The "left" hates rationality too

Growing up around religious people means that I got to know a bunch of folks who took inordinate pride in believing the unbelievable.  It doesn't matter much that most of these beliefs are easy to refute—these people want you to believe anyway and can get quite graphic in their descriptions of the eternal damnations for those who cannot or will not believe the unbelievable.

My refuge from this stream of bullshit and guilt was science.  What I loved most about science is that no one actually made you believe anything and even better, had proven methods for finding a right answer—and ways of then finding an even righter answer.  It was enough so I could ignore those well-meaning folks who would tell me that if did not actually believe in Noah's flood, I was going to go to Hell!  Not surprisingly, I get pretty protective about science and empiricism.  It got me through a rocky childhood.

Unfortunately, science is harder than it looks.  Most people don't have the time, inclination, skills, or resources to view their world scientifically so they look for explanations that are short and descriptive.  I have many educated and "progressive" friends who have rejected scientific rationality as thoroughly any of the religious extremists of my childhood.

I have a difficult time hiding my disappointment.  I was so sure that if I could escape the Jesus-wants-you-to-be-an-idiot crowd, I would be safe from the crazy people.  I was so wrong. (sigh)

Harden the infrastructure!

So a brand-new subway system that cost $527 million to build is going to cost $500 to repair due to Hurricane Sandy's storm surge.  When climate change denial reaches into half-billion dollar projects, we are talking major rejection of reality.  What is even more interesting, whatever changes they must make to build a station that can occasionally be flooded (or whatever they decide to do) it will probably triple the cost.

Just remember, expensive infrastructure projects are good for the real economy.

Argonne and the Volt

For 35 years, we have been told by fools that governments, and their employees, cannot do anything of importance.  Well, once upon a time, the guys at Argonne did things like invent the critical parts of nuclear power—its existence was the result of the first chain reaction.  Whatever one thinks of either Cold War Mutually Assured Destruction or nuclear power, it cannot be argued they weren't important.

Now they have turned some of their considerable intellectual horsepower on the subject of storage batteries.  One of the happy results is the Chevy Volt—from all accounts a perfectly wonderful automotive idea, beautifully executed.  The car guys have given it every important award they have.  Now whether you believe that it's good to turn weapons-grade researchers loose on a problem that touches both climate change and Peak Oil, or you simply want a demonstration that public institutions and public service are more than speech-making and "raising awareness," this story will make you happy.

Naturally, the excitement over the Volt drives the right wing nuts.  And there are real problems.  USA may still have Argonne but the batteries for the Volt can only be made in South Korea—rechargeable batteries, another difficult and important thing we stopped making in USA.  Hey, our high-priced economists told us manufacturing wasn't important anymore and otherwise mostly sane politicians believed them.

Doha grinds to an end

This is it.  Expensive bureaucrats toting expensive Powerpoint presentations fly to the capital of an oil emirate and what is accomplished?  An extension of Kyoto.  You know, the 1997 agreement the Clinton-Gore administration didn't even bother to submit to congress for approval.

Considering the urgent nature of the climate-change problem, the folks who go to these gatherings seem remarkably casual about getting anything done.  Of course, being good members of the Leisure Classes, they believe that actually solving problems is something they cannot be bothered with—it's why god invented the serving classes, after all.  You know, it's a damn shame the highest virtue of the Leisure Classes is uselessness.

When in doubt, just make shit up

So USA State Department climate envoy Todd Stern goes to Doha.  And since the record he must defend is indefensible, he just lies.  And while lying over at State is apparently as routine as breathing, lying about science or climate matters is a pathetic waste of time.  Instrumentation will show up falsehoods very quickly—which means Stern's lies are of the-dog-ate-my-homework variety.

You gotta wonder what poor career move Stern made at State to get such an  embarrassing assignment.  Perhaps it was something simple like he isn't one of the folks with family money.  Maybe he even believes what he says.  All I know is that I am furious that my country is represented by such a buffoon.  Just once before I die, I would like to see USA out in front of some important issue instead of wasting everyone's time—time we clearly do not have.

Peace Prize scandal

They are really going to do it.  Today.  The Norwegians really are going to give the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union.  This is the same country that twice rejected, by large margins, a chance to actually join the E.U.  Of course, all the "respectable" Norwegians were in favor of joining the E.U. so this crazy award is probably a way for that social stratum to reassure the rest of Europe that Norway would be a member were it not for its great unwashed.

As someone who was raised around pacifists, I am both stunned and appalled by this seemingly absurd decision.  Yes I understand that folks can quite easily be stampeded into supporting a war.  But absent some serious lying by some persons or individuals, most folks are fairly peaceable at heart.  Unfortunately, the E.U. is one of those institutions that makes the world a more dangerous place.  It might claim that its war-organizing in simply another way to juice the economies of it member nations.  But even though War Keynesianism is a known economic stimulus, it isn't very effective and is a serious drain on projects that really do need doing.

It's finally snowing

And oh, that first one is so beautiful!  Looking out my front door.



Yes we are coming up on holidays that promise the light will return.  Of course, the astronomical promise is always fulfilled.  But man, I sure could use a little return of the Enlightenment.  Intellectually and spiritually, we really have sunk back into another dark age.  I mean, just the other day, a US Senator claimed climate change was a hoax because it wasn't in the Bible.  In 2012.  I am NOT making this up.

Ellen Brown lectures on Public Banking in the land of Adam Smith

We who seek change in how our culture operates must admire Ms. Brown.  On one hand, she gets up every morning convinced she has discovered one of the best ideas in economics and has decided to use her considerable energy to promote it.  On the other hand, she has to see that in USA, only one state has managed to get a state-owned bank up and running effectively—and that state is out in the middle of freaking nowhere.  It takes a real leap of faith to come to the conclusion that you have seen the future while walking the streets of Bismarck, North Dakota.

Yet here she is, spreading her good news in Scotland—the country that gave us Adam Smith, after all.

DECEMBER 9, 2012
From North Dakota to Scotland

Exploring the Public Bank Option

by ELLEN BROWN

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and the Bank of Scotland have been pillars of Scotland’s economy and culture for over three centuries. So when the RBS was nationalized by the London-based UK government following the 2008 banking crisis, and the Bank of Scotland was acquired by the London-based Lloyds Bank, it came as a shock to the Scots. They no longer owned their oldest and most venerable banks.

Another surprise turn of events was the triumph of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 2011 Scottish parliamentary election. Scotland is still part of the United Kingdom, but it has had its own parliament since 1999, similar to U.S. states. The SNP has rallied around the call for independence from the UK since its founding in 1934, but it was a minority party until the 2011 victory, which gave it an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament.

Scottish independence is now on the table. A bill has been introduced to the Scottish Parliament with the intention of holding a referendum on the issue in 2014.

Arguments in favor of independence include that it will allow the Scottish people to make decisions for Scotland themselves, on such contentious issues as having nuclear weapons in their seas and being part of NATO. They can also directly access the profits from the North Sea oil off Scotland’s coast.

Arguments against independence include that Scotland’s levels of public spending (which are higher than in the rest of the UK) would be difficult to sustain without raising taxes. North Sea oil revenues will eventually decline.

One way budgetary problems might be relieved would be for Scotland to have its own publicly-owned bank, one that served the interests of the Scottish people. True economic sovereignty means having control over the national currency, credit and debt.

The Public Bank Option

It was in that context that I was asked to give a presentation on public banking at RSA Scotland (the Royal Society of Arts) in Edinburgh on November 22nd. Among other attendees were a special adviser and a civil servant from the Scottish government. The presentation was followed by one by public sector consultant Ralph Leishman, Director 4-consulting, who made the public bank option concrete with specific proposals fitting the Scottish context. He suggested that the Scottish Investment Bank (SIB) be licensed as a depository bank, on the model of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. Lively debate followed. more

Brown goes on to describe how North Dakota's Public Bank works in practice.  I have lived in North Dakota.  It requires actual courage to get out of the car because conditions are so harsh.  People who choose to live in such conditions while going to work at a bank that pays civil-service wages are culturally quite unique.  But Brown believes the numbers these tough westerners use to prove the soundness of their thinking.

Of course, maybe she is missing something obvious like...perhaps the reason only North Dakota has their Public Bank is that only there were conditions so harsh that the theological bullshit that keeps bankers in power becomes so ridiculously trivial compared the hazards of just getting to work.  Since those folks cannot afford to fight both the climatic reality of the high prairie and Predatory banking simultaneously, they choose to create a replacement for Predatory banking so they could survive.

Anyway, the Scotsman (which looks like a real newspaper / website with paid writers) dispatches a guy to cover Ms. Brown's presentation.  This is what he wrote.

Grain prices and animal farming

The problems for any farmers raising animals for markets continue.  They have been running in the red since August when drought worries caused grain prices to spike.

I don't know about the rest of the country, but the drought marches on here in Minnesota.  A couple of guys I know went out last week to take video footage of the installation of some deep-soil moisture sensors.  The probe went down through the topsoil looking for some indication of trapped water.  At 6.5' (2 meters) the probe hits the clay layer without triggering any sign of soil moisture.  This finding is especially worrisome for two reasons.  1) Even when things are dry, water is usually found in less than a foot.  2) There are damn few places on earth where topsoil is two METERS thick.

This means our current drought is affecting some of the richest and most fertile land known to humanity.  It's supposed to snow tonight.  Any moisture from the sky is welcome but if we get a real snow cover, it means the time to recharge the soil moisture has passed for the year.  Water that comes after the ground has frozen usually winds up just running off in the spring.

Saturday toons 08 DEC 12

Doha—Friday's update

It is no surprise that USA is the skunk at Doha.  It was inevitable.  In most of the world, the science supporting climate change predictions are beyond rational debate.  As a young German told me last summer when were discussing denialism, "Of course, we have climate change deniers in Germany.  They just don't get close to any important jobs."

There are countries at Doha who are literally 25 years ahead of the public positions of USA.  They stopped debating whether climate change was happening and would cause serious damage a generation ago.  They have already changed their building methods, made serious adjustments to their electrical generation mix, and have invested in industries that promise a low-carbon future.  There is a HUGE cognitive distance between questioning the reality of climate change and installing the systems that actually reduce the CO2 output of a society.

Poor damn Germans keep hoping that some single event will awaken the USA to the seriousness of the problem.  The disappointment in this not happening permeates the article below.  Personally, I have pretty much given up on the disaster scenario of changing things in USA.  I saw humans last summer who lived through the biggest drought ever in parts of the Corn Belt ignore the evidence because they literally do not know what to look for.

Transparency International's 2012 corruption index is out

There are dozens of metrics out there that measure the success (or lack thereof) of a given society—GNP, trade balance, quality of life measurements, tolerance for ethnic and sexual minorities, etc.  But for me, the single most significant measurement is "How pervasive is honesty?"  Trust is the glue that holds societies together.  Honest societies are cheaper to govern, have better relationships with their neighbors, but most importantly, have much more sophisticated and prosperous economies.  Actually measuring honesty is the hard part so Transparency International efforts here are to be applauded.

Looking at the top-ranked countries show that it's pretty obvious that if corruption (or its lack) isn't the best measurement of a successful social order, it will do until something demonstrates that it is better.

Union Depot to re-open

$243 million seems like a LOT of money for a light rail station.  But it includes a quite beautiful rehabbed building from the 1920s.  Even so, considering that the Minnesota Twin Cities had one of the most comprehensive light rail systems in the nation until the late 1940s, it seems especially wasteful to spend a quarter billion to get back a tiny fraction of it.

It's stories like this that make me believe that building a sustainable society will cost at LEAST $100 trillion.

Norway to Japan through the Arctic Ocean

Still at the level of a demonstration project, Gazprom just sailed an LNG tanker from Hammerfest Norway to Japan—with a little help from three nuclear-powered icebreakers.

Back in early September, I covered a story of some Swedish sailors who managed to sail a 31 ft yacht through the N.W. Passage.  If someone can make it with a pleasure craft—could a commercial vessel be far behind?  LNG tankers are not exactly the sort of ship I would have tried first but one made it—with a little help from the best icebreakers ever made.

Climate change opened the N.W. Passage.  It is probably appropriate that the first commercial cargo through the Passage should be liquified methane—one of the more robust greenhouse gasses we know of.

Take Five—Dave Brubeck RIP

I actually got to perform with Dave Brubeck.  It was 1970 and he had written a "Jazz Oratorio" called "A Light in the Wilderness."  I was in The University of Minnesota Choir and he was coming to Minneapolis to perform one of the first examples of this work.  We worked VERY hard on our parts but to be perfectly honest, it was pretty weird to count out 42 measures while waiting to sing ten, etc.  Finally, Brubeck and company show up for dress rehearsal.  Those long pauses were for when he and his band did their thing.  Oh My!

Concert night arrives.  Our choir dressed in tuxes and black evening gowns for concerts so my fellow singers looked spectacular.  About a half hour before we went on, Brubeck stops by to thank us for all our hard work—and it WAS hard.  Because of the complexities of Brubeck's time signatures, his music was more difficult to sing than Bach or Mozart.  My female fellow singers damn near swooned around Brubeck—he was an amazingly handsome guy to go with his obvious musical genius.

We went out and swatted one out of the park.  The audience went nuts—the standing ovation lasted around 20 minutes.  Now I am sure that 98% of that ovation was for Brubeck and crew, but it was great of fun to stand on stage and listen to the waves of sound wash down from a crowd of 5000.  I have had NO problem understanding why folks go through the suffering it takes to be a good musician after that night.

On necessary debt restructuring

The MAIN reason the world needs to restructure the insane amounts of existing debt is that they are crippling the possibility for doing anything about the serious problems we face.  I mean, just TRY to imagine Greece or Ireland trying to do anything significant about their CO2 emissions.  They cannot even afford basic services now because so much of their public income stream has been channeled to debt service.

There have been a few countries that have actually restructured their debts.  Argentina is perhaps the finest example.  Once they redid their debts, they have been a model nation making on-time debt payments.  But this was not enough for Paul Singer of Elliot Management—a vulture fund.

Singer has a long nasty history but is probably most notorious for what he did to Delphi Automotive during the GM "bailout."

The facts are simple. Mitt Romney's blind-trust invested more than a million dollars in a "vulture fund" managed by Paul Singer, a Romney adviser. In 2008, while Delphi Auto Parts was in bankruptcy, Singer's fund bought, for twenty cents on the dollar, Delphi bonds -- lots of them. With Delphi under Singer's control, he threatened to shut it down unless the taxpayer bailed it out -- holding General Motors and Chrysler hostage, because if Delphi shut down, the companies would lack steering columns and other essential parts. After getting his way, and a $7.3 billion bailout from the public, Singer then closed all but five U.S. plants to move these operations and 25,000 jobs to China.

So this Predator is looking around for other targets of opportunity.  He discovers there are Argentine Bonds that were not covered under the various restructurings and since they are now non-performing loans, they are now about as worthless as Confederate Bonds and can be bought for pennies on the dollar.

So now that Argentina is mostly back on her feet and is making regular payments on her restructured debt, Singer figured he may as well try to collect on his defaulted bonds.  He finds a crooked judge to sign off on an order demanding that Argentina pay Singer 100 cents on the dollar.  The crooked judge even allowed Singer to seize an Argentine tall ship used by their navy for basic training.  In other words, Singer is willing to anger a nation and the rest of the honest investors to collect a "debt" he is clearly not owed.

Here's the big problem.  If white collar crooks like Paul Singer are allowed to throw wrenches into something as basic as a simple debt restructuring, how will it ever be possible to reform the economy so it can address problems like climate change?  The answer is—it cannot.  So right now, we are stuck with the situation where the planet cannot save itself because some greedhead who already has more money that he can meaningfully spend wants to collect money that should be going into better things.

The global economy cannot do its job when every good idea can be sabotaged by thieves.

Go Argentina!  I know you have your share of problems these days but on this issue, you are clearly on the side of the angels.

A very bad year for greenhouse gasses

Say what you will about Doha, it has been an occasion for the publication of new scientific findings.  The findings are much more grim than we had ever imagined.

The only two of the top-10 polluting countries to lower their CO2 output are Germany (natch) and ta-daaaa, USA.  Since there have been no programs that are anywhere near big enough to trigger a CO2 decline in USA, the only explanation is economic.  Turns out there really were enough frivolous trips that eliminating some of them actually caused an emissions decline.  Works for me—it's been a LONG time since I have been stuck in traffic.  Of course, all the emissions reductions of USA and Germany were easily overwhelmed by increases from China and India.

Making the solar society work

It took me most of my life to learn life's most profound truth—NOTHING is as easy as it looks.  So please take the following article with a large grain of salt.  Because even though the Danes have made their conversion to renewable energy sources LOOK easy, they have many cultural advantages that made their conversion even possible.

• Rural Danes tend to be technologically literate.  This saves a lot of steps when selling new technology to the people who will have to run it.  My favorite quote from below "...the most famous wind turbine in Denmark, indeed at one time famous all over the world, the 2MW turbine built in 1978 at the Tvind school. While Germany was building the Grosse Wind-Anlage Growian, and NASA with Boeing and GE the Mod series, and the UK the Orkney group of turbines - all embarrassing and expensive failures - volunteers in Denmark built the Tvind machine..."  This isn't an Amish barn-raising, folks!
• Viking societies have been organizing small-scale yet complex projects since at least the 800s—not a bunch to sit around waiting for permission to do something.
• Going to sea tends to select for folks who take cause-and-effect seriously.  Notice these Danes decided to act based on the 1973-74 oil embargo.  Some folks understand problems right away—other need to be beat about the head with a 2 x 4.  At sea, folks who let problems fester tend to wind up dead.

Thanks to KF for turning me on to this story.

LOWER the retirement age

One of the original goals of Social Security was to give older Americans a reason to retire so their job would go to someone younger.  Even by the 1930s, there were more people who needed work than there were jobs.  So if you could give older workers a reason to get out of the job market...

Flash forward to 2012.  In much of the world, youth unemployment is around 25%—and that is probably being generous.  And a major cause of these absurd levels of unemployment is that between looted retirement plans and public policy changes, more older workers are hanging on to their jobs.

This is crazy.  People should work while they are young.  Youth unemployment destroys their futures.  They are furious for good reasons.  The boomers had their chance—now it is time for them to get out of the way and see if some new energy can help.

Of course, my argument is that there is PLENTY of work that needs doing—more than enough to keep several generations very busy.  Getting serious about hardening the infrastructure alone should result in full employment.  Get the money out of the hands of the banksters and put it in the hands of the problem-solvers, and many of the BIG economic problems could vanish like the morning dew.  Or would if we stop listening to the crowd who believes that the goal in life is to feel groovy.

Time for new energy!

Sticking the Producing Classes with the bills

One of my blessings in life is that I have been privileged to know members of the Producer Royalty.  Generalizing about those who successfully invent or organize difficult projects is hazardous task but it can be done.  Topping the list of their similarities is that at some point, all of them have come to the realization that the general public not only does not appreciate what they do, they will never even understand it.  So the Producers go to work every day knowing that their work makes existence possible for folks who don't want to even think about them.  This they must learn to accept.

But paying the bills for Predator stupidity is a bridge too far.  Was it the fault of a design engineer at General Motors that a gang of crooks decided to play video games with home mortgages?  Of course not!  But even though the current existential crises faced by the automobile industry is their history's most severe because transportation must provide alternatives to petroleum power, the bean-counters look at what a design engineer costs them and hope they can build the next generation of vehicles without their Producer Royalty.  And so the Predators wind up posing an existential threat to the livelihood of the very sort of person we need if we are to survive.

I have a friend who went to Harvard and is easily convinced that the ruling classes know what they are doing and have erected an elaborate institutional apparatus to make this plunder possible.  These guys didn't get into Harvard by accident, he argues.  The are extremely clever, shrewd, and cunning.

My response is that they have NO idea what they are doing.  They steal because they are stupid fucks who have no other skills.  And in their theft, they wreck things they don't even think about because they don't begin to understand them.  So they can organize a theft.  How exactly does that solve a problem like climate change?  It doesn't.  So even IF we cannot send all these crooks to jail, the very least we can do is stop listening when they pontificate about the real economy.

Saturday toons 1 DEC 12