Hat tip to the Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog.

The internet is an amazing, incredible thing. Despite what some blowhards might think (big hat tip to FireJoeMorgan for doing us the favor of tearing this to shreds so we don’t have to) it is amazing that every one of us has equal opportunity to say our piece and has equal ability to read what others are writing. It has the potential to enable massive political and cultural change, far beyond anything we’ve seen before.

The potential for the internet to truly enable real democratic growth and participation in society is one of the reasons I’m so passionate about Network Neutrality. I also think that the internet will help us enjoy many of the things we love without destroying the planet we all share. One way this can happen is through a massive shift in how we obtain and consume media.

Michael Bay has a wild and crazy theory that seems to me to be dead on. We’re currently in the midst of an epic battle between the next great media formats. There are two camps, the BlueRay group and the HD-DVD camp. Both make discs which play video with higher resolutions than current DVDs. Both come on discs strikingly similar to the first generation DVD and CD. Microsoft has been one of the largest backers of the HD-DVD format and Michael Bay thinks he knows why.

What you don’t understand is corporate politics. Microsoft wants both formats to fail so they can be heroes and make the world move to digital downloads. That is the dirty secret no one is talking about. That is why Microsoft is handing out $100 million dollar checks to studios just embrace the HD DVD and not the leading, and superior Blu Ray. They want confusion in the market until they perfect the digital downloads. Time will tell and you will see the truth.

He’s right. There’s no call for a new DVD format. It’s in fact destructive to make a major move to a new optical media format. Never mind the huge piles of electronic garbage created when everyone throws out their old DVD player to get that slick new HD-DVD player. Let’s talk about the disks themselves. Each CD/DVD produced and delivered contributes a kilogram of carbon dioxide to global warming. Then, when the disk is too scratched to play, it joins the 100,000 pounds of optical media thrown out each month.

Via Earth2Tech:

The chemical used in jewel cases, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), is especially damaging to the environment. It often contains a variety of additives, including lead, making it is the least recyclable, and least recycled, of the major plastics. The EPA estimates that less than one percent of post-consumer PVC is recovered or reprocessed. That means the remaining 99% either ends up in landfills or is incinerated, a process that releases damaging dioxins into the air.

…

Every $100,000 spent on commercial software reproduction creates the global warming potential of approximately 29 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents as well as 38 kilograms of toxic waste. This estimate does not include related materials such as printed manuals, nor does it include the impact of shipping, etc. required for distribution. There is no reason to assume that in-house software reproduction would have a lower environmental impact, and in fact, would likely be higher due to less efficiency in shipping, batch processing, etc.

Were there to be a shift towards digital delivery of all media we would all be better served. The increased efficiency would allow for more money to go to artists and prices to fall all without cutting into profits. There would also be a positive environmental impact and I’d be able to watch Superbad the day it comes out on DVD without getting off my duff and eventually adding to the pile of 5.5 million jewel cases thrown out each year. Yep, if Michael Bay is right, the garbage he directs will never become trash.

Think the RIAA is out to sue all file-sharers? Maybe not. A report in Wired suggests that they’re being uncharacteristically lenient in one area: MP3 blogs. If you’re unaware of them, the concept is pretty simple. The authors post descriptions of albums and/or songs, and link to where you can download them, usually for free. These songs are not hosted by the blogs, but rather third-party hosting services like Rapid Share.

The question is, why don’t the record companies care? If they’re spinning their wheels and suing Limewire and Bittorrent users, why aren’t they going after these music bloggers? After all, they’re facilitating the illegal download of copyrighted material (the words of the RIAA, not of me).

First is traffic volume. For instance, one of the more popular blogs, It’s Coming Out Of Your Speaker, saw just 1,487 visitors yesterday. That is substantial by some means, but in the overall scheme of things, it’s a drop in the pan. I run a fairly popular baseball blog (specifically on the New York Yankees, furthering the niche), and we see double that traffic on a normal day — and even more now because of the climate within the niche. In any event, far more people visit Bittorrent and P2P sharing sites daily than these blogs.

Second is culpability. The overwhelming majority of these MP3 blogs are hosted by Blogger or WordPress, rather than being independently hosted. This leaves the RIAA wondering where they should set their targets, if they are to do so at all. It’s one thing to publish copyrighted material. It’s quite another to post a link to copyrighted material on a blog that you don’t technically own (since it’s hosted by Blogger or WordPress, they reserve the right to take down your blog). So it’s unclear whether they can even do anything to the bloggers.

Third is relevancy. I searched through a few of these blogs, and all I found was obscure and older music. Those aren’t exactly the alleys from which the RIAA makes its dough. It’s more concerned with the piracy of mainstream music, the kind that can rake in millions, even billions through record stores and digital outlets like iTunes and the Amazon store. I doubt the RIAA cares if three copies of an old New York Dolls album is downloaded. Chances are, no one was going to buy it anyway.

(Aside: This is no knock on the New York Dolls or any other obscure band. It’s a mere sales issue. I’m all for the more obscure music…and have actually taken a liking to the selections on these blogs.)

You’d think that the RIAA would be even more fired up because of the advertising issue. Not only are these bloggers giving people a portal to download these copyrighted albums for free, but they’re making a dime or two from advertising through Google AdSense. The RIAA I know wouldn’t stand for people profiting from piracy.

To me, this signals that something is up. We don’t have all the relevant data at hand, after all. Perhaps there has been a measurable growth in the sales of these more obscure and older albums since the MP3 blogs have come into existence. Going back to the New York Dolls example, maybe they sold 10 albums per month before the birth of MP3 blogs. But after they were mentioned on one of them, they sold 50 albums the next month. I don’t think the record companies are going to complain about that, do you?

That might not necessarily be the case, but it’s something to consider. For all we know, they could be leaving this issue alone because they have bigger issues at hand — like the threat of EMI to cut funding to the group. Yeah, that might matter a bit more to them than MP3 blogs.

But they’re out there, so you might as well check them out. My suggestion is to hit up It’s Coming Out Of Your Speaker and checking out the links list. Should be able to find plenty of material there.

The Republicans must be glad they failed to eliminate the filibuster way back in 2005 when it seemed the good times would roll on forever. The filibuster isn’t the grand spectacle of days yore anymore. Current Senate Rules allow you to stop all Senate business if the opposition doesn’t have 2/3 majority to vote to end debate. Rather than requiring that you then occupy the floor and speak continuously until the offending bill is dropped., you now simply need to threaten to do so

Regardless, it is a procedural maneuver that was never used before 1841. Upon its first use there was a debate as to whether a simple majority should be enough to end debate but the Senate has tended to lean towards extended and careful consideration of all bills and so the tactic survived. Today it is truly in its heyday.

The NY Times ran a story tonight which just might explain why there has been so little movement on big issues from this congress. in the first year of this Congress there have been more filibusters than ever before in a two year Senate session.

So far in this first year of the 110th Congress, there have been 72 motions to stop filibusters, most on the Iraq war but also on routine issues like reauthorizing Amtrak funding. There were 68 such motions in the full two years of the previous Congress, 53 in 1987-88 and 23 in 1977-78. In 1967-68, there were 5 such votes, one of them on a plan to amend cloture itself, which failed.

I’m all for the minorities right to assert itself. It’s important that there is a means to empower proponents of alternative viewpoints. It’s important that there is the ability to force the majority to listen to your point of view. That’s something that should never be changed. There is a problem when filibuster is used to prevent rather than ensure debate. That’s the problem we’re seeing today.

Therefore I propose that we return to the days of long winded speeches. Bring us back to the days when passion drove politics. Bring back that good old filibuster, the kind you could make a movie about.

There’s been a bit of a stink this morning, and rightfully so, after the Washington Post decided to make a front page story out of claims that Obama is secretly a Muslim.

This is a story that reminds me so much of the Swiftboat attacks on John Kerry. It reveals a serious problem in how major media outlets conduct political reporting.

There is an assumption that balance is achieved by giving both sides of an issue equal weight. This is simply not the case. We are lucky enough to live in a world where there are objective realities. We can verify that something is true or false.

The problem is, it isn’t easy. It takes hard work to show that something is demonstrably false. You can’t simply compile a few quotes and head home to write. You have to do your due diligence.

We have seen the media take the lazy route. Instead of doing research and presenting the reality as fact and the rumors as unsubstantiated attacks, the media simply records both sides as worthy of equal time. This simply is not the case. We live in a world where sometimes there are many many equally valuable opinions and where sometimes there is simply a single reality. It’s part of the media’s job to distinguish between these cases and provide us with the truth, where ever possible. Sometimes that means calling a lie a lie.

Without the proper means to gauge which investments are safe and the bottom falling out of previous investments, there has been a rapid decline in the market for commercial paper.

The combined value of two major sources of credit - outstanding commercial and industrial bank loans, and short-term loans known as commercial paper - peaked at about $3.3 trillion in August, according to data from the Federal Reserve. By mid-November, such credit was down to $3 trillion, a drop of nearly 9 percent.

Not once in the years since the Fed began tracking such numbers in 1973 have these arteries of finance constricted so rapidly. Smaller declines preceded three recessions going back to 1975.

These are investors unwilling to take the risk involved in backing corporate loans. This could rapidly cause a major recession or depression. This is why it’s so important to have a working system for assessing the worth of investments. When that system breaks, everything else comes down like a house of cards.

Today’s Daily Irrational spewed from the mouth of Mitt Romney. Mitt, who has a vested interest in not making religious affiliation a part of the political campaign, has decided that maybe there is a place of religion in determining who should fill a political office. When asked if he’d be willing to give a cabinet level position to a qualified candidate of the muslim faith, he said no.

…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration.

Personally, I’d think that the nearly 3 million Muslim Americans deserve some representation at high levels. Recent census data shows that population more than doubled between 1990 and 2001 going from 0.3% of the total population to 0.6%. The Mormon population in contrast shrank over that time frame from 1.5% to 1.4% of the total population.

The real issue though, is that if Mitt seriously considers Jihadism to be the principal foreign policy threat, it would seem smart to make sure to include moderate Muslims in the decision making process as we plan a response. Denying any qualified candidate because of their racial or religious background is wrong. To exclude a perspective that could be particularly valuable is downright irrational.

I’m not an economist. I think it’s important I begin this post by saying that. In fact, I’m an IT Tech who happens to be interested in the way too many other things, like the economy. What can I say, I like having a job so it’s important to me that the economy is healthy. It’s important to you too. What I’m about to attempt to do is explain what I understand about the current lending crisis that is about to severely impact our countries economic health.

There’s a lot of talk about a crisis in subprime lending. These are loans given to people with less than perfect credit. The reality is that there are systematic reasons why banks chose to invest so heavily in loans that seem unwise on their face.

We’ve seen the effects an economic downturn can have on the nation at large. In early 2001 President Bush began an endless repetition of the mantra that Clinton had ruined our economy. He said it ever so nicely, for instance in March 2001, “You see, it’s the President’s job to look for warnings of economic trouble ahead, and to heed them, and to act.” With economics, perception often becomes reality and that constant negative drumbeat along with the end of an economic boom based around new dot com businesses led to a several year recession which cost the country about 2 million jobs.

That was small beans.

The current lending crisis could easily lead to a complete halt in growth in the US economy. Estimates I’ve read point to the potential for a halt in economic growth to drive unemployment from 4.7% of the population to 6.4%. This would be a loss of 3,000,000 jobs. Those are 3 million families who suddenly will find their lives exponentially more difficult.

Right now the bulk of the economic crisis that is discussed in the media is related to predatory mortgages that were given out to poor families regardless of their ability to repay. This is really the tip of the iceberg though. For a more complete picture of what is happening in the lending market, I’m going to attempt to summarize a talk given recently by David Einhorn which I will quote from liberally.

In short, he argues that we have learned nothing from the recent mortgage meltdown. We’ve decided that what happened was purely that a lot of bad people took advantage of a lot of people who didn’t fully understand the terms they were accepting for their mortgages. We talk about it purely as a crisis related to subprime mortgages when really it is a lending market crisis caused by major flaws in our securities evaluation systems.

This crisis came for exactly the right reason. There is a big flaw in the structure of our credit markets. The bad structure induced lenders to take imprudent risks and make imprudent loans, which, of course led to losses. What is unique about this crisis compared to others is that the losses are in illiquid, opaque structures scattered around the world.

…

In my view, the credit issues aren’t just about subprime. Subprime is what the media says. Subprime is what parts of our financial establishment says. Subprime is about them – those people and the people who made foolish loans to them. The word “Subprime” is pejorative. Subprime is not about us, for we are not subprime. How convenient to be able to pass the blame.

There has been much talk from politicians and pundits about predatory lending – that is making loans at high rates to people who couldn’t reasonably be expected to pay them back. They are right, that is a bad practice, but that is not what’s shaking the markets. At issue today is that lenders of all sorts have lent too much money and did not demand enough interest to compensate them for the risks they took. There has been a colossal undercharging for credit across the board.

The core of the flaw is that securities are evaluated by several private bodies, the major ones being Stanard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch Ratings. These companies issue ratings for each security that express the level of risk involved in purchasing the security. These ratings heavily influence which securities financial firms invest in and have a direct effect on the interest rates charged for similar loans. There is nothing wrong with a private body performing this task, but there is a serious problem in how they make their profit.

Have the rating agencies developed an expertise in analyzing these structures? Perhaps, but more pertinent, they are the only ones who can evaluate them, because they are the only ones with the detailed information about the structures. The underwriters give the rating agencies much more information than is contained in the prospectus. In their evaluation of corporate credits, rating agencies are exempt from regulation FD. This means that they can receive confidential information not available to other market participants. This is kind of like a confessional where the priest delivers a public opinion on the extent of your virtues and sins – and your spouse has to guess what a AAA or BBB means about your fidelity.

In other words, these ratings agencies know things every other investor never gets to find out. You know if you’re buying or selling junk bonds or pushing a strong investment because they told you so. Their job is to use the inside information they have to good advice to investors so they can properly understand the risk they are taking on.

Now if you were looking for inside information, let’s say on a boxing match you wanted to bet on, who would you want to get that inside information from? Would you rather get that information from a person who you paid, or would you rather listen to the guy your bookie has paid? The guy you paid has a financial incentive to give you the information that will help you win the bet. The guy who your bookie paid has a financial incentive to give you the information that will help your bookie win the bet. I’d listen to the guy who has my interests in mind.

Unfortunately, Moody’s, Stanard & Poor’s and Fitch all are paid by those looking to have their securities evaluated. Therefore, the three major firms are competing to be the best at attracting customers and getting those customers money. In this case that’s the sellers of securities. In effect, there is a financial incentive to give the highest ratings in as many cases as possible as that will make your firm more money.

There is also extra pressure to not always tell the whole truth about the health of an investment. Just as Presidents can affect the economy by exuding confidence or forecasting doom, by letting the cat out of the bag on all the pending trouble the ratings agencies run the risk of causing a panic in the market. This would further erode the financial health of those paying the bills. By telling the whole truth about the current crisis many banks would be forced to disclose the full extent of the hit they’ve taken at once.

When ratings agencies are more concerned about the effects of the rating actions than on the accuracy of the ratings, they become part of the Wall Stree “confidence” machine and surrender their ability to fulfill their statutory role in objectively analyzing credit.

To make things more complicated, rather than just evaluating all securities on one scale, they have decided to evaluate different securities on different scales. Therefore, a bond issued by a city or town, despite the fact that it is highly unlikely to be defaulted upon, may be issued a far lower rating than a corporate bond with a far higher likelihood of going bust. What’s worse, when securities are cleverly packaged, they can achieve a higher rating than any of them would individually, not because they are a better investment as a package, but because packaging them changes the ratings system that applies to them.

The result is that municipalities are charged higher interest rates on their bonds than corporate lenders, not because they represent a greater risk but rather because they’re in a different ratings scale. On this scale a municipal bond rated just above a junk bond is half as likely to go bust in 10 years as a corporate bond with the highest rating. This has led, according to Einhorn, to taxpayers paying $5 billion a year in interest they shouldn’t need to pay.

Is it proper to have the same ratings mean different things in different classes? Probably not. For many bond buyers the statutory requirements are determined by the credit rating. If the bond is rated investment grade, then it is eligible for purchase. No distinction is made for buying the “good” A rated bonds versus the “bad” ones. The bad A rated bonds don’t come with special warning labels. They tend to find themselves in the portfolios of the least sophisticated ratings-driven portfolios like pension funds.

This is simply because investors aren’t given the proper information to understand the risks they are taking on. Were the system designed to rate all investments on a single scale it would be obvious what the wise investment is. The cost of financing public projects would go down as the bonds that pay for them cheapen. Investors also would be able to avoid dangerous subprime investments.

When securities comprised of bundles of questionable investments can be assured an inflated rating, it makes it more financially viable to make the initial bad loan. Despite the fact that lenders know the loan is likely to go bust, they are sure they can sell the risk before it’s too late as a wise investment. We need to eliminate the short term financial incentive to make an economically disastrous decision.

Einhorn suggests that we change to a model where all the information that Stanard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch get also goes to the public at large. Those firms would instead have to go into the somewhat less lucrative business of competing to sell their services instead to the investors who will be purchasing the securities they are rating. In this case they will have the investors’ best interests in mind. If that leads to fewer people preying on poor Ms. Dailey, I’m all for it.

I spend most of my life tinkering with one piece of electronics or another. Such is the existence of a lowly IT Tech. I’ve also thrown out an old piece of electronics or two, and know a little about where they end up when they die.

In order to help consumers make electronics decisions that will have a minimal negative impact on our environment, Greenpeace has begun rating manufacturers on how green their business practices are. They rated they rated the top 18 manufacturers of consumer electronics 1-10 looking at their use of toxic materials and their efforts to ensure devices are recycled at their end of life.

Some companies, like Sony Ericson, Samsung and Dell scored in the mid to high 7’s, falling short on their efforts to help recycle old products. Other companies did not do so well. Apple is sitting in the middle of the pack with a 6. Bringing up the rear, with a shocking zero points is the Big N. Nintendo.

According to the AP the number 2 Republican in the Senate, Trent Lott, is resigning, effective the end of this year, to pursue “other opportunities”. Does anyone else smell a career in lobbying coming?

Spencer Ackerman Today’s Must Read

Remember that recently-impaneled grand jury looking at Blackwater’s Nisour Square shootings? Turns out it’s not just about Blackwater.

Four years into the occupation, prosecutors are attempting to build the first criminal case against private security companies — who up until now worked in a system rigged to ensure unaccountability.

Jeffery McMurray Soldier Decries AWOL Arrest at Hospital

A soldier facing his second tour of duty in Iraq said in a jailhouse interview he was at a hospital seeking mental help when he was arrested in the middle of the night for allegedly being absent without leave.

Spc. Justin Faulkner insists his superior officers at Fort Campbell knew about his mental problems but refused to provide adequate treatment.

Jason Rhyne Former White House Press Secretary: Bush, Rove Helped Pass Along “False Information” on Plame

“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” writes McClellan. “So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.”

But his press performances weren’t based on the facts, McClellan continues.

“There was one problem. It was not true,” he writes. “I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the president himself.”

It’s been a slow day here at the DR. I’m a bit under the weather, so I apologize to our three current readers.

However, I couldn’t leave this one behind. All I have to say is, remember the name Hans von Spakovsky. If you’ve got a half-hour on your hands, you might want to read this letter, which called von Spankovsky “the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights” when he was with the Department of Justice.

After that, I’d recommend reading this article from July, and this one from Tuesday. Yes, it’s all Talking Points Memo, but it still makes a valid point.

Okay. Got that? Okay, now read this article, and note the final line:

“We’ve lost control of the voter registration process.”

And then take a gander at one election official has to say:

When there is a problem, it kicks off a series of reviews and finally, efforts to contact the would-be voter, said Orange County Elections Supervisor Bill Cowles.

“There are so many levels to how this happens,” he said. “If we do notify a voter, they’re sent a letter and a new application to fill out. It is then up to the voter to take the next step”

But especially in neighborhoods where rental rates are high, those notices come back undeliverable, and there is nothing more a county can do, Cowles said.

That’s why he advocates a return to old ways — registering voters through trained volunteers under direction of the county.

By opening voter registration to anyone with a mass mailing or a clipboard on the corner, Cowles said Florida also opened the door to losing thousands of would-be voters through human error.

To me, that sounds like an roundabout means of disenfranchisement. Helping the case:

Blacks were 6 1/2 times more likely than whites to be rejected at that step.

Hispanics were more than 7 times more likely to be failed.

I’m sure that anyone reading this also reads Talking Points Memo. But I feel like this is so important that it should be shouted from building tops. Unfortunately, all I have is a blog.

Today’s Daily Irrational is an window into how far we’ve fallen. Look at what is being lauded as a sign, or more accurately the cause, of Bush’s new political strength. From the Washington Post:

In many ways, the shifting political fortunes may owe as much to the absence of bad news as to any particular good news. No one lately has been indicted, botched a hurricane relief effort or shot someone in a hunting accident.

Philip Baruth said it so well that I’ll simply quote his response.

We are a nation eminently capable of fucking up a free lunch. So capable, in fact, that if we don’t fuck up the free lunch entirely, but only to a certain extent, we’re ready to break out the champagne.

…

We’re grateful each day we don’t have to pick bird-shot out of our face and heart.

But good Lord, just what have we come to?

There has been a lot of talk about the larger financial consequences of the current mortgage crisis. I’m even guilty of discussing the concerns of the wealthy lenders before looking at the real victims of the crisis. Hopefully I can right that wrong now.

In today’s NY Times Bob Herbert brings us a look at the personal side of the mortgage crisis with the story of one family that is losing their home to predatory lenders.

“The people that wanted to put through the loan called me about a hundred times,” said Rosa Dailey, who is 65 and going blind and needs an oxygen tank at times to help her breathe. “I kept telling them no, because I didn’t think we could afford it. But they kept saying how it was to our advantage. So I finally said: ‘All right, let’s see what we can do.’ ”

What they did was rope her into a mortgage she couldn’t afford. The company inflated her income and the value of her home on the applications to get her a loan she shouldn’t have qualified for. When they began to slip behind on their original mortgage the lenders returned.

On Aug. 8, 2005, a representative of the Argent Mortgage Company took Ms. Dailey from the Merrill Avenue house to her sister’s bedside at Kindred Hospital. There the women signed papers for a loan that they were told would bring their monthly payments down to a manageable level.

Betty Jones was dying. Ms. Dailey’s eyesight was too poor to read the papers shoved in front of her. Both women were frightened and confused.

“I was told that was the only way I could save the house,” Ms. Dailey said.

Thousands of dollars in additional fees were heaped upon them. And the required monthly payment was more than they could possibly have afforded.

Now with her sister and mother gone, Ms. Dailey has been left fighting to stay in the home she had thought she was protecting. Her payments on her mortgage are so large she hasn’t been able to keep the heat working in the house or keep up with maintenance.

I asked Rosa Dailey yesterday how she’d be spending her Thanksgiving. She said her money for the month had run out, so she wouldn’t be doing anything special.

“I’ll be right here,” she said. “I’ve got some corn flakes and canned vegetables. That’ll be my Thanksgiving.”

As we think this Thursday about all we have to be thankful for, we ought to pause for a moment to remember the thousands of families who no longer have a home to gather in. As we consider packages to bail out the financial institutions who hoped to profit from fraud and abuse of economically vulnerable Americans, we ought to remember who really needs our help, average citizens like Ms. Dailey.

Once in a while some hippie doctor will drum up an excuse for his patients to get high. We all know once that happens you smoke marijuana you stop contributing to society and next thing you know you’re left with nothing. Only a song can stop the dreaded onslaught.

There are no legitimate medical uses for marijuana. When the BBC runs a story proclaiming that scientists have found that a chemical found in marijuana can stop the spread of breast cancer and brain cancer, just remember, these are hippies trying to ruin America.

They added that it would be highly unlikely that effective concentrations of CBD could be reached by smoking cannabis.

CBD works by blocking the activity of a gene called Id-1 which is believed to be responsible for the aggressive spread of cancer cells away from the original tumour site - a process called metastasis.

Past work has shown CBD can block aggressive human brain cancers.

The latest work found CBD appeared to have a similar effect on breast cancer cells in the lab.

Why do these scientists hate American cancer?

Normally I wouldn’t even acknowledge this sort of garbage. I honestly think that to engage in this debate is to legitimize this line of thought, but when an article goes up on Slate that sin has already occured. In in his piece Saletan explores the reasons that blacks tend to score lower on IQ tests.

The current favorite alternative to a genetic explanation is that black kids grow up in a less intellectually supportive culture. This is a testament to how far the race discussion has shifted to the right. Twenty years ago, conservatives were blaming culture, while liberals blamed racism and poverty. Now liberals are blaming culture because the emerging alternative, genetics, is even more repellent.

No, it’s the economics, stupid. The economic status, and more precisely the economic you’re status percieved to have, really does affect the options that become available to you, including education.

There are plenty of reasons why white Europeans ended up with so much power and so many other advantages and none of them are related to genetics. If you want to better understand the power dynamic that led to white Europeans sailing to Africa to capture slaves and not the other way around, I highly recommend reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond which explains the geographic realities that directly led to today’s inequalities.

Robert Levine A Guerilla Video Site Meets MTV
“‘They gave me a pitch of 60 Minutes-meets-Jackass,‘ said Jeff Yapp, the executive vice president for program enterprises for the MTV Networks music group.

In return for its investment — which is not mentioned on the VBS site — MTV gets a low-cost laboratory in which to experiment with Internet video programming as it struggles to adjust to a world where online content is chipping away at television’s dominance.”

Mark Tran Guards Shot Children Dead After Afghan Suicide Blast, Says UN
“Many of the children who died in Afghanistan’s worst-ever suicide attack were actually shot dead by bodyguards who fired indiscriminately into the crowd after the blast, a UN report said.”

Julia Preston Immigration Dilemma: A Mother Torn From a Baby
“Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.

The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.

The decision to separate a mother from her breast-feeding child drew strong denunciations from Hispanic and women’s health groups.”

Matthew Yglesias, The LBJ Analogy:
“And this bothers me about Hillary Clinton in a way that extends beyond the mere argument-by-analogy. What Roberts recounts as Clinton’s attitude toward the climate change issue — she understands the problem, she understands the solution, and rather than telling advocates what they want to hear she’s telling them that she also understands how to move the ball forward in concrete, realistic terms — seems pretty appealing to me. And on climate change, health care, and most of the other big domestic issues, I believe that she does understand the problem and understand the solution. The left-right divide on those topics has relatively little to do with disagreements about desirable end-states. Rather, you mostly see disagreement about political possibilities, or even things that aren’t disagreement at all, but just different politicians responding to different political circumstances.”

Maria Cramer Boston Police Plan to Search Youths’ Homes for Guns
“Boston police are launching a program that will call upon parents in high-crime neighborhoods to allow detectives into their homes, without a warrant, to search for guns in their children’s bedrooms.

The program, which is already raising questions about civil liberties, is based on the premise that parents are so fearful of gun violence and the possibility that their own teenagers will be caught up in it that they will turn to police for help, even in their own households.”

So your old computer is at the end of its life. It crashes every ten minutes. The hard drive makes a terrible crunching sound. The monitor is all pink in the upper left corner. It’s time for an upgrade but first what do we do with the old computer?

As a socially conscious person you don’t want that computer to be sitting in a landfill till the end of time so you send it to an electronics recycler. Being an IT tech I see a lot of equipment reach its end of life. I’ve filled dumpsters with junk computers to be sent to an electronics recycling company.

Where does all that junk go? It goes here:

It tends to go to third world countries where it is dismantled crudely by poor workers in extremely dangerous conditions. The picture above is of a recycling center in rural China.

While there are no precise figures, activists estimate that 50 to 80 percent of the 300,000 to 400,000 tons of electronics collected for recycling in the U.S. each year ends up overseas. Workers in countries such as China, India and Nigeria then use hammers, gas burners and their bare hands to extract metals, glass and other recyclables, exposing themselves and the environment to a cocktail of toxic chemicals.

“It is being recycled, but it’s being recycled in the most horrific way you can imagine,” said Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, the Seattle-based environmental group that tipped off Hong Kong authorities. “We’re preserving our own environment, but contaminating the rest of the world.”

After reading this article in the Boston Globe, I thought back to my elementary school days and the strong emphasis we had on reading. We had programs like Book It! and Reading Is Fundamental. Since I don’t know any kids currently in elementary school, I’m not sure if these programs still exist, or if they’re treated with the same fervor as they were in my day. Hey, we used to rag on kids constantly if they were lagging behind in Book It. After all, we all wanted that pizza party.

A new report has been released that shows an alarming downward trend of youngsters reading for pleasure. This isn’t necessarily fiction or non-fiction, but reading in general. Let’s cite some statistics.

When you’re 13, your mind is in a rapid development. Adolescence is in its early stages, and things are starting to seem different. It would make sense, then, to test various stimulus during this stage. Unfortunately, reading is not at the forefront of the average 13-year-old’s mind. Only 30 percent read daily.

At 17, just before college, 19 percent of kids never read for pleasure. This is quite disturbing. I say this because I never read for pleasure at age 17.

Oh, my friends did. They were busy reading The Lord of the Rings, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, and other sci-fi and fantasy literature (I have one friend who is obsessed with Philip K. Dick). But sci-fi wasn’t for me. So instead of finding my own niche in literature, I abandoned reading altogether.

What did I do? Probably what a lot of kids nowadays do. I watched a lot of wrestling and baseball. I rounded up various friends on a nightly basis to go waste time. And when I couldn’t find friends to go out with, I sat home and sulked. All told, from my Sophomore through Senior years, I probably read four books for pleasure (and I’m counting A Clockwork Orange, which was a summer reading assignment).

So when a study cites the average 15 through 24 year old spending two to 2.5 hours a day in front of the teevee and only seven minutes reading, my ears perk up. Because that was me. And I don’t wish that one anyone.

My friends who read for pleasure did rather well for themselves. They got into good to great schools: Colgate, Johns Hopkins, Penn State, Wake Forest, William and Mary, UNC, and even Rutgers (though the kid had gotten into RPI). Me? Oh, I got into a few rinky-dink state schools, but my parents, noting my complete lack of work ethic, forced me to go to community college.

Two years later, I still wasn’t reading. I didn’t have my associates degree, a standard after two years in CC hell. I had even ditched out on a final for a class I was failing…because I hadn’t read the goddamn material!

But I was a schmoozer. I did a little research, and found out that I could easily gain admittance to a Pennsylvania state school. So I sent out my application, and 30 days later I’m enrolled at a four-year school. But when I got there, I didn’t have a single friend. Not one. So what did I do to pass the time?

Well, at first I played Final Fantasy VII. But after I beat that thoroughly, I took to — guess what — reading. This started out by reading The New York Times online, and progressed to fiction. I took five classes that first semester, recording an A in four a B in the other. But my delve into reading pretty much ended there.

The next semester, I joined a frat, thus didn’t have much time to read. Then I transferred to Rutgers, where I fell in with that chapter of the fraternity, living at the house and all-in-all acting like a drunken degenerate.

Then came graduation and the struggle to find a job. I had plenty of time on my hands, so I started taking trips to my local library. Soon, I found myself completing books in under a week, whereas it took me nearly a month to get through a title in the past. After about a year of regimented reading, I finally landed a job. But I did not cut out the reading.

Now? I make a living as a writer. I read about a book a week, depending on my freelance workload. I’m writing fiction daily. And I’m finally becoming recognized for being good at what I do, which is my aspiration in everything I do.

Sure, I’m using myself as an example of someone who overcame not reading early in life (though I did read a lot as a youngster; by the age 11 I had read Catcher in the Rye and Jaws). But I don’t think that many kids will follow my path. Why? Because in order to do that, they have to be surrounded by ambitious and hard-working peers. I wouldn’t have made these strides if it wasn’t for a strong network of friends and family. And honestly, how many kids are going to be the only one in their group that doesn’t read, or really aspire to anything? It’s a rare predicament.

The point is, though: Go read a book! I promise, if you stick with a reading regimen, your life will become fuller and richer. You’ll think of things you never thought you would. Trust me. I’m not only the spokesman for this cause, I’m also a client.

More importantly, if you have kids, get them into the reading habit. If they can’t yet read, read to them. If they can, set them up with books they might like. Please, please, don’t start them off with anything classic. Make it modern; they’ll be able to connect with the material more easily. Baby steps. That’s the key.

It seems it’s all economic news all the time these days at the Daily Rational.

Our latest story brings us into a very private meeting that became very public this weekend. As leaders from the OPEC nations met this weekend they were unknowingly broadcasting their private words to news organizations around the world.

The topic of their discussions was the dollar. The dollar is the currency that all oil transactions are currently conducted in. A large chunk of the dollars in circulation are tied up in oil sales. Were OPEC to suddenly decide to conduct their business in Euros, for instance, the result would likely be sudden drastic inflation as vast numbers of dollars are suddenly put back in circulation.

Every political candidate who hopes to lead this country ought to be explaining to the nation how they would handle this looming crisis.