The BP Disaster is mindboggling. Also in the news: Britain’s elections, the Iran nuclear non-deal and sanctions, Greece, Elena Kagan, Thailand, FinReg, Carbon cap ‘n trade, Rand Paul, Arizona’s Illegal Immigration Law.
The Top 5:
Ooof, this is what happens when you don’t post for 3 weeks. There’s a huge post below the cut, so here’re my top five reads.
And one for fun: 2010 SXSW mp3’s (legal)
As usual, highlights are in red.
Way too much happens over the course of two weeks. It took me 2 hrs just to take all the links and clippings and format them >.< . But for now, here’s the news. Again, highlights are in red.
Haiti
Egads, so much good material this week. All of the videos are worth watching (not all could be embedded, sorry!) and the photo galleries are beautiful and fascinating. Obama’s Nobel Speech is worth a read. Definitely try to make some time to watch the Frontline expose on the credit card industry and the Global income vs Health vs Time videos. Or at least have them playing in the corner of your screen while you do your other web browsing =b.
(Update: Oh, and if you’re up late tonight (sunday) and lucky enough for it to be clear out, catch the geminid meteor showers!)
Data Visualization
Environment
Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta’s tar sands operation is the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.
Business / Finance
“The industry is just a giant wealth transfer mechanism from poor people to wealthly people. The profits from below (subprime) serve to subsidize the interest rate and rewards cost of people in the ’super prime’ category.”
My back of the envelope calculation says that we need to add around 18 million jobs over the next five years, or 300,000 jobs a month. This puts last week’s employment report, which showed job losses of “only” 11,000 in November, in perspective. ~Krugman
If we exclude these immigrants from the calculus, however (as domestic policymakers are naturally inclined to do), the small net gain that remains after subtracting US workers’ losses from US employers’ gains is tiny. And if we account for the small fiscal burden that unauthorized immigrants impose, the overall economic benefit is close enough to zero to be essentially a wash.
Where does this leave policymakers?
US Budget
Healthcare
Politics
the minority party has a continual stake in Congress not really working … it’s bad for Congress and bad for democracy. It means power devolves from the legislature and towards unelected, unaccountable organizations like the Federal Reserve, the EPA … or the courts.
In 1992 the end strengths of our military forces were:
Army 610,450
Navy 541,883
Marines 184,529
Air Force 470,315In 2000 the end strengths of our military forces were:
Army 481,669
Navy 373,692
Marines 173,371
Air Force 354,321
Christianity
Our Christian faith recognizes violence, harassment and unjust treatment of any human being as a betrayal of Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. As followers of the teachings of Christ, we must express profound dismay at a bill currently before the Parliament in Uganda. The “Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2009″ would enforce lifetime prison sentences and in some cases the death penalty for homosexual behavior, as well as punish citizens for not reporting their gay and lesbian neighbors to the authorities.
Photos
Funny
