The sign says “Be honest, does this dress make me look gay?”

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From FireDogLake.

The final discussion in the This Brave Nation series is up — between Tom Hayden and Naomi Klein — and like all the others, it is fascinating. And inspiring. But, in this case, there is also a moment where Tom and Naomi are talking about how much activity and organization there is online…and how little there is in the streets.

It’s not enough to upload the movement to the net, something which happened instantly and with dramatic effect during the Battle of Seattle anti-globalization protests. Indeed, it was precisely because they were in the streets that they had something to upload! In the video Hayden says writing is fine but when you take action, you start to change what you are writing about and no longer are just an observer.

They both agree it is crucial to get out of one’s reality tunnel and talk to people outside of it. Hayden learned this talking to black sharecroppers in Mississippi during the civil rights struggles in the early 60’s and found they knew things about how the system worked that he, being a middle class white, had no clue about. Klein spoke with people working in Third World sweatshops. Same thing. We need multiple perspectives in the movement - including working class whites who too often and unfairly now get categorized as lumpen racists. Most aren’t. But do resent being approached in a patronizing manner.

Does the net itself deflect energy that could be going into the streets? Yes. The presidential elections are doing the same. So the movement is at a low ebb now. There’s a sense that old tactics are no longer effective. An Obama presidency will indeed raise expectations for change very high, and that presents a real opportunity for change. The net is a useful tool. But we need to be in the streets, organizing person to person too.

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That’s what Asymptotic Life discovered when they went to buy more hay for their goats. The increase is due to the drought, which has cut supply, and oil prices, which has increased production costs. Those tractors run on diesel. So do they trucks that ship it.

Fertilizer is getting more expensive too, because natural gas is used to produce it.

Farmers and ranchers will be getting squeezed, and the price of food will continue to rise.

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I was emailing a friend recently about the stock market. He thinks the markets are “totally divorced from the reality of the time” and in many ways he’s right. They exist in a bizarre other universe, seemingly not affecting the rest of us much.

Except when they do, as witness the subprime debacle that has now morphed into a worldwide credit crisis.

• Former Sec. of Labor Robert Reich: “The economy is failing” and Congress needs to pass a massive stimulus package now, deficit spending be damned.
• Former Sec. of the Treasury Lawrence Summers: “In the months ahead there is the real possibility that significant financial institutions will encounter not just liquidity but solvency problems“
• Mish says forced sales of bank assets are coming soon as banks desperately try to raise money. WaMu is toast and Citigroup will be broken into pieces.
• Barclays Capital is warning clients that a major financial storm is coming and blames the Fed for not moving against inflation.
• The Royal Bank of Scotland advises all the chickens will be coming home to roost after the current excesses and that the contagion will be worldwide.

Banks will fail. Companies that rely on revolving lines of credit will find them more expensive or not available at all. Mortgages will continue to be harder to get. Businesses that rely on consumer spending will face slowdowns. Pensions fund will have serious losses. And so on.

The toxic waste spawned by subprime and its esoteric cousins, the CDOs and SIVs, has now spread to the financial system in general. And that means to all of us too.

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Matthew Simmons is founder and CEO of Simmons and Co, an investment bank to the energy industry.

He says the Tata Nano at $2400 is the future of cars, that the US needs to get off its ravenous appetite for oil now, and that the primary driver of high oil prices is increasing demand and declining supply.

As for those evil speculators.

Speculators are mostly betting that crude will soon crash, so I suspect this group of investors is net short, and if they are banned from speculating, oil prices will jump higher.

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The Pakistan stock market recently dropped off a cliff so the government banned short selling for a month then pumped $446 million into the market. They also decreed that prices could not fall more than 1% a day. This of course forced the market up.

Traders there no doubt were overjoyed by this gift of free money and immediately went long too, riding that money train up. Then, when the ban on shorting is lifted, they’ll go short again. What will the government have accomplished by this? Not much that I can tell. Instead they might have made things worse.

This is an instructive example of why clueless governments should probably not try to clumsily intervene in markets. Joe Lieberman, who wants to ban speculation in oil futures, are you listening?

Odd, isn’t it, that no one wanted to ban speculation during the dot com boom or when real estate prices were zooming up?

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This NASA photo dramatically shows the amount of smoke from the hundreds of fires now burning, most of them started by lightning. Floods in the midwest, Omaha just got hit by a devastating storm with winds up to 115 mph. The weather, it seems, is changing.

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Peak oil, peak food, peak water, global warming too. Is the root cause of all of these problems that there are just too many people on the planet?

The current world population is about 6.6 billion and growing fast. Yet suggesting that we need less people opens up all manner of ugly issues. Who gets to decide how to limit population growth? What will the rules be? Will it be voluntary? And in what countries?

Less Developed Countries are understandably highly suspicious of such proposals coming from the prosperous countries. There is also the undeniable problem of masked racism, with some using this as a pretext to get rid of Those People.

Malthusians say that limited resources on earth at some point will not be sufficient to feed the planet so that leaves us with what, that a good healthy die-off is what we need? This does present a teensy ethical dilemma, hoping for hundreds of millions to die so the rest may live better.

But the question remains: Are there too many people on the planet competing for too few resources?

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Their utilities will install a new digital electrical meter for homes with renewable power that tracks power used by the home separately from power generated into the grid. This is called “net billing” and allows the homeowner to be reimbursed for the power they create.

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From Naked Capitalism.

I was recently on an NPR show on consumer debt, and a caller said his uncle, a former loan shark who did 15 years in prison, was mystified by payday lending, particularly since he had charged only 17%.

Tip: John Robb’s Weblog.

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The Telegraph UK quotes a “senior Democrat” who said Bill Clinton told friends Obama could “kiss my ass” for support.

Someone once said about an exceptionally bad movie that Norman Mailer made that, I have no idea if Norman was drunk when he made this movie, just that I certainly hope he was.

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The home page for the L.A. Times is mostly fluff now. However, if you click the link for Print Edition, then you get the hard news.

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Former CIA director James Woolsey turned “green hawk” cleantech venture capitalist asks a panel at a Google/Brookings conference what is being done to prevent our aging electrical grid from being hacked, with potentially serious damage resulting. He cites two major blackouts he believes were caused by “Chinese paragovernmental hackers.”

While some panelists thought he might have overstated the case,  “the grid now is too inefficient to be taken out” completely (golly, how reassuring) but the “capacity to destroy hardware” through attacks exists now and there is a “very real security threat from doing nothing.”

Interestingly, a primary way to prevent attacks is by decentralizing the grid, which is precisely what we need to do anyway as we create additional sources of renewable energy and make the grid smarter and more resilient.

Earth2Tech has more.

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Germany has the world’s largest photovoltaic market. They did this with an innovative program that encourages homeowners to install solar. Rather than take the net metering approach (common in the US) in which excess energy is sent into the grid with the homeowner generally getting paid for it,they instead install the solar outside the meter and send all the energy into the grid. The homeowner pays the regular bill BUT is compensated at three times the going rate for energy generated. While a rate like that would probably have to be subsidized here in the US (and lots of energy already is subsidized), the program has had spectacular results.

The tariffs have been around since 2000 in Germany and, in that time, the proportion of energy derived from renewable sources has doubled. Germany actually reached their goal of 12.5% green energy three years early and increased its target to 27% green energy production by 2020.

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Would you PLEASE not autoplay video with the sound on when I arrive on your home page? And most especially not when they are advertisements. Thanks so much.

TheStreet.com did this for a few days this week with a series on totally dumb video ads from Microsoft that autoplayed with audio *every* time you arrived on or went back to the homepage. Sometimes the video was at the bottom of the page so you had to scroll down to turn it off.  Were they trying to drive people away? (They were even doing it on RealMoney, one of their pay sites, but are no more, probably because everyone including me complained.)

The Microsoft ad apparently is part of their new $300 million ad campaign designed to make them cool again. Ah, no. An ad where someone emerges out of a mud bath you are lounging in to give you money for using Microsoft Live Search is many things (ludicrous? stupid? bribery?) but cool is most definitely not one of them.

Websites: if you must autoplay video, do so with the audio off. And don’t replay it every time I return to the home page from another page on your site.

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The recent floods resulted in large amounts of stagnant water, which is producing enormous numbers of mosquitos. Some no doubt carry West Nile.

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A bear market is defined as a 20% drop from the high and with today’s close in the Dow we are a mere .01% from that. The trading floors are alive with the sounds of growly bears and there is much gnashing of teeth…

But the VIX, which measures volatility, tells us we are not yet near the bottom, which is generally a capitulation point filled with panic selling and a feeling of imminent doom.

This 1 year chart shows the Dow Jones on top and the VIX on the bottom. Note how when the VIX spikes above 30 that the Dow is at a low point. Moreover a VIX above 30 often signals an imminent reversal in the market. This is when traders with nerves of steel start buying, precisely when everyone else is panicking.

But the VIX is nowhere near 30, yet the DOW continues to drop precipitously. The bear, it appears, may just now be waking up.

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Solar thermal stores heat from the sun into molten salt to be used as needed to generate power through conventional steam turbines. Thus, it can generate power any time day or night, even when the sun isn’t shining. This is a zero emissions process and the salt itself is completely non-toxic.

Renewable Energy World has an fact-filled article about how solar thermal works written by the director of development at SolarReserve, who have a 1200 acre solar thermal plant. Their website has a wealth of information.

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With Virtual Met Metering a municipality buys or leases land not necessarily in their area and installs renewable energy on it. All energy goes directly into the grid. They then receive a credit on their electrical bill for the energy generated, offsetting their own usage.

The Rhode Island legislature recently approved a municipal net metering bill. May other states follow.

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Parts of the credit and mortgage markets today were “offered-only.” That means there were no buyers. None. These markets are different from the highly liquid NYSE and NASDAQ where there is always a buyer for every seller and a seller for every buyer, usually within a second or two. Not so with these thinly traded markets. If no one wants to buy, then no one can sell.

This from “The Lord of the Dark Market”, an anonymous highly-placed financial insider quoted by hedge fund manager Bill Fleckenstein.

From the comments

the guys who tip [Fleckenstein] have been eerily prescient… (sometimes his tips prelude major market drops just by a few days)

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I interviewed the Freeway Blogger today after videoing him putting up antiwar signs on San Francisco freeway overpasses. He’s put up over 6,000 of them on California freeways and thus has reached millions of people with an antiwar message. Yes, millions. One busy freeway alone can get 50,000-100,000 cars a day

He explains how to do this easily, quickly, and at very low cost. Use cardboard, not sheets. Paint one side white. Get a $35 overhead projector on eBay and use that to project the letters on the cardboard to make lettering easy. Then you have a “printing press for billboards” and the cost per sign is minuscule.

He says the Left “organizes too much and does too little” and that we need to get out and just do it. To reach millions, you need the message where they can see it - like on freeway overpasses.

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The current electric grid has its origins in the 1960s. One article noted that our current grid dates from the time when Frank Sinatra was in his prime, before a man walked on the moon, and before cell phones were invented.

Of particular concern are congestion areas in southern California and the Eastern Interconnection in the mid-Atlantic states and New England, with a particular trouble spot being in Connecticut near the New York border.

An electric vehicle future will require a smart, modern electrical grid. As will adding power from wind and solar. Lengthy blackouts are not out of the question in congestion areas now.

The country needs to upgrade the electrical grid now.

John Robb is not optimistic, saying this demonstrates “the decline of the state in action.”

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Net metering is a policy, usually set by the state and implemented by the electrical utility, that allows customers who generate renewable energy to get paid for it when it goes back into the grid.

Seems a simple enough idea, doesn’t it? Yet in practice the rules can be extremely convoluted, vary widely, and may or may not reimburse the homeowner.

New Jersey and Colorado have the most progressive net metering laws in the nation while New York and California are quite regressive.

Net metering regulations need to favor and encourage, not discourage, homeowners to install renewable power.

Renewable energy World has a useful explanation of the issues involved.

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The first offshore wind farm in the US will be in Delaware, scheduled to be completed in 2012. It might have been done earlier, off Martha’s Vineland, except for all those NIMBY liberal environmentalists (such as the Kennedys) who have tried to block that project every step of the way. Imagine the indignity of looking out on the ocean from your summer home and seeing wind turbines way in the distance. Oh, the horror.

At least Delaware gets it. Good.

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Subtopia profiles the Tear It Down campaign by Amnesty International to end the Guantanamo detentions.

Photo from the Guantanamo Cell Tour on Flickr.

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