Springtime in D.C. and Cherry Blossums Bloom

No surprises here. The State Department has been a hotbed of communists for, oh, going on 7 decades now.

Kendall Myers was known by the Cubans as Agent 202 and his wife went by both Agent 123 and Agent E-634, according to the indictment.

What I want to know is, what numbers did they assign comrades Barack and Michelle?

Court documents say the couple fell for the ruse and began meeting with the undercover agent at Washington hotels.

Maybe we could ask Sarkozy or Merkel to help do the same to expose our pals in the White House? (Reports are that there's no love lost.) Get it all on tape and we'll have them right where we want him -- headed for impeachment and then a friendly neighborhood waterboard. (Of course, the more pragmatic minded might want to cut him a deal... turn him into a double-agent and a sudden arch advocate of capitalism. Harry Reid and Pelosi would probably die of strokes from the shock. Best of all worlds.)

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/05/us/AP-US-US-Cuba-Spy-Charges.html?_r=1&hp

Couple Indicted on Charges of Spying for Cuba

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: June 5, 2009

Filed at 4:12 p.m. ET

The latest on President Obama, the new administration and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A retired State Department worker with top secret security clearance and his wife have been indicted on charges of spying for Cuba over the past three decades.

The indictment unsealed Friday in Washington says Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, have been clandestine agents for Cuba since 1979. The pair were arrested Thursday.

The indictment says the couple met with Cuban President Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1995, traveling through Mexico under false names. They allegedly made several other trips to Latin America and the Caribbean to meet with Cuban agents.

Kendall Myers, 72, worked at the State Department. Early in his career, he specialized in European issues at the agency's Foreign Service Institute. In 2007, he retired from department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

The indictment says in his last year of employment, Kendall Myers viewed more than 200 intelligence reports related to Cuba.

The government said that Gwendolyn Myers revealed to investigators that her favorite places to pass information were Washington-area grocery stores.

Kendall Myers was known by the Cubans as Agent 202 and his wife went by both Agent 123 and Agent E-634, according to the indictment.

The two were charged with conspiracy to act as illegal agents of the Cuban government and to communicate classified information to the Cuban government. Each is also charged with acting as an illegal agent of the Cuban government and with wire fraud.

The indictment says the couple own a shortwave radio, which they used to broadcast encrypted messages to the Cuban Intelligence Service using Morse code. In recent years, the documents say, they communicated through e-mail using a false name.

An undercover FBI agent approached them in April, pretending to be a Cuban spy. Court documents say the couple fell for the ruse and began meeting with the undercover agent at Washington hotels.

Hoist the Jolly Roger and Damn the Torpedoes

Or is it "torpedos"? I read the deceptively titled story copied at bottom, "Federal Reserve Puzzled by Yield Curve Steepening", and I just had to make a comment at this late hour.

The topic of the story, by a reporter appropriately named Alistair Bull, is that this last week there was a fast rise in the yield of long-term government bonds last week. Boy, if that doesn't sound dull, I don't know what does, but hang in there. I say "appropriately", because the story rambles back and forth on the various possible cause or causes of the rise in bond yields without reaching any useful conclusion -- was the cause an improving economy, or a worsening one? The article concludes,

Fed officials also believe that some better-than-expected economic data recently has encouraged investors to believe there is less need for the safe-haven of government bonds and more risk of inflation. ..."Obviously, there is a lot of supply of debt. Another way to interpret the steepening of the yield curve is ... confidence in the economy going forward."

And if you believe any of that, you are smoking something a lot stronger than dope.

First, for the bond neophyte (like me), what is a bond? Debt. Here's a helpful link: http://www.investopedia.com/university/bonds/default.asp

...a bond is nothing more than a loan for which you are the lender. The organization that sells a bond is known as the issuer. You can think of a bond as an IOU given by a borrower (the issuer) to a lender (the investor).

There's corporate and municipal bonds, but the biggest seller of bonds is Uncle Sam, in the form of long-term Treasury "bonds" (security with a maturity of more than 10 years), Treasury "notes" (maturity between one and 10 years). Short-term T-bills (maturity of less than one year) technically aren't a bond.

The point of bonds is that they have well-defined returns in the form of annual or semi-annual interest payments until a date in the future when the original bond value must be paid in full (sort of like a balloon payment on a mortgage):

The issuer of a bond must pay the investor something extra for the privilege of using his or her money. This "extra" comes in the form of interest payments, which are made at a predetermined rate and schedule. The interest rate is often referred to as the coupon. The date on which the issuer has to repay the amount borrowed (known as face value) is called the maturity date. Bonds are known as fixed-income securities because you know the exact amount of cash you'll get back if you hold the security until maturity.

If you're wondering about the difference between bonds and stock,

Bonds are debt, whereas stocks are equity. This is the important distinction between the two securities. By purchasing equity (stock) an investor becomes an owner in a corporation. Ownership comes with voting rights and the right to share in any future profits. By purchasing debt (bonds) an investor becomes a creditor to the corporation (or government). The primary advantage of being a creditor is that you have a higher claim on assets than shareholders do: that is, in the case of bankruptcy, a bondholder will get paid before a shareholder.

Unless you're a bondholder for GM or Chrysler, for whom Obama has launched a boarding party and run up the Jolly Roger. But in theory, the value of bonds is guaranteed (almost) at rates of return with lower risk than stocks.

Bonds are appropriate any time you cannot tolerate the short-term volatility of the stock market.

The risk isn't zero however -- corporations can go bankrupt (aka, GM) and so can municipalities (aka, California). When that happens, those "guaranteed rates of return" aren't so guaranteed anymore. The "coupon" payments stop, and the value of the bond falls.

What does it mean for the value of a bond to fall? Because bonds are long-term debt over years, they can be bought and sold on the open market. (You could hold an IOU and sell it to a friend, right?) Maybe you bought a 10 year bond and got tired of holding it, and prefer some other investment, for whatever reason. So you sell it, like a stock, to someone else.

But what are they willing to pay? If the bond issuer is healthy or reliable, there's only so many coupon payments left to receive. The bond value will be somewhat lower. But of course, not zero because of that coming balloon payment, when the bond must be paid off in full.

For example, say you buy a bond with a face value of $1,000, a coupon of 8%, and a maturity of 10 years. This means you'll receive a total of $80 ($1,000*8%) of interest per year for the next 10 years. Actually, because most bonds pay interest semi-annually, you'll receive two payments of $40 a year for 10 years. When the bond matures after a decade, you'll get your $1,000 back.

Various things can make that $1000 bond (in this example) worth more or less than $1000 when you try to sell it on the open market, and that can cause bond yields (your "return on investment") to be positive or negative. This gets into that news story below.

Remember: bond "yield" is in relation to the current bond price on the open market (once issued) plus those fixed coupon payments plus the final maturity payment. Those don't change, ever. But if the bond price falls to $950 on the market, "yield" improves -- you're getting a deal on the bond cause no one wants it. This can occur if the stock market is booming. Who wants a low yield "safe" bond (let's say, averaging 5% a year return over 10 years) when you can make 20% a year in stocks? So bond prices must fall as investors rush to the better returns of stocks, and bond yields rise to restore equilibrium in the supply and demand for bonds -- when the yields are high enough, someone will still prefer bonds to stocks.

Ah, but what if the stock market sucks? I can't imagine that ever happening, but just try. Everybody who is terrified of losses and uncertainty in stocks might find bonds *very* attractive lifeboats. Guaranteed interest payments, low chance of default.

But what if there's more people than there are seats in the raft? It's obvious: people bid up the price of lifeboats rather than go down with the Titanic. Bond prices increase, and they can even increase enough to make yields go negative. Such is the price of safety. When bond yields fall that much people are paying for the insurance value. (http://www.investopedia.com/university/bonds/bonds3.asp)

When interest rates rise, the prices of bonds in the market fall, thereby raising the yield of the older bonds and bringing them into line with newer bonds being issued with higher coupons. When interest rates fall, the prices of bonds in the market rise, thereby lowering the yield of the older bonds and bringing them into line with newer bonds being issued with lower coupons.

The article summarizes bond features nicely:

When price goes up, yield goes down, and vice versa.

When interest rates rise, the price of bonds in the market falls, and vice versa.

Bills, notes and bonds are all fixed-income securities classified by maturity.

Government bonds are the safest bonds, followed by municipal bonds, and then corporate bonds.

Bonds are not risk free. It's always possible - especially in the case of corporate bonds - for the borrower to default on the debt payments.

High-risk/high-yield bonds are known as junk bonds.

You may note that Michael Milken made all his money on so-called "junk bonds", a market he almost entirely created, and which may make him more responsible than anyone else for the business boom of the 80's. At least, till the government, goaded by envious goons at places like Goldman Sachs, decided to shut him down. Another story.

That summary of points gets directly to my point. When bond prices fall and yields rise, people either have better investments to pursue, such as stocks, or people simply don't want bonds because the risks are too high. The news story states that bond yields have been rising a lot this last week. There's some positive spin for you. "Yields are rising". What Bull doesn't say (though certainly the saavy investor knows this) is that this means that bond prices had to be falling last week to make yields rise.

Now, among the two explanations for falling bond prices -- rising stocks, or rising bond risk -- which makes sense? Take a look at the Dow for the last week:

Sorry, I don't see a great rush to the next Bull market, Alistair. So as Sherlock Holmes used to say, when you've eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, just must be the explanation: clearly, the market is bailing on United States Treasury bonds because the risk has gone way up.

What would cause the risk on Treasuries to increase sharply? Two things: 1. Default, and 2. Inflation.

Now, even if the U.S. loses their triple-AAA credit rating, they aren't going to default on Treasuries anytime in the near future. They dun have to. Hell, they run the printing presses. As Mr. Thompson told John Galt in Atlas Shrugged,

Mr. T: "I can offer you anything you can ask. Just name it."
J.G.: "You name it."
Mr. T: "Well, you talked a lot about wealth. If it's money that you want-- you couldn't make in three lifetimes what I can hand over to you in a minute, this minute, cash on the barrel. Want a billion dollars--a cool, neat billion dollars?"
J.G.: "Which I'll have to produce, for you to give me?"
Mr. T: "No, I mean straight out of the public treasury, in fresh, new bills... or... or even in gold, if you prefer."

That's the way they think. Not enough tax income coming in, Gomer? Just print off another trillion or three. It's only money. An' let's have some more of that D.C. Moonshine, while yer at it.

As I said in a previous post, the Fed's have at least doubled the amount of money in circulation by now. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking some real money. If you've got a pile of goods (the entire gross domestic product of the United States) represented by a pile of dollar bills (the entire money in circulation for the United States), and then you double the amount of bills in circulation, you'd kinda think the price of those goods should double, all things being equal. There's other effects, of course, like if the economy collapses so fast that demand falls faster than supply, prices can stay constant or even fall, but in that scenario, your income is falling so much faster you're starving. As Galt said, "A is A" -- there's no escaping reality, and you've *effectively* had severe inflation -- your standard of living falls in any scenario of the government printing money out of thin air.

Leave out the nuances. If you suddenly pump a few trillion of green ooze into the economic bloodstream, it's guaranteed to increase blood pressure and prices, but it takes a little time for the transfusion to filter into the prices everywhere. But it will. Give it time. My own wild guess is something like 10% this year, 20% next year, 25% the year after, and 25% the the year after that. 1.1 x 1.2 x 1.25 x 1.25 = 2.06. Assuming Obummer and Geithner don't keep mucking around with things. But you know where I stand on that one.

Here's something else to buttress that point: Look at the price of gold:

That is a pretty damned steep rise for one month. Is economic risk going down or up?

Now you know where the inflation's going to come from, why demand for bonds is falling, why bond yields are rising, and why there ain't no gold lining in the lead balloon of this sucker's market. I'm no expert on bonds, and I'm sure to get some corrections on my understanding from general quarters out there, but damn the torpedoes, I'm putting my money on another stock collapse before too long. This ship's going down to Davy Jones' locker.

Robb

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE54U1NZ20090531

Federal Reserve puzzled by yield curve steepening

Sun May 31, 2009 3:48pm EDT

By Alister Bull - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve is studying significant moves in the U.S. government bond market last week that could have big implications for the central bank's strategy to combat the country's recession.

But the Fed is not really sure what is driving the sharp rise in long-dated bond yields, and especially a widening gap between short and long term yields.

Do rising U.S. Treasury yields and a steepening yield curve suggest an economic recovery is more certain, meaning less need for safe haven government bonds and a healthy demand for credit? If so, there might be less need for the Fed to expand the money supply by buying more U.S. Treasuries.

Or does the steepening yield curve mean investors are worried about the deterioration in the U.S. fiscal outlook, or the potential for a collapse in the U.S. dollar as the Fed floods the world with newly minted currency as part of its quantitative easing program. This might be an argument to augment to step up asset purchases.

Another possibility is that China, the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury debt, has decided to refocus its portfolio by leaning more heavily on shorter-term maturities.

With officials still grappling to divine the factors steepening the yield curve, a speedy decision on whether to ramp up the Treasury debt purchase program or the related plan to snap up mortgage-related debt seems unlikely.

"I'm in wait-and-see mode," said one Fed official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We laid out the asset purchase plan and we're following it. That is going to have some affect on various interest rates, but together with a hundred other things. So I don't think we should be chasing a long-term interest rate," the official said.

An important clue could come on when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke testifies about the economy to U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday morning.

After lowering short term interest rates to near zero in 2008, the Federal Reserve said at its March meeting that it would buy up to $300 billion in longer-term Treasury securities over six months as part of its efforts to increase the money supply and ease the credit crunch of the past two years. So far, the Fed has bought $130.5 billion or about 44 percent of that $300 billion.

The Fed also has a goal of buying up to $1.25 trillion of mortgage backed securities (MBS) and $200 billion of debt issued by agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Fed purchases of agency MBS total $507.075 billion so far in 2009.

But last week the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury bond yield jumped to a six month high around 3.75 pct, while the spread between 2-year and 10-year bond yields widened to a record 2.75 percentage points.

Economists at Barclays Capital in New York have argued that the Fed should announce plans to increase its planned purchases of longer-dated Treasuries to $1 trillion from $300 billion to drive yields back down, lower home mortgage rates again, and support the embryonic economic recovery.

They warn the Fed cannot afford to hold fire until its next scheduled policy meeting on June 23-24.

But the Fed is not so sure, and officials note that corporate bond spreads have narrowed over U.S. Treasuries, and that although mortgage rates have risen, they are still low.

An obvious culprit for the move in bond yields is the country's record fiscal deficit, which will generate a massive amount of new government issuance.

The U.S. Treasury must sell a record net $2 trillion in new debt in 2009 to fund a $1.8 trillion projected fiscal deficit, resulting from falling tax revenues, an economic stimulus package and sundry bank bailouts.

Investors began to worry this could erode the United States' cherished triple-A sovereign credit rating when Standard and Poors's on May 21 revised its outlook for Britain's triple-A status to negative from stable, blaming higher government debt.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that gross U.S. debt will reach 97.5 percent of the country's GDP in 2010, versus 72.7 percent of GDP for the United Kingdom.

But other Fed insiders said they have a problem blaming the steepening of the yield curve just on the extra supply of new Treasury debt.

While there has been a sharp deterioration in the U.S. fiscal outlook, this has been evident for months and the dramatic steepening of the curve only occurred this week.

Fed officials also believe that some better-than-expected economic data recently has encouraged investors to believe there is less need for the safe-haven of government bonds and more risk of inflation.

Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said on Thursday that the yield curve often steepens after a period of flatness heralding an economic recovery, but in this case is it likely a combination of factors.

"Obviously, there is a lot of supply of debt. Another way to interpret the steepening of the yield curve is ... confidence in the economy going forward," he told reporters in Washington after delivering a speech.

(Reporting by Alister Bull)

(Additional reporting by John Parry and Lynn Adler in New York, and Ros Krasny in Chicago; editing by Carol Bishopric)

The March to World Domination

This worries me. I don't think it's a coincidence that it's only a month or two after Obama told the world in the Czech Republic that he wants to disarm the United States of all nuclear weapons, and recently put a known very left-wing peacenik and Russian apologist (Rose Gottemoeller, see previous post) in charge of arms treaties.

It's not a near-term threat, but if this country gives up all its nuclear arms, this world is headed for a disaster of Armageddon-like proportions. Give it 10 or 20 years. China won't give up theirs, for instance, and their ambitions go far beyond China.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/29/world/AP-EU-Disarmament-Deadlock.html

Arms Body Breaks 12 Years of Deadlock on Nukes

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: May 29, 2009

Filed at 7:07 p.m. ET

GENEVA (AP) -- The 65-nation Conference on Disarmament broke a dozen years of deadlock Friday and opened the way to negotiate a new nuclear arms control treaty.

Diplomats welcomed the adoption of a ''program of work'' as a breakthrough for the conference, which has been stalemated since it wrote the nuclear test ban treaty in 1996.

The program refers to nuclear disarmament in general, but it indicates a top candidate for a new treaty is one to ban production of so-called ''fissile materials'' -- highly enriched uranium and plutonium -- needed to create atomic weapons.

Ambassador Idriss Jazairy of Algeria, who as chairman of the conference pushed for adoption of the program, said the breakthrough came in part because of support by the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China.

''Terrific result,'' British Ambassador John Duncan wrote in a tweet on the Twitter micro-blogging site. He credited Jazairy with ''getting international work on nuclear disarmament restarted in Geneva.''

Even North Korea, which only this week tested its second nuclear bomb, endorsed the program of work.

An Myong Hun, a diplomat with the North Korean delegation, told the conference, ''The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has decided to support the draft decision in order for the conference to be able to start its substantive work.''

This decision was taken even though the U.N. Security Council continues to criticize North Korea, An said, adding that moves to acquire a nuclear arsenal were solely for self-defense.

He said it remains the country's policy to achieve total nuclear disarmament, but nuclear weapons states have to lead the way.

Iran, which has been accused of trying to develop nuclear weapons, said it had sent the accord to Tehran, but had yet to receive instructions.

Garold Larson, the head of the U.S. delegation, joined in the praise for Jazairy and other mediators and said delegates were looking forward to the work, ''which will surely be challenging.''

The United States has long backed proposals for a fissile materials treaty, but was credited with helping break the logjam by shifting its position to support a verifiable accord.

President Barack Obama said in Prague, Czech Republic, last month, ''The United States will seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons.''

On Friday, Obama welcomed an agreement by the conference to open the way to negotiate a new nuclear arms control treaty.

He said the decision signals a commitment to work together on what he calls a fundamental challenge. He also said he's committed to working with other governments to help complete the treaty quickly, saying such a treaty is an essential element of his vision for a world free of nuclear weapons.

Previously the Bush administration had rejected verification, arguing that inspections and monitoring were insufficient.

Russia and China also joined in the endorsement of the program and expressed hope for substantive work to get under way.

The program also takes into account a concern of many non-nuclear nations that the negotiations should consider existing stockpiles of fissile materials.

The accord balances different interests of countries that have been deeply divided over the future path of arms negotiations since the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was approved nearly 13 years ago. The conference in earlier years negotiated a treaty on chemical weapons.

Many non-nuclear countries have long wanted the conference to negotiate nuclear disarmament, but the United States led objections by arguing that it was unsuitable for a negotiations among many countries. It noted it already has been negotiating effectively with the Russians to reduce their stockpiles and that such talks between two powers was the best way to go.

By coincidence, the U.S. and Russia are scheduled to continue talks in Geneva next week on extending the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which expires at the end of the year.

The Conference on Disarmament also set up a working group on the ''prevention of an arms race in outer space,'' a favorite proposal of Russia and China, which have cited fears that the United States was trying to ''weaponize'' space.

Another working group will tackle a concern of non-nuclear countries, that they be given assurances by other countries of protection against the use or threat of attack with nuclear weapons.

DARPA has nothing on Forrest Gump

In response to the article copied below, I received a response from a friend sympathetic to my criticism of DARPA, who remarked that nonetheless, there are some very simple applications of EEG for medicine, in discerning the level of consciousness of a sedated patient.

I agree with what Doug says, that an electrically based estimate of consciousness or unconsciousness might be possible. And as a personal adjunct, it *might* (emphasize "might") be possible, using traditional external measures of brain wave activity, to "decode" (wrong term) EEG type signals to get very crude estimates of certain simple emotional states -- extreme anger, etc.

But speaking as a professional electrical engineer, part-time physicist and amateur neuropsychologist (an area of long-term interest and limited study though not of in-depth knowledge and experience) I will simply crudely assert with utter certainty that it is absolutely not possible, even remotely, for electrical sensors on the outside of the brain -- any number of them you choose, of any type (electrostatic, magnetic, electromagnetic) and sensitivity you can obtain -- to discern the content of conceptual thought via "brain waves" sufficiently to interpret those "waves" as language and transmit them to another person (as DARPA wants to) without the words first being spoken.

Without boring anyone with an essay, the interpretation of a state of consciousness is much more than a word or phrase measured in the moment, and the physical state pertaining to consciousness is much more than electrical emanations escaping the brain. It's much less possible to discern the content of consciousness from an array of external electrical sensors than it is to follow the total sequence of calculations in a computer with an array of electrical sensors. To be less ambiguous, the possibility in either case is simply, zero.

That DARPA doesn't realize this either means A) this is just a ruse to conceal funding of much more practical activities (a common ploy), or B) they haven't a clue. Speaking from personal experience, I strongly recommend (B). In all matters pertaining to the functioning of government, the operative principle most likely to lead one to the truth is: if it looks stupid, it probably is. In the vernacular of Forrest Gump, stupid is as stupid does.
Robb

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug

While telepathy is nonsense, there is one portion of the article which might touch on valid research. (I emphasize 'might'.) "The project has three major goals, according to Darpa. First, try to map a person’s EEG patterns to his or her individual words. Then, see if those patterns are generalizable — if everyone has similar patterns. Last, “construct a fieldable pre-prototype that would decode the signal and transmit over a limited range.” There is a now a monitor in the operating room which sums the electrical signals form the brain and converts that sum into an estimate of the patient's level of consciousness. Some anesthesiologists use it to monitor the level of conciousness to make sure that the patient is 'asleep'. (In my view, at the current state of the technology which does have errors in its estimates, it is no more valid than the customary approach.) But it does suggest to me that trying to find out if one can relate specific electrical signals from the brain to a specific thought might be a valid pursuit. A neurophysiologist would know better.

----- Original message -----

Why DARPA is a joke ...

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/pentagon-preps-soldier-telepathy-push/

Pentagon Preps Soldier Telepathy Push

• By Katie Drummond
• May 14, 2009 |

Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they’ll read each other’s minds.

At least, that’s the hope of researchers at the Pentagon’s mad-science division Darpa. The agency’s budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” That’s on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy.

Before being vocalized, speech exists as word-specific neural signals in the mind. Darpa wants to develop technology that would detect these signals of “pre-speech,” analyze them, and then transmit the statement to an intended interlocutor. Darpa plans to use EEG to read the brain waves. It’s a technique they’re also testing in a project to devise mind-reading binoculars that alert soldiers to threats faster the conscious mind can process them.

The project has three major goals, according to Darpa. First, try to map a person’s EEG patterns to his or her individual words. Then, see if those patterns are generalizable — if everyone has similar patterns. Last, “construct a fieldable pre-prototype that would decode the signal and transmit over a limited range.”

The military has been funding a handful of mind-tapping technology recently, and already have monkeys capable of telepathic limb control. Telepathy may also have advantages beyond covert battlefield chatter. Last year, the National Research Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency released a report suggesting that neuroscience might also be useful to “make the enemy obey our commands.” The first step, though, may be getting a grunt to obey his officer’s remotely-transmitted thoughts.

Trashing the Planet

I'm not using that phrase in the usual sense, of course. I'm talking about anti-human "activists" who promote their agenda via propaganda that gets pushed through the school system to brainwash young kids about issues they have no capacity for rationally assessing. Case in point: a creature named Annie Leonard, who has created a cartoon video to "educate" kids on the environment:

“A lot of what’s in the film was already out there,” Ms. Leonard said, “but the style of the animation makes it easy to watch. It is a nice counterbalance to the starkness of the facts.”

That says it all to me. I'm reminded again of Marlo Thomas, a long forgotten actress ("That Girl") who remarked on "The Tonight Show" back in the 70's, "Don't worry about the facts. The facts will kill you every time."

They sure will. Here is how the video says that to the kids:

“We’ll start with extraction, which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation, which is a fancy word for trashing the planet,” she says at one point. “What this looks like is we chop down the trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals.”

Al Gore would be proud.

Ms. Leonard put the video on the Internet in December 2007. Word quickly spread among teachers, who recommended it to one another as a brief, provocative way of drawing students into a dialogue about how buying a cellphone or jeans could contribute to environmental devastation.

As usual, worn-out cliche's of evil capitalists abound, but of course 9 year old kids wouldn't know a cliche from a climate hoax:

Mark Zuber, a parent of a child at Big Sky High School in Missoula, had a stronger reaction when a teacher showed the video to his daughter last year. “There was not one positive thing about capitalism in the whole thing,” Mr. Zuber said. Corporations, for example, are portrayed as a bloated person sporting a top hat and with a dollar sign etched on its front.

Feel free to comment on all this to evil denizens of the New York Times, who are absolutely in love with this kind of "informing". Of course, they have never been terribly wedded to the "starkness of the facts".

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/education/11stuff.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

May 11, 2009
A Cautionary Video About America’s ‘Stuff’
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
The thick-lined drawings of the Earth, a factory and a house, meant to convey the cycle of human consumption, are straightforward and child-friendly. So are the pictures of dark puffs of factory smoke and an outlined skull and crossbones, representing polluting chemicals floating in the air.

Which is one reason “The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video about the effects of human consumption, has become a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation.

The video is a cheerful but brutal assessment of how much Americans waste, and it has its detractors. But it has been embraced by teachers eager to supplement textbooks that lag behind scientific findings on climate change and pollution. And many children who watch it take it to heart: riding in the car one day with his parents in Tacoma, Wash., Rafael de la Torre Batker, 9, was worried about whether it would be bad for the planet if he got a new set of Legos.

“When driving by a big-box store, you could see he was struggling with it,” his father, David Batker, said. But then Rafael said, “It’s O.K. if I have Legos because I’m going to keep them for a very long time,” Mr. Batker recalled.

The video was created by Annie Leonard, a former Greenpeace employee and an independent lecturer who paints a picture of how American habits result in forests being felled, mountaintops being destroyed, water being polluted and people and animals being poisoned. Ms. Leonard, who describes herself as an “unapologetic activist,” is also critical of corporations and the federal government, which she says spends too much on the military.

Ms. Leonard put the video on the Internet in December 2007. Word quickly spread among teachers, who recommended it to one another as a brief, provocative way of drawing students into a dialogue about how buying a cellphone or jeans could contribute to environmental devastation.

So far, six million people have viewed the film at its site, storyofstuff.com, and millions more have seen it on YouTube. More than 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version, and hundreds of teachers have written Ms. Leonard to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web.

It has also won support from independent groups that advise teachers on curriculum choices. Facing the Future, a curriculum developer for schools in all 50 states, is drafting lesson plans based on the video. And Ms. Leonard has a contract with Simon & Schuster to write a book based on the video.

The enthusiasm is not universal. In January, a school board in Missoula County, Mont., decided that screening the video treaded on academic freedom after a parent complained that its message was anticapitalist.

But many educators say the video is a boon to teachers as they struggle to address the gap in what textbooks say about the environment and what science has revealed in recent years.

“Frankly, a lot of the textbooks are awful on the subject of the environment,” said Bill Bigelow, the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools, a quarterly magazine that has promoted “The Story of Stuff” to its subscribers and on its Web site, which reaches about 600,000 educators a month. “The one used out here in Oregon for global studies — it’s required — has only three paragraphs on climate change. So, yes, teachers are looking for alternative resources.”

Environmental education is still a young and variable field, according to Frank Niepold, the climate education coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There are few state or local school mandates on how to teach the subject.

The agency is seeking to change that, but in the interim many teachers are developing their own lesson plans on climate change, taking some elements from established sources like the National Wildlife Federation and others from less conventional ones like “The Story of Stuff.”

Ms. Leonard is self-educated on where waste goes and worked for Greenpeace to prevent richer nations from dumping their trash in poorer ones. She produced the video, with the Free Range Studios company, and with money from numerous nonprofit groups; the largest single giver was the Tides Foundation. She did so, she said, after tiring of traveling often to present her views at philanthropic and environmental conferences. She attributes the response to the video’s simplicity.

“A lot of what’s in the film was already out there,” Ms. Leonard said, “but the style of the animation makes it easy to watch. It is a nice counterbalance to the starkness of the facts.”

The video certainly makes the facts stark and at times very political: “We’ll start with extraction, which is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation, which is a fancy word for trashing the planet,” she says at one point. “What this looks like is we chop down the trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals.”

Mark Lukach, who teaches global studies at Woodside Priory, a Catholic college-preparatory school in Portola Valley, Calif., acknowledged that the film is edgy, but said the 20-minute length gives students time to challenge it in class after viewing it.

“Compared to ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ ” he said, referring to Al Gore’s one-and-a-half-hour documentary on climate change, “it is much shorter and easier to compact into a class segment. You can watch it and then segue into a discussion.”

Mr. Lukach’s students made a response video and posted it on YouTube, asking Ms. Leonard to scare them less and give them ideas on how to make things better. That in turn inspired high school students in Mendocino, Calif., to post an answer to Woodside, with suggested activities.

Dawn Zweig, who teaches environmental studies at the Putney School, a private academy in Vermont, said that the very reason the video appealed to teachers — it shows students how their own behavior is linked to what is happening across the globe — could also raise sensitive issues. She said students, particularly affluent ones, might take the critique personally. “If you offend a student, they turn off the learning button and then you won’t get anywhere,” Ms. Zweig said.

Sometimes teachers observe the opposite: children who become environmental advocates at home after seeing the video. After Jasmine Madavi, 18, saw it last year in Mr. Lukach’s class at Woodside Priory, she began nagging her parents to stop buying bottled water. Her mother resisted, saying that filtered tap water, Jasmine’s suggested alternative, would not taste as good. But Jasmine bought the filter on her own, and the household is now converted.

“You just have to be persistent,” said Ms. Madavi, who is now a community college student. “When you use a water bottle, it just doesn’t disappear. That’s Annie’s message.”

Most parents take such needling with humor. But Mark Zuber, a parent of a child at Big Sky High School in Missoula, had a stronger reaction when a teacher showed the video to his daughter last year. “There was not one positive thing about capitalism in the whole thing,” Mr. Zuber said.

Corporations, for example, are portrayed as a bloated person sporting a top hat and with a dollar sign etched on its front.

He described the video as one-sided. “It was very well done, very effective advocacy, but it was just that,” he said.

Mr. Zuber argued before the Missoula County School Board that the way in which “The Story of Stuff” was presented, without an alternative point of view, violated its standards on bias, and the board agreed in a 4-to-3 vote.

Still, Ms. Leonard is hoping the video will circle the globe. “I’ve heard from teachers in Palestine and Papua New Guinea,” she said. “It is just spreading and spreading.”

New Star Trek doesn't quite live up to the review...

...but isn't too bad. What comes across is that the review I commented on the other day was pure P.R. -- someone wrote a press release, pulled some strings, and the "review" was published. The movie, while entertaining, didn't have a deep theme (or little theme at all) beyond "outstanding people break the rules". Which I can have some sympathy for. A few lines in the end grated on me rather strongly -- the old "reason versus emotion" false dichotomy -- but as I said, overall it was entertaining, pulling a lot of elements from the original S.T., with hints of things from other sci-fi fare like Stargate, Battlestar, other S.T. movies, and even J.J. Abrams' show "Alias". I actually like the new James T. Kirk better than the old, and the younger versions of the other characters were all quite plausible. So -- 3 stars, which is a good score from me.

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