What the hell is going on? Why is energy dominating the right's campaign against Obama?

because it's the defining issue of our age.

the lobbies are terrified of any candidate who could harness the public fury at the oil and gas corporations who have been screwing us so handily since the carter presidency.

the only thing that can mend this broken economy is a concerted focus to clean energy, the New Deal and apollo program rolled into one massive rollout.

of course regulating financial loopholes and jailing some blanksters would be good news, taxing corporations, blocking tax havens, cutting military expenditure, buffet rule, tobin tax, all could do their part to rebalance the economy, but nothing would break the repeat cycle of corruption more than changing our energy policies from an exploitative, frack-you model, to the democratisation of energy, which is what it would be if the grid and homes were adapted to rooftop solar PV/thermal, distributed generation and negawatts-awareness.

the money pacs will go insane (heartland institute just gave us a taste of just how insane), in ways that will make the RIAA's persecution of filesharers look benevolent, but reality will out, as their efforts to demonise people who care about planetary survival become ever more grotesquely bizarre.

you can't fool all the people for ever. obama will keep appeasing the villains until he realises the public ain't buying the BS no more.

then that sumptuous loquacity can be bent to helping shepherd the american people through the 'slow emergency' powering down will seem like to many people, those who invested in the status quo, sacrificed for it, and now must watch lifetime savings vapourising into the maw of wall st profits, their old proud neighbourhoods going to seed, and their little sliver of the american dream being taken from them.

they're scared all right because the energy issue, once grocked by the majority, will do more rip back the curtain of lies and propaganda we've been being fed for decades faster and more effectively than anything they can do to keep the genie in the bottle.

that's why ET is so special...

The power of knowledge is in mortal combat with the knowledge of power. It really is that simple... That's the Edenic apple we are all munching on.

and the mess of pottage offered in return?

19 euro drills that last a year? melamine dogfood?

The power of knowledge is in mortal combat with the knowledge of power. It really is that simple... That's the Edenic apple we are all munching on.

SMHI: Sverige har blivit varmare - rapport | svt.se		SMHI, Sweden has become warmer - report | svt.se
Hela Sverige har i genomsnitt fått det ungefär en grad varmare och omkring tio procent mer nederbörd än normalt. Detta enligt den analys som SMHI gjort av det svenska vädret under de senaste 20 åren, 1991 till 2011.		Entire Sweden has on average been about one degree warmer and had about ten percent more precipitation than normal. This according to the analysis SMHI made of the Swedish weather during the past 20 years, 1991 to 2011.
Ju längre norrut, desto varmare har det blivit. Nederbörden har ökat i norr och i söder, men minskat på delar av ostkusten, skriver Sydsvenskan.		The further north, the warmer it has become. Precipitation has increased in North and South, but decreased in parts of the east coast, writes Sydsvenskan.
Begreppet "normalt" används för värdena under perioden 1961-1990.		The term "normal" is used for values ​​in the period 1961-1990.

The models and tools used by central banks, finance ministries, and regulators today generally rely on three strong assumptions: 1) that households, firms, and governments are perfectly rational and are homogeneous in their behaviors, 2) that markets always clear and the economy settles into a balanced equilibrium state, and 3) that the detailed institutional structures and interconnections of the financial system, i.e. the `plumbing' of the system, does not generally matter for macro policy.

While models relying on these assumptions may provide `good enough' answers during normal times, during the crisis they proved highly inadequate. The crisis was characterized by behaviors that did not fit the `perfectly rational' models, markets that failed to clear, severe economic imbalances that were far from equilibrium, and micro level features of the system and network structures of interconnection between institutions had major systemic impacts.

The CRISIS project will seek to address these limitations by building a next generation macroeconomic and financial system policymaking model. The CRISIS model will be a bottom-up `agent-based' simulation that fully accounts for the heterogeneity of households, firms, and government actors. The model will incorporate the latest evidence from behavioral economics in portraying agent behavior, and the CRISIS team will also collect new data on agent decision making using experimental economics techniques. While any model must make simplifying assumptions about human behavior, the CRISIS model will be significantly more realistic in its portrayal of relevant agent behavior than the current generation of policymaking models.