Changing Places

Mutants, I tell you!! Hah hah hah!!!

Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor

New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.

What is the genetic mutation

“Originally, we all had brown eyes”, said Professor Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology. “But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a “switch”, which literally “turned off” the ability to produce brown eyes”. The OCA2 gene codes for the so-called P protein, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives colour to our hair, eyes and skin. The “switch”, which is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 does not, however, turn off the gene entirely, but rather limits its action to reducing the production of melanin in the iris – effectively “diluting” brown eyes to blue. The switch’s effect on OCA2 is very specific. If the OCA2 gene had been completely destroyed or turned off, human beings would be without melanin in their hair, eyes or skin colour – a condition known as albinism.

Limited genetic variation

Variation in the colour of the eyes from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes. “From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” says Professor Eiberg. “They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.” Brown-eyed individuals, by contrast, have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production.

Professor Eiberg and his team examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Professor Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being responsible for eye colour.

Nature shuffles our genes

The mutation of brown eyes to blue represents neither a positive nor a negative mutation. It is one of several mutations such as hair colour, baldness, freckles and beauty spots, which neither increases nor reduces a human’s chance of survival. As Professor Eiberg says, “it simply shows that nature is constantly shuffling the human genome, creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so.”

Normally I don’t post much about the personal stuff (any more than that everything is actually personal, of course) but, since I’m depressed about the loss of Edwards from the political discussion today (which makes the rest of this campaign and everything until 2012 pretty much meaningless, really, since nothing will actually change) I’m focusing on what I’m pleased with today.

Which is my weight.

Normally, my weight matters very little to me in truth – if I am comfortable and able to do the things I want to do, then weight is mostly irrelevant. But today, I weighed in at 152.5. Which may not excite you, but it does me, since it’s the lowest I’ve weighed in at since last March. It means the weight loss from when I really started paying attention last January has stayed off, and I’m in a good place to lose the rest of the weight I want to lose this year. I bounced around in weight a bit last year, but never really got back down to that low weight of March, and now I have. This pleases me greatly.

I’m no longer fighting with myself over this. It’s like every part of me right now just wants to be healthy, to be more aware of what I’m actually doing and eating and is just paying attention. I don’t feel the need, beyond minor cravings at times, to just eat to be eating or because I’m stressed out. I’m eating my protein first, to feel fuller faster, and dropping so many of the empty calories. I’m eating lots of nuts, berries, even things I don’t particularly like at times because I know they are “good” for me. And this is all so different from how I used to eat, how I used to live. I check ingredients, I don’t buy anything with high fructose corn syrup or partially hydrogenated oils or too many processed chemicals.

And I feel better. Way better. Healthier, stronger, more able to deal with life and all it entails.

Coming into my 50th year on this planet, that’s a pretty good way to feel, really.

Not.

Your Keirsey Temperament Sorter Results indicate that your personality type is that of The IdealistTM.

All Idealists share the following core characteristics:

* Idealists are enthusiastic, they trust their intuition, yearn for romance, seek their true self, prize meaningful relationships, and dream of attaining wisdom.
* Idealists pride themselves on being loving, kindhearted, and authentic.
* Idealists tend to be giving, trusting, spiritual, and they are focused on personal journeys and human potentials.
* Idealists make intense mates, nurturing parents, and inspirational leaders.

Idealists as a temperament, are passionately concerned with personal growth and development. Idealists strive to discover who they are and how they can become their best possible self–always this quest for self-knowledge and self-improvement drives their imagination. And they want to help others make the journey. Idealists are naturally drawn to working with people, and whether in education or counseling, in social services or personnel work, in journalism or the ministry, they are gifted at helping others find their way in life, often inspiring them to grow as individuals and to fulfill their potentials.

Idealists are sure that friendly cooperation is the best way for people to achieve their goals. Conflict and confrontation upset them because they seem to put up angry barriers between people. Idealists dream of creating harmonious, even caring personal relations, and they have a unique talent for helping people get along with each other and work together for the good of all. Such interpersonal harmony might be a romantic ideal, but then Idealists are incurable romantics who prefer to focus on what might be, rather than what is. The real, practical world is only a starting place for Idealists; they believe that life is filled with possibilities waiting to be realized, rich with meanings calling out to be understood. This idea of a mystical or spiritual dimension to life, the “not visible” or the “not yet” that can only be known through intuition or by a leap of faith, is far more important to Idealists than the world of material things.

Highly ethical in their actions, Idealists hold themselves to a strict standard of personal integrity. They must be true to themselves and to others, and they can be quite hard on themselves when they are dishonest, or when they are false or insincere. More often, however, Idealists are the very soul of kindness. Particularly in their personal relationships, Idealists are without question filled with love and good will. They believe in giving of themselves to help others; they cherish a few warm, sensitive friendships; they strive for a special rapport with their children; and in marriage they wish to find a “soulmate,” someone with whom they can bond emotionally and spiritually, sharing their deepest feelings and their complex inner worlds.

Idealists are relatively rare, making up no more than 15 to 20 percent of the population. But their ability to inspire people with their enthusiasm and their idealism has given them influence far beyond their numbers.

When you need to focus on a task….

Working Memory: They Found Your Brain’s Spam Filter Blogs Scientific American Community

This new work ties together several converging lines of evidence indicating that your working memory capacity is closely related to how well you can keep irrelevant information out of your mental inbox. In particular, it suggests that this filtering mechanism is determined by coordinated activity in the basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex — with the prefrontal cortex providing details about the current task goals and the basal ganglia providing the muscle to block out information that doesn’t match these goals.

This role for the basal ganglia in helping to control the flow of information into working memory is quite similar to one of the basal ganglia’s other major functions, which is selecting which motor movements to use in a given context and suppressing the movements that we don’t want. Particularly intriguing is that the basal ganglia is an evolutionarily ancient brain structure that has been highly conserved across species; even lizards have them. Consequently, what is thought to be our uniquely human ability to engage in abstract reasoning and problem solving appears to be dependent upon brain structures that have been around for far longer than humans have. The ability to filter out irrelevant spam, it appears, is critical for lizards as well as humans.

Stirling’s SOTU is much better than Bush’s. Go read.

They did do nothing to deserve the name, “Americans”. | The Agonist

Showing that he is untouched by self-reflection, intellectual honesty, or self-doubt, George W. Bush has delivered a hard partisan, nasty and crassly self-promoting state of the union to a Congress. He demanded total acquiescence to his economic, foreign policy and domestic agenda, and high handedly threatened that Congress repeatedly if they did not yield to his every demand. Piling on dog whistle after dog whistle to anti-government and anti-tax zealots, in direct contradiction to being the most free spending executive in post-war history, he threw in the face of that same Congress his own duplicity on the matter. Trillions for corruption, but a few spare pennies for everyone else.

Bush was never a uniter, he was never interested in bi-partisanship, and he was always interested only in imposing his will and vision on America. A series of Congresses, filled with the corrupt and the craven, not merely bent it’s knee to the monarchial impulse, but eagerly participated in outrages against the Constitution that Bush now so gaily flaunts only the first three words of.

Because the faith of the founders was in the Union, that web of people, states, government, law and history which was bound together by wars and conflicts, and given a living presence in a document which is fouled by the expectorant of signing statements, secret courts, and overturned elections.

It is a mark of shame on this time, and on every American, that we have tolerated such continuous stream of lawless outrages by an executive that knows no honor, and a string of Congresses that have chosen to slop at the trough of pork and personal privilege, before even beginning to move a finger.

The results show. This President has been mired below 50% approval for his entire second term, and below 40% for most of it. He is viewed highly negatively as a person by more people who like him even a little. And Congress? This Congress has an approval of 18%, a level which means that were the public given the option of abolishing Congress, they might well pass it by a constitutional super-majority.

A foolish Speaker of the House has refused to prosecute high crimes and misdemeanors in the executive, and has cut deals on stimulus that shaft the poor, the children and the unfortunate in order to pile gifts to the extremely wealthy. A conservative Senate Majority Leader combined with her to pass more and more blank checks to the biggest squanderer in history. And two members of this inaugust Congress now vie for the nomination, topping each other in how little of the last eight years they want to undo. In poll after poll, both of them run double digits behind a generic Democrat running for the Presidency. Perhaps because the public understands how little they deserve that name.

Someone must say these things, and those that curry for favor or jobs in the government or with a party cannot do so, and will not do so. Those who clamor for attention will find the road blocked by a media which rallied behind a unity towards an illegal war, and now are eager to smirk at the failures of policies that they failed to oppose. This was not an unfortunate outcome, but a clear and obvious result and culmination of exactly what was obvious on a chill night in Florida, when word came down from the Supreme Court that once an election was stolen, it could never be returned to its owners, and Americans had no right to vote for who would occupy the executive office.

This is not a period of certainty, but of absolute certainty. America’s position in the world is diminished, our share of global GDP is down, our dollar is at its weakest in memory, our credibility destroyed by outrageous lies to the world, our military ground up by the grit of the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, while the more important wars remain unfought, and more dangerous prey remains unfettered. The clock of an aging baby boom has gone from the ticking of a watch, to the tolling of a bell. It will be midnight chiming soon.

Lio has become one of my favorite cartoons….

I actually felt like this today, when I confronted some idiots while having lunch. It wasn’t pretty….

From one of our local papers:

Forclosure mess emptying Oceanside neighborhoods, hurting those who’ve stayed North County Times – North San Diego and Southwest Riverside County News

Last year, one out of every 17 homes in Oceanside’s 92057 ZIP code entered foreclosure in this northeast corner of the city, according to data from RealtyTrac, a foreclosure tracking service, and the San Diego Association of Governments. Those numbers do not include December foreclosures.

The resulting effects, shown in a North County Times analysis of foreclosure and sale listing data, in that ZIP code illustrate the pandemic nature of the county’s, and the nation’s, housing crisis:

– For every nonforeclosed home for sale, there are about four to five homes in, or in serious danger of, foreclosure.

– Half of the area’s 36 December home sales were foreclosures.

– Just less than half of the month’s sales, 44 percent, sold for more than 10 percent below the original listing price. One home sold for 37 percent lower than the original listing, a $142,400 freefall.

– Of homes for sale in the beginning of January, 65 percent of 362 listings are either in some stage of foreclosure or on sale for less than the previous sale price or total loan amount.

“I think there’s more people that have lost their homes than actually still live here,” said Courtney Jones.

Many of the foreclosed families here said they were sent into foreclosure when their subprime loans graduated from the initial “teaser” rate — a low interest rate generally offered for only the first two or three years of a 30-year mortgage — to a higher adjustable interest rate.

But 30 miles northeast and across the Riverside County line, it is clear the spike in regional foreclosures knows no credit score. There, the city of Murrieta saw one of every nine homes enter foreclosure last year.

I’ve been following the housing mess pretty closely, mostly on Calculated Risk. I really feel for the people that are suffering from this bubble bursting, especially the families getting hurt.

I hope all those who profited from creating this mess are happy. I often wonder how some of them can sleep at night. It must be a lot easier to live without a conscience.

Which I’m sure will somehow not be his fault, of course… or will we get the usual “state of the union is strong” garbage? Most likely.

“Listen. I just wanted to say, y’know.
Whatever presidents say y’know.
Things like, er… the name of people and er, freedom
And I dunno. Democracy, stuff like that. Woo! Come on!”

Via Hoffmania…

UPDATE:

Hah hah hah!! He said “Charge to Keep”!!!! Hah hah hah!!!!!

Must be trying to keep us amused….

Tagged by Kathryn with this meme! Arrrgh!

Ok, ok, let’s see…..

Remnants of ham and vegetable soup….

Some seeds getting chilled to plant between our rain storms …

A bottle of Viognier from Imagery …

The only apple from my Fuji apple tree this year….

Zombie Devil Duck!

I won’t tag anyone, but play if you like and post a comment if you do…

Daily Kos: Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff

While the problems of consumer culture have spread worldwide, America holds a unique place in the scheme that Annie dates back to decisions that we made at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. In some countries, people chose to take advantage of increasing productivity to reduce the work week, to take more vacations, and enjoy more time with family and friends. But in America, every gain was turned into a material gain, into more stuff. Rather than gathering in more happiness and freedom from advancing technology, we buried ourselves in an ever accelerating quest for the latest goodies. Generation by generation, year by year, we’ve accumulated more goods and consumed more of the world’s resources (and made ourselves more miserable).

It’s a problem that’s perpetuated today by everything from the way we’re entertained to the way we’re educated. Where once we practiced “keeping up with the Joneses” by comparing ourselves to our neighbors, television has provided a window on consumer paradise where part-time baristas own huge Manhattan apartments and office workers dress in the latest designer duds. We’re no longer happy to compare our possessions with the couple down the street, we have to compete with Brad and Angelina. We don’t want what our friends have, or what our parents had, we want what Oprah has. This “vertical expansion of the reference group” means we can never reach our goals and are always left feeling as if we’ve failed. The only solution to our inadequacy? Go shopping for more stuff!

Shopping has become the key to how we view ourselves to such an extent that not only did George W. Bush urge us to shop ourselves out of the peril of 9/11, even environmental activists often turn to the mall. What’s the most frequent advice dispensed to people trying to behave more responsibly? Buy green. It’s advice that not only encourages still more consumption as means to address the problem of over-consumption, but it all too often ignores the market forces that have delivered “green” products to the local mall — forces that rarely have any concern for the resources or people damaged along the way.

As we worry about the current economic downturn, even the way we attempt to measure our problems reflects this distorted shopaholic culture. Take a primal forest, kick out the people who have lived there for generations, cut down the trees, slice them into pieces, soak them in toxic chemicals, turn them into disposable products, and ship the discarded remains off to a landfill. On the business page of your local paper or the glitzy stock channel on your television, each of those steps has the same name: growth. What’s a recession? Lack of growth. How do we end a recession? Stimulate spending on more disposable items, so we can buy more disposable goods, so we can cut down more forests, so we can have more… growth.

But if the first part of Annie’s film is devoted to describing the problems of our current unsustainable culture of disposable goods, it’s the final part that deserves special attention. Rather than stopping with the bad news, Annie shoots straight on into the good — we can change. The most engaging part of her description of our society is that everyone can find their place in the flow, and the same dynamic means that everyone is positioned to help change how things work. Environmental issues, social justice, and economics all play into making the change toward a fair, sustainable society. There are as many ways to insert yourself into the process as there are products on the shelves of the local big box store.

Go see the Story of Stuff here.

My favorite tip from the site:

Buy Green, Buy Fair, Buy Local, Buy Used, and most importantly, Buy Less. Shopping is not the solution to the environmental problems we currently face because the real changes we need just aren’t for sale in even the greenest shop. But, when we do shop, we should ensure our dollars support businesses that protect the environment and worker rights. Look beyond vague claims on packages like “all natural” to find hard facts. Is it organic? Is it free of super-toxic PVC plastic? When you can, buy local products from local stores, which keeps more of our hard earned money in the community. Buying used items keeps them out of the trash and avoids the upstream waste created during extraction and production. But, buying less may be the best option of all. Less pollution. Less Waste. Less time working to pay for the stuff. Sometimes, less really is more.

Oh, too funny. Go read….

“The Illustrated President” by Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine)

So Bush’s description of “A Charge to Keep” struck me as very strange. In fact, I’d say highly improbable. Now, however, Jacob Weisberg has solved the mystery. He invested the time to track down the commission behind the art work and he gives us the full story in his forthcoming book on Bush, The Bush Tragedy…

From Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift” (thanks, Evelyn!)

As a parable of a gifted person, “The Shoemaker and the Elves” is also a parable for artists. Most artists early on find themselves in the position of the shoemaker on the first night — a talent has appeared, but it’s naked, immature. Ahead lie the years of reciprocal labor which precede the release of an accomplished gift. To take a literary example, George Bernard Shaw underwent a typical period of retreat and maturation before he emerged as a writer. The young Shaw started a career in business and felt the threat not of failure but of success. “I made good in spite of myself, and found, to my dismay, that Business, instead of expelling me as the worthless imposted I was, was fastening upon me with no intention of letting go.” He was twentry. “In Marche, 1876, I broke loose,” he says. He left family, friends, business and Ireland. He spent about eight years ‘in absentia’, writing constantly (five novels, published only toward the end of his life — and then with a note by Shaw asking the buyer not to read them). Erik Erikson has commented:

“Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for theif gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature.”

For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.

Soros lays it all out on the table…. go read the whole piece, it’s good.

FT.com / In depth – The worst market crisis in 60 years

…

Credit expansion must now be followed by a period of contraction, because some of the new credit instruments and practices are unsound and unsustainable. The ability of the financial authorities to stimulate the economy is constrained by the unwillingness of the rest of the world to accumulate additional dollar reserves. Until recently, investors were hoping that the US Federal Reserve would do whatever it takes to avoid a recession, because that is what it did on previous occasions. Now they will have to realise that the Fed may no longer be in a position to do so. With oil, food and other commodities firm, and the renminbi appreciating somewhat faster, the Fed also has to worry about inflation. If federal funds were lowered beyond a certain point, the dollar would come under renewed pressure and long-term bonds would actually go up in yield. Where that point is, is impossible to determine. When it is reached, the ability of the Fed to stimulate the economy comes to an end.

Although a recession in the developed world is now more or less inevitable, China, India and some of the oil-producing countries are in a very strong countertrend. So, the current financial crisis is less likely to cause a global recession than a radical realignment of the global economy, with a relative decline of the US and the rise of China and other countries in the developing world.

The danger is that the resulting political tensions, including US protectionism, may disrupt the global economy and plunge the world into recession or worse.

Zaphod Beeblebrox

Richard Branson

The resemblance is striking, no?

Virgin’s Branson unveils commercial spaceship model | Reuters

Entrepreneur Richard Branson on Wednesday unveiled a model of the spaceship he hopes will be the first to take paying passengers into space on a regular basis next year.

Branson, whose Virgin Galactic is one of several commercial enterprises vying to offer the ultimate in sightseeing, said his SpaceShipTwo will start test flights later this year.

“Two thousand eight is going to be the year of the spaceship. We’re excited about this, and everything it will do,” said Branson at a media event at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.”

Virgin Galactic, part of Branson’s airline, vacation and retail company Virgin Group, has more than 200 people signed up and $30 million in deposits for the rides, which cost about $200,000 per person.

Zaphod Beeblebrox
He’s the guy you want to vote for
When you get into that Voting Booth
Put an X next to his name

Zaphod Beeblebrox for President
Building bridges between the stars
In no way is he stupid
In no way is his brain impaired
It’s just not true, he’s smarter than you
And he’s better looking too

Zaphod Beeblebrox
Has the longest hair of any candidate
And he’s got the coolest shades
And his teeth are white as snow

So let’s elect him President
He’ll build bridges between the stars
Don’t believe the rumours
Don’t believe those vicious lies
They’re just not true
He’s smarter than you
And he’s better look too

(Spoken)
“Listen. I just wanted to say, y’know.
Whatever presidents say y’know.
Things like, er… the name of people and er, freedom
And I dunno. Democracy, stuff like that. Woo! Come on!”

Wow. Just go live at the Agonist today – Ian AND Stirling are on!

Just, wow.

Essential Insanity | The Agonist

At the end of World War II the US had about half the world’s economy. Admittedly that’s because Europe had been bombed into oblivion, but even when Europe rebuilt the US was still far, far ahead. The US was insanely rich and powerful. See, when you’re rich you can do stupid and unproductive things for a long time. There are plenty of examples of this but the two most obvious ones are the US military and the War on Drugs.

The War on Drugs hasn’t reduced the number of junkies or drugs on the street in any noticeable way. It has increased the US’s prison population to the highest per capita level in the world, however. It has cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It has gutted civil liberties (the war on terror is just the war on drugs on crack, after all). And after 30 years does anyone seriously say, “Wait, this doesn’t work, it costs billions of dollars and it makes us a society of prisons”? Of course not. If anything, people compete to be “tough on crime.” What’s the definition of insanity, again?—Doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different results.

Then there’s the US military. It costs, oh, about as much as everyone else in the world’s military combined. It seems to be at best in a stalemate and probably losing two wars against a bunch of rabble whose total budgets probably wouldn’t equal a tenth of one percent of a single US appropriations bill. And it is justified as “defending” America even though there is no nation in the entire world which could invade the US even if the US had one tenth the military.

But the US could afford to have a big shiny military and lots of prisons, so it does. (Note that the US no longer can afford these things, but they still persist.) Lots of people get rich off of both the prison and the military industries, lots of rural whites get to lock up uban blacks, and lots of communities that wouldn’t exist otherwise get to survive courtesy of the unneeded military bases and prisons which should never have been built.

Insane: believing things that aren’t true.

Insane: decision-makers cut off from the consequences of their decisions. In fact, they receive reverse feedback: as things get worse for most Americans and as America gets weaker and poorer, the elites are the richest they’ve ever been.

Insane: no one will stop doing things that clearly don’t work and are harmful, because people are making money off the insanity.

All of these particular insanities combine to make predicting the US so surreal. It’s not just about knowing what the facts are and then thinking, “Ok, how would people respond to that?” You have to know what the facts are, what the population thinks the facts are, what the elites think the facts are, who’s exploiting the situation for profit, and then ask yourself if these facts are having any real effect on the elites and if that effect is enough to outweigh the money they’re making off of failure. (For example, how many of them have children serving in Iraq?—Right, so Iraq is not urgent to fix.)

And then you have to go back to the facts and ask yourself, “What effect will these facts have even if they’re being ignored.” Facts are ugly things: they tend not to go away.

All of which makes the US damn near impenetrable, often enough even to Americans.

But here’s what I do know: you can get away with being nuts as long as enough people benefit from you being insane. When the credit cards are all maxed out, when the relatives have stolen even the furniture, when suddenly all the enablers go away then the knee-breakers or the men in white pay you a visit. At that point you can live in the real world, or you can go to the asylum.

I wonder which way the US will go?

Go read Stirling today:

The Adventures of Captain Carnage: The Crash of 2008 | The Agonist
…

Many people think back to 1929. That is the wrong model. Instead, it is best to see the present period as an analogy to the series of panics that occurred during the classical gold standard, where there was a tension between the monetary and capital base. Gold was obtained through colonial conquest, and technological improvement in extraction. This made it related to the growth of the economy in that resources and technology to together were a good proxy for an over all economy. However the coming of the petroleum age did a number of things. One is it decoupled mineral wealth from energy wealth, the other is that it decoupled resources from their traditional qualities. Petroleum changed the game too dramatically. By 1929, the coal economy was ready to give out, and the attempts to force the world back on to rock money were doomed to failure.

However, we are not there yet, there isn’t a clearly superior new economy ready to leap and take the place of the old one. Instead, we have pieces of it which are clearly distorting old values and valuations, but cannot properly be measured in our current base of oil-for-paper economics. Computers create happiness that is not measured in how much oil they convert into homes, but they don’t monetize easily either. This means it is hard for money based on monetizing oil-to-homes-to-paper to measure the real value they create. We keep over, and under, estimating what the new economy can do, because it won’t do the one thing that investors want it to do, and that is make the old petroleum economy more profitable. There’s no more profit to be had, only the ability to downshift older working zones in favor of newer ones.

This means that, as with the late years of the 19th century and early years of the 20th century, stock valuations, measured in absolute terms, are going to remain relatively flat, though with very wide swings. The petroleum and second wave electrical economy didn’t save the coal economy, but destroyed it with the same brute efficiency that German dive bombers and tanks would dismantle the Polish army in 1939.

This means that this crash is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, of the present financial system. Instead what will be imposed is a massive bailout that will hobble US fiscal policy – the the delight of reactionaries who will let 8 years of discipline pass in the hopes that when there are goodies to be passed out they will take power and plunder the treasury to the tune of trillions of dollars more. It is only when that next plundering occurs, and the US economy does keel over from it, that we will really reach the end of American’s tether on this. Stupidity got us into the mess, and Americans are lining up to support yet more stupidity.

What should be done? Immediate, dramatic and forceful restructuring of the tax and entitlement systems, the banking system, and the energy system. Only by changing the incentives away from flipping houses, will we see a dramatic shift away from consumption and towards manufacturing. Historically this has taken a massive collapse in equities and a war.

Nothing seems to have altered that….

The ultimate failure of Bernanke is that he hasn’t read his own papers carefully enough, and he has forgotten that economies can be guided by money supply, but not remade. A multi-trillion dollar world economy can be rev’ed on go pills, but while the fed can print money, it can’t print oil.

If you’re watching the markets today, it’s Not Pretty. The blogroll on the right links to some of the best financial and economic blogs out there, including Calculated Risk, Big Picture, and many others. They are much better sources to follow the fun than the newspapers will give you. Mostly though, don’t panic or try to game this ride – it’s a rough waters out there this week. Good day to practice breathing…..

Or actually, ocular hypertension.

Hey, welcome to your 50th year on earth…

Oh well, at least I will have pretty eyelashes. I’m so thrilled.

OR perhaps I’ll try some alternative medicine.

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Journey into the Heart of an Insurgency

“The wise ones of olden times say that the hearts of men and women are in the shape of a caracol, and that those who have good in their hearts and thoughts walk from one place to the other, awakening gods and men for them to check that the world remains right. They say that they say that they said that the caracol represents entering into the heart, that this is what the very first ones called knowledge. They say that they say that they said that the caracol also represents exiting from the heart to walk the world…. The caracoles will be like doors to enter into the communities and for the communities to come out; like windows to see us inside and also for us to see outside; like loudspeakers in order to send far and wide our word and also to hear the words from the one who is far away.”

The United States and Mexico both have eagles as their emblems, predators which attack from above. The Zapatistas have chosen a snail in a spiral shell, a small creature, easy to overlook. It speaks of modesty, humility, closeness to the earth, and of the recognition that a revolution may start like lightning but is realized slowly, patiently, steadily. The old idea of revolution was that we would trade one government for another and somehow this new government would set us free and change everything. More and more of us now understand that change is a discipline lived every day, as those women standing before us testified; that revolution only secures the territory in which life can change. Launching a revolution is not easy, as the decade of planning before the 1994 Zapatista uprising demonstrated, and living one is hard too, a faith and discipline that must not falter until the threats and old habits are gone — if then. True revolution is slow.

Lewis Hyde – Home

Clever at deceit, tricksters are equally clever at seeing through deceit, and therefore at revealing things hidden beneath the surface. In Chinese legend, for example, only the trickster Monkey can see through the disguises of evil monsters who hope to eat him and his friends. With his “fiery eyes and diamond pupils,” Monkey is “the one who has perception.”

In many traditions this kind of deep sight belongs to the prophet, for prophets are those who can perceive the spiritual world beneath the veil of the mundane. Tricksters have similar powers, Lewis Hyde argues, and thus they too have a prophetic role to play, though theirs is prophecy with a difference: no traditional prophet lies and steals to deliver his message.

Traditional prophets disrupt the mundane to point toward eternal truths, but the prophetic trickster disrupts the “eternals” themselves, and in so doing points toward the plenitude of this world, the fullness it has when not obscured by all our ideas, structures, and rules for living. Traditional prophets point toward things that time cannot touch, but the prophetic trickster points toward time itself, toward the changing noise of this world, not the constant harmony of distant spheres.

The Hindu god Krishna makes a good example. As soon as Krishna has grown up, he stops stealing butter and starts stealing love. On moonlit nights he plays his flute, letting its charming melody drift over the garden walls until the faithful women of the town abandon their marriage beds and come dance with him in the forest. Krishna is a thief of hearts, but not because hearts are scarce. Dancing in the woods, he multiplies himself a thousand times so as to appear fully to each of the women, and gratify each one’s desire to be his lover.

But if there is no scarcity, why be a thief in the first place? Because the abundance that Krishna wants (and symbolizes) is available only when ordinary moral structure has been removed. In the Hindu culture from which this story comes, marriage does not express private desire so much as the social setting of family alliances, property, land and inheritance. In some parts of India, in fact, they say that love should never be the basis of marriage, since to introduce desire into the realm of structure would confuse and weaken it.

But in the trickster myth, desire becomes prophetic precisely because it can reveal the fullness that lies beyond the walls of convention. Stolen love opens windows onto that larger world. Society needs its designs if it is to endure, but trickster’s mischief regularly shows that no design can encompass creation’s great abundance. Trickster is the prophet whose actions reveal the uncontainable plenitude of this world.