Dennis Kucinich explains the futility of the Wall Street bailout. Full text here

Here is a very quick explanation of the $700 billion bailout within the context of the mechanics of our monetary and banking system:The taxpayers loan money to the banks. But the taxpayers do not have the money. So we have to borrow it from the banks to give it back to the banks. But the banks do not have the money to loan to the government. So they create it into existence (through a mechanism called fractional reserve) and then loan it to us, at interest, so we can then give it back to them.

Confused?

This is the system.

Tom Toles illustrates the difficulty — exercise in futility? — of converting to a green economy. View Here

In the meantime, here’s the image (click to enlarge):

The search for perpetual motion.  Read:  A short history of the search for perpetual motion, by Donald E. Simanek

Baskara

Tacolla's Wheel

Music to be tortured by

See Torture By Music at MusicRadar.com to learn what is…

known in the torture trade as futility music — chosen to “convince the prisoner of the futility of maintaining his position”.

and

US military have been using music as a form of torture in Iraq. Psychological operations (or psyops) play Metallica’s Enter Sandman or Eminem’s White America at excruciating volumes as a way of ‘breaking’ Iraqi prisoners of war.

Mother Jones magazine publishes the Torture Playlist so you can keep up to date with all the latest is torture tunes.

Who will be the next Top Tuneful Torturer?

by Tim Rutten

From The Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2008: Olympic protests’ history of futility

Poetry, as Auden famously instructed us, changes nothing — and neither, despite all the predicted turmoil in San Francisco today, do the Olympics.

and

Chinese conduct in Tibet and Sudan is reprehensible, so all this drama is cathartic in the way protests tend to be. But whether it will have much effect on China’s behavior is another question altogether. If history is any guide, the answer is no.