Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Weekend Economists Celebrate Endless Summer August 29-September 1, 2014
Yes, we are going into Summer, the Sequel. Because it's finally warm enough to call it summer, again...
Tansy mentioned Bruce Brown, film maker of the Surfing genre...
Bruce Brown (born December 1, 1937 in San Francisco, California) is an American documentary film director, known as an early pioneer of the surf film. He is the father of filmmaker Dana Brown.
Brown's films include Slippery When Wet (1958), Surf Crazy (1959), Barefoot Adventure (1960), Surfing Hollow Days (1961), Waterlogged (1962), and his most well known film, The Endless Summer (1964) which received a nationwide theatrical release in 1966. Considered among the most influential in the genre, The Endless Summer follows surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August around the world. Thirty years later Brown would film The Endless Summer II with his son in 1994.
He has also made a number of short films including The Wet Set, featuring the Hobie-MacGregor Sportswear Surf Team and one of the earliest skateboarding films, America's Newest Sport, presenting the Hobie Super Surfer Skateboard Team. These short films along with some unused footage from The Endless Summer were included in the DVD Surfin' Shorts, as part of the Golden Years of Surf collection. Brown has gone beyond surfing a few times with films about motorcycle sport, On Any Sunday (1971) which is held in high regard as one of the best motorcycle documentaries of all time, On Any Sunday II (1981) Baja 1000 Classic (1991), and On Any Sunday, revisited (2000). He made a guest appearance in the SpongeBob SquarePants episode SpongeBob vs. The Big One.
Brown is a 2009 inductee into the Surfers' Hall of Fame in Huntington Beach, California.
---wikipedia
http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/entries/brown-dana
Brown's films include Slippery When Wet (1958), Surf Crazy (1959), Barefoot Adventure (1960), Surfing Hollow Days (1961), Waterlogged (1962), and his most well known film, The Endless Summer (1964) which received a nationwide theatrical release in 1966. Considered among the most influential in the genre, The Endless Summer follows surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August around the world. Thirty years later Brown would film The Endless Summer II with his son in 1994.
He has also made a number of short films including The Wet Set, featuring the Hobie-MacGregor Sportswear Surf Team and one of the earliest skateboarding films, America's Newest Sport, presenting the Hobie Super Surfer Skateboard Team. These short films along with some unused footage from The Endless Summer were included in the DVD Surfin' Shorts, as part of the Golden Years of Surf collection. Brown has gone beyond surfing a few times with films about motorcycle sport, On Any Sunday (1971) which is held in high regard as one of the best motorcycle documentaries of all time, On Any Sunday II (1981) Baja 1000 Classic (1991), and On Any Sunday, revisited (2000). He made a guest appearance in the SpongeBob SquarePants episode SpongeBob vs. The Big One.
Brown is a 2009 inductee into the Surfers' Hall of Fame in Huntington Beach, California.
---wikipedia
http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/entries/brown-dana
As with so many things, I was just an infant when all this was going on, so if I get something wrong, please correct!
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_vu5GdfwqBYo/S9DKH2CUa5I/AAAAAAAAAn0/dVID626nje4/s1600/On+Any+Sunday_2.jpg
82 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Just asking? 
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sludge-match-chevron-legal-battle-ecuador-steven-donziger-20140828#ixzz3Blzvze9s
For more than two decades, energy giant Chevron and Ecuadorean activists, led by American lawyer Steven Donziger, have been embroiled in a contentious lawsuit about who is responsible for contaminating a vast swath of the Amazon. On March 4th, a federal judge in New York City blocked one of the richest and most scrutinized judgments in the annals of class-action law from being enforced on U.S. soil. The announcement of that decision, a closely watched event in legal and environmental circles, further muddied the future of $9.5 billion in damages the Ecuadorean Supreme Court in 2012 ordered the oil giant Chevron to pay for the systematic contamination of a patch of Amazon rainforest the size of Rhode Island. In his decision capping a seven-week trial, Judge Lewis Kaplan declared the Ecuadorean judgment null and void. The ten-figure fine, he concluded, was the fruit of a jungle shakedown — the result of a "five-year effort to extort and defraud Chevron."
The oil company cheered Kaplan's decision as "a resounding victory for us and our stockholders." Steven Donziger, the warhorse lawyer for the Ecuadorean plaintiffs, decried the judge as an accomplice in "the biggest corporate retaliation campaign in history."
The New York trial marked more than a possible turning point in the no-holds-barred battle-royale pitting Chevron against homesteading farmers and a union of five Amazonian tribes. It was also a surprise homecoming. More than a decade ago, the same court ruled to move the case out of New York, where the plaintiffs thought it belonged, and down to Ecuador, where Chevron had cozy relations with key officials in government. The subsequent seesaw between sovereign legal systems is uncommon. So too Chevron's decision to counterattack the Ecuadorean decision using the RICO Act, a collection of racketeering laws usually employed in the prosecution of meth-dealing biker gangs and famous Italian crime families. Which isn't to say Chevron's RICO suit lacked Sicilian-accented echoes with mob cases. The oil company's sole witness to its central charge of bribery was a corrupt Ecuadorean ex-judge named Alberto Guerra, whose entire family has been naturalized and relocated on Chevron's dime. The entire case turned on the testimony of a witness living under a corporate protection plan. (Chevron has stated that the company has taken "reasonable measures, based on third-party assessments, to protect Guerra's safety and security."
The RICO decision put another wrinkle in a case defined by unprecedented international sprawl. What began around the time of Bill Clinton's first inauguration as a class-action suit filed in a New York court has ramified into an overlapping thicket of legal systems and mutual corruption allegations playing out from Buenos Aires to Gibraltar, from Washington D.C. to the Hague. So far, half a dozen legal authorities have been called on to adjudicate the main-event suit and its related cases. Law professors call it a "challenging paradigmatic interface," but it's best described as an extraordinary jurisdictional clusterfuck.
"This drama is in unchartered territory," says Josh Galperin of Yale's Center for Environmental Law and Policy. "We don't have much to compare it to." Marco Simons, legal director of EarthRights International, notes a disorienting, mildly hallucinogenic aspect. "We could be looking at an Alice in Wonderland scenario of never-ending litigation," he says. "It's hard to see where this ends."
GO THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS AT LINK...FOR MORE
For more than two decades, energy giant Chevron and Ecuadorean activists, led by American lawyer Steven Donziger, have been embroiled in a contentious lawsuit about who is responsible for contaminating a vast swath of the Amazon. On March 4th, a federal judge in New York City blocked one of the richest and most scrutinized judgments in the annals of class-action law from being enforced on U.S. soil. The announcement of that decision, a closely watched event in legal and environmental circles, further muddied the future of $9.5 billion in damages the Ecuadorean Supreme Court in 2012 ordered the oil giant Chevron to pay for the systematic contamination of a patch of Amazon rainforest the size of Rhode Island. In his decision capping a seven-week trial, Judge Lewis Kaplan declared the Ecuadorean judgment null and void. The ten-figure fine, he concluded, was the fruit of a jungle shakedown — the result of a "five-year effort to extort and defraud Chevron."
The oil company cheered Kaplan's decision as "a resounding victory for us and our stockholders." Steven Donziger, the warhorse lawyer for the Ecuadorean plaintiffs, decried the judge as an accomplice in "the biggest corporate retaliation campaign in history."
The New York trial marked more than a possible turning point in the no-holds-barred battle-royale pitting Chevron against homesteading farmers and a union of five Amazonian tribes. It was also a surprise homecoming. More than a decade ago, the same court ruled to move the case out of New York, where the plaintiffs thought it belonged, and down to Ecuador, where Chevron had cozy relations with key officials in government. The subsequent seesaw between sovereign legal systems is uncommon. So too Chevron's decision to counterattack the Ecuadorean decision using the RICO Act, a collection of racketeering laws usually employed in the prosecution of meth-dealing biker gangs and famous Italian crime families. Which isn't to say Chevron's RICO suit lacked Sicilian-accented echoes with mob cases. The oil company's sole witness to its central charge of bribery was a corrupt Ecuadorean ex-judge named Alberto Guerra, whose entire family has been naturalized and relocated on Chevron's dime. The entire case turned on the testimony of a witness living under a corporate protection plan. (Chevron has stated that the company has taken "reasonable measures, based on third-party assessments, to protect Guerra's safety and security."
The RICO decision put another wrinkle in a case defined by unprecedented international sprawl. What began around the time of Bill Clinton's first inauguration as a class-action suit filed in a New York court has ramified into an overlapping thicket of legal systems and mutual corruption allegations playing out from Buenos Aires to Gibraltar, from Washington D.C. to the Hague. So far, half a dozen legal authorities have been called on to adjudicate the main-event suit and its related cases. Law professors call it a "challenging paradigmatic interface," but it's best described as an extraordinary jurisdictional clusterfuck.
"This drama is in unchartered territory," says Josh Galperin of Yale's Center for Environmental Law and Policy. "We don't have much to compare it to." Marco Simons, legal director of EarthRights International, notes a disorienting, mildly hallucinogenic aspect. "We could be looking at an Alice in Wonderland scenario of never-ending litigation," he says. "It's hard to see where this ends."
GO THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS AT LINK...FOR MORE
Burger King
Labor Day
http://www.businessinsider.com/thornburgs-real-real-equity-returns-2014-8
Fees, taxes, and even inflation just kill your investment returns.
A Thornburg Investment Management study of "real, real returns," which was alerted to us by Cullen Roche at Pragmatic Capitalism, shows how various costs eat into your stock market returns.
Real, real returns take into account expenses (the man), taxes (Uncle Sam), and inflation (the invisible hand).
Thornburg's study notes that "nominal returns are a misleading driver of an investor's investment and asset-allocation planning... because they are significantly eroded by taxes, expenses and inflation." The risk then, as Thornburg sees it, is that a failure to understand real, real returns could lead to investment decisions that miss potential diversification opportunities.
This chart from Thornburg shows how the annualized nominal return of $100 invested in the S&P 500 between 1983 and 2013 is about 11%, making that investment worth $2,346.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/thornburgs-real-real-equity-returns-2014-8#ixzz3Brvgl71A
Fees, taxes, and even inflation just kill your investment returns.
A Thornburg Investment Management study of "real, real returns," which was alerted to us by Cullen Roche at Pragmatic Capitalism, shows how various costs eat into your stock market returns.
Real, real returns take into account expenses (the man), taxes (Uncle Sam), and inflation (the invisible hand).
Thornburg's study notes that "nominal returns are a misleading driver of an investor's investment and asset-allocation planning... because they are significantly eroded by taxes, expenses and inflation." The risk then, as Thornburg sees it, is that a failure to understand real, real returns could lead to investment decisions that miss potential diversification opportunities.
This chart from Thornburg shows how the annualized nominal return of $100 invested in the S&P 500 between 1983 and 2013 is about 11%, making that investment worth $2,346.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/thornburgs-real-real-equity-returns-2014-8#ixzz3Brvgl71A
To international audiences, Ukraine is now no more than the scene of a Russian-inspired armed conflict. The fighting, however, is confined to areas that are home to 6.5 million of Ukraine's total population of 45 million. Although the outcome there is important to all Ukrainians, there is a bigger issue: Will the country emerge from the wreckage as a better, cleaner one? Some of the heroes of the Maidan revolution, which toppled the corrupt government of President Viktor Yanukovych in February, are beginning to doubt that.
Tetyana Chornovil is one of those heroes, a firebrand investigative journalist and anti-corruption activist whose beating in December, apparently at the hands of pro-Yanukovych thugs, sparked mass outrage. After the regime fell, she was put in charge of the new government's anti-corruption policy. Now, she's quitting, as she announced in a lengthy column on pravda.com.ua, saying her presence in the government was "useless." "There is no political will in Ukraine for an uncompromising, wide-scale war on corruption," she wrote, complaining that all her initiatives had drowned in a "bureaucratic swamp" and that Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was not interested in attacking the business interests of Ukrainian oligarchs to avoid vilification by oligarch-controlled media.
Ukraine Standoff
Chornovil's bitterness and sense of futility was amplified by the death of her husband, Nikolai Berezovoy, killed in action near Donetsk. Hers is not an isolated case, though: less than two weeks ago, Andriy Parubiy, head of the Defense and National Security Council, also tendered his resignation.
During the winter protests, Parubiy was an important figure, heading the self-defense force that fought off Yanukovych's riot police on the barricades. He declined to comment on his resignation, saying it would be "unacceptable" while his country is at war. The version making the rounds in Kiev, however, is that Parubiy wanted President Petro Poroshenko to be even tougher than he has been in fighting separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine, as well as in countering Russian propaganda.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-08-18/ukraine-s-revolutionaries-surrender-to-corruption
Well, call me not surprised, because this so-called "revolution" was never about what Ukrainians wanted or what was good for Ukraine. It was about outside forces raping and pillaging the country for fun and profit.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-08-29/how-should-future-argentinas-treat-future-vultures
It's a slow Friday, so let's talk about some nerdy sovereign debt stuff. But first, I'll tell you a story you may have heard before. In 2001, Argentina defaulted on its bonds. In 2005 (and again in 2010), it gave its bondholders a choice: They could exchange their defaulted bonds for new bonds at around 30 cents on the dollar, or they could get nothing. It took a while, but eventually Argentina persuaded most of its bondholders that 30 is a bigger number than zero, so most of them took the deal. And off they went, relatively cheerfully receiving interest on their new, 70 percent smaller bonds.
Some holders were unpersuaded, though. (We call them the "holdouts," as opposed to the guys who took the deal, whom we call the "exchange bondholders." They sued Argentina in a New York federal court, with a ... clever? ... theory. The defaulted bonds had a clause, called the pari passu clause, that said that the "payment obligations of the Republic under the Securities shall at all times rank at least equally with all its other present and future unsecured and unsubordinated External Indebtedness" of Argentina. The clever theory was that this meant what it said. It seems to say that Argentina can't pay interest on its new, smaller bonds without also paying interest (and back due interest, etc.) on the old, defaulted bonds that had never been exchanged.
This theory struck many people as crazy, but the holdouts managed to convince a New York district court, and then the Second Circuit, and then the U.S. Supreme Court, that it was right. And so now Argentina can't pay interest on the exchange bonds without paying lots of money to the holdout bondholders. And it would prefer not to do that -- or, quite plausibly, can't afford to do that.1 So now no one is getting paid, Argentina is in default again, and everything is rather a mess.
So the people who thought the holdouts' pari passu theory was crazy seem to be right. The world seems to be unambiguously worse off than it would be if the U.S. courts had rejected the theory. Argentina is worse off (it's in a default crisis), the exchange bondholders are worse off (their interest payments have stopped), and the holdout bondholders are no better off, since it's not like they're getting paid anything either.2
It's a slow Friday, so let's talk about some nerdy sovereign debt stuff. But first, I'll tell you a story you may have heard before. In 2001, Argentina defaulted on its bonds. In 2005 (and again in 2010), it gave its bondholders a choice: They could exchange their defaulted bonds for new bonds at around 30 cents on the dollar, or they could get nothing. It took a while, but eventually Argentina persuaded most of its bondholders that 30 is a bigger number than zero, so most of them took the deal. And off they went, relatively cheerfully receiving interest on their new, 70 percent smaller bonds.
Some holders were unpersuaded, though. (We call them the "holdouts," as opposed to the guys who took the deal, whom we call the "exchange bondholders."
They sued Argentina in a New York federal court, with a ... clever? ... theory. The defaulted bonds had a clause, called the pari passu clause, that said that the "payment obligations of the Republic under the Securities shall at all times rank at least equally with all its other present and future unsecured and unsubordinated External Indebtedness" of Argentina. The clever theory was that this meant what it said. It seems to say that Argentina can't pay interest on its new, smaller bonds without also paying interest (and back due interest, etc.) on the old, defaulted bonds that had never been exchanged.
This theory struck many people as crazy, but the holdouts managed to convince a New York district court, and then the Second Circuit, and then the U.S. Supreme Court, that it was right. And so now Argentina can't pay interest on the exchange bonds without paying lots of money to the holdout bondholders. And it would prefer not to do that -- or, quite plausibly, can't afford to do that.1 So now no one is getting paid, Argentina is in default again, and everything is rather a mess.
So the people who thought the holdouts' pari passu theory was crazy seem to be right. The world seems to be unambiguously worse off than it would be if the U.S. courts had rejected the theory. Argentina is worse off (it's in a default crisis), the exchange bondholders are worse off (their interest payments have stopped), and the holdout bondholders are no better off, since it's not like they're getting paid anything either.2
http://grist.org/food/booze-is-proof-nature-wants-us-to-be-happy/
I’d always thought of booze as something that was trying to kill me in the most unnatural way possible. So reading Adam Rogers’ new book Proof: The Science of Booze was like meeting a bully from high school and finding out that he’s really a sweet, misunderstood guy. Rogers shows, again and again, that booze is actually a high form of cooperation between human technology and nature.
I asked the author to meet me at one of his favorite bars and explain how drinking connects us to the natural world. He told me to meet him at Handlebar, a place in Berkeley with a massive wooden bar, muted lighting, and tinkling music. (I’ve edited and condensed our talk.)
?w=1024&h=576&crop=1
Q. I thought I’d just ask you to recommend a drink and tell me all the different ways it links us to the natural world. But you should know: I’ve become a lightweight since I had kids.
A. Maybe we should drink through the process of production. Here’s what we’re going to do: we’ll get a glass of wine — they don’t have grape juice to start with, which is a shame because it’s a good substrate. But wine, then pisco — which is distilled wine. Then brandy from a distillery called Osocalis in the mountains above Santa Cruz, run by a former scientist, very nice guy. And then an old fashioned, which is in some respects a model for the earliest kind of cocktail, because all it is booze, sugar, and bitters.
I’d always thought of booze as something that was trying to kill me in the most unnatural way possible. So reading Adam Rogers’ new book Proof: The Science of Booze was like meeting a bully from high school and finding out that he’s really a sweet, misunderstood guy. Rogers shows, again and again, that booze is actually a high form of cooperation between human technology and nature.
I asked the author to meet me at one of his favorite bars and explain how drinking connects us to the natural world. He told me to meet him at Handlebar, a place in Berkeley with a massive wooden bar, muted lighting, and tinkling music. (I’ve edited and condensed our talk.)
?w=1024&h=576&crop=1
Q. I thought I’d just ask you to recommend a drink and tell me all the different ways it links us to the natural world. But you should know: I’ve become a lightweight since I had kids.
A. Maybe we should drink through the process of production. Here’s what we’re going to do: we’ll get a glass of wine — they don’t have grape juice to start with, which is a shame because it’s a good substrate. But wine, then pisco — which is distilled wine. Then brandy from a distillery called Osocalis in the mountains above Santa Cruz, run by a former scientist, very nice guy. And then an old fashioned, which is in some respects a model for the earliest kind of cocktail, because all it is booze, sugar, and bitters.
