Listening To Conservative Talk Radio

Yesterday I listened to radio commentators Michael Savage and Mark Levin, and I was struck by the raging incoherence.

For example, Savage tried to whip his audience into a frenzy by invoking that oldest of hoary old European anti-Semitic stereotypes, that of the monocled, cosmopolitan financier, cackling over the various Washington bailouts currently underway.

So, what's supposed to make this evil financier take fright? A capital gains tax cut? More philo-Semitic military aid to Israel? Deregulation? What?

It just doesn't work. None of it works. It never did work, of course, but it works less-well now than ever.

One more week of 'God Bless George Bush, Our Commander In Chief', and then what?

The Universe Is A Hologram

Which explains some of the physical blurring, but doesn't explain why it's set up that way. Is the Universe some kind of cinematic art work?:

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

...The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The "holographic principle" challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

Susskind and 't Hooft's remarkable idea was motivated by ground-breaking work on black holes by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge. In the mid-1970s, Hawking showed that black holes are in fact not entirely "black" but instead slowly emit radiation, which causes them to evaporate and eventually disappear. This poses a puzzle, because Hawking radiation does not convey any information about the interior of a black hole. When the black hole has gone, all the information about the star that collapsed to form the black hole has vanished, which contradicts the widely affirmed principle that information cannot be destroyed. This is known as the black hole information paradox.

Bekenstein's work provided an important clue in resolving the paradox. He discovered that a black hole's entropy - which is synonymous with its information content - is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. This is the theoretical surface that cloaks the black hole and marks the point of no return for infalling matter or light. Theorists have since shown that microscopic quantum ripples at the event horizon can encode the information inside the black hole, so there is no mysterious information loss as the black hole evaporates.

Crucially, this provides a deep physical insight: the 3D information about a precursor star can be completely encoded in the 2D horizon of the subsequent black hole - not unlike the 3D image of an object being encoded in a 2D hologram. Susskind and 't Hooft extended the insight to the universe as a whole on the basis that the cosmos has a horizon too - the boundary from beyond which light has not had time to reach us in the 13.7-billion-year lifespan of the universe. What's more, work by several string theorists, most notably Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has confirmed that the idea is on the right track. He showed that the physics inside a hypothetical universe with five dimensions and shaped like a Pringle is the same as the physics taking place on the four-dimensional boundary.

According to Hogan, the holographic principle radically changes our picture of space-time. Theoretical physicists have long believed that quantum effects will cause space-time to convulse wildly on the tiniest scales. At this magnification, the fabric of space-time becomes grainy and is ultimately made of tiny units rather like pixels, but a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. This distance is known as the Planck length, a mere 10-35 metres. The Planck length is far beyond the reach of any conceivable experiment, so nobody dared dream that the graininess of space-time might be discernable.

That is, not until Hogan realised that the holographic principle changes everything. If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.

Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. "Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry," says Hogan.

This is good news for anyone trying to probe the smallest unit of space-time. "Contrary to all expectations, it brings its microscopic quantum structure within reach of current experiments," says Hogan. So while the Planck length is too small for experiments to detect, the holographic "projection" of that graininess could be much, much larger, at around 10-16 metres. "If you lived inside a hologram, you could tell by measuring the blurring," he says.

Chinook For The Books

It's so cold on the East Coast! It's so cold in the Midwest!

Tell it to the Alaskans, who finally saw the crystalline air in their Frozen Hell move somewhere else for a change:

The temperature at Fairbanks International Airport hit a record high of 44 degrees just before midnight on Wednesday, continuing what has been a dramatic warm-up following one of the worst cold snaps in decades.

On Sunday, the final day of a cold spell that kept residents in Alaska’s second-largest city shivering for 16 days straight, the low temperature at the airport was negative 44. That’s a difference of 88 degrees in just three days.

“Incredible,” said meteorologist Rick Thoman at the National Weather Service in Fairbanks. “Is there any other place in the country that can do that?

“It’s just a spectacular chinook,” he said.

The temperature at Eielson Air Force Base hit 50 degrees just after midnight Wednesday, setting a new all-time record high for January at the military base 25 miles southeast of Fairbanks.

In Nenana, the temperature climbed to 54 degrees Thursday morning, another all-time high, Thoman said.

The 44-degree reading at the airport late Wednesday broke the record of 43 degrees set in 1981. Thursday’s high of 45 degrees in Fairbanks fell 5 degrees short of a record of 50 degrees set in 1981.

Other notable warm temperature readings were 54 at Birch Lake; 52 in Salcha; 48 in Healy; 46 in Denali Park; and 45 in Central, the latter two of which set new daily records.

“There’s July days when it’s not that warm at Birch Lake,” Thoman quipped.

Things cooled off at the airport by the afternoon — 27 degrees at 4 p.m. — but above-freezing temperatures and melting snow persisted throughout the day in much of the Fairbanks area.

The blast of warm air is the result of strong south winds pushing across the Alaska Range, Thoman said.

“The south winds busted through,” he said. “That warm air was aloft, and it was just a matter of getting it down to the ground.”

Overnight winds near 70 mph were recorded on Eagle Summit, and gusts of 40 mph were recorded at Eielson.

The chinook comes on the heels of a cold snap in which the low temperature hit 40 below on 14 of 16 days and the high temperature never rose above 20 below.

“It seems like so often we have these deep cold spells, and they end with a bang,” Thoman said, noting that was the case with the legendary cold snap of January 1989.

Funny Celebrity Photo Of The Day

Bear with it....

Trying To Re-reconfigure Ecosystems

It's like Whack-O-Mole:

It seemed like a good idea at the time: Remove all the feral cats from a famous Australian island to save the native seabirds.

But the decision to eradicate the felines from Macquarie island allowed the rabbit population to explode and, in turn, destroy much of its fragile vegetation that birds depend on for cover, researchers said Tuesday.

Removing the cats from Macquarie "caused environmental devastation" that will cost authorities 24 million Australian dollars ($16.2 million) to remedy, Dana Bergstrom of the Australian Antarctic Division and her colleagues wrote in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology.

"Our study shows that between 2000 and 2007, there has been widespread ecosystem devastation and decades of conservation effort compromised," Bergstrom said in a statement.

The unintended consequences of the cat-removal project show the dangers of meddling with an ecosystem — even with the best of intentions, the study said.

"The lessons for conservation agencies globally is that interventions should be comprehensive, and include risk assessments to explicitly consider and plan for indirect effects, or face substantial subsequent costs," Bergstrom said.

Located about halfway between Australia and Antarctica, Macquarie was designated a World Heritage site in 1997 as the world's only island composed entirely of oceanic crust. It is known for its wind-swept landscape, and about 3.5 million seabirds and 80,000 elephant seals migrate there each year to breed.

Authorities have struggled for decades to remove the cats, rabbits, rats and mice that are all nonnative species to Macquarie, likely introduced in the past 100 years by passing ships.

The invader predators menaced the native seabirds, some of them threatened species. So in 1995, the Parks and Wildlife Service of Tasmania that manages Macquarie tried to undo the damage by removing most of the cats.

Several conservation groups, including the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Birds Australia, said the eradication effort did not go far enough and that the project should have taken aim at all the invasive mammals on the island at once.

"It would have been ideal if the cats and rabbits were eradicated at the same time, or the rabbits first and the cats subsequently," said University of Auckland Prof. Mick Clout, who also is a member of the Union's invasive species specialist group.

Countdown - Chris Matthews On Bush's Last Speech



Chris hits the nail on the head.

Shedding Light

In the light of the previous discussion regarding Google, somewhat ironic statements from Tom Hanks:

Tom Hanks, Executive Producer for HBO’s controversial polygamist series “Big Love,” made his feelings toward the Mormon Church’s involvement in California's Prop 8 (which prohibits gay marriage) very clear at the show’s premiere party on Wednesday night.

“The truth is this takes place in Utah, the truth is these people are some bizarre offshoot of the Mormon Church, and the truth is a lot of Mormons gave a lot of money to the church to make Prop-8 happen,” he told Tarts. “There are a lot of people who feel that is un-American, and I am one of them. I do not like to see any discrimination codified on any piece of paper, any of the 50 states in America, but here's what happens now. A little bit of light can be shed, and people can see who's responsible, and that can motivate the next go around of our self correcting Constitution, and hopefully we can move forward instead of backwards. So let's have faith in not only the American, but Californian, constitutional process.”

There is nothing either pro- or anti-American about Proposition Eight supporters: they participated in the electoral campaign, as was their right.

People discriminate (aka, make judgments) all the time in society. Just look at your Federal Form 1040 to see an important example regarding income, or the text of marriage laws for any state (the line between blissful matrimony and statutory rape can be rather fine).

What separates pro and anti-Proposition Eight supporters is exactly how discrimination is to be practiced. In other words, it is a matter of public debate.

Discrimination, followed by exclusion or inferior treatment, for religious, political, racial or sexual reasons can cause a vast amount of harm. This kind of discrimination must be avoided, where possible.

A perfect example of political discrimination that edged into racial discrimination was the Bush Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. The Administration saw a partisan political opportunity to cast blame for a slow emergency response onto the Democratic Governor of Louisiana, and concentrated their energies on having her surrender her emergency powers - something they did not do to the similarly-belabored Republican Governor of Mississippi. The political infighting that resulted from this misguided effort (no Governor will voluntarily surrender power in a crisis) resulted in a delay that cost the lives of 1,500 people. The American people rightly recoiled from the horror of that discrimination.

Proposition Eight was just another ballot measure presented to the voters for democratic consideration: not the first, and certainly not the last. The way to oppose it is through public education, persuasion, and mobilization: precisely those areas found wanting in the last election. Like others who cluster in like-minded thought ghettoes, anti-Proposition Eight folks tend to think that adequate public education, persuasion, and mobilization work has already been done. This is manifestly not the case.

Methane Plumes

Left: Methane plumes found in Mars' atmosphere during the northern summer season. Credit: Trent Schindler/NASA [animation]


Hmmm.... Well, it might be life, or it might be remnant volcanism....:

The situation sounds bleak, but research published today in Science Express reveals new hope for the Red Planet. The first definitive detection of methane in the atmosphere of Mars indicates that Mars is still alive, in either a biologic or geologic sense, according to a team of NASA and university scientists.

"Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas," says lead author Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif."

Methane -- four atoms of hydrogen bound to a carbon atom -- is the main component of natural gas on Earth. It is of interest to astrobiologists because much of Earth's methane come from living organisms digesting their nutrients. However, life is not required to produce the gas. Other purely geological processes, like oxidation of iron, also release methane. "Right now, we don't have enough information to tell if biology or geology -- or both -- is producing the methane on Mars," said Mumma. "But it does tell us that the planet is still alive, at least in a geologic sense. It's as if Mars is challenging us, saying, hey, find out what this means."

If microscopic Martian life is producing the methane, it likely resides far below the surface, where it's still warm enough for liquid water to exist. Liquid water, as well as energy sources and a supply of carbon, are necessary for all known forms of life.

"On Earth, microorganisms thrive 2 to 3 kilometers (about 1.2 to 1.9 miles) beneath the Witwatersrand basin of South Africa, where natural radioactivity splits water molecules into molecular hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O). The organisms use the hydrogen for energy. It might be possible for similar organisms to survive for billions of years below the permafrost layer on Mars, where water is liquid, radiation supplies energy, and carbon dioxide provides carbon," says Mumma.

"Gases, like methane, accumulated in such underground zones might be released into the atmosphere if pores or fissures open during the warm seasons, connecting the deep zones to the atmosphere at crater walls or canyons," he says.

"Microbes that produced methane from hydrogen and carbon dioxide were one of the earliest forms of life on Earth," notes Carl Pilcher, Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute which partially supported the research. "If life ever existed on Mars, it's reasonable to think that its metabolism might have involved making methane from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide."

However, it is possible a geologic process produced the Martian methane, either now or eons ago. On Earth, the conversion of iron oxide (rust) into the serpentine group of minerals creates methane, and on Mars this process could proceed using water, carbon dioxide, and the planet's internal heat. Another possibility is vulcanism: Although there is no evidence of currently active Martian volcanoes, ancient methane trapped in ice "cages" called clathrates might now be released.

The team found methane in the atmosphere of Mars by carefully observing the planet over several Mars years (and all Martian seasons) using spectrometers attached to telescopes at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility, run by the University of Hawaii, and the W. M. Keck telescope, both at Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

"We observed and mapped multiple plumes of methane on Mars, one of which released about 19,000 metric tons of methane," says Geronimo Villanueva of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Villanueva is stationed at NASA Goddard and is co-author of the paper. "The plumes were emitted during the warmer seasons -- spring and summer -- perhaps because the permafrost blocking cracks and fissures vaporized, allowing methane to seep into the Martian air. Curiously, some plumes had water vapor while others did not," he says.

According to the team, the plumes were seen over areas that show evidence of ancient ground ice or flowing water. For example, plumes appeared over northern hemisphere regions such as east of Arabia Terra, the Nili Fossae region, and the south-east quadrant of Syrtis Major, an ancient volcano 1,200 kilometers (about 745 miles) across.

The New Zealand Weather Book

I wanted to put in a quick plug for Erick Brenstrum's book, entitled "The New Zealand Weather Book".

New Zealand weather can be quite dramatic - more dramatic than one would suspect at first from the weather maps - and this guide is very helpful in preventing undue complacency. The mid-latitude marine influence is paramount, of course, and stormy precipitation often falls with little notice.

A good read!

U.S. Airways Plane Crashes Into The Hudson River

Brrr!

Double-Plus Ungood

Want to know where Proposition Eight donors live or work? Here is an interactive Google map with everything you need to know.

"1984" arrives in our lives, in bits and pieces. "Two Minutes Hate" need not be televised, but can arrive on your I-Phone, at your convenience.

Life On Mars?

Well, who knows, but the UK's tabloid press says there is, so it must be so.

What I find strange is that "The Sun" gives great weight to what NASA thinks, even though the Europeans, monitoring Mars Observer results, were the first to take note of methane, several years ago. So, as far as I'm concerned, the Europeans have bragging rights here, but what they think seems to be unimportant.

Are the Americans signing on to the organic explanation for the presence of methane? Why? Are they announcing previously-unavailable results from the Phoenix expedition? Who knows? Film at 11, I suppose....

(If you see any bear-like creatures emerging from giant metal cylinders, let me know....):

ALIEN microbes living just below the Martian soil are responsible for a haze of methane around the Red Planet, Nasa scientists believe.

The gas, belched in vast quantities in our world by cows, was detected by orbiting spacecraft and from Earth using giant telescopes.

Nasa are today expected to confirm its presence during a briefing at their Washington HQ.

And the find is seen as exciting new evidence that Martian microbes are still alive today.

Some scientists reckon methane is also produced by volcanic processes. But there are NO known active volcanoes on Mars.

Furthermore, Nasa has found the gas in the same regions as clouds of water vapour, the vital “drink” needed to support life.

Experts speculate that the methane is being emitted as a waste product by organisms called methanogens living in water beneath underground ice.

Speculation As The Source Of Last Year's Spectacular Oil Price Rise

I was reluctant at first to blame speculators for this, but it's hard to argue differently now: the amazing price fluctuation last year can have no other explanation. The price disturbance was so severe it may single-handedly ruin all American automobile manufacturers. And, as usual, the secrecy of the trades is not a bug; it's a feature, in the manner of Enron. This is what we can thank the Bush Administration for:

About the only economic break most Americans have gotten in the last six months has been the drastic drop in the price of oil, which has fallen even more precipitously than it rose. In a year's time, a commodity that was theoretically priced according to supply and demand doubled from $69 a barrel to nearly $150, and then, in a period of just three months, crashed along with the stock market.

So what happened? It's a complicated question, and there are lots of theories. But as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, many people believe it was a speculative bubble, not unlike the one that caused the housing crisis, and that it had more to do with traders and speculators on Wall Street than with oil company executives or sheiks in Saudi Arabia.

...[W]hen oil doubled to more than $147 a barrel, no one was more suspicious than Dan Gilligan.

As the president of the Petroleum Marketers Association, he represents more than 8,000 retail and wholesale suppliers, everyone from home heating oil companies to gas station owners.

When 60 Minutes talked to him last summer, his members were getting blamed for gouging the public, even though their costs had also gone through the roof. He told Kroft the problem was in the commodities markets, which had been invaded by a new breed of investor.

"Approximately 60 to 70 percent of the oil contracts in the futures markets are now held by speculative entities. Not by companies that need oil, not by the airlines, not by the oil companies. But by investors that are looking to make money from their speculative positions," Gilligan explained.

Gilligan said these investors don't actually take delivery of the oil. "All they do is buy the paper, and hope that they can sell it for more than they paid for it. Before they have to take delivery."

"They're trying to make money on the market for oil?" Kroft asked.

"Absolutely," Gilligan replied. "On the volatility that exists in the market. They make it going up and down."

He says his members in the home heating oil business, like Sean Cota of Bellows Falls, Vt., were the first to notice the effects a few years ago when prices seemed to disconnect from the basic fundamentals of supply and demand. Cota says there was plenty of product at the supply terminals, but the prices kept going up and up.

"We've had three price changes during the day where we pick up products, actually don't know what we paid for it and we'll go out and we'll sell that to the retail customer guessing at what the price was," Cota remembered. "The volatility is being driven by the huge amounts of money and the huge amounts of leverage that is going in to these markets."

About the same time, hedge fund manager Michael Masters reached the same conclusion. Masters' expertise is in tracking the flow of investments into and out of financial markets and he noticed huge amounts of money leaving stocks for commodities and oil futures, most of it going into index funds, betting the price of oil was going to go up.

Asked who was buying this "paper oil," Masters told Kroft, "The California pension fund. Harvard Endowment. Lots of large institutional investors. And, by the way, other investors, hedge funds, Wall Street trading desks were following right behind them, putting money - sovereign wealth funds were putting money in the futures markets as well. So you had all these investors putting money in the futures markets. And that was driving the price up."

In a five year period, Masters said the amount of money institutional investors, hedge funds, and the big Wall Street banks had placed in the commodities markets went from $13 billion to $300 billion. Last year, 27 barrels of crude were being traded every day on the New York Mercantile Exchange for every one barrel of oil that was actually being consumed in the United States.

"We talked to the largest physical trader of crude oil. And they told us that compared to the size of the investment inflows - and remember, this is the largest physical crude oil trader in the United States - they said that we are basically a flea on an elephant, that that's how big these flows were," Masters remembered.

...If anyone had any doubts, they were dispelled a few days after that hearing when the price of oil jumped $25 in a single day. That day was Sept. 22.

Michael Greenberger, a former director of trading for the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that oversees oil futures, says there were no supply disruptions that could have justified such a big increase.

"Did China and India suddenly have gigantic needs for new oil products in a single day? No. Everybody agrees supply-demand could not drive the price up $25, which was a record increase in the price of oil. The price of oil went from somewhere in the 60s to $147 in less than a year. And we were being told, on that run-up, 'It's supply-demand, supply-demand, supply-demand,'" Greenberger said.

A recent report out of MIT, analyzing world oil production and consumption, also concluded that the basic fundamentals of supply and demand could not have been responsible for last year's run-up in oil prices. And Michael Masters says the U.S. Department of Energy's own statistics show that if the markets had been working properly, the price of oil should have been going down, not up.

...Masters believes the investor demand for commodities, and oil futures in particular, was created on Wall Street by hedge funds and the big Wall Street investment banks like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, and J.P. Morgan, who made billions investing hundreds of billions of dollars of their clients’ money.

"The investment banks facilitated it," Masters said. "You know, they found folks to write papers espousing the benefits of investing in commodities. And then they promoted commodities as a, quote/unquote, 'asset class.' Like, you could invest in commodities just like you could in stocks or bonds or anything else, like they were suitable for long-term investment."

Dan Gilligan of the Petroleum Marketers Association agreed.

"Are you saying that companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and Barclays have as much to do with the price of oil going up as Exxon? Or…Shell?" Kroft asked.

"Yes," Gilligan said. "I tease people sometimes that, you know, people say, 'Well, who's the largest oil company in America?' And they'll always say, 'Well, Exxon Mobil or Chevron, or BP.' But I'll say, 'No. Morgan Stanley.'"

Morgan Stanley isn't an oil company in the traditional sense of the word - it doesn't own or control oil wells or refineries, or gas stations. But according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Morgan Stanley is a significant player in the wholesale market through various entities controlled by the corporation.

It not only buys and sells the physical product through subsidiaries and companies that it controls, Morgan Stanley has the capacity to store and hold 20 million barrels. For example, some storage tanks in New Haven, Conn. hold Morgan Stanley heating oil bound for homes in New England, where it controls nearly 15 percent of the market.

The Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs also has huge stakes in companies that own a refinery in Coffeyville, Kan., and control 43,000 miles of pipeline and more than 150 storage terminals.

...Asked if there is price manipulation going on, Dan Gilligan told Kroft, "I can't say. And the reason I can't say it, is because nobody knows. Our federal regulators don't have access to the data. They don't know who holds what positions."

"Why don't they know?" Kroft asked.

"Because federal law doesn't give them the jurisdiction to find out," Gilligan said.

It's impossible to tell exactly who was buying and selling all those oil contracts because most of the trading is now conducted in secret, with no public scrutiny or government oversight. Over time, the big Wall Street banks were allowed to buy and sell as many oil contracts as they wanted for their clients, circumventing regulations intended to limit speculation. And in 2000, Congress effectively deregulated the futures market, granting exemptions for complicated derivative investments called oil swaps, as well as electronic trading on private exchanges.

"Who was responsible for deregulating the oil future market?" Kroft asked Michael Greenberger.

"You'd have to say Enron," he replied. "This was something they desperately wanted, and they got."

Greenberger, who wanted more regulation while he was at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not less, says it all happened when Enron was the seventh largest corporation in the United States. "This was when Enron was riding high. And what Enron wanted, Enron got."

Asked why they wanted a deregulated market in oil futures, Greenberger said, "Because they wanted to establish their own little energy futures exchange through computerized trading. They knew that if they could get this trading engine established without the controls that had been placed on speculators, they would have the ability to drive the price of energy products in any way they wanted to take it."

"When Enron failed, we learned that Enron, and its conspirators who used their trading engine, were able to drive the price of electricity up, some say, by as much as 300 percent on the West Coast," he added.

"Is the same thing going on right now in the oil business?" Kroft asked.

"Every Enron trader, who knew how to do these manipulations, became the most valuable employee on Wall Street," Greenberger said.

But some of them may now be looking for work. The oil bubble began to deflate early last fall when Congress threatened new regulations and federal agencies announced they were beginning major investigations. It finally popped with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the near collapse of AIG, who were both heavily invested in the oil markets. With hedge funds and investment houses facing margin calls, the speculators headed for the exits.

"From July 15th until the end of November, roughly $70 billion came out of commodities futures from these index funds," Masters explained. "In fact, gasoline demand went down by roughly five percent over that same period of time. Yet the price of crude oil dropped more than $100 a barrel. It dropped 75 percent."

Asked how he explains that, Masters said, "By looking at investors, that's the only way you can explain it."

Carlos Coyote Does Couture

Recycling vogue:

SANTA FE, N.M. -- In the world of trashy fashion, designer Nancy Judd has hit the big time.

Ms. Judd spends her days in a studio here crafting clothing from castoff plastic bags, electrical wire and old cassette tapes. Now, her Dumpster couture has caught the eye of environmental activists, who plan to showcase her work in Washington at Saturday's Green Inaugural Ball honoring President-elect Barack Obama.

The star piece: A man's coat made from Mr. Obama's campaign fliers. She says it took her 200 hours to cut and paste and sew it.

Showing her stuff in the nation's capital is a big step for a woman who used to put on a furry blue costume and sweat her way through parades as Carlos Coyote, Santa Fe's recycling mascot. Working for the city trash department, Ms. Judd did the coyote gig for years. She also ran workshops and recorded radio ads urging New Mexicans to recycle. But she worried that nobody was paying attention.

Ms. Judd began to wonder whether she could spark new interest in solid waste by making garbage glamorous.

Ms. Judd, who is 40 years old, has no training in fashion. She can't sketch. She gets design ideas from old paper dolls. Still, she figured out how to craft a saucy cocktail dress from a shower curtain and aluminum cans. She fashioned a slinky black gown from canvas scraps and hundreds of rusty nails. When worn, it clinks alluringly.

She once spent 400 hours, she says, unspooling cassettes and crocheting the crinkled tape into a fake-fur coat.

As attire, the outfits have their limitations. An evening gown sparkling with 12,000 bits of glass tends to shed; a fitted jacket cut from the vinyl top of a convertible is so well insulated, it doubles as a sweat lodge.

Also, says Ms. Judd, "you can't sit down in any of them."

But these aren't meant to be wardrobe mainstays. Ms. Judd conceives of them more as wearable sculpture. "I like the idea of making aluminum elegant, or rusty nails sexy," she says.

Paul Kennedy Finally Speaks

Where has he been during the last decade? Events during the Bush Era seemed to follow the terrible blueprint he laid out in "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers", 20 years ago:

So while today's Russia, China, Latin America, Japan and the Middle East may be suffering setbacks, the biggest loser is understood to be Uncle Sam.

...The first reason, surely, is the U.S.'s truly exceptional budgetary and trade deficits. There is nothing else in the world like them in absolute measures and, even when calculated in proportion to national income, the percentages look closer to those you might expect from Iceland or some poorly run Third World economy. To my mind, the projected U.S. fiscal deficits for 2009 and beyond are scary, and I am amazed that so few congressmen recognize the fact as they collectively stampede towards the door entitled "fiscal stimulus."

...Never mind, I am told, the foreigners will pay gladly for that paper. This notion makes me queasy. In the first place, it is (without its advocates ever acknowledging it) a dreadful sign of America's relative decline. If you have seen Clint Eastwood's poignant war movie "Flags of Our Fathers," you also will have been stirred by the scenes where the three bewildered Iwo Jima veterans are dragged all over the country to beg the cheering audiences: "Buy American Bonds!" It's uncomfortable all right, but there was one massive consolation. The U.S. government, fully converted to Keynesianism, was asking its citizens to dig into their own hoarded savings to help sustain the war effort. Who else, after all, could buy? A near-bankrupt British Empire? A war-torn China? The Axis? The Soviet Union? How fortunate it was that World War II doubled U.S. GDP, and the savings were there.

Today, however, our dependency upon foreign investors will approximate more and more the state of international indebtedness we historians associate with the reigns of Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV of France -- attractive propositions at first, then steadily losing glamour.

...Do people really think that China can buy and buy when its investments here have already been hurt, and its government can see the enormous need to invest in its own economy? If a miracle happened, and China bought most of the $1.2 trillion from us, what would our state of dependency be then? We could be looking at as large a shift in the world's financial balances as that which occurred between the British Empire and the United States between 1941 and 1945. Is everybody happy at that? Yet if foreigners show little appetite for U.S. bonds, we will soon have to push interest rates up.

...Moreover, no three or four of those countries -- and perhaps not a dozen of them combined -- have anywhere like the staggering array of overseas military commitments and deployments that weigh upon Uncle Sam's shoulders. That brings us back, I'm sorry to say, to the "imperial overstretch" remarks I made some 20 years ago.

As I suggested at that time, a strong person, balanced and muscular, can carry an impressively heavy backpack uphill for a long while. But if that person is losing strength (economic problems), and the weight of the burden remains heavy or even increases (the Bush doctrine), and the terrain becomes more difficult (rise of new Great Powers, international terrorism, failed states), then the once-strong hiker begins to slow and stumble. That is precisely when nimbler, less heavily burdened walkers get closer, draw abreast, and perhaps move ahead.

Partisanship Will Serve Obama Best

Thomas Frank, excellent as always:

Centrism is something of a cult here in Washington, D.C., and a more specious superstition you never saw. Its adherents pretend to worship at the altar of the great American middle, but in fact they stick closely to a very particular view of events regardless of what the public says it wants.

And through it all, centrism bills itself as the most transgressive sort of exercise imaginable. Its partisans are "New Democrats," "Radical Centrists," clear-eyed believers in a "Third Way." The red-hot tepids, we might call them -- the jellybeans of steel.

...Yet what the Beltway centrist characteristically longs for is not so much to transcend politics but to close off debate on the grounds that he -- and the vast silent middle for which he stands -- knows beyond question what is to be done.

...[T]he real-world function of Beltway centrism has not been to wage high-minded war against "both extremes" but to fight specifically against the economic and foreign policies of liberalism. Centrism's institutional triumphs have been won mainly if not entirely within the Democratic Party. Its greatest exponent, President Bill Clinton, persistently used his own movement as a foil in his great game of triangulation.

And centrism's achievements? Well, there's Nafta, which proved Democrats could stand up to labor. There's the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. There's the Iraq war resolution, approved by numerous Democrats in brave defiance of their party's left. Triumphs all.

...Centrism is a chump's game. Democrats have massive majorities these days not because they waffle hither and yon but because their historic principles have been vindicated by events. This is their moment. Let the other side do the triangulating.

RIP, Ricardo Montalban

Like Jerry says, "Who's going to be the third?"

I always liked Montalban's attitude as a product spokesperson towards the pronunciation of words from different cultures. I remember hearing an interview regarding this subject, I think, on NPR.

For example, when representing the Chrysler Cordoba to American audiences, he placed the accent in "Cordoba" on the second syllable, as Americans do, even though he knew the correct Spanish is to place the accent on the first syllable. And when representing Colgate Toothpaste to Mexican audiences, he broke "Colgate" into three syllables, as Mexicans do, even though he knew the correct English is to have just two syllables. Paraphrasing Montalban: "you pronounce words according to the people amongst whom you find yourself."

Marcus Schrenker Caught

It's just hard to disappear:

With his world crumbling around him, investment adviser Marcus Schrenker opted for a bailout. However, his plan to escape personal turmoil was short-lived.

In a feat reminiscent of a James Bond movie, the 38-year-old businessman and amateur daredevil pilot apparently tried to fake his death in a plane crash, secretly parachuting to the ground and speeding away on a motorcycle he had stashed away in the pine barrens of central Alabama.

But the captivating three-day saga came to an end when authorities finally caught up to Schrenker in North Florida. Gadsden County Sheriff's Lt. Jim Corder said late Tuesday night that police there had Schrenker in custody.

Schrenker was on the run not only from the law but from divorce, a state investigation of his businesses and angry investors who accuse him of stealing potentially millions in savings they entrusted to him.

"We've learned over time that he's a pathological liar — you don't believe a single word that comes out of his mouth," said Charles Kinney, a 49-year-old airline pilot from Atlanta who alleges Schrenker pocketed at least $135,000 of his parents' retirement fund.

They Might Be Giants - "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)"

Prisoner Parody



Dreadful, but funny. With Teddy Bears.