American *Aerobics* in Beijing

A nightclub activity mostly considered the domain of strippers in the United States, pole dancing — but with clothes kept on — is nudging its way into the mainstream Chinese exercise market, with increasing numbers of gyms and dance schools offering classes.

The woman who claims to have brought pole dancing to China, Luo Lan, 39, is from Yichun, a small town in Jiangxi Province in southeastern China. Her parents teach physics at the university level.

“I’m not good at science like my parents. I’m the black sheep of my family, in that sense,” she said.[...]

“People here have never seen a pole dance, and for that reason they don’t associate it with stripping or women of ill repute,” Ms. Luo said. “I knew if I could give people a positive first impression of this as a clean, fun, social activity, people wouldn’t just accept it, they’d embrace it.” In today's NYTimes....,

Population bomb 'ticks louder than climate'

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.''

MSM Meltdown Coverage

It's very interesting to read, compare, and contrast the guarded coverage given to the meltdown of the American financial system in the mainstream media. Time for a new coinage perhaps? "financial correctness" - describing that paradoxical limbo state in which a commentator wants to write a powerful truth yet durst not do so for fear of engendering a self-fulfilling prediction. Funny stuff, when all the established models, methods, and jargon are found wanting to describe the goings on in the fin d'siecle absolute capitalist hierarchial food powered make work enterprise. In the NYTimes - Bank Investors Expect Less as Losses Mount;

It has now been a year since the credit crisis erupted, and, so far, the optimists have been proven wrong time and again. Skeptics say it could take years for banks to recover from the worst financial crisis since the Depression. And even when things do improve, the pessimists maintain, banks’ profits will be a fraction of what they were before.

There are many reasons for caution. Home prices continue to decline, and defaults are accelerating on a wide range of loans. As lenders struggle, loans are becoming even more scarce for hard-pressed consumers and companies. That, in turn, could slow any recovery in the broader economy.

For now, at least, some investors seem to have become so inured to the bad news that results that would have once been viewed as disastrous are now seen as good, or even great. The sober phrase often used on Wall Street to describe solid corporate results — “better than expected” — has been replaced by “not as bad as feared.”

In the Washington Post - A Depression? Hardly;

The specter of depression stalks America. You hear the word repeatedly. Are we in a depression? If not, are we headed for one? The answer to the first question is no; the answer to the second is "almost certainly not." The use of "depression" to describe the economy is a case of rhetorical overkill that speaks volumes about today's widespread pessimism and anxiety. A short history lesson shows why.

The Great Depression of the 1930s -- the last time the term rightly applied -- was industrial capitalism's worst calamity. U.S. unemployment peaked at 25 percent in 1933; it averaged 18 percent for the decade. From 1929 to 1933, 40 percent of U.S. banks failed. People lost deposits; businesses and consumers lost access to credit. Over the same period, wholesale prices dropped a third, driving farmers and firms into bankruptcy. Farm foreclosures, shantytowns (called "Hoovervilles," after the president) and bread lines followed.

This was a social as well as economic breakdown. Our present situation bears no resemblance to this. In June, unemployment was 5.5 percent, slightly below the average since 1960 of 5.8 percent. It's true that banks and investment banks -- Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia -- have suffered large losses. But on the whole, the banking system seems fairly strong. Although profits in the first quarter of 2008 were down 46 percent from 2007, they totaled $19 billion even after $37 billion set aside for loan loss reserves. Overall corporate profits are still running at a near-record annual rate of $1.5 trillion.

The unmentionable turd in the proverbial financial punchbowl is the unmentionable (and largely unperceived) end of the era of cheap energy. Though the normative economic claptrap is the equivalent of pre-Copernican astronomy - and not seeing Peak Oil is the equivalent of believing that the sun revolves around the earth - it is what it is, the dominant narrative constraining folks understanding of what's around that signpost up ahead.

The Oil Man Cometh

Really good op-ed in today's NYTimes;

There he is, the sound of money in a wizened Texas drawl, the tired realist looking a bit like the John Huston character from “Chinatown” as he warns in national television ads that we should just listen here and do as he says.

And what the 80-year-old T. Boone Pickens says, in a $58 million campaign, is that we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices. By implication, anybody who tells you otherwise — including the fellow Texan he helped put in the White House — is a fraud.

This is a political parable for the ages: the guy who was behind one of the knockout punches to John Kerry four years ago is now doing Democrats the biggest favor of the election by calling Republicans on their phony energy campaign.

“Totally misleading” is the way Pickens describes Republican attempts to convince the public that if we just opened up all these forbidden areas to oil drilling then gas prices would fall. He’s not against new drilling, but he is honest enough to say it wouldn’t do anything.

Republicans are furious at their longtime benefactor. Senator John McCain is currently running an ad in which he directly blames Barack Obama for $4-a-gallon gas at the pump — as bogus a claim as anything yet made in 2008.

Then along comes Pickens, Texas oilman and billionaire corporate raider, overwhelming the McCain attack with a saturation message that has the added value of being true, as Henry Kissinger once said about another matter.

Pickens was a geologist before he found a deep pool of money, so when he says “the geology just isn’t there” to reduce oil imports through new drilling in offshore areas, he has some cred.

But, more importantly, Pickens is betting $10 billion in constructing what he says will be the world’s largest wind farm in the gusts of West Texas. If the mighty winds of the American midsection were harnessed, it could free up plentiful natural gas for vehicles — a relatively quick step away from foreign oil.

Would it enrich him further? Yes. But perhaps it’s not about money. In “Chinatown,” the old man played by Huston was asked by Detective Jake Gittes what more he could possibly buy at his age.

“The future, Mr. Gittes. The future.”

I watched old dood give some of his testimony in congress and I found it shockingly convincing.

A City’s Police Force Now Doubts Terror Focus

Time to stop clowning and playing make-believe.

Flush with federal domestic-security grants, the police department acquired millions of dollars’ worth of hardware and enrolled officers in training courses to detect and respond to a terrorist attack.

But much has changed. Now, police officials here express doubts about whether the imperative to protect domestic security has blinded federal authorities to other priorities. The department is battling homicides, robberies and gang shootings that the police in a number of cities say are as serious a threat as terrorism.

The Providence police chief, Col. Dean M. Esserman, said the federal government seemed unable to balance antiterror efforts and crime fighting.

The domestic side of the GWOT boondoggle is about to have to begin winding down. There haven't been any instances, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the *preparations* (i.e., spending like a drunken sailor on useless crap with which to wage a make believe war to defend the homeland) Of course, just like with the so-called *war on drugs* - none of the allegedly grown folks charged with waging the *war* spoke out against the opportunity to play dress-up, cowboys, cops and robbers and live their very own little overextended fantasy against non-violent offenders - while the big drug wholesalers and manufacturers grew richer and more powerful with little or no threat of police interdiction.

Limits to Growth V 2.0

More Parasitic Delusions V. 2.0

Reading the current issue of Technology Review, it occurred to me that the business of scavenging infrastructural metal appurtenances for scrap shares a great deal in common with the the gossipy business of scavenging information concerning the personages and doings of folk in the dot.com *industries*. I suppose in the former, at least something useful is being pilfered and trafficked, while in the latter?

Nothing brought this notion home more clearly than the opening letter from the editor of the Review titled "The Next Bubble";

I know a little about Web bubbles.

From 1996 to 2002, I was the editor of Red Herring, a magazine the Wall Street Journal dubbed the "bible of the boom." We described the startups of the first bubble, explained their innovations, and chronicled their wonderful capacity for "wealth creation"--our polite shorthand for the fortunes their investors and employees made on a speculative stock market.

While we issued stern warnings about financial euphoria, we profited from it, too. By the middle of 2000 we had some 500,000 enthusiastic readers. Every month, we published two issues of more than 600 pages, whose editorial content was written by expensively recruited journalists from Forbes and the Journal, and whose ads were bought by startups keen to announce their existence, technology vendors frantic to sell products and services, and investment banks eager to brag about the public offerings they had underwritten. It was big business, at least for publishing: in the first six months of 2000, we earned more than $100 million in circulation, advertising, and sponsorship revenues.

The name Red Herring is a reference to the practice of calling a preliminary investment prospectus a "red herring" as a warning to investors that the document was not complete or final. The name reflects the publication's mission: providing a first look at the companies and trends that are shaping the business of technology.

With the exception of a small handful of ventures that facilitate and disintermediate a specific class of commercial transactions, amazon.com, ebay, google, etc..., the web 2.0 focused on trying to monetize *social networking* - i.e., scavenge value from human relationships - has proven to be a complete and abject boondoggle. None of the social networking sites makes any money. Other than trading on the personal information of social networking site users for sale to advertisers and others, there's no plan on the horizon for adding value to the users and generating revenue in return for tangible value added;

The new development in 2000 was the Web's alchemical ability to make markets for books, software, or stocks more efficient. In 2008, it is the collaborative, social functions of Web 2.0 that excite investors. The trigger for the dot-com collapse was multibillion­-dollar sell orders for bellwether tech stocks that were processed simultaneously soon after NASDAQ reached its high of 5132.52 on March 10, 2000, leading to an unprecedented selloff. Today, the collapse of the housing market and its derivative securities might close the market for initial public offerings and so discourage further investment in Web 2.0 ventures. The Web companies of both eras, however, reveal the same structural problems: they have no clearly understood business, but float on investors' capital and hope that getting big quickly will lead to profits.

As Bryant Urstadt explains in "Social Networking Is Not a Business", last March Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook for $240 million, giving the social-networking site a notional valuation of $15 billion. Yet according to Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, Facebook will lose $150 million this year. Similarly, Google paid $900 million in 2006 for the right to deliver ads on MySpace, the largest of the social networks, for three years--but Google says the results have been disappointing. So far, no one has much idea what will do for Web 2.0 what keyword advertising (the source of most of Google's 2007 revenues of $16 billion) has done for search.

Not only am I reminded of the pathetic plague of utterly alienated metal scavengers - I'm reminded of the unfolding spectacle of the collapse of the consumption-driven parasitic American financial house of cards built on a foundation of meringue..., didn't any of these folks ever listen to some Billy Preston back in the day?

Mining Urban Streets for Metal

Nice little slideshow visually documenting the state of affairs, and efforts to combat it serving as the accompaniment to the article Philadelphia Streets Unsafe for Manhole Covers.;

Francis McConnell is a field supervisor for the Philadelphia Water Department, but lately he is acting more like an undercover police officer.

Several hours a day, five days a week, he stakes out junkyards. Pretending to read a newspaper, Mr. McConnell sits near the entrances and writes down descriptions of passing pickup trucks and shirtless men pushing shopping carts.

His mission is to figure out who is stealing the city’s manhole covers and its storm drain and street grates, increasingly valuable commodities on the scrap market. More than 2,500 covers and grates have disappeared in the past year, up from an annual average of about 100.

Thieves have so thoroughly stripped some neighborhoods on the city’s north and southwest sides that some blocks look like slalom courses, dotted with orange cones to warn drivers and pedestrians of gaping holes, some nearly 30 feet deep.

Two adolescents were injured in recent months after falling into uncovered holes, motorists and cyclists are increasingly anxious about damaging tires, and the city is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars — $300,000 at last count — to replace the missing covers.

“They used to say the streets around here will swallow you up, but they were talking about drugs and guns,” said Keith Thomas, 32, as he hoisted a radiator he collected onto a scale at a junkyard in a drug-ravaged section of the Kensington neighborhood on the city’s north side.

It's indicative of where we're at, that thieves have been systematically stripping the available appurtenances of the infrastructure on which the communities - in which they themselves reside - depend. These people are fundamentally at odds with their own physical and social environment - scavenging from communal life support because they are no longer supported or self-supporting in that context. The folks doing this are canaries in the proverbial American coal mine....,

Debt Capitalism Self-Destructs

The once-dynamic US economy has turned itself into a system in which it is difficult to find any institution, company or individual not over their head in speculative debt. Undercapitalized capitalism, also known as debt capitalism, has been the engine of growth for the US debt bubble in the last two decades. This debt capitalism cancer is caused by a failure of central banking.

In the face of a broad systemic collapse of debt capitalism, where capital has become dangerously inadequate and new capital hazardously and prohibitively scarce, having been crowded out by massive debt collateralized by overblown assets of declining value and with a credit crisis that clearly requires systemic restructuring and comprehensive intensive care, those in the US responsible for the financial well-being of the nation seem to have been reacting tactically from crisis to crisis with a script of adamant denial of obvious facts, symptoms and trends, with no signs of any coherent grand strategy or plan to save the cancerous system from structural self-destruction. Says Henry C.K. Liu in today's Asia Times Online.

Hell Hath No Limits....,

Nice essay by Wendell Berry in the May Harper's Magazine apropos of our Faustian predicament;

The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such “biofuels” as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that “science will find an answer.” The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

This belief was always indefensible—the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed—and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but—thank God!—still driving.)

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. We have insistently, and with relief, defined ourselves as animals or as “higher animals.” But to define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves as limitless animals—which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define Himself: “I am that I am.”

The psychosocial machinery required to pull back from the abyss is broken. The political spectacle only serves to show exactly how broken our beliefs and practices have become. I took a shuttle bus ride through the airport in Houston yesterday morning and paid close attention to the details that I'd previously smugly ignored. The energy intensity of heavier than air travel is simply staggering. To look at it, is to know in no uncertain terms that this can't keep going for very much longer.

McCain's Pump Ad....,

This John McCain campaign teevee ad begs the question, no screams the question, just how stupid do you expect your constitutents to be?

I honestly wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my very own eyes on C-SPAN this morning. But I guess given y'day's news that McCain has likely gotten Dobson's endorsement - that there's now just no limit on the depths of stupid that the McCain campaign will seek to mine for votes.

It's not like either candidate is saying anything suggestive of the possibility of "Jesus in a Jug" leadership - but - making prima facie absurd pronouncements like this ad does, just seems beyond the pale....., if Obama can be conflated in the mind of any single American voter with the root cause of rising prices at the pump - when we know good and well the root cause of rising prices at the pump then we absolutely and positively deserve whatever leadership that we get.

Brass Thieves Hit Fire Hydrants

And they don't quit, and they don't stop...., Dogs aren't the only ones casting a longing eye at fire hydrants these days. Fire departments across the country report that thieves are twisting the brass nuts off the tops and selling them for scrap, raising concerns that the hydrants won't work when needed most.

Firefighters responding to an April house fire in Hesperia, Calif., found that the five closest hydrants were useless because thieves had taken the nuts needed to get to the water. They called in special equipment, but by the time they got the fire under control, the house was a total loss.

"It definitely delayed us. It's become a real problem," said Tracey Martinez, spokeswoman for the San Bernadino County Fire Department, whose firefighters now carry spare parts to access hydrants that have been tampered with, though using them can cost valuable time.

Brass parts are fetching higher prices at scrap recyclers, though a single hydrant nut is unlikely to be worth more than $10 even in the current inflated market.

Fire hydrants aren't the only target — thieves have stolen brass ornaments from graves in Chicago and West Virginia, chrome-plated brass piping from men's bathrooms at fast-food restaurants in Pennsylvania, and brass plaques from churches in Houston.

But the hydrant thefts raise unique safety concerns. Officials in Prince William County in northern Virginia recently found that nearly four dozen hydrants had been stripped of their brass nuts, rendering them inoperable.

"This is an extremely high priority concern because of the potential devastation it can cause," said Assistant Fire Chief Hadden Culp, who has never seen such a problem. "We're not used to pulling up to a hydrant and it not working."

Too Big To Fail

as American debts swell and foreigners hold more of it, nervousness grows that, some day, this arrangement will end badly. The dollar has been declining in value against other currencies. Some foreigners have begun to hedge their bets by buying more euros. “Obviously, this is going to come to an end,” Mr. Schiff said. “Foreigners are not charitable organizations, and they’re going to demand that we pay them back.”

No single country owning large amounts of dollar-based investments is inclined to dump them abruptly; nobody aims to start a panic. But fears have begun to grow that one day a country may get spooked that another is about to dump its dollars — and that could trigger pre-emptive panic selling.

“Foreigners could decide it’s just not worth the risk and sell,” says Andrew Tilton, an economist at Goldman Sachs. “The really dire scenarios have become a lot more likely than they were a year or two ago.”

Still, as Mr. Tilton and others are aware, one fundamental reality continues to offer assurances that foreigners will still buy American debt:

In the global economy of the moment, the United States itself is too big to fail.

The logic for that assurance goes like this:

The American consumer has for decades served as the engine of world commerce, using borrowed cash to snap up the accoutrements of modern living — clothes and computers and cars now manufactured, in whole or in part, in factories from Asia to Latin America. Eliminate the American wherewithal to shop, and the pain would ripple out to multiple shores.

In which the Freddie and Fannie bailouts serve as a metaphor for the economic house of cards built on a foundation of international meringue sustaining the dollar....., in y'day's NYTimes week in review.

Global Balance of Oil Wealth Shifts Towards Africa

From the UK Telegraph; By 2015, America will buy one quarter of all its oil from Africa, compared with about 15 per cent from Saudi Arabia, and the continent will become the superpower's largest single supplier, with the sole exception of Canada. Two reasons lie behind this crucial change in the global pattern of oil production.

First, Africa possesses a large proportion of the world's untapped reserves, mainly in offshore fields.

For decades, oil companies steered clear of Africa and conducted relatively little exploration. While new fields were discovered in the Middle East, the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska and South America, Africa was neglected.

Hence Africa now accounts for a high proportion of discoveries. Of the eight billion barrels of new reserves found in 2001, seven billion were in Africa.

While this figure was unusually high, at least one third of all global oil discoveries since 2000 have taken place in Africa, mainly in the Gulf of Guinea along the coastlines of Angola, Nigeria, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea.

Thanks to high oil prices, it makes economic sense to develop these new fields and conduct further exploration. Angola's proven reserves now exceed 11  billion barrels. But there could be two or three times as much oil still lying undiscovered along the country's vast Atlantic coastline. The central goal of America's energy policy is to diversify suppliers.

Golf Course Environmental Profile - Water

Interesting full series can be reviewed here. Some elements, pesticide, energy use - haven't been published yet, but are scheduled for later this year.

• The average person in the U.S. uses 100-175 gallons of water every day at home….
• In Africa, the average family uses 5 gallons a day.
• 15 billion is spent annually on bottled water in the U.S. 24% is ordinary tap water repackaged by major soft drinks companies. More than 70% of the plastic bottles are not recycled; 38 billion bottled end up in U.S. landfills.
• The United States uses about 346,000 million gallons of fresh water every day.

“When it comes down to it, it’s up to each community to decide what is a fit use for water,” Lyman says. “That’s where the percentage that golf uses is important — at the local level. I think where golf needs to be at the end of the day is to be known as an efficient user of water. If it is, it justifies a seat at the table to help decide how communities use their water.”

The Southwest agronomic region leads in annual water use per facility with 149.5 million gallons, followed by the Upper West/Mountain region with 97.9 million gallons. The Northeast region uses the least, 13.8 million gallons per facility. Interestingly, in total annual water use, the Southeast, with more than 3,200 facilities, consumes 260 billion gallons, while the North-Central, with 4,125 courses, uses 92 billion gallons.

The second survey of GCSAA’s Golf Course Environmental Profile is in, and results are being released this summer. The survey estimates that U.S. golf courses account for just 0.5 percent of the country’s daily water use. Photo courtesy of The Toro Co.

The survey divided the U.S. into seven agronomic regions — Northeast, North-Central, Transition, Southeast, Southwest, Upper West/Mountain and Pacific — and Lyman found it interesting that significant differences in water use, irrigated acres, costs, etc., surfaced across the regions.

“This study really documented the diversity of use in a way that we haven’t known before,” he says.

For instance, of the estimated 762 billion gallons in total annual water use on U.S. golf courses, the use per facility ranged from almost 250 million gallons a year in the Southwest and Upper West/Mountain regions combined — 2,300 courses — to only 29 million gallons in the Northeast and North-Central regions — 6,800-plus courses. Likewise, the annual cost of irrigation water in the western three regions is far above the rest of the country (topped by nearly $108,000 per course in the Southwest). Moreover, the proportion of courses that pay nothing for water is well over half of those in the four eastern regions.

The differences by region in the number of acres of irrigated turf on 18-hole facilities follows the pattern, but in far less dramatic fashion. Irrigated turf acreage, however, sticks out in the survey results as one of the issues that is a bit disconcerting to the golf course industry.

The Southwest region has the highest irrigation water costs at $107,800 per facility a year. The Pacific region is the next highest at $42,400 per facility. The lowest annual costs are in the North-Central region, $4,700. In recent years, irrigation water costs have increased at 27 percent of U.S. courses and have decreased at only 3 percent of the facilities.

Oil prices Impacting Golfers

From today's New Zealand Herald; The time is coming when golfers will have to choose - pay more to cover the increasing cost of oil or play on scruffier courses with longer grass?

That's the conundrum posed by the New Zealand Sports Turf Institute in the latest New Zealand Golf Update. Their fact sheet reinforces that golf, more than any other sport, will have to make significant adjustments.

Maintenance and grooming of grassed properties at least 40ha, means machinery fuel, fertilisers, pesticides and other chemicals, many of which are oil-based.

The Sports Turf Institute has taken a pragmatic view. Firstly, it asks if all the course, especially areas not intended for play, really need to be mowed and maintained. It suggests some areas off the fairway, well away from where you're supposed to hit the ball, could be re-vegetated with cluster planting of native species requiring no further maintenance. It may make the course more difficult to play - but is that a bad thing?

Sovereign Funds Shift to Asia

From Reuters; Sovereign wealth funds, controlling over $3 trillion in assets, are likely to turn to investments in Asia, a move likely to push the U.S. dollar lower against Asian currencies including the Japanese yen.

"This is not a euro-dollar story. It's going to be a developed world versus developing world story," said Stephen Jen, who heads up Morgan Stanley's global FX strategy.

Authorities in Kuwait this week said the state's sovereign wealth fund, which manages its massive petro-dollar assets, will not buy future Fannie or Freddie debt, opting instead to boost investments in stocks, bonds, and real estate in China, India and Japan.

A Chinese think-tank also said the travails at the two U.S. government-sponsored enterprises add urgency to China's goal of diversifying its $1.8 trillion stockpile of currency reserves.

Limits to Growth

Blackouts Spread

The daily synthesis comes courtesy Falls Church News Press.

Unfortunately, several major countries appear to be on the path to an energy shortage-induced economic and perhaps political collapse within the foreseeable future which obviously will have serious consequences for us all.

Currently, the most serious situations appear to be in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Both are nations with populations in excess of 150 million people that are ensnared in devastating power shortages that have destroyed their export industries. Both are facing water and agricultural problems that threaten their food supplies. Liquid fuels are running short and reductions in exports threaten their ability to import oil and natural gas. It was recently revealed that the Saudis already are forgiving $6 billion of Pakistan's $12 billion annual oil import bill.

On top of this, Pakistan has nuclear weapons and its strategic location is vital to the course of the insurgency in Afghanistan. Worsening blackouts, the liquid fuels shortage and probably the food situation are likely to lead to serious political instability before the year is out.

Where race/caste, cornucopian/population, peak oil/energy and Mayawati musings all blend together to form a vaguely coherent whole.

India's Obama

Here's a data point I suspect you may want to begin to follow, if you haven't done so already.

Kumari Mayawati, a daughter of so-called untouchables and India’s most maverick politician, stunned the nation last year when she won majority control of India’s largest state with an inventive political coalition that fused votes from up and down the ancient Hindu caste pyramid.

Now, with national elections only months away, Ms. Mayawati has emerged as the most important low-caste politician in India’s history, and she is asserting herself as a rainbow coalition leader, a woman whom all Indians can trust to be their prime minister one day. How far she will rise remains to be seen. But there is no disputing her importance.

While the advance of so-called low-caste, or Dalit, politicians like Ms. Mayawati has reshaped Indian politics for 20 years, no one from her social rank has so shaken up the country’s traditional political order. Dalits represent roughly 16 percent of the population and have traditionally been shunted to the lowest rungs of Indian society.

Also in today's NYTimes.