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World's Most Complete Map

BBC Geographical Science -- The most complete terrain map of the Earth's surface has been published. The data, comprising 1.3 million images, come from a collaboration between the US space agency Nasa and the Japanese trade ministry. The images were taken by Japan's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (Aster) aboard the Terra satellite. The resulting Global Digital Elevation Map covers 99% of the Earth's surface, and will be free to download and use. The Terra satellite, dedicated to Earth monitoring missions, has shed light on issues ranging from algal blooms to volcano eruptions. For the Aster measurements, local elevation was mapped with each point just 30m apart. "This is the most complete, consistent global digital elevation data yet made available to the world," said Woody Turner, Nasa programme scientist on the Aster mission. (06/30/09)

India Facing Drought

BBC Weather Science -- A heat wave is sweeping the country and rains are delayed in many parts. Rains usually last from June to September. "It [the monsoon] is late," federal minister Prithviraj Chavan told reporters. North-west India appeared to be worst affected by the slow rains with only 81% rains forecast. Monsoon rains are critical to India's farm prospects, which account for a sixth of economic output. Up to 70% of Indians are dependent on farm incomes, and about 60% of India's farms depend on rains. Irrigation networks are dismissed by critics as inadequate. The summer rains are crucial to crops such as rice, soybean, sugarcane and cotton. ... "Praying for rain, bracing for worst" headlined the Hindustan Times on its front page on Wednesday. The newspaper said that in at least eight states, monsoon rains so far had been 60 to 90% below normal. "There is concern but no worry as yet. There is still time," Farm Secretary T Nanda Kumar told the newspaper. One analyst said delay in the rains in some parts of India could hit economic growth. "Delay in monsoon will play the spoilsport and may hit GDP by at least 1 to 1.5 percentage points," stockbroker VK Sharma, told the Reuters news agency. Economists agree that the delay will cause further stress in a country where food prices are already high. (06/25/09)

Creative Genius 50,000 Years Ago?

BBC Archaeological Science -- Scientists in Germany have published details of flutes dating back to the time that modern humans began colonising Europe, 35,000 years ago. The flutes are the oldest musical instruments found to date. The researchers say in the journal Nature that music was widespread in pre-historic times. Music, they suggest, may have been one of a suite of behaviours displayed by our own species which helped give them an edge over the Neanderthals. The team from Tubingen University have published details of three flutes found in the Hohle Fels cavern in southwest Germany. The cavern is already well known as a site for signs of early human efforts; in May, members of the same team unveiled a Hohle Fels find that could be the world's oldest Venus figure. The most well-preserved of the flutes is made from a vulture's wing bone, measuring 20cm long with five finger holes and two "V"-shaped notches on one end of the instrument into which the researchers assume the player blew. The archaeologists also found fragments of two other flutes carved from ivory that they believe was taken from the tusks of mammoths. The find brings the total number of flutes discovered from this era to eight, four made from mammoth ivory and four made from bird bones. According to Professor Nicholas Conard of Tubingen University, this suggests that the playing of music was common as far back as 40,000 years ago when modern humans spread across Europe. "It's becoming increasingly clear that music was part of day-to-day life. Music was used in many kinds of social contexts: possibly religious, possibly recreational - much like we use music today in many kinds of settings." ... Professor Chris Stringer, a human origins researcher at the Natural History Museum in London comments: "These flutes provide yet more evidence of the sophistication of the people that lived at that time and the probable behavioural and cognitive gulf between them and Neanderthals. I think the occurrence of these flutes and animal and human figurines about 40,000 years ago implies that the traditions that produced them must go back even further in the evolutionary history of modern humans - perhaps even into Africa more than 50,000 years ago. (06/25/09)

Fear for a Lost Decade

John Mauldin in his latest issue of Outside the Box writes: What are we to make of the prospects for recovery over the next decade? Not much, if we listen to Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton. He suggests that the developed world could be entering a lost decade, just like Japan after their crash. Let me quickly point out that I routinely disagree with Krugman on a large number of issues. And I usually know why I disagree and believe his policy suggestions are wrong. That being said, it is always important to occasionally look at ideas and thinkers that we may not always agree with. Krugman certainly qualifies on that front for me. However, it must be admitted that he is a very smart man. Further, his thinking is important, because it somewhat reflects the thinking of that part of the establishment that is in charge of the Fed and the Treasury. And while we are not getting gloomy long-term forecasts from either the Fed or the Treasury, I find it remarkable that Krugman is less sanguine than his peers. And there is much (certainly not all!) within this interview that I find myself in surprising agreement with. This one made me think as I read and reread it. If he is correct, the rosy recovery assumptions built into the already bloated budget projections are going to be far too optimistic, not just for the US, but throughout Europe as well. Krugman is interviewed very capably by Will Hutton, a veteran writer and economist for The Guardian. ... Will Hutton: You are warning that what happened to Japan could happen to the whole world. Japan’s GDP at the end of this year will be no higher than it was in 1992 — 17 lost years. You are saying that this is an ongoing risk, certainly for the North Atlantic economy – – maybe the world economy. Paul Krugman: Yes. It’s not that the risk of the Japan syndrome has receded very much. The risk of a full, all-out Great Depression – – utter collapse of everything – – has receded a lot in the past few months. But this first year of crisis has been far worse than anything that happened in Japan during the last decade, so in some sense we already have much worse than anything the Japanese went through. The risk for long stagnation is really high. WH: So what is the heart of your pessimism? The bust banking system? A critic would say: “Hold on, Paul Krugman. Japan is a special case. It had an overblown export sector that had become too large for an American market it had saturated. The yen was very, very overvalued. And this interacted with a credit crunch and bust banking system. Its policy response was consistently behind the curve. That’s not the story of the United States or the United Kingdom.” PK: The thing about Japan, as with all of these cases, is how much people claim to know what happened, without having any evidence. What we do know is that recessions normally end everywhere because the monetary authority cuts interest rates a lot, and that gets things moving. And what we know in Japan was that eventually they cut their interest rates to zero and that wasn’t enough. And, so far, although we made the cuts faster than they did and cut them all the way to zero, it isn’t enough. We’ve hit that lower bound the same as they did. Now, everything after that is more or less speculation. For example, were the problems with the Japanese banks the core problem? There are some stories about credit rationing, but they are not overwhelming. Certainly, when we look at the Japanese recovery, there was not a great surge of business investment. There was primarily a surge of exports. But was fixing the banks central to export growth? In their case, the problems had a lot to do with demography. That made them a natural capital exporter, from older savers, and also made it harder for them to have enough demand. They also had one hell of a bubble in the 1980s and the wreckage left behind by that bubble – – in their case a highly leveraged corporate sector – – was and is a drag on the economy. The size of the shock to our systems is going to be much bigger than what happened to Japan in the 1990s. They never had a freefall in their economy – – a period when GDP declined by 3%, 4%. It is by no means clear that the underlying differences in the structure of the situation are significant. What we do know is that the zero bound is real. We know that there are situations in which ordinary monetary policy loses all traction. And we know that we’re in one now. (06/17/09)

Out of the Ashes

Ellen Brown writes: To put our new car company American Motors (formerly General Motors) to good use, we just need to own a bank. The federal government could create its own credit with its own government-owned lending facility, on the model of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation used by President Roosevelt to fund the New Deal. But instead of merely recycling borrowed money as Roosevelt did, the new facility could actually create credit on its books. Its capital base could be leveraged into many times that sum in loans, in the same way that private banks routinely create money (or “credit”) today. Assuming a reserve requirement of 10%, if the $300 billion or so that remains of the TARP money were deposited in the new bank, this money could be leveraged into $3 trillion in loans. If the money were counted as capital, at an 8% capital requirement it could become $3.75 trillion in loans, or 12.5 times the original sum. Indeed, it is the sovereign right of governments to create the national money supply, but few governments exercise that right today. The only money the U.S. government now issues are coins, which compose only about one ten-thousandth of the U.S. M3 money supply. The rest is created by private banking institutions when they make loans. This includes the privately-owned Federal Reserve, which creates Federal Reserve Notes (dollar bills) and lends them to the government and to commercial banks. Federal Reserve Notes compose only 3% of the money supply. All of the rest consists merely of credit created on the books of private banks. Many authorities have attested that banks simply create the money they lend as accounting entries on their books. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas states on its website: “Banks actually create money when they lend it. Here’s how it works: Most of a bank’s loans are made to its own customers and are deposited in their checking accounts. Because the loan becomes a new deposit, just like a paycheck does, the bank … holds a small percentage of that new amount in reserve and again lends the remainder to someone else, repeating the money-creation process many times.” This was confirmed recently by President Obama himself. In a speech at Georgetown University on April 14, he said: “[A]lthough there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of banks—‘where’s our bailout?’ they ask—the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to families and businesses, a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth.” The money generated by banks through the multiplier effect comes at a heavy cost in interest. One advantage of a government-owned bank is that it could fund public projects interest-free or nearly interest-free, cutting production costs dramatically. Interest comprises as much as 77% of the cost of goods and services, such as public housing, that require large amounts of capital. The cost of interest is lower for labor-based services such as garbage collection, for which it makes up only about 12% of the cost. Averaging them all together, the overall cost of interest has been estimated to be about half the cost of everything we buy. If money for infrastructure development were issued interest-free, projects currently considered unsustainable because of the burden of interest could become not only self-sustaining but actually profitable for the government. (06/16/09)

A Real Solution for California

James Howard Kunstler writes: This week's New York Times Sunday Magazine lead article was about California's Proposed High-speed Rail Project.  The article began with a description of California's current rail service between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. A commission of nine-year-olds in a place like Germany could run a better system, of course. It's never on schedule. The equipment breaks down incessantly. A substantial leg of the trip requires a transfer to a bus (along with everybody's luggage) with no working toilet.  You get the picture: Kazakhstan without the basic competence. The proposed solution to this is the most expensive public works program in the history of the world, at a time when both the state of California and the US federal government are effectively bankrupt.  By the way, I wouldn't argue that California shouldn't have high-speed rail. It might have been nice if, say, in the late 20th century, some far-seeing governor had noticed what was going on in France, Germany, and Spain but, alas....  It would have been nice, too, if the doltish George W. Bush, when addressing extreme airport congestion in 2003, had considered serious upgrades in normal train service between the many US cities 500 miles or so apart. The idea never entered his walnut brain. The sad truth is it's too late now.  But the additional sad truth, at this point, is that Californians (and US public in general) would benefit tremendously from normal rail service on a par with the standards of 1927, when speeds of 100 miles-per-hour were common and the trains ran absolutely on time (and frequently, too) without computers (imagine that !). The tracks are still there, waiting to be fixed. ... The fact that it is not even considered by the editors of The New York Times, not to mention the governor of California, the President of the United States, and all the agency heads and departmental chiefs and think tank gurus and university engineering professors, is something that will have historians of the future rolling their eyes.  But for the moment all it shows is that we are collectively too stupid to survive as an advanced society. (06/16/09)

IN TRANSITION: A Sneak Movie Preview

TransitionCulture.org -- Rob Hopkins writes: We live at a fascinating point in history. The convergence of challenges, most particularly global warming and peak oil, have brought us to a point where we are profoundly challenged to act. We are surrounded by what poet Gary Snyder, in his classic poem For the Children called “The rising hills, the slopes, of statistics” and by individuals telling us that this means the end, that we have gone too far, that it is inevitable that life as we know it will collapse catastrophically and very soon. Yet, at the same time, something very powerful is stirring and is taking root the world over. People are choosing life and are manifesting that in their lives and their communities. People are starting to see peak oil as the Great Opportunity, the chance to build the world they always dreamt of. As one man said during a group discussion at the end of a screening of The End of Suburbia that I organised in Clonakilty, “we’ve just seen that the end of the Oil Age will bring about the collapse of industrial society … bring it on!”. The scale of the challenge is huge, and the obstacles are plenty, but there is an emerging energy to succeed, a sense of quickening and an exhilaration in talking and listening to each other once again, to visioning what we want and then rolling up our sleeves and starting to co-create it. This is not a denial of the scale of the challenges we face, rather a practical and instinctual response to it. In towns and cities all over the world people are asking each other “what can we do about this?” What fascinates me, and what I plan to explore in this website, is the emerging culture that underpins this work. We are communities, a society, a world in transition, and to do that we need a culture of transition, but also the tools for manifesting it. The term ‘transition culture’ originated with Louise Rooney who formulated the term ‘Transition Design’ to best describe the work she and Catherine Dunne have undertaken in trying to drive the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan forward (above picture show, left to right, Louise Rooney, Catherine Dunne and myself). I love the term, and see the work I am doing as looking into a slightly different aspect of transitions, that of how one really roots it in a culture and creates a ‘culture of transition’. So, credit where credit’s due, collectively we see our various works as moving beyond ‘environmental’, ’sustainable’, ‘eco’ this or that. This is about transition to where we want to get to, how do we do it and what might it look like. ... As a first exploration of these ideas a new film has been created titled In Transition. It is now available for viewing, but just for the next 72 hours.  The version being screened is not the final version, it still has a sequence to add and some tidying up to do, but it is almost there. Please enjoy the sneak preview! (06/13/09)

Understanding H1N1 Influenza

BBC Medical Science -- Fergus Walsh reports: Do you want to avoid catching H1N1 swine flu? ... You could find a remote, uninhabited island until a vaccine is created. I think that's going a bit far. But the best defence is age. So far, the over-65s has been the group least likely to catch the infection. This has led to me receiving cheery comments from retired people saying that it's the first time in some while that they've felt glad to be old. So why aren't they falling ill? The likeliest explanation is that they have built up immunity over years of exposure to other H1N1 flu viruses. That might also help to explain why most other people get a mild infection. But I'm still puzzled as to why 30- to 50-year-olds are suffering a disproportionate amount of severe illness. In fact, I'm a bit puzzled as to exactly which age groups - under the age of 65 - are most at risk of severe illness. In her speech in Geneva yesterday, Margaret Chan, the WHO director-general, had this to say: "We know that the novel H1N1 virus preferentially infects younger people. In nearly all areas with large and sustained outbreaks, the majority of cases have occurred in people under the age of 25 years. "In some of these countries, around 2% of cases have developed severe illness, often with very rapid progression to life-threatening pneumonia. Most cases of severe and fatal infections have been in adults between the ages of 30 and 50 years. This pattern is significantly different from that seen during epidemics of seasonal influenza, when most deaths occur in frail elderly people. Many, though not all, severe cases have occurred in people with underlying chronic conditions. "Based on limited, preliminary data, conditions most frequently seen include respiratory diseases, notably asthma, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, and obesity. "At the same time, it is important to note that around one third to half of the severe and fatal infections are occurring in previously healthy young and middle-aged people. Without question, pregnant women are at increased risk of complications. This heightened risk takes on added importance for a virus, like this one, that preferentially infects younger age groups." (06/12/09)

Hidden Forrest Reveals 10 New Species!

BBC Rain Forest Science -- Five years ago, few knew there was a forest here. Its discovery by the scientific community is down to a very 21st-Century research tool. "I used Google Earth to locate all the mountains over 1,500m that were closest to Mount Mulanje in Southern Malawi," Dr Julian Bayliss, head of the cross-border conservation project, told me. "Mount Mabu was selected through Google Earth as one of these sights." Dr Bayliss's project, funded through a British scheme called the Darwin Initiative, looked for similarities between different patches of medium altitude rainforest. When images of Mount Mabu were analysed, it became clear that there was a large patch of dark green of which there was no official record. A quickly arranged visit to northern Mozambique confirmed what Dr Bayliss had suspected. "It was at that stage I realised that we were dealing with what looks like the biggest rainforest in Southern Africa," he said. Travelling with Dr Bayliss and a team of scientists on to Mabu, I saw what had so excited them. Unlike most of the forests in southern Africa there was no sign of any logging or burning having taken place. The 7,000 hectares of Mount Mabu are in pristine condition. "This is an island of evergreen forest in a sea of savannah," Professor Branch said. What that means is that the animals inside Mabu have had very little interaction with other groups of forest dwellers. ... That now translates into many of the species being new to science. Declaring a new species is a process fraught with the fear of being proved wrong. But Mabu's scientists are quietly confident that, in the last year, they have found more than 10 new species. "Whatever we see we pick up, and there's a high probability that it's going to be a new species," Dr Bayliss said. His own specific passion is butterflies. I watched his eclectic team, which included a 75-year-old enthusiast, as they scoured the forest canopy for new discoveries. They weren't disappointed. Four new butterflies are set to be confirmed, with one of them likely to bear Dr Bayliss's name. (06/12/09)

"Thirteen to Party in Space"

BBC Space Science -- Seven shuttle astronauts (photo to the right) will blast off from Florida on Saturday to join up with six colleagues already on the International Space Station (ISS). The orbiting platform has never before had so many individuals moving around it at the same time. The Endeavour ship is scheduled to lift off at 0717 local time (1117 GMT). The flight-time to the ISS is just three days. The union some 350km above the planet will be a significant moment for the space station project as it nears the end of its construction phase. The 13 spacefarers represent all the major station partners, with seven from the US, two each from Russia and Canada, and one each from Europe and Japan. Their ages range from 37 to 55; all but one are men. Although 13 people have been in space at the same time once before, in 1995, they were not all in the same place. "I don't know what it's going to be like," said Endeavour commander Mark Polansky, a veteran of two prior spaceflights. "We know it's going to be challenging with 13 people aboard." His ship is visiting the station to deliver the final components of Japan's Kibo laboratory. During five spacewalks, an external platform will be added to the lab which will enable those experiments to be performed that require materials to be exposed to the harsh environment of space. Endeavour astronauts also have to fit equipment to the exterior of the platform such as batteries and a spare space-to-ground antenna. In addition, Endeavour will deliver a new crew member (Tim Kopra) to the ISS and bring back another (Koichi Wakata) who has lived aboard the platform for more than three months. Endeavour is making the 127th space shuttle flight, and the 29th to the station. Seven more flights to the station remain before the shuttles retire in 2010. (06/12/09)

Wish I Was There !

New York Times Science -- (link) The second annual World Science Festival, a five-day extravaganza of performances, debates, celebrations and demonstrations, including an all-day street fair on Sunday in Washington Square Park, began with a star-studded gala tribute to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson at Lincoln Center Wednesday night. ... Photo: Yo-Yo Ma, with giant ants, honoring the biologist Edward O. Wilson, on backdrop, at Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday. ... Over the next three days the curious will have to make painful choices: attend an investigation of the effects of music on the brain with a performance by Bobby McFerrin, or join a quest for a long-lost mural by Leonardo Da Vinci at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Learn about the science behind “Battlestar Galactica” with actors from the show, or head to one of various panels of scientists and philosophers arguing about free will, alternate universes, science and religion, time and what it means to be human? On Saturday there’s a chance to play naturalist, scouring a pair of New York parks under professional guidance in what Dr. Wilson calls a “BioBlitz” for flora, fauna and “all things crawly.” On Sunday you can get your hands in a variety of experiments at the street fair, including a “CSI”-style crime scene. The festival is the brainchild of Brian Greene, a Columbia University physicist and mathematician and best-selling author, and his wife, Tracy Day, a former producer for ABC. They say they thought of the project after attending a science festival in Genoa, Italy, and being impressed by seeing science bubbling through the streets and cafes. The idea is to mix up art, theater and music with the inevitable talking heads and professional interlocutors like Charlie Rose or Alan Alda, who can keep the discussion moving and down to earth, in order to entice an audience that didn’t know it was interested in science. Ms. Day likes to describe the strategy this way: “Bring them in for the art and have them leave with science.” Last year more than 100,000 people stood in block-long lines to watch dancers reinterpret string theory, Oliver Sacks interpret his own failing eyesight, scientists debate quantum mechanics and what it means to be human. There were about 46 events, including a daylong street fair in Washington Square Park. In the end everything sold out, the organizers said. “We learned that there is an untapped hunger in the public for a way into science.” said Dr. Greene, who recently sat down with Mr. Alda (who was accompanied by a ghost Twitterer), to discuss the festival. (06/12/09)

Why we must create a New Economy

David Korten writes: Wall Street is bankrupt. Instead of trying to save it, we can build a new economy that puts money and business in the service of people and the planet—not the other way around. Whether it was divine providence or just good luck, we should give thanks that financial collapse hit us before the worst of global warming and peak oil. As challenging as the economic meltdown may be, it buys time to build a new economy that serves life rather than money. It lays bare the fact that the existing financial system has brought our way of life and the natural systems on which we depend to the brink of collapse. This wake-up call is inspiring unprecedented numbers of people to take action to bring forth the culture and institutions of a new economy that can serve us and sustain our living planet for generations into the future. The world of financial stability, environmental sustainability, economic justice, and peace that most psychologically healthy people want is possible if we replace a defective operating system that values only money, seeks to monetize every relationship, and pits each person in a competition with every other for dominance. From Economic Power to Basket Case -- Not long ago, the news was filled with stories of how Wall Street’s money masters had discovered the secrets of creating limitless wealth through exotic financial maneuvers that eliminated both risk and the burden of producing anything of real value. In an audacious social engineering experiment, corporate interests drove a public policy shift that made finance the leading sector of the U.S. economy and the concentration of private wealth the leading economic priority. Corporate interests drove a policy agenda that rolled back taxes on high incomes, gave tax preference to income from financial speculation over income from productive work, cut back social safety nets, drove down wages, privatized public assets, outsourced jobs and manufacturing capacity, and allowed public infrastructure to deteriorate. They envisioned a world in which the United States would dominate the global economy by specializing in the creation of money and the marketing and consumption of goods produced by others. As a result, manufacturing fell from 27 percent of U.S. gross domestic product in 1950 to 12 percent in 2005, while financial services grew from 11 percent to 20 percent. From 1980 to 2005, the highest-earning 1 percent of the U.S. population increased its share of taxable income from 9 percent to 19 percent, with most of the gain going to the top one-tenth of 1 percent. The country became a net importer, with a persistent annual trade deficit of more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars financed by rising foreign debt. Wall Street insiders congratulated themselves on their financial genius even as they turned the United States into a national economic basket case and set the stage for global financial collapse. All the reports of financial genius masked the fact that a phantom-wealth economy is unsustainable. Illusory assets based on financial bubbles, abuse of the power of banks to create credit (money) from nothing, corporate asset stripping, baseless credit ratings, and creative accounting led to financial, social, and environmental breakdown. The system suppressed the wages of the majority while continuously cajoling them to buy more than they could afford using debt that they had no means to repay. A Defective Operating System -- The operating system of our phantom-wealth economy was written by and for Wall Street interests for the sole purpose of making more money for people who have money. It makes cheap money readily available to speculators engaged in inflating financial bubbles and financing other predatory money scams. It makes money limited and expensive to those engaged in producing real wealth—life, and the things that sustain life—and pushes the productive members of society into indebtedness to those who produce nothing at all. Money, the ultimate object of worship among modern humans, is the most mysterious of human artifacts: a magic number with no meaning or existence outside the human mind. Yet it has become the ultimate arbiter of life—deciding who will live in grand opulence in the midst of scarcity and who will die of hunger in the midst of plenty. The monetization of relationships—replacing mutual caring with money as the primary medium of exchange—accelerated after World War II when growth in Gross National Product, essentially growth in monetized relationships, became the standard for evaluating economic performance. The work of the mother who cares for her child solely out of love counts for nothing. By contrast, the mother who leaves her child unattended to accept pay for tending the child of her neighbor suddenly becomes “economically productive.” The result is a public policy bias in favor of monetizing relationships to create phantom wealth—money—at the expense of real wealth. (06/08/09)

Abandoning Growth

Herman Daly writes: A steady-state economy is incompatible with continuous growth—either positive or negative growth. The goal of a steady state is to sustain a constant, sufficient stock of real wealth and people for a long time. A downward spiral of negative growth, a depression such as we are entering now, is a failed growth economy, not a steady-state economy. Halting an accelerating downward spiral is necessary, but is not the same thing as resuming continuous positive growth. The growth economy now fails in two ways: (1) positive growth becomes uneconomic in our full-world economy; (2) negative growth, resulting from the bursting of financial bubbles inflated beyond physical limits, though temporarily necessary, soon becomes self-destructive. That leaves a non-growing or steady-state economy as the only long run alternative. The level of physical wealth that the biosphere can sustain in a steady state may well be below the present level. The fact that recent efforts at growth have resulted mainly in bubbles suggests that this is so. Nevertheless, current policies all aim for the full re-establishment of the growth economy. No one denies that our problems would be easier to solve if we were richer. The question is, does growth any longer make us richer, or is it now making us poorer? I will spend a few more minutes cursing the darkness of growth, but will then try to light ten little candles along the path to a steady state. Some advise me to forget the darkness and focus on the policy candles. But I find that without a dark background the light of my little candles is not visible in the false dawn projected by the economists, whose campaigning optimism never gives hope a chance to emerge from the shadows. We have many problems (poverty, unemployment, environmental destruction, budget deficit, trade deficit, bailouts, bankruptcy, foreclosures, etc.), but apparently only one solution: economic growth, or as the pundits now like to say, “to grow the economy”-- as if it were a potted plant with healing leaves, like aloe vera or marijuana. But let us stop right there and ask two questions that all students should put to their economics professors. First, there is a deep theorem in mathematics that says when something grows it gets bigger! So, when the economy grows it too gets bigger. How big can the economy be, Professor? How big is it now? How big should it be? Have economists ever considered these questions? And most pointedly, what makes them think that growth (i.e., physical expansion of the economic subsystem into the finite containing biosphere), is not already increasing environmental and social costs faster than production benefits, thereby becoming uneconomic growth, making us poorer, not richer? After all, real GDP, the measure of “economic” growth so-called, does not separate costs from benefits, but conflates them as “economic” activity. How would we know when growth became uneconomic? Remedial and defensive activity becomes ever greater as we grow from an “empty-world” to a “full-world” economy, characterized by congestion, interference, displacement, depletion and pollution. The defensive expenditures induced by these negatives are all added to GDP, not subtracted. Be prepared, students, for some hand waving, throat clearing, and subject changing. But don’t be bluffed. Second question; do you then, Professor, see growth as a continuing process, desirable in itself-- or as a temporary process required to reach a sufficient level of wealth which would thereafter be maintained more or less in a steady state? At least 99% of modern neoclassical economists hold the growth forever view. We have to go back to John Stuart Mill and the earlier Classical Economists to find serious treatment of the idea of a non-growing economy, the Stationary State. What makes modern economists so sure that the Classical Economists were wrong? Just dropping history of economic thought from the curriculum is not a refutation! (06/08/09)

An Unusual Visualization of Oil Prices

Timothy Wilken writes: Visualizing Economics is a website created and presented by Economist-Artist Catherine Mulbrandon. She describes herself and her passion like this: I am an interaction designer with several years of experience designing web applications in the finance and education industries. In 1971, I was born in Washington DC. In 1993, I graduated with an AB in Economics from the University of Chicago. During the next eight years, I worked for a financial consulting firm where I learned about the financial markets. In 2004, I completed the 2 year Master's program in Interaction Design at Carnegie Mellon, where I explored information and interaction design in both print and digital pieces. In my Master's thesis, I created a series of posters presenting data about the United States' economy. Since then I have working as an interaction designer a discount brokerage firm and and software for public school districts. In 2006, I created a site called VISUALIZING ECONOMICS. I believe design can contribute to public debates by creating information-rich, easy-to-understand graphics revealing the meaning of data without hiding its complexity. While the Internet allows even greater access to economic data than ever before, much of it is hidden in databases, spreadsheets and academic papers. At the same time, the discussion of economics in the media can be confusing and contradictory. Often numbers are quoted out of context, while political agendas distort the presentation of economic data. The goal of this site is to help people who are interested in the subject of economics (but are not experts) to understand and participate in public discussions about economics through data visualizations. At Catherine's website you will find information about the US and World economy presented through graphs, charts and maps. You can contact her at: catherine[at]visualizingeconomics.com This unique website presents some of today's most complex economic information in striking and usually much easier to understand images. A free subscription is also available for bringing these amazing graphics to your email in-box. (06/08/09)

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

BBC Environment & Technology -- The world's first floating wind turbine is to be towed out to sea this weekend. Statoil's Alexandra Beck Gjorv told the BBC the technology, the Hywind, to be put off Norway's coast - "should help move offshore wind farms out of sight". And it could lead to offshore wind farms eventually being located many miles offshore, away from areas where they cause disruption, Ms Gjorv added. This would benefit military radar operations, the shipping industry, fisheries, bird life and tourism. "Taking wind turbines to sea presents new opportunities," said Ms Gjorv, of Statoil's new energy division. "The wind is stronger and more consistent [and] areas are large." Floating wind farms are set to be connected to mainland grids via cables across the seabed. The longer the cable, the more expensive it is, so the distance from land is not set to become unlimited, explained Ms Gjorv. The Hywind, a 2.3 megawatt (MW) wind turbine built by Siemens, combines technologies from both the wind farming industry and the oil and gas sectors, and will be tested off the coast of Norway for two years. In a similar way to how large parts of icebergs are hidden below the sea surface, the turbine has a 100 metre draft that is anchored to the seabed with cables, that can be up to 700 metres long. ... Floating wind farms could later be established off both coasts of North America and off the Iberian peninsula and the coasts of Norway and the United Kingdom, she said. These farms could provide an additional source of energy for countries that have run out of space for their onshore wind farms, or where there is not enough wind on land, Ms Gjorv added. (06/08/09)

Protecting the Hangul Red Deer of Kasmir

BBC Animal Extinction Watch -- The hangul - a sub-species of red deer found only in Indian-administered Kashmir - appears to be making a comeback. The latest census, conducted in March, puts the raw count of the endangered animal at 175. The increase in numbers may be nominal but wildlife authorities say it's a sign of hope. The hangul population started growing before the outbreak of armed conflict in the state two decades ago. Wildlife officials say at that time there were up to 800 in Dachigam National Park in the outskirts of Srinagar. People living in neighbourhoods outside the park say the hangul then was so commonplace that it even used to visit their mustard fields and vegetable gardens, damaging crops as it did so. ... Mohammad Qasim Wani, now aged about 90 and a retired wildlife official, says there were at least 3,000 hangul in the Kashmir area during the reign of the last monarch more than 60 years ago. "The hangul was widely distributed. I saw it in Lolab, Kupwara, Gurez, Teetwal, Uri, Kulgam, Pahalgam and other places. I saw herds of hangul as large as 200 and at times even 500. Today, when I think of the hangul, I cry." ... The wildlife warden for central Kashmir, Rashid Naqash, says the latest census has shown an improvement in the number of male hangul which promises better prospects for mating. He says the female-fawn ratio has improved too - boding well for a sustained population growth. The wildlife department is all set to start work on a $4.68m (£2.92m) plan to protect and promote the hangul. Mr Qasim says the hangul became vulnerable after the fall of the monarchy in 1947. "Bureaucrats indulged in wanton killing of the hangul for sport." Besides poaching, the hangul faced a threat to its existence from human encroachments on forestry which led to the fragmentation of its habitat. The five-year project includes a survey and census of the creature and its habitat along with similar studies of the leopard and black bear. The project will use the latest wild animal photograph technology, including the use of satellite imageries and geographical information systems. As part of the project, the hangul's habitat will be improved through reforestration, soil and water conservation, pasture development, fire protection measures and the construction of a carnivore proof enclosure. It will also include infrastructure development to stop poaching and grazing. The co-operation of local communities will be sought through awareness programmes. Wildlife officials say that credit for the increase of hanguls - even if modest - in the recent census goes to local communities who persuaded the bakarwals not to graze their sheep and cattle in designated areas. (06/08/09)

Understanding the Lord's Prayer

Writing in 1934 Emmet Fox explained: The Lord's Prayer is the most important of all the Christian documents. It was carefully constructed by Jesus with certain very clear ends in view. That is why, of all his teachings, it is by far the best known, and the most often quoted. It is, indeed, the one common denominator of all the Christian churches. Every one of them, without exception, uses the Lord's Prayer; it is perhaps the only ground upon which they all meet. Every Christian child is taught the Lord's Prayer, and any Christian who prays at all says it almost every day. Its actual use probably exceeds that of all other prayers put together. Undoubtedly everyone who is seeking to follow along the Way that Jesus led, should make a point of using the Lord's Prayer, and using it intelligently, every day. In order to do this, we should understand that the Prayer is a carefully constructed organic whole. Many people rattle through it like parrots, forgetful of the warning that Jesus gave us against vain repetions, and, of course, no one derives any profit from that sort of thing. The Great Prayer is a compact formula for the development of the soul. It is designed with the utmost care for the specific purpose; so that those who use it regularly, with understanding, will experience a real change of soul. The only progress is this change, which is what the Bible calls being born again. It is the change of soul that matters. The mere acquisition of fresh knowledge received intellectually makes no change in the soul. The Lord's Prayer is especially designed to bring this change about, and when it is regularly used it invariably does so. The more one analyzes the Lord's Prayer, the more wonderful is its construction seen to be. It meets everyone's need just at his own level. It not only provides a rapid spiritual development for those who are sufficiently advanced to be ready, but in its superficial meaning it supplies the more simpleminded and even the more materially-minded people with just what they need at the moment, if they use the Prayer sincerely. The greatest of all prayers was designed with still another purpose in view, quite as important as either of the others. Jesus foresaw that, as centuries went by, his simple, primitive teaching would gradually become overlain by all sorts of external things which really have nothing whatever to do with it. He foresaw that men who had never known him, relying, quite sincerely, no doubt, upon their own limited intellects, would build up theologies and doctrinal systems, obscuring the direct simplicity of the spiritual message, and actually erecting a wall between God and man. He designed his Prayer in such a way that it would pass safely through those ages without being tampered with. He arranged it with consummate skill, so that it could not be twisted or distorted, or adapted to any man-made system; so that, in fact, it would carry the whole Christ Message within it and yet not have anything on the surface to attract the attention of the restless, managing type of person. So it has turned out that, through all the changes and chances of Christian history, this Prayer has come through to us uncorrupted and unspoiled. The first thing that we notice is that the Prayer naturally falls into seven clauses. This is very characteristic of the Oriental tradition. Seven symbolizes individual soul, just as the number twelve in the same convention stands for corporate completeness. In practical use, we often find an eighth clause added - "Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory" - but this, though in itself an excellent affirmation, is not really a part of the Prayer. The seven clauses are put together with the utmost care, in perfect order and sequence, and they contain everything that is necessary for the nourishment of the soul. (06/06/09)

To Make a New Beginning

Barack Obama speaking in Cairo, Egypt: I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.  Instead, they overlap, and share common principles -- principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. I do so recognizing that change cannot happen overnight.  I know there's been a lot of publicity about this speech, but no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust, nor can I answer in the time that I have this afternoon all the complex questions that brought us to this point.  But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors.  There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground.  As the Holy Koran tells us, "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth."  That is what I will try to do today -- to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart. Now part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience. I'm a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims.  As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk.  As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith. As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam.  It was Islam -- at places like Al-Azhar -- that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment.  It was innovation in Muslim communities -- it was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.  Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.  And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality. I also know that Islam has always been a part of America's story.  The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco.  In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President, John Adams, wrote, "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims."  And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States.  They have fought in our wars, they have served in our government, they have stood for civil rights, they have started businesses, they have taught at our universities, they've excelled in our sports arenas, they've won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch.  And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers -- Thomas Jefferson -- kept in his personal library. So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.  That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn't.  And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. ... I know there are many -- Muslim and non-Muslim -- who question whether we can forge this new beginning.  Some are eager to stoke the flames of division, and to stand in the way of progress.  Some suggest that it isn't worth the effort -- that we are fated to disagree, and civilizations are doomed to clash. Many more are simply skeptical that real change can occur.  There's so much fear, so much mistrust that has built up over the years.  But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward.  And I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith, in every country -- you, more than anyone, have the ability to reimagine the world, to remake this world. All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort -- a sustained effort -- to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings. It's easier to start wars than to end them.  It's easier to blame others than to look inward.  It's easier to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share.  But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path.  There's one rule that lies at the heart of every religion -- that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples -- a belief that isn't new; that isn't black or white or brown; that isn't Christian or Muslim or Jew.  It's a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the hearts of billions around the world.  It's a faith in other people, and it's what brought me here today. We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning, keeping in mind what has been written. The Holy Koran tells us:  "O mankind!  We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another." The Talmud tells us:  "The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace." The Holy Bible tells us:  "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." The people of the world can live together in peace.  We know that is God's vision.  Now that must be our work here on Earth. (06/04/09)

Curry Good for the Brain?

BBC Medical Science -- Eating a curry once or twice a week could help prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, a US researcher suggests. The key ingredient is curcumin, a component of the spice turmeric. Curcumin appears to prevent the spread of amyloid protein plaques - thought to cause dementia - in the brain. Amyloid plaques, along with tangles of nerve fibres, are thought to contribute to the degradation of the wiring in brain cells, eventually leading to symptoms of dementia. ... Professor Murali Doraiswamy, of Duke University in North Carolina, said there was evidence that people who eat a curry meal two or three times a week have a lower risk of dementia. He said researchers were testing the impact of higher doses - the equivalent of going on a curry spree for a week - to see if they could maximise the effect. Professor Doraiswamy told the meeting: "There is very solid evidence that curcumin binds to plaques, and basic research on animals engineered to produce human amyloid plaques has shown benefits. You can modify a mouse so that at about 12 months its brain is riddled with plaques. If you feed this rat a curcumin-rich diet it dissolves these plaques. The same diet prevented younger mice from forming new plaques. The next step is to test curcumin on human amyloid plaque formation using newer brain scans and there are plans for that." Professor Doraiswamy said a clinical trial was now underway at the University of California, Los Angeles, to test curcumin's effects in Alzheimer's patients. He said research had also examined turmeric's therapeutic potential for treating conditions such as cancer and arthritis. (06/04/09)

Improving Cellular Memory

BBC Medical Science -- A common anti-diabetes drug may boost the potency of vaccines against cancer, research suggests. Tests on mice found metformin, used for Type 2 diabetes, helps the body's T-cells work more effectively. These cells, the body's key defenders against disease, "remember" former infections or vaccinations, enabling them to fight subsequent illness. Writing in the journal Nature, a US team said metformin appeared to improve this important memory of disease. This ability to remember disease has been the subject of much research, but there has been little understanding of the cellular mechanisms behind it. The team from McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania used an experimental cancer vaccine and found that when administered in mice, the diabetes drug appeared to improve the strength of the inoculation. Several studies in recent years have shown that people with diabetes may be more likely to develop certain cancers, although the exact nature of the relationship is unclear. Type 2 diabetes is associated with extra weight for instance, as are certain types of cancer. But there also appear to be similarities between the basic chemical reactions which happen in the cells when affected by either of these diseases. "Many genes involved in diabetes regulation also play a role in cancer progression," said Dr Russell Jones of McGill's Goodman Cancer Centre, one of the report's author. "There is also a significant body of data suggesting that diabetics are more prone to certain cancers. However, our study is the first to suggest that by targeting the same metabolic pathways that play a role in diabetes, you can alter how well your immune system functions." This is turn could help the body fight cancer more effectively with a vaccine. (06/04/09)

Laughing Apes

BBC Animal Science -- Would you tickle a gorilla? New research has given credence to the idea that laughter evolved in a common ancestor of the great apes and humans. Researchers tickled 22 young apes and three humans and acoustically analysed the laughing sounds that resulted. Though the vocalisations varied, the team found that the patterns of changes fit with evolutionary splits in the human and ape family tree. The research in Current Biology also suggests that gorillas and bonobos have some control over their breathing. Primate researchers have long guessed that many of the social behaviours that are seen in humans have a basis in our primate lineage. Studies have noted that vocalisations that some apes make while being tickled are similar to those made when they are playing, and acoustically they share some characteristics with human laughter. "We have various findings showing that human laughter is deeply rooted in human biology, because, for example, it's present in various cultures, in deaf and blind children," explained Marina Davila-Ross of the University of Portsmouth, the lead author of the study. So there have been many claims that these vocalisations have a pre-human basis." To put the idea on a firmer footing, Dr Davila-Ross made more than 800 recordings of the tickle-induced laughter of the apes and infants. Many of the characteristics of the actual frequencies in the recordings - such as the central and peak frequencies, and the variability of the frequencies within each laugh - were similar across all the subjects. The differences among the subjects, however, showed how they may indicate a common ancestor. Chimpanzees and bonobos - our closest relatives of the group tended, like the humans, to have longer series of laughs, each made up of shorter calls. Another component is in the role that the voice plays in the sound of a laugh. "When humans laugh, they voice stable sounds: that means the vocal folds are moving in a very regular synchronised way," Dr Davila-Ross explained. "We found these acoustic properties also in bonobos." Orangutans, by comparison, had fewer "vibration regimes" - meaning they could get fewer tones from their vocal cords. Because the sounds of the most closely related apes matched most closely in the analysis of the laughter, the researchers believe the work is proof of laughter's shared evolutionary origin, followed by adaptation to its form in the species we see today. (06/04/09)

Take Back the Power to Create Money

Ellen Brown says: My proprosal to "Take Back the Power to Create Money from the Private Banking Industry" is now #6 overall on the President's brainstorming website, out of 1864 ideas submitted.  It's not too late to vote! Just click on the link below: TAKE BACK THE POWER TO CREATE MONEY FROM THE PRIVATE BANKING INDUSTRY Money in a government-owned bank could give us the best of both worlds. We could have all the credit-generating advantages of private banks, without the baggage cluttering up the books of the Wall Street giants, including bad derivatives bets, unmarketable collateralized debt obligations, mark to market accounting issues, oversized CEO salaries and bonuses, and shareholders expecting a sizeable cut of the profits. A state could deposit its vast revenues in its own state-owned bank and proceed to fan them into eight to 10 times their face value in loans. Not only would it have its own credit machine, but it would control the loan terms. The state could lend at ½% interest to itself and to municipal governments, rolling the loans over as needed until the revenues had been generated to pay them off. According to Professor Margrit Kennedy in her 1995 book Interest and Inflation-free Money, interest composes, on average, fully half the cost of every public project. Cutting costs by 50% could make currently-unsustainable projects such as low-cost housing, alternative energy development, and infrastructure construction not only sustainable but actually profitable for the government.  (06/03/09)

The Meadow Across the Creek

Thomas Berry writes: I was a young person then, some twelve years old. My family was moving from a more settled part of a Southern town out to the edge of town where the new house was still being built. The house, not yet finished, was situated on a slight incline. Down below was a small creek and there across the creek was a meadow. It was an early afternoon in May when I first looked down over the scene and saw the meadow. The field was covered with lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something, I know not what, that seems to explain my life at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember. It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in an otherwise clear sky. It was not something conscious that happened just then. I went on about my life as any young person might do. Perhaps it was not simply this moment that made such a deep impression upon me. Perhaps it was a sensitivity that was developed throughout my childhood. Yet, as the years pass, this moment returns to me, and whenever I think about my basic life attitude and the whole trend of my mind and the causes that I have given my efforts to, I seem to come back to this moment and the impact it has had on my feeling for what is real and worthwhile in life. This early experience, it seems, has become normative for me throughout the range of my thinking. Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation as well as in education and religion and whatever. That is good in economics that fosters the natural processes of this meadow. That is bad in economics that diminishes the capacity of this meadow to renew itself each spring and to provide a setting in which crickets can sing and birds can feed. Such meadows, I would later learn, are themselves in a continuing process of transformation. Yet these evolving biosystems deserve the opportunity to be themselves and to express their own inner qualities. As in economics so in jurisprudence and law and political affairs: That is good which recognizes the rights of this meadow and the creek and the woodlands beyond to exist and flourish in their ever-renewing seasonal expression even while larger processes shape the bioregion in the larger sequence of transformations. (06/02/09)

Good Health from Tomatoes

BBC Medical Science -- Scientists say a natural supplement made from tomatoes, taken daily, can stave off heart disease and strokes. The tomato pill contains an active ingredient from the Mediterranean diet - lycopene - that blocks "bad" LDL cholesterol that can clog the arteries. Ateronon, made by a biotechnology spin-out company of Cambridge University, is being launched as a dietary supplement and will be sold on the high street. Experts said more trials were needed to see how effective the treatment is. Preliminary trials involving around 150 people with heart disease indicate that Ateronon can reduce the oxidation of harmful fats in the blood to almost zero within eight weeks, a meeting of the British Cardiovascular Society will be told at Ateronon's launch on Monday. Neuroscientist Peter Kirkpatrick, who will lead a further research project at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge on behalf of Cambridge Theranostics Ltd, said the supplement could be much more effective than statin drugs that are currently used by doctors to treat high cholesterol. ... Lycopene is an antioxidant contained in the skin of tomatoes which gives them their red colour. But lycopene ingested in its natural form is poorly absorbed. Ateronon contains a refined, more readily absorbed version of lycopene that was originally developed by Nestle. Dr Peter Coleman of The Stroke Association said: "We know that diets rich in antioxidants are beneficial in reducing the plaque build up and welcome the findings of this research." (06/02/09)

New Treatment for Advanced Melanoma

BBC Medical Science -- Scientists say they have developed a drug that can treat the most deadly form of skin cancer in its most advanced, incurable stages. Malignant melanoma is the most rapidly increasing cancer in the UK, largely due to sun exposure. An experimental drug PLX4032 (R7204) could help many patients with incurable disease live longer with the disease in check, early trial results suggest. Roche and Plexxikon presented the work at a renowned US cancer meeting. Experts welcomed the findings and urged people to take care when out in the sun this summer, which is tipped to be hot. PLX4032 works by seeking out and destroying tumour cells carrying the BRAF mutation implicated in 60% malignant melanomas. This could not only help to shrink the skin cancer, but also delay its spread. Currently, only a small proportion of people - less than 5% - live more than two years if their cancer has spread around the body. In a phase I study involving 16 patients with BRAF-positive melanoma, over half saw the extent of their cancer reduce by at least 30%. Patients treated with PLX4032 lived for a median of six months without their disease getting worse and more than half experienced significant shrinkage of their tumours. This included patients where the cancer had spread to the liver, lung and bone. Roche and its partner Plexxikon told delegates at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Florida that they now plan larger trials to further test the drug's safety and check things like what dose is best. They also hope to make a diagnostic test to easily spot which patients have BRAF-positive melanoma. In the UK, more than 10,400 people are diagnosed with malignant melanoma each year. (06/02/09)

Stop All Fishing NOW !!!

BBC Ocean Science -- The End of the Line is a film packed with footage of big-scale fishing in oceans around the world. The work is efficient, modern, industrial and, according to the film makers, unsustainable. Amid doom laden music, the narrator tells us: "Our view of the sea has always been that it is huge, beautiful and inexhaustible. The oceans are the common heritage of all mankind and for billions of years they have been full of life." But that, according to the film-maker and journalist Charles Clover, is changing. The world's ocean environment - and the fish in it - is facing catastrophe. "These huge resources which we once believed to be renewable, that our whole human history has led us up until now to believe are renewable, are not renewable any more because of what we are doing to them. And so our entire philosophical approach has to change. It is not going to be the same in the future as it was in the past." The documentary claims to be to the marine environment what An Inconvenient Truth was to global warming. The basic problem, says the film, is the huge over-capacity of the modern fishing industry. There are too many boats chasing too few fish: "The global fishing capacity could catch the world catch four times over. The world's long-lining industry sets 1.4 billion hooks every year. These are estimated to be set on enough line to encircle the entire globe more than 550 times." If we are in any doubt about the sheer power of the modern fish industry, we are told: "The mouth of the largest trawling net is big enough to accommodate 13 747 jets." So amid claims of insufficient, poorly enforced regulation it is hard to find any good news when it comes to the world's fisheries. (06/02/09)

Bernanke: A Stunning Revelation

Jeff Harding writes: Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a startling commencement address for the Boston College School of Law Class of 2009 this week. He admitted an apparent turnabout of his fundamental views of economics. No news media picked up the significance of what he was saying. After the introductory and self-humbling remarks usually made by great men at these events, he made the following revelatory comment: Instead, I’d like to offer a few thoughts today about the inherent unpredictability of our individual lives and how one might go about dealing with that reality.  As an economist and policymaker, I have plenty of experience in trying to foretell the future, because policy decisions inevitably involve projections of how alternative policy choices will influence the future course of the economy.  The Federal Reserve, therefore, devotes substantial resources to economic forecasting.  Likewise, individual investors and businesses have strong financial incentives to try to anticipate how the economy will evolve.  With so much at stake, you will not be surprised to know that, over the years, many very smart people have applied the most sophisticated statistical and modeling tools available to try to better divine the economic future.  But the results, unfortunately, have more often than not been underwhelming.  Like weather forecasters, economic forecasters must deal with a system that is extraordinarily complex, that is subject to random shocks, and about which our data and understanding will always be imperfect.  In some ways, predicting the economy is even more difficult than forecasting the weather, because an economy is not made up of molecules whose behavior is subject to the laws of physics, but rather of human beings who are themselves thinking about the future and whose behavior may be influenced by the forecasts that they or others make.  To be sure, historical relationships and regularities can help economists, as well as weather forecasters, gain some insight into the future, but these must be used with considerable caution and healthy skepticism. [Emphasis added] Let me translate this for you on two levels. On one level he is talking about his personal belief in the failure of economic prediction, and at another level, is the realization by him of the failure of the science of econometrics. No small thing. (05/26/09)

Governor, You can print your own money.

Ellen Brown writes: As reported in the May 22, 2009 issue of TIME Magazine, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently stated: "I understand that these cuts are very painful and they affect real lives. This is the harsh reality and the reality that we face. Sacramento is not Washington -- we cannot print our own money. We can only spend what we have." Christmas comes early, Governor. You can print your own money. Fiscally solvent North Dakota is doing it...and so can California. Now! In a May 22 article in Time titled "Billions in the Red: Fiscal Reckoning in CA," Juliet Williams reports that since California voters have now vetoed higher taxes and further state government borrowing, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has indicated that he intends to close the budget gap almost entirely through drastic spending cuts. The cutbacks could include laying off thousands of state workers and teachers, ending the state's main welfare program for the poor, eliminating health coverage for about 1.5 million poor children, halting cash grants for about 77,000 college students, slashing money for state parks, and releasing thousands of prisoners before their sentences are finished. Schwarzenegger bemoaned the fact that the state could not print its own money but said it could only spend what it had But the state can create its own money. After all, banks do this every day. Certified, card-carrying bankers are allowed to do something nobody else can do: they can create "credit" with accounting entries on their books. ... Money in a government-owned bank could give us the best of both worlds. We could have all the credit-generating advantages of private banks, without the baggage cluttering up the books of the Wall Street giants, including bad derivatives bets, unmarketable collateralized debt obligations, mark to market accounting issues, oversized CEO salaries and bonuses, and shareholders expecting a sizeable cut of the profits. A state could deposit its vast revenues in its own state-owned bank and proceed to fan them into eight to 10 times their face value in loans. Not only would it have its own credit machine, but it would control the loan terms. The state could lend at ½% interest to itself and to municipal governments, rolling the loans over as needed until the revenues had been generated to pay them off. According to Professor Margrit Kennedy in her 1995 book Interest and Inflation-free Money, interest composes, on average, fully half the cost of every public project. Cutting costs by 50% could make currently-unsustainable projects such as low-cost housing, alternative energy development, and infrastructure construction not only sustainable but actually profitable for the government. If all this seems too radical and unprecedented to venture into, consider that one state has had its own bank for 90 years; and it has not only escaped the credit crunch but is doing remarkably well. Only three of 50 states are now solvent, meaning they have the revenues to meet their state budgets; and one of them is North Dakota. It is an unlikely candidate for the distinction. It is a sparsely populated state of fewer than 700,000 people, largely located in isolated farming communities afflicted with cold weather. Yet since 2000, the state's GNP has grown 56%, personal income has grown 43%, and wages have grown 34%. The state not only has no funding issues, but this year it actually has a budget surplus of $1.2 billion, the largest it has ever had. North Dakota boasts the only state-owned bank in the nation. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) was established by the state legislature in 1919 specifically to free farmers and small businessmen from the clutches of out-of-state bankers and railroad men. The bank's stated mission is to deliver sound financial services that promote agriculture, commerce and industry in North Dakota. (05/26/09)

Wishes, Hopes, Fantasies

James Howard Kunstler writing on May 25, 2009: Something like a week remains before General Motors is reduced to lunch meat on industrial-capital's All-You-Can-Eat buffet spread. The wish is that its deconstructed pieces will re-organize into a "lean, mean machine" for producing "cars that Americans want to buy," and that, by extension, the American Dream of a Happy Motoring economy may be extended a while longer. This fantasy rests on some assumptions that just don't "pencil out." One is that the broad American car-owning public can continue to buy their cars the usual way, on credit. The biggest emerging new class in America is the "former middle class." Credit kept the remnants of the middle class going for decades after their incomes stopped growing in the 1970s. Now, their incomes have stopped coming in altogether and they are sinking into swamp of entropy already occupied by the tattoo-for-lunch-bunch. Of course, this has plenty of dire sociopolitical implications. Unfortunately, the big American banks did their biggest volume business in their biggest loans at the very time that that the middle class was on its way to becoming former. Now that the former middle class is arriving at its destination, the banks are so damaged by bad paper that they won't make loans to even the remnant of the remnant of the middle class. In other words, the entire model for financing Happy Motoring is now out-of-order, probably permanently. ... The implications of all this in the sociopolitical and geopolitical realms are pretty daunting. As long as we maintain Happy Motoring as the normal mode of existence in this country, we are going to see an ever-growing class of very resentful citizens pissed off at being foreclosed from it. In my oft-repeated scheme-of-things, this leads very quickly to the trap of political extremism, perhaps even corn-pone Naziism, as the system becomes increasingly difficult to prop up except by force. In geopolitical terms it leads to ever more dangerous international contests over the world's remaining oil reserves. All this leads to two conclusions. One is to accept the fact that the Happy Motoring era is over and to devote our remaining resources to re-localization, walkable communities, and public transit. It obviously requires a very drastic revision of our current collective self-image, of what we aspire to and who we are. If the car companies have any future at all, it should be based on making the rolling stock for public transit -- and for now the most intelligent choice for us is to fix the existing passenger railroad lines instead of venturing into grandiose new transit systems requiring stupendous capital outlays. Let the car era wind down gracefully. Triage and prioritize the highway maintenance agenda -- we won't be affluent enough to keep repaving the whole existing system -- and let other nations meet the diminishing demand for cars in the USA. This would be a "best case" scenario. (Other nations may decide to go further up the Happy Motoring road at their own eventual peril.) My second conclusion is not so appetizing, namely that the bankruptcy of General Motors may set in motion a chain of events that will accelerate the destructive unwind of the bad credit economy, the damage to our bond values, the loss of faith in our currency, and the authority and legitimacy of our leaders. This last dire outcome might be allayed if, say, President Obama directed his policy efforts to the items in the paragraph above, that is, a reality-based agenda for true change in how we live -- but who can feel confident about that happening these days? Maybe it will take a horrifying chain of events to get Mr. Obama there. And then, tragically, he may be overwhelmed by the chain of events itself. I hope not. (05/26/09)

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