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In the Clearing Stands a Boxer

May 13th, 2008

– One of the Blogs I follow on a daily basis is Only in it for the Gold by Michael Tobias. He’s put up a new piece that I particularly liked and I’ve copied here in its entirety. After you’ve read it, please follow the link to the original so you can read the follow on comments which are equally interesting. Thanks, Michael.

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From “Unequal Democracy” by Larry M. Bartels (emphasis added):

American beliefs about inequality are profoundly political in their origins and implications. Well-informed conservatives and liberals differ markedly, not only in their normative assessments of increasing inequality, as one might expect, but also in their perceptions of the causes, extent, and consequences of inequality. This is not simply a matter of people with different values drawing different conclusions from a set of agreed-upon facts. Analysts of public opinion in the realm of inequality–as in many other realms–would do well to recognize that the facts themselves are very much subject to ideological dispute. For their part, political actors in the realm of inequality–as in many other realms–would do well to recognize that careful logical arguments running from factual premises to policy conclusions are unlikely to persuade people who are ideologically motivated to distort or deny the facts. While it is certainly true, as Jennifer Hoschschild has argued, that “Where You Stand Depends on What You See,” it is equally true that what you see depends in significant part on where you stand.

Or more succinctly from “The Boxer” by Paul Simon:

I have squandered my resistance
for a pocketful of mumbles,
such are promises,
all lies and jest,
still a man hears what he wants to hear
and disregards the rest.

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– To the original and its comments… ➡

Posted in General | No Comments »

Who Will Tell the People?

May 13th, 2008

– Thomas Friedman is one of my favorites and here’s an excellent piece he’s penned for the New York Times. I highly recommend it.

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Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I’ve had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.

They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil.

Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: “You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.”

More… ➡

– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

– Research thanks to L.A.Â

Tags: Thomas L. Friedman
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Survey shows US honey bee deaths increased over last year

May 13th, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A survey of bee health released Tuesday revealed a grim picture, with 36.1 percent of the nation’s commercially managed hives lost since last year.

Last year’s survey commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America found losses of about 32 percent.

As beekeepers travel with their hives this spring to pollinate crops around the country, it’s clear the insects are buckling under the weight of new diseases, pesticide drift and old enemies like the parasitic varroa mite, said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the group.

This is the second year the association has measured colony deaths across the country. This means there aren’t enough numbers to show a trend, but clearly bees are dying at unsustainable levels and the situation is not improving, said vanEngelsdorp, also a bee expert with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

“For two years in a row, we’ve sustained a substantial loss,” he said. “That’s an astonishing number. Imagine if one out of every three cows, or one out of every three chickens, were dying. That would raise a lot of alarm.”

The survey included 327 operators who account for 19 percent of the country’s approximately 2.44 million commercially managed bee hives. The data is being prepared for submission to a journal.

About 29 percent of the deaths were due to Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious disease that causes adult bees to abandon their hives. Beekeepers who saw CCD in their hives were much more likely to have major losses than those who didn’t.

“What’s frightening about CCD is that it’s not predictable or understood,” vanEngelsdorp said.

More… ➡

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, CrashBlogging, Extinctions, Food Shortages, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Unexplained Mass Die-Off Hits German Hives

May 13th, 2008

Bees in the German state of Baden-WÃ¼rttemburg are dying by the hundreds of thousands. In some places more than half of hives have perished. Government officials say the causes are unclear — but beekeepers are blaming new pesticides.

Â In Germany’s bucolic Baden-WÃ¼rttemburg region, there is a curious silence this week. All up and down the Rhine river, farm fields usually buzzing with bees are quiet. Beginning late last week, helpless beekeepers could only watch as their hives were hit by an unprecedented die-off. Many say one of Germany’s biggest chemical companies is to blame.

In some parts of the region, hundreds of bees per hive have been dying each day. “It’s an absolute bee emergency,” Manfred Hederer, president of the German Professional Beekeeper’s Association, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “Fifty to 60 percent of the bees have died on average, and some beekeepers have lost all their hives.”

The crisis hit its peak last weekend. Beekeepers from Germany’s Baden-WÃ¼rttemburg reported hives full of thousands of dead bees. The worst-hit region, according to state officials, was along the upper Rhine river between the towns of Rastatt and Lorrach. The Rhine valley is one of Germany’s prime agricultural regions.

Regional officials spent the week testing bees, pollen, honey and plant materials to look for the die-off’s causes. The Julius KÃ¼hn Institute in Braunschweig, a federal research institute dealing with agricultural issues, set up a special hotline for beekeepers to send in dead bees for analysis.

More… ➡

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, CrashBlogging, Extinctions, Food Shortages, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Growing Deficits Threaten Pensions

May 11th, 2008

– One aspect of the Perfect Storm Hypothesis that is particularly hard to convey is the collateral damages part of it. A problem in one area is not typically an isolated event. In a complex world like ours, everything basically connects to everything else at some level.

– The currently unfolding economic situation in the U.S. economy is one such. It may have started with the Sub-Prime melt-down but other dominoes are still continuing to fall as the consequences roll through the system. The melt-down, itself, was made worse by other preexisting problems. The deep U.S. trade deficit, the shifting of manufacturing and technical jobs offshore, the huge amounts being spent on the Iraq War. All of these have served to ‘weaken the patient’ in advance of the Sub Prime debacle.

– The article I’m reporting on here, “Growing Deficits Threaten Pensions” is one of the follow-on consequences of a weakening economy. And, if these pensions fail to deliver what all the folks who’ve spent an entire working career assuming they would deliver, then what? Then what?

– People at the end of their career suddenly finding out that they have no retirement? People who’ve done their half of the pension bargain at every step of the way – only to find out that the other side isn’t going to do theirs?

– I’ll make a prediction here… When it turns out that pensions funds fail and everyone starts asking who is responsible, there’s going to be a lot of talking heads, lawyers and fund managers explaining how it wasn’t their fault and, in the end, no one will be responsible. But, just watch and see if any of those ‘explainers’ got caught up in the damage – or did they walk away richer than they began?

– Sorry to be such a cynic but in an age of failing pension funds for the ‘little people’ and golden handshakes for the fund managers, I am a bit soured on it all.

– There was a piece of ‘humor’ the other way on one of the financial Blogs I follow. It was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek word problem for those aspiring for a financial career. It went like this:

In a given year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rises 8.3 percent, the NASDAQ rises 7.6 percent, and the S&P 500 rises 7.9 percent. If, in that same period, you manage a $29 billion hedge fund that loses 11.6 percent, how large a year-end bonus are you entitled to? (Round to the nearest $10 million.)

– Funny, eh?

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Accounting Tactics Conceal a Crisis For Public Workers

The funds that pay pension and health benefits to police officers, teachers and millions of other public employees across the country are facing a shortfall that could soon run into trillions of dollars.

But the accounting techniques used by state and local governments to balance their pension books disguise the extent of the crisis facing these retirees and the taxpayers who may ultimately be called on to pay the freight, according to a growing number of leading financial analysts.

State governments alone have reported they are already confronting a deficit of at least $750 billion to cover the cost of the retirement benefits they have promised. But that figure likely underestimates the actual shortfall because of the range of methods they use to make their calculations, including practices that have been barred in the private sector for decades.

More… ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Nuclear’s CO2 cost ‘will climb’

May 9th, 2008

– I’m not a fan of nuclear power. Until we work out a good way to deal with the waste, we are just robbing Peter to pay Paul and pushing the whole mess caused by our irresponsibility onto future generations who will get to deal with it.

– In spite of that, I’ve invested some money in PKN an ETF which focuses on the nuclear industry. While I don’t like nuclear, I think it is pretty inevitable that we (mankind) will be going down that road because the oil’s running out and we don’t seem to be smart enough to accept that fact and implement viable alternatives now – while we still can.

So, in the end, we will leave ourselves no choice and nuclear power will be massively built out. What smart monkeys we are.

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The case for nuclear power as a low carbon energy source to replace fossil fuels has been challenged in a new report by Australian academics.

It suggests greenhouse emissions from the mining of uranium – on which nuclear power relies – are on the rise.

Availability of high-grade uranium ore is set to decline with time, it says, making the fuel less environmentally friendly and more costly to extract.

The findings appear in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

A significant proportion of greenhouse emissions from nuclear power stem from the fuel supply stage, which includes uranium mining, milling, enrichment and fuel manufacturing.

Others sources of carbon include construction of the plant – including the manufacturing of steel and concrete materials – and decomissioning.

The authors based their analysis on historical records, contemporary financial and technical reports, and analyses of CO2 emissions.

Experts say it is the first such report to draw together such detailed information on the environmental costs incurred at this point in the nuclear energy chain.

More… ➡

Ocean Dead Zones Growing; May Be Linked to Warming

May 9th, 2008

The world’s hypoxic zones—swaths of ocean too oxygen-deprived to support fish and other marine organisms—are rapidly expanding as sea temperatures rise, a new study suggests.

Researchers have tracked a decline in dissolved oxygen levels since 1960 in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, which has extended the size of these undersea deserts and intensified their effects.

The oxygen level in these zones “is below the critical oxygen level for fish and other large marine animals,” said team leader Lothar Stramma, of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel in Germany.

The team constructed a time line of oxygen concentrations at depths of between 985 and 2,295 feet (300 and 700 meters) using oxygen data records going back 50 years. The results fit predictions of the effects of global warming.

The oxygen declines were found to be most marked in tropical Atlantic regions, the study team reports in the latest issue of the journal Science.

In the east Atlantic, for example, the low-oxygen layer was found to have increased in height by 85 percent, growing from 1,215 to 2,265 feet (370 to 690 meters).

“The vertical area covered by some of these layers has almost doubled in the Atlantic,” Stramma said.

Conditions have also become more suffocating for life within these hypoxic waters, he said.

“In general this low-oxygen zone had widened, and in some areas the oxygen value also got lower.”

More… ➡

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Ocean Dead Zones, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Fertilizer use and ocean dead zones

May 9th, 2008

Nice chart in the New York Times showing the use of fertilizer around the world and where the world’s oceanic dead zones are located.

Go here to see the chart: ➡

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, CrashBlogging, Ocean Dead Zones, Pollution, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

080508 – Facing up

May 8th, 2008

This is a personal post about a decision I came to tonight. Nothing earth shaking – I’ve just decided to let go of one of my life’s deep pleasures – because it is time.

Tonight, I decided I’m done with racquetball; a sport I’ve played with great love and enjoyment for 35 years; since I first learned it in college.

It’s the last time I will move through space with millions of my neurons tracking the ball, predicting its trajectory, noting where the other players are, developing moment to moment strategy, estimating timing, ensuring balance while moving, knowing the three dimensional space around me and experiencing the coordination of this beautiful body that the Beloved has given me.

The last time to feel the swing, estimate the force, think where I want the ball to go and be conscious and observant in the midst of the execution of neural programs that have been deepening themselves in this body and mind for most of my life. Neural sequences that flow like a ballet that I am privileged to watch from the inside. Intimate and possessive and pleased that this, this beauty and passion and animal joy are mine to feel.

I’ve loved this sport deeply for so many years. I’ve played it left handed, I’ve played it right handed, I’ve taught it to two sons and to many friends. I’ve played it in competition and I’ve played it for fun. And if my body has strength today at 60, it is largely because of the many years I’ve danced the light three-dimensional fanstastic with that flashing blue ball.

Thanks you, my Beloved, for these experiences .

So tonight, after an hour of hard play with men much younger than myself, I realized that I was lucky, yet again, in that I hadn’t blown out my knee or damaged my elbow.

There’s been a deep truth looking me in the face for sometime now. I’ve had surgery on both knees from the hard sports I’ve played. The most recent operation just last year. I’ve blown out my lower back and my left wrist rubs bone against bone at the base of the thumb.

I know that every time I play now, I risk going through a door marked “permanent damage – no return”.

I don’t want to have my knee replaced but, if I blow one of them out again, that’s the likely outcome.

Right now my right elbow just hurts from the power swings that I should have given up at 40 and that I’m still slamming at 60. And maybe the next time, that ache may not go away in a week. Maybe next time, something will tear away.

At 60, I’m beginning to think about conservation. My body is no longer invincible and sure to heal flawlessly. I could, in a careless or unlucky moment, lose serious functionality for the rest of my life.

Right now I can walk, my hands work and I can do real work and do it well. Right now, my body is strong and sound despite all the hard use I’ve given it. I’m thinking that these things, this functionality, has a deep value to me and the quality of my remaining life.

And I know that every time I play now, I am gambling them.

Tonight, as I drove home from playing, I weighed these things against the desires of that old athlete. The one that loves the dance, loves the airborne turn in the air and the racquet’s sweep and the feeling as it all comes together as the racquet finds the ball and physics and neural magic unfold together in the hanging moments of light and sound.

And I decided that in spite of this love, it is time. Time now, before I buy myself a deep regret in exchange for ‘just one more game’.

I’ve had a good long run – far better than most folks in this life and there is much I still want to do in these next decades and I need the functionality of this body to see me through those things.

So be it then. I’m giving my racquetball gear to my son, Christopher and I’m going to let go of something I’ve deeply loved, as of tonight.

Thank you, Beloved, for all of these experiences. You have given me such a rich and varied life and I am very deeply grateful. Even for this. For it is all part of life.

Posted in Personal | 3 Comments »

samadhisoft.com

In the Clearing Stands a Boxer

Who Will Tell the People?

Survey shows US honey bee deaths increased over last year

Unexplained Mass Die-Off Hits German Hives

Nuclear’s CO2 cost ‘will climb’

Ocean Dead Zones Growing; May Be Linked to Warming

Fertilizer use and ocean dead zones

080508 – Facing up

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