On Friday, I posted some background on the host of NPR's Planet Money suggesting that he was more evil than just your typical Wall Street stooge. The problem with such assessments is that it is VERY difficult to distinguish between someone spouting flawed, but deeply-held beliefs, and someone who has been corrupted by bankster money. After all, both would say most of the same things.
First up, we have Pam Martens who has worked on Wall Street and is still impressed by how "brilliant" everyone is. From that point of view, it is almost impossible not to conclude that these people who are saying really absurd things in the press must be selling out to evil.
Matt Taibbi, on the other hand, is NOT so impressed by the "brilliance" of the denizens of Wall Street. He thinks they are narrow-minded provincials with a very pinched worldview that have been given the keys to dad's sports car (the economy) and don't really know how to drive it. Stupid, reckless, rich kids!
I tend to find both arguments have merit, though because I tend to think of banksters as these pathetic losers that have turned to crime because it's the only "skills" they have, my basic sympathies are with Taibbi (whose writing I just love!)
But really, I think the ultimate guilty parties are the economic theorists who have concocted a belief system that is plausible to those who think that the economy can best be described by following the money trail. Start with the supposition that markets are all-wise and there is literally no end to the mischief that follows from that—up to and including the destruction of the biosphere and the demolition of the real economy. Give dullards the power to manipulate and sabotage the real economy by their rigging of the numbers and you have utterly foreclosed on the possibility of solving difficult problems.
So I guess I believe that if you fill someone's head with enough bullshit, they will quite naturally turn out like a Davidson, or Sorkin, or Bartiromo. So the power rests with the teachers of bullshit—although as paid propagandists for this BS, financial reporters are very important in the widespread inculcation of a truly evil and destructive belief system. They are far from innocent but in the end, they are just the "carriers" of the BS.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
The casual sadism of the Leisure Classes
Because tools and skills are the two most important assets a Producer has, the process of removing a functioning factory—that has usually taken many years to get running smoothly—is a direct assault on the wealth created by the hard work and ingenuity of the folks who built it. But the Predators have discovered that most of things that Producers do are actually a lot harder to get right than they would appear. So in an especially ugly twist of the knife, the strategy is now to get the Producers being robbed to give up their hard-won skills and knowhow too. Not since the Romans forced crucifixion victims to carry their own crosses has there been anything so relentlessly sadistic.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Friday, August 10, 2012
Even NPR
One of the phenomenon that has fascinated me for most of my adult life is how this country could be convinced to dismantle the regulatory apparatus that had been put in place (mostly in the 1930s) to prevent another Great Depression. Part of this process was easy—the folks who actually remembered the Depression and the arguments in favor of putting strict controls on Wall Street grew old and senile and eventually died. The hard part facing the deregulators was building a case for a set of ideas that had been utterly discredited by the Depression. JK Galbraith cracked, "Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried."
In 1977, my favorite wisecracking economist wrote a book and starred in a fifteen-part series on Public Television called The Age of Uncertainty. As an offshoot of Moral Philosophy, there is the need in economics to control the narrative. So by 1980, the "intellectual" pushback against the economics taught by Galbraith had begun when PBS put Milton Friedman on the air with his crackpot ideas called Free to Choose. I pretty much stopped watching PBS by 1982 when it was clear that some decision had been reached at some management level whereby every economic report was going to have a neoliberal, Chicago-School bias.
So I have missed the total takeover of the economic narrative on the various public broadcasting venues. But as the following demonstrates, one of the mainstays of NPR economic reporting is actually quite a bit worse than just a seriously confused Chicago hack explaining his arrant nonsense for the Nice Polite Republicans who like tote bags. This guy is evil. Read for yourself and mentally do the math for how many people have had their lives screwed up by policies championed by the host of Planet Money.
In 1977, my favorite wisecracking economist wrote a book and starred in a fifteen-part series on Public Television called The Age of Uncertainty. As an offshoot of Moral Philosophy, there is the need in economics to control the narrative. So by 1980, the "intellectual" pushback against the economics taught by Galbraith had begun when PBS put Milton Friedman on the air with his crackpot ideas called Free to Choose. I pretty much stopped watching PBS by 1982 when it was clear that some decision had been reached at some management level whereby every economic report was going to have a neoliberal, Chicago-School bias.
So I have missed the total takeover of the economic narrative on the various public broadcasting venues. But as the following demonstrates, one of the mainstays of NPR economic reporting is actually quite a bit worse than just a seriously confused Chicago hack explaining his arrant nonsense for the Nice Polite Republicans who like tote bags. This guy is evil. Read for yourself and mentally do the math for how many people have had their lives screwed up by policies championed by the host of Planet Money.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
The crop is lost...what now?
The truth is, I have absolutely no idea what happens when global food stocks run low. I am 63 years old and during my entire life, the biggest problem facing USA agriculture has been, How do we get rid of all that food? I have seen corn piled up in huge mountains next to grain elevators because there was no place to put it. But shortages?—there is literally no precedent in American history. This is a country that has really only had to deal with excess. And most people cannot imagine any other possibility.
One of the reasons many folks in USA cannot believe Peak Oil, even though the concept is widely accepted by the professionals who actually find the stuff, is because they believe in the American Dream of permanent abundance. If there is a shortage of oil, it is only because bad guys are doing something to disrupt the supply. I have "liberal" friends who believe that oil companies have bought up the technology for magic engines that get 200 mpg so this technology will not destroy the markets for oil, or that oil companies have capped thousands of good producing wells within our borders to reduce supply. And when it comes to climate change—a phenomenon that is so widespread most people have to move less than ten feet to encounter more evidence—they simply cannot believe something as big as the sky can be changed by their lifestyles.
One of the reasons many folks in USA cannot believe Peak Oil, even though the concept is widely accepted by the professionals who actually find the stuff, is because they believe in the American Dream of permanent abundance. If there is a shortage of oil, it is only because bad guys are doing something to disrupt the supply. I have "liberal" friends who believe that oil companies have bought up the technology for magic engines that get 200 mpg so this technology will not destroy the markets for oil, or that oil companies have capped thousands of good producing wells within our borders to reduce supply. And when it comes to climate change—a phenomenon that is so widespread most people have to move less than ten feet to encounter more evidence—they simply cannot believe something as big as the sky can be changed by their lifestyles.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
The complexity of energy
The electricity markets are sufficiently complex that they have long been subject to intense regulation. The reasons are twofold: 1) the infrastructure necessary to electrify a community is both very expensive and in the end, there only needs to be one of them. The whole set of arguments about "natural monopolies" gave us regulated utilities. 2) Energy is a qualitatively different product than most on the market. Once someone has invested in equipment that needs electrical power, not having it is often literally a matter of life and death (think: a surgical suite). Therefore demand is not very elastic.
These two reasons just scream for regulations. Deregulating the market for electricity has spawned such utter disasters as Enron. Until we understand again that whatever benefits may accrue as a result of "free market" ideology, and that these ideas clearly do not apply to electrical generation and distribution, we are doomed to brazen manipulation by petty would-be white-collar thieves. JP Morgan Chase might just be the sort of place that incubates such Predators.
These two reasons just scream for regulations. Deregulating the market for electricity has spawned such utter disasters as Enron. Until we understand again that whatever benefits may accrue as a result of "free market" ideology, and that these ideas clearly do not apply to electrical generation and distribution, we are doomed to brazen manipulation by petty would-be white-collar thieves. JP Morgan Chase might just be the sort of place that incubates such Predators.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Machiavelli and the survival of republics
A tip o' the hat to Avedon for pointing to this posting by a Renaissance scholar who has completed a year of living in Florence, explaining the historical context and significance of Machiavelli. The core theme is that Machiavelli sought above all else to protect and preserve the city of Florence, as a human triumph of art and architecture, but more importantly, as the admittedly imperfect embodiment of the idea of self government.
I found the article particularly interesting, and wanted to share it, because Gordon S. Wood, in his monumental study of the thinking and philosophy that underlie the American Revolution, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, identified Machiavelli as one of the important sources of Revolutionary thinking:
The education of Gore Vidal
I am not exactly certain just why I have so enjoyed the writings of Gore Vidal over the years. But what I do know, and a PBS special from 2002 that recently resurfaced has made so abundantly clear, is that my life and Vidal's were about as different as is humanly possible. I watched it last night.
Examples abound. Vidal was born to the USA's ruling class. He was the pet grandchild of a blind Senator and so found himself reading the documents of government to him on the Senate floor. He probably knew more about the inner workings of government by 10 than I would know in a lifetime.
Then there was the matter of Vidal being so absurdly handsome that he was probably the best looking person in the room for most of his life. Beautiful people get away with a LOT and so comments that would have destroyed the careers of lesser folks were tolerated and even loved when written by Gore. We can be reasonably certain that Vidal would never have been a regular on Johnny Carson if he had been an ugly man.
In the end, his great intellectual contribution to life in USA was that he understood how its Leisure Classes operated. From the founding fathers to the wretched empire builders who hatched the invasion of Iraq, Gore wrote about them as amusingly absurd. He had a home in Italy for much of his life where he would compare the American Empire's depravities with those of Rome's. And so his life's work could be summed up by his strange insistence on telling the truth about some of the greatest liars and hypocrites to have ever walked the earth. No small contribution, that.
But the USA of the builders completely escaped his notice. He did not write about Whitney or Edison or Ford. His father was a senior aviation bureaucrat for FDR but young Gore never became the least interested in how aerospace became one of the dominant industries in the land. And so now, when the great existential threats to the nation and the world such as climate change are those only the builders can truly understand, his stunning insights can be reduced to yet another observation that the Leisure Classes really are as useless as they aspire to be.
As someone who has grown to detest the Leisure Classes over the years, I guess I loved reading Vidal because he provided me with so much ammunition in my understanding of just how those folks preserve their archaic traits. And how impervious they are to the influences of science and rational thought. We know the Enlightenment happened. We also know that it was wasted on the current crop of scientifically illiterate politicians who can watch their country burn to a crisp and still deny climate change. When Vidal unfavorably compared our current manifestations of the Leisure Classes to the emperors like Caligula, he gave us insights that were actually quite impossible to ignore. Because while it is possible to dismiss the Leisure Classes as just more useless protoplasm, Vidal gave us chapter and verse for why this is probably a good idea.
Examples abound. Vidal was born to the USA's ruling class. He was the pet grandchild of a blind Senator and so found himself reading the documents of government to him on the Senate floor. He probably knew more about the inner workings of government by 10 than I would know in a lifetime.
Then there was the matter of Vidal being so absurdly handsome that he was probably the best looking person in the room for most of his life. Beautiful people get away with a LOT and so comments that would have destroyed the careers of lesser folks were tolerated and even loved when written by Gore. We can be reasonably certain that Vidal would never have been a regular on Johnny Carson if he had been an ugly man.
In the end, his great intellectual contribution to life in USA was that he understood how its Leisure Classes operated. From the founding fathers to the wretched empire builders who hatched the invasion of Iraq, Gore wrote about them as amusingly absurd. He had a home in Italy for much of his life where he would compare the American Empire's depravities with those of Rome's. And so his life's work could be summed up by his strange insistence on telling the truth about some of the greatest liars and hypocrites to have ever walked the earth. No small contribution, that.
But the USA of the builders completely escaped his notice. He did not write about Whitney or Edison or Ford. His father was a senior aviation bureaucrat for FDR but young Gore never became the least interested in how aerospace became one of the dominant industries in the land. And so now, when the great existential threats to the nation and the world such as climate change are those only the builders can truly understand, his stunning insights can be reduced to yet another observation that the Leisure Classes really are as useless as they aspire to be.
As someone who has grown to detest the Leisure Classes over the years, I guess I loved reading Vidal because he provided me with so much ammunition in my understanding of just how those folks preserve their archaic traits. And how impervious they are to the influences of science and rational thought. We know the Enlightenment happened. We also know that it was wasted on the current crop of scientifically illiterate politicians who can watch their country burn to a crisp and still deny climate change. When Vidal unfavorably compared our current manifestations of the Leisure Classes to the emperors like Caligula, he gave us insights that were actually quite impossible to ignore. Because while it is possible to dismiss the Leisure Classes as just more useless protoplasm, Vidal gave us chapter and verse for why this is probably a good idea.
Monday, August 6, 2012
Mars rover Curiosity landed safely
The Mars rover Curiosity landed safely on Mars early this morning. The rover weighs over one ton and is larger than a full-size American automobile (notice the two people standing at the left side of the photo, below). Congratulations are due to the people at NASA, JPL, and elsewhere who conceived, designed and executed this impressive mission.
OIL in the USA
Ms. Tverberg has decided to look at the fundamental dilemma of our time. The price of fuels go up and causes the economy to contract. The sinking economy drags down fuel prices so there is a modest recovery. And so the prices go up again. Rinse and repeat.
The ONLY way to get out of this trap is to figure out how to use less fuels—efficiency, sustainable substitutions, etc. Otherwise, there is a ceiling to economic activity. Combine a fixed-size global economy with a growing population and there are a LOT of people shut out of any chance for a meaningful life. The ONLY way for the economy to grow continuously is for there to a major advances in securing energy that does not come from the ground. Very difficult and utterly necessary.
The ONLY way to get out of this trap is to figure out how to use less fuels—efficiency, sustainable substitutions, etc. Otherwise, there is a ceiling to economic activity. Combine a fixed-size global economy with a growing population and there are a LOT of people shut out of any chance for a meaningful life. The ONLY way for the economy to grow continuously is for there to a major advances in securing energy that does not come from the ground. Very difficult and utterly necessary.
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Proving the obvious
The central skill of science is precise observation. Unfortunately, observation tells us what is—not necessarily what will happen in the future. Which is why when computer modeling became possible, everyone jumped on that bandwagon. Like all forms of modeling, it's a lot harder than it looks—and it looks damn hard. So, not surprisingly, mathematical models of pretty much anything have not lived up to the high expectations we all had back when we still carted around the punch cards used to communicate with computers. And in some disciplines such as economics, the reliance on models has been catastrophic.
I might suggest that reliance on mathematical models in the climate change "debates" has been almost as disastrous as with economics—even though climate modeling uses more relevant data and employs more hard science disciplines like chemistry and fluid dynamics. And it did not need to happen. The basic climate change argument is fifth-grade simple—all our fires have led to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. CO2 traps solar energy more efficiently than nitrogen and oxygen. Therefore, our atmosphere now has more energy. This means our hot days will be hotter, our windy days windier, our droughts drier, etc. This is what we know—all other predictions are educated guesses.
But we have gone past the point where predictions are necessary. Now we can go simply with observations. Some day, maybe soon, our ability to predict the effects of climate change will get a lot better. Why not?—the ability to predict weather events has been transformed in my lifetime from a barometer, a thermometer, and watching the sky to the other night when I watched a thunderstorm march through my county on Nexrad streamed to an iPad. Of course, weather forecasting got better through better methods of observation (satellite images, doppler radar, etc.) and NOT through modeling—which is still in its infancy.
So I am delighted to see that James Hansen has decided that climate change is by now so freaking obvious to anyone who looks out his front door, that we can better describe the phenomenon using historical records and statistical analysis than by arguing which flawed math model is more valid.
I might suggest that reliance on mathematical models in the climate change "debates" has been almost as disastrous as with economics—even though climate modeling uses more relevant data and employs more hard science disciplines like chemistry and fluid dynamics. And it did not need to happen. The basic climate change argument is fifth-grade simple—all our fires have led to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. CO2 traps solar energy more efficiently than nitrogen and oxygen. Therefore, our atmosphere now has more energy. This means our hot days will be hotter, our windy days windier, our droughts drier, etc. This is what we know—all other predictions are educated guesses.
But we have gone past the point where predictions are necessary. Now we can go simply with observations. Some day, maybe soon, our ability to predict the effects of climate change will get a lot better. Why not?—the ability to predict weather events has been transformed in my lifetime from a barometer, a thermometer, and watching the sky to the other night when I watched a thunderstorm march through my county on Nexrad streamed to an iPad. Of course, weather forecasting got better through better methods of observation (satellite images, doppler radar, etc.) and NOT through modeling—which is still in its infancy.
So I am delighted to see that James Hansen has decided that climate change is by now so freaking obvious to anyone who looks out his front door, that we can better describe the phenomenon using historical records and statistical analysis than by arguing which flawed math model is more valid.
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Banksters' PR campaign is not working....
Hat tip to Washington's Blog, which last week highlighted former British prime minister Tony Blair whining:
We must not start thinking that society will be better off “if we hang 20 bankers at the end of the street” ….Yeah, just 20 is not nearly enough. 20,000? Now, that would make a dent in the problem.
Wind Energy News - July 2012
Study shows renewable-energy potential in the U.S.
The U.S. has 481,800 terawatt-hours of technical renewable-energy generation potential and 212,224 gigawatts of technical renewable-energy capacity potential, according to a report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The West and central Great Plains have the most potential for land-based wind power, while the Southeast has the least. The Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico have lower offshore-wind potential than the Pacific Coast, but their relatively shallow continental shelves mean they have a bigger development potential, the report showed. Greentech Media (8/1)
The U.S. has 481,800 terawatt-hours of technical renewable-energy generation potential and 212,224 gigawatts of technical renewable-energy capacity potential, according to a report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The West and central Great Plains have the most potential for land-based wind power, while the Southeast has the least. The Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico have lower offshore-wind potential than the Pacific Coast, but their relatively shallow continental shelves mean they have a bigger development potential, the report showed. Greentech Media (8/1)
Friday, August 3, 2012
Question for the weekend
Will this summer's drought and the resulting shortage of basic foodstuffs be a problem serious enough so that even politicians and journalists understand that it is no longer possible to ignore the problems of climate change?
I say "no" but this is because I believe it is always bad to bet against stupid in USA.
I say "no" but this is because I believe it is always bad to bet against stupid in USA.
Corn belt drought—another week without rain
We got rain again last night here just south of St. Paul. If this keeps up, the farmers around here will be suffering survivor's guilt. Because those Iowa corn crops we saw last week that were "just going to make it" if they got rain soon, didn't get the rain. As you can see by the map below the area we visited last week is now listed as D3 Extreme.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Another great tribute to Gore Vidal
In what passed for idealistic thinking in 1968 while the Cold War lies were thick on the ground, we were assured that if an asteroid were hurtling toward us, the US and USSR could put aside their differences to cope with the great external threat. Unfortunately, even that glimmer of hope has proven absurd because it is quite clear we HAVE such a threat in climate change and yet they are ratcheting up the old Cold War rhetoric again.
Gore Vidal wrote about this absurd mentality while it was being "invented"—one of the many reason Vidal was an important writer.
Gore Vidal wrote about this absurd mentality while it was being "invented"—one of the many reason Vidal was an important writer.
Meta-thinking on political economy
Once in awhile it is good to have big thoughts on economics. So without further ado, a small collection starting with the idea that if $21 Trillion are parked in offshore tax haven, it is almost assured that money is NOT financing any worthwhile activity in the real economy.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
The death of a great one
Gore Vidal has been pretty popular in our house over the years. My S.O. read Lincoln several years ago and then proceeded to read the rest of his historical fiction. I am not into fiction so much but I loved his political commentary. He had two things going for him.
Here is an obit from France 24 on his passing.
- In a USA where the overwhelming majority see the world as America and those other places, Vidal understood that there other places on earth where educated people of good taste actually prefer to live. Many of his best pieces were written in Italy.
- He was an excellent historian who had been given an insider's view of the folks who actually get to run things. Like the preacher's kid who discovers his old man isn't any more connected to God than anyone else, Vidal grew up knowing that powerful politicians were usually corrupt, not very bright, and easily distracted by the pleasures of the flesh. And from that perspective, he assumed the historical figures he wrote about were much the same.
Here is an obit from France 24 on his passing.
Serious science fights back
I have probably been excessively passionate in my defense of science over the years. Growing up in a home that trafficked in a belief system set me up to become very fond of an intellectual system that didn't ask you to believe anything except your own eyes. Science wasn't built on reputations—it was built on experimentation. I liked that a LOT.
Because science is so powerful and useful, there have been MANY charlatans over the years that have claimed their snake oil was scientific. And so for many of those who didn't turn into hopeless science junkies, the question of what is scientific and what is not isn't very clear. The success of the climate change denialists in USA is a vivid reminder of the dangers of not getting this basic point straight.
I am a bit too old to have become a fan of Bill Nye. But from what I have seen of his work, he seems like just the sort of person you would want to teach science to your 10-year-old. And because he has been on TV for years, he has some interesting insights into how the media works. And he is correct about the utter lack of media coverage over such a life-threatening subject as climate change.
Because science is so powerful and useful, there have been MANY charlatans over the years that have claimed their snake oil was scientific. And so for many of those who didn't turn into hopeless science junkies, the question of what is scientific and what is not isn't very clear. The success of the climate change denialists in USA is a vivid reminder of the dangers of not getting this basic point straight.
I am a bit too old to have become a fan of Bill Nye. But from what I have seen of his work, he seems like just the sort of person you would want to teach science to your 10-year-old. And because he has been on TV for years, he has some interesting insights into how the media works. And he is correct about the utter lack of media coverage over such a life-threatening subject as climate change.
The corn belt drought—the news gets worse
Just in case anyone points out that in 2010 the Russians essentially lost their wheat crop and it barely caused a ripple in the world food supply, it should be noted that this year, the disaster in the USA corn belt is being joined by major crop losses in Russia AND Australia.
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