From Arthur Nelsen of EurActiv:

Greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels such as palm oil, soybean and rapeseed are higher than those for fossil fuels when the effects of Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) are counted, according to leaked EU data seen by EurActiv.

The default values assigned to the biofuels compare to those from Canada’s oil sands – also known as tar sands – according to the figures, which should be released along with long-awaited legislative proposals on biofuels in the spring.

A spokesperson for the European Commission said she could “not comment on leaked documents, such as impact assessments which have not been published.”

But industry and civil society sources described the data as credible and in line with other studies. One said it would sound a death knell for the biodiesel industry, if published.

“I think the science has proved clearly that because of the link to deforestation in places such as South East Asia, a lot of the biodiesels have significantly negative impacts on the climate,” Robbie Blake, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth, told EurActiv.

Read the rest.

As regular readers know, we don’t use the term biofuel because it ignores the harsh reality that the so-called “feedstocks” used for the great majority of projects stem from crops farmed on land that might otherwise be used to feed the world’s hungry.

As we’ve repeatedly blogged, the corporate forces pushing crop-based fuels are key players in seizing communally held land in Africa and deforesting vast swatches of Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

One key player, UC Berkeley’s Chris Somerville, has made a tidy pile in the corporate sector by tweaking soy genes, and he’s not the lead player at the BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute at Cal.

Somerville and other key players in the agfrofuel game have fought the use of the indirect land use measure in evaluating the crops’ impact, for reasons made clear by the EU documents.

Somerville also distorted the impacts of the Berkeley research, saying that Cal’s goal was to develop crops to be farmed on unused marginal farmland east of the Mississippi. But even before the deal was signed, his researchers had already set out for Africa and Asia, some of the green parts of the earth BP’s then chief scientist said were the company’s targets for the crops to be developed in Berkeley.

Oh, and those unused farmlands in the U.S.? They’re part of the national Conservation Reserve Program kept out of production to protect endangered farmlands from erosion.

Chris Hedges [previously] and Lawrence Lessig discuss the fundamental blow to democracy embodied in the Citizens United decision, the corporate capture of governance, the decline of American radicalism, and the need to Occupy the Courts.

The program notes, from Occupy TVNY:

On January 20th, occupiers across the country rallied together in protest against the insidious influence of the corporations over the judiciary. Shortly before the rally in Foley Square, New York CIty, Lawrence Lessig and Chris Hedges met in front of Occupy TVNY’s cameras to discuss their vision of change.

H/T to Dangerous Intersection.

Is Newt’s zero-gravity sex idea any good?

From RT’s program description:

On tonight’s Geeky Science segment…We all know how magic mushrooms made the 1960′s a big colorful blur. But what is new research showing us about their possible beneficial effects? A new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science suggests that the key ingredient in magic mushrooms, psilocybin, may be the perfect aid for certain mental disorders.

Okay, but we could have done without the Timothy Leary bit. But don’t let the references to Pitifully Weary distract from the stunning nature of the findings.

So how does it work? Well, consider the last line [emphasis added] from this excerpt of recently published findings by British and Danish researchers [more here]:

As predicted, profound changes in consciousness were observed after psilocybin, but surprisingly, only decreases in cerebral blood flow and BOLD signal were seen, and these were maximal in hub regions, such as the thalamus and anterior and posterior cingulate cortex (ACC and PCC). Decreased activity in the ACC/medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was a consistent finding and the magnitude of this decrease predicted the intensity of the subjective effects. Based on these results, a seed-based pharmaco-physiological interaction/functional connectivity analysis was performed using a medial prefrontal seed. Psilocybin caused a significant decrease in the positive coupling between the mPFC and PCC. These results strongly imply that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain’s key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition.

The BBC’s Pallab Ghosh reports the remarks of one of the British researchers:

Former government drugs adviser Prof David Nutt has said that regulations should be relaxed to enable researchers to experiment on mind-altering drugs.

Prof Nutt told BBC News that magic mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy, cannabis and mephedrone all have potential therapeutic applications.

However, he said they were not being studied because of the restrictions placed on researching illegal drugs.

He said the regulations were “overwhelming”.

His comments followed the publication of new research by his group in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which suggests that the active ingredient in magic mushrooms could be used to treat depression.

“I feel quite passionately that these drugs are profound drugs; they change the brain in a way that no other drugs do. And I find it bizarre that no-one has studied them before and they haven’t because it’s hard and illegal,” he said.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The Home Office licensing regime already enables research to take place through a system of controlled drug possession licences, allowing bona fide institutions to carry out scientific research.

“This regime recognises the importance of such research and enables that to take place in an appropriate environment, ensuring the necessary safeguards are in place.”

Prof Nutt was sacked by the home secretary from his government advisory role three years ago for saying that ecstasy and LSD were less harmful than alcohol.

He says his new research indicated that there were no “untoward effects” from taking magic mushrooms and that it should not be illegal to possess them.

Read the rest.

And more research is about to be published, reports WebMD’s Charles J. DeNoon:

A study to be published this week suggests the drug improves people’s sense of wellbeing, and might be a useful treatment for clinical depression.

In the study, 10 volunteers looked at written cues that spurred memories linked to strong positive emotions. These memories were, as you might expect, far more vivid when the volunteers were given psilocybin than when they were given placebos.

Two weeks later, the volunteers who had the most vivid memories while on psilocybin had the greatest sense of wellbeing.

“Our findings support the idea that psilocybin facilitates access to personal memories and emotions,” Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, the study’s lead author, said in a news release.

Earlier studies, some going back to the 1950s, suggest that psilocybin can reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and cluster headaches. The new findings support recent studies in which volunteers given psilocybin underwent long-lasting positive changes in personality and rated the experience as one of the most spiritually significant in their lives.

Read the rest.

Finally, here’s a clip from Roslyn Dauber’ documentary The Medicine – Medical Research on Psychedelics, featuring an interview with a terminal ovarian cancer patient whose life was profoundly changed for the better during her participation in an experimental psilocybin treatment program at UCLA Harbor Medical Center in Los Angeles:

In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles.

Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States. Joseph Stiglitz characterizes the Obama administration’s vast transfer of money and pubic debt to the banks as a “privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a ‘partnership’ in which one partner robs the other.” Prof. Bill Black describes banks as becoming criminogenic and innovating “control fraud.”  High finance has corrupted regulatory agencies, falsified account-keeping by “mark to model” trickery, and financed the campaigns of its supporters to disable public oversight. The effect is to leave banks in control of how the economy’s allocates its credit and resources.

If there is any silver lining to today’s debt crisis, it is that the present situation and trends cannot continue. So this is not only an opportunity to restructure banking; we have little choice. The urgent issue is who will control the economy: governments, or the financial sector and monopolies with which it has made an alliance.

Read the rest.

But so many came, we figured they must be firecrackers. But they were regular, perhaps a neighbor busy with a hammer.

There were lots of them, in two distinct burst, for a total we’d guess at 20 or or so. The sheer number of them seemed to argue again gunshots.

Still, we grabbed our trusty Nikon and walked out to our front porch and look up the street toward the neighborhood, where a few folks were outside, simply chatting. Nothing special, we thought, then returned to our new computer and on ongoing effort to rebuild our web bookmarks after the demise of our old machine.

Then came the siren.

Doug Oakley reports for the Oakland Tribune:

Berkeley police are investigating the city’s first homicide of the year after a man was fatally shot Thursday night in the 3000 block of Shattuck Avenue near Emerson Street, police said.

Police dispatchers started receiving calls about gunshots heard in the area around 6:50 p.m.

Paramedics arrived and found a man with gunshot wounds a few minutes later, Berkeley police spokeswoman Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said. Paramedics worked on the man at the scene for about 30 minutes and then transferred him to Highland Hospital in Oakland, where he was pronounced dead.

Read the rest.

In retrospect, we might have walked up the street. But in the end, there was nothing we could have done.

And so our neighborhood became the scene of the city’s first murder of the year, and, for most of us, life went on.

Questions do linger. Given the large volume of shots fired. what kind of pistol was involved? And if there was only one person firing, how did one person come to be carrying at least two ammo clips, because the shots were so many that the shooter had to have reloaded, accounting for the two volleys we heard?

And where, we wonder, did all those slugs go that didn’t hit their target?

Warnings of a ‘lost generation’

Amazing how fast all those rose-colored glasses have lost their hue.

Where once economists were hailing the Great Recovery, there’s no hint of optimism in the latest pronouncements from th World Economic Forum.

From the BBC:

Preventing a “lost generation” of workers unable to get jobs is one of the world economy’s biggest problems, according to delegates at the World Economic Forum.

One university professor said the US, the world’s largest economy, is experiencing an “unemployment crisis”.

Countries in the West are experiencing high levels of youth unemployment.

“People will accept austerity if we also talk about growth,” Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said.

The region is struggling with a sovereign debt crisis, which has badly affected economic growth as governments have implemented tough spending cuts.

Data this month showed unemployment in the eurozone was at a record high in November, at 10.3%. There were 16.3 million people in the bloc out of work.

Spain, for example, has the highest unemployment rate in Europe, at 22.9%.

“It is also very important that we remember people are willing to make sacrifices, but not be sacrificed,” Mrs Thorning-Schmidt said during a session on rebuilding Europe.

Read the rest.

Spain to Merkel: ‘Sister can you spare a dime?’

Spain’s recently elected conservative prime minister went to Europe’s most powerful conservative, looking for a handout.

From euronews:

Looking for ideas on how to help Spain’s struggling economy new Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy met with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on Thursday.

Merkel welcomed a proposal by Rajoy for surplus European funds to be used to generate jobs, particularly for young people.

Rajoy said: “The most important aim of our country for the next year is to create jobs and assure economic growth, that’s the basis of prosperity in Spain and also for the perpetuation of public services like education and pensions.”

At an EU growth summit on Monday, Rajoy will push for unused European structural and social funds money to go to creating jobs and training opportunities

Read the rest.

EU taxpayers to cough up cash for Greek bailout

We didn’t say “for Greece,” because the money’s not for Greece. It’s for investors who gambled on Greece and lost. None of the cash is going to Greece. It’s going to banksters, state and private, and institutional investors.

None of it’s going to help jobless Greeks, and the families who are abandoning their babies in desperation.

All of which is context for this from The Guardian’s Phillip Inman:

European Union officials are preparing to concede that eurozone taxpayers may need to make bigger sacrifices on their loans to Athens or risk a string of sovereign collapses across the continent.

Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund and some EU leaders, Brussels said it may need to go further than the €30bn (£25bn) write-off that was put in place last year as part of a package of measure to save Greece from going bust – a substantial part of which came in the form of writedowns on loans from the European Central Bank (ECB).

The concession came as private sector creditors renewed talks in Athens over the €100bn due to be written off by banks and other lenders.

The head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, urged all parties to make concessions to bring an end to weeks of wrangling that has caused turmoil on international markets. Lagarde said the public sector must consider a bigger write-off following an assessment by the IMF that Greece was in a worse situation than previously thought. Its economy has been hit hard by the severe austerity measures adopted last year.

Read the rest.

And it’s not just Greece that’s panhandling

No, it’s those private banks, too.

From EurActiv:

Greece’s creditor banks argue they cannot fulfil their part of the deal unless the EU first commits the money.

“All Greek [political] parties must agree to the [austerity] measures and a new programme, independently of the upcoming elections,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble told journalists after a meeting of EU finance ministers in Brussels.

Greece is expected to stage snap elections before 8 April. Antonis Samaras, whose centre-right New Democracy party governs in coalition with technocrat Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, has openly criticised some austerity measures prescribed by international lenders.

Opinion polls suggest Samaras would win an election, but he would need to form a coalition with other parties to gain a mandate for governing.

Europeans want commitments from Greek political parties before the elections take place before backing any further bailout cash.

“Greece has fallen short of its reform and austerity targets by a wide margin,” Austrian Finance Minister Maria Fekter said after the Brussels meeting. She said that the Greeks had been “sent home with a list of things they need to fulfil”, adding that the country would not receive its second bailout otherwise.

The new requirement to obtain undertakings from all potential political players adds a further obstacle for Greece to surmount before Germany and other European donors hand out any further bailout cash.

Read the rest.

Guess who’s praying for a big Greek default?

If you said “hedge funds,” you win the brass ring.

From Spiegel:

For some hedge funds, the fight over interest rates has given them more incentive to push for a breakdown of the proposed plan. Officially, they are in the same boat as the banks and insurance companies. But in reality their interests are vastly opposed. “Hedge funds don’t need to worry about their public image,” one banker says. Their reputation has already been destroyed. Therefore, they can be relatively cavalier in gambling with the possibility of a Greek bankruptcy.

In an internal analysis of the German Savings Banks Association (DSGV), which represents the public banks, the hedge funds come off fairly badly. With the financial investors “only the performance” is most important. There is “hardly a political or economic corrective factor,” such as long-term customer or contractual relations, the analysis says. Therefore, “one can conclude that they are not really interested in an actual Greek rescue.”

Unlike the creditors who have long held Greek state bonds and definitely stand to lose in the case of a Greek debt haircut, some investors have only jumped in over the past few weeks. They have stocked up not just on Greek bonds, but also on the related Credit Default Swaps (CDS). These Credit Default Swaps guarantee the buyer protection in the event that the underlying bonds default. “This week alone there will be scores of new CDS transactions,” one insider says. “And some of them at exorbitant prices.”

Those who in the past few days have bought Greek state bonds worth €1 million euros and wanted to protect them against loss with CDS, would have had to pay more than €400,000 or even €500,000. And they fluctuated wildly — depending on the news, the price of CDS rose and fell sharply. That indicates that the CDS are being used mainly for gambling.

Read the rest.

And a nice fat payday for a bankster

We always like to conclude our economic news potpourri on a positive note.

So here it is, from the BBC:

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) boss Stephen Hester is to receive a bonus of almost £1m.

RBS announced on Thursday that Mr Hester is to get £963,000 in shares based on the bank’s closing share price on Wednesday 25 January 2012.

The bank said the bonus was for “substantial progress in making RBS safer, rebuilding performance in many businesses and improving customer service and support”.

RBS is 82% owned by the taxpayer.

BBC business editor Robert Peston has learnt that the bonus came due to fear about resignations on the RBS board.

“I am reliably told that they feared Mr Hester and much of the board would have quit, if the payment had been vetoed by the government as the majority shareholder,” said our business editor.

Read the rest.

Did you catch that bit about who owns the bank?

So little Stevie Hester is a rcih man getting richer — on the backs of of British taxpayers.

Americans, bamboozled by years of propaganda and mass media pap, have long been convinced that they lived in a land of unprecedented opportunity, where fortune is just a blink away.

Class is an issue that’s traditionally been raised by the left, and with the destruction of the American left during the red scares of World War I and post-World War II, class vanished form mainstream discourse. But the Occupy movement has succeeded in raising the issue anew, albeit in the somewhat simplistic form of the one percenters versus the rest.

Without a discussion of class, economics and politics are meaningless. Here, at least, is a good start.

I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career. We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.

Read the rest.

Bank Of America’s Offer To Homeowners: We’ll Modify Loans If You’ll Erase All The Mean Things Said About Us On Twitter

From France 24:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has expressed the possibility of his defeat in the country’s forthcoming elections in an off-the-record conversation he had with journalists and which some of France’s leading news outlets decided to make public.

According to reports on Tuesday by AFP news agency, Le Monde and Liberation newspapers, and other media organisations, Sarkozy told a small gathering of reporters that “for the first time in my life I am faced with the possibility that my career is coming to an end.

“Today, I have to ask myself that question”, the French president, who is trailing Socialist candidate Francois Hollande in opinion polls and struggling with low approval ratings, was quoted as saying.

The exchange, which occurred during the president’s visit to French Guyana on Sunday, immediately became a subject of intense speculation in France. Were Sarkozy’s words a from-the-heart confession or a calculated move to garner sympathy?

Left-wing daily Liberation said that at least on two occasions Sarkozy warned that the conversation was off the record, insisting at one point that if his words were printed the same kind of exchange “would never happen again”.

During the three-hour-long talk, Sarkozy reserved some disparaging words for his own ruling UMP party, saying he would prefer a religious cloister to active participation in party life if he lost the election, the reports said.

Read the rest.

Sad to say, it’s unlikely that a change at the top will mean any real shift, but it is nice to see the bellicose bully who played such a central role in the war on Libya sweat a bit.

A Sarkozy loss implies a victory for the French Socialists, who are anything other than their name implies.

Well, consider the latest from Reuters, via Al Arabiya:

Aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has halted its work in detention centers in a Libyan city because it said its medical staff were being asked to patch up detainees mid-way through torture sessions so they could go back for more abuse.

Rights groups have repeatedly raised concerns about torture being used against people, many of them sub-Saharan Africans, suspected of having fought for Muammar Qaddafi’s forces during Libya’s nine-month civil war.

The agency said it was in Misrata, 200 km (130 miles) east of the Libyan capital and scene of some of the fiercest battles in the conflict, to treat war-wounded detainees but was instead having to treat fresh wounds from torture.

“Patients were brought to us in the middle of interrogation for medical care, in order to make them fit for more interrogation,” MSF General Director Christopher Stokes said in a statement.

“This is unacceptable. Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions.”

Read the rest.

We eagerly await the howls of protest from the White House.

Computer technology is wonderful, except for when it isn’t. Our new machine is a lot more powerful and faster that the 2003 model we were using before. It’s 16 gigs of ram verus 1, and a CPU that’s screamingly faster.

But a whole bunch of programs aren’t making it over from XP to Windows 7, so we’ve slightly handicapped. Hopefully we’ll be ale to resume a more normal schedule of posting in the next few days. . .

We already had the new system, but the day we had set aside for the transfer was the very morning the old system died. It’s thanks to the help of a great friend, Tom Hunt, we’re able to function at all. And for anyone in the Berkeley area with computer woes, Tom’s the go-to guy of choice.

So bear with us, and we promise to be back to all our bloogy goodness soon.

Monsanto’s capitulation comes a week after agro/chemical giant BASF announced it was pulling all it genetic plant modification operations from the continent to the GMO-friendlier U.S.

From Sybille de La Hamaide of Reuters:

U.S. biotech firm Monsanto said on Tuesday it does not plan to sell its genetically modified maize MON810 in France this year, nor after, even though the country’s highest court overturned a 3-year ban in November.

“Monsanto considers that favorable conditions for the sale of the MON810 in France in 2012 and beyond are not in place,” the company said in a statement, adding that it had told the French authorities about its intentions.

The French government said earlier this month it would uphold its ban on the insect-resistant strain of maize, despite the court’s decision to annul the ban after finding that it had not produced enough evidence that Monsanto’s MON810 posed a significant risk to health or the environment.

The farm ministry said France would reintroduce its moratorium on MON810 maize (corn) before spring sowings start.

Monsanto’s statement follows an action by anti-GMO activists in one of its plants in southwestern France on Tuesday. They said Monsanto was about to sell MON810 to French farmers ahead of sowings whereas the U.S. firm said GMO seeds stored at some of its French plants were aimed at export markets.

Read the rest.

As for BASF, we’ve gotta wonder if they might be thinking about bringing some of their operations to the new UC Berkeley national GMO lab in nearby Richmond. We’re sure UCB Chancellor Robert “Grinnin’ Bob” Birgeneau would welcome them with open arms.

Cyberspace’s most famous activist, Julian Assange, is launching his own talkshow, to be broadcast on RT. The program, written and hosted by the founder of whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, will focus on his favorite topic: controversy.

­The show, arguably the most anticipated news series of 2012, will feature ten “iconoclasts, visionaries and power insiders” – people Assange can clearly identify with, being a rather controversial figure himself. The 40-year-old Australian media and internet entrepreneur will get to talk about the issues of the day with those he believes will shape “the world tomorrow.”

In his own words, the world-famous Wikileaks founder is “a pioneer of a more just world and a victim of political repression” which is why he promises to deliver a new type of television. Many are already wondering whether it will be as explosive as the biggest mass disclosure of secret documents in US history, also orchestrated by Assange and his team.

The show will be filmed at the very location that Julian Assange has been under house arrest for the last year and a half, with the first episode to be shot just a week before Assange’s Supreme Court hearing in the UK. He has been on conditional bail for 414 days, with no charges officially filed, as he fights extradition to Sweden.

“Assange to record TV series for RT while under house arrest – I am sure it will be an amazing show!” RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan posted on her Twitter on Wednesday. “I’ve never waited for a show on RT with such excitement.”.

Read the rest.