is considerably worse, than I've had time to sketch for you. I don't think there are many books that all Americans should read, but I think this is one of them.

Is there hope? Can anything be done? Yes, but only if we remember that we created this Frankenstein monster, and it is only a "person" because we said so, and we can change our views and change our laws and change the way in which corporations are allowed to do business in this country and in the world. You can find lists of cities and counties that have revoked the charters of corporations, and refused to let them operate unless they are reconstituted to serve the good of society, the common good, rather than just the greed of a few men and women.

And New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer recently said that if "a corporation is convicted of repeated felonies that harm or endanger the lives of human beings or destroy our environment, the corporation should be put to death, its corporate existence ended, and its assets taken and sold at public auction." (p. 157) Eliot Spitzer isn't anti-government. He works for the government. The government isn't bad, it's a neutral but powerful tool that can be used to reclaim our nation and redefine the acceptable role of corporations in our world. We created corporations, we defined them, and we have the authority to redefine them, to insist that they may only operate in our society if they are organized to serve the greater good of the majority in our society, rather than simply the arrogant greed of a tiny percentage of us. They need to be taxed again, and taxed to pay a fair share of our economy's expenses, just as the tax rates on rich individuals needs to be raised. In 1960, the tax rate was 91% for the richest Americans, and corporations paid fair taxes. That is why our middle class was empowered after WWII, because the money was being distributed fairly. Today, we have socialism for the rich, and a brutal kind of capitalism for everyone else. We can stop it.

And now we're at war again, a war General Butler would recognize immediately. Haliburton, the company from which Vice President Cheney came back to Washington, has made billions of dollars from contracts they haven't even had to bid on. Other large US corporations that contributed to the presidential campaign have also made hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of their civilian truck drivers are being paid $80,000 a year to risk getting killed making profits for the stockholders.

Meanwhile, many of our American soldiers, as you may have read, are getting paid $16,000 a year, a pay so low that they are being given food stamps with their pay, and many of their families back home are on welfare. The soldiers are not fighting and dying for democracy, freedom, or anything noble at all. They are dying, like General Butler's soldiers died eighty years ago, as inconsequential drones whose only purpose in life is to help Haliburton, other major U.S. corporations and rich individuals make a lot of money. If they get killed, at least they're cheap to replace. There's cost-benefit analysis at work.

This is the story of the Frankenstein monster come full circle, to the point where it is succeeding in forcing its human creators to serve it, even if they become beggars or corpses by doing so. It is un-American. It is ungodly. It is inhuman and it is disgusting. And it is continuing. Only the American people are likely to stop it, and then only if they wake up, get informed, get angry, get organized and get going.

I can't write an ending for this sermon. It would have to be written in the real world, in real time, by real people. But there is something riding on our backs that doesn't belong there, and that does not have our best interests at heart. It will, if it is allowed to remain there, eat our soul and our society. Nor can it really stop itself. It has been programmed with a very simple program: it's just its nature.

the occupy movement busies itself in germany..,

Video - Occupy Reichstag thousands march in Germany.

why one-time needs to join OWS, not be swinging on them...,

Market Ticker | I told you so!

U.S. Bancorp was sued by an Oklahoma police pension fund over allegations investors in mortgage bonds were hurt by the bank failing to ensure that securities were backed by loans.

U.S. Bancorp knew mortgage loans underlying the bonds weren’t properly transferred to trusts and caused investors to suffer millions of dollars in losses, Oklahoma Police Pension and Retirement System said in a complaint filed yesterday in federal court in Manhattan.

The argument that US Bancorp will probably raise is that their duties were "merely ministerial" and that they're not responsible even if they knew or should have known that the securities were defective.

There has been limited success with this argument too.

The point I've been raising for more than four years stands: Public-service employee pensions are not going to be paid.  Not only were these people sold unicorn-style rates of return which cannot possibly be sustained the losses that were generated by all the scams and frauds are real and will be recognized -- and when they are, you're going to get a truly ugly surprise.

The police and firefighters should be marching with the Occupy folks, not opposing them.

cali police, prison guards, and firefighters in for a reality correction...,

VanityFair | It’s late afternoon when I meet Mayor Chuck Reed in his office at the top of the city-hall tower. The crowd below has just begun to chant. The public employees, as usual, are protesting him. Reed is so used to it that he hardly notices. He’s a former air-force officer and Vietnam-era veteran with an intellectual bent and the clipped manner of a midwestern farmer. He has a master’s degree from Princeton, a law degree from Stanford, and a lifelong interest in public policy. Still, he presents less as the mayor of a big city in California than as a hard-bitten, upstanding sheriff of a small town who doesn’t want any trouble. Elected to the city council in 2000, he became mayor six years later; in 2010 he was re-elected with 77 percent of the vote. He’s a Democrat, but at this point it doesn’t much matter which party he belongs to, or what his ideological leanings are, or for that matter how popular he is with the people of San Jose. He’s got a problem so big that it overwhelms ordinary politics: the city owes so much more money to its employees than it can afford to pay that it could cut its debts in half and still wind up broke. “I did a calculation of cost per public employee,” he says as we settle in. “We’re not as bad as Greece, I don’t think.”

The problem, he explains, pre-dates the most recent financial crisis. “Hell, I was here. I know how it started. It started in the 1990s with the Internet boom. We live near rich people, so we thought we were rich.” San Jose’s budget, like the budget of any city, turns on the pay of public-safety workers: the police and firefighters now eat 75 percent of all discretionary spending. The Internet boom created both great expectations for public employees and tax revenues to meet them. In its negotiations with unions the city was required to submit to binding arbitration, which works for police officers and firefighters just as it does for Major League Baseball players. Each side of any pay dispute makes its best offer, and a putatively neutral judge picks one of them. There is no meeting in the middle: the judge simply rules for one side or the other. Each side thus has an incentive to be reasonable, for the less reasonable they are, the less likely it is that the judge will favor their proposal. The problem with binding arbitration for police officers and firefighters, says Reed, is that the judges are not neutral. “They tend to be labor lawyers who favor the unions,” he says, “and so the city does anything it can to avoid the process.” And what politician wants to spat publicly with police officers and firefighters?

Over the past dec­ade the city of San Jose had repeatedly caved to the demands of its public-safety unions. In practice this meant that when the police or fire department of any neighboring city struck a better deal for itself, it became a fresh argument for improving the pay of San Jose police and fire. The effect was to make the sweetest deal cut by public-safety workers with any city in Northern California the starting point for the next round of negotiations for every other city. The departments also used each other to score debating points. For instance, back in 2002, the San Jose police union cut a three-year deal that raised police officers’ pay by 18 percent over the contract. Soon afterward, the San Jose firefighters cut a better deal for themselves, including a pay raise of more than 23 percent. The police felt robbed and complained mightily until the city council crafted a deal that handed them 5 percent more premium pay in exchange for training to fight terrorists. “We got famous for our anti-terrorist-training pay,” explains one city official. Eventually the anti-terrorist-training premium pay stopped; the police just kept the extra pay, with benefits. “Our police and firefighters will earn more in retirement than they did when they were working,” says Reed. “There used to be an argument that you have to give us money or we can’t afford to live in the city. Now the more you pay them the less likely they are to live in the city, because they can afford to leave. It’s staggering. When did we go from giving people sick leave to letting them accumulate it and cash it in for hundreds of thousands of dollars when they are done working? There’s a corruption here. It’s not just a financial corruption. It’s a corruption of the attitude of public service.”

When he was elected to the city council, Reed says, “I hadn’t even thought about pensions. I can’t say I said, ‘Here is my plan.’ I never thought about this stuff. It never came up.” It wasn’t until San Diego flirted with bankruptcy, in 2002, that he wondered about San Jose’s finances. He began to investigate the matter. “That’s when I realized there were big problems,” he says. “That’s when I started paying attention. That’s when I started asking questions: Could it happen here? It’s like the housing bubble and the Internet bubble. There were people around who were writing about it. It’s not that there aren’t people telling us that this is crazy. It’s that you refuse to believe that you are crazy.”

He hands me a chart. It shows that the city’s pension costs when he first became interested in the subject were projected to run $73 million a year. This year they would be $245 million: pension and health-care costs of retired workers now are more than half the budget. In three years’ time pension costs alone would come to $400 million, though “if you were to adjust for real life expectancy it is more like $650 million.” Legally obliged to meet these costs, the city can respond only by cutting elsewhere. As a result, San Jose, once run by 7,450 city workers, was now being run by 5,400 city workers. The city was back to staffing levels of 1988, when it had a quarter of a million fewer residents. The remaining workers had taken a 10 percent pay cut; yet even that was not enough to offset the increase in the city’s pension liability. The city had closed its libraries three days a week. It had cut back servicing its parks. It had refrained from opening a brand-new community center, built before the housing bust, because it couldn’t pay to staff the place. For the first time in history it had laid off police officers and firefighters.

By 2014, Reed had calculated, a city of a million people, the 10th-largest city in the United States, would be serviced by 1,600 public workers. “There is no way to run a city with that level of staffing,” he said. “You start to ask: What is a city? Why do we bother to live together? But that’s just the start.” The problem was going to grow worse until, as he put it, “you get to one.” A single employee to service the entire city, presumably with a focus on paying pensions. “I don’t know how far out you have to go until you get to one,” said Reed, “but it isn’t all that far.” At that point, if not before, the city would be nothing more than a vehicle to pay the retirement costs of its former workers. The only clear solution was if former city workers up and died, soon. But former city workers were, blessedly, living longer than ever.

This wasn’t a hypothetical scary situation, said Reed. “It’s a mathematical inevitability.” In spirit it reminded me of Bernard Madoff’s investment business. Anyone who looked at Madoff’s returns and understood them could see he was running a Ponzi scheme; only one person who had understood them both­ered to blow the whistle, and no one listened to him. (See No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller, by Harry Markopolos.)

In his negotiations with the unions, the mayor has gotten nowhere. “I understand the police and firefighters,” he says. “They think, We’re the most important, and everyone else goes [gets fired] first.” The police union recently suggested to the mayor that he close the libraries for the other four days. “We looked into that,” Reed says. “If you close the libraries an extra day you pay for 20 or 30 cops.” Adding 20 more police officers for a year wouldn’t solve anything. The cops who were spared this year would be axed next, in response to the soaring costs of the pensions of city workers who already had retired. On the other side of the inequality is the taxpayer of San Jose, who has no interest in paying more than he already does. “It’s not that we’re insolvent and can’t pay our bills,” says Reed. “It’s about willingness.”

I ask him what the chances are that, in this pinch, he could raise taxes. He holds up a thumb and index finger: zero. He’s recently coined a phrase, he says: “service-level insolvency.” Service-level insolvency means that the expensive community center that has been built and named cannot be opened. It means closing libraries three days a week. It isn’t financial bankruptcy; it’s cultural bankruptcy.

“How on earth did this happen?” I ask him.

“The only way I can explain it,” he says, “is that they got the money because it was there.” But he has another way to explain it, and in a moment he offers it up.

“I think we’ve suffered from a series of mass delusions,” he says.

how do you do I, see you've met my, culture of competency....,

This is not critisism. I am picking up to stimulate myself whilst I look at the screen. I think one needs to level the playing field, if this phrase is too ominous, I'll use another sentence: A level playing field, say a baseball field has laws that I would imagine 99% of the people understand. Unfortunately, getting anywhere near law that the whole playing field, and stadium an analogous statement to represent the world itself understand is shrouded in 'World domination is bad, they try to control us, they are aliens, they are reptiles, they set up 9/11, etc etc etc etc.'

Whilst the East are more likely to believe in Mohammed than the West according to my television, and the West are more likely to believe in Jesus according to my television, for one thing I cannot see the moral ground being comprensible nor integrable, so we are not in a good position to set the Utopia into action as doing so now would still attract anarchy from a distant land who doesn't understand the workings.

For one, I am sure of the Chinese culture so much that they wouldn't disrespect the elderly as we would say that our governments are gentocracy. I am quite certain younger people have as many ridiculous ideas as older people, I would just further the point and note that different social classes will have varying ideas on such a thing as justice, some will say throw the transgressors all in a room, lock them up and throw away the key, cushy jails, four wall jails.

To my more debatable points, I do think that global trade isn't all that great, it sounds great to me sometimes, that I can ship a good 6000 miles away, but I feel sometimes the good would be better suited to serving a local need, rather than across seas and through borders.

Two things I'd like to go on about next to finalise the outro are: Honchos and economic bafflement.

I need honchos in the police and in the army protecting the country. I have to wonder the need of a PM if we already have Minister of Education, foreign policy and so on leading the front in their field. Just a question... Is the PM just a face? What if there were good ministers but a PM sabotaging good work? OK I am not saying the world is massively wrong to me personally, but if we, you, me never face up to the issues that we have, we will never solve them. All I can really close with, is I have some issues about poverty in the UK, the seemingly low interest in self sufficient trade and entrepreneurial spirit. I cannot rely on the government to do everything, I must make wave of change myself too.

it paints the crosshairs on itself...,

NYTimes | WHEN the snowstorm hit a week ago Saturday, Evan Sidel was driving home from the supermarket, having stocked up on soup ingredients, thinking she and her two daughters would have a cozy evening in. But while she was unpacking the groceries, the power went out with an audible bang, said Ms. Sidel, who lives in a 100-year-old farmhouse in Wilton, Conn.

“You could literally hear the transformer exploding,” she said.

Then things went south fast, escalating perilously like the plot of an action movie, or “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” in previews. As Ms. Sidel pulled an old land-line telephone out of the closet, one birch tree crashed into the side of her house and another into her front door.

“I called a friend who said, ‘My generator has just kicked in, come on over.’ I got out through the garage, drove over the lawn to the street, and I stayed at my friend’s house until Wednesday,” she recounted. “My girls generator-hopped all over town all week, thrilled to have a different sleepover every night. But another friend of mine has four kids, and she was not so lucky. You can’t generator-hop with a family that size. I have nothing but gratitude for all my generator hosts.”

In another part of town, Christopher Peacock, the high-end kitchen man, was charging a few lights and the refrigerator, along with his family’s computers and cellphones, on a small gasoline-powered manual generator he set out in his driveway, snaking a web of extension cords from the living room.

But Mr. Peacock has well water, and with not enough power for the pump, his family grew not just colder but grubbier as the week progressed. On Wednesday, he; his wife, Jayne; and their 11-year-old son fled to Cape Cod, where they have a summer house.

“School is canceled, so why not?” he said. “It’s like a war zone here. The thing is, I am waiting for, and am in line for, a permanent generator installation. I’ve got one essentially on order, but they’re all back-ordered since Irene. I am definitely feeling some generator envy.”

Mr. Peacock was not alone in this feeling. The back story to the recent biblical weather was the Great Generator Divide. With hundreds of thousands of households without power last week — nearly 800,000 in Connecticut alone — who had a generator (and how big it was) was the second most urgent topic in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. Generator envy ran wide and deep as the staccato growl and smoky breath of portable generators defined the haves and the have-nots in many neighborhoods.

In Greenwich, Conn., some chilly residents shivered while their neighbors’ mega-units (the whole-house kind that kick on automatically and emit a sound hardly louder than a cat’s purr) powered not just furnaces, washers and dryers, garage doors and electric gates, “but the mood lighting on their trees,” Leslie McElwreath, a broker at Sotheby’s International Realty there, said wonderingly, impressed by her neighbor’s generator prowess (and his spotlighted trees).

Indeed, in a town like Greenwich, where the accouterments of the high-end houses are super-sized, generator power is now a selling point, as home theaters, heated driveways and wine grottos were in years past, said Robert Bland, the brokerage manager of the Sotheby’s office in Greenwich.

“You can’t even open your garage door or your electric gates if you don’t have a generator,” he said. “And with the weather so unpredictable, it’s become a required amenity.”

do shame and honour drive cooperation?

Royal Society | Can the threat of being shamed or the prospect of being honoured lead to greater cooperation? We test this hypothesis with anonymous six-player public goods experiments, an experimental paradigm used to investigate problems related to overusing common resources. We instructed the players that the two individuals who were least generous after 10 rounds would be exposed to the group. As the natural antithesis, we also test the effects of honour by revealing the identities of the two players who were most generous. The non-monetary, reputational effects induced by shame and honour each led to approximately 50 per cent higher donations to the public good when compared with the control, demonstrating that both shame and honour can drive cooperation and can help alleviate the tragedy of the commons.

how I stopped worrying and learned to love the OWS protests

The Colbert Report
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Rolling Stone | I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.

The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.

That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."

The protesters, chirped Supreme Reichskank Ann Coulter, needed three things: "showers, jobs and a point." Her colleague Charles Krauthammer went so far as to label the protesters hypocrites for having iPhones. OWS, he said, is "Starbucks-sipping, Levi's-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters [denouncing] corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over." Apparently, because Goldman and Citibank are corporations, no protester can ever consume a corporate product – not jeans, not cellphones and definitely not coffee – if he also wants to complain about tax money going to pay off some billionaire banker's bets against his own crappy mortgages.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of assholes like Krauthammer. Don't give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! We were all playing the Rorschach-test game with OWS, trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes, it was hard to see how skirmishing with cops in New York would help foreclosed-upon middle-class families in Jacksonville and San Diego.

What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.

We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.

If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.

That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.

OWS: meatworld instantiation of interweb communication styles?

Video - Bill Black addresses occupy LA.

WaPo | Ten years ago, the streets of Manhattan would be desolate on any given weekend, emptied of its bankers and lawyers. Not so, last Sunday.

Just outside the Fulton Street subway stop, the once-lonesome streets had a festival feel to them. Tourists packed the sidewalks, some headed to pay their respects at the newly opened 9/11 memorial. Others had a different destination in mind: Zuccotti Park, ground zero for Occupy Wall Street.

The urban campground is part sideshow, part adult playground, part protest and almost entirely an enigma to the media, the government and even to the protesters themselves. Just how this leaderless, unwieldy ship is steered — and where exactly it’s going — is something many of the protesters admit they don’t know.

After spending a day in the camp and watching the conversations of the protesters online, it struck me: The work-in-process aspect, while confusing to people outside the Occupy confines, doesn’t trouble those on the inside. In fact, some seem to embrace bewildering outsiders.

The “horizontal hierarchy,” as the group likes to call its leadership style, becomes more understandable when viewed through the prism of the Internet. The style of communication, decision-making and planning taking place in Zuccotti Park, and in Occupy protests across the country, mimics much of the way we have learned to talk to one another online. Although there have been signs of this altered communication style in earlier movements, such as the tea party, the Occupy protesters seem to have fully realized and implemented the lessons of a thousand message boards in a real-life community.

the thorium dream

Video - Motherboard's 30-minute film on the grassroots movement to make thorium nuclear power a reality.

Motherboard | If the year is 2011, you are likely watching the above video on a Mac OS computer or a Windows computer. Those two obvious possibilities represent only the tail end of many not-so-obvious choices, the ones that determine, for better or worse, the direction that technology takes. Some things win and other things lose; some operating systems succeed, building on previous ideas, and others end up in the trash can of history. Or, in the case of Windows (which Apple once claimed “stole” the idea from Mac OS), the Recycle Bin. The trash is where Xerox’s Alto operating system ended up after inspiring both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to develop their own graphical user interface, the front-end of computers that we now take for granted.

There’s much to take for granted in the evolution of technology, or at least in the way that technology appears to us today – refined, perfected, ever cutting-edge. In the case of energy, where innovation has never been more sorely wanted, what we take for granted are a set of circumstances that are both entrenched and terrible. Coal and oil and natural gas seem like the only sure-fire ways of providing base-load energy, if your only criteria is cheap electricity. Globally, if they don’t look paltry, our energy and resource supplies are becoming increasingly costly to extract and use. Demand has never been higher; ditto levels of CO2 and other terrible greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Nuclear energy is powerful, but it’s even worse than the others, given persistent waste storage issues (these really need to end) and the threat of proliferation.

So fixed do these set of circumstances sound that when the topic of thorium comes up at a party in a webpage comment string, it elicits either a yawning eyeroll or an eye’s glint of hope.

In our case, it was the latter. While the idea of building small, thorium-based nuclear reactors – thought to be dramatically safer, cheaper, cleaner and terror-proof than our current catalog of reactors – can be shooed away as fringe by some, the germ of the idea began in the U.S. government’s major atomic lab, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 1960s, only to be left by the wayside as the American nuclear industry plowed ahead with its development of the light water reactors and the uranium fuel cycle. It’s only in the past half-decade that the idea has picked up steam again on the Internet, thanks to enterprising enthusiasts who have chronicled the early experiments, distributed documents, and posted YouTube videos. But if thorium’s second life on the Internet has grown the flock of adherents exponentially, it’s also pulled in more than a few people whose nuclear expertise doesn’t extend far past Wikipedia, adding a sheen of hype to the proceedings.

Still, the idea has legs, if new research programs by India and China are any indication. The former has just announced a prototype thorium-based advanced heavy water reactor, while the latter is researching a liquid fuel reactor based on the 1960s design. In the U.S., the race is being advanced not by the government but by some of the central movers and shakers of the Internet movement.

One of them, Kirk Sorensen, left his engineering job to study nuclear physics and start a company devoted to building small, modular liquid fluoride thorium reactors. The goal now may be to build some for the military, a tactic that would circumvent many of the challenges of building commercial reactors in the U.S. We met Kirk at the Thorium Energy Alliance summit in Washington, as well as an Army colonel focused on energy, and the head of the alliance, the thorium advocate and industrial engineer John Kutsch. We also interviewed Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at the Atlantic and author of Powering the Dream, a history of green technology evangelism, David Biello, associate editor at Scientific American, and Phillip Musegaas, the director of Riverkeeper’s Hudson River Program, which keeps careful tabs on the Indian Point Power Station, one of the country’s many aging nuclear plants, located about 30 miles from New York City. The nuclear physicist Alvin Weinberg, who led the first thorium reactor experiment, makes a cameo as well. Fist tap Dale.

that sweet "I TOLD YOU SO" moment has arrived...,

WaPo | Ralph Izzo, the chief executive of the New Jersey’s Public Service Electric and Gas Co., isn’t your average utility executive.

At Columbia University, he studied mechanical engineering as an undergraduate and later earned a doctorate in applied physics. At the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, he did numerical simulations of fusion experiments and published or presented 35 papers on something called “magnetohydrodynamic modeling.”

So it’s not surprising he would say that he “fell in love” in 1998 with the gadgetry commonly known as “smart grid” technology — as Izzo puts it, “customer communication technology, real-time price signals and fantastic sensory capability.”

But 13 years later, Izzo says, “I have only now come to realize that what I really wish my customers would do would be to use more caulking.”

The smart grid has been one of the most talked-about issues in energy policy. Experts — and manufacturers of equipment and software — have promoted the idea that “smart meters” could enable utilities to flip household appliances on and off to ease the load of summertime electricity demand and that the devices would help homeowners manage their refrigerators, lights and air conditioning, even controlling them remotely with cellphones, laptops or tablets. Smart grid technology is also seen as critical for integrating renewable energy sources onto grids designed to carry power one way only, from big clunky generating stations to the home.

All this depends on software, networking devices and smart meters, tens of millions of which have been installed across the country. If the grid is modern society’s central nervous system, then the smart meter could become the brains of the operation.

Yet many utilities have come to the conclusion Izzo has: You can install smart meters in homes, but the homes probably still have dumb appliances and homeowners who are too busy to be bothered. At least for now, simple measures such as caulking might save more energy.

“Somehow all of us collectively decided to skip the low-hanging fruit and go for the top of the tree,” he said at a recent energy conference sponsored by The Washington Post.

link confirmed between earthquakes and hydraulic fracturing

Video - My Water's on Fire Tonight

OilPrice | On 5 November an earthquake measuring 5.6 rattled Oklahoma and was felt as far away as Illinois. Until two years ago Oklahoma typically had about 50 earthquakes a year, but in 2010, 1,047 quakes shook the state.

Why?

In Lincoln County, where most of this past weekend's seismic incidents were centered, there are 181 injection wells, according to Matt Skinner, an official from the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the agency which oversees oil and gas production in the state.

Cause and effect?

The practice of injecting water into deep rock formations causes earthquakes, both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Geological Survey have concluded.

The U.S. natural gas industry pumps a mixture of water and assorted chemicals deep underground to shatter sediment layers containing natural gas, a process called hydraulic fracturing, known more informally as “fracking.” While environmental groups have primarily focused on fracking’s capacity to pollute underground water, a more ominous byproduct emerges from U.S. government studies – that forcing fluids under high pressure deep underground produces increased regional seismic activity.

As the U.S. natural gas industry mounts an unprecedented and expensive advertising campaign to convince the public that such practices are environmentally benign, U.S. government agencies have determined otherwise.

According to the U.S. Army’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal website, the RMA drilled a deep well for disposing of the site’s liquid waste after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “concluded that this procedure is effective and protective of the environment.” According to the RMA, “The Rocky Mountain Arsenal deep injection well was constructed in 1961, and was drilled to a depth of 12,045 feet” and 165 million gallons of Basin F liquid waste, consisting of “very salty water that includes some metals, chlorides, wastewater and toxic organics” was injected into the well during 1962-1966.

Why was the process halted? “The Army discontinued use of the well in February 1966 because of the possibility that the fluid injection was “triggering earthquakes in the area,” according to the RMA. In 1990, the “Earthquake Hazard Associated with Deep Well Injection--A Report to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency” study of RMA events by Craig Nicholson, and R.I. Wesson stated simply, “Injection had been discontinued at the site in the previous year once the link between the fluid injection and the earlier series of earthquakes was established.”

Twenty-five years later, “possibility” and ‘established” changed in the Environmental Protection Agency’s July 2001 87 page study, “Technical Program Overview: Underground Injection Control Regulations EPA 816-r-02-025,” which reported, “In 1967, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) determined that a deep, hazardous waste disposal well at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal was causing significant seismic events in the vicinity of Denver, Colorado.”

There is a significant divergence between “possibility,” “established” and “was causing,” and the most recent report was a decade ago. Much hydraulic fracturing to liberate shale oil gas in the Marcellus shale has occurred since.

According to the USGS website, under the undated heading, “Can we cause earthquakes? Is there any way to prevent earthquakes?” the agency notes, “Earthquakes induced by human activity have been documented in a few locations in the United States, Japan, and Canada.