Wall Street has apparently learned nothing from nearly toppling the global economy last year.

The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

Awesome. See you in a few years for the next crash.

The only way to protect ourselves from the horrible consequences of massively altering the Earth's climate is by massively altering the Earth's climate.

Thursday night!

* President Edwards prepares to resign the presidency tonight after admitting he had lied about the fathering of Rielle Hunter's baby during the third debate with John McCain. Vice President Barack Obama is expected to assume the presidency tomorrow morning.

* Paul Krugman, legendary futurist?

* Luck, math, and how to win at gambling.

* What's hot: potbellies!

* Multitask: the game. Note: you will hate this game.

* On the cinematography of Mad Men. Nice video to get you ready for the third season.

* Behold, NASA's secret plan to move the Earth.

Hence the group’s decision to try to save Earth. ‘All you have to do is strap a chemical rocket to an asteroid or comet and fire it at just the right time,’ added Laughlin. ‘It is basic rocket science.’

The plan has one or two worrying aspects, however. For a start, space engineers would have to be very careful about how they directed their asteroid or comet towards Earth. The slightest miscalculation in orbit could fire it straight at Earth – with devastating consequences.

What could possibly go wrong? (Not a hoax. Via Occasional Fish.)

* Behold, the banned Family Guy episode.

* Nerdivore points out District 9 is getting great reviews.

* GLAAD flunks SyFy.

* And a physicist at Slate says The Time Traveler's Wife checks out.

Friday politics roundup.

* Early returns from the Iranian elections suggest things could get heated, with both sides declaring victory.

* On the day Jon Kyl threatened a Republican boycott of the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearing, George H. W. Bush cautioned his party not to go overboard.

"I don't know her that well but I think she's had a distinguished record on the bench and she should be entitled to fair hearings. Not - [it's] like the senator John Cornyn said it," [the elder former President Bush] told CNN. "He may vote for it, he may not. But he's been backing away from these...backing off from those radical statements to describe her, to attribute things to her that may or may not be true.

"And she was called by somebody a racist once. That's not right. I mean that's not fair. It doesn't help the process. You're out there name-calling. So let them decide who they want to vote for and get on with it."

* Kos analyzes party ID, empathy, and the generation gap.



* High-school student discovers plastic-eating microbe. We're saved!

Random.

* Call us "brights": Evidence is reviewed pointing to a negative relationship between intelligence and religious belief in the United States and Europe. It is shown that intelligence measured as psychometric g is negatively related to religious belief.

* The New Hampshire legislature has passed gay marriage. Live free or die!

* Teaser images from the "lost," DVD-only 13th episode of Dollhouse. This looks really, really good.

* Watchmen watch: costumed vigilantes in Cincinnati.

* "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission tells lawmakers it has no power to stop a Salt Lake City firm from taking tons of waste from Italy, processing it in Tennessee, then disposing of it in Utah." Well, who the hell does have the authority?

Getting everything together for the big roundtable this Friday is keeping me fairly busy, so it's just links tonight.

* Sad news: Eve Sedgwick has died.

* Matt Yglesias luxuriates in the deliciousness of Richard Burr's low approval ratings. So say we all.

* 'Pentagon Prioritizes Pursuit Of Alternative Fuel Sources.' With the military-industrial complex at our back, we can't fail!

* St. Augustine vs. the pirates.

In the "City of God," St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him, "How dare you molest the seas?" To which the pirate replied, "How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor." St. Augustine thought the pirate's answer was "elegant and excellent."

* The mutants walk among us: 'Woman has developed an imaginary, but useful, third arm.'

* New fiction on the way from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut.

* 7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs. What could possibly go wrong?

* Can poetry save the Earth?

Remember that list of "10 mad ways to save the planet"? They're trying #10. From e360:

A team of scientists will soon dump 20 tons of iron sulphate into the stormy waters of the Southern Ocean to test whether the fertilization helps pull large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere and sequesters it under the sea. The expedition aboard the German vessel Polarstern has drawn protests from environmental groups, which claim that the controversial geoengineering project — aimed at slowing global warming — was banned last year by the U.N.’s Convention on Biological Diversity. But scientists say that their experiment, which will spread the iron sulfate across a 300-square-kilometer (116-square-mile) area not far from South Georgia Island, will help provide data needed to judge the effect of such iron fertilization experiments. Meanwhile, researchers have reported that the warming waters of the Sea of Japan are now absorbing only about half as much CO2 from the atmosphere as was absorbed in the 1990s.

The headline reads, 'Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes.' What could possibly go wrong?

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

We're saved!

Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, reports Cath O'Driscoll in SCI's Chemistry & Industry magazine. According to the article, Shell is putting a lot of money into this:

Shell is so impressed with the new approach that it is funding an investigation into its economic feasibility. 'We think it's a promising idea,' says Shell's Gilles Bertherin, a coordinator on the project. 'There are potentially huge environmental benefits from addressing climate change -- and adding calcium hydroxide to seawater will also mitigate the effects of ocean acidification, so it should have a positive impact on the marine environment.'
...

'This process has the potential to reverse the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would be possible to reduce CO2 to pre-industrial levels,' Kruger says.

So, assuming this works—and I can't imagine that it won't—we're saved! Hooray! Except.

Global population growth is looming as a bigger threat to the world's food production and water supplies than climate change, a leading scientist says.

Speaking at a CSIRO public lecture in Canberra yesterday, UNESCO's chief of sustainable water resources development, Professor Shahbaz Khan, said overpopulation's impacts were potentially more economically, socially and environmentally destructive than those of climate change.

"Climate change is one of a number of stresses we're facing, but it's overshadowed by global population growth and the amount of water, land and energy needed to grow food to meet the projected increase in population. We are facing a world population crisis."

(first one via Joe)

Scientists have developed a "safe" Ebola for study in the lab. What could possibly go wrong? Via Posthuman Blues.