Posts from — February 2010

Memo from Al Gore: Please discontinue use of the phrase “Global Warming.” From now on it’s Climate Change. Climate Change. Climate Change.

But some independent climate experts say the blizzards in the Northeast no more prove that the planet is cooling than the lack of snow in Vancouver or the downpours in Southern California prove that it is warming.

As an illustration of their point of view, the family of Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, a leading climate skeptic in Congress, built a six-foot-tall igloo on Capitol Hill and put a cardboard sign on top that read “Al Gore’s New Home.”

The extreme weather, Mr. Inhofe said by e-mail, reinforced doubts about scientists’ conclusion that global warming was “unequivocal” and most likely caused by human activity.

via Climate-Change Debate Is Heating Up in Deep Freeze – NYTimes.com.

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Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, mounted stiff resistance tonight to any swift bailout of Greece, as a rift opened up between European capitals over how best to tackle the risks posed to the euro.

Despite a show of Franco-German unity on the crisis and the first statement from EU leaders pledging to safeguard the currency's stability, hopes on the markets of a German-led rescue plan to shore up Greece’s critical public finances were dashed by Merkel, who repeatedly emphasised that Athens would need to put its own house in order and brushed aside all questions of financial support.

“Germany is stepping totally on the brakes on financial assistance,” said a senior EU diplomat. “On legal grounds, on constitutional grounds and on principle.” Another senior diplomat said of the Germans: “They’re not waving their chequebooks.”

via Angela Merkel dashes Greek hopes of rescue bid | Business | The Guardian.

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Modern society, needless to say, is in the grip of wireless technology. All you have to do to understand this is step outside your door. “It just so happens,” [Allan] Frey had told me, “that the frequencies and modulations of our cell phones seem to be the frequencies that humans are particularly sensitive to. If we had looked into it a little more, if we had done the real science, we could have allocated spectrums that the body can’t feel. The public should know if they are taking a risk with cell phones. What we’re doing is a grand world experiment without informed consent.”

via Warning, Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous To Your Health: Gear + Gadgets: GQ. by Christopher Ketcham

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Greek tax collectors and customs officers walked off the job on Thursday, kicking off a spate of strikes against government austerity cuts designed to halt a financial crisis caused by massive debt.

Both groups embarked on a two-day walkout ahead of industrial action called by civil servants, doctors and Communist-backed workers on February 10 and a general strike called by Greece’s main umbrella union on February 24.

“We have already made sacrifices and will accept no more cuts,” the chairman of the customs officers’ union Argyris Sakellaropoulos told Flash Radio.

The unions are on the warpath over a government austerity programme that they say has progressively become harsher under pressure from the European Union and market speculation that has hurt Greek finances and rattled the euro.

via Greece faces strike barrage over austerity cuts – Glock Talk.

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Secretary Geithner can keep repeating his assertion he has worked in public service his whole life… How does he define working in the public service?

Geithner’s last job, as the President of the New York Fed highlights that question.

The New York Fed is not government-owned. Most people fail to recognize this fact. Simply, the Federal Reserve Board (responsible for monetary policy, with a dual mandate of full employment and price stability) is an independent part of the federal government, while the New York Fed is a shareholder-owned or private corporation...

Historically, the New York Fed has been among the most profitable shareholder-owned corporations in the world. Yet it keeps the details of its shareholders’ ownership information private. What we do know is that its owners include precisely those institutions it is tasked to regulate and supervise and those is has obviously failed to adequately supervise. Unlike the other District Banks of the Federal Reserve system, which have overseen their banks quite well, the New York Fed’s concentration of the largest banks, coupled with its unique role of managing the market operations of the entire Fed system, has built a culture where it sees itself as a market participant and peer to those firms it regulates.

via Has the New York Fed been serving the public trust? Has Geithner? » New Deal 2.0.

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You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil. The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan. The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a “preliminary commitment” letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. …this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.  via President Obama Finances Offshore Drilling in Brazil – WSJ.com.

And so it goes here in the United States of America during its fin de siecle, where NIMBY knows no bounds, where we will no longer build factories here but will contract to build them in China, and we will no longer drill for oil, but will contract with third-world states to do the drilling for us instead.

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