naked capitalism

No Problemo says:

“Once people understand their connection to the land, Leopold concluded, they would willingly take personal responsibility for maintaining its health.”
Boy, BP sure blew that philosophy out of the water.

Need to add – except when personal wealth is a stake.

Personal and public responsibility, what quaint concepts. How about corporate responsibility, or corporate ethics, now AIG can provide an education and role model.

Why should anyone get rich on developing (exploiting) public resources or protecting those resources ? In fact, why should anyone get rich on exploiting natural resources at the expense of public interests.

Golden Rule – Scam the many for the few.

Carrick says:

A few years ago, I lived in the Kings Canyon/Sequoia National Park back country for six months working on a trail crew.

Any time we saw a bear, day or night, the entire crew of 15 people had to charge the bear at full sprint, screaming and yelling to terrify the bear. If we could, we were trained to chase the bear up a tree, and scream, taunt, and throw rocks at it for hours until while it cried and shat itself. The point, was that unless the bears are terrified of people, they continue to view them as a source of food.. and once they equate people with food, they abandon their natural foraging/hunting skills, and have to be put down by park staff.

We’d chase these 300-400 pound bears, sometimes with cubs, for miles, sometimes at 3am while trying to go to the bathroom. Then we’d catch some idiot intentionally luring a bear in by feeding it toothpaste. The bears get so accustomed to people, that eventually they shred tents with people sleeping inside and the people confuse this foraging for an attack, and attack in kind.

When I see ‘cute’ pictures like this one, of bears sauntering beside cars and people (or worse, people doing things to keep their bears around for the sake of a photo), I get bummed.. one of those cubs is going to under up shot by park staff, because people have no grasp of nature, and think they’re watching TV. We’re turning into the Japanese..

doc holiday says:

BP to use Red Tide data for death toll?

Looks like BP will try to manipulate data, in a suggestion that oil is not behind aqua deaths…

> “It’s good that we have the data, and it’s sad that we are here,” said Balmer, who returned to the bay this month — on a hastily arranged research trip paid for by BP — for what could be a last check on the dolphins before the oil arrives.

To this day, scientists from government agencies and universities can’t say for certain whether a red tide was responsible for the deaths of St. Joe’s dolphins six years ago. Just as perplexing is what percentage of the bay’s dolphin population at the time died that year and whether any of the bay’s current population of nearly 100 have the ability to leave their 73,000-acre sanctuary should oil threaten.

Randall Wells, a scientist at Mote Marine Research Laboratory in Sarasota, has learned from more than 40 years of studies in Sarasota Bay that the dolphins there don’t stray far from home…

> http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2010-06-23/news/os-florida-oil-spill-st-joe-bay-20100623_1_dolphin-population-sarasota-dolphin-research-program-randall-wells

Ignim Brites says:

The explanation for roos’ short arms is underwhelming. Why does this feature even need explanation. Seems like a case of big armism. Isn’t the whole point of modern evolutionary theory that life forms are in essence accidental? What is the point of postulating that one or another feature or one or another life form is “constrained” and then offering a quasi teleological explanation of that feature. Roos have short arms so that as infants they can climb into the pouch. Really? Maybe roos have pouches because as infants they have short arms.

doc holiday says:

THE SHORT FILM BP DOESN’T WANT YOU TO SEE.

http://www.leanweb.org/

Toxins in air from evaporating oil may pose greater threat to Gulf residents than oily water

http://www.examiner.com/x-38220-Orlando-Independent-Examiner~y2010m6d15-Toxins-in-air-from-evaporating-oil-may-pose-greater-threat-to-Gulf-residents-than-oily-water

Also See: http://my.auburnjournal.com/detail/153055.html

Kessler’s team measured both surface and deep water within a 5-mile (8 kilometer) radius of BP’s destroyed wellhead. “There is an incredible amount of methane in there,” Kessler told reporters. He said the level may be as much as one million times the normal level.

In addition, Madsen reports, Corexit 9500, the oil dispersant used by BP, is viewed by FEMA sources as mixing with evaporated water from the Gulf. This deadly mixture is then absorbed by rain clouds and produces toxic precipitation that threatens to continue killing marine and land animals, plant life, and humans within a 200-mile radius of the Deepwater Horizon disaster site in the Gulf.

Peripheral Visionary says:

Re: Extreme Measures: Arming the Zealotocracy, Serving the Elite

A fact check on Floyd is in order.

First of all, he dates the rise of Islamic extremism to the mid-20th Century, but the reality is that the rise of Islamic extremism goes to a much earlier date. The opening salvo of the extremists’ war on the West would likely be the Mahdist uprising in the Sudan in the 1880′s; but at any rate, Islamist movements led by the likes of Hassan al-Banna and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem were well in place even before World War II, with the ranks of extremists swelling in Egypt, Palestine, and elsewhere.

The next problem is with his argument that “tyrants of every stripe (often clients of the West) turned to hitherto marginal fundamentalist religious groups”. First of all, many, if not most, of the Middle Eastern regimes in predominantly Islamic countries, including the specific example of Egypt that he cites, were clients of the Soviet Socialist state, not the Western democratic states, with the U.S. maintaining its alliance with Israel, secular Turkey, and secular Iran. Second of all, the regimes in question had limited and conflicted relationships with the extremists, with the most frequent outcome being systematic repression, e.g. Egypt’s extended campaign to crush the Muslim Brotherhood.

Floyd’s argument that “this same dynamic . . . has happened in Iran” is nonsense on stilts. Iran was a secular state supported by the West that was overthrown by Shi’ite Islamic extremists that the U.S. was vehemently opposed to.

Oddly enough, the one place where his argument works–Afghanistan–is the one example he does not cite. That really does make me wonder–what exactly is the agenda here? How could anybody talk about the mistakes of the West in supporting extremism when the one clear-cut, incontrovertible example–Afghanistan–is ignored? I am reluctant to come to this conclusion, but it is hard to escape the possibility that his sympathies in the Afghanistan conflict of the 1980′s may lie with the other side.

Given his inability to grasp (or recognize) basic facts, there isn’t much of a point of even responding to the rest of the post-Marxist rantings. I will give credit where credit is due, however: Floyd appears to be one of the few remaining progressives who is actually willing to consider Islamic extremism to be both a real phenomenon and a bad thing. Either that, or he hasn’t gotten the memo yet.