Monthly Archives: March 2012

Israel is planning to demolish ‘illegal’ solar panels that are the only source of electricity for Palestinians in West Bank villages

open quoteImneizil is not connected to the national electricity grid. Nor are the vast majority of Palestinian communities in Area C, the 62% of the West Bank controlled by Israel. The solar energy has replaced expensive and clunky oil-powered generators.

According to the Israeli authorities, these solar panels – along with six others in nearby villages – are illegal and have been slated for demolition.

Nihad Moor, 25, has three small children. The family live in a two-room tent kitted out with a fridge, TV and very old computer. She also has a small electric butter churn, which she uses to supplement her husband’s small income from sheep farming.

“The kids get sick all the time. At the moment, because of a change in the weather, they all have colds. Without electricity I wouldn’t even be able to see to help them when they need to use the [outdoor] toilet at night,” Moor says. “I don’t want to imagine what life would be like here if [the panels] were demolished.”

Imneizil’s solar system was built in 2009 by the Spanish NGO Seba at a cost of €30,000 to the Spanish government. According to the Israeli authorities, it was built without a permit.

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Ron Paul Wins First Caucus: MSM Changes Rules, Reports Romney Wins

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open quoteRepublican presidential candidate Ron Paul secured his first caucus
victory over the weekend, by winning 29 percent of the popular vote
among the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands. However, the mainstream
media decided to report that despite coming in second with 26 percent,
Mitt Romney was the real winner.

The Republican Party of the U.S. Virgin Islands reported the results as “112 to Paul (29%), 101 to Romney (26%), 23 to Santorum (6%), 18 to Gingrich (5%),”

In response, The AP and other mainstream reports yesterday claimed that Mitt Romney won caucus, because he stands to come away with more delegates.close quote (Read more)

Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs

open quoteOver the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.close quote (Read more)

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

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,” sometimes over internal e-mail.

IPaidABribe.com

All government “services”.

open quoteMs. Ramanathan and her husband, Ramesh, along with Sridar Iyengar, set out to change all that in August 2010 when they started ipaidabribe.com, a site that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid and requests that were expected but not forthcoming.

About 80 percent of the more than 400,000 reports to the site tell stories like the ones above of officials and bureaucrats seeking illicit payments to provide routine services or process paperwork and forms.

“I was asked to pay a bribe to get a birth certificate for my daughter,” someone in Bangalore, India, wrote in to the Web site on Feb. 29, recording payment of a 120-rupee bribe in Bangalore. “The guy in charge called it ‘fees’ ” — except there are no fees charged for birth certificates, Ms. Ramanathan said.

Now, similar sites are spreading like kudzu around the globe, vexing petty bureaucrats the world over. Ms. Ramanathan said nongovernmental organizations and government agencies from at least 17 countries had contacted Janaagraha, the nonprofit organization in Bangalore that operates I Paid a Bribe, to ask about obtaining the source code and setting up a site of their own. close quote (Read more)

See My Theory of Bribes.

The two worst things about MMA: government and government

open quoteAs the sport of Mixed Martials Arts (MMA) continues to grow at a rapid pace, marked improvements have been made in all areas of the industry with only one exception that stands as a potential impediment to MMA’s continued meteoric rise – judging and refereeing. Not surprisingly, judges and referees are both aspects of the various state athletic commissions that sanction MMA, and as such, no competition is allowed in this area. One of the many cumbersome regulations the state athletic commissions mandates is that you must use the judges/referees assigned to you.

The atrocious judging, which UFC president Dana White has said is the greatest threat to the continued growth of the sport, is due to two factors: the incompetency of the judges assigned to MMA events (many are simply recycled boxing judges with little to no understanding of the sport of MMA) and the nonsensical 10 point must scoring system imposed upon MMA. It should not be too surprising that mandating the use of another sport’s scoring system for the sport of MMA may not produce the most desirable results.

Even worse than judging, is the refusal to allow the many free market solutions that have already cropped up, to provide competent referees. As referees are literally tasked with protecting the fighter from serious injury, or even death, one would think that refereeing competency would be set at the highest level, with little to no tolerance for inadequate performance. The reality is almost the exact opposite. Here is the most recent example (of which there are so many) of gross referee incompetency that directly endangers the safety and welfare of the fighter: From popular MMA website, Cage Potato’s recap of last night’s fight, Strikeforce: Tate vs Rousey – The good, the bad, and the ugly under the section for “the bad”:

– The referee in Tate vs. Rousey not stopping the fight until about eight seconds after Tate’s arm had grown a new elbow. Tate showed her warrior heart by not tapping until the pain was overwhelming; the ref showed his ignorance by not stopping the fight until that moment.close quote (Read more)

Academic publishers have become the enemies of science: yet more real piracy

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This is the moment academic publishers gave up all pretence of being on the side of scientists. Their rhetoric has traditionally been of partnering with scientists, but the truth is that for some time now scientific publishers have been anti-science and anti-publication. The Research Works Act, introduced in the US Congress on 16 December, amounts to a declaration of war by the publishers.

The USA’s main funding agency for health-related research is the National Institutes of Health, with a $30bn annual budget. The NIH has a public access policy that says taxpayer-funded research must be freely accessible online. This means that members of the public, having paid once to have the research done, don’t have to pay for it again when they read it – a wholly reasonable policy, and one with enormous humanitarian implications because it means the results of medical research are made freely available around the world.

But, due to lobbying by academic publishers, “If passed, the Research Works Act (RWA) would prohibit the NIH’s public access policy and anything similar enacted by other federal agencies, locking publicly funded research behind paywalls.”

What we have here is a lobbying effort to take work out of the public domain and put it behind a copyright-like wall.close quote (Read more)

Elderly Israeli Fighter Talks About 1948 Genocide

open quoteElectronic Intifada‘s Benjamin Doherty shared a video from “Nakba”-awareness group Zochrot – “Remembering” – of a former Palmach fighter who participated in the expulsion of unarmed Palestinian Arabs from their villages in Southern Israel. Amnon Neumann casually describes that he helped kill people, burn their villages, and chase off women and children. He regrets his actions but notes he is one of the few to admit his crimes; even so, he is loath to talk about the details of the atrocities.

In one grimace-inducing moment, Neumann talks of the Palestinians who didn’t quite realize they wouldn’t be coming back, who sneaked out of Gaza refugee camps at night to tend their villages’ grapevines. There, says Neumann, they were gunned down.close quote (Read more)

Netherlands joins growing chorus for burqa ban

open quoteThe Dutch government today promised to ban face coverings, including burqas or niqabs, by next year, Reuters reported.

The minority Liberal-Christian governing party denied, though, that the law is religiously motivated. The ban will also apply to such things as balaclavas, ski masks and helmets with shields worn inappropriately in public.

“People should be able to look at each other’s faces and recognize each other when they meet,” a statement from the interior affairs ministry said, according to Reuters.

The coalition government that rules the Netherlands, however, includes the pro-Dutch Freedom Party.close quote (Read more)

DA: Robbery victim, 65, justified in shooting of teens on trail

open quoteA 65-year-old man was justified in shooting two of three teenagers who were attempting to rob him as he rode his bicycle along a popular river trail Wednesday morning, authorities announced Thursday.

The ordeal unfolded shortly before 11 a.m. on the Thun Trail in Cumru Twp., Berks Co.

The teens knocked the man off his bicycle and onto the ground in their third random robbery attempt in about an hour’s time, said Berks County District Attorney John Adams.

Two of the teens were assaulting the man when he pulled out a gun and shot them, police said.close quote (Read more)

Divers find large, unexplained object at bottom of Baltic Sea

open quoteA team of salvage divers has discovered an unexplained object resting at the bottom of the Baltic Sea near Sweden.

“This thing turned up. My first reaction was to tell the guys that we have a UFO here on the bottom,” said Peter Lindberg, the leader of the amateur treasure hunters.

Sonar readings show that the mysterious object is about 60 meters across, or, about the size of a jumbo jet. And it’s not alone. Nearby on the sea floor is another, smaller object with a similar shape. Even more fascinating, both objects have “drag marks” behind them on the sea floor, stretching back more than 400 feet.close quote (Read more)