Next-gen tidal turbines
Bob Morris @ 21:49 Category: Renewable energy Tags: tidal turbines;
The Transverse Horizontal Axis Water Turbine (THAWT) produces more energy with lower production and maintenance costs than previous turbines.
September 10, 2008
Our moronic presidental campaign
Bob Morris @ 17:34 Category: Election 2008;
Today, as Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual continue to circle the drain, you might think Obama and McCain would make major speeches about it, proposing ideas and solutions. I mean, it’s not every day that major financial institutions go on a death march to oblivion. But no. Instead they squabbled about whether “lipstick on a pig” was insulting or not. Gosh, I am SO inspired by this campaign…
Banks are cratering, the economy has the wobbles, and the forecast is for increasing financial turbulence. Yet neither campaign is talking about this in any substantive way. In fact, they’re mostly ignoring it. Pathetic.
Omen
Bob Morris @ 13:18 Category: Credit crisis;
Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway will no longer sell insurance on bank deposits over $100,000.
That Mr. Buffett is withdrawing from this insurance market is an indicator of how many in the industry are worried about future bank failures.
Palin, class, and liberals
Bob Morris @ 09:16 Category: Election 2008 Tags: Palin;
Just because she is religious and right-wing doesn’t mean she is stupid, or incompetent. She is a hard-boiled professional politician, with a high domestic approval rating. When she eventually starts giving media interviews she will do well, and she will talk directly to the anxieties of middle class Americans in small towns.
America stands as a land divided. The liberal condescension towards the deeply held religious and moral choices of large numbers of their fellow countrymen plays directly into the hands of the Republican right. The only way this divide can be healed is by progressive America finding common ground with the economic problems that unite working Americans: the lack of universal health care, the poverty wages of the working poor, the jobs being exported and the high levels of personal debt.
The social issues like gun ownership, separation of church and state and abortion are of course important. But there cannot be meaningful dialogue until people start listening to each other..
More and more I’m seeing precisely that as the problem. The Left and the Right don’t listen to each other. Nor do they want to. Both sides, too often, are convinced that their views are correct, while the center is vanishing or ignored.
What’s happening on Wall Street isn’t socialism
Bob Morris @ 04:30 Category: Credit crisis, Socialism;
Let’s be clear about it. What’s happening on Wall Street now with the federal government propping up collapsing financial institutions is most assuredly not socialism. Last time I checked, the definition of socialism did not include the enriching of corporate pirates who drove huge institutions into bankruptcy while pocketing hundreds of millions for themselves and pals, while escaping prison time all the while. Nope, that’s not socialism at all.
Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of good.
The public collectively does not own Fannie and Freddie, nor do they have the slightest say in their administration. Nor will they in whatever institutions are about to collapse that the government will attempt to prop up. So, if it’s not socialism, then what is it? Hmmm.
Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth. In a plutocracy, the degree of economic inequality is high while the level of social mobility is low.
Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to U.S. President Richard Nixon, argues that the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a “fusion of money and government.”
Sound familiar?
Plunder by Danny Schechter. Coming soon
Bob Morris @ 00:30 Category: Credit crisis;
Danny Schechter “The News Dissector” has a new book, Plunder, that will be released soon. Am definitely looking forward to reading it.
