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An Arrow Through the Throat of the Deficit Hawks (Who will eat our livers if we don't get them first.) Bloomberg .com is a hard core financial news site. No wishy -washy ideology-driven spins on the money news. Here are some excerpts from today's issue: Are the "Bond Vigilantes" Going to Punish Obama? Instead of punishing the Obama administration for running up a budget deficit ..., bond investors are pouring money into fixed-income assets as inflation slows and equity markets stumble. That’s a turnaround from 16 years ago, when Bill Clinton was forced to abandon stimulus plans after his advisers said the bond market would punish him with higher borrowing costs if it sensed swelling deficits. “The deficit concerns are on the back burner,” said Andy Richman , who oversees $10 billion as a strategist in Palm Beach, Florida for SunTrust Bank’s private wealth management division. “The bigger concerns are on the deflationary mode and seeing grow...

Why Do We Make Dangerous Decisions? (Like deciding climate change "isn't real") Fiddling while the Arctic Melts It amazes me that whole swaths of humanity ignore facts, refute the irrefutable and get all conspiracy-ish when issues arise that they don't like or that make them uncomfortable. Two unrelated (except they were both in the NY Times) columns offered nice, tight nuggets of insight into why some of us human beans lock our mental steering wheels and drive ourselves into major crashes. Here's an excerpt from an Op-Ed on our dismal climate fate, the author Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. Climate policy is gridlocked, and there’s virtually no chance of a breakthrough. Many factors have conspired to produce this situation. Human beings are notoriously poor at responding to problems that develop incrementally. And most of us aren’t eager to change our lifestyles by sharpl...

And Understand America a Little Better The Big Short by Michael Lewis. I'm a little late, since it's been the top biz book on the NYTimes list (still up there close). It's been praised and berated with vigor. But, MAN, it's a killer book. When you read it, not only will you understand the causes of the Great Recession better than you did before, but you will have an insight into us human folk with another layer of delusion ripped away. And it's a hoot to boot, a fun book to read. The characters are great (notwithstanding that they are real), and the narrative plays at full throttle. Imagine, a page-turner about synthetic CDOs and that ilk! It'll put a different light on Tuesday's headline from the Christian Science Monitor, " How Wall Street uses your money to lobby against you. " Enjoy.

More Stimulus NOW The deficit hawks are dangerous to America. He said conservatively, in quiet understatement. Nothing is as important as getting our army of unemployed back to work. Cutting the deficit can and should be done, but not now. Not with the gnawing cancer of mass unemployment claiming more lives daily. There are so many extremely productive places to spend more stimulus money. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our education system is in tatters and a whole new category of American industry is just waiting to be stimulated by the right laws and the right government funding - c lean e nergy, e fficient h omes a nd b uildings, and e fficient t ransportation. (CEEHABET, acronym fans). Oh, and there is the little fringe benefit of saving ourselves from climate change and freeing ourselves from dependence on malign foreigner's oil. So I'm signing on wholeheartedly to... [[ drum roll, bugles ]] Reboot America - Manifesto ... started by The Da...

...They're not even willing to check it out. Now that's sad, ain't it? I've had the experience many times that a "discussion" of differing opinions ends up with categorical rejection of any idea that runs contrary to what a person believes. "That's just not so," said a pal in response to what I saw as irrefutable evidence that it is so. Then I ran across an article in Science News about how mathematics is being used to fight terrorism. It's brilliant. It's effective and getting moreso fast. It puts to powerful use all those billions of bucks worth of intelligence we are buying. However, the very idea is running smack into the "belief so extreme" that it "just can't work" that some important intelligence types won't even see for themselves. Here's the paragraph that caught my eye. ARGHHHHH . Now that makes me mad. Sure, when I can't get someone to consider one of my ideas, it's frustrating....

You will LOVE it, if... ... You like great writing. (I don't use "great" with "writing" very often, but Spiller deserves it.) ... You think war is a fascinating subject. ... You think PTSD is a new thing. ... You think this makes the book sound worthwhile: Enjoy.

... That Would Be 2009 Woe is us. The predictions keep getting worse, while the denialists keep getting louder. Something completely human about that, no? In case you missed the latest blast from the future from the National Academy of Sciences, here is the L.A. Times piece on it (from a month ago - thanks, Digg, for reviving it). Always check your sources, boys and girls. Know what the N.A.S. is? The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is an honorific society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. The NAS was signed into being by President Abraham Lincoln on March 3, 1863, at the height of the Civil War. Do you believe the NAS or the latest Climate Denialist/Birther/Creationist whackjob? Up to you, of course. In short, the big, Congressional-mandated study by all those distinguished scholars says things are URGENT, we should get on the stick an...

IT'S ONLY MONEY More than 1 in 5 (U.S.) kids live in poverty (U.S.A. Today) Now that is just unacceptable. Remember that the top 1% in American wealth have more money than the bottom 80%. Then there's: A new Gallup poll finds the national debt tied with terrorism as voters' biggest worry. Health-care costs, unemployment, immigration, and global warming all lag. http://bit.ly/9sbXaf Oh, great, the "deficit hawks" are about to eat our livers again. Quoting that rich old liberal George Soros: "June 10 (Bloomberg) -- Billionaire investor George Soros said “we have just entered Act II” of the crisis as Europe’s fiscal woes worsen and governments are pressured to curb budget deficits that may push the global economy back into recession. " The "pressuring" comes from deficit hawks who - in my humble opinion - just don't understand that getting the economy going again with LOTS of jobs is the only way to start reducing the national...

THE JOY OF PUBLICATION II I said it before; I'll say it again. There is something special about seeing one's letter in a paper. This one is in the April 21, 2010 The Independent one of our East Mountain weeklies. The publisher Wally Gordon interviewed three of the local "Tea Party" organizers after a small rally. He used "Passion" in his headline. It was a good piece, quite fair, and used many quotes from the three ladies. One of them, a Mrs. Cooper, said she "didn't believe in health insurance, didn't have it and wouldn't use it if she did." She also said "death panels" were in the health care reform law. I was moved to write a letter. (You probably have to click it to read it.) I even got a "fan" call from a guy happy to see another liberal in the East Mountains.

Singapore Moving to Dominate the Water Biz There's wind power (China & Germany in the lead), geothermal (Iceland in the lead), Ocean wave power (Britain, Australia & Scotland in the lead), solar power (China & Germany leading) ... WAIT! Where's the U.S.A. in this renewable energy list? In what is clearly a big part of the future of the world energy budget, we are slow getting off the starting line. We invent and innovate and engineer really well, but when it comes to actually manufacturing in this field, we simply are not living up to our own (and the world's) expectations. Then there's WATER. Some say it will soon be more valuable than oil. Potable water is already one of the great shortages in the world. Even in rich America, fresh water is in precipitous decline. So another big part of the future is processing water. "Treating" water: Cleaning it up, desalinizing it, recycling it . Again, the leading countries in this vital field ...

I Admit It… I’VE TRADED OPTIONS Therefore I’m the worst kind of gambler . Now, before I get into excessive breast beating and teeth gnashing, let’s face it, EVERYONE WHO “INVESTS” IN STOCKS is gambling. That money you put in General Electric or General Motors or General Mills, etc. does NOT go to those companies. It goes to whoever sold that stock, plus a slice of it goes to the brokerages involved. Typically, not a penny goes to the company on the stock certificate. The companies don’t do more R&D, buy more equipment or hire more people because you “invested” in them. So you are not investing in American industry, you are just gambling that some other sucker will pay you more for your stock than you paid. Or – more rarely – that the company represented by the stock will dole out some of its profits as dividends to you as a stockholder. We all believe that buying stock is better than playing roulette because we make more i...

Wrongo, Coast Guard See below, "Some Good News" where I blithely accepted a Friday Coast Guard evaluation that there was no more leakage from the big BP rig that blew up, burned an sank in The Gulf. That's what I get for being such an optimist. Here's the current state of things from the A.P. By CAIN BURDEAU The Associated Press Sunday, April 25, 2010; 9:43 PM NEW ORLEANS -- It could take hours or it could take months to stop a 42,000-gallon-a-day oil leak polluting the Gulf of Mexico at the site of a wrecked drilling platform. Whether the environmental threat grows many times bigger depends on whether the oil company can turn the well completely off. Crews are using robot submarines to activate valves at the well head in hopes of cutting off the leak, which threatens the Gulf Coast's fragile ecosystem of shrimp, fish, birds and coral. If the effort fails, they'll have to start drilling again. Dang.