Wake Up Call

Just finished a brilliant article by Fred Branfman that really makes one think...

"The Briefer: You are being sent to the United States of America, Earth’s most powerful nation, at a time of great economic, geopolitical and biospheric crisis.

In Is Humanity Suicidal? E. O. Wilson, one of Earth’s leading biologists, wrote: "People place themselves first, family second, tribe third, and the rest of the world a distant fourth. During all but the last few millennia of the two million years of [their] existence ... a premium was placed on close attention to the near future … So today the human mind still works comfortably backward and forward only a few years." This is a precise description of how America and the world have reached its present crisis. Powerful elites have preyed upon the poor and gullible to destroy national economies and even their own companies, enriching themselves at the expense of others. Now, only a dramatic transformation without precedent in human experience—changing from modes of competition to cooperation, consumption to investment and short- to long-term thinking—can save the species."

Time to make a change on how we do business on planet earth because time's running out.

"So is the heating of the planet the only problem?

No. Also of particular concern is the state of the Earth’s oceans. The moderate Economist magazine’s survey of the world’s oceans concluded on December 31, 2008: "Fish are now almost everywhere in decline. Coral reefs have suffered most. The sea is hideously polluted. Ice melts. Each of these changes is a catastrophe. Together they make for something much worse. Moreover, they are happening alarmingly fast. Many are irreversible." Wisely, it stated that "the mass extinction, however remote, that should be concentrating minds is that of mankind."

Read the complete piece as if our future depends on it because, in indirect fashion, it does.

Single Payer

As a systems guy who knows a little bit about communications, the web and databases, it never ceases to amaze me when politicians' unenlightened self interest enables greed and incompetence to be injected into, in this case, Universal Health Care, an environment the vast majority of Americans, including me, want as a single payer entity. According to Ralph Nader, there's a damn good reason why...

"Among the giant taboos afflicting Congress these days is the proposal to create a single payer health insurance system (often called full Medicare for everyone).

How can this be? Don’t the elected politicians represent the people? Don't they always have their finger to the wind?

Well, single payer is only supported by a majority of the American people, physicians and nurses. They like the idea of public funding and private delivery. They like the free choice of doctors and hospitals that many are now denied by the HMOs.

There are also great administrative efficiencies when single payer displaces the health insurance industry and its claims-denying, benefit-restricting, bureaucratically-heavy profiteering. According to leading researchers in this area, Dr. David Himmelstein and Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, single payer will save $350 billion annually.

Yet, on Capitol Hill and at the White House there are no meetings, briefings, hearings, and consultations about kinds of health care reforms that reform the basic price inflation, indifference to prevention, and discrimination by health insurers.

There is no place at the table for single payer advocates in the view of the Congressional leaders who set the agenda and muzzle dissenters.

Last month at a breakfast meeting with reporters, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) responded to a question about health care with these revealing and exasperating words: "Over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it's not going to be a single payer."

Thus spake Speaker Pelosi, the Representative from Aetna? Never mind that 75 members of her party have signed onto H.R. 676-the Conyers single payer legislation. Never mind that in her San Francisco district, probably three out of four people want single payer. And never mind that over 20,000 people die every year, according to the Institute of Medicine, because they cannot afford health insurance."

Simply unreal and it gets even better.

Baucus (Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee) crafted a hearing to kick off the health care debate in the Senate yesterday where 15 witnesses would be at the table to discuss health care reform.

The insurance industry was at the table.

The Business Roundtable was at the table.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was at the table.

Blue Cross Blue Shield was at the table.

The Heritage Foundation was at the table.

And corporate liberals like Andy Stern, Ron Pollack, and AARP were at the table.

But not one person who stood for what the majority of Americans, doctors, nurses, and health economists want - single payer - was at the table.

Not one.

"As Senator Baucus started his introductory remarks, something happened. One by one, eight people in the audience, most of them physicians and lawyers, stood up to politely but insistently protest the absence of a single payer presentation.

One by one, the police came, took them out of the hearing room, arrested and handcuffed them. The charge was "disruption of Congress"--a misdemeanor.

Amerika anyone?

Click here to see civil "disobedience" at it's best, something we are going to see a lot more of in the weeks and months ahead as the economy continues it's downward slide while the connected and powerful take the "Let them eat cake." attitude toward us great unwashed.

I wonder if Obama and company remember what happened to Marie Antoinette even though she probably did not say that famous quote. I do.

Wolfram Alpha

A new era in computing may start on May 18.

"Mr. Wolfram’s service does not search through Web pages, and it will not help with movie times or camera shopping. Instead it computes the answers to queries using enormous collections of data the company has amassed. It can quickly spit out facts like the average body mass index of a 40-year-old male, whether the Eiffel Tower is taller than Seattle’s Space Needle, and whether it is high tide in Miami right now.

WolframAlpha, which is expected to be available to the public at wolframalpha.com in the next week, is not a finished product. It is an early working version of a project that has been years in the making and will continue to evolve over years, if not decades. As such, there is much it cannot answer now."

Answering questions is something long sought after for internet trolls like yours truly. If Wolfram Alpha lives up to the hype, the answer to my prayers will have been answered. :)

The Credit Card Bomb

Next up: The Credit Card Bomb

"But if unemployment breaches 10 percent, as many economists predict, the rate of uncollectible balances at some banks could far exceed that level. At American Express and Capital One Financial, around 20 percent of the credit card balances are expected to go bad over this year and next, according to stress test results. At Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, about 23 percent of card loans are expected to sour.

Even the government’s grim projections may vastly understate the size of the banks’ credit card troubles. According to estimates by Oliver Wyman, a management consulting firm, card losses at the nation’s biggest banks could reach $141.5 billion by 2010 if the regulators’ loss rate was applied to their entire credit card business. It could top $186 billion for the entire credit card industry."

Addendum: We haven't even discussed the looming specter of commercial property defaults, the dirty secret the banks are holding onto to limit losses on their books, something that must eventually be reported if they are to be considered as viable business entities in this rapidly contracting economy.

Fox Guarding the Hen House

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House told industry officials on Friday that it is leaning toward recommending that the Federal Reserve become the supercop for "too big to fail" companies capable of causing another financial meltdown.

After substituting Bernanke for Paulson, one immediately understands who owns this country.

Any Questions?

To understand what kind of entity the Fed is, click here.

Knowing how this country manages its money is of paramount importance but there's a problem, 99.9% of the people in America don't know and for good reason, We were never taught.

Where ignorance is bliss, / ‘Tis folly to be wise.’” - Thomas Gray:

Addendum:

This week, the government released the results of the stress tests performed on the nation’s 19 largest banks. According to the report, Bank of America’s $34 billion hole was the largest. The Wall Street Journal reports, however, that the Fed Reserve initially estimated Bank of America’s figure at more than $50 billion. Over the last few weeks, a number of banks successfully lobbied the Fed to make the stress tests less stressful:

The Federal Reserve significantly scaled back the size of the capital hole facing some of the nation’s biggest banks shortly before concluding its stress tests, following two weeks of intense bargaining.

In addition, according to bank and government officials, the Fed used a different measurement of bank-capital levels than analysts and investors had been expecting, resulting in much smaller capital deficits."

Fed Head, Ben Bernankie

So much for Change, eh?

Just had to link to Slate with their piece called Fed Dread.

to whit...

A quasi-independent, public-private body, the New York Fed is the first among equals of the 12 regional Fed branches. Unlike the Washington Federal Reserve Board of Governors, or the other regional fed branches, the N.Y. Fed is active in the markets virtually every day, changing the critical interest rates that determine the liquidity of the markets and the profitability of banks. And, like the other regional branches, it has boundless power to examine, at will, the books of virtually any banking institution and require that wide-ranging actions be taken—from raising capital to stopping lending—to ensure the stability and soundness of the bank. Over the past year, the New York Fed has been responsible for committing trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to resuscitate the coffers of the banks it oversees.

And this from Robert Scheer & Truthdig...

When N.Y. Fed Chairman Stephen Friedman bought stock in the company that he once headed, and where he still serves as a director, he was already in violation of Federal Reserve policy and was hoping for a waiver to permit him to hold his existing multi-million-dollar stock stash and to remain on the Goldman board. The waiver was requested last October by Timothy Geithner, then the president of the N.Y. Fed and now Treasury secretary. Yet, without having received that waiver, Friedman went ahead in December and purchased 37,300 additional shares. With shares he added in January, after the waiver was granted, he ended up with 98,600 shares in Goldman Sachs, worth a total of $13,330,720 at the close of trading on Tuesday.

Friedman was in violation of the Fed’s policy because, thanks in part to the urging of Geithner and the N.Y. Fed, Goldman Sachs was allowed to become a bank holding company, making it eligible for government bailout funds (an option that Geithner had denied to Goldman rival Lehman Brothers)

Guess who ran this beast prior to Obama becoming president.

Same as it ever was - Talking Heads

Get2Human

We all know the horrors of voice mail and the "options" one must endure in order to find a "human" to deal with the situation at hand. Now there's hope. Click on da Vinci's iconic image to go to Get2Human.com. It seems they have a list of "secret numbers" by which one can actually find a member of homo sapiens able to help you escape from digital hell. :)

America's Fastest Growing Minority

"So what explains the impressive increase among those willing to identify as atheist or agnostic? For those who think that books and ideas simply don’t matter, it is dramatic tribute to the success of the “new atheist” writers—including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. To paraphrase the title of Dennett’s book, their goal has been to “break the spell” of religion—and they have evidently helped more Americans “achieve” that goal."

It's good to know I'm not so alone anymore. :)
IMHO, 15% is a pretty good percentage don't you think?

The Ultimate Twitterer

Marcel Proust, author of Swann's Way and Remembrance of Things Past, was the ultimate stream-of-consciousness writer. When reading Proust, one gets the sense of how important the immediate sensation of being alive at any given moment was the essence of Proust's reality.
"For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V."

Needless to say, reading Proust is intense. I still remember Swann's Way as a novel filled with summer light, something akin to Edwin Hopper's paintings but much warmer in tone and oh so precious in attitude.

This quote below says it all, especially the part with James Joyce, the other great SOC writer, meeting Proust for the first and only time in 1922.

"Throughout his life Proust suffered from asthma. He was looked after by his Jewish mother, to whom the writer was – neurotically – attached. After the death of his father in 1903 and mother in 1905, Proust withdrew gradually from high-society circles. Until 1919 Proust lived in a soundproof flat, at the 102 Boulevard Haussmann, where he devoted himself to writing and introspection. When James Joyce met Proust at a midnight supper in the fashionable Majestic Hotel in May 1922, the two great innovative writers did not speak more than a few words with each other. "Of course the situation was impossible," Joyce recalled later. "Proust's day was just beginning. Mine was at an end."

Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is sublime.

CoolIris

One must have fun while learning new tech. :)

The 2nd Law

One of the best books I have ever read is Into the Cool by Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan. The best passage in their book, IMHO, is "Nature Abhors Gradients", a statement that stays in my head, foreverreminding me nature is both modular and economical in terms of how reality works. Take the most energy efficient way possible to delineate anything (flows) because the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics rules. Because of this, the linkage between living and physical systems becomes common sense, something now codified as science fact in Constructural Theory whereby "Thermodynamics becomes a science of systems with configuration."

While looking at the Constructural site, the connect to D'arcy Thomson's seminal On Growth & Form resonates as Thompson explains not only how biological forms take shape but also how their shapes relate to design and mathematics.

To better understand why D'arcy Thomson's 1917 masterpiece never ceases to amaze me, just look at the transformation piece of a fish using shear mapping, a concept that shows, in elegant fashion, how structural changes in an evolving species can happen in logically consistent ways.

I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds. - Dizzy Gillespie

To get another take on Constructural Theory, click here.

Had to put a clip of Dizzy (& Bird) in this piece as Dizzy was simply awesome as composer, musician and really cool guy.