And for the sake of our health, please keep raising and selling your pastured beef.

The system of producing feedlot beef requires antibiotics to keep the cattle alive because the unnatural food they’re forced to eat makes them sick. Michael Pollan has illustrated this clearly.

So what you provide us is non-sick beef.

Looking across America we see an increasingly unwell population. And sick beef is cheap enough everyone can eat it all the time.

Poor, foolish, overweight, health-impaired America.

We are in a silent crisis in America because our food supply chain is being poisoned, and will ultimately be destroyed. What’s causing this is the action of corporate practices that exist only to strip every last dollar out of farming until the land is dead. Then the buyers of food will eat whatever they are fed to survive.

This crisis needs to become louder. It needs to turn into the scream it really is. We are being killed by bad food, and the answer for each one of us lies within a few miles of where we live.

This actually goes very well with your Matt Bai post up above. Bank balance sheets are in trouble because assets (loans made to people who are supposed to be paying the banks back, and collateral for those loans) are yielding less money than they were - i.e., those assets have fallen in value dramatically, and rewriting the prices of those assets to those real values (i.e. marking them to market) would leave the banks without enough assets to meet their liabilities (what they owe depositors, bondholders, etc). If a bank didn't accept deposits (i.e. didn't incur debts) it wouldn't be a bank. If a bank can't cover its debts, it's an insolvent bank; but the borrowing (taking deposits) isn't really the problem, it's the fact that they made loans that can't or won't be repaid.

This is an example of Matt Yglesias not knowing what he's talking about, because he is not an expert. For a really simple explanation of how this works, listen to the "Bad Bank" episode of This American Life. For more complex explanations, read Simon Johnson, Yves Smith, etc.

An editorial on saving the banks dismissed nationalization because it would involve the government in running the banks. Then it discusses the idea of buying bad assets and warns, "but there is a huge risk that the government would badly overpay in the first place."

Actually, this is not a risk, this is the point. If the government paid the market price for these assets the banks would be bankrupt and we would be back to step 1, nationalization. The point of buying the bad assets is to pay too much, so that the banks can get enough money to stay solvent. (In is worth noting that deciding how much the government will overpay, and to whom, also involves the government in running the banks in a really big way.)

It would be nice if the Post and the rest of the media would report honestly...

It would be nice to have a small population, plenty of fertile soil, healthy oceans and lots of snow at the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, but that's not the world as we find it. We, the intelligentsia, are forced to find ways to disseminate information despite the overwhelming power of the corporate news hawkers. That is our most important challenge now, and is far more difficult than electing a President. It's more akin to a genuine political revolution. Our rules of government now come not from some puny constitution but from the existing media structure and control apparatus, which, as we saw during the B*sh administration, can effortlessly override any law, convention or agreement, simply by accepting the new behavior with the pasted-on smile of a news anchor.

The Foulness: "The assets are still backed by real estate, which while not worth 100% of their original value, are certainly worth more than the 5% you could probably get for them on the market now."

This is a common misconception. Many of the "assets" in question are NOT "backed by real estate" in anything but the loosest sense of the term. Many mortgage-backed securities are bundled together from junior tranches, which only get paid off if ALL the senior tranches have been paid off first. In other words, if the property loses 20% of its value, the junior tranches don't just lose 20% - they are completely worthless, since the senior tranches got paid first and there's nothing left over.

Many of these securities were rated AAA on the basis that, even if some borrowers might default, they wouldn't all default at once. But that assumption was flawed - it assumed first of all that borrowers circa 2006-7 were similar to borrowers from previous years (they weren't) and secondly that housing prices would never go down (they did). If these assumptions fall apart, the securities are worthless.

And that's without even getting into the trillions in "credit default swaps," which have absolutely nothing at all backing them up.

The Foulness: "And of course, eventually real estate prices will rise again, foreclosed house will be bought and regain some value."

Why would you think that? Housing is still way overpriced in some parts of the country, and we have a massive glut. It's not going back up for decades, and probably not until most of the people who remember this bust are senile or dead.

For any first-time visitors here because of the Rolling Stone special section “RS100: The people who are reinventing America,” this post is intended as an introduction to Climate Progress.

[My apologies to regular CP readers for yet another introductory piece — and of course, for the tasetless RS cover — but I’ve kinda started hangin’ with a bad crowd now. And who doesn’t like ice cream?]

Because these cars of tomorrow require the batteries of tomorrow, I am announcing that the Department of Energy is launching a $2 billion competitive grant program under the Recovery Act that will spark the manufacturing of the batteries and parts that run these cars, build or upgrade the factories that will produce them, and in the process, create thousands of jobs right here in America.

Show us that your idea or your company is best-suited to meet America’s challenges, and we will give you a chance to prove it. And just because I’m here today doesn’t exempt all of you from that challenge — every company that wants a shot at these tax dollars has to prove their worth.

We are also making a $400 million down-payment on the infrastructure necessary to get these cars on the road; and because these cars won’t leave the showroom unless consumers buy them, the Recovery Act includes a new tax credit of $7,500 to encourage Americans to plug one in at home.

Summary





The invention suggests employing a super tall chimney to facilitate heat exchange in
the atmosphere as a remedy to Global Warming. Calculations show that if we construct a chimney 5 kilometers (3 mile)
tall and 1 kilometer (0.7 mile) in diameter, we can expect the following amazing results:



• Just 10 chimneys like the one proposed will offset
  Global Warming.
  
  
• Each chimney will produce ~330,000 Mega Watts of
  electricity, which is equivalent to the amount of energy 15 super powerful nuclear
  stations produce
  
  
• Each chimney will induce rain generation in
  surrounding areas and will produce roughly 70 million tons of water
  precipitation every day, which is equal 4% of Mississippi river flow in New
  Orleans or about 80 Jordan Rivers.
  
  
• Each chimney will transform at least 300 square miles
  of desert into arable land.
  
  
• Each chimney will trap approximately 1,500,000 tons of CO2 per year in the newly created arable area.



---






The goal of this website is to explain the idea of
utilizing super-chimney technology as a unique way to avert global warming
catastrophe at the same time as generating clean energy and irrigation. After
looking through the information on this site you will understand how this
technology works, and -- in fact -- how simple it is!










I suspect you might have questions, concerns, or criticism. In this
regard, I urge you not to hesitate to contact me at mike@superchimney.org. I
promise to do my best in replying to you in a timely fashion with more detailed
explanations and discussion.




Sincerely,




Michael Pesochinsky

It all starts off when a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?

They begin by forming an initiating group and then adopt the Transition Model (explained here at length, and in bits here and here) with the intention of engaging a significant proportion of the people in their community to kick off a Transition Initiative.

After going through a comprehensive and creative process of:


• awareness raising around peak oil, climate change and the need to undertake a community lead process to rebuild resilience and reduce carbon
  
• connecting with existing groups in the community
  
• building bridges to local government
  
• connecting with other transition initiatives
  
• forming groups to look at all the key areas of life (food, energy, transport, health, heart & soul, economics & livelihoods, etc)
  
• kicking off projects aimed at building people's understanding of resilience and carbon issues and community engagement
  
• eventually launching a community defined, community implemented "Energy Descent Action Plan" over a 15 to 20 year timescale
  

What is Repower America?

Repower America is the bold clean energy plan to “repower” our country with 100% clean electricity within 10 years.

First described in a speech last July by Al Gore, Repower America means new industries with high-paying jobs. It means lower energy costs. And, it means substituting clean domestic sources of energy and a transition away from dirty coal and foreign oil. Read about the goal here.

By making buildings and homes more efficient, ramping up renewable energy generation, constructing a unified national smart grid, and transitioning to clean and affordable plug-in cars, we can address our country’s economic and national security challenges—all while making huge strides to solve the climate crisis.

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Emerging market crises are marked by an increase in tunneling - i.e., borderline legal/illegal smuggling of value out of businesses.  As time horizons become shorter, employees have less incentive to protect shareholder value and are more inclined to help out friends or prepare a soft exit for themselves.

Boris Fyodorov, the late Russian Minister of Finance who struggled for many years against corruption and the abuse of authority, could be blunt.  Confusion helps the powerful, he argued.  When there are complicated government bailout schemes, multiple exchange rates, or high inflation, it is very hard to keep track of market prices and to protect the value of firms.  The result, if taken to an extreme, is looting: the collapse of banks, industrial firms, and other entities because the insiders take the money (or other valuables) and run.

This is the prospect now faced by the United States.