Via Scott at Corrente, a post by George Monbiot in the Guardian‘s Comment is Free area: The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen.

While I am aware that Monbiot is looked upon with distrust by some people, [‘moonbat’ was coined for him], he does a researched look at the ‘Masters of the Universe’, with references to a number of different people’s work that studied the CEO class.

Read the article and then review what you know about the bankers, and people like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg. Ask yourself, is the portrait that Monbiot draws accurate? Is the hypothesis valid?

Update: The British satire site Newsbiscuit gives a hint about what some people think about George: Authorities threaten St Paul’s protestors with George Monbiot.

Vizzini Award for Language Abuse [Second Class] to University of California Police Captain Margo Bennett for her redefinition of “violence”.

In Digby’s article, Asymmetrical Violence, we discover this quote:

“The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence,” UC police Capt. Margo Bennett said. “I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”

Captain, if the English department of the University decided to pound you to a pulp with dictionaries, they could plead ‘defense of the language’.

I was extremely busy with Real Life™ and couldn’t present my normal coverage of Tropical Storm Sean, which used up a name while making life exciting in the Atlantic between Bermuda and the East Coast of the US. That should give some idea of how pressed for time I’ve been, and what a ‘nothing’ of a storm Sean was.

Of more personal interest was the buran in the Bering Sea. Buran [Буран] is the Russian name of the ‘snow hurricanes’ that are normally only seen in the interior of Siberia. They can have winds up to 100mph, bitter temperatures, and blowing snow.

Infrequently they make it into the Bering Sea and pummel the Northwest Coast of Alaska, as happened this past week. The loss of permafrost due to the rising temperatures in the Arctic makes the coast even more susceptible to erosion.

The area most affected by the storm is the end of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race on the coast of the Norton Sound.