Gobble, Gobble.  Is it that time of year again?  Well, I could probably use the rest anyway though I’m happiest when I’m in my routine.  Comedy Central will have repeats.  Me?  I hate to repeat myself though I might, or I could do something else, or maybe nap (though vampire-like at this time of year I have a tendency to sleep in the daytime, work in the night time, I might not ever get home, which is incredibly dysfunctional if you have to work with people but does wonders for my solitary creativity).

For the sites we will be continuing as best we can in the usual fashion because of my firm belief that nobody needs you quite as much as they do during those periods when everything else is closed.  This weekend will see the conclusion of the 2014 Formula One season in Abu Dhabi and we will start putting up our Thanksgiving specials culminating in the Big Balloon Parade a week from today, and then whatever we can scrounge to see us through the Black Friday weekend when our dozens of readers are presumably greasing the gears of Amurrican ‘Free’ Market capitalism with their life blood and money.  Let’s not forget the money.

And that’s one thing I am thankful for.  Because of our low financial overhead I’m not perpetually in the position of coming to you as a mendicant, especially when you are sentimental and vulnerable and need that money your own damn self thank you very much.

Yeah, we’ll run ads if you want them and accept donations if that’s the kind of thing you feel you need to do to register your satisfaction with the product, but that’s not why I write.

I do it for art.

The one thing that never fails to gratify me is when you use our platform to express yourselves.  What I do is mostly structure, a wall you can hang your own canvas on.  The gift I would most like during this holiday period, the contribution that would have the greatest impact, is for you to decide that your voice is important; or at least important enough to be included here where the natives are mostly friendly (mostly) and I have set the bar so low you can hardly help but trip on it (have a nice fall).  Exceeding expectations is not optional, it’s hard to avoid.

Over the river and through the guilt a la casa de ek vamos.

Oh, you came here for the waters?  You were sadly misinformed.

Back in Black Friday

Live Free or DIE!

The Lake House is close enough to Keene that I know they’re not only famous for Pumpkin throwing riots.

The real news below.

Institute for New Economic Thinking

The Real News

Transcript

Zero Prosecutions Aren’t Few Enough – Wall Street Wants SEC Sanctions Reduced to DMV Points

by William Black, New Economic Perspectives

Posted on November 10, 2014

Let’s begin by reviewing the bidding. We have just suffered through the third economic crisis driven by epidemics of control fraud. In two of the crises the financial industry led the fraud epidemics. In the Enron-era fraud epidemic they eagerly aided and abetted Enron’s frauds. In the current crisis we know that U.S. government investigators have found that 16 of the largest banks in the world conspired to falsify Libor, which is used to price $350 trillion in assets. This is the largest cartel in world history by at least three orders of magnitude. Note that all 16 of the banks that participate in creating Libor falsified their statements for the express purpose of falsifying the Libor “fix.” There were no honest banks and there is no reason to believe that if 25 banks participated in setting Libor the results would have differed. The conspirators are not known to have blackballed any bank from participating in “fixing” Libor because of fears that the blackballed bank was led by an honest CEO who would expose and end the conspiracy.

Government investigators have found that over 20 of the largest banks defrauded Fannie and Freddie by selling them vast amount of toxic mortgages through fraudulent “reps and warranties.” Government investigators have found that over 20 of the largest banks defrauded a series of credit unions by selling them toxic mortgages and toxic mortgage derivatives through fraudulent reps and warranties. Government investigators have found other wide ranging frauds by the large banks to (1) rig bids for issuing municipal securities, (2) to foreclose on people through fraudulent affidavits, and (3) by conspiring to falsify foreign exchange (FX) rates. In sum, the leaders of the largest banks in the world are overwhelmingly leading criminal enterprises that commit financial frauds of unprecedented scope and damage. The resulting financial crisis caused by the three most destructive fraud epidemics in history caused over a $21 trillion loss in U.S. GDP and the loss of over 10 million American jobs. Each of those figures is much larger in Europe.

Worse, no senior banker who led the three fraud epidemics has been prosecuted in the U.S. for those crimes. Virtually no senior bankers who led the three fraud epidemics has even been the subject of a civil suit by the U.S. Virtually no senior banker in the U.S. has had his fraud proceeds “clawed back” by the government or the bank. The senior bankers were made wealthy through the “sure thing” of accounting control fraud – with nearly perfect impunity from the criminal and civil law.

This is the setting in which Fichera writes. As a sometimes good guy, one would expect his column to call for the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the SEC to end this impunity and immediately act vigorously to hold the senior bankers personally accountable for leading the frauds that blew up the global economy. Instead, Fichera wrote to urge (1) that the largest banks be treated as “too big to jail,” (2) to decry the “tendency to vilify all Wall Street firms as unscrupulous,” (3) to urge SEC sanctions to be reduced to the level of “DMV” “points,” and (4) to provide that no matter how egregious the fraud the SEC would have no power to remove a Wall Street firm’s license until it committed “multiple” cases of the equivalent of deliberate homicide in which each case could involve deliberately running over millions of investors. Under Fichera’s plan, every dog would get at least one bite – of every investor – which would mean hundreds of thousands of bites. Fichera wants banks to be – officially – entitled to commit securities fraud without effective sanction from the SEC.

…

This is a great system. I can’t wait for it to be applied to muggers who prey on Wall Street traders. A mugger will have to wait six years after getting caught battering and robbing a Wall Street trader (which will be a small percentage of the times they mug) for their “slate [to be] wiped clean.” I’m sure that if the muggers who specialize in attacking Wall Street traders only get caught every six years “the tendency [of bankers] to vilify all [muggers] as unscrupulous would fade.” But this doesn’t capture the true spirit of Fichera’s DMV plan. His plan proposes that the SEC “forgive points” if the mugger “takes a remedial class” that teaches that it is not appropriate to mug. And if you like a DMV point system for muggers you’ll love one for sex offenders that target your children, girlfriends, and spouses.

I can hear some of you saying – “but mugging and sexual molestation are real crimes” while defrauding people that trust you of tens of billions of dollars is just like driving without buckling your seatbelt. Accounting and securities fraud are really close to being victimless crimes, if one ignores a few million fraud victims who foolishly believed you when you said you were a fiduciary representing them as your principal.

…

Fichera could not be more wrong – and more revealing of why the “sometimes good” elements of Wall Street cannot be relied upon to clean up its intensely criminogenic environment. First, no banker is ever “too big to jail” or “too big to bar from securities or banking. Second, no “bank” can be “jail[ed].” Third, no matter how big the bank it can be placed in receivership or have its senior managers “removed and prohibited” when they are leading frauds or unsafe and unsound practices. Fourth, the “principles of regulation and justice” do not conflict when we hold elite frauds accountable for their frauds through prosecutions, receiverships, and removals and prohibition orders. Indeed, “the principles of regulation” are: (1) create incentive systems and controls that minimize fraud and unsafe and unsound practices, (2) to remove from any position in which they can endanger the bank, customers, or the public, and (3) to prosecute the most elite criminals to increase deterrence and use enforcement and civil actions to ensure that no senior officer gains a penny from leading the frauds and unsafe and unsound practices. Vigorously pursuing justice not only does not “conflict” with “the principles of regulation” – it is essential to achieving “the principles of regulation.”

What is clear is that when Fichera uses the word “principles” he means “unprincipled.” Fichera has forgotten the most fundamental principle of justice expressed in the famous Latin maxim:. Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum (Let Justice be done, though the Heavens Fall).

Fichera considers the ancient Latin principle hopelessly naïve, and the fact that he does so demonstrates further that he does not understand that there is nothing more practical than consistently seeking justice through the legal and regulatory systems. Financial crises occur when we abandon the maxim, betray justice, and decide that some elite banks and bankers are so big or so politically powerful that they must be de facto immune from effective regulation and prosecution. A society that deliberately abandons justice and the principles of regulation in order to protect large banks and powerful bankers is a Nation that will see the heavens fall. A Nation that abandons justice encourages massive fraud by the wealthy and powerful and guarantees recurrent, intensifying economic crises and a descent into crony capitalism. There is nothing more practical for a person or a Nation than leading a principled life.

Only elite financial sector officers believe that they and their banks are entitled to being exempted from the rule of law. Normal human beings are nauseated when they read such claims. The reason that Fichera’s ode to the unprincipled life is so distressing is that he was believed to be in the top 10% of the distribution of financial sector CEOs when it came to integrity. That indicates how depressingly deep the rot runs among Wall Street’s CEOs.

When I was in school we got assigned Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West.  The reason you assign a book like this to children is not because they’ll really understand it, or that you do, but because it’s really short.

It was about the first existentialist work I was exposed to and one of the bleakest.

While the write up in Wikipedia (and Sparks and Cliffs for that matter) focus on Miss Lonelyhearts and his sad moral existence and the metaphorical parallels to the Great Depression I couldn’t, and can’t to this day, read it without weeping over the plight of his correspondents-

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts–

I am in such pain I dont know what to do sometimes I think I will kill myself my kidneys hurt so much. My husband thinks no woman can be a good catholic and not have children irregardless of the pain. I was married honorable from our church but I never knew what married life meant as I never was told about man and wife. My grandmother never told me and she was the only mother I had but made a big mistake by not telling me as it dont pay to be innocent and is only a big disappointment. I have 7 children in 12 yrs and ever since the last 2 I have been so sick. I was operated on twice and my husband promised no more children on the doctors advice as he said I might die but when I got back from the hospital he broke his promise and now I am going to have a baby and I dont think I can stand it my kidneys hurt so much. I am so sick and scared because I cant have an abortion on account of being a catholic and my husband so religious. I cry all the time it hurts so much and I dont know what to do.

Yours respectfully,

Sick-of-it-all

Miss Lonelyhearts threw the letter into an open drawer and lit a cigarette.

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts–

I am sixteen years old now and I dont know what to do and would appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the block makeing fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nites, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose–although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes.

I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I cant blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me.

What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didnt do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesnt know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I dont believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?

Sincerely yours,

Desperate

The cigarette was imperfect and refused to draw. Miss Lonelyhearts took it out of his mouth and stared at it furiously. He fought himself quiet, then lit another one.

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts–

I am writing to you for my little sister Grade because something awfull hapened to her, and I am afraid to tell mother about it. I am 15 years old and Gracie is 13 and we live in Brooklyn. Gracie is deaf and dumb and biger than me but not very smart on account of being deaf and dumb. She plays on the roof of our house and dont go to school except to deaf and dumb school twice a week on tuesdays and thursdays. Mother makes her play on the roof because we dont want her to get run over as she aint very smart. Last week a man came on the roof and did something dirty to her. She told me about it and I dont know what to do as I am afraid to tell mother on account of her being liable to beat Grade up. I am afraid that Gracie is going to have a baby and I listened to her stomack last night for a long time to see if I could hear the baby but I couldn’t. If I tell mother she will beat Gracie up awfull because I am the only one who loves her and last time when she tore her dress they Joked her in the closet for 2 days and if the boys on the blok hear about it they will say dirty things like they did on Peewee Conors sister the time she got caught in the lots. So please what would you do if the same hapened in your family.

Yours truly,

Harold S.

Depressed yet?

Well, that didn’t help at all.  But nothing really does, you just forget for a while.

Maybe it’s just that time of year when the time and light change and the pressure of the Holiday season, the sense that another big tick has just tolled on your life clock.

This is mere introduction to the two best Science and Technology posts I found this week which happen to be tremendously depressing.  On the other hand I could be beating you about the head every week about Climate Change and Mass Extinction so there is that.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

“I am lonely, will anyone speak to me”: Inside the saddest thread on the internet, ten years later

Tori Telfer, Salon

Wednesday, Nov 19, 2014 06:58 PM EST

This October, a guest user logged onto moviecodec.com – a technical Q&A forum for media file playback and conversion – to post a cry for help on one of the site’s off-topic forums. “[I’]m so lonely,” wrote the user, “feeling sad please anyone talk to me.” It was an almost word-for-word replica of the thread’s title, written 10 years and thousands of posts earlier: “i am lonely will anyone speak to me.” The thread’s creator was also a guest, who logged in as “lonely” in 2004. A decade ago, due to the freakishly searchable title and the fact that the site was already optimized for maximum Google search exposure, the thread went viral. Within days, it was the No. 1 result for “I am lonely” on Google, and hundreds of anonymous lonely hearts were flocking to the forum to commiserate, console and weep.

…

Today’s bigger, flashier Internet means lonely people don’t have to turn to a random off-topic thread on a tech site to assuage their feelings of isolation. “[The thread] no longer receives as much traffic as it used to receive, and I believe that is mostly due to there now being many more sites and sources on the Internet dealing with loneliness,” says Lundgren. The lonely can take a Loneliness Quiz from Psych Central or join the Campaign to End Loneliness. They can listen to sad arias on Spotify while ordering near-limitless amounts of comfort food from GrubHub. If loneliness is cured by distraction and a sense of interconnectivity, the Internet is a much better place for the lonely today.

But has the Internet also turned crueler? More isolating? Lundgren seems to think so, calling Internet forums “generally more harsh and less helpful than 10 years ago.” (And it’s not just forums. “The distribution system for our beastliness has gotten so much better because we have the Internet now,” said satirist Andy Borowitz on NPR in 2010.) Why the bad turn? “Because as a whole people have become more hurried, more goal-oriented, and less helpful on the Internet,” says Lundgren. “People don’t ‘hang out’ and help each other the same way as before.” If this is true, the “i am lonely” thread reflects this shift. Though the overall tone remains empathetic and helpful, a sense of solidarity, of us-vs.-them, has been lost. As one guest user wrote in August, “This thread signifies the very volatile nature of society. Look at the replies people were getting a decade ago after they confided to a forum that they were lonely and look at the replies people get now … SADDENING.”

Whether or not the Internet is the dark source of all our loneliness is a fiercely debated topic. It’s like the chicken-or-egg conundrum, or the tree-falling-in-the-forest question. Does the Internet cause loneliness, or do lonely people choose the Internet? If one solitary nerd has a thousand online friends, is he still alone in real life?

No one has been able to answer the question conclusively. A 1998 study called the “Internet Paradox” is still an apropos descriptor of the whole mess. We use the Internet to communicate, but is it killing “real” communication? We chat with old crushes on Facebook, but should we really be taking out our headphones and talking to the cute guy in the checkout line? Terrifying think pieces about the links between technology and dying alone are, ironically, all over the Internet; in Public Culture, Zeynep Tufekci points out that this is mostly an “appeal to moral panic,” as there’s not a lot of empirical research to support these hypotheses. But there’s a reason we see a headline about Facebook causing loneliness and think, yes, that makes sense. It’s not empirical, but it’s intuitive. Everybody knows the sort of gnawing ache that hits when you find yourself online late at night. You feel … like a loser. And you want to see if anyone else is out there.

The “i am lonely” thread provides affecting – if inconclusive – contributions to the Internet loneliness debate. On the one hand, without the Internet, where would the lonely Vegas housewife “alone in [her] room and longing for company” go to vent? On the other hand, would user “depresico” have a better life if the Internet didn’t exist? “Another thing for my loneliness is those freaking computers,” depresico writes. “[I] just happend to have my computer as my best friend since i wasnt that socially related to the outer world but now i realized how much i had missed” [all sic]. Another user mourns the sadness of using technology to connect to people “who may not even exist.”

The crux of the Internet loneliness debate isn’t actually the Internet; it’s the tension between Internet reality and real world reality. There’s a sense in which the Internet is somehow fake, and that the real world is better, but we go online to talk about it anyway, hovering in that space between technological connection and physical connection. It’s illogical to think of the Internet as separate from the real world – we’re still regular people communicating regular things on it – and yet we constantly differentiate between the two. Lundgren, for instance, believes that loneliness can only be solved in the latter.  “The Internet will never suffice,” he says. “You need to actually talk to and see people in real life to feel like a real person.” In other words, there’s a fear that a person on the Internet is somehow less real than an unplugged one. And the fear of talking to people “who may not even exist” on the Internet is a relevant, though surreal, worry. If the original poster, “lonely,” logged off forever and never came back to the thread, how much value do we get from thinking of them as a real person with a real life and real loneliness? For all intents and purposes, hasn’t “lonely” become just another search term, another bit of code?

Twine, the Video-Game Technology for All

By LAURA HUDSON, The New York Times

NOV. 19, 2014

Perhaps the most surprising thing about “GamerGate,” the culture war that continues to rage within the world of video games, is the game that touched it off. Depression Quest, created by the developers Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey and Isaac Schankler, isn’t what most people think of as a video game at all. For starters, it isn’t very fun. Its real value is as an educational tool, or an exercise in empathy. Aside from occasional fuzzy Polaroid pictures that appear at the top of the screen, Depression Quest is a purely text-based game that proceeds from screen to screen through simple hyperlinks, inviting players to step into the shoes of a person suffering from clinical depression. After reading brief vignettes about what the main character is struggling with – at home, at work, in relationships – you try to make choices that steer your character out of this downward spiral. The most important choices are those the game prevents you from making, unclickable choices with red lines through them, saying things like “Shake off your funk.” As your character falls deeper into depression, more options are crossed out. You can’t sleep; you can’t call a therapist; you can’t explain how you feel to the people you love. In the depths of depression, it all feels impossible.

…

Twine games look and feel profoundly different from other games, not just because they’re made with different tools but also because they’re made by different people – including people who don’t have any calcified notions about what video games are supposed to be or how they’re supposed to work. While roughly 75 percent of developers at traditional video-game companies are male, many of the most prominent Twine developers are women, making games whose purpose is to explore personal perspectives and issues of identity, sexuality and trauma that mainstream games rarely touch on.

Although plenty of independent games venture where mainstream games fear to tread, Twine represents something even more radical: the transformation of video games into something that is not only consumed by the masses but also created by them. A result has been one of the most fascinating and diverse scenes in gaming. The very nature of Twine poses a simple but deeply controversial question: Why shouldn’t more people get to be a part of games? Why shouldn’t everybody?

One of the most prominent and critically acclaimed Twine games has been Howling Dogs, a haunting meditation about trauma and escapism produced in 2012 by a woman named Porpentine. The gameplay begins in a claustrophobic metal room bathed in fluorescent light. Although you can’t leave, you can “escape” once a day by donning a pair of virtual-­reality goggles. Each time, you’re launched into a strange and lavishly described new world where you play a different role: a doomed young empress learning the art of dying; a scribe trying to capture the beauty of a garden in words; a Joan of Arc-like figure waiting to be burned on a pyre. And each time you return to the metal room, it’s a little dirtier and a little more dilapidated – the world around you slowly decomposing as you try to disappear into a virtual one.

“When you have trauma,” Porpentine says, “everything shrinks to this little dark room.” While the immersive glow of a digital screen can offer a temporary balm, “you can’t stay stuck on the things that help you deal with trauma when it’s happening. You have to move on. You have to leave the dark room, or you’ll stay stunted.”

…

This year, Porpentine released Everything You Swallow Will One Day Come Up Like a Stone, a game about suicide. One of her most moving games, it also remains one of the most obscure – largely because she distributed it for only a single day.

“This game will be available for 24 hours and then I am deleting it forever,” she wrote during its brief availability. “Suicide is a social problem. Suicide is a social failure. This game will live through social means only. This game will not be around forever because the people you fail will not be around forever.”

The concept for the game is tremendously simple. A number counter is set to zero, with plus and minus buttons beneath it to make the number bigger or smaller. “I counted this high,” it begins, and then the game is just that: counting up, though the purpose of doing so isn’t clear at first. I’ve played it four or five times now and never made it all the way through without crying.

Sometimes, nothing happens when you click to the next number; other times, words appear like stray thoughts. “Who would you miss if they were gone for a day?” it asks at one point. Keep clicking, and the word “day” is replaced by “month,” then by “year” and finally “forever.” Sometimes it asks you questions. Sometimes it tells you stories. At one point it quotes from the suicide note of a Czech student who killed himself by self-immolation, later from a news report about a woman who committed suicide after being raped. “This is the game,” it says.

The numbers start to feel like days, and the rhythm of clicking feels like passing time, like checking off days on a calendar. It isn’t always “fun,” per se; sometimes, when you click 10 or 15 times in a row and see nothing but an empty screen, a little part of you wonders when it’s going to end. But you keep on clicking. After all, what other choice do you have? It feels like surviving.

But somewhere around the number 300, the game decides to throw you for a loop. Click the wrong link – or the right one? – and it catapults you suddenly into the tens of millions. The moment you see it, your guts twist with panic; the space between where you were and where you are becomes a vast numeric desert, and the idea of clicking millions of times to get back seems impossible. You won’t be able to do it, you think for a moment – you’ll just have to quit the game. Then you remember you’re playing a game about suicide.

“That’s what it feels like to wake up insane or with trauma,” Porpentine said. “It’s like, Oh, God, how do I get back there? It feels like it’ll take a million days to get back, a million steps. That is the crisis. ‘Will I ever be the same again?’ And you won’t.”

Science and Technology News and Blogs

• A Time for Revisiting Real Fears, by George Johnson, The New York Times
• This Map of the Huge Asteroid Vesta Is the Best Geologic Look Ever, by Kelly Dickerson, Space.com
• Is Russian Mystery Object a Space Weapon?, by Mike Wall, Space.com
• Parallel Worlds Could Explain Wacky Quantum Physics, by Kelly Dickerson, Live Science
• Hackers Can Steal Data Wirelessly From PCs That Aren’t Even Online, By Gwen Ackerman, Bloomberg News
• Scientists discover two new particles at Large Hadron Collider, By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times
• Six Decades Left to Eliminate All CO2 Emissions, UN Says, By Alex Morales, Bloomberg News
• Oil Spills Linked to Decline in Texas Sea Turtle Population, by: Enozia Vakil, American Live Wire
• Mystery Object in Space: A Rogue Black Hole or Strange Supernova?, by Calla Cofield, Space.com
• John Hodgman is “baffled” Uber exec wasn’t fired, says he won’t use Uber, by Sarah Gray, Salon
• A Comet Did It! Mystery of Giant Crater Solved, By Tia Ghose, Live Science

Science Oriented Video!

The Obligatories, News, and Blogs below.

What about bigger do you not understand?

Off the Table

Hey Nancy?  What Jon said.

The problem is not that he said it. The problem is that he thinks it. I’m serious. The core problem under the damn law is it was put together by a bunch of elitists who don’t really fundamentally understand the American people. That’s what the problem is.- Howard Dean

Reporto Gigante

The real news and this week’s guests below.

Glenn Ford of Black Agenda Report on The Real News.

All Eyes on Ferguson as Gov. Nixon Declares State of Emergency Ahead of Grand Jury Decision

Transcript

Water, Water, Everywhere, But not a drop for the poors (ah, let’s just face it) Black People.

Bernie Sanders

The real news, Laura Poitras’ 2 part web exclusive extended interview, and this week’s guests below.

A white elephant is a possession which its owner cannot dispose of and whose cost, particularly that of maintenance, is out of proportion to its usefulness. The term derives from the story that the kings of Siam, now Thailand, were accustomed to make a present of one of these animals to courtiers who had rendered themselves obnoxious in order to ruin the recipient by the cost of its maintenance. In modern usage, it is an object, scheme, business venture, facility, etc., considered without use or value.

So it appears that Mary Landrieu will get her Senate vote on Keystone XL as a sop to her doomed candidacy.  It may even be that she can round up enough Quisling Democrats to reach the artificial 60 vote filibuster limit.

Well, it doesn’t matter.

Nor do the supposed “trump cards” of Enbridge Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain, or Energy East which are facing regulatory difficulties just as severe as Keystone XL even though they’re entirely Canadian and have the full backing of Stephen Harper, Conservative PM of Canada.  This is because the territorial governments of British Columbia (Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain) and Quebec (Energy East) are not exactly on board nor are the First Nations who have treaties the government of Canada is a little more bound to respect than our own with our native population.

Blocked on the Keystone XL, the Oil-Sands Industry Looks East

Christina Nunez, National Geographic

Published October 24, 2014

Energy East has only the Canadian regulatory system to contend with. That’s plenty, as executives at Enbridge and Kinder Morgan might attest.

Enbridge’s 525,000-barrels-a-day Northern Gateway proposal, which would run west to the Pacific, has received approval from the Canadian government, but with a huge caveat: The Toronto-based company must meet more than 200 regulatory conditions before it can begin construction. That, along with strong opposition to the project at its terminus in British Columbia, has led to speculation that the pipeline will never be built.

…

Houston-based Kinder Morgan has proposed expanding its existing Trans Mountain pipeline between Alberta and the British Columbia coast, which would boost capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels a day-a project that’s also under attack. Like Northern Gateway, it has faced formidable opposition from First Nations, and in British Columbia they have the right to reject any project running through their territory.

…

Community activism on Energy East is to be expected, but TransCanada has also had to contend with other business interests. Natural gas distributors, for example, have complained that the project, by converting a natural gas pipeline to oil, will force them to bear the costs of replacing it.

“This is a fool’s bargain,” said Sophie Brochu, president and CEO of Montreal-based gas distributor Gaz Métro, in a speech this week. “They want to remove a vital pipeline that is already largely amortized and replace it with a smaller pipeline at a higher cost. No thanks.”

…

Assuming it can resolve the commercial sticking points, TransCanada will then need to secure federal approval for Energy East, a process that could take up to 15 months. And then it must meet any conditions set by the federal government and by provincial governments along the proposed route of the pipeline-the same step that has cast doubt on Northern Gateway’s prospects.

A temporary court injunction has already delayed initial work on a marine terminal for Energy East at Cacouna, Quebec, because of fears that construction would disrupt a key calving area for beluga whales. Environmental groups have raised a host of other concerns-including the role the pipeline would play in expanding the use of emissions-intensive oil sands.

…

“It is unclear what the Quebec government will do, but it appears there’s significant public opposition,” said Danielle Droitsch, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which opposes the pipeline. By setting tough conditions for Energy East, Quebec might have the power to delay it or, for example, to scuttle one of the planned marine terminals.

Once again, the familiar battle lines have been drawn. “I cannot tell you how often I read, when I started working on Keystone XL, ‘This is a done deal. It’s gonna happen,'” said Droitsch. “And of course that’s not the case.”

Now Trans-Canada (the pipeline developers) think they can dispose of this potential ugliness with a little messaging campaign-

P.R. Firm Urges TransCanada to Target Opponents of Its Energy East Pipeline

By IAN AUSTEN, The New York Times

NOV. 17, 2014

The advice from a top American public relations firm was simple: A Canadian pipeline company should take aim at its opposition.

In detailed proposals submitted in May and August, the public relations firm Edelman outlined a plan to investigate groups that had opposed Energy East, a pipeline in development by TransCanada. Edelman urged TransCanada to develop its own sympathetic supporters and spread any unflattering findings about the opposition.

“We cannot allow opponents to have a free pass,” Edelman advised TransCanada, according to five documents that were obtained by Greenpeace, the environmental group. “To make an informed decision on this project, Canadians need to have a true picture of the motivations not only of the project proponents, but of its opponents as well.”

…

In its proposal, Edelman proposed “a perpetual campaign to protect and enhance the value of the Energy East Pipeline and to help inoculate TransCanada from potential attacks in any arena,” according to the documents. The language, at times, invoked a military battle, one that would “add layers of difficulty for our opponents, distracting them from their mission and causing them to redirect their resources.”

If TransCanada or Edelman did investigate, Maude Barlow, national chairwoman of the Council of Canadians, said they probably would come up with little fodder.

“I’m a grandmother,” she said. “To me it’s a sign of desperation,” she added. “It’s basically all wrong, and it takes away from the public debate we should be having.”

Like Ms. Barlow, Ben Powless, the antipipeline campaigner at Ecology Ottawa, said he was somewhat surprised that Edelman, the largest independent public relations firm based on revenues, would be concerned about his small group’s influence. Ecology Ottawa has about nine paid employees and mainly relies on volunteers who tend to be students and retirees.

“To me, it’s a smear campaign really trying to shut down the voices of local people who have legitimate concerns,” Mr. Powless said.

Mr. Millar said that TransCanada mainly hired Edelman to help in Quebec, because it has few French speaking employees from the province. The documents indicate that Edelman’s efforts for TransCanada are being led by Mike Krempasky, the co-founder of the conservative blog RedState.com who joined Edelman in 2005. In the past, Mr. Krempasky has recruited bloggers and online commenters to post favorable comments about Walmart’s business and labor practices.

You know, I’ve actually chatted (on line) with Mr. Krempasky and surprisingly enough I’m still a member in good standing at Red State (as opposed to some supposedly “progressive” Democratic blogs I could name) and I never had to toe the Party Line or kiss his ass to do it.

Revealed: Keystone company’s PR blitz to safeguard its backup plan

by Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian

Tuesday 18 November 2014 00.01 EST

Strategy documents drafted by the public relations giant Edelman for TransCanada Corporation – which is behind both Keystone and the proposed alternative – offer a rare inside glimpse of the extensive public relations, lobbying, and online and on-the-ground efforts undertaken for pipeline projects. The plans call, among other things, for mobilising 35,000 supporters.

…

In the five strategy documents, made available to the Guardian by the campaign group Greenpeace, representatives from Edelman’s offices in Calgary propose an exhaustive strategy to push through the Energy East project including mobilisation of third-party supporters and opposition research against pipeline opponents.

In the wake of the Keystone XL opposition and a pipeline spill in 2010 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, oil industry projects now face “permanent, persuasive, nimble and well-funded opposition groups”, in Edelman’s words.

…

In the wake of the Keystone XL opposition and a pipeline spill in 2010 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, oil industry projects now face “permanent, persuasive, nimble and well-funded opposition groups”, in Edelman’s words.

But the documents say the oil industry and public relations firms have developed an effective strategy to beat back those opponents through online organising.

Industry mobilised a million activists and generated more than 500,000 pro-Keystone comments during the public comment period, one of the documents says.

“It’s not just associations or advocacy groups building these programs in support of the industry. Companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and Halliburton (and many more) have all made key investments in building permanent advocacy assets and programs to support their lobbying, outreach and policy efforts,” the documents say. “TransCanada will be in good company.”

“This approach strives to neutralize risk before it is leveled, respond directly to issues or attacks as they arise, and apply pressure – intelligently – on opponents, as appropriate,” the documents say.

The documents say Edelman and TransCanada should “work with third parties to pressure Energy East opponents”.

They advise: “Add layers of difficulty for our opponents, distracting them from their mission and causing them to redirect their resources,” and warn: “We cannot allow our opponents to have a free pass. They will use every piece of information they can find to attack TransCanada and this project.”

Recruiting allies to deliver the pro-pipeline message is critical, Edelman says in the documents. “Third-party voices must also be identified, recruited and heard to build an echo chamber of aligned voices.”

Edelman also offers “detailed background research on key opposition groups” such as Council of Canadians, Equiterre, the David Suzuki Foundation, Avaaz and Ecology Ottawa.

…

The campaign group Avaaz, one of the potential targets of the opposition research, called on Edelman to sever its connections with the campaign.

“Edelman’s cynical plan to smear citizens groups shows how low fossil fuel companies will stoop to protect their profits in the face of rising seas, melting ice caps and millions calling for climate action,” Alex Wilks, a campaign director in New York, wrote in an email. “Edelman must cancel its TransCanada contract and stop promoting one of the world’s dirtiest oil pipelines.”

The Council of Canadians, another targeted group, said the ambitious scale of the PR pitch suggested TransCanada was concerned about growing opposition to the project. “What this speaks to is that they are losing,” said Andrea Harden-Donaghue, climate campaigner for the council. “What these documents reveal is that they are bringing Tea Party activists into the equation in Canada combined with a heavyhanded advertising campaign. They are clearly spending a lot of time and thought on our efforts. I’d rather see them address the concerns that we are raising.”

Now we already know that the “tens of thousands” of jobs that Keystone XL will supposedly create is actually more like “tens”, and that the heavy tar sands crude is unmarketable in the U.S. and intended only for export which means that it will do nothing at all to improve domestic energy production or reduce prices, and we also know that the firms which produced the reports showing negligible environmental impact were operating from faulty assumptions and had corrupt conflicts of interest, AND that after 2 years they still don’t have a map of the proposed route through Nebraska which will not approve the project without one.

But none of that is why Keystone XL is going to fail.

This is why-

Economics no longer make Keystone pipeline viable

Tim Mullaney, CNBC

Thursday, 13 Nov 2014 10:32 AM ET

Since June, crude oil has declined by 28 percent, pushing the price that oil from new wells in Canada may command below what the expected cost will be to produce it.

The so-called “heavy oil” extracted from sand in Alberta, which the proposed pipeline would carry to Nebraska, en route to refineries on the Gulf Coast, will cost between $85 and $110 to produce, depending on which drilling technology is used, according to a report in July by the Canadian Energy Research Institute, a nonprofit whose work is often cited by Keystone proponents. West Texas Intermediate crude oil traded today at $76.67.

…

Oil sands are among the most expensive sources of oil, costing an average of $75 to $80 a barrel to produce, Norwegian energy-consulting firm Rystad Energy said in June.

“I would think that in order for new drilling projects to be capitalized and economical, the price of oil would need to be around $85 to $90,” Moody’s Analytics energy economist Chris Lafakis said.

The situation is broadly similar to that faced by an earlier proposal to build a natural-gas pipeline from Alaska to the Midwest, Lafakis said. After being approved by then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in 2007, the pipeline was never built, because newly discovered supplies of gas in the Lower 48 states pushed gas prices down by about two-thirds.

“If oil were to stay as cheap as it is right now, you might very well get that Palin pipeline scenario,” Lafakis said.

…

West Texas Intermediate prices will fall to $70 a barrel by the second quarter of 2015, Goldman Sachs forecast last month. The U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted Wednesday that the benchmark price of U.S. crude oil will average $77.75 a barrel next year. That’s down from a previous forecast of close to $95.

Demand has been running slightly lower than expected in 2014, which will persist into early next year, the International Energy Agency said, blaming reduced expectations for global economic growth. Supply has risen by more than 900,000 barrels a day in September alone and nearly 3 million barrels a day in the last year, about three times as much as the expected improvement in demand.

In addition to surging production in the U.S., which has boosted oil output by more than 60 percent since 2008, the IEA said OPEC crude oil output is rising as production in Libya and Iraq recovers from political disruption.

Alberta Tar Sands are an economic dead end as the Nazi’s found out with their “synthetic crude” (basically the same thing) in the desperate days at the close of World War II.  Their excuse was that they couldn’t get any other oil.  Canada has no excuse, they’re just greedy bastards with a White Elephant.

The Daily Show with John Oliver

Dancing with Death

Emily Bazelon

The real news, all of John’s Rosewater interviews, Jason Jones’ Behind the Veil reports, and this week’s guests below.

You know, it ain’t all happily ever after.

Grimm brothers’ fairytales have blood and horror restored in new translation

Alison Flood, The Guardian

Wednesday 12 November 2014 06.09 EST

Rapunzel is impregnated by her prince, the evil queen in Snow White is the princess’s biological mother, plotting to murder her own child, and a hungry mother in another story is so “unhinged and desperate” that she tells her daughters: “I’ve got to kill you so I can have something to eat.” Never before published in English, the first edition of the Brothers Grimms’ tales reveals an unsanitised version of the stories that have been told at bedtime for more than 200 years.

The Grimms – Jacob and Wilhelm – published their first take on the tales for which they would become known around the world in December 1812, a second volume following in 1815. They would go on to publish six more editions, polishing the stories, making them more child-friendly, adding in Christian references and removing mentions of fairies before releasing the seventh edition – the one best known today – in 1857.

…

How the Children Played at Slaughtering, for example, stays true to its title, seeing a group of children playing at being a butcher and a pig. It ends direly: a boy cuts the throat of his little brother, only to be stabbed in the heart by his enraged mother. Unfortunately, the stabbing meant she left her other child alone in the bath, where he drowned. Unable to be cheered up by the neighbours, she hangs herself; when her husband gets home, “he became so despondent that he died soon thereafter”. The Children of Famine is just as disturbing: a mother threatens to kill her daughters because there is nothing else to eat. They offer her slices of bread, but can’t stave off her hunger: “You’ve got to die or else we’ll waste away,” she tells them. Their solution: “We’ll lie down and sleep, and we won’t get up again until the Judgement Day arrives.” They do; “no one could wake them from it. Meanwhile, their mother departed, and nobody knows where she went.”

Rapunzel, meanwhile, gives herself away to her captor when – after having a “merry time” in the tower with her prince – she asks: “Tell me, Mother Gothel, why are my clothes becoming too tight? They don’t fit me any more.” And the stepmothers of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel were, originally, their mothers, Zipes believing that the Grimms made the change in later editions because they “held motherhood sacred”. So it is Snow White’s own mother who orders the huntsman to “stab her to death and bring me back her lungs and liver as proof of your deed. After that I’ll cook them with salt and eat them”, and Hansel and Gretel’s biological mother who abandons them in the forest.

…

The original stories, according to the academic, are closer to the oral tradition, as well as being “more brusque, dynamic, and scintillating”. In his introduction to The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, in which Marina Warner says he has “redrawn the map we thought we knew”, and made the Grimms’ tales “wonderfully strange again”, Zipes writes that the originals “retain the pungent and naive flavour of the oral tradition”, and that they are “stunning narratives precisely because they are so blunt and unpretentious”, with the Grimms yet to add their “sentimental Christianity and puritanical ideology”.

But they are still, he believes, suitable bedtime stories. “It is time for parents and publishers to stop dumbing down the Grimms’ tales for children,” Zipes told the Guardian. The Grimms, he added, “believed that these tales emanated naturally from the people, and the tales can be enjoyed by both adults and children. If there is anything offensive, readers can decide what to read for themselves. We do not need puritanical censors to tell us what is good or bad for us.”