Since the days of Alexander the Great, binge drinking has been a very popular past time - leading to him apparently killing a friend and burning down Persepolis while drunk.

Those are some Great shoes to fill.

Yet, governments, schools and the media have repeatedly tried to teach us of binge drinking's dangers. 

Dartmouth University has taken the lead, instigating a new nationwide policy to curb heavy drinking by their students.

Pour me another glass.

Binge drinking is defined as "the consumption of five or more drinks in a row by men — or four or more drinks in a row by women — at least once in the previous 2 weeks. Heavy binge drinking includes three or more such episodes in 2 weeks."

Seems I don't know anyone who isn't a heavy binge drinker.

Do you think this definition should be changed or should we change people's attitudes? Or should you follow HPD's no fools guide to drinking a lot but not dying?  . . read more

The oil companies' staggering profits are a windfall of the purest sort (Websters' definition: "an unexpected, unearned, or sudden gain or advantage"). This is not a moral judgment about the oil companies, it is just a description of what's happening. A windfall profits tax could generate substantial government revenues. Allocated to investment in renewable energy, it could significantly increase funds directed to renewables, and be a small but important down payment on the massive investment needed in mass transit, energy efficiency and renewable energy...

Re-regulating energy markets, imposing margin requirements and lessening investors' ability to trade with borrowed money, and cracking down on market manipulation will all slow the Wall Street frenzy and limit price spikes. For the long term, however, oil demand will continue to shoot up and supply cannot keep up. Ultimately, new sources of oil may become available, including from deep water sites and tar sands and shale, but these will be more expensive to obtain. The world is likely witnessing a long-term, steady (if bumpy) and permanent rise in oil prices. This price increase will impose major economic hardships, unless there is a massive effort to shift to oil-displacing technologies and renewable energy. [More] . . read more

By Simon Moore

For the first time since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill fiasco began, relatively good news has arrived. apparently twenty-six million litres of oil is enough to satisfy BP’s desire to bankrupt the shrimp industry of the United States and spoil all the pretty fish, their new past time? Mud cakes. It only took 37 days to do something effective. We should all be glad that Obama is going to put the offshore drilling on a timeout for a little while. Last time I looked wind farms weren’t spewing oil on everyone.

Maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board?

Unlike Batman’s order-obsessed rigidity, Joker explodes with chaos. He is the perfect Anti-Batman. Where Batman is the pillar of Law and Order, Joker is the arbiter of Anarchy. The key scene (and my personal favorite) which reveals the Joker as the anarchist is when he stands in front of a giant mountain of cash (the combined assets of all the crime leaders which represents the centralized economic power of a corrupt system), and he burns it...

Maybe Nolan is asking us to choose from different sides of nothingness. If so, I know what side I’m choosing. I’ll take the Joker’s anarchistic chaos over Batman’s archaic commitment to corrupt systems of law and order any day. Not only that, Joker’s exploding hospitals and burning towers of cash (executed with economic explosive devices) are infinitely more entertaining than Batman’s Multi-million Dollar Extreme Warfare Batmobile. And speaking of the Joker burning things, when he gave his speech about not needing money and held a match to the giant mountain of cash, I didn’t hesitate for a second. “BURN IT!” I screamed inside my head. And I let out a little gasp of victory when the whole stack of bills burst into flame. But I also know that I was surrounded by people who gasped in horror at the sight of burning money, and those people were, unequivocally, the majority. [More] . . read more

Without a single day of talks, the vast majority of pundits have already set the bar of expectations so low that it seems we should be popping the champagne if the most anodyne of political agreements is reached.

Not to fall into the trap of optimism, but shouldn't we be a little bit hopeful and a little bit proud of the victories this fight has already won?

For instance, there cannot be a single sane leader on this planet who can realistically ignore this issue.

Yes, so far most of the world's responses have bordered on the tokenistic, but the sheer awareness and the fear of backlash, is a sign that the movers and shakers are getting scared.

Not to exaggerate but there could also be a dangerous connotation to this wide-spread cynicism-that connotation being that the most modest of successes will cause surprise and a spark of hope amongst a grey and apathetic public.

Sort of takes the heat off government leaders who thought they'd have to thrash it out in debates and eventually return to their countries exhausted, treaty in hand proclaiming that the problem was finally solved.

Instead, with the contour-less global media poised with their fingers quivering over keyboards (and the letters that spell 'failure'), an undue amount of column inches will be written for the promised funds for developing nations, as renewable technolgies are extolled and the great demon coal is exorcised. 

My point?

Well we really have to keep our collective critical thinking cap on, because this about to become a no-holds barred grudge match where everything will be too little, too late, too much, too weak etc.

Just don't be too pessimistic because fatalism never fixed anything.   . . read more

The audit stated that I had failed to declare the $123 in interest I had received from my high-interest banking account at the end of the 2008 financial year. ATO – 1, Alex – 0, but enough modest self-deprecation. The letter also claimed that “banks and other financial institutions are required by law to report details of interest income paid to people”. What the letter failed to mention was that in actual fact the information had been supplied to the ATO by Centrelink as part of the Pay-As-You-Go Data Matching Protocol.

Whilst I acknowledge that in my circumstance the audit was justifiable, I can’t help but feel that if Centrelink were approached by someone who was genuinely destitute such an approach would yield bitter public resentment. Despite the audit I was thankful I failed to submit my savings account details as the ATO might have chased up the 23 cents interest the Commonwealth Bank so generously departed with last financial year. . . read more

The emails could prove to be extremely damaging to the reputation of the scientists and the robustness of their research if they are revealed to be authentic.

A UEA spokesman said: "We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine."

The authors of the emails include Philip Jones, the Director of the CRU, Keith Briffa, also at the CRU, and Michael Mann at the University of Virginia.

An anonymous link to an FTP server where the data was posted by the hacker first appeared on the blog The Air Vent yesterday.

According to Dave Britton, a press officer at the Met Office, the security breach occurred a couple of days ago. "We don't know yet whether the data that was stolen is authentic, but a thorough investigation is underway," he says.

Mann declined to comment on the content of the emails, but added, "However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction on public web sites, etc. of individuals emails that were obtained, constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping that the perpetrators and their faciliators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows."

Published at New Scientist, click view for more information  . . read more

After reviewing the contents of this Citibank-friendly new law called the Financial Modernization Act, I asked him: "Do you think the big banks have too much power"?

He paused for a few seconds and replied: "Not Yet." Intrigued by his two word answer, I noted the rejection of modest pro-consumer provisions, adding that now that the banks had had their round, wasn't it time for the consumers to have their own round soon?

He allowed that such an expectation was not unreasonable and that he was willing to meet with some seasoned consumer advocates and go over such an agenda. We sent him an agenda, and met with Mr. Summers and his staff. Unfortunately, neither his boss, Bill Clinton, nor the Congress were in any mood to revisit this heavily lobbied federal deregulation law and reconsider the blocked consumer rights.

The rest is unfolding, tragic history. The law abolished the Glass-Steagall Act which separated commercial banking from investment banking. This opened the floodgates for unwise mergers, acquisitions and other unregulated risky financial instruments. Laced with limitless greed, casino capitalism ran wild, tanking economies here and abroad.

One champion of this market fundamentalism was Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve. Last October before a House Committee, Greenspan admitted he was mistaken and expressed astonishment at how corporations could not even safeguard their own self-interest from going over steep speculative cliffs.

Greenspan and Summers were deemed "brilliant" by the press and most of Congress. Summers' predecessor at Treasury, Robert Rubin, was also a charter member of the Oracles--those larger-than-life men who just knew that the unfettered market and giant financial conglomerates would be the one-stop shopping mart consumers were assumed to be craving.

Now the world knows that these men belong to the "oops oligarchy" that bails itself out while it lets the companies collapse into the handcuffed arms of Uncle Sam and bridled taxpayers who have to pay for unconditional megabailouts. Instead of the Wall Street crooks being convicted and imprisoned, they have fled the jurisdiction with their self-determined compensation. Corporate crime pays, while pensions and mutual fund savings evaporate.

Now comes the next stage of the Washington rescue effort in a variety of stimulus packages which every vendor group imaginable wants a piece of these days. When trillions are offered, many come running.

As the public focus is on how much, when and where all this money should be spent, there are very serious consequences to be foreseen and forestalled. First, consider how much more concentrated corporate power is occurring. Forced or willing mergers, acquisitions and panic takeovers of big banks by bigger banks along with bankruptcies of companies further reduce what is left of quality competition for consumer benefit.

Remember the anti-trust laws. Obama needs to be their champion. The fallout from the Wall Street binge is likely to lead to a country run by an even smaller handful of monopolistic global goliaths.

In the stampede for stimulus legislation, there is a foreboding feeling on Capitol Hill that there is no proposal on the table to pay for it other than by the children and grandchildren. Just the opposite is raining down on them. Everybody including the private equity gamblers, Las Vegas casinos and Hollywood studios along with the banks and auto companies are looking for tax breaks.

So with the economy deteriorating and taxes being cut, where is the enormous money coming from? From borrowing and from printing money. So look out for big time inflation and decline in the dollar?s value vis-à-vis other currencies.

In all the hundreds of pages of stimulus bills, there is nothing that would facilitate the banding together of consumers and investors into strong advocacy groups. We have long proposed Financial Consumer Associations, privately and voluntarily funded through inserts in the monthly statements of financial firms.

If this bailout-stimulus-Wall Street funny money waste, fraud and abuse sounds confusing, that is because it is. A brand new paperback "Why Wall Street Can't Be Fixed and How to Replace It: Agenda For a New Economy" by long-time corporate critic, David C. Korten will explain some of the wheeling and dealing.

You don't have to agree with all or many of Korten?s nostrums. Just read Part II: the Case For Eliminating Wall Street. He considers three central questions:

First, do Wall Street Institutions do anything so vital for the national interest that they justify trillions of dollars to save them from the consequences of their own excess?

Second, is it possible that the whole Wall Street edifice is built on an illusion of phantom wealth that carries deadly economic, social, and environmental consequences for the larger society?

Third, are there other ways to provide needed financial services with greater results and at lesser cost?

Ralph Nader is an American attorney, author, lecturer, political activist, and perennial candidate for presidency as an independent candidate. . . read more