Snails yield drug addiction clue BBC
New proposal would require identification to buy prepaid cellphones Washington Post
BREAKING: If Top Kill Doesn’t Work, U.S. Navy To Take Over Spill The Hayride (hat tip Oil Drum)
Safety Rules Can’t Keep Up With Biotech Industry New York Times
Falling sales dampen recovery hopes Times Online
Warren Buffett to testify under FCIC subpoena after resisting commission’s request Fortune. It’s well known that the author of this piece, Carol Loomis, has a long standing friendship with Buffett. Even so, this piece is pure PR placement “oh the Sage of Omaha really doesn’t belong before the FCIC. Pretty much only the bad guys are asked to testify.”
Fed’s Next Move Could Be Reduced Rate on Dollar-Euro Swaps Wall Street Journal
Whistling Past The Graveyard? Karl Denninger
Special Report: For some people, CDOs aren’t a four-letter word Reuters (hat tip reader Tim S)
Mark Hoban says investment banks likely to face competition review Guardian
Goldman seeks settlement with SEC on lesser offence Financial Times
Good Government vs. Less Government Baseline Scenario
The pictorial, speculative, yen carry trade FT Alphaville
On writing fiction billy blog
Is Europe heading for a meltdown? Edmund Conway, Telegraph
Banking split essential to avoid new financial crisis, warns OECD adviser Guardian
BREAKING THE CYCLE: A Conversation with Emanuel Derman Edge
Antidote du jour:
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Re the US navy:
While my response to the idea of the government taking over the operation (though of course not the liability) is “Why did it take so long?”, this has got to be a joke.
“Sinking a battleship” on top of it? How could that possibly be expected to work? Even if you could get it to settle exactly the way you wanted, wouldn’t that just be like trying to put your hand over a fire hose while pressure kept building up? And how long would one expect the integrity of the blockage to hold up?
Re good govt vs less govt:
Yeah, Heritage isn’t too tendentious, taking all its bizarre categories of “freedom” and weighing them equally. I’d sure expect that to lead to an objectively useful metric.
I’ll also reproduce my own earlier comment at Baseline:
The argument is rather coarse, in that it fails to distinguish between the various elements of neo-liberalism, or moderate deregulation vs. extreme deregulation.
I don’t see any evidence that in practice there’s such a thing as a coherent “moderate deregulation” ideology or policy.
On the contrary once a system embarks upon neoliberalism as such, there’s never any logical line to be drawn in principle short of total dereg, nor does there ever seem to be any concerted will to find a place to draw that line.
Sure, the likes of Krugman may in some vague way want to deregulate and privatize “only so far”, but in practice they’ve never been able to put up much of a fight against the endless death march of corporatism, because once you agree with it in principle, and once even for a moment you’re on the same side as the die hard gangsters who want the complete liquidation of all public property and the entire public interest, there’s never a coherent way to “moderate” the ideology or the process.
That’s one of the fundamental untenabilities of corporate liberalism.
The alternative would be to maintain social democracy or something better and stronger as the baseline for ideology and practice and then allow individual exceptions where the evidence truly indicates them.
But corporate liberals start out agreeing with the hardline corporatists. They start with the principle that corporations should rule, that the basic policy should be deregulation, privatization, gutting the safety net and liquidating labor. But then in their feckless, incoherent way they want to put limits on it.
As should always have been obvious, that doesn’t work, conceptually or in terms of such inferior people being the ones who expected to be able to put up any real resistance against the sustained aggression of gangsters.
Re If Top Kill Doesn’t Work, U.S. Navy To Take Over Spill
When the president stated yesterday that he was taking full responsibility; when BP stopped pumping mud early yesterday (as in a delay)only to restart pumping in the past few hours; when the president stated that BP was being directed by administration officials; these should tell you that an announcement of the leak being plugged is imminent and timed to coincide with the president’s visit to the region today.
and right on cue from MSNBC
NBC, msnbc.com and news services
updated 32 minutes ago
U.S. official says Gulf oil spill flow has stopped
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37394541/ns/gulf_oil_spill/
See http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/5/11/865387/-Fishgrease:-DKos-Booming-School
Quote:
I’ve been in Oil and Gas Production (all upstream) and Exploration for over 30 years. My salary is a little bigger than God’s, which is okay because I’m more useful than he is. I’m a better cook than God is too, but lets get back on subject here. Booming School. Not only is Oil Spill Booming a large industry in the USA, teaching Oil Spill Booming is a large industry in the USA. Most of BP’s production and pipeline employees in the USA have attended at least one booming school. Many have attended two or three. Most oil and gas production employees in the USA have attended booming school. Some of us have attended really good, really extensive, week or two-week booming schools. BP’s production employees have attended the best booming schools. I know this. I’ve seen them there.
BP’s drilling folks have mostly not attended booming school. They’re sometimes sent to booming school, but they fuck off in the bar and their bosses sign off on that being okay. Because for Drilling Hands, booming is for pussies. This is a generalization. Not all drilling hands think that, but most of them do and I guarantee BP’s drilling executives think that booming is for pussies — and that’s if they think about booming at all or even know what it is. That’s not so shocking. In the major oil companies, there are likely a few drilling executives that don’t even know what drilling is. I’m not kidding. There’s good BP drilling people who would, in private, back me up on that.
Boom is not meant to contain or catch oil. Boom is meant to divert oil. Boom must always be at an angle to the prevailing wind-wave action or surface current. Boom, at this angle, must always be layered in a fucking overlapped sort-of way with another string of boom. Boom must always divert oil to a catch basin or other container, from where it can be REMOVED FROM THE FUCKING AREA. Looks kinda involved, doesn’t it? It is. But if fucking proper fucking booming is done properly, you can remove most, by far most of the oil from a shoreline and you can do it day after day, week after week, month after month. You can prevent most, by far most of the shoreline from ever being touched by more than a few transient molecules of oil. Done fucking properly, a week after the oil stops coming ashore, no one, man nor beast, can ever tell there has been oil anywhere near that shoreline.
In practice, there’s a reason the best booming schools last weeks. Different types of shoreline, different shapes, require different configurations. Your numerous anchor points (for this spill those would be 1-yard cement blocks with tie-off buoys) need to be chosen so the boom-tenders (you) can adjust the ropes, slanting the booms this way and that to account for changes in wind and current. Booms are tended 24/7, by the way. BUT… just having learned what you’ve learned here today, DKos Boomer, you know enough of the CONCEPT to figure it out. You get it. You could go out there and watch how the ping-pong balls (your test-oil) glide along the boom. You could see where they miss the catch basins and you could adjust and re-configure and you could perform fucking proper fucking booming. By the third day of actual booming, no one on this planet would be better than you. So if you understand it, and all these production employees understand it (we’re talking tens of thousands of people here), then why is most or all of the booming along the Gulf… being done wrong?
RE: Billy Blog ‘On Writing Fiction’…
“Conclusion:
I hope my attempts at fiction will be better than the writing I have been discussing today.”
A great read for anyone that believes that ‘deficits do not matter (the Cheney doctrine), that the US is somehow immune to default on it’s soverign debt because the US prints it’s own currency (so did Weimar Germany, and countless other soverigns), the US Fed can continue with ZIRP forever (and remain bumping along the bottom, with occasional bouts of deflation, like Japan for the last two decades), and that the US Treasury purchasers will continue to buy US Treasury Issues even if the effective return on them is negative. Hey, no problem! What could possibly go wrong with this plan?
Billy Blog already writes very fine fiction and it is on display here and now.
Got an argument?
“Weimar and countless others”: name four.
Weimar was under the thumb of foreign powerrs: is America?
And the Japanese seem to be doing ok.
And people have been purchasing Treasuries with a close to negative rteturn.
Meanwhile, I see that the US deficit has caused inflation to come roaring back….oh, wait…
Weimar’s debt also was not in its own currency.
“Got an argument?
“Weimar and countless others”: name four.
Weimar was under the thumb of foreign powerrs: is America?”
Yes, America is under the thumb of foreign powers because a great deal of US debt is owned by foreign powers…like China. Recently the Chinese military threatened to sell US debt because of US armament sales to Tiawan…The US is not demanding that China remove it’s currency peg…The US will have to consider every step it takes in SE Asia based on the enormous amount of debt held by foreing soverigns in that region.
Name four? I can do better than that. Every fiat currency ever created has become worthless, over 5,000 of them in recorded history.
“And the Japanese seem to be doing ok”
Is ok good enough for an economy that was a powerhouse 20 years ago? Fortunately for the Japanese almost all of their debt is owned internally; ie, by Japanese corporations and citizens. Japan is in a 20 year slump for the same reasons that the US is in a slump… They did not let capitalisim work. The bad debts remain on the books of their banks, same as the US situation, while their public debt has risen because of continual QE for the last 20 years.
“And people have been purchasing Treasuries with a close to negative rteturn.”
When bond vigilanties turn it happens very fast. Unless you have a crystal ball you cannot say that what has been happening will continue.
“Meanwhile, I see that the US deficit has caused inflation to come roaring back….oh, wait…”
Do not think that the Fed is not trying to induce some inflation…but, with little success so far. If the Fed does succeed you better hope that they can induce ‘just a little’ inflation. It is not as easy as it seems at first blush.
Try again…put a little more effort into it.
Regarding China, right now, when China says ‘jump,’ the markets ask, ‘how high?’
“They did not let capitalisim work.”
Use a word (were it spelled correctly) that has no universally accepted meaning, and you can prove anything!
Let’s have more counterfactuals, please! Tell me what happens in the fantasy land in which all the things we didn’t try were actually tried!
Honestly, someone who is so unskilled at arguing really shouldn’t be ending his comments with “try again.” It’s embarrassing. All these words spilled, all these delusions of grandeur that you’ve figured out the whole world and know exactly how it should be run. Seriously, give it a rest. The most likely interpretation of you is that you know far less than you think you do.
…and you know what?
If you cannot see the train wreck then you should at least stand aside and let those that do get out of the way.
Fiscal/monetary policy to this point is worse than useless…it has simply added to the desaster that is unfolding while you cheer lead. Go back to watching bobble head tv, cause you certainly do not want to admit what is happening in the real world.
Conway’s article is, shall we say, bracingly clear. The problem with Yurp is “Shirk and Owed”. Mind you, that’s the problem for all of JaPiigsUKUS.
BP Oil Spill: Frustrated Plaquemines Parish President Nungesser Lashes Out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jQUfOZTK-Y
“…there is no leadership for this cleanup…” “We need leaders for this emergency, there are no leaders on this telephone call” conference call with Coast Guard Commandant, Thad Allen and Senator Landrieu “…something stinks…”
http://fieldnotes.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/05/11/4377136-long-suffering-tribe-fears-oil-may-strike-final-blow
LA FOURCHE PARISH, La. — The native Houma people, who have long relied on fishing and trapping in the marshlands of Louisiana, have been through a lot as a tribe.
They have been robbed of their lands, subjected to segregation, witnessed the steady erosion of marshlands and been displaced by hurricanes. Now, some fear the oil slick that threatens to invade the bayou could be the final blow to their culture and traditions.
“We still could make a living here,” says tribal elder Antoine “Whitney” Dardar, 74. “But now, with the oil coming, I don’t know.”
The tribe, which has about 17,000 members, has lived off the marsh for hundreds of years, and until recently many members made their living entirely off of marsh resources—moving from one harvest to another, season by season.
Excellent idea, no telephone unless you identify yourself! Then we’ll identify all intelligence officers undertaking unlawful domestic surveillance, and then all government officials under suspicion of torture under Torture Convention Article 12, and then we’ll all get to know one another, How’s that, you cowardly fucking war criminals?
Re. “Is-Europe-heading-for-a-meltdown”
We’re getting used now to the daily stream of articles from the Telegraph that Europe is doomed, corrupt, evil, etc. etc. Its status is now unrivaled in Europe as a prophet of impending doom to anything European (and, as we all know, the UK is not a European country but a continent/empire onto itself). When the euro goes up it is “Europe is doomed, as exports will slump”, when it goes down it is “Europe is doomed, as investors loose faith.”.
What struck me though, were the comments below the article. For the first time it shone through that a lot of them were from Americans. One of them even apologized for his compatriots, who apparently have forgiven the Brits and now want them to join their tea party. Will this be a new trend? Now that Murdoch has lost his absolute control on the UK government through the coalition, will the rank-and-file right wing nutters help out to get the ‘Europe = socialist = evil’ message across? Watch this space.
Gravity Psychology & Sociology
In any system, there is a closed recursive loop, balanced by an open recursive loop, and the universe has an expansive relative frame structure, so analysis from any symptomatic layer is necessarily going to be general, and there are nearly an infinite number of generalities, frame perspectives, at any given time, the discussion of which is limited by time. Having said that…
The examination of the gravitational field pole in this case begins with the population bred into its core, which is largely responsive to human stimulus across a wide DNA expression. At the peripheral, the click/gear mechanism begins with individuals seeking a sense of personal fairness, balance, and pathologically devolves to serve the pole by molding these individuals into groups, to seek issue fairness on a daily basis, profiting from the leverage created. The semi-neutral capacitor structure, made up of individuals that would largely be neutral in a vacuum, lines up with gravity.
You’ll notice the evolution of political personalities that become increasingly popular / entertaining. They begin their careers addressing fairness generally, proposing solutions that may make some sense on a larger scale, and devolve into primarily attacking straw-men, readily available in the environment or created for the purpose. In net, such activity creates the “wind” across the communication stream, to which a society’s sails are rigged.
The mind at the core of gravity has all kinds of efficient circuits, but it does not evolve readily with environmental stimulus. It is largely focused on directing human stimulus, and simply employs environmental issues toward that end. The mind at the periphery, focused on single issue fairness, has very few circuits, with quick and efficient, but irrational programmed responses to environmental stimulus, because the number of possible responses has been severely limited, by a small, socially reinforced algorithm, that does not learn.
Generally, this creates the character of gravity, which is scaled up with controlled breeding. Because the entire field is quite limited in its scope of perception, it concludes generally and individually that anyone with a different response to a set of conditions must be stupid. Naturally, there are all kinds of exceptions. There are many individuals captured within the bonds of the gravitational field that are highly adaptive, working from the inside out.
For every force field, there is a counter force field that naturally develops, due to the nature of the fulcrum of fulcrums. At the periphery, individuals cannot fathom the cause of symptoms surrounding them, but they instinctively resist, moving away from the pole, swimming upstream. Because they are different, the gravitational field immediately recognizes them, and pulls them all in as a group, through the parameter of recognition found within the initial individual caught in the field. As it feeds farther and farther up the chain, collecting parameters of recognition, its leverage increases, which results in depth of the gravitational field. In relative terms, the click observes resistors flying by into the black hole, reinforcing the closed feedback loop.
An inexperienced ea observes the system in its entirety, and can identify individual placement with a short interaction, a casual conversation passing by in the street, but is still learning to present a neutral feedback response. As a result of errors, the young ea is swimming back and forth, in and out of that black hole, deeper and deeper.
An experienced ea has immediate recognition, a first syllable or facial movement, anything, and presents a completely neutral response, or a response designed as a stimulus to trigger a counter response, to start a wave action. These participants can operate anywhere in the system, like valence electrons, which creates a positive feedback in the recursive open loop, providing complete circuit access and analysis of much larger datasets.
The point is that the CDE system is training participants to operate in any given role at any given time, making the system much more fluid structurally, beyond the knowledge of gravity in the old system. And you are going to need a bridge, which will be built by applying your unique talents to prefab the parts, and recognizing where to fit them by adopting a missing role, to balance the progression. The participants that fit their side of the bridge will earn an equity position in the new utility.
You are being provided with the required URGENCY on the part of the gravitational field, which is all it understands, what is right in front of its face, on its event horizon.
Social Security began with 7 or 8 contributors for every recipient, and the age of retirement was two years after the average age of death. That system is long gone, Congress has spent all the money, the baby boomers that participated in the leveraged largesse are trying to retire, and the few kids capable of creating the required wealth have all dropped out of the circuit. And social security is the easy problem.
If you see that the captive protected labor pensions have lost 500 points in the market so far in the last two days, you are on the right track. If you are expecting those pensions to get bailed out beyond the next blink of the eye, you are in a wee bit o trouble. Ultimately, there is no final demand, on the part of those capable of generating wealth, for a make-work economy, and the accounting and tax system, designed to hide that reality, with symbiotic corporate accruals and government cash, has run its course, triggering implosion.
There is no point going further to discuss the biological urgency, or the psychological dissonance due to that biology, as Al Gore, his followers, and the associated “experts”, employed for the cause of cap and trade, amply demonstrates.
The Telegraph article ‘Is Europe headed for a Melt Down’ is a typical Telegraph little Englander, passive aggressive, hostile piece aimed at a very successful Euro Zone currency and in particular at Mediterranean countries plus “their Celtic outpost Ireland”. Having taken note of the Telegraph’s attitude to Ireland in the past I am relieved that we now are in the good company of the Mediterranean countries. If you want an even handed take on the EuroZone it will be found in Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Le Figaro, La Stampa, El Pais, The Independent (Brit and Irish versions) and of course the grandmother of even handed reporting The Guardian (British) even the Economist is improving its act. The US MSM (print) have little original to say on Europe other than UK articles rehashed to appeal to US eyes. Google translate opens up the universe but not Le Figaro the alternative being Les Echos (France). I must say Yves Smith herself is very well rounded on European issues.
Why has no one been talking about breaking out the #1 technology in America’s arsenal, the Hippie Drill?
http://www.southparkstudios.com/games/31
Alaska Dispatch had an article on a new kind of blowout preventer still in development. The article also talks in detail about differences between US and Canadian oil drilling regulations.
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/projects/gulf-spill/5498-gulf-oil-spill-the-technology-oil-executives-dont-want-to-talk-about
onsolidated Fish and Wildlife Collection Report- Gulf Coast Disaster
As of noon today in the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater response team has recorded the following recorded deaths among marine life:
Birds: 444 (They have only found 63 alive)
Sea Turtles: 222 (They have only found 16 alive)
Mammals, including dolphins: 24 (None found alive)
Those are the ones emergency responders know about. How many are the Deepwater team not telling us about?