Michael Mann of PSU on Facebook

Michael E. Mann

Time unknown - I thought I saw a poster that said 8pm - better call the speaker series and check.

I think this is interesting (and very recent) news. I wonder who his ground teams will be?

Dumas Circulating Petitions for Democratic Party nomination for the US House of Representatives, 5^th Congressional District of Pennsylvania.

Charles Dumas is circulating petitions for the Democratic Party nomination for the US House of Representatives, 5^th Congressional District of Pennsylvania. Dumas is a Professor in the School of Theatre, Pennsylvania State University. He is also a visiting professor at the University of the Free State in South Africa. He writes a monthly column for the Centre Daily Times called Under the Baobob. Dumas served three years as Chair, Human Relations Commission of the State College Borough and has worked actively on many Democratic campaigns during his seventeen years in Centre County. Dumas earned Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from State University of New York (SUNY), Juris Doctorate from Yale University, was the first Hendler Fellow in Screenwriting at the American Film Institute and a Fulbright fellow at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

Prior to Law School, Dumas was a Congressional intern in Congressman Charles Rangel's Washington office. He was a legal researcher for the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) and worked for two years in the corporate law offices of the IBM Corporation. Dumas served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Mid-Hudson Legal Services in New York, taught Constitutional Law at SUNY and ran for NY State Senate before moving to Pennsylvania.

Dylan Ratigan (that's the guy's name, right), get's fired up and lays down a fine rant about how the money in politics is destroying the american leader's ability to govern...  Yes it's old, yes nothing not one thing has changed, and yes we are still pretty much screwed.

It's old - 2011 - but it has been reappearing netsam (net flotsam) for some reason - election season I guess.

Ratigan blamed not only both houses of Congress but also the president for failing to address the root of the country's economic problem. He said of President Obama, according to an MSNBC transcript:

I came across something nice on the net today, and wanted to share it. This image was released by NASA recently, and is supposedly the most detailed image of the earth ever taken - and it happens to be a direct view of our continent and country. Click the picture to see it full size.

Now, I have modified this image a bit, to make it the right size for a computer desktop background. The full size image is 3000 pixels by 2000 pixels, and fits nicely on my desktop. You can click this thumbnail above and save the full size image and use it on your desktop, or pass it along to some science geek you know, they are sure to appreciate it.

Here's one of the places this photo was released, with original links. You can get more info there and look at the supersized lossless TIF image.

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=57723

"This spectacular “blue marble” image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the public. This record includes preview images and links to full resolution versions up to 21,600 pixels across."

I always liked Jethro Tull - just not a kind of music the corporations will make anymore...

And here are a few more... Locomotive Breath

Aqualung

Christmas Song

Oh c'mon, that is just freekin hilarious! Adorable corpo-kitsch!

The beibster sings fine, it's the genetically modified processed food-like corporate packaging that just kinda sticks in the throat.

"Musical haircut Justin Bieber has a new Christmas song, "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," and the video is inexplicably steampunk-themed. Sorry, steampunks: time to get a new quirky aesthetic pastime..."

http://gawker.com/5865597/justin-bieber-ruins-entire-nerd-subculture-with-new-christmas-video

I don't think this is all that relevant, just curious. No surprise at increased surveillance of campuses, and that university presidents should be connected in board memberships. Penn State and related local institutions has always been a hotbed of classified research. Just one of those coincidences, appearing in the aggregators.

Two Scandals, One Connection: The FBI link between Penn State and UC Davis

Spanier was jettisoned because of what appears to be a systematic cover-up of assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s serial child rape. Katehi has faced calls to resign after the she sent campus police to blast pepper spray in the faces of her peaceably assembled students, an act for which she claims “full responsibility.” The university’s Faculty Association has since voted for her ouster citing a “gross failure of leadership.” The names Spanier and Katehi are now synonymous with the worst abuses of institutional power. But their connection didn’t begin there. In 2010, Spanier chose Katehi to join an elite team of twenty college presidents on what’s called the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, which “promotes discussion and outreach between research universities and the FBI.”

...

Here's an interesting example of transparency spontaneously appearing in our community - the CDT has reported on a rape case that has very important implications for legal theory and our culture.

I have my google news aggregator set to look for State College area news, and this article appeared last night in the google feed - then again in the CDT newsletter.

http://www.centredaily.com/2011/11/23/2997664/woman-says-man-continued-sex-acts.html

The core of the case is wether or not a woman has the right to withdraw consent - and consent and withdrawal of consent is one of the dawning ethical and legal issues of our time.

The woman making the charge is to be commended - can you imagine how hard it must be to stand for principles and the right to bodily integrity in our sex-obsessed, sex-negative, sexually immature society and culture?

Thank you, whoever you are, for risking the censure and stupidity of the immature people of our society, and standing up for what you believe is right. Others, who should have done so at some past violations of the principle of consent, did not - and the whole valley will be paying for that for some time. 

There are many people who are proud of you and will support you, even if we can't outshout the haters. Thank you.

Speaking of coarse and immature - the CDT commenters, as always, do not dissapoint in their displays of "conservative morality". One imagines that they would be first in line to hide something like, say, the sins of a footbal program.

A good essay, I thought, worth making sure it gets spread and read.

I lost faith in the leadership of the older generations and so called "serious people" long, long ago. They have abandoned us in the name of greed, expediency, and self-aggrandisement.

Not all of them, but a clear majority. They ignore the facts on the ground, embrace questionable ideologies that JUST COINCIDENTALLY HAPPEN to laud and justify their self-aggrandisement and self-interest, and they have left this world a worse place then they found it.

Ultimately this essay is silly, based on a nonsensical hero-worship and a clearly flawed view of reality - but still...

Penn State, my final loss of faith

With the demise of my own community’s two most revered leaders, Sandusky and Joe Paterno, I have decided to continue to respect my elders, but to politely tell them, “Out of my way.”

They have had their time to lead. Time’s up. I’m tired of waiting for them to live up to obligations.

Think of the world our parents’ generation inherited. They inherited a country of boundless economic prosperity and the highest admiration overseas, produced by the hands of their mothers and fathers. They were safe. For most, they were endowed opportunities to succeed, to prosper, and build on their parents’ work.

For those of us in our 20s and early 30s, this is not the world we are inheriting.

Krugman has a good piece on the onepercenters hatred of governments buying the building of bridges but love of governments buying the building of bombs.

Republicans LOVE wars and government war spending, but HATE government spending money on infrastructure stimulus - why is that republicans? Explain that - how does government not create jobs when it pays for schools, but does create jobs when it massively overpays for a hellfire missle? (A hellfire missle has less technology and materials by far than a modern car, but costs 6 times as much per unit. Why? - corrupt no competion bidding among the onepercenters that run the military-industrial complex.)

Here's a few snippets from Krugman:

Bombs, Bridges and Jobs

"A few years back Representative Barney Frank coined an apt phrase for many of his colleagues: weaponized Keynesians, defined as those who believe “that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.”

I often am attracted to articles about cold fusion and vacuum energy and the like - typically as a manufestation of a curious subsect of fringe science.

But MSNBC has posted an article saying the best known cold fusion claim has passed another round of tests, and it's starting to attract more attention.

I'm not sure what to think - the safe bet is that it's a fake - but wouldn't that be cool if it wasn't.

Italian cold fusion machine passes another test

The physicists who were invited to the demonstration in April gave the E-Cat a solid thumbs-up. It produced too much excess heat to have been originating from a chemical process, they wrote in their report, adding that, "The only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production."

In the intervening months, Rossi has built a large version of his device that combines many smaller cold fusion modules. At the demo in October, after an initial energy input of 400 watts into each module, each one then produced a sustained, continuous output of 10 kilowatts (470 kW altogether) for three to four hours.

From my man Barry Ritholtz, who of course aggregated it from someplace else, which in this case happens to be - Der Speigel - often an interesting source of news...

Barry's commentary is clever as always - it's always worthwhile in my experience to drop by his blog.

"Its kinda funny — how come so few people (especially those on the right) were all that upset about the massive surge in debt under Bush? Is it that they only recently kinda figured out the significance of debt — or are they are merely hypocrites when it comes to this sort of thing?" 
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/10/us-debt-accumulation-by-president/

Matt Taibbi is one of the few jourmalists worth reading these days - while all the others faithfully repeat the corporate party line, he looks at the sneaky shit our government and the lobbyists and teh big corporations with their interlocking directorates and 1 percenter owners - and then he says, right out loud, "Hey look at that sneaky shit they are trying to pull!".

And he does it again with his latest piece on the massive sneaky "AG Settlement": deal being done right now, all hush hush behind-closed-doors and in the smokiest and darkest of back rooms.

Go read the whole article - but if you don't - remember these paragraphs - remember when they pass this deal and let the bankers who own the government make off with trillions of dollars of stolen and mismanaged wealth. This is what the politicians want to cover up - this is the bankers "get out of jail free" card.

I talked to one foreclosure activist over the weekend who put it this way: “[The AG settlement] will be a bigger bailout than TARP.”

How? The math actually makes a hell of a lot of sense, when you look at it closely.

Any foreclosure settlement will allow the banks to pay one relatively small bill to cover all of their legal liabilities stemming from the monstrous frauds they all practiced in the years leading up to the 2008 crash (and even afterward), when they all schemed to create great masses of dicey/junk subprime loans and then disguise them as AAA-rated paper for sale to big private investors and institutions like state pension funds and union funds.

"There's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip...". This could be the theme song for sustainable energy research - one so often reads a fascinating bit of news about this or that idea for new technologies, then those ideas seem to dissappear, only to be "rediscovered" on a few years later. So many good ideas and scientific findings and discoveries - but the developed and ready-to-use technologies always are just ten years out of reach.

So - good news, if true.

A grain of salt or two may be all that microbial electrolysis cells need to produce hydrogen from wastewater or organic byproducts, without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere or using grid electricity, according to Penn State engineers.

I've heard of Bruce Logan...

"This system could produce hydrogen anyplace that there is wastewater near sea water," said Bruce E. Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering. "It uses no grid electricity and is completely carbon neutral. It is an inexhaustible source of energy."

Microbial electrolysis cells that produce hydrogen are the basis of this recent work, but previously, to produce hydrogen, the fuel cells required some electrical input. Now, Logan, working with postdoctoral fellow Younggy Kim, is using the difference between river water and seawater to add the extra energy needed to produce hydrogen.

Their results, published in the Sept. 19 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, "show that pure hydrogen gas can efficiently be produced from virtually limitless supplies of seawater and river water and biodegradable organic matter."