“Goldman Sachs Testimony: Why Congress Won't Do Diddly - TPMCafe (blog)” plus 3 more |
- Goldman Sachs Testimony: Why Congress Won't Do Diddly - TPMCafe (blog)
- Sandra Bullock’s Sister Slams Reports That She Spent ... - Access Hollywood
- The Recently Deceased Alan Sillitoe's Greatest Hit: The ... - Associated Content
- Disastrous Computer Models Predictions From Limits to ... - Canada Free Press
| Goldman Sachs Testimony: Why Congress Won't Do Diddly - TPMCafe (blog) Posted: 26 Apr 2010 05:03 PM PDT  This could be a week the boys at Goldman Sachs would like to forget, but it's more likely to be the equivalent of falling asleep on the beach - it'll sting for a few days, and their faces will be boiled lobster red, but in a week they'll be okay. Between the showdown in the senate, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will try to make the GOP walk the plank as they reject the Democrats financial reform proposal, and the oh so scary thought of the fifteen or twenty Goldman employees who are expected to testify tomorrow in front of Congress, you would think something might finally come out of all this that would really make a difference to the general public. This ain't that kinda party. In fact, it never is. I love my president to death, but he does not have the will to stick hot pokers up the collective asses of Wall Streets denziens until they scream out for mercy. For a nation that is obsessed with the truth, even as our lives are constructed mostly out of half truths and convenient fictions, it would simply be too much for the average American to process the kind of stream of consciousness confession this kind of torture might elicit, the kind of rambling harangue between tears that would reveal to the public how little connection there is between the rows of zeros they play with and the actual hard earned pensions and savings and mutual funds they represent, the kind of coughing, sputtering, agonized howl of foul, vile invective that would really show you how much they cared about your American Dream. These were such great times, in fact, when there were no roads to speak of, patent medicines that killed or maimed people by the thousands, regular epidemics that wiped out hundreds of thousands, factories that tacked the value of lost limbs on the wall the way you see prices for a Big Mac at McDonald's, no libraries, few public colleges - the list could go on, but at the top of it were those oh so honorable Robber Barons like Vanderbilt and Gould and Sage, men who manipulated markets and cooked the books and renamed liabilities as assets like... ...well, like Goldman Sachs. But so long as we are willing to wink at Wall Street when it tells us that 2+2=5, we deserve what we get. So long as we are willing to welcome the latest invention they've cooked up in the lab, because it helps us to get what we want today, even if we don't have the money for it, or the cash flow to pay it off, we deserve what we get. So long as we get weak in the knees while reading about multi-million dollar salaries and billions of dollars in bonuses for standing on top of OUR money, we deserve what we get. This is why Congress won't do diddly - because we aren't demanding anything more than a slap on the wrist to make it look good for the cameras. Until the SEC has the same powers the FBI has, or at the very least what the IRS has, we are just whistling Dixie. I'll bet the folks in Greece are wishing they'd never heard of Goldman Sachs right about now. One thing the "we don't need no regulation" Tea Baggers might want to consider - back in the good old days, when the Robber Barons ran the show on Wall Street, there were no bailouts from the government. They just failed, often without warning, stopping the entire economy in its tracks. If you would quit listening to Glen Beck and Michelle Malkin long enough to read some actual history instead of struggling so hard to grasp what the Constitution really says, maybe you would see this. I'll be looking for you Tea Baggers in the Goldman Sachs cheering section - I imagine you'll be the ones who AREN'T wearing the $3000 suits. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Sandra Bullock’s Sister Slams Reports That She Spent ... - Access Hollywood Posted: 26 Apr 2010 02:04 PM PDT LOS ANGELES, Calif. -- Sandra Bullock's sister, Gesine Bullock-Prado, is denying reports that she was with the Oscar-winning actress over the Easter weekend. Gesine, who runs a bakery in Vermont, took to her blog, Confessions of a (Closet) Master Baker, setting the record straight about Sandra's whereabouts. "Apparently I'm able to time travel because according to Star Magazine, radaronline.com and now my local Vermont favorite (and in this I'm being totally honest, it is my favorite) Seven Days, it's reported that my husband of eleven years and I took my sister to some inn (which shall remain nameless because they've gotten enough free publicity from lying up to now) for Easter dinner," she wrote last week. "I know this isn't about pastry and it's not about running a bakery. But this story is about eating and I'm nothing if not deadly serious about eating. And I'm also deadly serious about my family, their privacy and even the most benign fictions printed about them. Usually I don't have the patience or the actual physical evidence to refute printed stupidity. But modern air travel is so cluttered with paper trails, I thought I'd share mine," she continued in the post, which also contained a copy of her flight itinerary. "So to set the record completely straight, if the post on Easter about gorging my way through Chicago doesn't convince you to my whereabouts and only my whereabouts, then let my reservations on the lovely United Airlines be a true and honest testament to what I ate for Easter dinner and with whom, and it wasn't with my lovely family at some nameless Vermont inn I've never set eyes upon," Gesine wrote, referring to Sandra who has largely remained out of the public eye since infidelity allegations against husband Jesse James surfaced last month. Gesine ended her blog post saying, "That night I ate alone and I ate airline food. And who the hell would lie about that?" Copyright 2010 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved. Keep your Access to everything in Hollywood! Breaking news and personal commentary from Billy, Tony, Shaun, Maria & all of our producers! Follow us on Facebook and Twitter now! Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| The Recently Deceased Alan Sillitoe's Greatest Hit: The ... - Associated Content Posted: 26 Apr 2010 11:26 AM PDT The 1958 Movie that Launched Albert Finney's Screen Career and the British "Angry Young Men" GenreAlan Sillitoe, who died yesterday in London at the age of 82, published more than 50 books (including the 1995 autobiography Life Without Armour), but if remembered at all, is remembered for two early "angry young [working-class] men" fictions that were made into movies that launched the film careers of Albert Finney (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960) and Tom Courtenay (The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, 1962, directed by Tony Richardson before "Tom Jones," which starred Finney, in 1963).*"Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" won the Author's Club First Novel Award. The screen adaptation wasthe most commercially and critically successful of the British new wave/ angry young men flicks of the late 1950s and early 1960s and the one that made Albert Finney a star. The movie was produced by Tony Richardson, who had directed two John Osborne plays (Look Back In Anger, The Entertainer). It was directed by Karl Reisz (1926-2002; a Czech-born British director who has made relatively few films, but they have included the brilliant adaptations of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers as "Who'll Stop the Rain" and John Fowles's seemingly unfilmable The French Lieutenant's Woman from a novel adapted for the screen by Alan Sillitoe). In its day (the novel in 1958, the movie in 1960), "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" was regarded as realistic, and despite censoring, as shocking. I'll get back to that. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Disastrous Computer Models Predictions From Limits to ... - Canada Free Press Posted: 26 Apr 2010 05:00 AM PDT An Unavoidable TruthDisastrous Computer Models Predictions From Limits to Growth to Global WarmingBy Dr. Tim Ball Monday, April 26, 2010
No matter what political committees try to absolve corruption of climate science of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), they cannot hide the complete failure of the computer models to make a single accurate prediction. Leaked emails from the CRU received media attention, but the emphasis must shift to the computer models. They gave the IPCC Reports far more credibility than they deserved by producing simple graphs and crude maps of a warmer world with increasingly, expanding and threatening red (hot) areas that avoided the need for scientific understanding. What was more dramatic than the infamous hockey stick? The combination of the flat handle achieved by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period and the upturn of the blade in the 20th century with Phil Jones' undisclosed data was visually dramatic. The propagandists in Hollywood who produced Gore's movie understood this. Computer climate models give unwarranted scientific credibility for people who don't understand them. As Pierre Gallois explained, "If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it." Dr David Frame, climate modeler at Oxford University said, "The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful." But climate models are not convenient fictions. They do not produce anything useful other than to deceive and scare the public. IPCC models are part of continuum of the exploitation of useless computer models to promote environmental extremism and political agendas. An Early Example of Political Policy Driven By Computer Output."Limits To Growth" was a 1972 report produced for The Club of Rome. It used grossly simplistic linear models to claim the world was on the verge of collapse. The central theme was a continuation of the idea about population capacity of the world that has gone on throughout written history. Plato and Aristotle discussed the ideal size for a city-state in the 3rd and 4th centuries BC, but Confucius preceded them in the 5th century with warnings about excessive growth. Predictions of population outgrowing resources were given a boost by the speculations of Thomas Malthus with his 1798 "An Essay on the Principle of Population." "Limits To Growth" followed and built on Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb that claimed the world was already overpopulated and doomed. "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."
Despite the ludicrous nature of these claims, they drew attention and promotion from environmentalists and people who saw the political potential of the fears his claims engendered. Not least among these was John Holdren, who co-authored a 1969 article with Ehrlich that claimed, "if the population control measures are not initiated immediately, and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come." Holdren is in a position as science Czar in the Obama White House to try and make this prophecy a reality. "Holdren was a fully paid-up member of The Limits to Growth club. For example, in his 1971 Sierra Club book, Energy: A Crisis in Power, Holdren declared that, "it is fair to conclude that under almost any assumptions, the supplies of crude petroleum and natural gas are severely limited. The bulk of energy likely to flow from these sources may have been tapped within the lifetime of many of the present population." Because of this view, Holdren joined with Ehrlich and John Harte in a bet with economist Julian Simon that five metals would increase in price over ten years because of increasing scarcity. Simon easily won the bet. (Forbes Feb. 3, 2009) Failures Fail To Destroy CredibilityDespite this, the credibility of these people remained unsullied and essentially unchallenged in the same way that the credibility of the CRU/IPCC does today. A significant reason was because they both used computer models that mystify and beguile most people, as Gallois observed. However, beyond not understanding the mathematics was the public belief that the models produced accurate predictions of the future. In fact, the Limits to Growth "World3" model was not intended to be predictive. "In this first simple world model, we are interested only in the broad behavior modes of the population-capital system." The "population-capital" phrase is telling because it links the catastrophic population predictions of Ehrlich with the economic system. It was a barely disguised attack upon the capitalist system. IPCC models do the same thing. Most think they are only about global temperature, but that is incorrect. The final Reports produced by working Group II are based on the temperature predictions, "After confirming in the first volume on "The Physical Science Basis" that climate change is occurring now, mostly as a result of human activities, this volume illustrates the impacts of global warming already under way and the potential for adaptation to reduce the vulnerability to, and risks of, climate change." These are blended into the influential Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM) that says population and economic growth measured by CO2 have caused temperature increase and the solution is to stop the economic growth and reduce the population. Models of both groups are built on population projections and assume business as usual. Both are simplistic linear models based on virtually no data, with completely inadequate understanding of the mechanisms and inabilities to accommodate feedback. Every model prediction or projection of both groups was remarkably wrong, regardless of attempts at improvement. This is true for weather, climate, population and economic models. A similar record of failed predictions would doom any other area of research and policy. But money and politics combined with the use of computer models bestows a completely unjustified credibility. It's time their failures were exposed. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana CFP ToolsShare(1) Reader Feedback | Subscribe | Print friendly | Contact Us | Send this page to a friend! |
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
Every time history repeats itself the price goes up. Anonymous| You are subscribed to email updates from fictions - Bing News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar