So says Matt Taibbi, “It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure.” Maybe we should just use non-recourse 0% interest loans from the Federal Reserve to balance the budget? We could use 1% of the American People as collateral, which while a bit harder to trade on the market are at least not made of fiberboard...

Talk about sticking my foot in my mouth. It now looks almost certain that the containment for Unit 2 has been breached and that the core may be in or close to full meltdown mode. I am being told second hand that my fears that the core will create a massive steam explosion that compromise the whole structure are not unfounded by still “unlikely.” This is by a friend of a friend who works at a nuclear plant, however they are totally caught off guard by developments as well. Yet, I read...

While I’m not so happy about how the odds of disaster are presented, I think it is imperative that we put the safety of nuclear power in context. The truth of the matter is that coal power plants release much more destructive pollution into the environment than even the worst nuclear accident. This article in Slate cites 1 million annual premature deaths [or "500 Chernobyls"] from particulate pollution. Literally every nuclear plant in existence could have catastrophic failure and it would...

As a scientific rationalist I get irritated when people argue without understanding all the facts, but as a student of history I get more irritated when people with the facts argue without understanding their limits. One of the things that engineers tend to do incorrectly is assess risk factors largely independent of each other: if X happens then part 1 will address it and if Y happens then part 2 will address it, etc. They think this way in part because they design different functionalities in a...

There are numerous confirmed reports that protesters in Libya are being bombed from fighter jets. CNN reports there may be helicopter gunships opening fire. Protesters are increasingly reporting that foreign mercenaries are leading the ground attacks and continue to be shipped in by helicopter. Two fighter pilots have defected to Malta claiming that they were ordered to carry out bombings and refused. Against this backdrop Al Jazeera is reporting that seven diplomats have now resigned — with...

Al Jazeera is reporting massacres against protesters in Bahrain through a combination of on the ground reporting, interviews with medical personnel and (unverified) Youtube videos. Read the Bahrain blog for more. These reports are backed up by journalists from other sources that are seeing them first hand (e.g. Nicholas Kristof) and international NGO and governmental authorities. I’m not sure what is on CNN at the moment (I don’t have cable) but their website headline and story is unfathomable....

Geopolitical analyst company Stratfor has a great release on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Tunisia. Algeria. Egypt. Now Yemen. Soon Jordan? Is this a flash in the pan or the beginning of the end for the petro-dictatorships? Unfortunately I have been and will continue to be extremely preoccupied with some nascent personal life changes and haven’t been able to keep up. If you have any insights then please comment. I do have these quick feelings: I am more optimistic that these will work than the prior demonstrations in Iran, particularly due to geopolitical differences. The demonstrations...

More MERS related mess.

One of the dirty secrets in the climate change community is that the IPCC consensus is widely seen as the lower bound of likely warming because the models do not incorporate the slower and much more powerful positive feedbacks such as increased methane release from permafrost and bogs. In the years since it was released, every study that has looked at the issue has concluded that the models are far far more likely to drastically understate warming and sea level rise than overstating. One reason for...

Balloon Juice’s resident libertarian points to a Cato series about corporatism from a couple years ago. It takes place as a dialogue between the Cato libertarians, mainstream liberal Matthew Yglesias and progressive economist Dean Baker. I have not read it all but what I have read is an excellent demonstration of the potential and pitfalls for left-libertarian alliances that I have long felt were desperately needed.

Yes, another post about the climate of “political rhetoric” that at this point is surely unneeded. I’ll make it quick, because it’s something that I have yet to see pointed out. Personally, for quite some time I’ve been expecting there to be something like Tuscon, and I believe that there will be more incidents like it in the next few years. This is because we’re going through a major societal shift which is generating a lot of conflict about the proper path forward;...

Update 2: Yves Smith points out that this is a narrow ruling that is largely about MA law: The judges based their ruling strictly on Massachusetts law issues, and did not opine on the New York trust law issues we have highlighted. The ruling emphasized the horrible job the banks did in protecting and documenting their ownership interest and the overall carelessness of the securitization process. Massachusetts. law is somewhat unique in requiring that not only the note (the borrower IOU) be assigned...

Anyone hoping Obama would change course through his picks for Chief of Staff and National Economic Advisor will be surely disappointed with his selections. Bill Daley has already been announced for the former and Gene Sperling looks like a shoe in for the latter. Both were pivotal in crafting Clinton’s neoliberal policies that I believe are the root cause of our economic woes, and to make matters worse, Volcker is going to step down from his position. This signifies the continuation of Too...

It’s been a few months since I’ve kept track of my bet to no one in particular that 2010 would be the hottest recorded year. With the conclusion of the Cancun climate meetings proving fruitless and NASA releasing data for November, it’s time to see how I did. To briefly recap, in fall 2009 I started to tell people that I believed there was a 99.9% chance that we’d see at least one new hottest year before 2013, with a 75% chance that 2010 would set a new record. Based on the...

Glenn Greenwald had a radio interview and follow up examples where he hammers the point that WikiLeaks is being falsely accused of dumping “thousands” of cables instead of the careful vetting by major press institutions. The reality is that nearly without exception they are simply posting cables that have already been reported by one of their media partners, and with the full redactions in place…redactions that are made with input from US officials. In other news, Daniel Ellsberg...

David Stockman, the director of the Office of Management and Budget for Reagan’s first term has a great breakdown of job growth during a segment on CNBC. In it he claims that there have been zero new “breadwinning” (i.e. enough to raise a typical family) jobs created since the official end of the recession, with the enormous losses from the recession on a pace to take decades to recover. Nearly all the growth has been in the temporary and service sectors, a pattern that continues...

In my last post I argued that an analysis of WikiLeaks shows it is operating on anarchist principles and methods. These views were elucidated in the comments, including the point that Assange had worked on some key technical components behind the crypto-anarchist movement. As someone that has been exposed to these ideas, I readily understood the context in which Assange operates, if only on an intuitive level that was not based on reading his philosophical writings. Leonidas supplied a great link...

There are digital reams of pages about how we should feel about WikiLeaks but nearly no one is talking about the actual content inside the US; which is the pattern for the prior leaks but is getting worse. I’m beginning to wonder how many Americans actually read the articles written about the leaked contents (I try to), let alone the primary documents (I have not nor would I have the time and patience…perhaps to my detriment). For those that are interested I would check out the New York...

Ron has had an increasing amount of posts about the coming energy shortages that are going to threaten industrial society. The estimates are converging across nations and social groups: we have already hit peak conventional oil and it is almost definite we will have sizeable overall oil shortfalls by 2015. Various agencies across the world project this to be around 10 million barrels per day or about 15% of total demand. This will cause oil to skyrocket to unimaginable levels or lead to a commensurate...