Monks are marching again in the streets of Burma.

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If you’ve wondered why web site tracking programs give hugely different answers, I discuss at least a few of the reasons on my tech blog, as well as showing how to bring the results closer together and presumably then more accurate.

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Sue and I have been looking for ways to cut energy usage, as this saves money and is good for the planet.

Electronics now get turned off or unplugged when not being used. This includes computers as well as the electric toothbrush, which doesn’t need to stay plugged in. Bizarrely (and wastefully) most electronic equipment continues to use electricity even when turned off. This is a wasteful design flaw that needs to be fixed.

The best way to stop such power drains is to plug the equipment into a power strip, then turn the strip off.

We have CFLs everywhere. The prices for them continues to drop. Wal-Mart just sold their first 100 million CFLs ahead of their projected schedule, and are helping enormously in mainstreaming their usage.

The thermostat stays on the low side in the cool weather. We can always wear a sweater. We’ll also be replacing our old R-11 insulation with R-23. My sister who lives nearby keeps her house at 65 in the winter, which is definitely on the cold side. OTOH, we turn the air conditioning on much less than others here because to us, a 90 degree day isn’t hot, and it rarely gets over that.

An efficient wood-burning stove would generate heat. But getting that heat into the ventilation ducts would be a challenge. Plus, such stoves are not cheap and you then need to buy (or chop) the wood. An environmental engineer tells me heating oil probably burns more efficiently and cheaper than any wood or wood pellet stove.

What are you doing to cut energy costs?

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 I think that China is going to be a greater and greater force in the world’s economy in every way.  And I think that in our relations generally with them, we’ve often had a superior attitude about things … Americans do that all the time.  I probably do it myself.  We are used to being King Pin and, we may have to learn a bit more humility.  I mean, there are other major countries in the world that do not have to accept orders from the United States.

– Warren Buffett

He also sees a “fairly significant” chance of the US going into a recession.

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Chris Anderson, The editor of Wired, tired of getting hundreds of unsolicited emails a day from PR firms, has retaliated in a suitably fitting manner. First, he put all their emails in his blocked list.

There is no getting off this list. If you’re on it and have something appropriate to say to me, use a different email address.

Second, and this is the sweet part, he printed all their email addresses on his blog.

If their address gets harvested by spammers by being published here, so be it–turnabout is fair play.

Tip: The Big Picture

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How the SWP’s bureaucratic factionalism is wrecking Respect

If like me, you have trouble figuring out what’s happening with the Respect/SWP rupture because you don’t know the players and the history, the following explains clearly what happened, then puts the blame squarely on SWP. Their conclusion -

If Respect now crashes this will have extremely negative effects. It will create deep scepticism about the possibility of greater left unity and the potential for a broad left party. It will set back and complicate the whole process of politically and organisationally refounding the British left. Although the SWP leadership clearly don’t see this, it will have major negative consequences for the SWP itself and confirm the suspicions of all those who see the SWP as a deeply sectarian and factional formation.

It will confirm those suspicions because they are, sadly, correct. The SWP has shown itself in successive experiences - the Socialist Alliance, the SSP and Respect - to be incapable of fruitful long-term co-operation with other socialists in building a national political alternative. The leopard hasn’t changed its spots.

I call it”Leninitis.” A left faction decides it is inerrant and therefore need not form coalitions or cooperate with those with differing views because, ta da, they are leading a revolutionary vanguard, just like Lenin did! Well, ah no. There was only one Lenin (love him or hate him, he was a brilliant and charismatic organizer, strategist, and tactician) and they aren’t him. What they forget is that for a vanguard party to lead, people must want to follow. Not “be forced to”, not “bludgeoned into” but “want to follow.” Because if they want to follow, then poisonous bureaucratic factionalism never really has a chance to form, does it?

For continuing coverage of what’s happening, check Socialist Unity and Liam Macuaid.

Tip: Left Click

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Monsooned Malabar is my current favorite coffee. You can buy the green beans from Sweet Marias (then roast your own, which is both much cheaper and better quality than store-bought.)

From their review:

Monsooned coffees are stored in special warehouses until the Monsoon season comes around. The sides of the structure are opened and moist monsoon winds circulate around the coffee making it swell in size and take on a mellowed but aggressive, musty flavor. The monsooning process takes around 12 to 16 months of duration, where in the beans swell to twice their original size and turn into pale golden color.

While a good Monsooned coffee should be pungent, aggressive and almost musty, these should be clean flavors: nobody wants coffee to taste like mold! The Elephant is exactly that, which means it is great for espresso blending.

Sweet Maria’s carries dozens of coffees, all meticulously reviewed and graded. We use the Fresh Roast 8 to roast the beans, it’s $75 and works fine for two people. Given that green beans are $5-6 a pound, it quickly pays for itself. Plus, fresh-roasted beans are way better than anything you can buy in a store. Another of my favorites is the Ethiopia Kochere District Yirgacheffe.

The photo shows the Fresh Roast 8, with the Ethiopian on the left and the Monsooned on the right. Both are 5 lb. bags. Note how much larger and lighter the Monsooned beans are. This is due to its unique processing which makes the beans swell.

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From Bill Gross of PIMCO, they manage $726 billion in assets

The loose regulation and financial innovation of the past 35 years have spawned what PIMCO’s Paul McCulley has labeled a “shadow banking system” where credit is composed on a keyboard as opposed to a printing press. Economic historians marvel at the ability of the Weimar Republic in the late 1920s to have printed paper money so fast that workers would lower their afternoon wages in a basket to waiting wives in order to front run rampaging six-digit inflation. Surely they could not have imagined shadow investment bankers and their minions spawning financial derivatives in the hundreds of trillions, far beyond the reach of central bankers and Treasury officials alike.

Gross concludes by saying the Fed will need to drop real interest rates to 1% to stave off recession, and is clearly worried about the economy. Yet the Japanese recession, which started for much the same reasons, was not solved by dropping interest rates to 0.25%.

John Robb comments

Unfortunately, there aren’t any control systems big enough or fast enough to compensate for behavior that exceeds acceptable boundaries — as we are seeing today. In physical systems this usually results in loads that exceed the tolerance of the system, things break apart, and the system crashes. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the financial system.

In you look at this in Marxist terms, then the ruling class should be manipulating and controlling the situation. But they’re not. The really scary truth, I think, is they are just as stunned by this as anyone else - and uncertain about what to do. This crisis of capitalism could mangle the lives of countless people everywhere, most of whom have  probably never even heard of CDOs or SIVs.

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Call them water wars, with the Great Lakes states hunkering down to protect what they see as theirs.

Why would they need to form a water pact to protect their water? Let the always-charming Dick Armey explain.

“We’re not going to be buying it. We’re going to be stealing it,” then-U.S. Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) said in 2000. “You’re going to have to protect your Great Lakes.”

That’s the incentive behind the proposed water compact. Bill Richardson of New Mexico is making similar threats, saying Great Lakes water needs to be sent to the Southwest - that such a mad scheme would be hugely expensive, impractical, plus the Great Lakes are also low on water, appears not to matter to him. Nor does concern as to what this might do to the Great Lakes long term.

Asymptotic Life has commented here that the northern tier states have the water and the southern tier states grow the food. This is certainly true. But there’s no practical way to get northern water to southern states.

“It doesn’t make economic sense to send Great Lakes water to the High Plains or the Southwest,” Annin said, “but we know the thirsty will be calling.”

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The Bush Administration censored the top public health official in the US, cutting her Senate testimony in half, so she could not tell them that “the public health effects of climate change remain largely unaddressed.”

Six of the twelve pages of her testimony were stricken from her original draft. Sickening, aren’t they?

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“They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff. The pendulum in the Christian world has swung back to the moderate point of view.” said the booted pastor.

The thaw is finally coming. And it bodes well that a lot of those evangelicals think global warming is critically important.

More on the burgeoning progressive evangelical movement at Revolution in JesusLand, “a guided tour for secular progressives to America’s fourth great awakening.”

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Even the Brahmins at Barron’s are skeptical of the current stock market. Countrywide announced hideous earnings and a huge write off last Friday which triggered, you got it, a big rise in the stock price as the Bloomberg cheerleaders joined in singing “I can see clearly now, the pain is gone.”

Barron’s called this “a touching display of faith-based investing,” implying such irrationalities can not last for long. (Yes, part of this was short-covering, but clearly the market is desperate for a reason, any reason, even a faulty one, to go up. So such inanities as Countrywide saying they will be profitable next quarter were greeted unskeptically.)

Nouriel Roubini echoes Barron’s, saying the coming economic dislocations will be severe and that the current Happy Face consensus of a mild, soft landing has little basis in reality.

The soft landing consensus is increasingly delusional in believing that the biggest housing recession in US history will not have severe macro effect.

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Farmers are increasingly planting corn to be used as biofuel instead of wheat and barley, which are key ingredients in beer. This inexorably means that beer prices will rise.

(Do I see a ten-million man march on D.C. in the offing? Raise your Budweiser can to the sky and yell, we’re mad as hell and won’t take it anymore. Hey, this could bring together NASCAR fans and greenies into one mass movement!)

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Over 100,000 marched in Saturday in NYC, LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, and other cities. It was the lead story on Google News for several hours too.

Flickr slideshow of L.A. march and die-in

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Derek Wall, Principal Male Speaker of the Green Party of England and Wales, has an excellent overview of ecosocialism and its increasing relevance and importance to the Left in Britain and Europe.

Many European Green Parties, in my view have moved to the centre ground and need an injection of ecosocialism if they are to be relevant, more positively the Latin American left as shown by the reaction of Cuba to oil shortages, to Chavez’s condemnation of the great car economy to Morales speech to the UN, to the participation of Hugo Blanco in the ecosocialist network to the work of the green socialist in Brazil…shows that ecosocialism is making modest waves.

It’s relevant here in the States too of course. But the ignorance of and hostility to socialism here means you generally have to wade through all the knee-jerk So You Love Stalin garbage before people start to understand that socialism is multi-faceted and genuinely relevant.

What’s generally absent from US political discourse is any discussion of class, and that’s precisely what socialism brings, 150 years of analysis and understanding of how class is inherent in our political and economic systems - something the ruling class has always understood quite perfectly. Activism and determination is also something socialism brings, as the desire for social change is in its DNA. In most any movement for social justice, you’ll generally find socialists organizing, often long after others have given up too. Like I said, it’s in the DNA. Plus, the experience of 150 years of organizing has been written down and documented and thus offers a huge body of experience on which to draw.

The joining of the environmental movement with socialism into ecosocialism, with its criticism of capitalism as a primary driver of environmental degradation and exploitation, shows the relevance of socialism as we deal with global warming and peak oil.

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Then twitter me (and I’m also on Facebook)

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We knew that despite protestations from the Government that British companies are supporting the regime, as are French and American companies. So it’s no surprise that Chevron and Total are part of a consortium with the junta and that Halliburton was involved in the construction of the gas pipline which was built with forced labour.It seems that the EU arms embargo on Burma has been compromised by India by their selling of European made military helicopters to the junta. Russia, China and Ukraine have also been arming the regime supplying it with everything from small arms to surface-to-air missiles. Israel too is playing a role in keeping the junta armed so that it can slaughter defenceless monks. Israel and Burma have developed a military pact.

All of which perhaps makes it clearer why the West has done little to pressure the Burmese government. Don’t want to interrupt those income streams, after all.

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It’s called the Bhut Jolokia, and measures out at 1 million Scoville heat units, nearly twice as hot as the former champ, the Red Savina habanero.

(For comparison, the lowly jalapeno only manages a puny 5,000-10,000 Scovilles.)

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Craig Murray’s book Murder in Samarkand is now available in the U.S., under the title of Dirty Diplomacy.

Great subtitle:

The Rough-and-Tumble Adventures of a Scotch-Drinking, Skirt-Chasing, Dictator-Busting and Thoroughly Unrepentant Ambassador Stuck on the Frontline of the War Against Terror.

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 The third quarter’s total surpasses 24,000, which is a record. ‘It’s working its way to the Westside,’ an agent says.

The Westside is the pricey part of Los Angeles. Default notices (which precede foreclosures) rose to 72,571 statewide, also a record. That means lots more foreclosures are coming.

[most  of a foreclosure agent’s listings] were in the San Fernando Valley and South Los Angeles, but about 10% of her listings are now in a more affluent part of town.

We moved from the San Fernando Valley in January. There were few if any foreclosures then. A recent check on a foreclosure site showed hundreds of current foreclosures in the area we lived in. While the Valley is certainly less affluent than the Westside, home prices there are still at least $500,000.

So what you have is a solidly middle-class area that is getting hammered by the subprime debacle. How much longer until the Valley resembles parts of San Bernardino, which got whacked hard first, with abandoned homes, thickets of For Sale signs, overgrown front yards and swimming pools full of algae?

Real homes. Real people. Dreams and plans shattered. And we’re still just on the leading edge of the mortgage resets that are triggering foreclosures.

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Time: Iran war drumbeat grows louder

“It looks like a slow-motion train wreck,” said Barbara Slavin, author of a new book, Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S. and the Twisted Path to Confrontation. “Neither side is willing to back down and the chances for conflict are growing over the nuclear program and Iran’s support for U.S. adversaries in the Middle East.”

Moon of Alabama suggests that since Iranian supreme leader Khamenei and former president Khatami are now openly criticizing Ahmedinjad, perhaps the Iranian power elite will simply replace him, thus defusing the crisis, at least temporarily.

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Our cats have been adapting slowly to Connecticut since we moved here in February. The outdoors is much more fun than it was in Los Angeles, with many small furry creatures to chase and bring home as presents.

Rain still baffles them. While it did of course rain in L.A., it rains more here. Joey got caught in a cloudburst and came inside drenched. After Sue got him dry, he sat at a window and scowled at the rain.

Today he and Bandit insisted on going inside in a soaking storm then swiftly came running back inside. More scowling. Watching them run outside the first time during a blizzard when the deck is icy should be fun.

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Firefighters drained the Ramona reservoir to fight the fire. Now there’s no water left and little possibility, considering the ongoing serious drought, that it will be replenished any time soon. What happens to a town of thousands when there’s no water?

Another serious problem the fire burn areas will face once the fires are out and the rains return will be mudslides, as the denuded hillsides will have no vegetation left to hold the soil in place.

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The Roxylander in Flame, a financial blogger, doesn’t post often, but when he does, it’s worth paying attention to. Like yesterday’s post titled “Red Alert.”

Today we had a first grade panic in [two] credit default swaps and second grade panic in [another].

In the past two occasions that kind of panic was a very reliable indicator that the chain reaction will happen. The next thing to happen before the stock market starts moving down is the decline of junk bonds.

He sees the probability of stock market crash in the next 2-3 weeks as over 50%. That a crash or at least a major correction is coming soon seems unavoidable. The talking heads in D.C. and Wall Street put on a happy face as the subprime debacle metasticized. Now the rot is everywhere. The dollar is falling and billionaire investors are shorting it, which will only lead to a further fall. The wars have produced nothing but ruinous debt. The home equity ATM has been shut down so consumer spending, in turn, must slow. Oil may well hit $100 a barrel soon and stay there. The only thing propping up the market are a few absurdly valued tech stocks

Roughly 25%, or nearly 450 points, gained by the Nasdaq 100, a whopping 230 points, or over half the index’s rise, has come from just three issues: Apple (135 points), Research In Motion (60 points) and Google (35 points).

Those stocks are starting to wobble now too. Seems to me the stock market is running on fumes. Look out below.

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