Crime Stopper agencies are reporting a sharp rise in crime tips for reward money. The motivation is money, not a desire to stop crime. A risky way to pay the rent. for sure, as those informed on might seek revenge should they find out who ratted them out, but it certainly shows how desperate people are getting for money.

Fom Sudden Debt, first quoting the NY Times, then commenting

“Crime doesn’t pay but we do,” say the mobile billboards cruising Jacksonville, Fla. A poster in Jackson, Tenn., draws a neat equation: “Ring Ring + Bling Bling = Cha-Ching.” The bling, in this case, is a pair of handcuffs.

Cha-Ching? Cha-Ching? What’s next? Children squealing on their parents to buy the latest version of Grand Theft Auto?

Have we gone utterly nuts?

Maybe not so much nuts as desperate, and definitely a sign of the economic times.

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From 1966 on the TNT show. A pioneer of rock. Listen to his early stuff, the backing musicians were stone cold bluesmen. But then, that’s what early rock and roll was, blues with electric guitar and attitude.

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Foreign Policy lists them, I’d only heard of one, Mara Salvatrucha. Their organizational styles appear to be heavily decentralized, using 4GW tactics, which makes them difficult to monitor and infiltrate. John Robb once blogged (don’t have link) that Mara is transnational and uses extremely sophisticated money laundering operations.

Cash businesses are the best for laundering money. I suppose if a gang had serious resources, they could always buy a bank, and simplify things even more.

In The Godfather movies, the Corleone family eventually wanted to go legit, or at least have most their businesses that way. Will the major gangs of today go that route too?

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Donald Rumsfeld says another terrorist attack could restore the neo-con agenda.

Reader DJ Mitchell often blogs about this at Asymptotic Life, about how if participants in a supposed peace process never somehow manage to achieve peace, then quite probably they don’t want it. The process of war and conflict rewards them in some way, and peace would end that.

His thoughts on this are not theoretical, he has spent considerable time in Sri Lanka working with an organization to end the decades-old civil war there.

Do Rumsfeld’s comment sound like a man who wants peace? Not hardly. Instead he almost seems to hope for another attack.

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If you work through the existing structures you are going to be corrupted. By working through political system that poisons the atmosphere, even the progressive organizations, you can see it even now in the US, where people on the “Left” are all caught in the electoral campaign and get into fierce arguments about should we support this third party candidate or that third party candidate. This is a sort of little piece of evidence that suggests that when you get into working through electoral politics you begin to corrupt your ideals. So I think a way to behave is to think not in terms of representative government, not in terms of voting, not in terms of electoral politics, but thinking in terms of organizing social movements, organizing in the work place, organizing in the neighborhood, organizing collectives that can become strong enough to eventually take over – first to become strong enough to resist what has been done to them by authority, and second, later, to become strong enough to actually take over the institutions.

This seems to be the crux of the problem for the Left. How can you work outside of the system, presumably not co-opted, yet build enough of a mass organization that you can resist on a mass basis, then eventually take over that same system?

Given that theoretical framework, I don’t think you can. By staying outside the system you effectively limit your reach and influence to the relative few already on the Left who are willing to listen to you. But you can’t build a mass organization that way.

The question remains the same, whether Anarchist or Marxist, how do you influence the system if you are resolutely determined to stand outside of it?

Tip: American Leftist

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Darrell Dickey has a Toyota EV that he recharges using solar power from the roof of his home. Thus, it runs for free. Maybe someday soon there will be hundreds of thousands of solar-powered EVs. It could happen.

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Yes, the delayed escrow of 16 days was nerve-rattling, especially since we’d already moved. But the circumstances of our home sale were, especially considering the current real estate situation, quite extraordinary.

We had been thinking about selling when, out of the blue, a real estate agent approached us, saying he had a client who loved our house and would we consider selling.? We said yes, and the house sold for more than we paid for it 16 months ago, as the part of Connecticut we were in still has prices rising slightly. Contrast that with the house we sold in Los Angeles 16 months ago. It has dropped 30% in value since then.

Will prices keep rising in Connecticut? I doubt it. True, it’s a prosperous state, even if now the middle and upper middle class are getting squeezed too. But the real estate malaise that is affecting much of the country can not help but hit Connecticut, especially when you factor in the nose bleed property tax rates (at least double that of California) and the exorbitant price of electricity and skyrocketing heating oil prices. We just paid $3.69 a gallon for heating oil on May 5. Last year the price was $1.95 a gallon. Ouch. Many people flat couldn’t afford it and kept their thermostats at 55 degrees all winter.

California is of course getting whacked by the real estate slump, which is affecting revenues adversely at the local, country, and state level. We are renting now, and have a good chunk of money in the bank to tide us through any bad times.

Many are not so lucky. I have friends who have lost homes. You probably do too. Others, who never could afford a home at all, may be getting crushed by credit card debt.

During those 16 days when we didn’t know if the house would actually be sold, and if it didn’t, we would have a serious scramble to make ends meet until it did, I got a taste of what millions go through every day - wondering how the bills will ever get paid.

We really need a saner economic system. One that doesn’t crush people.

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The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety tested the tiny Smartfortwo for crash safety.

[The Smartfortwo] earned the top rating of good for front and side crash protection. Its seat/head restraints earned the second highest rating of acceptable for protection against whiplash in rear impacts.

Larger cars are always safer than smaller cars

But among the smallest cars, the engineers of the Smart did their homework and designed a high level of safety into a very small package.

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Sgt. Matthis Chiroux, who served in the Army until being honorably discharged last summer after over four years of service in Afghanistan, Japan, Europe and the Phillipines, today publicly announced his intention to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq.

He says

This occupation is unconstitutional and illegal and I hereby lawfully refuse to participate as I will surely be a party to war crimes. Furthermore, deployment in support of illegal war violates all of my core values as a human being, but in keeping with those values, I choose to remain in the United States to defend myself from charges brought by the Army if they so wish to pursue them. I refuse to participate in the occupation of Iraq.

Chiroux deserves our full support for his courageous and principled opposition to an illegal and unjust war.

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The escrow closed 16 days late, but it has indeed finally closed. Our house in CT has been sold. We’ve moved into our apartment near San Francisco now. Starting in July, Sue will walk across the street to the BART station and travel to Golden Gate University downtown to get a Masters in Taxation.

To say my nerves were frazzled during the seemingly endless 16 days would be an understatement. However, all’s well that ends well.

Sue and I look forward to discovering SF and meeting lots of new friends here.

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The worst of the “credit crisis” might be over, but the real effects of tighter lending, less capital spending, rising unemployment, and consumer defaults on credit cards and auto loans is just starting.

By this viewpoint, the apparent slowing of the bad news lately is just a lull, not an ending, with more (but different!) crises coming.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that new-generation nuclear power plants are going to end up costing quite a bit more than estimates. Not just a few percents, but double to quadruple, or $5 billion to $12 billion a plant.

So what’s to keep the costs from doubling again, and why were previous estimates unrealistically low?

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Broken marriages, drug and alcohol abuse, increased violence, even suicide can be a result of foreclosures and losing a home. Sounds a bit like PTSD, doesn’t it? This is the human cost behind the current wave of foreclosures, which is so often masked or ignored, hidden behind statistics and numbers.

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Sheriff deputies in southern Californioa have killed three tribal members on Sodoba land recently. Things are so tense now that Department of Forestry officials are refusing to go on the land without police escort.

“There are better ways to solve these problems than by bringing in the 7th Cavalry and wiping them out. I would say we are in a war right now,” said Robert Salgado, Soboba tribal chairman and a cousin of those killed.

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Gay and lesbian couple might be able to web as soon as next month. Been a long time coming. Property rights, hospital visitation rights, there is so much from a legal standpoint that marriage guarantees. Any couple joining into a committed partnership should -and deserves - such rights.

(We are now officially moved back to California from CT and this is my first blog post from our new place!)

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Actually, I think this is a fine idea — as long as they only use computers that they legally own.

This continues the move of war into cyberspace, in this case, if attacked, then flood the attacking computers with so much traffic they become useless.

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Yet only eight states have laws that prevent lower municipalities from banning solar panels. Arizona just passed regulations prohibiting homeowner associations from blocking solar, yet at least one such association near Phoenix says they will continue to block solar any way they can. In a Land of Sun, this is myopic madness.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some say solar panels are ugly, and maybe they are (however the aesthetics of solar is improving fast.) But consider this, maybe a homeowner association in Arizona with 500 homes, all with solar, generating most if not all their power is a thing of beauty too.

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Not only is it the right thing to do, greening your business can save money, as Qualcomm has found. They use waste heat from servers to create power, built floors that cut down on cooling costs, use virtualization instead of buying more servers - and more.

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From Synergic Earth News

Had the Soviet Union, the weaker of the two great powers of the second half of the last century, simply imploded first, while the U.S., enwreathed in a cloud of self-congratulation, was almost unbeknownst to itself also slowly making its way toward an exit? And, as a final irony, Klare — author of the not-to-be-missed new book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet — points out, energy has refloated Russia, even as it’s sinking us.

Yet Russia is hardly immune from peak oil, their supplies are peaking and massive corruption by the state is hardly making things better for the populace at large. China has so many problems and is so vast that it’s difficult to see how they can solve them. This is not a a good era to be a superpower in.

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Not only can shipping containers be used in a multitude of ways to create housing, they are piling up the thousands at ports, since it’s cheaper to build new ones than ship them back, so they are freely available and cheap, if not free.

Photo from Container City, who has built several such projects.

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If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route.

That should settle it, particularly for those who have experienced smooth flights, train rides and road travel, and speedy communications networks in, say, Beijing, Paris or Abu Dhabi recently. The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness.

Doc Searls notes that Obama has a plan to rebuild our transportation infrastructure while McCain does not.

Another problematic area is the Internet. European nations, Japan, China, and Singapore often have vastly faster and more reliable net infrastructures, and they’re cheaper too. This country needs to stop spending hundreds of billions to destroy other countries with insane, pointless wars, and spend the money here instead, rebuilding the decaying infrastructure.

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From Wikipedia

Northridge earthquake, 1994. Magnitude 6.7. Equal to 5.6 megatons

Sichuan earthquake, 2008. Magnitude 7.9. Equal to 600 megatons

The Richter Scale is logarithmic. Thus, an 8.0 can be hugely more destructive than a 7.0.

I was in L.A. during the Northridge quake. It did tremendous damage. But this China quake was vastly more powerful than that.

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From a review of Spies for Hire in DailyKos

You won’t read the words “ruling class” in Spies for Hire, and I’m sympathetic, because few writers who want to be taken seriously will unhesitatingly employ those words in public discourse these days. Not so much out of fear that Patrick Buchanan will redbait them as that many post-Cold War liberals will do so. But a slice of the ruling class is who Shorrock describes throughout his book.

Point well taken. Sure, there’s a ruling class, but calling them that does indeed, especially in America, tend to immediately turn people off and get you dismissed as an irrelevant Marxist. That’s why the Left needs new phrases and ways of explaining its often quite useful and on-target analysis.

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DSP splits in Australia along lines all familiar to the Left.

The fundamental dividing line therefore among Marxists today is between those who wish to continue with the demonstrably failed paradigm of building ideologically homogenous “parties” that are ostensibly “Leninist”, but have almost no impact on the politically relevant mainstream; and those who are prepared to work with others in the radical but pragmatic left to build a broad party in the space vacated by social democracy.

The first approach, the Leninist Party, risks becoming marginalized and ignored while often falling prey to endless factional splits over maddening obscure tenets of Marxism while the other can become diluted, losing zeal  and commitment for structural and revolutionary change.

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“We need sensible gun laws,” said the Senator. “I just got back from Montana where just about everyone has guns. In that culture, fathers and sons bond over hunting. You can’t take that away from rural America. But the inner city is different, and we should tighten the laws on gun purchases and close the loopholes in gun show sales to unscrupulous buyers. The gun control people and the right to bear arms people are talking past each other about disconnected topics.”

I completely agree. Guns are much more about the differences between cities and rural areas than Left vs. Right and need to be approached that way. Guns have been a part of life in the country for hundreds of years, and people need them, as critters sometimes want to attack and eat their livestock and crops. But  OTOH, I don’t want the driver in the car next to me during a Los Angeles freeway traffic jam to have a loaded Glock under the seat.

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