Fukushima Update

The Japan Times newspaper reports the problems of the nucler melt down in Japan still affect daily lives. the problems are less directly visible and dramatic than radiation burns but they are appalling nonetheless.

The number of Japanese suffering from Kawasaki syndrome, an autoimmune disease that mainly afflicts children and whose cause and cure remain unknown, has been steadily increasing, a recent nationwide survey showed.

The total number of patients under age 4 stood at 12,755 in 2010, exceeding 10,000 for the sixth straight year, according to the biannual survey.

Of even greater concern, the disease's incidence per 100,000 children under 4 came to 239.6, the highest rate recorded since the study began in 1970, eclipsing the rate of 219.9 seen in 2008.

The 2010 total also was the third-highest level on record, after the 15,519 incidences in 1982 and the 12,847 cases four years later.

Kawasaki syndrome is the most common cause of acquired heart disease among children in developed countries. It is an acute febrile illness of unknown etiology that primarily affects children younger than 5, and can damage coronary arteries supplying the heart, triggering a heart attack.

"The incidence of the disease has been rising steadily since the mid-1990s, although we don't know exactly what has been behind the latest increase," said Yoshikazu Nakamura, a public health professor at Jichi Medical University in Tochigi Prefecture.

The survey was led by a professor at the university. It collected data in 2009 and 2010, covering 2,033 medical institutions with pediatric departments. Of these, 1,445 submitted valid responses.

Kawasaki syndrome was first discovered in Japan, when pediatrician Tomisaku Kawasaki diagnosed the disease in 1967. Since then it has been found worldwide in children of all ethnic origins.

The cause of Kawasaki syndrome has yet to be identified, but it is widely believed that viral or bacterial infections can spark an autoimmune reaction in the patient, possibly causing coronary artery aneurysms.

It inflames small and medium-size blood vessels throughout the body, especially in coronary arteries.

Major symptoms include high fever, strawberrylike red bumps on the tongue, swollen lymph nodes in the neck, skin rashes and bloodshot eyes.

The standard treatment is intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), produced using antibodies from the blood of 3,000 to 10,000 healthy donors.

When administered in high doses, the treatment considerably reduces the symptoms of most Kawasaki syndrome patients, including inflammation.

Still, IVIG is not effective on 20 percent of patients, prompting researchers to look for other treatments, including steroids.

A research team at the health ministry conducted a clinical trial of steroids from September 2008 to December 2010 at 74 medical institutions across the country involving patients with potentially serious afflictions.

The patients were divided into two groups. One was treated only with IVIG and the other with both IVIG and steroids.

The trial found that 23 percent of those in the first group contracted coronary artery aneurysms, but the symptom was detected in only 3 percent of patients administered both IVIG and steroids.

Goldman Sachs Pay Scale

From the website http://www.econmatters.com this discussion of executive pay at the Giant Squid:

In addition to suffering a one-day $2 billion loss in market value on March 12 bestowed upon by the Goldman Letter at New York Times on March 12 , Goldman also has to deal with God problem regarding executive compensation packages as well.



According to Reuters, in the past two years, a group of religious institutions that hold Goldman shares, including the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, has been successful in getting its proposal requiring Goldman to conduct an independent examination of whether Goldman's executive pay levels were appropriate taken into regular shareholders' meetings.



However, this year, for the first time, the U.S. SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) sided with Goldman, which argued it had already complied with the request. The SEC's letter of rejection came out just one day after Gregg Smith's Goldman Letter appeared on the Times.



From Reuters,

The SEC sided with Goldman this year because it felt the company had "substantially implemented" the proposal, an SEC spokesman said. "If the company's actions effectively moot the proposal, then we permit exclusion."

In its January 11 letter to the SEC, Goldman described a number of processes that the firm has in place that it says address the religious group's concerns.

For example, the company has an independent committee that reviews executive compensation packages, and it discloses the compensation principles in proxy reports to shareholders, according to the letter.

While it is true that many Wall Street big banks, including Goldman, had to endure pay cuts after the financial crisis partly in response to backlashes stemming form lavish paydays on its executives. Nonetheless, since the paycut has lofty starting point to begin with, the current average pay is still much higher above the national norm,



For example, The average Goldman employee took home roughly $365,000 last year. Although that's already down 15% from $430,000 in 2010, it is still 539% of $67,690--the national annual average salary of "Business and Financial Operations Occupations" as of May 2010, the most recent data from Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's hard to justify even after taking into account of the variables such as an ivy league degree, Quant wizard, etc.



In terms of executive compensation, Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman, earned $19 million in 2010 — roughly $5.4 million in cash, restricted stock valued at $12.6 million and other compensation. Before the near collapse of Wall Street in 2008, Blankfein made $68.5 million in 2007.



This year, Blankfein was granted $7 million in restricted stock, according to a regulatory filing last month, other forms of compensation like cash bonus have not been disclosed yet. The same $7 million award is also extended to Gary D. Cohn, the president, and David A. Viniar, the chief financial officer. The value is based on the company’s stock price as of Feb. 1.



Gregg Smith, who was merely one of 12,000 company vice-presidents, a low ranking employee, according to Goldman, was supposedly earning "no more than $750,000".



While it is refreshing to see SEC taking a contrarian view after Gregg Smith's Goldman exit letter, it looks like the government's regulatory sensors may have been blunted partly by the record $550 Million Goldman's settlement to SEC in 2010 on fraud charges related to Subprime Mortgage CDO, and possibly by the powerful Goldman revolving door between Goldman alumni and the U.S. Government.



Nevertheless, as Reuters quoted Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for corporate governance at the University of Delaware,

"It's a [Goldman's] victory in a sense that it's kept off the proxy this year, but it doesn't make the issue go away."

Wall Street pay has garnered a lot of attention since the financial crisis, and the pressure for more transparency and review is unlikely to relent, SEC's opinion notwithstanding

Obesity Epidemic And Chemicals

From zero hedge this discussion of a chemical problem that may be causing huge weight gain in humans in this country. the damning evidence comes from the measurement of obesity in babies, receptors of environmental toxins and not subject to the same vagaries of diet and exercise in humans. provocative stuff.

Some 68% of all Americans are overweight, and obesity has almost doubled in the last couple of decades worldwide. As International Business Tribune reports:

Studies conducted jointly by researchers at Imperial College London and Harvard University, published in the medical journal The Lancet, show that obesity worldwide almost doubled in the decades between 1980 and 2008.



***



68 per cent of Americans were found to be overweight while close to 34 percent were obese.

Sure, people are eating too much and exercising too little. The processed foods and refined flours and sugars don’t help. And additives like high fructose corn syrup – which are added to many processed foods – are stuffing us with empty calories.

But given that there is an epidemic of obesity even in 6 month old infants there is clearly something else going on as well.

The toxins all around us might be making us fat.

As the Washington Post reported in 2007:

Several recent animal studies suggest that environmental exposure to widely used chemicals may also help make people fat.



The evidence is preliminary, but a number of researchers are pursuing indications that the chemicals, which have been shown to cause abnormal changes in animals’ sexual development, can also trigger fat-cell activity — a process scientists call adipogenesis.



The chemicals under scrutiny are used in products from marine paints and pesticides to food and beverage containers. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found one chemical, bisphenol A, in 95 percent of the people tested, at levels at or above those that affected development in animals.



These findings were presented at last month’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A spokesman for the chemical industry later dismissed the concerns, but Jerry Heindel, a top official of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), who chaired the AAAS session, said the suspected link between obesity and exposure to “endocrine disrupters,” as the chemicals are called because of their hormone-like effects, is “plausible and possible.”



Bruce Blumberg, a developmental and cell biologist at the University of California at Irvine, one of those presenting research at the meeting, called them “obesogens” — chemicals that promote obesity.



***



Exposed mice became obese adults and remained obese even on reduced calorie and increased exercise regimes. Like tributyltin, DES appeared to permanently disrupt the hormonal mechanisms regulating body weight.



“Once these genetic changes happen in utero, they are irreversible and with the individual for life,” Newbold said.



***



“Exposure to bisphenol A is continuous,” said Frederick vom Saal, professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Bisphenol A is an ingredient in polycarbonate plastics used in many products, including refillable water containers and baby bottles, and in epoxy resins that line the inside of food cans and are used as dental sealants. [It is also added to store receipts.] In 2003, U.S. industry consumed about 2 billion pounds of bisphenol A.



Researchers have studied bisphenol A’s effects on estrogen function for more than a decade. Vom Saal’s research indicates that developmental exposure to low doses of bisphenol A activates genetic mechanisms that promote fat-cell activity. “These in-utero effects are lifetime effects, and they occur at phenomenally small levels” of exposure, vom Saal said.



***



Research into the impact of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on obesity has been done only in laboratory animals, but the genetic receptors that control fat cell activity are functionally identical across species. “They work virtually the same way in fish as they do in rodents and humans,” Blumberg said. “Fat cells are an endocrine organ.”



Ongoing studies are monitoring human levels of bisphenol A, but none have been done of tributyltin, which has been used since the 1960s and is persistent in the marine food web. “Tributyltin is the only endocrine disrupting chemical that has been shown without substantial argument to have an effect at levels at which it’s found in the environment,” Blumberg said.



Concern over tributyltin’s reproductive effects on marine animals has resulted in an international agreement discontinuing its use in anti-fouling paints used on ships. The EPA has said it plans next year to assess its other applications, including as an antimicrobial agent in livestock operations, fish hatcheries and hospitals.



Bisphenol A is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in consumer products, and the agency says the amount of bisphenol A or tributyltin that might leach from products is too low to be of concern. But the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, is reviewing bisphenol A, and concerns about its estrogenic effects prompted California legislators to propose banning it from certain products sold in-state, a move industry has fought vigorously.

Similarly, the Daily Beast noted in 2010:

Bad habits cannot explain the ballooning of one particular segment of the population, a segment that doesn’t go to movies, can’t chew, and was never that much into exercise: babies. In 2006 scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health reported that the prevalence of obesity in infants under 6 months had risen 73 percent since 1980. “This epidemic of obese 6-month-olds,” as endocrinologist Robert Lustig of the University of California, San Francisco, calls it, poses a problem for conventional explanations of the fattening of America. “Since they’re eating only formula or breast milk, and never exactly got a lot of exercise, the obvious explanations for obesity don’t work for babies,” he points out. “You have to look beyond the obvious.”



The search for the non-obvious has led to a familiar villain: early-life exposure to traces of chemicals in the environment. Evidence has been steadily accumulating that certain hormone-mimicking pollutants, ubiquitous in the food chain, have two previously unsuspected effects. They act on genes in the developing fetus and newborn to turn more precursor cells into fat cells, which stay with you for life. And they may alter metabolic rate, so that the body hoards calories rather than burning them, like a physiological Scrooge. “The evidence now emerging says that being overweight is not just the result of personal choices about what you eat, combined with inactivity,” says Retha Newbold of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in North Carolina, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “Exposure to environmental chemicals during development may be contributing to the obesity epidemic.” They are not the cause of extra pounds in every person who is overweight—for older adults, who were less likely to be exposed to so many of the compounds before birth, the standard explanations of genetics and lifestyle probably suffice—but environmental chemicals may well account for a good part of the current epidemic, especially in those under 50. And at the individual level, exposure to the compounds during a critical period of development may explain one of the most frustrating aspects of weight gain: you eat no more than your slim friends, and exercise no less, yet are still unable to shed pounds.



***



Newbold gave low doses (equivalent to what people are exposed to in the environment) of hormone-mimicking compounds to newborn mice. In six months, the mice were 20 percent heavier and had 36 percent more body fat than unexposed mice. Strangely, these results seemed to contradict the first law of thermodynamics, which implies that weight gain equals calories consumed minus calories burned. “What was so odd was that the overweight mice were not eating more or moving less than the normal mice,” Newbold says. “We measured that very carefully, and there was no statistical difference.”



***
`Programming the fetus to make more fat cells leaves an enduring physiological legacy. “The more fat cells, the fatter you are,” says UCSF’s Lustig. But fat cells are more than passive storage sites. They also fine-tune appetite, producing hormones that act on the brain to make us feel hungry or sated. With more [fat cells], an animal is doubly cursed: it is hungrier more often, and the extra food it eats has more places to go—and remain.

***
In 2005 scientists in Spain reported that the more pesticides children were exposed to as fetuses, the greater their risk of being overweight as toddlers. And last January scientists in Belgium found that children exposed to higher levels of PCBs and DDE (the breakdown product of the pesticide DDT) before birth were fatter than those exposed to lower levels. Neither study proves causation, but they “support the findings in experimental animals,” says Newbold. They “show a link between exposure to environmental chemicals … and the development of obesity.”
***
This fall, scientists from NIH, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and academia will discuss obesogens at the largest-ever government-sponsored meeting on the topic. “The main message is that obesogens are a factor that we hadn’t thought about at all before this,” says Blumberg. But they’re one that could clear up at least some of the mystery of why so many of us put on pounds that refuse to come off.

Pthalates – commonly used in many plastics – have been linked to obesity. So has a chemical used to make Teflon and other products.

Most of the meat we eat these days contains estrogen, antibiotics and powerful chemicals which change hormone levels. Modern corn-fed beef also contains much higher levels of saturated fat than grass-fed beef. So the meat we are eating is also making us fat.

Antibiotics also used to be handed out like candy by doctors. However, ingesting too many antibiotics has also been linked to obesity, as it kills helpful intestinal bacteria. Arsenic may also be linked with obesity, via it’s effect on the thyroid gland. Arsenic is often fed to chickens and pigs to fatten them up, and we end up ingesting it on our dinner plate. It’s ending up in other foods as well.

The National Research Council has also found:

The effects of fluoride on various aspects of endocrine function should be examined further, particularly with respect to a possible role in the development of several diseases or mental states in the United States.

Some hypothesize that too much fluoride affects the thyroid gland, which may in turn lead to weight gain.

In response to information about toxic chemicals in our food, water and air, many people change the subject by saying “well, everything will kill you”. In other words, they try to change the topic by assuming that we would have to go back to the stone age to avoid exposure to toxic chemicals.

But this is missing the point entirely. In fact, companies add nasty chemicals to their products and use fattening food-producing strategies to cut corners and make more money.

In the same way that the financial crisis, BP oil spill and Fukushima nuclear disaster were caused by fraud and greed, we are daily exposed to obesity-causing chemicals because companies make an extra buck by lying about what is in their product, cutting every corner in the book, and escaping any consequences for their health-damaging actions.

In fattening their bottom line, the fat cats are creating an epidemic of obesity for the little guy.

Telling Truth To Power

This story from London where reports are circulating about a young South African salesman for the Giant Vampire Squid who gave up after a year and decided to speak out rather negatively about the corporate culture:

Goldman Sachs faced an unprecedented assault from one of its own on Wednesday after a banker published a withering resignation letter in the New York Times, calling the Wall Street titan a "toxic" place where managing directors referred to their own clients as "muppets."

It was the latest blow for the investment bank. The company -- dubbed a "great vampire squid" in a 2009 article in Rolling Stone magazine -- has been embroiled in the biggest-ever insider trading scandal on Wall Street. And just weeks ago, a top judge criticized Goldman for big conflicts of interest in an energy deal.

In an opinion column in Wednesday's Times, Greg Smith, who worked in equity derivatives, said Goldman had become "as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

"It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as 'muppets,'" Smith said.

In the United States "muppet" brings to mind lovable puppets like Kermit the Frog, but in Britain, "muppet" is slang for a stupid person. (Goldman, as it happens, was at one time also the bank for the family of Muppets creator Jim Henson.)

Goldman Sachs issued a short statement in response:

"We disagree with the views expressed, which we don't think reflect the way we run our business. In our view, we will only be successful if our clients are successful. This fundamental truth lies at the heart of how we conduct ourselves."

In a memo to staff, Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and Chief Operating Officer Gary Cohn said Smith's views were in the minority among his 12,000 fellow vice presidents.

"And, what do our people think about how we interact with our clients? Across the firm at all levels, 89 percent of you said that the firm provides exceptional service to them," they said in the memo, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters.

Congressman Barney Frank, an architect of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, said Smith's piece would have "a big impact" on the banking industry's efforts to push back against financial reform.

"It puts the burden on Goldman Sachs and others to show us how what they do benefits the clients and therefore the broader economy," he told Reuters.

Goldman shares closed 3.3 percent lower, on a day when broader markets were up slightly. At least one bank wasted no time in trying to take advantage of the situation.

"In my experience ... client success and firm success can peacefully coexist; in fact thrive," Harris Private Bank Chief Investment Officer Jack Ablin said in an open letter.

"Having served clients for nearly 30 years I can tell you that the long-term success of any institution, whether in the financial field or not, depends on the long-term success and satisfaction of its clients," said Ablin, who oversees $60 billion of investments for individuals and families.

But the company, which sometimes lacks for defenders, garnered at least some public support in response to Smith.

"The many people we have dealt with there have all been exceptionally talented and high-grade, and never once have we had a negative experience in which we felt that they took advantage of us or didn't do what they said they would do," well-known fund manager Whitney Tilson said in a note.

FRIENDLY AND GENUINE?

Smith, who did not return voice mails on his cellphone, carried the title of executive director, but it was not nearly as illustrious as it might sound. Goldman's roughly 12,000 vice presidents and executive directors compare with 450 managing directors -- the next rung up in the Goldman hierarchy and a job classification that Smith didn't achieve. Overall, the company has about 33,000 employees, meaning that 36 percent of Goldman's workforce carried a title similar to Smith's.

South African David Berman, founder of hedge fund Durban Capital and friends with Smith, called him "a very understated, humble type of guy who would tell the truth as truth is important to him.

"But he never struck me as the Goldman-type as he isn't aggressive nor (the) salesman type one expects," Berman said, adding, "I am convinced this is for real with no selfish intent here."

According to the British Financial Services Authority's register, Smith joined Goldman's UK unit a year ago.

Johannesburg-born Smith attended universities in his home country and in the United States, where he received a degree in economics from Stanford University in 2001. He also interviewed to be a Rhodes Scholar in South Africa in 2002.

While at student at Stanford he had a summer internship at Paine Webber in 1999 and a summer internship at Goldman in 2000. Upon graduating from Stanford in 2001, he landed at Goldman.

Internally, Smith's op-ed piece was not necessarily well received. A trader, who knew Smith in passing, said the company is telling staff that Smith is a disgruntled employee who is leaving because he didn't make managing director.

This trader, who did not want to be named, says former Goldman colleagues are saying that Smith "wasn't very commercial," which means he wasn't producing the kind of sales the company wanted.

PAST MEDIA STORMS

Goldman Sachs -- fourth among investment banks last year based on fee-income rankings compiled by Thomson Reuters and Freeman Consulting -- has a history of tension with client interests, experts say.

"Greg Smith refers to the last 12 years, but in fact Goldman has been doing this kind of thing since going back to the Great Depression," author William Cohan told Reuters Insider.

"It's not just the last 12 years; unfortunately it's part of the firm's DNA," said Cohan, author of the Goldman profile "Money and Power" and a former Wall Street banker himself.

In recent years the company has faced other high-profile incidents damaging to its image after the near-collapse of the global banking system in 2008.

Earlier this month it was accused of a major conflict of interest for advising El Paso Corp on its sale to Kinder Morgan, while being a significant shareholder in Kinder.

A lawyer representing an Australian fund in a lawsuit against Goldman over mortgage-backed securities, filed in New York last year and alleging fraud and breach of contract, said he may seek Smith's deposition to help bolster his case.

"Part of Goldman's defense is everybody is sophisticated and everybody knew as much as we knew did," the lawyer, Eric Lewis, said. "But if you're calling your clients muppets -- most muppets don't have the cranial capacity of Goldman."

Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman, called the Smith piece a "reflection of the change in market mentality over the last 15, over the last 20 years" at an economics summit in Washington hosted by the Atlantic magazine.

TWITTER IGNITES

Unsurprisingly, Smith's resignation letter captured the imagination of Twitter users. "Greg Smith" was a worldwide trending topic early Wednesday, meaning it had suddenly spiked in interest, while both that and "Goldman Sachs" were trending in the United States.

Many of the commentators expressed surprise about the allegations in the piece, while others called for Smith to shed light on why he left the bank, or pointed out that he seemed to have been employed in a comparatively junior role.

As happens on the Internet in cases like this, near-instant parodies of Smith's letter cropped up. The most popular by far had Darth Vader of "Star Wars" fame resigning from the Empire via a letter similar to Smith's.

"To put the problem in the simplest terms, throttling people with your mind continues to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making people dead," the film franchise's dark lord wrote.

Evolution Is True

I have decided that when the time comes and I am asked why I believe in evolutuion I will say it's just a matter of faith. However there is a blog on the subject, http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/ from the UK which makes for an excellent read. here's one essay dissecting a Huffington Post opinion piece.

I swear, physicist and atheist Victor Stenger gets more “militant” with each new post in his HuffPo column, and I love it. The man speaks the unvarnished truth.

His latest is a strong and alliteratively titled discussion of the incompatibility of science and religion called “The fall of foolish faith.” Besides urging scientists to help rid the world of religion, Stenger adds a new twist: that non-scientists should go after scientists who coddle faith.

I want to urge those of you who are not scientists to try to convince those who are to stop pussyfooting around with religion and confront the reality of what it is and always has been — a blight on humanity that has hindered our progress for millennia and now threatens our very existence.

Scientists have to help the rest of the secular community to work toward reducing the influence of religion to the point where it has negligible effect on society. I don’t believe this is impossible. Astrology and the reading of sheep entrails are no longer used to decide on courses of events, such as going to war. Why can’t we expect the same for the imagined dialogues with an ancient tribal sky god that at least one recent president has used to justify his actions?

Much of his message concerns the influence of religion on preventing the development of an energy-efficient America, one that, he says, should be using liquid thorium nuclear reactors (I have to confess I know nothing about these). Instead, the rich people, armed with the club of faith, continue to fight solar power and other new technologies, deny global warming, and foster the continued use of fossil fuels:

So why don’t we move in these directions already clearly marked out by science? Because since the late nineteenth century we have lived in a plutocracy in which petroleum and other fossil energies dominate almost every sector of our economy by virtue of the enormous wealth they bring to their producers and distributers.

Now, what does this have to do with religion? Since prehistoric times religion has served as the handmaiden to those in power, helping them to maintain that power. Tribal chiefs, kings, and emperors always had shamans and priests at their sides to assure their subjects that they led by divine right.

In America today, petro-dollars fuel a giant Christian propaganda machine that works to undermine the efforts of scientists to find solutions to the problems that face us with overpopulation, pollution, and climate change. They use techniques that were pioneered 30 years ago by the tobacco industry to suppress the evidence that smoking causes cancer and heart disease. And these techniques exploit the antiscience that is inherent in religious belief.

A new technique that in recent years has been added to the arsenal of global warming denialism is to frame climate change as a theological issue. Global warming deniers say that God would never allow life on Earth to be destroyed. After all, he gave humans dominion over the planet. Besides, the world is coming to an end soon anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

Energy matters are above my pay grade, though it’s clear that religion is behind (or at least used to justify) much of climate-change denialism. There’s also a connection, says Stenger, though the kind of magical, nonscientific thinking fostered by faith:

While the petrocrats use science in every aspect of their businesses, they hypocritically exploit the antiscience that is inherent in religion in order to undermine any scientific findings that threaten their power and fortunes.

But my favorite part of Stenger’s longish piece is his no-nonsense pronouncements about the incompatibility of science and religion:

Most scientists do not realize that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. This is not because they have thought about it. It is because they prefer not to think about it.

Fundamentalists know science and religion are incompatible, since science disputes so much of what is in the Bible, which they take as the literal word of God. To them, science is simply wrong and must be Christianized. A well-funded effort exists to do just that, while most scientists sit on the sidelines because they prefer not to get involved.

But science and religion have always been at war, and always will be. One of yesterday’s speakers said that he did not like to use the word “religion” but rather called it a “belief system.” Well, there are different kinds of belief systems. Science is a belief system based on reason and evidence. Religion is a belief system based on bullshit.

I love the last sentence, which I wouldn’t have the guts to publish in a forum like HuffPo. He’s right of course, though I’d say “revelation and other forms of superstition” rather than “bullshit.”

And he’s absolutely on the mark with this:

Moderate Christians claim they support science, but they still hold to beliefs that have no empirical basis. Moderates will tell you that they accept evolution, but then they insist it is still guided by God. This is not Darwinian evolution. This is intelligent design. There is no guidance, divine or otherwise, in Darwinian evolution.

Yes, a hundred times yes! The National Center for Science Education should take this to heart, as should the Ken Millers, Francis Collinses, and the 38% of the American public who accept evolution, but only a form guided by God (only 16% of Americans accept naturalistic evolution, while 40% are straight-out creationists). Let us install this in our neurons: theistic evolution is not science, but creationism.

Among his other peeves is another I agree with: that science can indeed test the “supernatural,” or, if you don’t like that word, can test for the presence of a theistic god.

No doubt, science has its limits. However, the fact that science is limited doesn’t mean that religion or any alternative system of thought can or does provide insight into what lies beyond those limits. For example, science cannot yet show precisely how the universe originated naturally, although many plausible scenarios exist. But the fact that science does not–at present–have a definitive answer to this question does not mean that ancient creation myths such as those in Genesis have any substance, any chance of eventually being verified.

The scientific community in general goes along with the notion that science has nothing to say about the supernatural because the methods of science, as they are currently practiced, exclude supernatural causes. I strongly disagree with this position. If we truly possess an inner sense telling us about an unobservable reality that matters to us and influences our lives, then we should be able to observe the effects of that reality by scientific means.

If someone’s inner sense were to warn of an impending earthquake unpredicted by science, which then occurred on schedule, we would have evidence for an extrasensory source of knowledge.So far we see no evidence that the feelings people experience when they perceive themselves to be in touch with the supernatural correspond to anything outside their heads, and we have no reason to rely on those feelings when they occur. However, if such evidence or reason should show up, then scientists will have to consider it whether they like it or not.

So here’s one more thing to encode in our neurons: a theistic god is indeed a god that can be examined with the tools of science and reason. Every good theologian knows that—the people who don’t are the scientific organizations who have made the “god-is not-testable” statements: the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Center for Science Education.

If I go on, I’ll wind up reproducing Stenger’s whole article. So go read it: it’s all good.

Meredith Whitney Was Right

You don't get much more mainstream than CNN Money and that outlet is admitting that predictions which were mocked as overblown are coming true. You just can't argue with the math.

To readers of the business press, the story is a familiar one: fifteen months ago, superstar analyst Meredith Whitney rocked the world of municipal finance with a December 2010 prediction on 60 Minutes that a wave of municipal debt defaults was headed our way. Her forecast was quite specific: "You could see fifty to a hundred sizable defaults," she told her interviewer, correspondent Steve Kroft. "This will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of defaults."

The bottom fell out of the muni bond market as a result. Investors pulled some $14 billion from muni bond funds between December 22 and February 2, 2011, and returns in the fourth quarter of 2010 were the lowest in 16 years. Long-time players in the space, including analysts, fund managers, and muni brokers, reacted with indignation that an arriviste such as Whitney—the woman who made her name calling out Citigroup (C) as an emperor with no clothes at the dawn of the mortgage crisis—dared to try to expand her analytical purview into their cozy little corner of the capital markets.

She was wrong, they said. She didn't know squat about how their market worked. The kind of defaults she called for were never going to happen. And they were right, in the most literal sense. Since then, there have only been $2.6 billion in defaults from the $3.7 trillion market. And the muni bond swoon didn't even last very long: in 2011, Barclay's muni bond index returned 10.7%, more than five times the 2.1% return of the S&P500.

Nothing satisfies like a comedown of a prominent prognosticator, and Whitney has taken her lumps in both the business press and the more unbridled blogosphere ever since. She deserves at least some of it, but that's only for being overly specific. The more general point that she was trying to make—that municipal finances in this country were a mess that was only going to get messier—was dead on. Laugh at her all you want, but then try this: go find one person who says their local taxes are falling or their municipal services have improved in the past year or two. I wish you luck in your endeavor.

"States have pushed more and more expenses down to the local level," Whitney tells Fortune. "And municipalities don't have the money to make up the difference. That is where you see the real strain, especially after the American Reinvestment Recovery Act expired in June 2011."

Whitney's September 2010 report on municipal finances didn't contain a single call on a specific municipal bond. Indeed, the 1,400-page beast of analysis, titled "The Tragedy of the Commons," was instead focused on delineating the myriad—and slightly terrifying—financial obligations that the largest states in the country were having increasing trouble meeting. Something had to change, she said. And something did. It just wasn't as simple as a bunch of outright defaults.

When the criticism came raining down on her in early 2011, Whitney explained that she didn't just mean "technical" bond defaults but also mushier terms such a "social contract defaults"—e.g. less frequent trash removal schedules—and "employment contract defaults"—e.g. government employees being forced to contribute to their own pensions. Whether you think she tried to change the conversation after the fact or was merely elaborating is really neither here nor there. Because all of that is happening, and more. Municipal bond brokers may still find the time to chuckle about Whitney's comeuppance, but if you're someone responsible for actually dealing with the real-life implications of deteriorating muni finances, the mirth becomes a little harder to come by.

"States are regular bond market issuers, so they do care about their debt ratings, and have done everything they can to prevent public attention focusing on their crises," Whitney says. "They've even taken cities into receivership to prevent them from going bankrupt. But municipalities are only occasional issuers. They're much less concerned with bond market ratings than with the real pain they're already suffering."

Alabama's Jefferson County has actually gone bankrupt. Stockton, California is all but ready to do the same. And all you have to do is look to Detroit—or any of the nearby auto towns named after a Buick model of one sort or another—and you see fiscal crisis playing out right now. Look in your own backyard—or at the potholes on your neighborhood roads—and you will likely find the same.

Consider the email I received on March 7 from former New York State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky about Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano's recently formed Commission of Inquiry into what he refers to as that city's "Great Unraveling." (Brodksy is serving on the commission.)

"[Yonkers has] a budget of about $1 billion and a budget gap in the upcoming year that looks like it can't be bridged. There are reasons aplenty. Like may urban centers the Yonkers manufacturing base disappeared, the middle-class moved out and the people simply can't afford the property and sales tax burden that ensured. Anti-tax fervor hit and elected officials refused to raise recurring revenues. Gimmicks, one-shots, borrowing for operating expenses, assets sales, and assorted maneuvers 'kicked the can down the road' for a couple of years…The city has now run out of gimmicks."

And then he sounds very Whitney-like: "It's as though we stand on the shore and watch a tsunami gather and shrug and hope we'll get through it…That needs to change, and if the list of endangered cities gets larger this will force itself onto the national stage. [For now] the great national battle about the size of government and the level of taxation will be played out in the streets of small cities across America, with school kids, garbage pick-up, fire-protection, and safe streets competing with each other for inadequate resources. It's an ugly way to solve a problem."

In late February, Whitney signed a deal to write a book about the trouble that isn't going anywhere, even if her bond-market prediction was a misfire. Titled Downgraded: Why the Next Economic Crisis Will Be Local, it's on a fast turnaround for November publication.

Whitney isn't that interested in talking about her words on 60 Minutes anymore—why would she be?—but it's hard to argue with the fact that a prominent voice succeeded in bringing more focus to a real and pressing issue and helped change the conversation. Thirty-six freshly elected governors were listening in 2010. Or at least a few were—the likes of New Jersey's Chris Christie, Florida's Rick Scott, and Indiana's Mitch Daniels—but they and their successors are going to be playing the fiscal prudence game for years to come.

I have argued at length and one more than one occasion with Whitney that she made a mistake when she got too precise on TV. She doesn't agree. But we do find common ground about the fact that continuing to play "Gotcha!" over those 20 or so words is missing the forest for the trees. "Look at Greece," she says. "They're not in technical default. That doesn't change the fact that it's the biggest sovereign debt writedown in history. It's all the same in the end."

Fading Dollar Hegemony

The US dollar has been the world's currency since World War Two but that dominance may be fading according to http://oilprice.com/ which argues that there is a drive by up and coming super powers to defeat the world's dependence on dollars:

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“When the dollar collapse comes, it will happen two ways – gradually then suddenly. That formula, famously used by Hemingway to describe how one goes bankrupt, is an apt description of critical state dynamics in complex systems. The gradual part is a snowflake disturbing a small patch of snow, while the sudden part is the avalanche. The snowflake is random yet the avalanche is inevitable. Both ideas are easy to grasp. What is difficult to grasp is the critical state of the system in which the random event occurs.” Jim Rickards, Currency Wars

As already published in the previous Oil and Gold Reports, the US dollar hegemony has been subject to increasing bouts of criticism. China, Russia, and India, but also Japan, are the countries that have gradually been switching the settlement of their bilateral trade in their own currencies or in commodities in order to circumvent the US dollar. This is a clear sign of a paradigm shift, especially since more than two thirds of the US currency is held abroad.

Last year, the Chinese rating agency Dagong Global Credit raised eyebrows when it downgraded the rating of the US to A and reduced the outlook to “negative”. According to Dagong, the QE scheme has sustainably eroded the legitimacy of the US dollar as global reserve currency. The rating agency regards the lack in willingness to pay off the government debt as ignorance vis-à-vis the creditors. In 2011 S&P downgraded the US rating to AA+. Since then, according to S&P, reckless budget policy continues, and a further downgrade is possible. Since Barack Obama took office, the US government debt has increased by 50%.

The Chinese policy of small steps signals the increasing intention to turn the renminbi into a freely convertible currency and to gradually liberalise the capital market. By 2020, China wants to have turned Shanghai into an international financial centre.

The open criticism vis-à-vis US politics is becoming louder even as we speak. And the fact that China wants to achieve full convertibility for the yuan in the long run is becoming clearer by the day. This would be a big step towards a new global leading currency. China is preparing for the post-USD era at full speed. The yuan should outrank the US dollar in terms of global relevance within but a few years. Yi Gang, the co-chairman of PBoC has recently made reference to a liberalisation within the next five years. Li Xiaojing, Managing Director of Bank of China in New York, has already mentioned the preparation work for the day that the Chinese currency will be fully convertible. He regards this as one of the highest priorities. The plans are more than just ambitious, but China has a track record of showing that it is possible to achieve ambitious goals if the political will is there. At the moment only 0.4% of all foreign exchange transactions are settled in Chinese currency. The US dollar has recently accounted for 43% of total transaction, the euro for close to 20%, and the Japanese yen for 10%. This means that the yuan is clearly underrepresented in view of the already central relevance of China for the world’s economy.

Currently, numerous smaller agreements are being signed that reveal the overall long-term strategy. We assume that this is how China wants to gradually boost demand without achieving outright convertibility right away. Within the framework of the new five-year plan, China wants to settle almost 50% of foreign trade in yuan by 2016. It wants to invoice in yuan in the bilateral trade transactions with African or Latin American countries that are rich in resources. Iran for example is said to supply oil for yuan. In addition, the PBoC has allowed almost 70,000 companies to invoice its foreign business worth almost USD 70bn in yuan.

Numerous further examples indicate the fact that the dollar scepticism is growing:

• India wants to pay in gold for Iranian oil. And, according to reports in the media, China may soon follow suit. The two countries together account for almost 40% of Iranian oil exports and are at the same time by far the biggest consumers of gold.
• In October, China reported that it had signed a free trade agreement with the ASEAN members, in the framework of which transactions would be settled in yuan. China also announced that a central bank for the entire ASEAN region would be set up and the yuan should be the reserve currency. In addition to the ASEAN countries, Japan and South Korea would also be invited to participate in the central bank. Since the bilateral free trade agreement ratified in 2010, trade between China and the ASEAN members has increased substantially. The ASEAN group has meanwhile become the third most important trading partner for China, after US and the EU. By 2015 ASEAN wants to create a common market for its 600mn citizens.
• Ecuador announced it was going to settle its debts owed to China (almost USD 5bn) through future oil deliveries.
• At the beginning of January, Iran and Russia agreed not to trade in US dollar anymore, but instead to resort to rouble and rial.
• India and Japan signed a currency swap agreement worth USD 15bn in order to facilitate bilateral trade.
• In July 2011, China and Iran agreed on a barter set-up for Iranian oil and Chinese goods .
• Japan and China, too, want to circumvent the US dollar even farther . In December Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and the Japanese Prime Minister Noda agreed to promote trade in yuan and yen. China has become Japan’s most important trading partner (USD 340bn per year). Both countries hold the highest volumes of US Treasuries, which is why the symbolic meaning of this agreement cannot be over-emphasized.

By Ronald Stoeferle of Erste Group an Eastern European Fincial Services Group.