1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed.

If your heart goes pit-a-pat when you hear the phrase "mycelial mat," these presentations from mycological entrepreneur Paul Stamets, taken from the Agricultural Innovations podcasts of 2007, are for you.

The Big Picture (hat tip) put up two short, much more focused and, though I say it, investor-friendly TED talks from Stamets today, but I think the following long-form podcasts give a greater sense of the cornucopia of blazing insight that Stamets provides. Listen to these instead of NPR!

Part 1:

It's finally raining in the Northeast. Here's some pretty for your day.

The town of Volos, Greece recently introduced the local currency TEM . I wonder if a local currency like that could be introduced in a US town and whether it could fund a jobs guarantee. I think of Philip Pilkington's description of a community controlled jobs guarrantee program:

Awesome:

The Junior High students managed to beat High School students from across the state.

A pull of a string and it's all engines go. "We have a four stroke engine. It's hooked up to a gear box," said Aurora SuperMileage Team member Nate Basham.

The driver, aptly known around the shop as "Rodeo," straps in and #17 takes off.

"I'm pretty proud of it because it took a long time for us to make it," said Aurora SuperMileage Team member Brett Schellen.

The car it isn't just a toy. "We were just nervous about our car looking the coolest I think," said Aurora SuperMileage Team member Caleb "Rodeo" Baker. ...

When asked what it was like competing against boys older than them, Scheller replied, "At first it was a little intimidating, but once we saw how they were doing it made us feel better."

Awesome. Go to it, Occupiers! ;-)

Reuters:

French voters headed to the polls on Sunday in round one of a presidential ballot, with economic despair on course to make Nicolas Sarkozy the first president to lose a fight for re-election in more than 30 years.

Assuming, of course, that the French electoral system isn't as "innovative" as our own.

Well, the legislation implementing “The Buffet Rule” has been voted down in Congress as we all knew it would be. But so what? The Federal Government doesn’t really need your money, since it can generate all the money it needs to pay off the national debt and also close any gap between tax revenues and Federal spending that Congress may want to legislate for the foreseeable future.

There’s no problem of Federal solvency. There hasn’t been since 1971, when the US went off the Gold Standard! The idea that we risk insolvency is just a fantasy of people who won’t acknowledge that the US Government is the monopoly supplier of fiat currency to the non-Government sector of the economy, including all of the private sector.

However, even though your money isn’t needed by the Government, it is very badly needed to help fund two things, I’ll describe below. But, before I do that, since your patriotism has moved you to advocate for higher taxes for yourselves, I hope and expect that you will be motivated to spend the same amount in the two areas of activity where your money is most needed and would be much more effective in bringing the United States back to the state of a healthy democracy, than it would be if you and and other similarly situated patriots paid it to the Government in taxes.

I know you’ve frequently heard the Republican response to your proposals for higher taxes on very wealthy people like yourselves, namely that if you’re so sure that higher taxes on the very wealthy are the right thing to do, then you can always contribute the additional money to the government, if you really want to. Well, my view is that you can equally well, and with much greater effect on restoring fair and effective functioning to our democracy, contribute that money directly to activities that will change key background conditions that are driving our democracy towards plutocracy right now. Here are the two areas of activity.

It’s been two years. Two years since our collective shock and awe over the worst environmental disaster in American history.

Horrified we watched for three long months as hundreds of millions of gallons of oil relentlessly bled into the Gulf of Mexico.

BP pr handlers and Obama spokespeople asked America to trust that this corporation and our government were seriously responding to the crisis and would do everything possible for future prevention of another such catastrophe.

Here is a stack of resurrected revelations and new revelations about the disaster that we must not let disappear into a national memory hole.

Eleven men died when BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. (Robert Weissman)

This discussing the panic of 1837 caught my eye:

Americans forget that outside of a unique period after World War II, the United States has not been an economic hegemon. What changes when we’re not on top?

When you’re not the hegemon, domestic politics is more difficult. Often, it’s the politics of constraint—that is, explaining to voters what can’t be done, because of the demands of the global marketplace. This is a difficult, unpleasant kind of politics. Indeed, it might not even be right to call it “domestic” politics at all. In a very open economy, the line between domestic and foreign policy breaks down. As I show in the book, many local issues suddenly acquire international significance. When there were riots in Philadelphia in 1844, for example, there was real concern in London—because holders of Pennsylvania bonds wondered whether the government had enough control of the population to collect the taxes needed to make its loan payments. About one third of American states were already in default to foreign lenders.

 Hmm...

... but I can think of one very bad outcome here:

For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer.

Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.

The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, http://www.dcwg.org , that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.

Most victims don't even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

And that outcome would be....

Coyote Creek reminds us of this quote from Orwell's 1984:

Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

Now that the Republicraps and the Democants are indistinguishable in terms of performance and policy -- the "War on Women" being transparent propaganda waged by an administration whose Praetorian guard is in the procuring business -- tribalism is about all that's left, isn't it? Everything but the pom poms and jerseys has been stripped away.

Lone maple, Japanese garden, Bloedel Reserve

[2012-04-20: This hardy perennial from Stirling Newberry just got a link from the SideShow, so I thought I’d repost it to the top of the heap once again. My hat is off to perhaps the best 30,000 foot view of American politics I’ve ever read. For “progressive,” since that term been co-opted by Moderate D weasels (sorry for the redundancy), you might perhaps read “prefigurative left” — everybody who’s sick at heart from the corruption, the looting, and is trying in their everyday practice to make the situation better with solutions that scale. In other words, it’s not a matter of policy lists any more, as I wrote two years ago. It’s systems…. Read on! —lambert]

* * *

[2010-09-12: If Yves can do Summer Re-Runs, then I can do Fall Classics. This post by Stirling Newberry from 2009-07-09 is one such. Vocabulary note: In using the word Progressive, Stirling does not mean ‘career “progressive”,’ but… the “third pole” in American politics, by which he does not mean anything like the “Third Way.” —lambert]

* * *

[2010-04-17: Welcome, Open Left readers! Stirling wrote in 2009. Needless to say, in 2010 self-identified career “progressives” are firmly at the Moderate pole, based on the health insurance company bailout debacle, the news blackout imposed on single payer policy advocates, and a general unwillingness to challenge the Obama administration when it consolidates and rationalizes Bush policies (for example, executive powers) —lambert]

[2009-07-09 I’m leaving this sticky because Stirling’s ideas generated such good discussion. —lambert]

[And again Sunday. Generally, I’m agnostic about policy lists, but after looking at what Obama and our tribunes of the people in the blogosphere — that is, the Moderates — did to single payer, I’m starting to change my mind. What would be Progressive policy wedge issues that would break up the Confederates and/or the Moderates? I say policy because it might make sense to start from the fresh perspective that “It matters that you’re a citizen. It doesn’t matter what your fucking social identity markers are — These are the basics that every citizen should get.” —lambert]

It would be easy to hope that this downturn represents the final capitulation of the Bush years, and that once we work away the excess, that there will be a new age after it. However, this is not what the numbers indicate. While selling self-spin and hope may be the province of those who hope to curry favor with the powers that be, or with masses of people desperate to believe that this is as bad as it will get, hard slabs of reality are my stock and trade.

Let me introduce you to post-petroleum thesis.

... as I am not, and who can record the interview for later transcription. Maybe a Correntian in radio or film? Details on application!

From a comment at Yves's place:

For any of you in Washington State that have been affected by these mortgage crimes and are willing to fight, please visit http://www.propertydefensenetwork.com. We have a goal of 5000 quiet titles. We are working from a premise that Sheila Bair said that a year ago, there were 110,000 lawsuits by homeowners against the big banks and those numbers were straining the system….we figure if we can start to double that number, we can break the court system. We’ve got around 20 law firms geared up…and we are putting mechanisms in place to reach the lofty goal of 5000 QTs for Washington State. Let’s do this!

Doing the arithmetic...

This is a rough draft and needs more work. Please let me know if you have any feedback for me. You can post here, or if you want to post anonymously you can do so in the comments at my blog (just tell me you don't want your comment published). Remember still accepting submissions!

Making spaces accessible to people with invisible disabilities

The fight against fracking in Ohio comes at a time when the state is approving new wells at a rapid pace. Local activists are organizing in an environment where the ground is constantly shifting under their feet - sometimes literally.

Anti-fracking activism has been influenced by developments both inside the state and beyond. At a recent public anti-fracking meeting a representative from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) described the experience of activists in western Pennsylvania several years ago.

IMF's Lagarde: Let EU Bailout Funds Go To Banks Without Sovereign Pit Stop

One major concern is if banks decide to stop funding sovereigns...

Er, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that make the banks sovereign?

This is an awesome and righteous post by Yves:

Similarly, I had a colleague tell me today that I shouldn’t use the “c” word, meaning corruption, since it would alienate potential allies. The logic is similar to arguments against being Shrill. He claimed that even if a lot of people in positions of authority engage in corrupt looking behavior, that doesn’t mean they understand it to be corrupt, so calling the corrupt will merely get them worked up to no useful end. They could well think they are doing the right thing and just be victims of cognitive capture.

I deeply oppose this line of argument. First, it assumes that decision-makers don’t recognize when they are taking ethically problematic actions. The people I know who have yielded to institutional pressures to do the wrong thing say they knew they were doing so and found a way to rationalize it. And I suspect even sociopaths know where the lines are. They have to do a better job of covering their tracks when their conduct is dubious.

Second, it assumes that it isn’t worth taking a firm position on ethics because it will turn off powerful people who have engaged in questionable behavior. Better to be less accusatory in order to have a dialogue with them. I don’t buy that because being indulging their justifications of their conduct helps preserve a bad status quo.

Remember when Krugman was literally the only voice of sanity in the early days of the Bush administration?

[Welcome, Naked Capitalism readers! You might also enjoy this long-form 30,000 foot view I dug out of the vault because it keeps being right. It's a nifty analytical framework. --lambert]

Remember Travelgate? Back in 1993? The very first "scandal" the wingers ginned up to take down the Clinton administration? How the wingers frothed and stamped and went on and on and on about how the Clinton administration fired some officials who, after all, served at the pleasure of the President, and in the end, the whole story was a humongous nothingburger?* And how gleefully our famously free press played along? Happy, innocent days, before we understood that the legacy parties are two brands with the same owner, and when we thought that electing more and better Democrats was the answer!

Fast forward to 2012. Here's the Obama administration, having traveled to Cartagena, organizing "party space":

CARTAGENA, Colombia - Secret Service officials planning a wild night of fun in Colombia did some of their own advanced work last week, booking a party space at the Hotel Caribe before heading out to the night clubs [clubs, plural? Not just the Pley Club?], hotel sources tell ABC News. ...

ABC has learned that, when booking the party space, the men told hotel staff that they anticipated roughly 30 people.

Alrighty. Ya know, Obama's made 21 trips abroad to 44 different locations. Some enterprising reporter, assuming we still have any, enterprising, or reporters, might consider checking whether the Secret Service booked "party space" at any of these other locations, and, if so, whether "people" were brought back back to those spaces from "night clubs" as well.

And that same enterprising reporter might also ask who signed off on the invoices.

For whatever reason, Senator Collins from the great state of Maine seems to be taking point on this (and not the loud-mouthed and ineffectual Darryl Issa). She's focusing on the "foreign nationals" aspect:

An angry Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein had this to say about Obama’s certification last Sunday of the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

President Obama called it a win-win. No, it's a lose-lose for workers. It's a deadly assault on the freedom of Colombian workers to organize, as well as on the freedom of American workers from unfair competition from workers who make poverty wages because they are violently repressed.

Malus hybrida "Katherine"

Flowering Crabapple

Discovered in 1928 as a chance seedling in Rochester, NY. This tree produces small 1/4" diameter fruit that matures in the fall and will persist into winter, to the delight of birds everywhere.

Hey, guess what color she her skin was?

Awesome.