Yes there IS. Leonard Cohen is on tour right now at age 75. Check the audio on the link. It's just as true as when he sang it wayback when.   more »

A great blog article here,hehey. It actually makes sense though, Arnie goes into various stretches that actual yoga asanas are named after. dog, cat, and cow, and almost every other familiar stretching techniques are derived from watching animal friends stretch. This could be a great educational feature for kids yoga especially, but most yoga afficianados are animal lovers, it's the zen... and the life force itself.   more »

Remember the timeless wisdom that HG Wells put into "War of The Worlds"? Mother Earth was saved by the lowliest of God's creatures, the virus. It looks like a fly, and a virus, and a greedy corporation all wotked on this potential pandemic. Read this excellent piece in Grist by Tom Philpot. For me it ties up the case. Is the pig, the "filthy animal" that eats it's own waste to blame, or is it the filthy corporate citizen that is to blame.   more »

This wasn't news to the blog world, we have been pointing this out for years. but finally it's getting some traction with main stream media? maybe:   more »

Try this,you'll like it. Stand by me cut from continent to continent,different artists,blended. Like twitter blends us.   more »

Get it now. These eagles are getting ready to fend for themselves. Watch as they grow and learn.   more »

From the Huffington Post blog: video/transcript of Elizabeth Warren explaining just how depression era regulation prevented the 15 year cycle of US financial crisis.   more »

Check the story and video from @cbellantoni   more »

Jon said,"Google muppet scat". Here's the video   more »

Latest ice disaster video news from Reuters: very alarming!    more »

You tell me: is going around from blog to comment on Grist to twitter and all around ..way too much? It all could get confusing. Just hope no one adds timetwitter&, where we tweet into the past through a solar orbiting tachyon accelerator.   more »

I just called firefly,the price will be around $490 per battery. Available from their website this summer. Three of them will move my honda plugin hybrid conversion (work in ((DIY)) progress) 30 to 40 miles. For 1500 bucks? Not bad.   more »

With his own 38. More from Tom Waites   more »

From the NYT: "WASHINGTON — Lawrence H. Summers, the top economic adviser to President Obama, earned more than $5 million last year from the hedge fund D. E. Shaw and collected $2.7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street companies that received government bailout money, the White House disclosed Friday in releasing financial information about top officials."   more »

The latest from David Roberts: "Responding to the 'energy tax' attack"   more »

I decided to post gristmill article links with short comment, then offer up my blog for comments. No official Grist connection, but why not revive comments unoficially? No harm, no plagirism, hehey.   more »

The ultimate musical philosopher, a comment on our financial crisis?   more »

Very nice job!  From the country whose president insists on international financial regulation. They both RULE!

Just had to claim this lame joke about the certainly lame brained Rep Michele Bachman (R-Minn). When does oral diarrhea become treason?   more »

What goes better together than long distance High voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power transmission and continental/global solar and wind power?   more »

Very proud of this tweetback!   more »

A very cool wind land speed record winner

This is to serve as a virtual sanctuary for endangered walken tweeters,please tweet away in comments and link to the comment section in twitterland.   more »

I'm training now. Running and yoga this time around.    more »

Yes, it just might be, from "Solve Climate" blog: 'Raser made Fast Company’s list of the “50 Most Innovative Companies” last month for its ability to "generate zero-emissions electricity using water that's scarcely hotter than a cup of coffee." The listing followed Raser initial completion of its first 10.5 megawatt commercial power plant.' "With considerable backing from Merrill Lynch, Raser has begun an ambitious plan to construct 155 MW worth of geothermal plants on its vast real estate acquisitions across the western United States. It has plans to do the same overseas through a partnership announced in September with Indonesia Power."   more »

Isn't there anyone out there! A scary reamination of Gristmill commentary. Can it live?   more »

Hilarious video.   more »

Don't settle for an imitation. Only the real drx has no I.   more »

Does he want "more cowbell"?   more »

Check out this amazing new blog. I'm already intensely jealous, this has to drive me to get video too. Who else do you know who converted his own bike to the latest lithium ion plugin hybrid technology? You probably didn't know anyone who did that, so click on his blog and find out how he did it.   more »

"Plausible deniability" is the operative phrase. Here's how this works: the well placed and comfortably fixed within the structure of power, in government or industry, place their savings in a hedge fund where they can't be blamed for the inside information that is slipped to hedge fund managers "anonymously". Eventually nearly everyone with a potential conflict of interest has money in a hedge fund. These individuals, congressmen, senators, management, (de) regulators all protect and enhance the "rights" of hedge funds to avoid any and all regulation and scrutiny.   more »

Not so fast. Coal state democrats and wall street democrats are agin' it. It's a tax they say. This sounds familiar. "No new taxes", yeah that's it the old talking point. So how do you get the money and retain support from no new taxers? Subsidy diversion. Take from the oil and coal companies, give to consumers, robin hood style. Pretty simple really.   more »

Yes, another one. This one uses microwave ovens to make the charcoal, at $65 worth of electricty per ton. Put aside the fact that biochar actually accelerates the breakdown of soil carbon sink and then feature the prospect of coal burned in a power plant to power a microwave oven to make wood into biochar to bury. How would you ever get ahead in the carbon balance, burn the coal, bury the char?   more »

Jon concentrated on the outrage at the gaming aspect of trading, and the wacky bent that Cramer gives it all. That was kind of beside the point, real traders don't take Jim's advice. Maybe his callers do? Traders, especially self taught ones like me, don't generally trust bombastic entertainment like Jim provides as a good barometer of market sentiment. We see it as a contra-indicator, just as several statistical studies of Cramer's schtick have proven, he is wrong more often than he is right. His act tells where the herd is at, how close they are to the cliff. Real traders take their gains before the lemmings jump off into freefall.   more »

Check out the video that started the war between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer. My adivice to Stewart is that he run the video of Cramer's show where Cramer explains the uptick rule and why it needs to be reinstated just before he comes on. This will put a better face on Cramer's schtick. John, please ask Cramer about the Glass Steagell Act and margin requirements for trading derivatives. This way when you guys get into your dispute over Cramer's obvious mistaken touting of various stocks before the crash, he will at least get credit for what he does right. Explaining how regulation works and why it needs to be reinstalled.   more »

Obama's hair is graying already. Caught between the science of GHG climate disaster, healthcare reform, and the wall street masters of the universe threatening to destroy the global economy if they don't get their way, this is still surprising. I'm seeing a distinct downward trend towards real hopelessness. Kind of like the slide in financial markets. Gloom and doom, without the sense of humor.   more »

Nope, they don't have a president anywhere on them, not even the fraudulent president, duuhbya. I think they are counterfeit, who gave all these credit default swaps their alleged dollar value of 800 trillion? If counterfeiters print money we don't honor it, whoever gets stuck with it suffers. International banks and their customers are the ones who accepted the bad paper.   more »

Newspapers dying, massive layoffs, Rupert media monopolizing the formerly free press? Well yeah, those are the headlines, but here on the internet street corner there is deeper examination of the process from paper based to internet based media The internet street is right next to our park bench here in virtual global interactive reality. This is distributed news media, like distributed smart grid power generation, and distributed manufacturing and agriculture and learning, research, and development; this will all change business models and make the whole topic pretty interesting.   more »

It doesn't have to be. As long as it isn't permanent, but rather a stage in a recovery plan. Take a bank for instance, why give the present management and owners bailout money? Why not just take over the bank then share ownership with bank employees who were owed retirenent, healthcare, and pensions? Put senior employees in charge, they did most of the work anyway, and they now have an incentive to make the business succeed, once the economy turns around and the bank is profitable again, the government would sell it's shares taking the bank public again.   more »

No need to ask Swiss bankers how and what happened to the global economy, Frontline asked the right questions and the simple explanation followed. PBS had our back all along, go figure. How could socialist media be so much more effective than "free" market media? Here is the essence of the 800 trillion dollar mortgage scam: Mortgages were bundled into "mortgage backed securities", essentially bonds. These bonds were sold to banks and other investors all over the world. They were supposed to provide good safe returns based on homeowners paying their mortgages. The bank or investor that bought the bond did not have to deal with each homeowner, the mortgage company did that for them. But what if an economic downturn, caused by soaring oil prices, for instance, caused job losses that started to make it difficult for those mortgages to be payed?   more »

Where is the new administration on the hi-tech organic ag front? When Vilsack connects farm biogas, organic fertilizer, and distributed smart grid backup from farm based energy, wind, solar, and biogas fuel cell power generation. And calls for per kwh subsidies direct to farmers, that replace the current farm subsidy program, that will be the time to celebrate. Elimination of GMO crops, pesticides and herbicides is going to take robotic organic farming, it's just too hard to grow grain and soybeans on an industrial ag scale with human labor. Even getting enough veggies will be difficult with human powered organic farming.   more »

How could this be good news? From the Grist interview: "...analysts suggest an even higher figure, attributing between 38 percent and 52 percent of GHGs to the livestock sector, if all the factors are considered." Even this is a low estimate. Everyone forgets a HUGE source of GHG, namely nitrous oxide emitted by chemical fertilizer, it is equal to a staggering 2/3 of the CO2 uptake of the crop fertilized.   more »

Finally exponential climate change hits the headlines. From WAPO: 'The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday. ' "We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.   more »

Speaking across the centuries, heed his observations. "It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the doubt of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it."   more »

It's great to see the times catching up on energy reporting. The Lovins blog article was another great example of this. GristMill chews over the virtual newsprint: As usual the main talking point against renewables, reliability, is identified early on. This article mentions Xcel and the reporter talked to Xcel's boss, but not about their Colorado smart grid project, the first city-wide effort of its kind in the US.   more »

Here's where we are really at: over 50% of us want to go green. Under 10% of our energy use is renewable and conservation and efficiency combined barely have the combined figure reaching 10% of our energy use. Over 50% of us are willing to sacrifice some convenience and adjust our lifestyles to do it. We would be willing to give up always on 100% centralized grid power and gas guzzlers, and go for smart grid power timing and ocasional emergency backup power and plugin hybrids that make us actually pay attention and plugin our cars. So we have 50% of us demanding change and willing to sacrifice for it, and less than 10% market pentration of green energy conversion. There is huge growth potential, only capital for mass production is missing. Government stimulation could set a fire under this commercial wave.   more »

15 cents per kwh with installation and inversion/grid connection? That's at southwestern US solar insolation levels and durations? The latest mass produced solar technology could even compete with large scale wind power at these prices. First Solar is expanding capacity rapidly, even a modest subsidy and low interest loan program could increase growth right into the exponential range, large scale wind is already there. And that kind of growth is necessary to counter exponential GHG climate change and economic disaster. Job losses are in danger of hitting exponential growth too. Get those solar manufacturing plants and solar installation companies humming Barack! That way we will be on the right side of the exponential growth curve where the mathematical trend is our friend.   more »

Yeah GE thanks for your smart grid commercial during the superbowl and beyond. But it just can't explain what Amory Lovins and others have in mind for the future. It would be nice to understand progressive green energy reform from a new perspective. What will your energy bills be for electricity, heating fuel, and gasoline and what will your taxes be to pay for war after oil war after oil war? This current round of oil wars totals a trillion so far. Will energy and taxes cost more than your mortgage if we persist in the status quo energy systems? Will a distributed renewable smart grid help? Will it get you free energy after you payback your solar panels and plugin hybrid in savings on energy costs? Will it mean lower energy costs across the economy? And much lower trade deficits from canceling the purchase of imported energy? Could it mean good manufacturing jobs and financial security for families too? Yep it looks like it: but how to explain how it could do that? Let's follow Lovins point by point and try to put his technicaleze into plain english and household budget concerns. Let us reason together: hehey.    more »

And why it is already replacing central coal and nuclear powered grids. Especially in terms of investment. Now contrast and compare the idiocy displayed by an economics reporter in the times just a few pages away from the NYT blog Lovins was writing on. In Lovins' world, conservation and efficiency cuts power demand and the supply is everywhere, mainly renewable, with distributed storage and backup distributed generation. In the economist's world of the perpetual status quo, the only/best of all possible worlds: plugin hybrids are mass produced in China and Germany, we aren't allowed to buy them here though. Will that change anytime soon? How about the rest of the devices needed to make the new energy economy work? Will they be mass produced elsewhere too? Solar cogeneration panels, smart grid devices, batteries, all the items that will make this next big boom happen will most likely only produce installation and sales jobs here.    more »