‘Dark matter’ concept darker than ever

Posted on April 19, 2012 by oddmanout215

“The stars are matter. We’re matter. But it doesn’t matter.” — Captain Beefheart

For years laymen have felt puzzled by “dark matter,” an unscientific term scientists use to describe the invisible substance that supposedly accounts for 83 percent of the matter in the universe. So it was less than comforting to read yesterday that scientists were and still are as puzzled as the rest of us.

According to widely accepted theories, the neighborhood around the sun should be filled with dark matter, with billions of these particles rushing through us every second. However, the most accurate study yet of motions of stars in the Milky Way now has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume around the sun…

“Our results contradict the currently accepted models — the mystery of dark matter has just become even more mysterious,” said study lead author Christian Moni Bidin, an astronomer at the University of Concepción in Chile…

“Despite the new results, the Milky Way certainly rotates much faster than the visible matter alone can account for, so if dark matter is not present where we expected it, a new solution for the missing mass problem must be found,” Moni Bidin said.

Yes indeedy. So where does that leave us?

“Strictly speaking, the results do not say that dark matter does not exist — they only say it is not here,” Moni Bidin told SPACE.com. “We have not proven that dark matter does not exist, and even if we do, at this point we cannot explain many other phenomena that today are explained only by dark matter.”

I’m beginning to see the light. Pass me that bong, Professor.

Posted in astronomy, humor | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Yes Men’s fake BofA site is back

Posted on April 18, 2012 by oddmanout215

An ad for the Yes Men's 2009 movie. Now they're trying to fix Bank of America.

As the movie trailer put it, “Sometimes it takes a lie to expose the truth.”

The Raw Story reported earlier today that “Google blacklisted on Wednesday a website made to look like an outreach campaign by Bank of America, in what turned out to be an activist’s effort to get people talking about how the nation’s largest bank should operate.”

However, after the Raw Story piece appeared, Google took the website off its blacklist.

The website was the work of the Yes Men, activist satirists who create fake websites and news releases that lampoon the cozy relationship between corporate giants and prominent politicians.

From the “personal letter” by CEO Brian Moynihan, on the fake BofA site:

The institutions you rescued in 2008 have continued much as they always were, engaging in the same practices that brought our economy so close to collapse. To make sure that this time around, things turn out differently, we at Bank of America are launching a forum in which you, the American taxpayer, can prepare for the time that you own us. By sharing ideas, and reading and rating the ideas of others, you can begin charting a course for this Bank—your course.

And when the day comes that you, the American taxpayer, own this Bank, you will be ready to make it a Bank for America—one that brings benefits not to the privileged only, but to all of our customers, and to all of our stakeholders too.

Three cheers for the Yes Men who, unlike employees of the mainstream media, have the freedom to say what ought to be said.

Posted in economic collapse, humor, mainstream media | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Killer drones are people, too

Posted on April 17, 2012 by oddmanout215

Wow, this is way cooler than Wargaming.net!

Q. What’s the difference between a terrorist who bombs civilian centers and a military pilot who does the same thing?
A. Usually, it’s only a matter of altitude, although the terrorist is likely to be hunted down and the pilot to be deemed a hero, at least in his home country.

Most people don’t want to acknowledge this reality, especially in America, where warfare has reached a new level of remoteness with the introduction of unmanned “killer drones” operated from a great distance. This can be a formidably efficient way to kill people. And yet, when you think about it, the pilot, “flying” the drone from the ground via computer, bears more resemblance to some wanker playing a video game than to an actual killer. But he’s still a killer, isn’t he?

From Rolling Stone:

[Sixteen-year-old Pakistani] Tariq [Aziz] had been killed in a drone strike while he was on his way to pick up his aunt. It appears that he wasn’t the intended target of the strike: Those who met Tariq suspect he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, especially since his 12-year-old cousin was also killed in the blast.

The Obama administration has no comment on the killing of Tariq Aziz, even though his death raises the most significant question of all. Drones offer the government an advanced and precise technology in its War on Terror – yet many of those killed by drones don’t appear to be terrorists at all. In fact, according to a detailed study of drone victims compiled by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, at least 174 of those executed by drones were under the age of 18 – in other words, children. Estimates by human rights groups that include adults who were likely civilians put the toll of innocent victims at more than 800. U.S. officials hotly dismiss such figures – “bullshit,” one senior administration official told me…

For Nasser al-Awlaki, who lost his teenage grandson to a predator drone, such denials are almost as shocking as the administration’s deliberate decision to wage a remote-control war that would inevitably result in the deaths of innocent civilians. “I could not believe America could do this – especially President Obama, who I liked very much,” he says. “When he was elected, I thought he would solve all the problems of the world.”

A lot of well-meaning people in America liked Obama, too, and probably thought he couldn’t possibly condone civilian-killing drones (planes and pilots.) But that was a long time ago.

Posted in terrorism | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The dog days of spring

Posted on April 16, 2012 by oddmanout215

It feels almost like August in April, and so what if glaciers are melting and the sea level rising and scientists predicting vast coastal areas will be underwater within a century? Jon’s Water Ice, which is usually shuttered until after Memorial Day, was doing great business today. I like the novelty.

I’m joking. I don’t even like August weather in August, not in Philadelphia, which is why I’ll be spending the summer in New Zealand, where the bees buzz in cool breezes that blow up from the South Pole with icebergs the size of Rhode Island.

Joking again. I’ll be stuck in Philly, most likely, trying to pay the bills and find an agent for my novel, and writing new short stories, for which I expect a boatload of posthumous praise. Unlike Dorothy Parker, I won’t have Pascal Covici breathing down my neck, but I’ll proceed as if, unless some unknown relative dies and leaves me enough money to make the big move. I so terribly incompetant [sic].

And I’ll try to soldier on with my blog, so as not to disappoint my legion of readers. Anger is a great distraction, and for me there’s nothing more anger-inducing than writing about the rich and powerful crooks who have driven the final nail into the coffin of American democracy. As Atrios wrote today, we’ve lived through a decade in which:

… this country stopped even bothering to pretend to live up to many of its supposed ideals. We go to war and kill lots of people for no good reason, elites have eliminated any accountability for themselves for criminal wrongdoing, we’ve tortured and assassinated people, and the response to massive economic suffering and related criminal fraud has been to give lots of free money to the people who caused it all.

See you at the water ice shop.

Posted in climate change, economic collapse, fiction, history, Iraq war | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

No mercy from bailed-out BofA

Posted on April 15, 2012 by oddmanout215

Mr. Potter of It's a Wonderful Life was a very visible villain. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan does most of his dirty work in the dark.

In the not-so-distant past, one of the most reviled characters in American popular culture was the landlord who threw families into the street if they couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage on their homes. Think of Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Villainy in our time often isn’t as easy to personify. It involves robo-signing and other illegal foreclosure practices. It is delegated and administered through corporations that have vast real estate holdings. Most of the people involved in foreclosures and evictions are invisible. They don’t have to witness or even hear of the misery they cause. Sometimes they even deny having anything to do with it.

From Gale Holland of Los Angeles Times:

Dirma Rodriguez had five minutes to gather her things and vacate the West Adams house she and her severely disabled daughter had lived in for more than 25 years. As a property manager changed the locks, Rodriguez fluttered back and forth from the yard – where a pile of stuff lay by the kitchen stove – to her car, where her daughter, Ingrid Ortiz, sat screaming and crying.

How Rodriguez and Ortiz ended up in this predicament is a long, messy story that resounds with a misery all too common in this age of foreclosure.

Rodriguez took out a loan to retrofit her house for her special-needs daughter. After she fell behind on her payments, the Bank of America lowered her monthly obligation, but then sold the house at a foreclosure auction last September. The new owner, a house flipper from El Segundo called West Ridge Rentals, moved to evict the family.

I came upon Rodriguez’s story through Occupy Fights Foreclosure, the latest offshoot of the 99% movement. Occupy interceded to stop her eviction March 26, and it just may have saved her home for good. Bank of America said last week it is considering a loan modification that would return the home to Rodriguez and her family.

But how did it come to this? Bank of America took a $45-billion bailout from taxpayers when it got into financial trouble. Why couldn’t the bank have shown Rodriguez – a widow whose life was already a trial – the same courtesy when she got squeezed?

One answer to that question is that the Obama administration agreed to a settlement on the robo-signing scandal that, as Slate noted, “barely punishes the huge banks behind the foreclosure crisis.” Now that they’re been fined and are off the hook, the banks can go back to throwing people into the street with impunity.

Which is not to say that a Republican administration would have handled the mortgage crisis more honestly. On the contrary, the big banks wouldn’t even have been fined.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, movies, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

The logic of telling Christie-size lies

Posted on April 13, 2012 by oddmanout215

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

— Joseph Goebbels

Paul Krugman likes to argue from the high ground, eschewing the sort of ad hominem attacks I can’t resist making when the subject is Chris Christie, a big man in many ways, from his XXXX-large suits to his elephantine ego to his ability to tell the boldest lies at maximum volume without betraying even a hint of shame.

Today, Krugman noted that Christie often speaks of the importance of “acting responsibly, but may actually be the least responsible governor [New Jersey] has ever had.” He mentioned the recent report from the Government Accountability Office that proves Christie lied about costs in order to create an excuse for canceling construction of the New Jersey-New York rail tunnel. Krugman used the report as a springboard for a larger point:

But while it’s important to document Mr. Christie’s mendacity, it’s even more important to understand the utter folly of his decision. The new report drives home just how necessary, and very much overdue, the tunnel project was and is. Demand for public transit is rising across America, reflecting both population growth and shifting preferences in an era of high gas prices. Yet New Jersey is linked to New York by just two single-track tunnels built a century ago — tunnels that run at 100 percent of capacity during peak hours. How could this situation not call for new investment?

Right. Is any East Coast state more desperately in need of better public transportation options than New Jersey, with its dense population and daunting tangle of roads and highways? Does anyone believe Christie’s policies – killing the tunnel project, cutting school budgets, maximizing corporate tax breaks, and so on — are meant to do anything more than benefit his wealthiest constituents and impress Republican power brokers when he runs for president in 2016, or maybe for VP this year?

What’s impressive about Christie is not that he lies — all politicians do — but rather that he has mastered the art of the big lie, to advance policies that are, as Krugman put it, “completely at odds with New Jersey’s needs.”

If you’re going to lie, lie big. Public sector unions are ruining the economy. Public school teachers are too well paid. Public transportation systems are too expensive. The scared and demoralized “middle class” will believe you, at least until they figure out you’ve dug for them an even deeper hole than they were in before they elected you.

Footnote: I didn’t hear anything today from the organizers of the proposed Chris Christie 100-Yard Walk. I wonder if they were putting me on again.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

One word for you, young man: ‘Prisons’

Posted on April 12, 2012 by oddmanout215

The “too-big-to-fail” bank Wells Fargo received a $37 billion bailout from the government after playing a major role in sparking the 2008 collapse of the housing market. Now the bank is bigger than ever and investing heavily in one of the country’s fastest-growing industries — for-profit prisons.

From Salon:

Wells Fargo has been busy expanding its stake in the GEO Group, the second largest private jailer in America. At the end of 2011, Wells Fargo was the company’s second-largest investor, holding 4.3 million shares valued at more than $72 million. By March 2012, its stake had grown to more than 4.4 million shares worth $86.7 million.

Unfortunately, it’s a safe investment. While a 50 percent growth in the number of human beings our society cages in rape factories may sound impressive – or perhaps the word is “revolting” – a study released last year by the Justice Policy Institute found that the private prison industry grew by more than 350 percent over the last decade and a half. While other industries of course benefit from state-granted privileges, companies like GEO profit by the state literally kidnapping and handing them clientèle, particularly as of late about-to-be-deported immigrants, of which President Barack Obama has ensured there is a steady, record-breaking supply.

It’s a win-win situation for Wells Fargo, which apparently has realized that housing for prisoners is a much less risky business than housing for free people.

The Salon story calls to mind the award-winning movie The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman’s character, a young college grad, is pulled aside and given career advice from a friend of his father’s: “I just want to say one word to you, just one word, are you listening? Plastics.” If The Graduate were remade now, the magic word might be prisons.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, humor, movies | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Attention, couch potatoes: Walk for Christie

Posted on April 11, 2012 by oddmanout215

Chris Christie shouting down a member of the paternalistic entitlement society? No, it's Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, another paragon of fitness and integrity.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is rangy and fast, a sinewy specimen of manhood, a champion of physical fitness who said yesterday that he fears America might become a “paternalistic entitlement society” populated not by hard workers but by “a bunch of people sittin’ on a couch waiting for their next government check.” Cynics immediately accused Christie of pandering to anti-government wing nuts, but others think the governor, whose self-discipline is evident not only in his streamlined physique but also in his style of speech, was simply urging people to get off the couch, put on their walking shoes, and start racking up yardage on the road.

Christie’s remarks have sparked renewed hope for a Chris Christie 100-Yard Walk to mark the June 2011 day when the governor was flown by helicopter “from Trenton to Montvale [NJ] to watch his son Andrew play baseball in a state playoff game. Upon arrival next to the field, Christie was shuttled about 100 yards in a dark town car with tinted windows to the stands.” The governor apparently used this incident as an incentive to begin a conditioning program, and these days is said by unbiased sources to be weighing in at a lean and mean 320 pounds.

In his speech yesterday, Christie linked physical fitness and virtue when he said success in life depends on one’s “willingness to work hard and to act with honor and integrity…” Long-time Christie watchers believe the governor was referring in part to his years as a hard-working lobbyist who fought to keep Wall Street exempt from laws against securities fraud. Or to the fact that he worked so hard to “exaggerate” the potential cost of a train tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan that would have reduced traffic congestion and pollution.

Promoters of the 100-Yard Walk say they are optimistic that the governor will not only lend his name to the event but also permit them to stage it at Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton. Apparently, they are hoping to capitalize on the fact that Christie is, as his speech implied, a credible role model for those seeking both fitness and integrity. How could this event not be a success?

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

U.S. is leader of the pack — in poverty rates

Posted on April 10, 2012 by oddmanout215

In an article in Boston Review, Paul Osterman notes that income inequality in the United States is much greater than in northern Europe, and that the situation here could improve if our government focused on raising and enforcing labor standards, pushing companies to invest in training, and allowing labor unions to effectively advocate for workers.

Sounds pretty simple and fair, but don’t tell that to the corporatists and legislators who, with something like religious zeal, oppose all efforts by the gov’mint to intervene in the jobs market.

Using tables of statistics to make his points, Osterman writes:

… Clearly the United States is the outlier. It is not surprising that the U.S. poverty rate substantially exceeds that of other developed nations.

Europeans achieve [lower poverty rates] through a combination of higher minimum wages, stronger unions, and more egalitarian social norms. Economists often argue that more egalitarian wages reduce incentives to work and that a higher minimum wage increases the cost of labor and therefore encourages unemployment, so the European job market should suffer as a result of lifting the bottom. Does it? In fact, among both women and men, the fraction of the “prime age” (25–54 years old) population that works is higher in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands than in the United States.

Read the whole article then ask yourself whether American apathy regarding our high poverty rate stems from principled objection to government intervention, or simply from misinformation about how government works in democracies where income inequality isn’t nearly as shameful as in America.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Why liberalism is on life-support

Posted on April 9, 2012 by oddmanout215

Why do so many so-called liberal politicians in our time openly embrace cultural liberalism — i.e., equal rights for blacks, women, gays and other groups — while running like hell from the sort of economic liberalism that made the New Deal possible?

Writing in the Sunday NYT, Eric Alterman argued that the problem stems from a failure of vision, over the past half-century, on the part of those who should have been encouraging a stronger coalition of poor and middle-class constituencies:

… Many liberals chose to focus, rather perversely, on a “rights” agenda and the internecine fights it engendered within their increasingly fractured coalition. They lost sight of the essential element that had made the coalition possible in the first place: the sense that liberalism stood with the common man and woman in their struggle against economic forces too large and powerful to be faced by individuals on their own.

Liberals must find a way to combine their cultural successes with new approaches to achieving economic equality. But they must do so unambiguously and unequivocally…

This is not happening under the party headed by Barack Obama, who will, as the presidential election approaches, make more and more noble noises about the importance of economic equality, but without taking any actions that would indicate he stands in opposition to the interests of the crooked investment bankers and the corporations that send our jobs overseas — i.e., the forces that bolster economic inequality.

Bottom line: Call me a progressive, even if you think it’s an insult. Just don’t call me a liberal. These days, the word summons feelings of guilt by association.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , | 6 Comments