Archive for the 'Elite' Category
Shocker: Solar Panels Could Destroy U.S. Utilities, According to U.S. Utilities
April 14th, 2013Via: Grist: Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground. That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves. Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute […]
Cliodynamics
April 14th, 2013Via: Wired: In Isaac Asimov’s classic science fiction saga Foundation, mathematics professor Hari Seldon predicts the future using what he calls psychohistory. Drawing on mathematical models that describe what happened in the past, he anticipates what will happen next, including the fall of the Galactic Empire. That may seem like fanciful stuff. But Peter Turchin […]
Judges Threaten California Governor Jerry Brown with Contempt of Court Over Prison Overcrowding
April 13th, 2013Via: Los Angeles Times: A panel of federal judges Thursday threatened to hold Gov. Jerry Brown and other state officials in contempt of court if they do not quickly produce a plan to remove thousands of convicts from California’s packed prisons. In a blistering 71-page ruling, the jurists rejected Brown’s bid to end restrictions they […]
Manager of a South Pacific Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong Franchise Says That Kids Should Consider Learning Mandarin
April 10th, 2013Via: New Zealand Herald: Prime Minister John Key wants more students to consider learning Mandarin. And a Herald-DigiPoll survey shows a surprisingly high number of people, more than 25 per cent, would like Maori and a foreign language to be compulsory at school – although the majority prefer no compulsion. The Prime Minister is visiting […]
Chinese Colonel Says Latest Bird Flu Virus Is U.S. Biological Weapon
April 10th, 2013Via: Washington Post: Colonel Dai Xu of the People’s Liberation Army wrote online that the new strain of bird flu hitting China, known as H7N9, is an American “bio-psychological weapon” meant to destabilize China. The rant, posted to Dai’s account on the Twitter-like service Weibo, had already been shared by more than 30,000 fellow users […]
Helmut Kohl: I Acted Like a Dictator to Bring in the Euro
April 10th, 2013Via: Telegraph: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s former chancellor, has admitted that he acted like a “dictator” to bring in the single currency to the country, otherwise he “would have lost” had he held a referendum. In an interview conducted for a journalist’s PhD thesis, Germany’s longest-serving postwar chancellor said that he would have lost any popular […]
Margaret Thatcher Dead at 87
April 8th, 2013Via: BBC: Former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher has died “peacefully” at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke, her family has announced. Successor David Cameron called her a “great Briton” and the Queen spoke of her sadness at the death. Lady Thatcher was Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990. She was the first […]
Biden: “Create a New World Order”
April 7th, 2013Via: CSPAN: Vice President Joe Biden calls for the creation of a “new world order” at the Export Import Bank conference in Washington on April 5, 2013. Flashback: 1992 Biden Speech: “On the Threshold of the New World Order: A Rebirth for the United Nations”
‘Bitcoin Really Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State’
April 6th, 2013Via: Bloomberg: So far, Bitcoin is not a big deal. Its total value in circulation was $1.4 billion as of this week. That’s equivalent to the currency stock of a small nation — somewhere between Iceland and Uruguay — and just one-thousandth of the total value of U.S. dollars in circulation. The volume of transactions […]
Price Increases for U.S. Military Gear Dwarf Most Nations’ Defense Budgets
April 5th, 2013Madness. Via: Wired: Here’s an example of what Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was talking about in his Wednesday speech on reforming the way the Pentagon buys gear. If you look at just the increases in how much defense gear costs, the bloat dwarfs what nearly every other nation on earth spends on defense annually. I […]
