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--></style><title>NYTimes: Increasing risk of wildfire is
real</title></head><body>
<div><font face="Georgia" size="-5" color="#262626">1st 4 paragraphs:
The first Alaska wildfire of 2016</font><font face="Georgia"
size="-5" color="#1F557F"><u> broke out</u></font><font
face="Georgia" size="-5" color="#262626"> in late February, followed
by a second there just eight days later.</font></div>
<div><font face="Georgia" size="-5" color="#262626"><br>
New Mexico has had 140 fires this year, double the number in the same
period last year, fueled by one of the warmest, driest winters on
record.</font></div>
<div><font face="Georgia" size="-5" color="#262626"><br>
And on the border of Arizona and California this month, helicopters
dumped water on flames so intense that they jumped the Colorado River,
forcing the evacuation of two recreational vehicle parks.</font></div>
<div><font face="Georgia" size="-5" color="#262626"><br>
Fires, once largely confined to a single season, have become a
continual threat in some places, burning earlier and later in the
year, in the United States and abroad. They have ignited in the West
during the winter and well into the fall, have arrived earlier than
ever in Canada and have burned without interruption in Australia for
almost 12 months.</font></div>
<div><font face="Georgia" size="-5" color="#262626"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Georgia" size="-5"
color="#262626"
>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/science/wildfires-season-global-wa<span
></span
>rming.html?mabReward=A6&action=click&pgtype=Homepage®<span
></span
>ion=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEn<span
></span>gine&_r=0</font></div>
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<div><font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#000000">"A new area
of study is the field that some of us are beginning to call<i> social
traps.</i> The term refers to situations in society that contain traps
formally like a fish trap, where men or whole societies get themselves
started in some direction or some set of relationships that later
prove to be unpleasant or lethal and that they see no easy way to back
out of or to avoid."<br>
<br>
John Platt. Social Traps.<i> American Psychologist</i>, August
1973</font></div>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style"
color="#000000"><b
>============================================================</b></font
></div>
<div><font face="Geneva" size="-1" color="#000000">"Controlled
capitalism Š had been a truly colossal success. From the end of the
Second World War until the mid-1970s the American and European
economies were uplifted by many years of rapid growth, bringing
affluence from the relatively few to almost all."<br>
<br>
"In the late 1970s the tendency to control capitalism was
abruptly reversed."<br>
<br>
" Š the most striking feature of our turbo-capitalist times, the
hollowing-out of democratic governance over the economy."<br>
<br>
</font><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-1" color="#000000">Edward
Luttwak,<i> Turbo-Capitalism.</i><br>
1998 in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.<br>
1999 in the U.S. by Harper Collins.<br>
ISBN 0-06-019330-1</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-1"
color="#000000">==================================<br>
James Grant.<i> Money of the Mind : Borrowing and Lending in America
from the Civil War to Michael Milken.</i> Farrar Straus Giroux.
1992.</font><br>
<font face="Lucida Grande" size="-1" color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-1" color="#000000">From the
introduction, p.5.<br>
"Real estate speculation must be as old as the land - in the United
States, it is certainly as old as the frontier - and the first bad
bank loan was no doubt made around the time of the opening of the
first bank."<br>
<br>
"Still, the boom of the 1980s was unique. Not only did creditors
lend more freely than they had in the past, but the government
intervened more actively than it had ever done before to absorb the
inevitable losses."<br>
<br>
From the Afterword: The End of the Line:<br>
"In the early 1990s a number of long-running trends were apparently
cresting Š. Tommy Mullaney, eleven, of Crownsville, Maryland,
returned home from camp in the summer of 1990 to find his name
inscribed on a MasterCard complete with a $5,000 credit line. 'I
jumped up and down and said Wow - the hologram was cool,' Tommy told
the Washington Post. 'But it sure made me wonder who was running that
bank'."<br>
=========================================================<br>
"Proponents of the loan push notion suggest that the banks have
victimized themselves by their absurd lending decisions ....
From this perspective, bankers as loan pushers become active door to
door salesmen (albeit in pin stripe suits)."<br>
<br>
William Darity and Bobbie Horn.<i> The Loan Pushers: The role of
commercial banks in the international debt crisis.</i> 1988. Ballinger
Publishing Company, a subsidiary of Harper & Row.<br>
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</font><font color="#000000"><br>
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<font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#000000"></font></div>
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