Two More Reasons...

Two more reasons why pot should be legal  :)

METHODOLOGY: Researchers at the University of Nebraska, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center analyzed data from a nationally representative sample of over 4,600 adults. About 12 percent of the participants self-identified as current marijuana users, and another 42 percent reported having used the drug in the past. The participants were tested for various measures of blood sugar control: their fasting insulin and glucose levels; insulin resistance; cholesterol levels; and waist circumference.

RESULTS: Current marijuana users had significantly smaller waist circumference than participants who had never used marijuana, even after adjusting for factors like age, sex, tobacco and alcohol use, and physical activity levels. They also had higher levels of HDL ("good cholesterol"). The most significant differences between those who smoked marijuana and those who never or no longer did was that current smokers' insulin levels were reduced by 16 percent and their insulin resistance (a condition in which the body has trouble absorbing glucose from the bloodstream) was reduced by 17 percent.

Any questions? How about it Eric, do something useful for a change and legalize pot, now.

Buy Local - It's the Right Thing to do. :)

This was a fun project done gratis for a local Redding, CT store doing the right thing by offering top products locally grown, something whose time has come. Enjoy.

400

Crossing the Rubicon pales in comparison to reaching the threshold of 400 parts per million of CO2, the greenhouse gas that will change a benign earth into something altogether different thanks to the continued and unfettered use of fossil fuels all over the world.

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called the Pliocene. Geological research shows that the climate then was far warmer than today, the world’s ice caps were smaller, and the sea level might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher.

With "luck", combined with continued use of fossil fuels, we might reach the Eocene era, a hot house scenario that could end man's existence on planet earth.

The Eocene Epoch contained a wide variety of different climate conditions that includes the warmest climate in the Cenozoic Era and ends in an icehouse climate. The evolution of the Eocene climate began with warming after the end of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) at 56 million years ago to a maximum during the Eocene Optimum at around 49 million years ago. During this period of time, little to no ice was present on Earth with a smaller difference in temperature from the equator to the poles. Following the maximum, was a descent into an icehouse climate from the Eocene Optimum to the Eocene-Oligocene transition at 34 million years ago. During this decrease ice began to reappear at the poles, and the Eocene-Oligocene transition is the period of time where the Antarctic ice sheet began to rapidly expand.

With no ice, sea level rise will be nearly 300 feet and...

Using isotope proxies to determine ocean temperatures indicate sea surface temperatures in the tropics as high as 35 °C (95 °F) and bottom water temperatures that are 10 °C (18 °F) higher than present day values.[15] With these bottom water temperatures, temperatures in areas where deep-water forms near the poles are unable to be much cooler than the bottom water temperatures.

What makes matters worse is man's ever expanding population and pollution footprint as the Eocene, even though extremely hot, was pristine and teemed with life because we were not there, littering the planet with innumerable pollutants while plundering the place with unbridled greed and ferocity.

Continue the status quo is no longer viable. To continue to burn fossil fuels at the expense of developing alternative ways of generating energy is suicide but we already know about this as the President contemplates approving Keystone, the truly modern way to bring forth a new Eocene within our lifetimes instead of having to wait for it to happen within a few centuries.

May 25th, March against Monsanto

May 25th, March against Monsanto, sounds good to me. 

Latch

Everyone HATES security, at least yours truly does. Has anyone ever forgotten a password? Don't ask but... two young guys have come up with something pretty cool. They built an app that eliminates this PITA in a heart beat. Enter Latch, the Swiss Army Knife able to save passwords. Today, it does Wordpress and iPhone, soon, it will do Android.

Way to go guys. :)

High Diving Giraffes

Exquisite animation with wit and style by French director Nicolas Deveaux is a ten. :)  Enjoy

Giedi Prime

Giedi Prime is an industrial wasteland with a low photosynthetic potential, the planet's bio-resources depleted and its environment fouled with industrial pollution.[4] Rich in mineral resources, the economy of the planet is based on mining, refineries, and industrial manufacture. In Dune, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and his heirs live in the "family city of Harko."[4]

Due to its ravaged environment, Giedi Prime has to import almost all of its food. Society on Giedi Prime has evolved around power and conquest, and the weak rarely survive. Gladiatorial games are a common form of entertainment, particularly for nobility, and vocational combat training from an early age is the norm in all classes of society. Slavery is legal and widely practised, while judicial punishment is usually draconian. Such conditions form the basis for a vast military-industrial complex and an army conditioned by fear, which make House Harkonnen the sole contender for House Atreides — or the throne — in terms of military power.

Seems the oil cartel wants to do the same to planet earth.

"I was just appalled at this collaboration ... to create these regulations based on the false premise that fracking is inevitable," said Sandra Steingraber, an Illinois native and founder of New Yorkers Against Fracking, a group whose champions include actor Mark Ruffalo and singer Natalie Merchant. "It was not their job to help pave the way for fracking to move into Illinois. It was to protect the environment."

But Michigan's largest environmental coalition might be willing to take a cue from Illinois if lawmakers decide that fracking should be part of Michigan's energy mix.

"We would love to see that kind of bipartisan cooperation," said Hugh McDiarmid, spokesman for the Michigan Environmental Council. The Illinois bill "has a lot of good ideas and a lot of things ... that mirror what we're trying to achieve in Michigan" because stopping or banning fracking would be unrealistic.

Solar costs are dropping like a stone but we continue to invest in tech that will kill us off. Simply unbelievable in this day and age but there is an alternative if we have the courage to grasp it.

Rob Wile uses a graph to point out the obvious, the dramatic fall in the cost of solar power generation. In many countries– Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal — and in parts of the US such as the Southwest, solar is at grid parity. That means it is as inexpensive to build a solar plant as a gas or coal one. The pace of technological innovation in the solar field has also accelerated, so that costs have started falling precipitously and efficiency is rapidly increasing. By 2015, solar panels should have fallen to 42 cents per watt. Reneweconomy.com says that the best Chinese solar panels fell in cost by 50% between 2009 and 2012. That incredible achievement is what has driven so many solar companies bankrupt– if you have the older technology, your panels are suddenly expensive and you can’t compete. It is like no one wants a 4 year old computer. Conservatives shed no tears when better computers drive slower ones out of the market, but point to solar companies’ shake-out as somehow bad or unnatural. No wonder US solar installations jumped 76% in 2012. The reductions in cost over the next two years are expected to continue, at a slowing but still impressive 30% rate:

So why are we allowing this to happen when clean tech like solar and wind continue to drop in price. Sheeple, wake up. When aquifers are gone, they are gone forever and PA is beginning to see the real "benefits" of fracking, the literal raping of our planet. 

Combine fracking with Keystone XL and earth may become the next Giedi Prime. Sounds pretty good to me, right?

Change is in the Air

TBTF banks might finally be coming to an end according to Matt Tiabbi. If so, it's about time.

Minds are changing on Too Big to Fail. A month ago, it was just something in the air. Now, it looks like we're headed for a real legislative confrontation. And man, is the finance sector freaking.

Last week, on April 24th, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Louisiana Republican David Vitter introduced legislation called the "Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act of 2013 Act," or the "Brown-Vitter TBTF Act" for short. The bill is a gun aimed directly at the head of the Too-Big-To-Fail beast.

During the Dodd-Frank negotiations a few years ago, Brown teamed up with Delaware Democrat Ted Kaufman to introduce an amendment that would have physically capped the size of the biggest banks. The amendment was bold and righteous but was slaughtered on the floor by a 61-33 margin, undermined by leaders of both parties – 27 Democrats voted against it.

Brown-Vitter offers a different and, in a way, more elegant solution to the problem than Brown-Kaufman. Rather than impose size limits, it simply insists that banks with over $500 billion in assets maintain higher capital reserves than are currently required. Companies like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America will have to keep capital reserves of about 15 percent, about twice the current amount.

The bill only has such tough requirements for just those few megabanks, which sounds unfair, except that the aim of the bill, precisely, is to level the playing field. Right now, the biggest U.S. banks enjoy a massive inherent market advantage in that they're able to borrow money far more cheaply than other banks, because everybody on earth knows the government will never let them fail and will always bail them out in a pinch, making their debt essentially U.S.-government guaranteed. Studies have shown that these banks borrow money at about 0.8 percent more cheaply than other banks, and that this implicit government subsidy is worth about $83 billion a year just to the top 10 banks in America. This bill would essentially wipe out that hidden subsidy and make the banks bailout-proof.

As soon as Brown-Vitter was introduced, a very interesting thing happened. The Independent Community Bankers of America, or ICBA, issued a press release boosting the bill. "ICBA strongly supports this legislation," the release read, "and urges all community banks to join the association in advocating passage of legislation to end too-big-to-fail."

Hopefully, jail time might be forthcoming as well for the TBTF banksters who have stolen our money without a care in the world. 

Elementary My Dear Watson

Elementary My Dear Watson from Robert Moran on Vimeo.

This is a a terrific talk on IBM's Watson, given by Mike Rhodin, Senior V. P. in charge of the project. Insightful, warm and above all else, informative,  check it out. It's an important discussion on tech of the most disruptive kind. Enjoy. :)

20 Years

The Web's now 20, the disrupter supreme.

The Fix is in

BRT has talked often about the Fed and how it games the system for Wall Street while us rube take the hit. The old term, "Privatize the profits, socialize the losses." rules when bailouts at our expense became the norm in 2008, a policy that continues to this day though the corporate controlled press never talks about it... ever, save for Matt Tiabbi, a guy who knows the drill and has been right on since, it seems, from the beginning of time. To that end, I give you Everything is Rigged, The biggest Price Fixing Scandal Ever.

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

What's truly amazing about this piece is that the data used to drive ICAP and LIBOR is not vetted and the trivial bribes the geeks take in gaming the system is absolutely astounding.

Famously, one Barclays trader monkeyed with Libor submissions in exchange for a bottle of Bollinger champagne, but in some cases, it was even lamer than that. This is from an exchange between a trader and a Libor submitter at the Royal Bank of Scotland:

SWISS FRANC TRADER: can u put 6m swiss libor in low pls?... 

PRIMARY SUBMITTER: Whats it worth 

SWSISS FRANC TRADER: ive got some sushi rolls from yesterday?... 

PRIMARY SUBMITTER: ok low 6m, just for u 

SWISS FRANC TRADER: wooooooohooooooo. . . thatd be awesome

Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi – it's hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector.

David Stockman's right about the corruption permeating every aspect of finance. BRT disagrees about gold being the solution to our financial woes but not on his premise we are in trouble thanks to the malfeasance of government, the Fed and Wall Street banks but we already knew about this because the power elite has been doing this kind of business since the beginning of time, only now, the web shows us how this chicanery is done. 

Everywhere he sees sweetheart deals between government and industry, often engineered by lobbyists. The energy sector in particular he views as a sewer of subsidy and false "green" promises. Meanwhile, corporate America enters into reckless deals in part because borrowing is much too cheap, thanks to skewed tax and monetary policies.

Any questions?

Addendum: The book's a very good read. Very entertaining without question. 

Addendum II: Click here for another MT piece, this time on foreclosures. Guaranteed to make one feel even better about the Fed, governance and WS Greed.

Creativity Takes Flight :)

It feels good that creativity still rules as seen by this wonderful video courtesy of 18BIS. Enjoy

Wringing Out Water - NASA style :)

 Very cool experiment showing why water + science rocks :)

There is a Hell

Being an atheist, god is not part of the equation but hell does reside, in Alberta, CA, as seen in the Tar Sands operation pix, courtesy of Nat Geo. The enormity of the project and the impact it's already having on the environment boggles the mind even though the pipeline itself is far from completion. BRT has written copiously about the impending disaster known as Keystone but as a "subtle" reminder, read on if you have the courage to do so.

Nowhere on Earth is more earth being moved these days than in the Athabasca Valley. To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine, the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of two tons of peat and dirt that lie above the oil sands layer, then two tons of the sand itself. It must heat several barrels of water to strip the bitumen from the sand and upgrade it, and afterward it discharges contaminated water into tailings ponds like the one near Mildred Lake. They now cover around 50 square miles. Last April some 500 migrating ducks mistook one of those ponds, at a newer Syncrude mine north of Fort McKay, for a hospitable stopover, landed on its oily surface, and died. The incident stirred international attention—Greenpeace broke into the Syncrude facility and hoisted a banner of a skull over the pipe discharging tailings, along with a sign that read "World's Dirtiest Oil: Stop the Tar Sands."

Moving asphalt through a pipe 36"in diameter requires three steps. 1. Heating the sludge to high temperature, (think hot tar when paving a road as dibit is actually tar/asphalt) 2. Thin same with artificial hydrocarbons (naphtha etc., etc.) to keep it in a liquid state and 3. Move the stuff at higher pressure than that of crude (see 1. & 2.)  Because of these "wonderful" characteristics, the impact of dibit spills is far worse then that of crude as seen by the residents of  Mayflower Ak who saw first hand what a liquified asphalt spill of 5000 barrels really means. 

In perspective, imagine a Keystone rupture, with a pipe diameter of 36", vs the 9" pipe break of Mayflower or... instead of 5000 barrels, think 45,000 and have it go into the Missouri. Something to think about considering just how corrosive this stuff truly is. Already, 12 leaks, including Mayflower,  have occurred.

Over the last year we’ve had many recent indications of the risks of tar sands diluted bitumen pipelines – an 840,000 gallon spill in Michigan, a 250,000 gallon spill outside Chicago, a 1.3 million gallon spill in Alberta, as well as our recent report examining the safety of tar sands pipelines.  On May 7, the Keystone tar sands pipeline provided yet another warning when it spilled approximately 21,000 gallons of crude in North Dakota. This is its eleventh and most significant spill. 

Even better, we don't know how to clean this stuff up.

The clean up of dilbit is entirely different from that of oil. The industry knows that but where's the effort on their part to ensure that communities along their pipeline routes have properly trained clean-up crews. How can the clean up proceed if the crew doesn't even know what they are dealing with? As we see from the Mayflower, Arkansas spill, the clean up involved allowing the dilbit to get into the wet lands of Lake Conway and then pieces of absorbent material (looking like paper towels) were dropped on top of contaminated sections. Dilbit is heavy, it sinks. This photo demonstrates that they really do not know what they are doing.

Update to expand on this statement. The "paper towels" are not only useless, they inhibit the evaporation of the chemicals in the dilbit. From the clean-up of the Kalamazoo dilbit disaster:

But as the bitumen mixed with grains of sand and other particles in the river, the weight of the sediment pulled the bitumen underwater.

This dilbit in the wetlands of Conway Lake will sink to the bottom dragging the absorbent papers with it.

Well Barak, do you have the guts to pull the plug on this Fubar? One never knows, do one?

As a parting shot, here's a before and after shot of the tar sands. Question, how would you like have this in your back yard?

Addendum: Click here for in depth data from people who really know about Keystone;