My last post dealt with the need for alternative sources of energy, to save money, decrease pollution, and help slow climate change.  A cautionary post should be added, as the race to develop and utilize alternative energy is not all good.  I took the above picture on a trip to Borneo in 2008, riding in an Iban long boat on a multi day trip deep into the jungle.  Here’s a picture of what much of Borneo is becoming due to the demand for alternative energy:

After spending time in the jungle, seeing the incredibly diverse flora and fauna and the lifestyles of the few tribes still able to live there, it was depressing to see how much of Malaysian and Indonesian Borneo was being deforested to make room for palm oil plantations.  These plantations are wiping out jungle around the world at an unbelievable rate, to satisfy the demand for alternative energy.

The fact is, palm oil and ethanol are worse for the environment when you consider the cost in energy, water, land, and fertilizer to grow the crops necessary for production.  AND, they’re destroying enormous amounts of jungle, driving plants and animals into extinction and producing more CO2 as the jungle is cleared and burned.

While developing GOOD alternative sources of energy is necessary, it needs to be done in a smart manner.  An alternative to oil is no good if it does worse than oil.  While this should be obvious, it’s not being practiced now.   For further reading, here are two great articles from Foreign Policy:

Seven Myths About Alternative Energy

Is a Green World a Safer World?

In our quest to decrease pollution, save money, prevent deaths due to limited resources, and slow climate change, we need to think smart.  Renewable resources like wind and solar are great, but they’ll no doubt have their own problems.  Clearly, the best option for everyone is to reduce consumption.  What’s the point of moving away from oil only to destroy life even faster!?!?

But lets just ignore reality and assume that human pollution is not warming the planet.  Fine.  Since when is reducing pollution a bad thing?  Since when is saving money a bad thing?  Regardless what you believe about climate change/global warming, it’s just plain smart to utilize renewable energy sources. In addition to using renewable energy sources, all of us can likely save money by reducing our energy bills. Tools like the P3 Kill A Watt make it easy.

Right now we’re getting most our energy from countries we ought not be sponsoring.  When the oil is gone we’re going to be doing the same thing if we don’t get in the race now.  China is killing us.  We’ve got the technology already, it’s just that we’re not using it.

A friend sent me a link to this Bill Moyer’s program with an interview with Rory Stewart, a professor from Harvard University who among other things has walked across Afghanistan during the war and written a book about it.  He explains why Obama and the West have it wrong in Afghanistan, and it’s one of the best interviews I’ve ever seen.  It’s excellent for its honesty, realism, and reason.  No doubt he’ll be proven correct.

Yukio and Miyuki Hatoyama

Ok, if Yukio Hatoyama was a fortune teller with an unemployed husband, it would be funny that she thinks her “soul” was abducted by aliens and flown to the planet Venus, which was “a very beautiful place, and it was very green.”  It would also be funny that she thinks she was a friend of Tom Cruise in a past life, and that she thinks he would understand if she met him and said “‘long time no see”.  It’s not that funny though, because Yuko Hatoyama is the wife of the new Japanese prime minister!!!  Yes, you read that right.

You can read more about this here.  Wow…

Where to begin…

Xe most definitely needs to be flushed down the toilet. Read the testimony of John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 if you have any doubts. What the hell is the Obama administration doing keeping Blackwater/Xe lunatics on the payroll?!?!? Courtesy of US taxpayers, they’re getting another 20 million dollars to continue on their crusade in Iraq. From The Nation:

Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

In The Nations follow up article we hear that at least some in government are pissed about this:

“These contracts with Blackwater need to stop,” says Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. “There’s already enough evidence of gross misconduct and serious additional allegations against the company and its owner to negate any possibility that this company should have a presence in Iraq, Afghanistan or any conflict zone–or any contract with the US government.”

There are plenty of bloggers talking about the Obama administration continuing to support Xe, but where is the mainstream media in all this? I guess they’re too busy with the likes of Michael Jackson and Jon and Kate…

WHAT!?!?!?!?!?!?!? He gives her speech an A-? What planet are these people on??? If that doesn’t disqualify Fox News as anything but a bunch of crap, I don’t know what does. It’s obvious why Palin dislikes the media…because they show her as she really is! Here’s a more reasonable, and also funny analysis:

And finally…the clip that spurred my search:

If there’s one thing that definitely needs to be flushed down the toilet, it’s high frequency trading.  If you’ve got any money in stocks, you’re likely losing some due to companies like Goldman Sachs using your bailout money to artificially inflate the value of stocks by using super computers to make millisecond trades.  They’re watching your orders, and quickly sneaking in and inflating prices before you can buy.  See this NYTimes article for more, along with this PDF from 12/08.  If Sal L. Arnuk and Joseph Saluzzi knew about this at the end of 2008, why hasn’t the government put a stop to it!?!?!?!?

Fortunately Senator Charles Schumer has decided to do something about this, according to the Bloomberg article High-Frequency Trading Faces Challenge From Schumer.  Better late than never…  A couple of quotes:

“It’s an arms race driven by technology,” said Sang Lee, managing partner at financial-services consultant Aite Group LLC in Boston. “Someone like Chuck Schumer getting involved in the process will create a deeper conversation about where the whole market is headed”…

“This kind of unfair access seriously compromises the integrity of our markets and creates a two-tiered system, where a privileged group of insiders receives preferential treatment,” Schumer wrote. “If allowed to continue, these practices will undermine the confidence of ordinary investors, and drive them away from our capital markets.”

While high frequency trading is not yet illegal, IT SURE AS HELL IS UNETHICAL! Tatyana Shumsky is saying the same, but also questions the legality:

Forget for a moment how lucrative this can be: how is it legal? Front-running, the practice of getting ahead of other people’s orders, is illegal. Yet this is exactly what high frequency traders do – see your orders, get ahead of them, buy low and sell higher to you.

Here are a few more articles on the subject:

High Frequency Trading Programs Ripping Investors Off

High Frequency Trading Is A Scam

Controversial High-Frequency Trading Yields Billions in Profits

Flush it down!

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

The latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine has an article that is definitely a must read.  Before linking to it I’d like to first say that the author makes the unfortunate mistake of cursing throughout it (making it far less likely that the mainstream media will link to or comment on it), and unfairly picks only on Goldman Sachs.  There is a LOT of blame to go around…borrowing money you shouldn’t is your fault as much as it is the lending bank’s, etc.  For all the articles flaws though, it’s interesting, thought provoking, and throws light where it should shine.  A couple of quotes:

…as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to crises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be “very helpful in the short term,” while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out.

But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the shortterm flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the shortterm supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling — which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.

The article goes on to explain that speculation was to blame for the spike, and mostly as a result of Goldman Sachs.  Another interesting quote regarding oil prices and speculation:

Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

This is alarming not only because of the negative effect that high oil prices have on the lives of ordinary people, or the fact that they allow tyrants to more easily remain in power, but also because as one commodity goes, so do others.  According to the Rolling Stone’s article, commodity speculation also forced “an estimated 100 million people into hunger and sparked food riots throughout the Third World.“  This is horrible, and something needs to be done about it.

Pages 5, 6, and 7 of the article are the best in my opinion, and my hope is that readers aren’t turned off by the author’s style on the first page and click off.  The portions on the rigging of the bailout and the next predicted bubble, alternative energy are excellent.  Many people bash the republicans on alternative energy and the fact that most of them go against science by denying climate change is real.  But few of them point out how self serving and two faced people like Al Gore are:

Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There’s also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in greentech … the list goes on and on.

Based on Gore’s behavior it’s pretty clear that his movie was designed to boost the profits of his company more than anything.  Sick.  Cap and trade/carbon offsetting is BS anyway.

There’s plenty more on Goldman Sachs, from additional analysis of the Rolling Stone’s article to this appalling NYTimes article.  The bottom line is that something is really, really wrong in the US, to put it mildly…and it doesn’t look like anyone is calling for real change.

A video saying the same:

Nancy Pelosi

I’m starting a new category today called Flush It Down!  After reading this article on the democrat’s horrible plan to have the “rich” pay for the health care of everyone else, I thought it would be appropriate to have a category for things and ideas that should be “flushed down the toilet”.

I do want to provide a disclaimer first though: Just because I’m bashing the democrats doesn’t mean I think the republicans would be a better choice.  60% of republicans believe that humans were created in their present form by god…10,000 years ago!  Granted, 38% of democrats believe the same thing, which is appalling.  But that’s a pretty big difference.  The republican war on science is downright scary.  It’s news when one of them is actually for science.  They want to  teach creationism in schools, ban stem cell research, etc.  That alone should be enough to stop any reasonable person from voting republican…if military, environmental, and economic polices are not enough.

(If you haven’t read The God Delusion yet, get it now.)

It’s no wonder that religious fundamentalists and uneducated people are more likely to vote republican, whereas the higher your education is the less likely you are to be religious and the more likely you are to vote for a democrat.

With that out of the way though, we can move back to the idiot democrats.  This new plan to “tax the rich” an additional 1% for anyone making over $280,000 (even more if you make over 400K, and even more still if you make over 800K) is not only unfair, it’s also a slap in the face.  These bastards need to quit spending tax payer money on vacations and cut a whole lot of pork before they decide to slap extra taxes on people who earn more than others.  Let’s flush all this down the toilet and move to a flat tax for all.  Below a certain amount of income you pay no taxes, then there’s a flat tax rate that everyone pays.  It would be fair, people making more money would pay more taxes, and you wouldn’t get penalized for doing better than average.