Through the quotidian rhythm imposed by the online Schwartzreport (www.schwartzreport.net) I sit at my computer and watch streams of data trek across my desk, the influences shaping America’s future. The details teach the trend if you can find the pattern and, once you do, you can see it swell and retreat, like a melody in a symphony. The trick is to put all judgments aside and just follow the data with no cherished outcome. Some of the trends are easy to track and describe. The evolution that has brought us to the iPad and the iPhone (Apple, Cupertino, CA) and the effects they have are easy to see, and the data does not threaten values. Certainly, there are some people who scorn computers. But they are not a force. With some trends the principal problem is the signal-to-noise ratio. Climate change is such a trend where the most notable thing about it is the complete divorcement of data from political debate. The Denier movement upon close examination is almost entirely fact-free. This is part of an even larger trend: the growth of Willful Ignorance-a worldview notable for being formed through the deliberate exclusion of relevant data. Creationism is climate change […]
Among the standard epithets often leveled at green energy is the one about subsidies. As the conservative myth goes, green energy is allegedly not ‘cost competitive’ with dirty energy sources like coal or natural gas. This, we are led to believe, makes green energy just another wasteful taxpayer-supported boondoggle for dominant special interests. In this version of the story, big, bad all-powerful solar, wind and insulation companies are supposedly getting government handouts to unfairly oppress the earnest mom-and-pop oil and gas industry.
As laughable as it is to portray oil, gas and coal companies — some of the wealthiest corporations in the world — as underdogs, the narrative’s Machiavellian brilliance should be obvious. For both the global fossil fuel industry and a conservative political movement underwritten by oil barons like the Koch brothers, the mythology self-servingly casts environmentally friendly alternatives as inherently ill-suited to free market economics. In the process, it convinces millions of consumers and entrepreneurs that even if they want to go green, they can’t do so in any sort of economically viable way, meaning they should just keep guzzling as much fossil fuel as ever.
But in an up-is-down political arena where being a millionaire is ‘struggling’ and where […]
LOS ANGELES — Across Hollywood, a quiet revolution is brewing that’s about to transform living rooms around the world.
After desperate attempts to prop up the industry’s once-thriving DVD business, studio executives now believe the only hope of turning around a 40% decline in home entertainment revenue lies in rapidly accelerating the delivery of movies over the Internet.
In the next few years, the growing number of consumers with Internet-connected televisions, tablets and smartphones will face a dizzying array of options designed to make digital movie consumption a lot more convenient and to entice users to spend more money.
With films that can be accessed on any digital device, downloaded as iPhone apps or shared on Facebook as easily as a photo, it may be the biggest shift in Hollywood’s business model since the explosion of the DVD in the late 1990s.
‘The days of baby steps on the Internet are over,’ said David Bishop, president of Sony Pictures’ home entertainment unit. ‘It’s now critical that we experiment as much as possible and determine how to build a vibrant market for collecting digital movies.’
Though the online movie business has been growing at a healthy clip for the last few years, driven in large part […]
Police made 853,838 arrests in 2010 for marijuana-related offenses, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Uniform Crime Report, released today. The arrest total is among the highest ever reported by the agency and is nearly identical to the total number of cannabis-related arrests reported in 2009.
According to the report, marijuana arrests now comprise more than one-half (52 percent) of all drug arrests in the United States. An estimated 46 percent of all drug arrests are for offenses related to marijuana possession.
‘Today, as in past years, the so-called ‘drug war’ remains fueled by the arrests of minor marijuana possession offenders, a disproportionate percentage of whom are ethnic minorities,
GENEVA — Betting against Einstein and his theory of relativity is a way to go broke.
For more than a century, everyone from physicists to the Nazi Party – which encouraged the publication of the tract ‘One Hundred Authors Against Einstein’ – has tried to find cracks in his work. And all have failed.
On Thursday, the world’s biggest physics lab unveiled a shocking finding: that one type of subatomic particle was clocked going faster than the speed of light. If true – a big if, even the scientists there concede – it could undercut Einstein’s theories. Physicist Michio Kaku of City College of New York called it ‘the biggest challenge to relativity in 100 years.’
Antonio Ereditato, who participated in the European experiment as head of the Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics in Bern, knows what is at stake. After his team fielded two hours of technical questions, some a bit sharp, from a skeptical audience Friday, Ereditato had a beer in hand and was asked about the idea that his work was challenging the secular saint of modern physics.
‘Yes, that’s why I’m concerned,’ he said with a laugh.
There’s a long history of experimental results that at first seem to contradict […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
