parallels....,

Kyrgyzstan to demand U.S. army withdraw from Ganci air base

Mathaba | Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev will sign a decree demanding the retreat before his visit to Russia in the near future, the news agency said.

Kyrgyzstan will demand the U.S. army dismantle all its facilities at the Ganci base and halt all activities at the base within six months.

The move by Kyrgyzstan will have a positive influence on negotiations between Russia and Kyrgyzstan over the former providing 300 million U.S. dollars credit to the latter, the Russian Business Consulting Agency said.

Bakiyev also hopes Russia will write off about 180 million dollars in debt.

The United States set up the Ganci Air Base at Manas international airport in the suburb of Bishkek in 2001 in its war against Afghanistan.

In recent years, conflicts between U.S. troops and local residents have occurred from time to time. In Dec. 2006, U.S. soldiers stationed at the base killed a local airport worker, drawing resentment from the Kyrgyz public.

The Kyrgyz parliament has urged the government to reconsider the necessity of the existence of the Ganci base. Kyrgyzstan will call for the U.S. army to withdraw from the Ganci Air Base near its capital Bishkek, Kazakhstan News Agency cited Russian media as reporting on Monday.

What does this mean? Hard to say exactly, but it cannot be great news for US military strategic planners. Is that great game they're all playing going to be heating up soon? Kyrgyzstan straddles the high ground between China and Russia and has great strategic value because of its unique geographic position.

depression ahead, prepare for stock rout

This just in from the RC-net:

Guardian | Societe Generale said on Thursday that the United States' economy looks likely to enter a depression and China's could implode. In a highly bearish note, veteran cross asset strategist Albert Edwards said investors should now cut equity exposure after a turn-of-the-year rally and prepare for a rout.

He predicted that the S&P 500 index of U.S. stocks could be set for a fall of nearly 70 percent from recent levels. Edwards also raised the danger of a global trade war with China.

"While economic data in developed economies increasingly reflects depression rather than a deep recession, the real surprise in 2009 may lie elsewhere," Edwards wrote.
"It is becoming clear that the Chinese economy is imploding and this raises the possibility of regime change. To prevent this, the authorities would likely devalue the yuan. A subsequent trade war could see a re-run of the Great Depression."

Edwards has long been one of the most bearish analysts in London, first with Dresdner Kleinwort and then with SocGen. But he called in October for clients to increase their exposure to equities, which he said were due a rebound.

"We believe that the market is (now) set to quickly slide sharply towards our 500 target for the S&P," he said. The S&P 500 <.SPX> stock index is currently at 842, up about 14 percent since hitting a low in November.

Peak Capitalism - economists are killing the planet

In this particular session, I want people to understand the main reasons that humans are committing collective suicide. It's because of worthless methodology on the part of the social sciences AND human nature.

The reason that Greenspan failed to understand the impact of peak oil on the economy is because his "methodology" prevented it. The economists must be denounced for their crimes against humanity and removed from their positions of influence. We could discuss this for days...

"Economists have become a plague as dangerous as rabbits, prickly pear or cane toads. Economists have become the cultural cane toads of Canberra, oozing over the landscape and endangering myriad indigenous species. Not only the economy but also mental health would be greatly improved if we could lift the fog of obfuscation on things economic. The first step is to take economists from their pedestal and to see them as the curiosities they are. The first step to reducing their power is to reduce their legitimacy. How is this to be achieved? First, economists' outpourings should, as a matter of principle, be met with laughter, derision, benign paternalism. They should cease to be employed as media commentators. In the long term they should cease to be hired. Let them be pensioned off and die out. Extinction is a worthy end for a profession whose brief is rotten to the core."
-- Dr. Evan Jones, Economics Department, University of Sydney, 1991

"[The Chicago School of Economics is] a great center of contemporary scholasticism. The economists working there and produced by it are as important to the stagnation of useful thought as the Schoolmen of the University of Paris were at the height of the Middle Ages Like that of the Paris scholastics, their mastery of highly complex rhetorical details obscures a great void at the centre of their argument. A large number of America's economic problems could be solved by shutting down the Chicago School of Economics. The purpose of closure would be simply to disentangle a tendentious ideology from its unassailable position within contemporary power structures. The same sort of liberating shock treatment was applied to European civilization in 1723 when the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was disbanded. The effect was to set free the ideas of the Enlightenment."
-- John Ralston Saul, 1994

gazprom recap and subtext...,

Eurasia Daily Monitor | Russia was supposed to resume pumping gas to the EU through Ukraine on January 13 following trilateral Moscow-Kyiv-Brussels talks, but the Russia-Ukraine gas row is far from over. Neither the issue of Kyiv’s debts, the very existence of which Ukraine denies, nor the conditions of gas supply to Ukraine in 2009 have been clarified. There are fears in Kyiv that Moscow wants to take control of Ukraine’s gas transport network. Meanwhile, Ukrainian industry, heavily reliant on gas, is grinding to a halt; and people are freezing in their homes in subzero temperatures.

Russia stopped delivering gas to Ukraine on January 1 in the absence of contracts for 2009; and it stopped gas transit through Ukraine on January 7, accusing Ukraine of siphoning off gas bound for Europe. Ukraine’s gas monopoly Naftohaz Ukrainy admitted that it had been withdrawing 20 to 25 million square meters of gas from the pipelines a day in order to keep up pressure in the pipe needed to pump gas to the EU. Gazprom agreed to resume gas transit only if inspectors representing the European Union, Russia, and Ukraine could verify that no gas was being siphoned off (Kommersant Ukraine, January 12).

A protocol stipulating the conditions of checking the pipelines in Ukraine was signed by the three parties from January 10 to 12 with the mediation of Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, who traveled between Moscow, Kyiv, and Brussels (Interfax, January 10-12). Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko tried to attach to the protocol a declaration that essentially shifted all the blame for gas transit disruptions on Russia saying that Ukraine did not steal Russian gas and that it had been a reliable partner in gas trade. This angered Moscow. It accepted the protocol only when Tymoshenko backtracked, saying that the declaration was unrelated to the protocol (UNIAN, January 12).

Although gas deliveries to the EU are about to resume, it is too early for the EU consumers of Russian gas to sigh with relief. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned that transit through Ukraine might be halted again if Ukraine resumed “stealing” gas (Interfax, January 11). Ukraine has never admitted to “stealing,” and it is still not clear which side will pay for the “technological” gas that Ukraine uses to maintain pressure in the pipelines. In the absence of contracts between Ukraine and Russia, new disruptions to the gas transit cannot be ruled out.

Russia insists that Ukraine owes $600 million for gas delivered in 2008, and Gazprom wants Ukraine to reimburse $800 million that it lost because of the transit halt (Ekho Moskvy, January 12). But the issue of the gas price for 2009 remains the thorniest. According to Kommersant, Ukraine has agreed to pay $250 per 1,000 square meters of gas, a price Gazprom offered at the end of December and Naftohaz rejected; but Moscow now wants “the market price” of $450, something that Kyiv simply cannot afford (Kommersant Ukraine, January 13).

It is feared in the Yushchenko administration that the gas row may result in Ukraine losing the gas transit network, which is probably the country’s most lucrative asset. Putin said in a recent interview that Russia was not against taking part in the network’s privatization (Interfax, January 11). The head of Yushchenko’s office, Viktor Baloha, accused Russia of “blackmailing” Ukraine in order to grab the network. According to Baloha, if Kyiv did not agree to Moscow’s conditions, Moscow expected an uprising against Yushchenko in the industrial east prompted by a stoppage of the local industry and freezing cold in homes as a result of the absence of gas (Ukrainska Pravda, January 10). Ukrainian laws forbid the network’s privatization.

Chávez Reopens Oil Bids to West

NYTimes | President Hugo Chávez, buffeted by falling oil prices that threaten to damage his efforts to establish a Socialist-inspired state, is quietly courting Western oil companies once again.

Until recently, Mr. Chávez had pushed foreign oil companies here into a corner by nationalizing their oil fields, raiding their offices with tax authorities and imposing a series of royalties increases.

But faced with the plunge in prices and a decline in domestic production, senior officials have begun soliciting bids from some of the largest Western oil companies in recent weeks — including Chevron, Royal Dutch/Shell and Total of France — promising them access to some of the world’s largest petroleum reserves, according to energy executives and industry consultants here.

Their willingness to even consider investing in Venezuela reflects the scarcity of projects open to foreign companies in other top oil nations, particularly in the Middle East.

But the shift also shows how the global financial crisis is hampering Mr. Chávez’s ideological agenda and demanding his pragmatic side. At stake are no less than Venezuela’s economic stability and the sustainability of his rule. With oil prices so low, the longstanding problems plaguing Petróleos de Venezuela, the national oil company that helps keep the country afloat, have become much harder to ignore.

Magic and Realism

NYTimes | One thing seems certain: The meltdown is going to hang over at least the first 18 months of the Obama presidency. The Treasury is bare. Americans are deluged in debt. Confidence has been Madoffed.

That’s the realism. But this 47-year-old man of mixed race, whose very name — O-Ba-Ma — has the three-syllable universality of a child’s lullaby, has always had something of the providential about him, a global figure who looks more like the guy at the local bodega than the guys on dollar bills. That’s the magic.

He needs this magic, which resonates in a voice with the solemn clarity of a bell. Smart power will not be enough. If it were, Americans would have elected Hillary Clinton president.

But in their abiding good sense, Americans intuited the imperative to reach beyond smartness for some ineffable quality, capable of unifying and inspiring at a time of national and global division.

Inevitably, the nation is looking back to 1932. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his first inaugural, with the economy devastated by the Depression. He also said: “This nation asks for action and action now.”

Action followed — a torrent of legislation and speeches in the first 100 days designed to kick-start the country.

Obama has been vowing a similar flurry, but has also been talking down expectations, saying things are going to get worse. That may be true, but he has to be careful. An excess of realism will undo him.

magical false positives...,

Warsocialism | “The human mind evolved to believe in gods... Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to [science] which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms.” – E.O. Wilson

“Magical thinking” is defined as “non-scientific causal reasoning” or “correlation”. I define “political thinking” (which apparently has no formal definition) as trying to prove one’s assertions are true instead of trying to “falsify” them like a scientist or a good engineer.

We are genetically both “magical” and “political” thinkers. However, we can be specifically trained to use the scientific thinking in specific domains. Unfortunately, training in one domain does not mean we automatically use scientific thinking in other domains. The best scientists are just as likely as anyone else to use magic and politics in domains they haven’t been trained in.

Imagine yourself in Africa and you notice a herd of zebra staring intently at the trees. You stop and look at the trees, but you can not see anything. Suddenly a huge lion bursts out of the tree line, grabs an impala, and hauls it off. Every time after that, when you see zebras staring at trees, you will think “lions”. That is precisely the kind of magical thinking which would have kept our ancestors alive.

Political thinking co-evolved and was required to give magical thinking at least half of its value. Saving the lives of your fellows – by convincing them that a lion was nearby – was absolutely vital to your own survival. A few thousand years ago, almost no penalty would be attached to a “false positive” in this “lion in the trees” situation. Today, magical false positives on the part of social scientists are going to kill us all:

“Oil is a renewable resource, with no intrinsic value over and above its marginal cost... There is no original stock or store of wealth to be doled out on any special criterion... Capital markets are equipped to handle [oil depletion].” – M. A. Adelman

The social sciences employ magical (correlation) and political (proving oneself right) thinking. False positives on the part of economists (all economic theory) caused WW1 & WW2.

The “economic method” (correlation and “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”) is the opposite of the “scientific method”:

Hanson's Peak Capitalism Discussion - Day One

Is an "intentionally sustainable" human society to replace capitalism even possible, or are countries condemed to fight to the death over the remaining energy resources? 

This first day I want to introduce a couple of key points raised in Henry Plotkin's EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT IN PSYCHOLOGY and also discuss "magical thinking" in the social sciences. It's literally impossible to understand the problems that confront us today if one's methodology is flawed! Widespread ignorance concerning these topics exists today in our universities (perhaps intentionally for political purposes). Hopefully, the following comments will explain why our universities are helpless in the face of our widespread social problems and lead to changes and solutions. 

Plotkin identifies the origins of evolutionary thought (and the nature-nurture debate) as beginning two thousand years ago in Plato's MENO: 

"Can you tell me, Socrates - can virtue be taught, or is it rather to be acquired by practice? Or is it neither to be practiced nor learned, but something that comes to men by nature..." 

Plato's student, Aristotle, had a profound effect on Western thinking because his teachings were adopted and taught by the Catholic Church. One of Aristotle's major achievements was the invention of formal deductive logic which consisted of four forms of "causation." We are concerned here with Aristotle's first and last causes: the "material cause" and the "final cause." 

MATERIAL CAUSE 

The "material cause" of a book would be the physical processes used in making the book. For example, making paper from trees, making ink, running the paper through the printing press, etc. In other words, Aristotle's material cause would be cause and effect as a scientist would describe it. 

FINAL CAUSE 

The "final cause" of a book would be the "goal" of the book. For example, educating the public. This is also known as "teleological thinking" and is fundamentally unscientific because it places effects before their causes. Nevertheless, Aristotle's 2,000 year old final cause is still used by social scientists today. 

EXAMPLES OF SCIENTIFIC VS TELEOLOGICAL THINKING (or "Magical Thinking") 

Suppose one were playing pool and attempted to hit the ONE ball with the CUE ball. When the cue ball was struck, a scientific thinker would explain the behavior of the CUE ball in scientific terms: Hooke's Law, Newton's Second Law, and so on. However, a teleological thinker would explain the behavior of the CUE ball in terms of goals: the CUE ball wanted to hit the ONE ball. In other words, the teleological explanation places the effect before the cause. 

Suppose a man was driving to work. Suddenly, a dog ran in front of his car. The man swerved to avoid the dog. A scientist would explain his avoidance behavior in terms of photons striking his eye, the signals being sent to the proper areas of his brain, neurons recognizing the image, (and so on): cause before effect. A social scientist - a teleological thinker - would say that he wanted to avoid the dog: effect before cause. 

"Magical thinking" is the common term for the teleological thinking which social scientists use to explain our social world. If you haven't already done so, please view this video  

Over the next couple of weeks, we are going to discuss the issues introduced in this first post. Teleogical thinking is worthless for discovering how the human brain works.

recriminations...,

Guardian | Russia accused the US last night of "orchestrating" Europe's gas crisis as gas deliveries to the EU were halted hours after they resumed, amid venomous exchanges of accusations between Moscow and Kiev.

Gazprom, Russia's gas company, said its pumping stations began sending gas through Ukraine early yesterday, following a monitoring deal signed in Brussels on Monday. But hours later, Gazprom said Ukraine was blocking the flow of gas - adding that the US was to blame.

The EU said "little or no gas" flowed yesterday to countries in central and southern Europe suffering acute energy shortages. Gazprom said Ukraine had stopped shipments and prevented Russian observers from entering its gas stations. Ukraine said Russia had "provocatively" sent the gas the wrong way, and compared Moscow's actions to the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

"We believed yesterday that the door for Russian gas was open but again it's been blocked by the Ukrainians," said Gazprom's deputy chairman, Alexander Medvedev. "It looks like ... they are dancing to the music which is being orchestrated not in Kiev but outside the country."

Falsification

World News | Nearly 70 years ago, in the course of the Second World War, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called "the Red Army" held the millions of the town's inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centres.

The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books - if the Germans had won the war.

War - every war - is the realm of lies. Whether called propaganda or psychological warfare, everybody accepts that it is right to lie for one's country. Anyone who speaks the truth runs the risk of being branded a traitor. The trouble is that propaganda is most convincing for the propagandist himself. And after you convince yourself that a lie is the truth and falsification reality, you can no longer make rational decisions. Falsification

eulogizing the news...,

NPR | Fresh Air from WHYY, January 12, 2009 · After 44 years as a newspaperman, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. is making his debut as a fiction writer. His new novel, The Rules of The Game, features an investigative reporter on the beat of a hotly contested presidential election.

Downie joined the Post as an summer intern in 1964, and retired in Sept. 2008 after serving 17 years as the paper's executive editor. In his last year as editor, the paper won six Pulitzer Prizes for work done in 2007 — the most it had ever earned in one year.

Though I don't think it was the intention of either the interviewer or the interviewee, what I heard in this exchange was an account of the end of newspaper journalism and the obsolescence of the business model and the distribution media (print/online) undergirding traditional journalism in America.

occupied territories

Next Steps

Washington Post | Officials and analysts say Israel's top three political leaders disagree over how the remainder of the war should play out. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is said to favor an expansion, while Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are believed to be more hesitant. Barak has aggressively pushed the talks in Egypt; Livni has said that Israel can soon declare victory and withdraw. The three run the country together and must achieve consensus before Israel can act.

Olmert spokesman Mark Regev acknowledged that Barak, Livni and Olmert don't always see eye-to-eye, but said they have agreed on the war's aims. "It's probably a very good thing that we don't have group-think at the top levels of the Israeli government," he said.

In an interview with Israel Radio on Monday, Livni said Israel had succeeded in proving to Hamas it is serious about deterrence.

"Israel is a country that reacts vigorously when its citizens are fired upon, which is a good thing," she said. "That is something that Hamas now understands, and that is how we are going to react in the future if they so much as dare fire one missile at Israel." Israel and the United States consider Hamas a terrorist organization.

reagan's real revolution...,

Our Future | Our current economic meltdown may finally have ended the era that began when Ronald Reagan became President. Now a new study — from the Congressional Budget Office — helps us understand the inequality that has us melting. Americans in the overall top 1 percent, the 2007 CBO data showed, did quite well in the Reagan era's first quarter-century. Their average incomes, after taking inflation into account, essentially tripled, rising 201 percent.

But these top 1 percent stats, the new CBO data help us understand, hardly tell the full story. The truly stunning income increases over recent decades have gone to the tippy-top of the U.S. income distribution, not the top 1 percent, but the top tenth — and top hundredth — of that top 1 percent.

The higher up you go on the income ladder, in other words, the sweeter the Reagan era.

Between 1979 and 2005, the bottom half of the top 1 percent saw their average incomes only double, after inflation. These incomes increased 105 percent. The next highest four-tenths of the top 1 percent somewhat raised the income bar. Their average incomes, after inflation, rose 161 percent.

That brings us to the top 0.1 percent of Americans. Their incomes, from 1979 to 2005, rose a staggering 294 percent after taking inflation into account. Not bad at all. But the top 0.01 percent did even better. The 11,000 households in this rarified air took home an average $35.5 million in 2005, a 384 percent increase over average top 0.01 percent incomes in 1979.

Need some perspective here? Let's compare Americans at the top to Americans in the middle. Between 1979 and 2005, the average income of America’s statistical middle class — the 20 percent of Americans in the exact middle of the U.S. income distribution — rose, according to the CBO figures, a mere 15 percent. That's less than 1 percent a year. [...]

And that brings us to about the only hopeful news we can take, of late, from the Congressional Budget Office. No one on Capitol Hill has spoken out more clearly on the noxious consequences of preferential treatment for capital gains income than Peter Orszag, the CBO director until last month.

Taxing capital gains at a lower rate than other forms of income, as Orszag has testified to Congress, “creates opportunities for tax avoidance and complicates the tax system.”

As CBO director, Orszag couldn’t do much about capital gains tax breaks for mega millionaires. Now he can. President-Elect Barack Obama last month named Orszag his choice to direct the Office of Management and Budget, the federal government’s most powerful fiscal agency.

no quick fixes...,

GlobeandMail | In November, The New York Times asked a number of prominent energy experts to assess president-elect Barack Obama's chances of ending American dependence on imported oil. Vaclav Smil, the prolific environmental thinker at the University of Manitoba - he's written 25 books - was one of these experts. The only way that Mr. Obama could significantly advance this objective, he said, would be with the help "of a deep and lasting recession." Otherwise, he said, "there will be precious little of any rapid change." As for Mr. Obama's promise to enact a cap-and-trade regime to discourage the use of fossil fuels, "it will only further cripple America's industries."

Why so bleak, Prof. Smil?

"Energy systems are inherently inertial," Prof. Smil said. "Energy transitions take decades to accomplish. Anyone who expects Mr. Obama to transform the world will be disappointed [and] the degree of disappointment that must follow such naiveté will be phenomenal."

Prof. Smil expands on these blunt judgments in the December issue of The American, the business magazine published by the American Enterprise Institute, where he describes in precise detail the time-consuming process of "energy transition." He notes that humans relied almost exclusively on biomass for millennia - wood, charcoal, straw, supplemented everywhere by muscle and here and there by wind (sail) and waterwheel.

In many parts of the world, Prof. Smil notes, humans still relied on these ancient energy sources until the middle of the 20th century - "and in large parts of Africa and Asia the grand energy transition from biomass fuels to fossil fuels has yet to be completed." He identifies 1882 as "the tipping point" in the United States, the year in which Americans first burned more coal than wood. But the global "tipping point" didn't occur until the turn of the century.

Neoconservatism dies in Gaza

Salon | The recent Israeli offensive has put the final nail in the coffin of the Bush administration's Middle East fantasy. The Gaza War of 2009 is a final and eloquent testimony to the complete failure of the neoconservative movement in United States foreign policy. For over a decade, the leading figures in this school of thought saw the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the institution of a parliamentary regime in Iraq as the magic solution to all the problems in the Middle East. They envisioned, in the wake of the fall of Baghdad, the moderation of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the overthrow of the Baath Party in Syria and the Khomeinist regime in Iran, the deepening of the alliance with Turkey, the marginalization of Saudi Arabia, a new era of cheap petroleum, and a final resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on terms favorable to Israel. After eight years in which they strode the globe like colossi, they have left behind a devastated moonscape reminiscent of some post-apocalyptic B movie. As their chief enabler prepares to exit the White House, the only nation they have strengthened is Iran; the only alliance they have deepened is that between Iran and two militant Islamist entities to Israel's north and south, Hezbollah and Hamas.

dr. strangelove indeed....,

NYTimes | President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign officials.

White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States protested, or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying to goad the White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left office. But the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.

The White House denied that request outright, American officials said, and the Israelis backed off their plans, at least temporarily. But the tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a major covert program that Mr. Bush is about to hand off to President-elect Barack Obama.

This account of the expanded American covert program and the Bush administration’s efforts to dissuade Israel from an aerial attack on Iran emerged in interviews over the past 15 months with current and former American officials, outside experts, international nuclear inspectors and European and Israeli officials. None would speak on the record because of the great secrecy surrounding the intelligence developed on Iran.

the view from the holding pen....,

Guardian | These last two weeks have left me deeply troubled. The images of innocent, wounded Palestinians being carried on stretchers to hospitals as they recited the Muslim testimony of faith called out to me. On my deathbed, I will recite the same Islamic declaration of faith. Like a billion Muslims across the world, I identified with the Palestinians.

I desperately tried to understand Israel's position, but couldn't. A ragtag Hamas army and its rockets did not warrant the wrath of F16 jets and Apache helicopters followed by an invasion, with mass killings in their wake. Like most Brits, I looked on aghast. I recalled Britain's involvement in creating Israel in 1948. We had a duty to help Arabs, to make right our historical wrongs. But how?

The constant lies from Israeli government and military spokespeople infuriated me, as did Hamas' warmongering and desire for perennial conflict. Just as Hamas smuggled in rockets over the last six months, Israel meticulously planned this murderous onslaught. While both extremes plan to kill and maim, mostly innocent Arabs and some Israelis lose their lives. How can this happen before our eyes? I got text messages from Muslims across Britain expressing anger, shock and, most important, a deep desire to act. We all wanted to do something, but what? We could not simply sit by and watch as the Israelis killed mercilessly and cleared the decks during the last days of the Bush presidency.

What you don't know about Gaza

IHT | This war on the people of Gaza isn't really about rockets. Nor is it about "restoring Israel's deterrence," as the Israeli press might have you believe.

Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people."

Nearly everything you've been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip.

THE GAZANS Most of the people living in Gaza are not there by choice. The majority of the 1.5 million people crammed into the roughly 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip belong to families that came from towns and villages outside Gaza like Ashkelon and Beersheba. They were driven to Gaza by the Israeli Army in 1948.

THE OCCUPATION The Gazans have lived under Israeli occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel is still widely considered to be an occupying power, even though it removed its troops and settlers from the strip in 2005.

Israel still controls access to the area, imports and exports, and the movement of people in and out. Israel has control over Gaza's air space and sea coast, and its forces enter the area at will.

As the occupying power, Israel has the responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.

THE BLOCKADE Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, with the support of the United States and the European Union, has grown increasingly stringent since Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006.

Fuel, electricity, imports, exports and the movement of people in and out of the Strip have been slowly choked off, leading to life-threatening problems of sanitation, health, water supply and transportation.

The blockade has subjected many to unemployment, penury and malnutrition. This amounts to the collective punishment - with the tacit support of the United States - of a civilian population for exercising its democratic rights.

THE CEASE-FIRE Lifting the blockade, along with a cessation of rocket fire, was one of the key terms of the June cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. This accord led to a reduction in rockets fired from Gaza from hundreds in May and June to a total of less than 20 in the subsequent four months (according to Israeli government figures).

The cease-fire broke down when Israeli forces launched major air and ground attacks in early November; six Hamas operatives were reported killed.

WAR CRIMES The targeting of civilians, whether by Hamas or by Israel, is potentially a war crime. Every human life is precious. But the numbers speak for themselves: Nearly 700 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the conflict broke out at the end of last year. In contrast, there have been around a dozen Israelis killed, many of them soldiers.

Negotiation is a much more effective way to deal with rockets and other forms of violence. This might have been able to happen had Israel fulfilled the terms of the June cease-fire and lifted its blockade of the Gaza Strip.

on the highway to hell....,

Reuters | The U.S. is seeking to hire a merchant ship to deliver hundreds of tons of arms to Israel from Greece later this month, tender documents seen by Reuters show.

The U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command (MSC) said the ship was to carry 325 standard 20-foot containers of what is listed as "ammunition" on two separate journeys from the Greek port of Astakos to the Israeli port of Ashdod in mid-to-late January.

A "hazardous material" designation on the manifest mentions explosive substances and detonators, but no other details were given.

"Shipping 3,000-odd tons of ammunition in one go is a lot," one broker said, on condition of anonymity.

"This (kind of request) is pretty rare and we haven't seen much of it quoted in the market over the years," he added.

The U.S. Defense Department, contacted by Reuters on Friday in Washington, had no immediate comment.

The MSC transports amour and military supplies for the U.S. armed forces aboard its own fleet, but regularly hires merchant ships if logistics so require.

The request for the ship was made on December 31, with the first leg of the charter to arrive no later than January 25 and the second at the end of the month.

The tender for the vessel follows the hiring of a commercial ship to carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip.

A German shipping firm which won that tender confirmed the order when contacted by Reuters but declined to comment further.

endgame...,

Washington Post | This conflict is not merely about land and water and mutual recognition. It is about national identity. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians define themselves by the Holy Land -- all of it. Any territorial compromise would compel both sides to relinquish part of their identity.

In recent years, with the rise of Hamas and the increasing militance of some Jewish settlers, this precariously irrational conflict has also assumed a more religious character -- and thereby become even more difficult to solve. Islamic fundamentalists, as well as Jewish ones, have made control of the land part of their faith, and that faith is dearer to them than human life.

So I find myself among the new majority of Israelis who no longer believe in peace with the Palestinians. The positions are simply too far apart at this time.

I no longer believe in solving the conflict. What I do believe in is better conflict management -- including talks with Hamas, which is a taboo that must be broken. The need for U.S. engagement has led me, along with many other Israelis, to harbor high hopes for the administration of Barack Obama. The Bush administration was mainly concerned with keeping alive a diplomatic fiction called "The Peace Process." But there really was no such "process." Instead, the oppression of the Palestinians continued and intensified, even after Israel had evacuated several thousand settlers from Gaza in 2005. More settlements were put up in the West Bank.

The friendliest thing that President Obama can do for Israel in the long run would be to induce her to return to her original purpose: to be a Jewish and democratic country. Rather than design another fictitious "road map" for peace, the Obama administration may be more useful and successful by trying merely to manage the conflict, aiming at a more limited yet urgently needed goal: to make life more livable for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Collapse by the numbers....,

WSJ Online | The worsening U.S. economy hit the nation's work force hard in December, as the unemployment rate climbed to 7.2% and brought the total number of jobs lost last year to just over 2.5 million -- the most since 1945.

Of those, 1.9 million vanished in just the final four months of the year.

Job losses spared no region or sector, except for small increases in education and health-care services and government employment. The U.S. lost 524,000 jobs in December, the Labor Department said Friday. Financial markets sank on the news, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling 143.28 points, or 1.64%, to close at 8,599.18 on Friday.

1) The average work week has dropped to 33.3 hr, a record low (since the end of WW2), 2) The dark number ( estimated actual unemployed number) rose to 13.5% from 12.8% last month.

If 32hr is regarded as part time employment, we are now very close to being a nation of predominantly part time workers (therefore without benefits).

So our staggering trade deficits (asset losses) should be improving as we buy less? No, in fact it worsened last month as we exported even less. We lost about 750 billion USD in hard assets to the rest of the world, again, this past year from the trade imbalance alone.

Vatican compares Gaza to Nazi camp

Independent | The pope's minister for peace and justice was accused yesterday of speaking like a Holocaust denier after comparing Gaza to a "big concentration camp".

Cardinal Renato Martino, a veteran Vatican diplomat with years of experience as the Pope's delegate to the United Nations, told an interviewer for L'Avvenire, the daily paper of the Italian bishops, that "nobody" in the Israel-Hamas dispute "sees the interests of the other, but only their own". He continued: "But the consequences of egoism are hatred for the other, poverty and injustice. The ones who pay are always the defenceless populations. Look at the conditions in Gaza: more and more it resembles a big concentration camp."

He added that "both sides" were to blame for the dispute and must be separated like feuding brothers. "The world cannot just look on, doing nothing," said Cardinal Martino. His comments were later echoed by Pope Benedict XVI, who said "the military option is not a solution and violence from whichever side must be firmly condemned".

But Israel and its supporters reacted angrily to the cardinal's implied comparison of Gaza to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. "We are astounded to hear from a spiritual dignitary words that are so far removed from truth and dignity," said Yigal Palmor, a Foreign Ministry spokesman.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, went further, saying such comments "are only used against Israel by terrorist organisations and Holocaust deniers".

The row cast doubt on the Pope's tentative plan to visit the Holy Land in May.

Obama camp 'prepared to talk to Hamas'

Guardian | The Guardian has spoken to three ­people with knowledge of the discussions in the Obama camp. There is no talk of Obama approving direct diplomatic negotiations with Hamas early on, but he is being urged by advisers to initiate low-level or clandestine approaches, and there is growing recognition in Washington that the policy of ostracising Hamas is counter-productive. A tested course would be to start ­contacts through Hamas and the US intelligence services, similar to the secret process through which the US engaged with the PLO in the 1970s. Israel did not become aware of the contacts until much later.

A UN resolution was agreed last night at the UN, calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire between Hamas and Israeli forces in Gaza. The resolution was passed, though the US, represented by secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, abstained.

Richard Haass, a diplomat under both Bush presidents who was named by a number of news organisations this week as Obama's choice for Middle East envoy, supports low-level contacts with Hamas provided there is a ceasefire in place and a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation emerges.

Another potential contender for a ­foreign policy role in the Obama administration suggested that the president-elect would not be bound by the Bush doctrine of isolating Hamas.

"This is going to be an administration that is committed to negotiating with ­critical parties on critical issues," the source said.

you can fool some people some of the time....,

HuffPo | By New Year's Day, Israel's cheering squad had turned the opinion pages of major American newspapers into their own personal romper room. Of all the editorial contributions published by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times since the Israel's war on Gaza began, to my knowledge only one offered a skeptical view of the assault. But that editorial, by Israeli novelist David Grossman, contained not a single word about the Palestinian casualties of IDF attacks. Even while calling for a cease fire, Grossman promised, "We can always start shooting again."

Israeli public relations agents fanned out to broadcast studios from the US to Europe, fulfilling an aggressive strategy conceived after the country's catastrophic 2006 attack on Lebanon. An analysis by Israel's foreign ministry of eight hours of coverage across international broadcast media concluded that Israeli representatives received a whopping 58 minutes of airtime compared to only 19 minutes for Palestinians. "Quite a few outlets are very favorable to Israel, namely by showing [its] suffering. I am sure it is a result of the new co-ordination," said Major Avital Leibovich, an IDF spokesperson who has become a fixture on cable news in the past weeks.

But while Israel's PR machine cranked its Mighty Wurlitzer to full blast, drowning out all opposing voices with its droning sound, a surprisingly substantial portion of the American public decided to dance to its own tune. According to a December 31 Rasmussen poll (so far the only measure of US opinion on the Gaza assault), while Americans remained overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, they were split almost evenly on the question of whether Israel should attack Gaza -- 44% in favor of the assault and 41% against it. The internals are even more remarkable.

Oil, Gas, and Palestinian Peace

OilandGasInvesting | In the late 1990s, the Palestinian government was able to secure an agreement with British Gas that allowed them to begin drilling for natural gas and oil in the Mediterranean Sea. After years of drilling and exploration, Palestine was rewarded with an oil reserve 22 miles off of the coast of the Gaza Strip. The entire country was excited by this natural mineral that would hopefully provide them with the economic freedom and financial stability they desired. Unfortunately, the financial success did not come directly on the heels of their discovery.

International instability and internal political strife has made it extremely difficult for Palestinian officials to utilize their newfound resource. In 2005 Israel delivered a major blow to the Palestinians fledgling oil industry by choosing to import natural gas from Egypt. By doing this, Israel completely bypassed its neighbor in favor of making a political statement.

This deal completely destroyed Palestine’s early plans to establish a flourishing gas industry in Gaza that would create many much needed jobs and earn the Palestinian government millions in taxes. The millions the government planned to receive were based on the Gaza Marine field containing 1.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Many experts and Triple Diamond Energy Corp. believe that this reserve would be able to amply cover all of Palestine’s energy needs with much left over to be used for trade.

Substantially more and very interesting detail about Palestinian energy resources here.

Countries affected by Russia-Ukraine gas dispute

(Reuters) - Ukraine's state energy company Naftogaz said on Wednesday that all Russian gas supplies to Europe via Ukrainian territory had halted at 0544 GMT (12:44 a.m. EST) in a pricing dispute.

Following are summaries of the gas supply situation in European countries affected by the action.

AUSTRIA

Gas flows stopped on January 7. Russia supplies 51 percent of Austria's gas.

Oil and gas group OMV was drawing on reserves, domestic production and other imports to guarantee supply.

The company has about 1.75 billion cubic meters of gas in storage, enough to supply Austrian household demand for three months during the winter.

GERMANY

E.ON Ruhrgas said gas shipments to Europe via Ukraine had been massively reduced since early on Tuesday and expects gas transit into Germany via Czech Waidhaus border point to stop entirely during the day.

Germany receives more than 40 percent of its gas from Russia. Energy firms warned of gas shortages if the dispute lasted much longer and sub-zero temperatures endured.

ITALY

Russian gas imports via the TAG pipeline were substantially interrupted from 1 a.m. on Wednesday.

Russia supplies around 31 percent of Italy's gas imports, or about 60 million cubic metres a day.

Italy has enough gas reserves to last several weeks, according to Industry Minister Claudio Scajola.

Italy has no reasons for concern regarding its energy supplies over the next few weeks in the wake of the gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine, the chief executive of oil and gas company Eni, Paolo Scaroni, said on Tuesday.

Scaroni said that since the first gas crisis between Russia and Ukraine at the start of 2006, Eni had put in place a policy of diversifying gas supplies and boosting gas storage.

FRANCE

Russian shipments dropped by more than 70 percent on January 6. French Energy group GDF Suez guaranteed supplies.

France imports 15 percent of its gas supply from Russia. It does not rely on gas in the same way as Germany or Italy because 80 percent of its electricity is produced by nuclear energy.

Remaining effected countries listed at Reuter's link above.

Idle ports signal two 'bleak' years ahead...,

Calgary Herald | Port traffic is slowing around the world -- everywhere from North America to Asia -- as a recession erodes consumer demand and the credit crisis chokes off loans to export-dependent companies. International trade is set to fall by more than two per cent next year, the most since the World Bank began measuring it in 1971. Idle ports are showing how quickly a collapse in trade can spread, undermining growth in each country it reaches.

September and October are typically Long Beach's busiest months as U.S. retailers take deliveries for holiday sales. This year, September imports fell 15.8 per cent from a year earlier, October's dropped 9.5 per cent, and November's slid 13.6 per cent.

"Everybody expects 2009 to be a bleak year," said Jim McKenna, chief executive officer of the Pacific Maritime Association, a San Francisco-based group representing dock employers at U.S. West Coast ports. "Now, it looks like 2010 is going to be just as bleak."

Slowing trade is both a cause and an effect of the first simultaneous contraction in the world's largest economies since the Second World War. Throughout this decade, trade grew by an average 12 per cent a year, reaching $13.6 trillion in 2007 and propelling growth in nations including Germany, China and Chile. Now the evaporation of financing and collapse in demand threaten an activity that accounts for a quarter of the $54-trillion global economy.

"We are having this dramatic reversal," said Michael Finger, a trade economist in Geneva since the early 1970s. "I'm a long time in this business, but this is unique."

Scripting Asian Civil War?

Washington Post | Indian authorities and international experts have expressed the suspicion that the good intentions of Pakistan's civilian leaders are not necessarily shared by its military and intelligence establishments, which were forged in a decades-long rivalry with India and have sponsored armed Islamist groups in Indian Kashmir and in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet conflict there.

But Qureshi and Pakistan's intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, said Wednesday that the country's security forces are subservient to civilian authority and committed to supporting democratic rule. "It is completely clear to the army chief and I that this government must succeed," Pasha said of Zardari's administration. "I report regularly to the president and take orders from him."

Pasha also ruled out the possibility of going to war with India, telling the online edition of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel that Pakistan is "distancing itself" from such conflict and that "we know full well that terror is our enemy, not India." He acknowledged, however, that although he had been willing to travel to India after the Mumbai attacks, some senior officials were "simply not ready" to make such a gesture to Pakistan's longtime adversary.

Indian Outsourcing Giant Admits Fraud

Washington Post | The leader of one of India's largest technology outsourcing companies, Satyam Computer Services, on Wednesday admitted cooking its books and committing other grave financial wrongdoing to inflate profits over several years. The revelation shook India's stock market and sent shockwaves across the country's booming software industry, while television commentators quickly dubbed Satyam "India's Enron."

Satyam's auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, said Wednesday that it was examining Raju's statement but declined to comment further. Satyam had 631 clients at the end of June, and U.S.-based companies make up an estimated 60 percent of its revenue.

Financial observers expressed fears that other Indian technology companies might be hiding accounting skeletons similar to those of Satyam, casting doubt on the celebrated outsourcing industry and oversight of its companies. Observers worried that the scandal could erode the confidence of overseas clients.

The National Association of Software and Service Companies in New Delhi issued a statement calling Satyam "a stand-alone case of failure of corporate governance" that is not a "reflection on the industry or corporate India."

Scripting European Civil War?

Washington Post | Is this really the way to resolve what has been a byzantine bilateral argument over prices and transit fees? Of course not -- but that's not Mr. Putin's objective. The real aim is to advance Russia's aggressive strategy of using its energy exports to divide Europe and undermine those states it still considers its rightful subjects, beginning with Ukraine. Listen to Mr. Putin's ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin: "It's clear that if Europe wants to have guaranteed natural gas supplies, as well as oil in its pipelines, then it cannot fully rely on its wonderful ally, Mr. Yushchenko." Viktor Yushchenko was democratically elected Ukraine's president in 2004 after a Moscow-backed vote-rigging operation backfired. Like Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, the Ukrainian leader strongly favors the entry of his country into NATO. Mr. Putin responded to Mr. Saakashvili with an invasion last August; now he has launched an offensive against Mr. Yushchenko.

Some in Europe will no doubt buy Mr. Rogozin's argument, just as they blame Mr. Saakashvili for the Russian troops still entrenched on Georgian territory. Like its Georgian counterpart, Ukraine's government has many weaknesses, which Mr. Putin has ruthlessly exploited. But the real message of this cold week is the same that European governments have repeatedly received -- and largely ignored -- in recent years. Mr. Putin's regime plainly intends to use Europe's dependence on Russian energy to advance an imperialist and anti-Western geopolitical agenda. The only rational response is a dramatic acceleration of the European Union's search for alternative sources of energy -- and greater support for those countries that Russia seeks to subjugate.

Russian and Ukrainian Politics

Washington Post | With its economy in deep trouble, Ukraine has little to lose by using its control of European fuel shipments to resist Russia's demand for a price increase. By contrast, Russia is suffering huge losses in immediate gas revenue and enormous damage to its reputation as an energy partner seeking European investment. Yet political considerations seem to have prevented the Kremlin from surrendering.

The Kremlin's relations with Ukraine have been strained since the 2004 street demonstrations known as the Orange Revolution, which resulted in a pro-Western government in the former Soviet republic that is seeking membership in NATO and the European Union. Ties worsened last year after Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko vocally backed Georgia in its August war with Russia.

Putin later accused Ukraine of secretly supplying arms to Georgia before and soon after the fighting broke out. Some analysts say he is trying to using the fuel cutoff to damage Ukraine's reputation in the West and sink its NATO bid while undermining Yushchenko. Russian officials have singled out Yushchenko for criticism in the standoff, saying he refused to authorize Ukrainian negotiators to sign a deal on New Year's Eve.

"Russia is trying to browbeat us," said Ivan Lozowy, president of the Kiev-based Institute of Statehood and Democracy. "Polls show that Russians are more concerned about the loss of superpower status than poverty or economic issues. And for Russia to reestablish itself as a great power, Ukraine is critical."

Russia Cuts Gas, and Europe Shivers

NYTimes | Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly, halted nearly all its natural gas exports to Europe on Tuesday, sharply escalating its pricing dispute with neighboring Ukraine. The cutoff led to immediate shortages from France to Turkey and underscored Moscow’s increasingly confrontational posture toward the West. Across Europe, countries reported precipitous drops in gas pressure in their pipelines at the peak of the winter heating season in a bitterly cold January.

The cutoff appears to have multiple aims.

Ukraine has angered Russia by seeking membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as has Georgia, a country Russia fought a brief war against last summer.

Mr. Putin is also under heavy pressure domestically. Oil and gas exports provide about 60 percent of the Russian budget; oil prices, meanwhile, have fallen by about two-thirds since their peak last summer.

The effects are rippling through the economy. The ruble is being devalued, Russian companies are facing bankruptcy and the government’s huge budget surplus will turn into a deficit next year if prices do not rebound, analysts say.

At the same time, Russia’s relations with the West slumped to post-cold-war lows after Russia sent troops into Georgia in August.

Even as Russia will need foreign investment to offset dwindling energy export revenues, options are dwindling for attracting investors to a country that even in the best of times had a poor track record of property rights.

“The Russian elite mind-set right now is a residue of petro-confidence slamming into the financial crisis,” said Cliff Kupchan, a director at the Eurasia Group, a global risk-consulting firm based in New York. “So in my view, they’re confused about whether to seek help from the international financial system to solve their problems that way or continue a bare-knuckled approach to the world.”

Gazprom is seeking to raise the price Ukraine pays for gas to $450 per 1,000 cubic meters, from $179.50 last year.

The ghettos of Warsaw and Gaza

NOW | When Germany conquered Europe, the Nazis first rounded up Eastern European Jews into ghettos before sending them to extermination camps, the most notorious of which was in Warsaw, where 440,000 people were piled up in a narrow surface area surrounded by walls. These Jews started dying in large numbers, as they were deprived of food, medication and heating, in addition to a ban on leaving the ghetto and arbitrary assassinations. Approximately 100,000 are estimated to have died of deprivation, brutality and sickness in the ghetto, not to mention deportations toward the death camp of Treblinka. Such was the situation that, in early 1943, the ghetto numbered 71,000 occupants only, with many being forced to leave to concentration camps on a daily basis.

A group of young Jews decided to resist and formed the Jewish Military Union, which was initially composed of boys and girls aged 13 to 22. These volunteers fought deportation and took control of the ghetto. Against all odds and expectation, they resisted to the Nazi offensive from January 18 to May 16, 1943 and were ultimately eliminated, but not without extracting a heavy price from their oppressors.

The situation in Gaza is strangely similar to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, albeit on a different scale and intensity. As was the case with Hitler, who wanted an Aryan Germany and Europe without Jews, the Zionists seek a Jewish Palestine without Palestinians. After implementing a terror policy that drove the majority of Palestinians to flee, they expropriated their properties much like the Nazis did in the 1930s. And as was the case with the Nurnberg Laws, Israel subjected the Palestinians to a policy of ethnic cleansing using threats, terror, economic strangulation, expropriation of properties, humiliation and violence, thus pushing Palestinians to raise the banner of the Intifada.

A 50-Year Farm Bill

NYTimes | For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.

Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.