Readers, PLEASE label your Antidote submissions as “Antidote” in the subject line! Many of you send images I don’t use immediately, usually because I have a backlog and/or your image is in the same category of ones I’ve run recently. If it is not clearly labeled “Antidote” there is absolutely no way I will be able to find it in my 20,000+ message Inbox.
Crowds Of Stock Traders Gather At Weeping Statue Of Wall Street Bull Onion (David L)
Hooray for war Daily Mash
Study: Dumb People Think Dumb Things Are Deep GAwker
Quest to drill into Earth’s mantle restarts Nature (furzy mouse)
The creed of speed Economist
Wikipedia has a ton of money. So why is it begging you to donate yours? Washington Post (furzy mouse)
Amazon Buys Thousands of Own Trucks as Transportation Ambitions Grow Re/code
Why Electronic Health Records aren’t more usable CIO (Chuck L) As we’ve been saying, or rather cribbing from Health Care Renewal
COP21
Naomi Klein says politicians leading world to “very dangerous future” National Observer (Sid S)
Congress Moves to Sabotage the Paris Climate Summit New Yorker (furzy mouse)
Indian city’s historic rainfall — nature’s fury or construction frenzy? Washington Post
A Chinese artist vacuumed up Beijing’s smog for 100 days and made a brick from what he collected Quartz
China?
China Sucked Deeper Into World Financial Vortex and Vice Versa, as BRICS Sink Fast Counterpunch (Sid S)
Is China exploiting Africa? Al Jazeera
Anonymous Takes Credit for Knocking Police Offline Khaosod (furzy mouse)
Pakistan petition demands return of Kohinoor diamond from Britain Telegraph (furzy mouse)
Grexit?
Greek central bank chief warns on reforms Financial Times
EU welcomes Greek request for border aid ekathimerini
It has started: A global proxy war against freedom! failed evolution
Draghi Says ECB Could Step Up Stimulus Efforts if Necessary Wall Street Journal. Translation: cold porridge for Mr. Market!
Syraquisan
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Persistent Surveillance founder: “We have more fun than we should be allowed” Pando. Unlocked for now.
Witness (activists/change advocates, please read) Patrick Durusau
Imperial Collapse Watch
The Bust of Sociopathic Criminal Cheney Unveiled in DC Ring of Fire (furzy mouse)
Defense Contractors Cite “Benefits” of Escalating Conflicts in the Middle East Lee Fang, Intercept
Who will fight the next war? Economist (Li). From October, still important. Be sure to read why only 30% would be eligible…
The State Department Tried To Fight ISIS On Ask.fm, and It Didn’t Go Well Gizmodo (Chuck L)
Gunz
False flags, true believers and trolls: Understanding conspiracy theories after tragedies Washington Post
Former Australian Politician: Country Should Issue Travel Warning for US After Shootings Policy Mic
California candidate’s gun giveaway fundraiser will go on Los Angeles Times
Black Injustice Tipping Point
The Racially Charged San Francisco Police Shooting You Don’t Know About But Should Mother Jones (Samuel A)
Chicago officials release reports in police shooting of teen Washington Post
Ohio community lives in fear as rifle-toting white man stalks black neighborhoods with impunity Raw Story. Furzy mouse: “Now if he were a black guy…”
Police State Watch
Judge: Chicago police must notify media before destroying decades of misconduct files Washington Post
Massachusetts Bill Would Cripple Already Weak Public Records Law Photography is Not a Crime. If you are in Mass., make a BIG stink with you state legislators.
Fed
Kocherlakota Blames Fed for Slow Recovery in Blunt Parting Words Bloomberg
The Federal Reserve is about to take a big gamble by hiking rates Washington Post
Job Market to Fed: Proceed With Caution Bloomberg
Academic Study Says Fed Engaged In Systematic Leaks To Insiders Value Walk (TF). Quelle surprise!
Crude Tanks As OPEC Refrains From Cutting Production OilPrice
New York pension fund launches $2 billion low-carbon index Reuters (EM)
Unlocking Climate Finance Project Syndicate (David L). Aiee, public/private partnerships, aka looting, discover climate change.
Supreme Court to hear Puerto Rico appeal Financial Times
Class Warfare
Hard Left, No Apologies US News
When Labor Groups and Silicon Valley Capitalists Join Forces to “Disrupt” Protections for Employees In These Times. TF: “More than ridiculous.”
Antidote du jour. We featured another photo from this series a LONG time ago. Frosty zoom:
Here are a few pics of my family playing Scrabble with our cat, “Phydeaux”. As you can see we are all geeky nerds chez nous (and proud!). Phydeaux insists on having tiles and rack when we play. Otherwise he’ll sit in the middle of the board and destroy the game. With his tiles, however, he patiently waits his turn, occasionally showing us his very cute belly.
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
118 comments
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re: China / Africa…long history. here’s a quote that updates generalizations.
“Ambassador Zhong Jianhua (China’s special representative on African Affairs) when he said:
“You cannot say China is good or China is bad. China is a combination of these things.”
It is up to Africa and Africans to take the good and reject the bad.”
…so its up to the victim to bring drums of Vaseline.
some pro/cons bottom of this ‘awkward’ piece: https://www.stratfor.com/the-hub/chinas-roar-africa
“Academic Study Says Fed Engaged In Systematic Leaks To Insiders :Value Walk (TF). Quelle surprise!”
I’m sure they are leaking to our Job Creators. What other transmission mechanism could there be?
Once again Kocherlakota proves he’s the Underwear Gnome of Monetary Policy.
1) Scrap Taylor Rule
2) ??????
3) Inflation!
Bloomberg reports on Job Market talking to Fed. It does? Ya, sure.
This all makes my head hurt.
Its all that monetary transmission.
The FED: here’s the money – come and get it!
The 0.1%: Thanx! Now we can buy more assets! Have you seen the price of Bacon lately?!
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/expensive-artworks-sold-auction-gallery-1.1522496
I once saw a documentary on obesity and they mentioned a gastric bypass bariatrics surgery.
Maybe we need the monetary equivalent.
You can bootleg better than that on the internet for free nowadays! Plus, they’re videos, not just a stupid still pic.
Hello rich people. The Talkies are here!!!!
But at any rate, I guess Fed policy is to employ dead .01% artists???
faaak 170 milllion for a Modigliani. he had a rough life. that’s not entirely amazing to me that one of hhis paintings could go for that. he really had something, pretty amazing. I have a little hard back book of his paintings, just about 4 by 5 inches, i bought it used in some church book sale. There was about 18 of them, Renoir, Cezanne, Monet, Rubens (yeah they had more than just the moderns), Durer even! I grabbed every one I could get and paid like 50 cents each. So the Modigliani paintings. They seem so simple, and they sort of are, but he had the line down so fine that it’s like the sun shining in your mind, just to look at them. There is so much there that’s so aware of the ideas of seeing and form and color and space and flesh. That”s what an artist does. They nail it withh such persuasion that you just go “OK wow.” At any rate, he had a rough life. And then his girlfriend, she threw herself off her parents balcony after he died. They were evidently severe French pricks who couldn’t feel or understand. Soemtimes I thhoughht of “Amadeo” — “for the love of God” when i thought of what he did. what else is it to be an artist that good, so you can see reality and render it so magnificently they way that he could? That”s what it means to love God. But it doesnt mean God will love you back.
Yeah, those are nice – I’d pay 20 bucks for a good reproduction.
As opposed to a Pollock, where I wouldn’t buy a real one with someone’ else’s money…
Look at how society is run, and than consider that someone can convince people of how beautiful and valuable his paint splatters are – no wonder billions of dollars of worthless MBS were sold….
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/arts/design/selling-a-fake-painting-takes-more-than-a-good-artist.html?_r=0
http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/24/the-real-fake/
Paying so much money for things of so little utility….
Human vanity – even the ultra rationale, like me, will sometimes spent more than something is worth. Just last week I bought the 6$ watch at Sprawlmart instead of the 4$ watch, even though the 6$ dollar watch was no more accurate or durable as the 4$ watch, but merely because of how it looked….
Of course, some thought I was putting on airs…
pollock is a strange case. he was quite a good drawer and a did very nice figurative work, studied under Thomas Benton. I actually have a paperback of his sketch books, he was really good. He did a painting called “portrait of a dream” that to me is phenomenal, as it combines both figurative analysis and the idea of a dream hanging around your head in a cloud as you wake up. At any rate, I do think he was a great artist. I’m not so crazy about some of his later abstract works, but he was an explorer and a visionary. It didn’t always work, but he tried, I think, with tremendous integrity that never faltered. I’d go a bit easy on him.
I have a $10 dollar plastic watch that i’ve had for years. I wear it every day. It was an indulgence, to be sure. :-) since you can always tell the time just by looking at your computer or your phone these days.
Many years ago, when I was in London, some pigeons kept crapping on my window sill. It looked just like a Pollock.
Even pigeons are influenced by a great artist. I bet they’d seen a Pollock show at the Tate or something. They couldn’t do that on their own.
given a thousand pigeons window ledges……
Kocherlakota has always sounded like the only Fed person who understands that monetary policy must respond to actual economic realities. And when he points out that the Fed has been fiating monetary policy out of thin air in order to meet its mandate via policies that no longer apply it makes me nervous. One thing Congress could do, if it weren’t a big Fed accomplice, is clarify this whole situation by rewriting the Feds famous mandate and do some conflict therapy. To mandate price stability is a euphemism for maintaining a strong dollar which in turn conflicts with full employment because wage-price inflation historically accompanies full employment. And we have been given awful therapies like Trickle Down. Why can’t Congress get a clue here? Besides which the Fed is captive to the global economy now and if we are affected by global inflation the Fed will panic to raise rates that have nothing to do with its “mandate.” And it’s all irrational anyway because money itself should not carry the burden of holding any particular value. Maybe.
We don’t have a strong dollar. I’ve been tracking black bean inflation the last 5 years and they have gone up 50% USD. But that’s probably 150% in Pesos and 20-30% in Euros. But that’s just because we are the reserve currency, and treasury bonds are “safe haven investments”. Because US taxpayers.
We should maintain price stability in just the reverse manner by mandating prices. How would that evolve? Money would stay stable, check. Prices would not spiral, check. Exchange rates would stay stable, check. Sovereign currencies would not devalue, check. Exploitation and windfall profits, and even fraud, would be seriously reduced, check. Chronic profiteering would be controlled. The burden of accurate valuations would not be placed on money, but on products. Maybe.
so bring back Glass-Steagall?
December 4, 2015 8:45 pm
The US financial industry should listen to leftwing reformers
John Dizard
The US financial industry should consider reinstating the Glass-Steagall act, says
Bankers, let me wipe you with an alcohol swab and tell you this is going to hurt. The US financial industry should accept the leftwing reformers’ demand to reinstate what is called the Glass-Steagall act. That refers to the sections of the US Banking Act of 1933 that severely limited commercial banks’ direct participation in securities markets.
Glass-Steagall’s “Chinese wall” between commercial and investment banking was pinpricked, then breached, then reduced and finally ended in 1999 with the enactment of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
So why should Wall Street go along with the demands of politicians such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who do not even have control over the Democratic party? Because in the next crisis, the large banks and securities dealers will need a bailout not so much for themselves as for their customers.
Bank compliance culture has become so elaborate and impenetrable that traders are unable and unwilling to provide bids and offers. They do not want any echoes of Ms Warren’s recent comment that “I never hear the case why it is that some investment bank that wants to take risks on Wall Street, and wants those kinds of profits, should have access to your grandmother’s checking account”.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5b8f5f20-9a87-11e5-a5c1-ca5db4add713.html#ixzz3tTrU42A2
Dumb People article source = On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit.
That study is Excellent!
: As noted, we also obtained 10 items from Deepak Chopra’s Twitter feed…
Yes. In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.
~Chance the Gardener
Did he steal that from the FED?
No, a Looney Tunes Kali Kongressklown named Brad Sherman stole it from Chauncey Gardiner:
Thus the practice of “seasonal adjustment.”
“Why Electronic Health Records aren’t more usable ”
I’ve been told by a doctor at a major medical center that ordering completely standard bloodwork
now takes at least 16 clicks (or was it clicking on at least 16 pages?)
Also too: although the EHR might create some efficiencies, there is no way
it will ever pay for the cost of installation, conversion and continuous upgrades.
So EHR can be thought of as a form of income redistribution.
But on the bright side, boomtown Madison.
The fact that many of these systems didn’t even pay lip service to user centered design is amazing.
We can have “user centered design” or we can have “top-down design.” In the case of both EHR and Obamacare, the latter approach was chosen.
Not coincidentally, EHR has been a Hillary Clinton hobby horse since, oh, about 1993. And she’s still yammering on about it to this very day.
My brother works at Epic and I lived in Madison for several years. When I go back to visit I’m amazed at the pace of construction in town. It seems like there are two or three new high-rise apartment buildings every time I go back. Then of course there’s Epic itself in Verona. It’s like disneyland. The buildings are themed and have art lining the halls(employees who stay there 5? years get a $300 stipend to go buy local art to decorate the building). It’s an extravagant and absurd spectacle out there, reminiscent of the nearby Taliesin complex, if only in megalomania. I stood at the podium of that 11k+ seat auditorium, which the sole private owner has because she believes in monthly all-company meetings(pep rallies), and shouted some German for a while while on tour.
She really picked the right industry to go into. Software-where essentially the only cost is labor- and the healthcare industry where no one cares about cost. A model of capitalist accumulation in our information society. My brother loves it and is paid very well for a fresh grad. My old roommate, who also worked there and has a bit of a contrarian streak, couldn’t stand the cheer-leading and stultifying environment.
Maybe the solution is robot doctors.
Diagnosing, recording, networking and retrieving simultaneously.
They have them in the Star Wars movies. Remember the scene at the end of “The Empire Strikes Back” where the robot is making the final adjustments on Luke Skywalker’s new prosthetic hand? Unless “Star Wars” is fictional, that’s proof that robot doctors work well!
Star Trek Voyager took it up a notch with a doctor who was a hologram. You don’t even need metal!
Unfortunately, the downside is that he couldn’t actually even do surgery himself…
In the dystopian, class bifurcated movie ‘Elysium’ the rich and privileged humans living on a space station version of an ivory tower have automated medical pods that can heal anything. The pods have an appearance that resembles a cross between a MRI machine, a phone booth, an old iron lung and a human-sized vacuum tube canister like you see at old drive-through bank windows. In one scene the medical pod revives a guy who had his head blown off by shotgun or maybe a grenade. In another it cures a little girl of leukemia. In the 2012 Ridley Scott sci-fi film ‘Prometheus’ the most memorable scene of the entire movie is a gruesome, late-term, alien abortion performed on a desperate human by an automated medical pod nearly identical to the ones in Elysium. (Or maybe the other way around, Prometheus was released first) That was the best part of the movie besides Michael Fassbender’s android character. Totally loved that scene!
To continue the science fiction themed analogy; remember that the ‘AutoDoc’ in “Prometheus” was set for males only. Thus, even in medicine, code ruled.
I first remember reading about an “autodoc” in a Larry Niven book. I would expect something on the order of an ‘enhanced’ live medico, a la the ‘Lobot’ who managed the cloud city in “The Empoire Strikes Back” to be more probable. George Alec Effinger uses that idea in his Audran books.
No problem. Just assign the surgery to a barber surgeon like Ben Carson! I apologize to barbers, most of them are sane, unlike Ben Carson.
I had problems when I had to deal with my hand last March because my primary health care provider clinic and my orthopedic clinic were not in the same network. As a patient, I literally took copies of what each doctor did back and forth with me as they monitored me. My hand still has some issues but because the experience was so frustrating, I’d just as soon deal with the occasional problem then risk the health care community might make it worse.
Same here…hand issue. Had a form of trigger lock in my left-hand ring finger…..for almost a year! got to the point where when i woke up from bed ,i’d have to grab that finger and straighten it out…… every day. Then one morning i got up,pissed off, and just shook that hand, once, hard. Felt a very sharp pain in the palm of that hand, but that finger worked right as rain! I deduced that somehow, i had dislocated it, with that sudden flicking action putting said finger back into its’ normal position. Now how much do you think i would have been bilked, having seen a doc,…..uninsured, or even w/ ACA crappified plan?
You must have terrific insurance.
My husband is a union member so his benefits are probably better than most. We have what is considered a “Cadillac plan” that’s been somewhat crappified(but still better than many folks.)
Even with “good” health insurance that is supposed to have co pays we ended up with several thousand in health care costs thanks to fibroids, kidney stones,and my blood pressure(which skyrocketed during the month they couldn’t figure out why my hand wasn’t healing.)
In opposite land instead of taking care of my fibroids(or fixing a health problem before it gets to be a problem), I’m “budgeting” my health care. Luckily, most of the time they are benign.
The Bust of Sociopathic Criminal Cheney Unveiled in DC Ring of Fire (furzy mouse)
He might be a sociopath to normal human beings but in the Beltway Cheney’s still part of the crowd. Here is Joe — Friend of Labor and Great TPP Salesman — showing once again that scumbaggery is not problem in the fetid sewer of American politics:
Bush, Biden joke and praise Cheney at his bust unveiling
The sitting Vice-President, a Democrat, making like its all just fun-and-games, which it is when you’re at the head table. Surprising this discordant fact didn’t make it into the linked article reviling Cheney and pretending he is some political aberration universally condemned in America.
Agreed… my first reaction to the Joe Biden quotes re his BFF Dick Cheney were the same.
But then again we see photos of Bill Clinton palling it up with George HW Bush on the golf course, and Obama laughing with (war criminal and torturer) George W Bush… all one big club, enabling or allowing torture and the violation of the constitution they swore to uphold.
Shame.
all one big club, enabling or allowing torture and the violation of the constitution they swore to uphold.
George Carlin – It’s a big club and you ain’t in it
I thought this was a very good Jacobin article by Adam Hanieh A Brief History of ISIS: How ISIS emerged out of the dashed hopes of Arab Spring
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/isis-syria-iraq-war-al-qaeda-arab-spring/
It seems to me to be one of the outcomes of continuing neoliberalism where justified demands for more equality were repressed and resprouted in a more violent form.
Re Arab Spring
“These protests drew millions into mass political action for the first time in generations, seriously shaking established state structures and the grip of repressive, Western-allied regimes.
The underlying reasons drawing people into the streets were deeply connected to forms of capitalism in the region: decades of neoliberal economic restructuring, the impact of global crises, and the ways in which Arab states were governed by autocratic police and military regimes long backed by Western powers.
At the level of economic policy, there was little alteration, with Western donors and international financial institutions insisting on the continuity of neoliberal reform packages in places such as Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Jordan. Coupled with this economic continuity, indeed a prerequisite for it, was the rolling out of new laws and emergency orders that banned protests, strikes, and political movements.
Simultaneously, political and military intervention in the region rapidly expanded. The fracturing of Libya following direct Western military intervention, and the Saudi-led crushing of the Bahrain uprising were two key moments of this process. Egypt’s military coup in July 2013 also marked a critical point in the reconstitution of old state structures, and confirmed the pernicious role of the Gulf States in pushing back Egypt’s revolutionary process.
Perhaps most significantly, the social and physical devastation wrought by the Assad regime in Syria, including hundreds of thousands of deaths and the millions of people displaced across and within borders, further reinforced a region-wide sense of despair that came to replace the initial optimism of 2011.
Yet as the initial aspirations for real change appeared to be increasingly thwarted, ISIS and other jihadist groups emerged as a symptom of this reversal”
———–
Denying justified change can come at a large price.
The Syrian Arab Republic is not a Western-allied country and does not have a Western-allied regime.
And it is the West which is supporting the jihadis in trying to overthrow Assad so as to take over Syria and destroy civilization in Syria.
Proof That Klein Is Dumb And Shallow.
Klein/McKibben are funded by the Rockefellers to spearhead public acceptance for government/corporate control of any future carbon taxes. James Hansen wants 0% of carbon taxes to go to governments and corporations and wants 100% to go to you. Klein is delusional and promises that renewable energy will provide 6 times as many jobs as fossil fuels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s5m8YEBXks
Vaclav Smil explains the energy efficiency trap, the intense dependency of renewable energy on fossil power production and how much complexity our hi-tech green energy fantasies will face, as well as how incredibly difficult, long and complex energy transitions actually are for humanity. Because of these factors, he says the energy transition to renewables will takes generations, not just decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxO3s0U5WdY
In “After The Age Of Cheap Oil” two Finnish energy experts tell us that in a world of scarce oil, every ounce of it we possess will have to meet essential needs, i.e. food-shelter etc., before those of alternative energy.
http://fpif.org/like-everything-else-alternative-energy-requires-cheap-oil/
To close down a 1 megawatt fossil fuel plant we require 10 megawatts of solar and wind power just because they don’t run all the time. This does not include the massive battery and smart-grid infrastructure solar and wind require. We refuse to even harden existing grids against solar flares, let alone smarten non-existent grids that will take decades and trillions to build.
Vaclav Smil is Canadian. So is Naomi Klein. Naomi Klein spent her whole life relying on nuclear power. Vaclav Smil says comparing wind power in a small windy country like Denmark — with its international smart-grid right next to German markets — to vast countries like Canada and the U.S. — who have no smart-grids — is ridiculously misleading. This is what Naomi Klein does, I call it lying.
Klein extols the green energy virtues of Germany, where 50% of their renewable energy comes from burning trees imported from all over the world. Then they use this renewable energy to build cars for world export. Cars run on roads made from oil. German diesel cars burn palm oil and soy oil imported from Brazil and Indonesia, then they lie about their emissions. There is nothing green about Germany. This is lying dressed up as fantasy.
Green energy is low-density energy in that it is spread out over large geographical areas, i.e. – there is not enough land in South Korea for a 100% energy transition to solar and wind power. There are a dozen mega-cities facing certain near-term severe storm-drought-flood damage and are impractical for wind and solar power. Too many foggy windless days in China and the Typhoon or Monsoon season in places like Japan and India, never mind building a solar farm in Miami. It’s laughably stupid.
What this means is that the resource intensity per unit of intermittent energy production is unsustainably high in the face of rapid climate change stressors. Not to mention that solar and wind products have a planned life-cycle obsolescence of 30 years. Recycling their component alloys cost more than mining for them in the first place because recycling them uses more energy. Each time component minerals are recycled they lose their qualitative usefulness in our high-standard hi-tech world.
We are set to double energy demand in 50 years exactly when all resource production becomes more difficult to afford because of low-ore grades and high energy costs combined with water and food shortages in the face of ever increasing climate stressors, i.e. – new fossil fuel sources demand more water than ever before exactly when we are facing water shortages due to climate stressors.
The energy trap is leading us into a complexity trap where the confluence of crises overwhelms human society. Or, put another way, most of us never knew shortages of energy, food and water, or even shortages of anything. The last time we had just an energy shortage was in 1973 and that’s how we ended up with Ronald Reagan’s contra freedom fighters and Soldier of Fortune magazine. Don’t be fooled by temporary gluts from capital misallocation.
Without severe demand destruction, there is no energy future. But, nobody wants to destroy energy demand 80% in 50 years when at the same time all forecasts point to a 100% increase in energy demand in those same 50 years. It’s like stealing candy from a capitalist baby. Nobody wants to hear it except for people who don’t understand what that really means. Especially those who oppose austerity. We are incapable of resolving energy -political, -economic and -ecological dynamics. But relax, it’ll be years before peak human slavery, peak civilization and peak cannibalism.
100 years ago cars were the latest greatest thing, and millions of blacks in Africa were killed to control the rubber plantations for all the tires cars needed.
100 years later swiping video screens is the latest greatest thing. and millions of blacks were killed in Africa for the conflict minerals all our smartphones need.
20 years from now eating will be the latest greatest thing and millions of blacks will be killed in Africa as China and the U.S. battle for control of the black slave farms rich people need to eat. The farm land we are fighting to save in Africa is not for the Africans, it’s for the rich foreign government and corporate landowners in China and the U.S..
There will be no green hobbit shire with dancing rainbow ponies and unicorns.
Next year, we’ll do it all again. Same story, different metaphors.
Green is the new brown. Devolutionary Transition indeed.
It’s all here: https://www.reddit.com/user/BeezleyBillyBub/
I just want to tell you that I really love this post, thank you so much.
…I truly hope that is sarcasm.
You’ve just made a fairly strong case for a massive next gen nuclear power build out. Because if renewables are as nonviable as these people suggest (which I quite doubt), there is really nothing else responsible left to do.
Very insightful comments. The assertion that we need cheap energy to build our the 10x less efficient renewable energy is spot on. Thorium/LFTR technology seems to be a good idea for those of us not close to hydroelectric, geothermal, consistent wind/solar.
Well, that’s what climate scientist James Hansen wrote in his book Storms Of My Granchildren . . . that there is no choice but to build a vast fleet of nuclear power plants because “renewables” are laughably insufficient for the time being. But he then goes on to describe an approach to nuclear power called Fast Neutron Reactor or something like that . . . which is designed to fissionable-ize and subsequently fiss something like 98 per cent of all the theoretically fissionizable nucleii in the fuel-batch. He is certainly not advocating for more of the present type of reactors we have.
Thank you for these reminders RC.
Wow. There is so much wrong with this screed it’s hard to know where to begin. I guess I’ll just point out that Germany already has about 40% or more of it’s power coming from alternate energy already, and it didn’t take them 100 years.
This is the best time ever to convert, too. We have hundreds of thousands of technically-minded people out of work, along with many others, who would be delighted to do the conversions, insulate homes, on and on. Many electrical engineers too are available to do the planning and design. If we put this on a “war footing”–mobilized everybody, we could do it in a decade or less. Bringing more solar and wind online takes months, not years, unlike any fossil fuel or nuclear plant.
And with the will, we can do it with social justice as well. That’s political, not natural law.
Crowds Of Stock Traders Gather At Weeping Statue Of Wall Street Bull
Reading the article I couldn’t help thinking that if they thought it would give them some extra alpha, bankers would totally do such things. And then I couldn’t help thinking that some of them probably do. One way to explain wealth disparity is to assume that God wants one to be richer than their neighbors.
It was interesting to read the ekathimerini article after these from keeptalkinggreece:
1) http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2015/12/02/anti-greek-circus-in-full-motion-kick-greece-out-of-the-schengen-area/
and
2) http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2015/12/04/explosive-situation-in-greeces-northern-border-as-eu-creates-a-perfect-mess/
and after listening to a friend that was recently in Thessaloniki for a congress and was mystified by the fact that she mentioned Macedonia (the country) a couple of times and she thought that people feigned not to have heard her…
Yes, not an easy task. It will be interesting to see if this gets more transparency than the private prisons in the US or Christmas Island in Australia. Hopefully it will shift the focus back onto what is causing this crisis including decades of neoliberalism.
I enjoy and learn from NC but am saddened when I see links to scornful, arrogant articles like “Study: Dumb people think dumb things are deep.” I’m a commenter who thinks reductive materialism is an incomplete and ideological (not purely scientific) view of the world, that it doesn’t adequately address the “hard problem” of consciousness, and that it poorly addresses the most remarkable thing in the world – human “agency.” I think NC is at its best in this area when it derides “prosperity gospels, “laws of attraction” and the like as obscuring for many Americans that they are oppressed by a neoliberal political/economic order. (Barbara Ehrenreich is also excellent in this area.) If/when NC goes further and denies subtle links between psyche and world, even if these are expressed by religious persons in prayers or new age types with their inchoate slogans, there I think it errs.
Don’t want beyond these remarks to get into a metaphysical argument, but do want to assert via a book recommendation that there are very sophisticated (i.e., not “dumb”) people who posit a larger world-view: NYU philosophy prof. Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,” pub. by Oxford Univ. Press, 2012.
I have not read the linked articled, perhaps because the title stopped me, but it seems to me that people act dumb from time to time, committing dumb acts, and other times, not-so-dumb acts, maybe even ‘smart’ acts.
It would take more than a life time to master the dark act of 100% dumb, 100% of the time, or the not-so-dark art of 100% smart, 100% of the time. And let us remind ourselves that when the world knows smart as smart, dumbness arises.
I am not sure where they recruited the dumb people in their study.
I am testimony that dumb people can do smart things
NO WAIT that smart people can can do dumb things
*sigh* okay both
“Let your finger do the research if you’re not up to it, click on the link in the post, for instance, before jumping to conclusions”
I think a more enticing title would have been ‘Why we humans think dumb things are deep.”
The best title would have been:
“The Role of Ambiguity, Vagueness, and Contextual-Sensitivity on Inference and Semantic Content within Gricean Conversational Norms: A Case Study”
That would have had less play in Gawker, but would have recieved more citations in the long term!
Actually, it’s more like the world is so complex and multi-faceted that having a strong “Bullshit Antenna” is essential. (No. those flashing lights in the sky, created by a too fast auto moving through road dips, is not evidence of ET.)
I was having a similar thought: most of what we decide is “profound” or not has almost everything to do with our limited cultural framework of reductionist materialism.
That said, I have also directly seen “spiritual” people who endorse word salads as having profound meanings. Incidentally I once let such a spiritual individual live in an extra room that I had because I felt bad for his situation–and then from then on he talked shit about me to all my friend behind my back and almost never paid me that (very small) amount of money he’d agreed to give me for the room, while he sat in my spare room smoking drugs all day.
Actually he pretty much convinced me that euthanasia was perhaps not such an outlandish idea, and might in fact make for good policy in America.
I see your point, but at the same time, you were what they call a ‘willing participant’ in that situation, now weren’t you? So I mean there’s what you can’t change (other people’s behavior) and what you can change.
I think what Aumua is saying, is that you should have kicked him out earlier.
Of more efficacy would be the complete legalization of recreational drugs, with ‘common sense’ restrictions on behavior while under the influence, as is the norm with alcohol. The numbers do not lie. Portugal seems to be carrying out the ‘legalization’ experiment for the rest of us. Early days yet, but the results from Portugal seem to be very reassuring.
As I see it, the basic motivation for prohibitions of most sorts is an underlying belief in Exceptionalism in all its’ guises. “We know what is best for you because [—-]. Why? Because we have a special and singular knowledge of X,Y, and or Z. We’re better than you.”
Good for you in that you tried to help in the first place. You found out, as did we in a similar situation, that some people cannot be of do not want to be helped. That’s their problem. You did your bit. Now you are “older but wiser.” The other person will probably die early.
I think Mark from California is a marketing bot.
At no point does the study/Gawker post engage in reductive materialism, address Chalmer’s “Hard Problem” in consciousness, or the concept of human agency.
Additionally, Nagel’s book does not have the slightest connection to the core findings or methedology of the study in question.
That said, a cursory glance (I saw this a couple days ago) raised all kinds of red flags. For example, out of the 280-or so people in the headline study, about 35% (N=99) did not pass the reading/comphrension check…..BUT the authors decided to keep the results. LOL!
It’s no shame to lose to Phydeaux.
if he doesn’t win, he chomps on our calves.
http://www.abc6.com/story/30673494/chicago-cops-versions-of-teens-killing-at-odds-with-video
CHICAGO (AP) – Chicago police officers who watched one of their own shoot a black teenager 16 times filed reports depicting a version of events that contrasted sharply with what was captured on the dashcam footage that has sparked protests and cost the police commissioner his job.
===================
I wonder if the job description of Chicago police includes a provision that police must write reports that comport with reality….probably an exception to exonerate cops who appear to the untrained eye, or insufficiently appreciative of our heroes in blue, to be shooting somebody in the back…
Will there by any consequences to these police officers?
No. Were there any consequences for any police, anywhere, who repeatedly lied,
including in court, to cover up their abuse of Occupy protesters?
And the horrible thing is if a regular citizen lied in a police report they’d be committing a crime and charged with filing a false police report. Personally, it ought to be the same for a police officer found lying.
A LE officer lying to protect themselves or to conceal a crime by others is actually a far worse than an ordinary person doing the same. Someone acting under the color of law is potentially far more dangerous than that ordinary person and the penalties should reflect that danger.
Revisiting that point from my comment a few days ago. Tapping fingers here, where are those indictments for filing false reports, obstruction of justice and whatever other baggage goes along with a sworn officer lying?? Is everyone that has a fingerprint Identified, suspended and on unpaid leave?
It will be interesting to see if anyone rats on Rahm E, One might assume there were some profane interactions w/ him before he coughed up the $5M hush money to the family.
So of course even Fox Saturday business shows are about terrorism.
And of course, in the commentary (really the whole show is commentary) there is the idea that those who complain about the police should stop their bitching.
As it is obvious that there really is a concerted effort to hide police misconduct, the proposition that the police COMMIT more crime than the equivalent number of citizens is something that probably can’t be determined with any rigor.
But when I was growing up in Fresno, we had the Fresno police, who seemed OK, and the Fresno county sheriffs – who seemed more criminally inclined than the Hell’s Angels, and were always being fired, prosecuted, and convicted for drug dealing and any number of other crimes – and this way before video
http://www.businessinsider.com/cop-pulled-gun-at-traffic-stop-2015-12
“A Maryland cop was convicted Wednesday of first-degree assault and misconduct in office for putting a gun to a man’s head during a traffic stop. He faces a maximum sentence of 45 years in prison.”
In May 2014, officer Jenchesky Santiago approached William Cunningham as he was sitting in a car outside of his cousin’s home. Santiago told him that he was illegally parked: prosecutors claim he wasn’t.
When Cunningham tried to go inside the house, Santiago pointed his firearm at him. Cell phone video of the incident released by the Prince George’s County Police Department shows the officer pushing Cunningham back towards the car and pointing the gun at his head.
“[Santiago’s] behavior is flagrant, appalling, and isolated,” said Police Chief Mark Magaw in a statement. “His actions are among the worst I’ve seen as chief of police, and that will be taken into account when I make a decision about his employment.”
==============
Sorry chief, but with all the videos I have seen – its not isolated.
If any of those police officers lied to a grand jury while testifying about the shooting, we can add perjury to the list of crimes for which they can be prosecuted.
Are there mechanisms for citizen groups to force a prosecution into getting-under-way when government prosecutors are part of their level of government’s broad conspiracy of blanket immunity and impunity? For example, if that officer in Chicago ends up getting convicted of murder, is there a legal theory under which Mayor Emmanuel can be prosecuted for being an accessory-after-the-fact to murder for his role in suppressing the tape to prevent any legal action from ever being taken? And if so, what kind of citizen group or movement could force such a prosecution into existence, given the fact that no government prosecutor will EVER choose to prosecute Mayor Emmanuel in this scenario?
A Chinese artist vacuumed up Beijing’s smog for 100 days and made a brick from what he collected Quartz
Is China exploiting Africa? Al Jazeera
Or is Africa giving China the rope to hang itself with?
Sounds like a scalable solution.
Barefoot vacuum cleaning artists.
A vacuum cleaner for every pedestrian and cyclist. And a vacuum cleaner under the front bumper in every car.
Not only did nut brother exhibit all the crap in Beijing air at nose level, he then packed that stuff into bricks and fired them into stg that resembled cement but appeared to have no strength as it showed a lot of cracking. What nut brother has demonstrated is the uselessness of spending huge amounts of energy to sweep up the air particles and fire them (requiring several hours of thousands of degrees of red-hot fire in brick kilns) and then using the bricks, which have little construction quality strength, in construction projects. Or, alternatively, he has demonstrated the value of not polluting in the first place.
He should have turned it into cheap tea sets or dinner sets which could then be sold to turists and protesters at COP21!
Such a waste of a good marketing opportunity!
Chicago officials release reports in police shooting of teen Washington Post
In newly-released police reports, however, several officers, including Van Dyke, described McDonald as aggressively approaching officers while armed with a knife.
Van Dyke told an investigator that McDonald was “swinging the knife in an aggressive, exaggerated manner” and that McDonald “raised the knife across chest” and pointed it at Van Dyke, according to one police report. Multiple officers reported that even after McDonald was down, he kept trying to get up with the knife in his hand.
“In defense of his life, Van Dyke backpedaled and fired his handgun at McDonald, to stop the attack,” one report reads. “McDonald fell to the ground but continued to move and continued to grasp the knife, refusing to let go of it.”
Van Dyke told an investigator that he feared that McDonald would rush him with the knife or throw it at him. He also noted a 2012 Chicago Police Department warning about a weapon that was a knife but was capable of firing a bullet, hence making it firearm, according to the reports.
The officers’ portrayal of the incident, recorded in hundreds of pages of handwritten and typed reports, prompted police supervisors to rule at the time that McDonald’s death was a justifiable homicide and within the bounds of the department’s use of force guidelines. It’s not clear who wrote some of the police reports.
=================================
“It’s not clear who wrote some of the police reports”
????!!!!!!
Well, if we’re gonna be in the realm of the ridiculous, I would say it is a confession. McDonald rose from the dead and committed to paper what he did. If police don’t write police reports, than the person who would have the most knowledge would be the alleged perpetrator. And we all know from zombies and vampires what the dead are capable of….
Seriously (sarc) – this is probably a one time anomaly – a inexplicable departure from the noble, truth telling Chicago police (or police in general). The police chiefs and mayors are right on top of the police, and use the most advanced forms of management to assure the highest levels of professionalism. And the mayor will appoint a commission, and you know that will fix everything…
The Tribune has put up .pdfs of some of the police reports.
This one claims of the Burger King CCTV,
A leading contender for this year’s Rose Mary Woods Award.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-rahm-emanuel-laquan-mcdonald-police-perspec-20151204-story.html
As bad as Emanuel is, he really should be impeached and become a pariah. But until there is a willingness to investigate and prosecute prosecutors, than that legal line remains a great wall between law and justice.
It seems apparent to me the delay was to impede, hinder, and obstruct justice. The prosecutor has to undergo a serious investigation and get asked critical questions about why charges were not brought sooner.
And this whole idea of the rather undocumented way that prosecutors are allowed to operate needs to stop as well. It is becoming apparent that the US legal system is designed not to protect the innocent, but the police.
The Fed is about to take a big gamble (itself, this time, but not the only time).
Well, it has been forcing seniors in their 80s and 90s to move cash into stocks for a long time.
“Don’t worry, you will live to 110 – just don’t ask me how – so you will have plenty of time to recover from any crash.”
Gun giveaway fundraiser.
Maybe a bulletproof vest and Kevlar helmet giveaway fundraiser is more effective.
The same with travel warnings. Why not give your citizen-travelers more realistic protection, instead of verbal warning?
Going out in public is like driving. You are required to wear a seat belt, and put on a vest and a helmet.
Amazon’s transportation ambitions.
Just back of an envelope. 500 companies…perhaps 100 major industries.
Each industry roughly = 1% of GDP.
Say, 100 companies to ensure competition in each industry. 1% over 100 = 0.01%.
If your corporation’s revenue is around 0.01% of the GDP, someone ought to look into that.
$16 trillion GDP x 1/100% = $1.6 billion.
The distribution is more Zipf-like, and this article is trying to look at sub-sectors of the economy, and distribution of resources, from an interesting perspective:
http://prosperouswaydown.com/whatever-happened-to-hierarchies-ecology/
(xxx) community live in fear as rifle-toting (yyy) men stalk neighborhood with impunity.
XXX – Ukrainian, Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan, etc.
YYY – Imperial troopers, the Foreign Legions, headhunters, etc.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/04/san-bernardino-conspiracy-theories-already-exist-an-expert-tells-us-why/
============================
The article doesn’t even posit that the declining credibility of the government has a lot to do with it. (hmmmmmm…… runs finger along brim of tinfoil hat and strokes chin… WHY is that?????)
And yes, conspiracy theories have much wider distribution and easier access thanks to the internet.
I used to believe pretty much the narrative of the government. And if it got something wrong like dietary guidelines, it was mistakes made in good faith.
Whether it is HOW laws are written, regulations are enforced, who met with who, are whether you can only trust 50% or 10% of what the police/prosecutor complex says, there seems to be a concerted effort to conceal, mislead, omit, dissemble – – and of course, the best word for lying, SPIN…well, you can get your own thesaurus for all the ways to describe how the government no longer seems to want to speak straightforwardly. Did Rahm wait a year for video to be released to help his own re-election, or gosh dang it, these things take time???
E.G., Whats the real reason to get rid of Assad?
No, no, no – the REAL reason. No one could possibly be stupid enough to believe that we want to remove Assad to give the Syrian people representative government and a better life.
So if you don’t believe government rationale for its actions – are you conspiratorial? or a realist?
Amazon’s trucking ambition. Using the disrupt model of hiring only Independent Contractors appears to be missing that most independent truckers work for round trip arrangements because one way trips are a cost losing proposition. Amazon appears to be a One-Way situation.
One more way to skrew the worker.
That’s not entirely true. My cousin drives a truck and may take a job, say Chicago to Denver, once in Denver he may take a job from Denver to LA. There are some cities he avoids because there are never any out trips.
He driver a refrigerated truck and sleeps in the bunk in the back of the cab.
So he has no home base?
Banks Said to Face SEC Probe Into Possible Credit Swap Collusion
And this time Mary Jo is dead serious.
The wet noodles will only be cooked al dente before the lashings begin.
The Kohidoor diamond, the Elgin marbles…
I am sure there are others that need to be returned…obelisks, mummies, cuneiform blocks, Chinese antiques, etc.
Collectively, museums could agree to return items and simultaneosuly negotiate loan terms so the items may tour to other museums. Rather than cultural hoarding – which is what museums really are, the ultimate hoard – there’s an opportunity to share culture across nations.
But alas, man is prone to greed.
http://chinahall.fieldmuseum.org/explore
Cyrus Tang Hall of China Exhibition Online
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/discover/on-exhibit/greeks/#cycladic
re: Dumb people think dumb things are deep
It seems unfair to single out Chopra when there are so many good examples in academia. Anyone who has spent a lot of time reading (or writing) academic/trade journals can probably come up with 5-10 statements like these in a day.
Better yet, just read the moustache Thomas Friedman who religiously displays his captivation with his own bon mots.
Why even read the real Thomas Friedman? The Thomas Friedman article generator makes word salads just as dumb. Maybe even less dumb.
I did search up the authors on the study and the journal it was in.
Just to be sure. The distinction between serious and satire being so opague as of late…
This surreal event was lots of fun:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
That “Who Will Fight The Next War?” article was disturbing. Not for the ineligibility of the target age group, but for the assumptions blandly stated by the author: that we will get into more wars and that those wars will be bloodier; and perhaps worse, the author’s clear attitude that Americans are squeamish and selfish not to want to sign up for a “career” that inherently involves killing other human beings.
No acknowledgement that objections to the Iraq War might be ethical or moral. No questioning of whether the wars the U.S. has fought in the last decade and a half have been beneficial for Americans, for Iraqis or Afghans. Or for anyone at all other than politicians and companies that make a bundle off of war — weapons manufacturers, security and construction contractors, whatever nominally U.S. corporations’ interests we’ve gone to war to protect. No consideration of what the consequences of empire abroad are to the rights, security, and economic status of Americans.
No serious consideration whatsoever that militarism might be harmful or dangerous — despite the mention of critic Bacevich.
wookies
The Eclownomist was an up-front cheerleader of the “Iraqi regime change” project of Tony BLiar and George W. Bush in 2003.
Operation Mockingbird, comrades: it ain’t just the Times and the WaPo no more.
‘America’s … mastery of precision-guided weapons, is fading, as these become widely available even to the bigger militant groups, such as Hamas or Hizbullah.’ — The Eclownomist
Evidently this leader was drafted by the Jerusalem bureau.
The article is fairly reasonable. Increasing the pool is why combat arms positions was just opened for women besides clearing the path for a female Joint Chief. The other is that a World War has started. It is just nobody in politics or the media wants to admit it or talk about it. Hillary Clinton with her no fly zone over Syria would put America clearly on the opposite side of Russia, China and Iran. Right now there is wiggle room for the USA to join the world to eliminate the Islamic State and quarantine radical Islam and rebuild the Middle East. If not, the World War with Sunni and Shiite Islam with Russia and the West on opposite sides will escalate with apocalyptic consequences.
Andrew Bacevich pretty well lays out what is coming:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-bacevich/beyond-isis_b_8708726.html
Whatever Clinton, Trump, or anyone other candidates’ plans are, I reject the framing that we’re already in a “World War”.
We are only if we let them walk us into it. And one way we let them walk us into it is by considering it reasonable to think of young adult disinterest in putting themselves deliberately into the military machine as somehow a problem.
The children of the oligarchs, Biden excepted, rarely serve these days. If they’re so all-fired certain a war is just and necessary, they should encourage their own kids to enlist. They’re not. Why? Because it’s only necessary to risk the lives and limbs and sanities of the poors’ kids. It’s not a war of survival; if it really were, there would be lines around the block at enlistment offices.
And maybe that day will come, but presupposing it will gives a free pass to the oligarchs to keep escalating and doubling down and d!ck waving.
ABH goes mainstream
Meanwhile Sanders, as Lambert keeps pointing out, beats Trump in head to head polls. Could Sanders be playing the spoiler by not trying harder to save the Dems from the Hillary kool-aid? Of course the conventional view is that the press has Hill’s back and will take Trump down when the time comes. But Trump’s staying power at the top and recent events in Britain suggest that the public may–finally–have had it up to here with the fourth estate. Get ready for supermodels in the West Wing.
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2015/12/httpwwwcnncom20151204politicshillary-clinton-republicans-head-to-head-pollindexhtml.html
Yes, pretty much the only way the Democrats could lose the WH next year is to nominate HRC. That appears to be the plan as far as i can tell. What the heck, it’s their turn anyway. There are really very few negative repercussions on a personal level for what I’ll coin the “Deep Party” if the GOP takes the WH; if Sanders won it, would be far more dangerous to their positions and their personal well being. It’s not about winning or losing as a party, it’s about winning or losing personally.
As I’ve been saying all along, the party would far rather lose with HRC than win with Sanders.
“Deep Party” . . . ha ha ha . . .
In the Kurt Vonnegut collection of essays called Palm Sunday is a chapter titled In A Manner Which Must Shame God Himself. And somewhere in that chapter Vonnegut is retrospectively describing a dinner for important people which he happened to find himself at. People like Galbraith and Cronkite and Kennedy and so forth. And he noted that among this group when in private party “whether one was a Democrat or a Republican was considered to be some sort of hilarious accident which nobody was required to explain.”
An update link on the murder of Mario Woods by a police firing squad on a San Francisco sidewalk on December 2. A group of citizens last night demand San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr resign. Why isn’t he being fired? In a desperate attempt to make any eyes that have seen the video of the brutal murder the liar, Suhr produces a blown-up frame of the video showing the victim’s “arm outstretched.” Crowd calls bullshit, and brings Suhr’s attention to the British police who disarmed a man with a MACHETE without forming a firing squad. Still, inexplicably, some Americans believe police have the right to execute anybody who disobeys them. The entire Civil Rights movement would have been slaughtered in its cradle.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bayview-crowd-calls-for-S-F-police-chief-to-quit-6677273.php
phy’s back in town!
let me get some good video of him playing guitar and i’ll send it along soon..
Someone help me out on the Kurds. I am positive Turkey’s civillian government would not send troops to train Kurds, but it seems they are in Kurd-controlled territory and not shooting Kurds left and right. What’s actually going on here?
They were in Iraq without permission apparently, in a region controlled by Iraqi Kurds. I could see them playing nice with Iraqi Kurds. It’s their own Kurds, who like Iraqi Kurds want sovereignty, that the Turks have a problem with.
Even in fraud cases, Wells Fargo customers are locked into arbitration
All those Law and Economics™ continuing legal education seminars have really paid off. For someone.
Why don’t we cut you up into little pieces and feed you to your pooches? Hmm? And then we’ll see how loyal a hungry dog really is. It’s not about money. It’s about sending a message. ~The Joker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6-doD3VpyA
Pink Floyd – One Of These Days I’m Going To Cut You Into Little Pieces [Live At Pompeii]
theme song
Forgive me if this has been posted, but the rhetoric is truly scary.
New world war? Wartime president? Wow, what a hard-on. But here’s the money quote from Ted Cruz, who has renounced his foreign policy sanity with spectacular alacrity: They have declared war on us. And we need to declare war on them.
Um, how many hundreds of thousands have we killed in the ME? Is anyone keeping count?
Isn’t the internet wonderful. Something north of 1,000,000, perhaps?
Honest question re Project Syndicate piece: where you write “public/private partnerships, aka looting,” do you mean to say that public/private partnerships necessarily loot — as if it was in the DNA of such projects — or that they often loot? Because those are two different things
Theyre designed to loot. Its in the blueprints, as it were.
Speaking of Dumb Humans and CRAP21, there’s this for the really masochistic:
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/carbon-clock/
http://i.imgur.com/dgwHB8g.jpg
Bomb Science 101
Simple and spot on.