Global Governance Strained

From the Christian Science Monitor - Food crisis: A daily quest for bread in Cairo;

Egyptians are living through the worst food crisis in a generation, caught in a storm of stagnant wages, rising global food prices, rampant corruption, and a quickly advancing inflation rate that hit 16.4 percent in May. The price of basic commodities like bread, wheat, rice, and cooking oil has doubled since this time last year – prompting bread riots.

The riots are why Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was a featured speaker among 40 government leaders at the three-day UN food summit that concluded Thursday in Rome. Mr. Mubarak called for an end to subsidies for biofuels because they are creating a "hazardous distortion to the present system of agricultural trade."

While Mubarak pushed for changes abroad, his government struggles to meet the basic needs of Egyptians.

Under a government order, bakers now start work at 4 a.m. to produce enough bread for everyone waiting in the city's bread lines, says Yasser Shalaby, who owns a bakery with his brother Said in another part of Imbaba.

Once at work, they labor under the careful watch of government supervisors. The supervisors ensure they bake through the day, but there are allegations that they participate in theft and smuggling as often as they prevent it.

Bread line violence in other parts of the city has led to brawls in which at least a dozen people have died since January.

Bread shortages have eased since government measures went into effect but inflation and high prices show no signs of ending anytime soon.

Not Quite Yet....,

Of course, I could be mistaken. But having slept on it, this morning I'm disinclined to think that yesterday's market meltdown and oil price spike constituted anything remotely approaching the last straw. I believe that the energy bubble is still in its early phases and that controls will be implemented to ensure that this bubble expands gradually until all possible profit is extracted. If it were to explode prematurely, then TPTB would miss out on their vampiric extraction of remaining collateral value from the middle and the bottom.

Speculative analysts echoed this view;

"In the past two months nothing very dramatic has happened to warrant an increase in the oil price to $135. This is pretty much 100 percent speculation," he told the Reuters Global Energy Summit from Singapore.

"It is very likely and possible that we will go back again to the $100 range as speculators take profits and go out of the market. It could happen by end-August or latest by September."

Blue Gardena....,

This just in from my man rembom. Gardena pushing up hard on the $5.00 Gas Club. Today, at 190th and Western, Gardena, CA. (note the palm tree in the background Ed Dunn, in case you're busy scrutinizing....,)

Nitrogen Fertilizer

My man BD keeps it truthy and keeps the subrealist ouevre on its toes, thank you sir;

Photo of $8.95 20# bag of garden fertilizer attached. I recently bought several bags for TSHTF purposes since the price has not gone up appreciably yet in response to the oil skyrocket. Price was same as a year ago.

$5 did sound waaay high - but organic fertlizer is more expensive than commercial fertilizer. At the end of the day, urine is a better nitrogen fertilizer than chemical nitrogen. A little humanure, compost from your own yard, ashes from your fireplace and barbeque and some regular golden showers, and voila! The form of the fertilizer makes a HUGE difference.

As for the rest, spending to treat wastewater sewage is both wasteful and destructive to the environment. That urban output has a far more valuable and immediate application to victory gardening and doesn't drag gallons of tapwater down the drain to send it gushing out of your apt. or house and into the infrastructural money pit.

The Water Crisis - A Practical Solution

Local food production is the basis of all economies and the missing component in modern cities.

The economic potential of capturing human urine is stunning. Human urine is 18% organic nitrogen and has been used in agriculture for thousands of years. Sweden, Germany, Holland and many other countries have been using and processing human urine for agricultural purposes and to protect the environment from water based sewer systems. Human urine is the only renewable, sustainable and economically feasible source of nitrogen available to humanity and it is free.

What is the economic value of human urine? Here is how it works, the value of comparative petroleum derived fertilizer with the same 18% nitrogen content is approximately $10.00 a gallon and requires a massive polluting industry that is not renewable. The average person produces 2 liters of urine a day or roughly $5.00 worth of organic nitrogen. A city like Miami flushes down the drain 10 to 20 million dollars worth of nitrogen a day and spends another fortune to do it. Integrated Recycling is the future of our economy and could replace taxation in funding community services. The cities will become fertilizer factories and urban and suburban farming and food production could provide a sustainable, local food supply. Schools and churches could be nurseries and local gardening centers, hubs of city and urban agriculture and recycling. This could be a sustainable, local system that is a renewable doable foundation for local economies.

This section on water/sewage is in the midst of other, more general material. For more of the author's thoughts about agriculture see Interview.

The Urban Farmer

In the Independant;

Last April, in a discussion about the global food crisis, Gordon Brown announced: "We need to make great changes in the way we organise food production in the next few years." High on the list of viable changes is the idea of inner-city agriculture. Which is the theory behind Haeg's concept, detailed in his new book Edible Estates: it proposes the replacement of the domestic front lawn in cities with "an edible landscape". Last year, to illustrate this point, Haeg was commissioned by the Tate to create a permanent "edible estate" on a triangle of communal grass in front of a housing estate near Elephant and Castle, bordered on two sides by a main road along which London buses thunder every few minutes.

The aim was to engage and involve the local residents – and together they miraculously transformed a patch of grass previously favoured by dogs and drunks into a luscious agri-plot housing apple and plum trees, a "forest" of tomato plants, aubergines, squashes, Brussels sprouts, runner beans, sweet peas, a "salad wing", herbs, edible flowers and 6ft artichoke plants. It is also quite beautiful: "The design was inspired by the ornate, curvy raised flowerbeds you find in front of Buckingham Palace," explains Haeg. Interestingly, although this space is still accessible by passers-by – unlike the traditional allotment, which Haeg feels is outdated – there has been no theft or vandalism. The London project was mirrored in several locations around the US. [...]

Many are already talking about it. Inspired by the "victory gardens" of the First and Second World Wars, when civilians were urged to "dig for victory" to survive the food shortages. [...]

It's not just about financial and health benefits – Wright has also noticed social benefits. "People who have not spoken for five years are suddenly chatting again, discussing what they've grown. And it brings together people from different cultures too – they lean over the fence and reminisce about the vegetables they grew in their countries as children – okra, bananas, yams, sweet potatoes."

Wright describes one gardener, an elderly widow, who has planted an almond tree as a memorial to her late husband and says he would have loved to see how the space had been transformed. "One guy has even replaced the photo of his family on his mobile phone with a picture of the garden. It's given them so much pride."

The impact of the garden has been enormous, says Wright. People from further and further away are coming along to get involved, learn new skills and socialise. "They see it and it's like a lightbulb and they say, 'We want our own edible estate.' Well, it makes sense, doesn't it?"

farm's wells going dry as water competition stiffens

New subdivisions, industrial sites, playing fields all pumping water from changing eastern Travis County. Since the wells on their eastern Travis County farm went dry this month, Katie and David Pitre have struggled to water and wash the vegetables they sell at farmers markets. Their three children have showered at the YMCA, and their dishes have had to be cleaned with pond water.

Relying on a nearby creek for irrigation and the generosity of neighbors for water to wash dirt off their vegetables, the Pitres say they will still show up to farmers markets today and make their weekly home deliveries to their 170 customers.


The situation exemplifies how changing land-use patterns in eastern Travis County have driven competition for water. In what was once a primarily rural area, a fleet of subdivisions, industrial sites and playing fields have jockeyed with farms for limited water resources. Gieselman said the county could probably not sell water to the farm because it is not a utility. He said the farm could try to buy water from a supplier with nearby wells, such as Manville.

When the Pitres asked a local water supplier whether an agricultural water rate existed, they had little luck. "We were told, 'Most farmers rely on Jesus,' " said Katie Pitre, 39. "When you grow row crops for your living, you can't rely on Jesus all the time." From the Austin American Statesman.

Essential BioScience

Nana, when I complete the communication tools for social networks technology project I've been working on for the past few years, I plan to retire to cultivate goats and mushrooms.

Entrepreneurial mycologist Paul Stamets seeks to rescue the study of mushrooms from forest gourmets and psychedelic warlords. The focus of Stamets' research is the Northwest's native fungal genome, mycelium, but along the way he has filed 22 patents for mushroom-related technologies, including pesticidal fungi that trick insects into eating them, and mushrooms that can break down the neurotoxins used in nerve gas.

There are cosmic implications as well. Stamets believes we could terraform other worlds in our galaxy by sowing a mix of fungal spores and other seeds to create an ecological footprint on a new planet.

Permanent Occupation

In today's Independant; Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control

Bush wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all American soldiers and contractors

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.

The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

But the accord also threatens to provoke a political crisis in the US. President Bush wants to push it through by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory and claim his 2003 invasion has been vindicated. But by perpetuating the US presence in Iraq, the long-term settlement would undercut pledges by the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, to withdraw US troops if he is elected president in November.

The timing of the agreement would also boost the Republican candidate, John McCain, who has claimed the United States is on the verge of victory in Iraq – a victory that he says Mr Obama would throw away by a premature military withdrawal.

Good Riddance......,

The Humvee has GOT to go....,

Wagoner said the change in the U.S. market to smaller vehicles likely is permanent. "We at GM don't think this is a spike or a temporary shift," Wagoner said.

On the Hummer, Wagoner said GM is "undertaking a strategic review of the Hummer brand, to determine its fit with GM's evolving product portfolio" in light of changing market conditions.

"At this point, we are considering all options for the Hummer brand... everything from a complete revamp of the product lineup to partial or complete sale of the brand," he said.

General Motors is closing four truck and SUV plants in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, affecting 10,000 workers, as surging fuel prices hasten a dramatic shift to smaller vehicles.

CEO Rick Wagoner said Tuesday before the automaker's annual meeting in Delaware the plants to be idled are in Oshawa, Ontario; Moraine, Ohio; Janesville, Wis.; and Toluca, Mexico. He also said the iconic Hummer brand will be reviewed and potentially sold or revamped.

Grid Lock

A month ago, I posted an article about sweeping systemic weaknesses in the U.S. electrical power grid. Sure enough, gridlock is beginning to take its toll as folks seek to bring alternative power sources online;

Thousands of wind turbines in the US are sitting idle or failing to meet their full generating capacity because of a shortage of power lines able to transmit their electricity to the rest of the grid.

The issue of transmission capacity will be high up the agenda as 10,000 wind power industry executives descend this week on Houston, Texas, where the shortage of power lines is hampering the state's alternative energy plans. The problem is particularly acute in Texas because of the speed with which it has grown its wind power industry, two years ago surpassing California as the state with the most capacity. The solutions devised in Texas could form a model for the future of the industry in the US and elsewhere, as energy companies look beyond fossil fuels for cheaper and greener sources of power.

and, as folks flee the rising costs of heating fuel and try to get their home heating needs met by power off the grid;

An emerging issue around the world and perhaps here soon is that people are switching to electric heat in response to higher heating fuel prices or actual shortages. An overload of the grid leads to "load shedding" or a complete shutdown. Rolling blackouts are the daily fare in many countries already (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, China, India, Albania, Argentina, Tajikistan, etc etc). Lack of reliable electricity already has had devastating consequences to the economy in those countries. E.g., in South Africa many mines and coal-to-liquid fuel plants had to shut down, inoperable traffic lights snarl traffic, farmers cannot irrigate their fields nor ventilate stored harvests, and dairy farmers cannot milk their cows.

Here in Vermont the current fixed low price for electricity is actually no more expensive (per delivered BTU) than the current prices of propane and heating oil (but not natural gas, yet). Check out the state's fuel price report - the per-btu chart is in the PDF report linked from there. Also, while many are pondering how to afford a fuel delivery, everybody can "buy" electricity on credit, and are not quickly disconnected if they put off paying the bill. If too many people plug in electric heaters during a cold snap, this may cause a bigger problem. If blackouts result, most people would lose their heating altogether: only those with wood stoves or generators would retain heating.

We're not even talking about the hybrid hypercars yet that will get 100 plus MPG and need to be plugged in at night to recharge, instead, we're talking about meeting existing basic needs, and, trying to bring renewable power sources online. Seems to me that a $50-100 Trillion infrastructure re-investment needs to be directed toward the power grid. Hmm.., wonder where that money's gonna come from?

The Dominoes Fall - Collapse Casualties

Trucking company downsizes;

WH Transportation Co. has plans to lay off 340 employees from its operations in Wisconsin, Ohio and Georgia, citing rising fuel expenses.

The company, which expanded into the van freight business in the 1980s, will focus on delivering housing components for its sister companies Wausau Homes and Sterling Building Systems. In addition, it will deliver general flatbed freight for other customers.

"Everyone's costs, especially fuel, continue to increase, and the industry cannot raise rates sufficiently to cover the increases due to the national economic downturn," Tom Schuette, the company's co-owner, said in a news release. "The flatbed business is the best business for us to be in."

Schuette declined to elaborate Monday about the company's decision to downsize, according to an employee at Wausau Homes. WH Transportation will continue its van trailer service through July, and then reduce its Wisconsin staff to 80 employees, according to the written statement.

The company did not specify how many employees it would lay off in Wisconsin. The 340 total employees include drivers, owner operators, service technicians, support personnel and dispatchers.

The company's Web site, ironically, stated on Monday that it's still hiring drivers.

With diesel at $4.80/gallon, this is just the first of many. Independent truckers have been falling off like flies. The long haul trucking industry is a dead man walking. The return of rail will actually be a good thing, but it will be intensely upsetting for many for some years to come.

The Codex Alimentarius

Codex Alimentarius was created in 1962 as a trade Commission by the UN to control the international trade of food. Its initial intentions may have been altruistic but it has been taken over by corporate interests, most notably the pharmaceutical, pesticide, biotechnology and chemical industries. Codex Alimentarius will go into global implementation by December 31, 2009.

The Gods of Greed

Fabulous audio treatment of the failings of the "free" market in yesterday's Guardian;

the chief executives of Britain's five largest banking institutions - Barclays, HBOS, HSBC, Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland - met the Bank of England. In the jargon of the City, they wanted governor Mervyn King to widen the types of collateral against which the Bank would lend to the clearing banks. In plain English, they wanted him to lend taxpayers' money against much flakier assets than would normally be considered acceptable.

Why did they need this handout? Because banks themselves had stopped lending each other money. The collapse of the US housing market, and the complex financial instruments that had been spun off from it, had caused chaos in the money markets. The victims of last year's "subprime crisis" included two of the world's most respected banks, America's Bear Sterns and France's BNP, while the "credit crunch" that followed claimed Britain's Northern Rock. Those banks that escaped unharmed were sure of only one thing: with so many of their peers exposed to incalculable risks, there was more bad news to come.

But it doesn't end there;

Speculation has left the global economy more vulnerable to a financial collapse than at any time since 1929. According to the supposedly sophisticated models used by market practitioners, a stock-market crash such as the one in 1929 was likely once in 10,000 years. They said the same, however, about the stock market crash of 1987, the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998 and the subprime crisis. The obvious conclusion is that these models are flawed. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently described the crisis that erupted last August as "the largest financial shock since the Great Depression". George Soros, the billionaire speculator who knows a thing or two about financial upsets, says the world is facing the "most serious crisis of our lifetime".

Extracted from The Gods That Failed: How Blind Faith in Markets Has Cost Us Our Future by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson

Is Humanity Sustainable?

Abstract; The principles and tenets of management require action to avoid sustained abnormal pathological conditions. For the sustainability of interactive systems, each system should fall within its normal range of natural variation. This applies to individuals (as for fevers and hypertension, in medicine), populations (e.g. outbreaks of crop pests in agriculture), species (e.g. the rarity of endangerment in conservation) and ecosystems (e.g. abnormally low productivity or diversity in ‘ecosystem-based management’). In this paper, we report tests of the hypothesis that the human species is ecologically normal. We reject the hypothesis for almost all of the cases we tested. Our species rarely falls within statistical confidence limits that envelop the central tendencies in variation among other species. For example, our population size, CO2 production, energy use, biomass consumption and geographical range size differ from those of other species by orders of magnitude. We argue that other measures should be tested in a similar fashion to assess the prevalence of such differences and their practical implications.

Copper Thieves Knock Out Cable in South KC Area

Kansas City Police received a call today about copper thieves cutting wires near Red Bridge and Blue River Road.

No arrests have been made.

Time Warner Cable has a recorded message on their phone saying, “We’re experiencing an outage of all services in the south Kansas City area.”

NBC Action News tried to reach Time Warner Cable, but a representative for Time Warner did not return our calls.

Wizards at War VIII - Are Physicists Smart?

Given what we know about the social, energetic, and capital costs of the warsocialist enterprise, the fact for example, that war has driven up the cost of energy by $6 Trillion in the past few years, this is not an idle or superfluous question.

It's been a while since I posted anything to the Wizards at War series. Not for lack of information, it's just that there's been so much "the end of the world as we know it" (TEOTWAWKI) to cover, that I got sidetracked. Prof. Dennis Rancourt posed this question a couple of years ago, leading with the assertion that "80 % of physicists in North America work for the military";

Eighty percent of physicists in North America work for the military, in the world’s largest military economy. But of course physics students are drawn to physics because all can be understood via the physics portal and because worm holes are neat. Students search for meaning and social status and find military and corporate service, often in an environment that maintains the neat-problem mental bubble first cultivated in sci-fi and electronic game land.

If you’re already smarter than everyone else (as is generally the working assumption in most professions), then you don’t really need to venture out into other fields – that are so primitive and qualitative and descriptive in comparison to physics.

Other fields…? Other methods…? Complexity…? Professional physicists have so buried themselves into their culture of the doable, the mappable, the reducible, the solvable, the codable, … that they are largely unable to perceive complexity.

In objective terms, physicists are among the smartest folks in the general population. However, the institutions and acculturation surrounding the professional practice of physics channels and subverts these keen intellects into some of the most destructive and least productive areas of human endeavor.

Active Denial System

60 Minutes updated and rebroadcast its story on Raytheon's Active Denial System last night. I found the CBS story piquant in light of the domestic law enforcement applications touted in the revised story. Interestingly, alternet found it interesting in that regard last week as well and scooped 60 Minutes;

Coming soon, from the folks who brought you the microwave -- Raytheon! After more than ten years in the making and at a cost of over 40 million dollars, 'Silent Guardian', or Active Denial System, (ADS, in it's formal mood), is almost ready for public release!

Yes, Raytheon -- manufacturer of the 100 bunker buster bombs kindly flown by America to Israel at the height of their bombardment of Lebanon, and supplier of electronic equipment for the apartheid wall built on Palestinian land; -- Raytheon -- with its 73,000 employees worldwide and annual revenues of 20 billion dollars has gone and done it again!

For, Raytheon -- the world's largest producer of guided missiles, and fifth largest defense contractor in the world, provider of aircraft radar systems, weapons sights and targeting systems, communication and battle-management systems, and satellite components -- has come up with a system which could scatter a crowd in a trice without a drop of blood being spilled.

Yes, folks, originally designed to protect military personnel against small-arms fire without the use of lethal force, Silent Guardian, ADS, the Pain Ray, call it what you will, (Raytheon would prefer you not to use the latter however), will finally soon be here!

The question posed by Michael Dickinson, how long before the "Holy Grail of crowd control" is used to quell domestic dissent? Those doggone physicists are always up to something, aren't they?

Fuel is a Feminist Issue

Fascinating column in the Times Online;

Fuel duty is not just a political deal-breaker for Gordon Brown; it is a genuinely feminist issue. Without the short cuts afforded to women by cheap, flexible, personal transport, many working mothers would simply not be able to honour their various commitments to home, children and employer. Until someone can arrange the establishment of a Utopian Britain, where children cycle half a mile to school down empty, safe country lanes and mums work just around the corner, the car, for better or for worse, is going to remain king - and fuel duty an issue that affects even those sections of society without tattooed forearms.

Amanda Kovatanna put it best;

Along the way, he reveals pithy insights to explain how the American system works in contrast with the Russian one. For instance the story of the classless society is exemplified by the concept of a middle class — something Americans have proudly espoused — which he points out is held together by the common denominator of everyone owning a car. That's right, not education, not equal opportunity, or equal rights but the one-ton behemoth that we must have to get around the wasteful geography created by suburbia.

We know about this waste from the film The End of Suburbia and James Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere and all the other peak oil fellows, but Orlov points out that because we are so identified with owning a car as part of this American middle class identity we will be hard put to let it go. And when we are forced to (due to diminishing and increasingly expensive gasoline supplies) so will go the myth of the middle class.

And there it is in a nutshell. Few national politicians dare give voice to what's just beyond the signpost up ahead. Being unwilling and unable to discuss reality, how then could they ever go about proposing, much less implementing, any of the radical engineering redesigns required to genuinely rebuild along viable and sustainable lines? The patient is as yet utterly unwilling to hear an objective and accurate diagnosis. With no diagnosis, how can she participate in her own treatment, much less get on board with the radical measures required to effect an actual cure?

Airline Deathwatch

Also in the Times Online;

Airlines are being forced to pay cash in advance for jet fuel as the major oil companies tighten the screws on an industry that is being crushed by an extraordinary surge in the price of crude oil.

Sources within the airline industry indicate that credit is being denied to most of the leading American carriers and the practice is moving to Europe and Asia. So uncertain is the cash solvency of the industry that jet fuel suppliers insist on prepayments into special bank accounts.

A credit controller at a leading European multinational oil company told The Times that the oil industry was moving to jet fuel prepayment. “It’s common in the US and it is moving to Europe. We have been moving to prepayment since Swissair went bust.”

The need to put up money before delivery of fuel is a huge financial burden that has been shifted from the oil companies to the airlines. According to John Armbrust, a US jet fuel consultant, the oil industry had $5 billion (£2.5 billion) of jet fuel credit outstanding to airlines before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Now they are demanding that airlines leave cash on deposit.

You Are On Your Own!!!

Three days late, and three dollars short is all that the government is capable of being in response to the massive issues du jour. Neither presidential candidates or the deliberative body of congress is up to the task at hand. Given that all the candidates are from the deliberative body, well......,

The possible economic cost of confronting global warming — from higher electricity bills to more expensive gasoline — is driving the debate as climate change takes center stage in Congress.

The Senate will begin considering legislation Monday that would mandate a reduction in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from power plants, refineries, factories and transportation, cutting heat-trapping pollution by two-thirds by mid-century.

The debate opens as Americans are reeling over $4 gasoline and soaring expenses to heat and cool their homes. That's making it all that harder to sell the merits of a bill that would transform the nation's energy industries and — as its critics will argue — cause energy prices to increase even more.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., one of the chief sponsors of the bill, says computer studies suggest the overall impact on energy costs could be modest with several projections showing overall continued economic growth. The measure calls for tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks to offset higher energy bills, its sponsors say.

Returning from the Memorial Day recess, lawmakers also have to fix the international food aid and trade components of a farm bill that, through a printing error, were left out of the parchment version that President Bush signed into law last month. And the House and Senate are still working on a bill to fund the Iraq war another year, expand G.I. Bill college benefits and strengthen New Orleans levees.

While this week's Senate debate on global warming is viewed as a watershed in climate change politics, both sides of the issue acknowledge the likelihood of getting the bill passed is slim, at least this year.

Speaking of 3rd Rails - Legitimizing Marijuana

In today's NYTimes online;

Medical marijuana is legal in California, but federal law still bans sales. Amid the uncertainty that this creates — including the occasional raid by federal agents — a full-fledged industry has blossomed, taking in about $2 billion a year and generating $100 million in state sales taxes, CNBC reported.

Setting up a clinic “can cost as much as a hundred grand,” Ms. Wells reports. The equipment, the cuttings from which plants are grown and office space all tend to be expensive. And from there, the costs only grow, mostly in the form of legal fees. Many clinics keep lawyers on retainer.

Nonetheless, “this is the business model of the future,” says JoAnna La Force of Farmacy, an herbal remedy shop in Southern California. Ms. LaForce says her business is close to breaking even (medicalmarijuanafarmacy.com).

The business model of the future won't just be about folks in California who want to self-medicate or even just to get high, rather, it'll be about locally cultivated and utilized Food, Fuel, and Fibre.

Energy - THE Political Third Rail

OK, so this one comes directly out of the twilight zone. I can't believe I missed it last week, but then again, it WAS strategically placed in the Religion section of the Sunday Washington Post. James Howard Kunstler was one of the first non-petroleum hitters to write a book and participate in a documentary intended to colorfully and accessibly communicate the challenges aborning from Peak Oil.

Wake Up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster

Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.

I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system -- or even a fraction of these things -- in the future. We have to make other arrangements.

The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:

The way we produce food

The way we conduct commerce and trade

The way we travel

The way we occupy the land

The way we acquire and spend capital

And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.

So those are the facts and they comprise a lot of the grist we mill hereabouts.

In any discussion of political "third rail" issues, it's meet and right to talk about the climate setting that takes place in the mainstream media, given the media's role in defining normative discourse. I mean, there's gotta be a reason they call it "mainstream" right? Kunstler goes there, and I guess thereby provided the WaPo with all the reason it needed to bury this column in its religion section;

Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a U.N. environmental conference told their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is "not up for negotiation." This stance is, unfortunately, related to two pernicious beliefs that have become common in the United States in recent decades. The first is the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. (Oprah Winfrey advanced this notion last year with her promotion of a pop book called "The Secret," which said, in effect, that if you wish hard enough for something, it will come to you.) One of the basic differences between a child and an adult is the ability to know the difference between wishing for things and actually making them happen through earnest effort.

The companion belief to "wishing upon a star" is the idea that one can get something for nothing. This derives from America's new favorite religion: not evangelical Christianity but the worship of unearned riches. (The holy shrine to this tragic belief is Las Vegas.) When you combine these two beliefs, the result is the notion that when you wish upon a star, you'll get something for nothing. This is what underlies our current fantasy, as well as our inability to respond intelligently to the energy crisis.

These beliefs also explain why the presidential campaign is devoid of meaningful discussion about our energy predicament and its implications. The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our current lifestyle is absurd. So is the gas-tax holiday. (Which politician wants to tell voters on Labor Day that the holiday is over?) The pie-in-the-sky plan to turn grain into fuel came to grief, too, when we saw its disruptive effect on global grain prices and the food shortages around the world, even in the United States. In recent weeks, the rice and cooking-oil shelves in my upstate New York supermarket have been stripped clean.

So here's our catch-22 in all its bizarre magnificence. Because it's been ignored, and all mainstream policy and praxis, including corporate for-profit policy and praxis has been driven in the absence of knowledge about Peak Oil, everyone is essentially unprepared for the massive changes at hand.

Because no one is prepared to deal, nobody of consequence in the public sphere is empowered to responsibly broach the central issue facing the American polity, i.e., the end of the era of cheap energy and all that that entails for the end of the American "way of life". Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar, but you're gonna catch unheard of political hell if you're a presidential candidate and you try to light that bad boy up in a public space.

Kent WA Joins the $4.00 Gas Club

Courtesy Big Don - Today in Kent Washington

Zbig....,

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser, said that the pro-Israel lobby in the US was too powerful, while the slur of anti-Semitism was too readily used whenever its power was called into question.

Presenting a solution for the Middle East, he listed historical compromises that had to be made by Israelis and Palestinians but accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) – the largest and most influential Jewish lobby group – of obstructing peace efforts.

He said: "Aipac has consistently opposed a two-state solution and a lot of members of Congress have been intimidated and I don't think that's healthy." Full Monty in the UK Telegraph.

Father Pfleger

Obama said he was "deeply disappointed" by Pfleger's comments. "As I have traveled this country, I've been impressed not by what divides us, but by all that unites us," he said in a statement. "That is why I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger's divisive, backward looking rhetoric, which doesn't reflect the country I see or the desire of people across America to come together in common cause."

Where is the Outrage?

Robert Scheer at TruthDig; Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of the detailed 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture, issued last week by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Because the report was widely cited in the media and easily accessed as a pdf file on the Internet, it is fair to assume that those of our citizens who remain ignorant of the extent of their government’s commitment to torture as an official policy have made a choice not to be informed. A less appealing conclusion would be that they are aware of the heinous acts fully authorized by our president but conclude that such barbarism is not inconsistent with that American way of life that we celebrate.[...]

Evidently the FBI’s long history in such matters had led to a protocol that stressed gaining the confidence of witnesses rather than terrorizing them into madness. But an insane prisoner is the one most likely to tell this president of the United States what he wants to hear: They hate us for our values.

Global Rorschachian

In english Al-Ahram, Gamal Nkrumah writes one of the strangest, most disjoint assessments of a political figure that I've ever seen. It's a mess which perfectly exemplifies the unique rorschachian qualities that Baraka Obamamandius brings to the face of global hegemony.

Barack Obama is a deft politician. He makes sure that all and sundry understand that there is much to be gained from peering into the deep recesses of his mind. Obama is not, contrary to what many of his detractors would have us believe, about obscurantism. There is a world of difference between an obscurantist attitude and a multifaceted and manifold mind.

There is nothing nebulous about Obama. He is also a heart-throb with a head for political foresight. He is not about entertaining his audience, as many American politicians, particularly black ones, have been prone to do. The phenomenon of a magnetic politician driving America in a new direction is nothing new. Comparisons have been made between Obama and John F Kennedy. However, steering America away from the warpath is no walkover task, as the latter learned the hard way.

However, the political climate in America today appears to be ready for change, even though those who espouse anachronistic opinions hold out.

"...And during the few moments that we have left, we want to have just an off-the-cuff chat between you and me -- us. We want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand."

"Ask not what your country can do for you"

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Cult of Personality

Global Scenario Planning

From the dystopian management consulting files, i.e., the stories used to rationalize operational changes, rather than the substantive changes in how we do what we do, "Future scenarios is intended to help both policy makers and activists come to terms with the end of the era of growth."

While the end of growth is so unthinkable to many policy makers and economists that they use the term ‘negative-growth’, we now face less and less available energy each year, coupled with a destabilized climate. The simultaneous onset of climate change and the peaking of global oil supply represent unprecedented challenges for human civilisation. Each limits the effective options for responses to the other.

Future Scenarios uses a scenario planning framework to bring to life the likely cultural, political, agricultural and economic implications of peak oil and climate change. Scenario planning uses stories about the future as a reference point for imagining how particular strategies and structures might thrive, fail or be transformed. Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures. Each is a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines. Scenarios range from the relatively benign Green Tech to the near catastrophic Lifeboats scenario.

Cerritos Joins the $4.00 Gas Club

Courtesy Rembom - May 28, 2008, at Bloomfield and Artesia, in Cerritos, CA

The Genetic Determinism Open Thread

quoth Big Don;

You can't debate with folks who won't even believe mountains of undisputed peer-reviewed research and related supporting statistics from a multitude of respected sources that all point to the same conclusions.

responded Submariner;

What exactly are those conclusions? Do they confirm preexisting bias on the part of the investigator or advance the agenda of the study's underwriter? Are the categories value laden or truly random assignments, like one's Zodiac sign, which don't confer or denote advantage?

Now somewhere in there, I got in it for half a hot second. Okay, twice actually and once with an uncivil dose of mean-spirited ridicule, not exactly a gracious host. My bad. Everytime I try to get out, they pull me back in!!!



quoth rembom, "Ah'm yo huckleberry";

BD, 17,000 goes to basic principles, combinatoric explosions, and such. Pretty obvious...to anyone who has done even a modicum of homework on the fundamentals of the theories at issue with this genetic determinacy of yours.

What is to be said of people who are provably mistaken, and yet actively resist knowledge or understanding of the proof? I call that willfully ignorant. If you want to call it ad hominem, I suggest you look the word up.

So here's where we're at. If you search eugenics or IQ on this blog, you'll pull up pretty much the lion's share of my thoughts on the subject. I'm not really feeling the urge to debate what for all intents and purposes, (my intents and purposes at least), is a settled matter. However, since the spirit seems to be moving folks, I thought I'd go ahead and dedicate a post and associated open comment thread to scrip-a-scrapping about the heritability of IQ.

I'm going to stay out of it. My point of departure on this theme was nicely summed up by the autocratic Abiola Lapite. Four of whose treatments of the issue;

Genetic Determinism
Population Genetics
Quantitative Traits
IQ Genes

I linked in a post last year - at the peak of my own multi-front debates on the subject. If you feel so moved to enter the fray, and you're more than welcome to bring reinforcements, by all means do so here, on this thread, dedicated to that purpose.

Iran Air Strike by August?

Rumors of the impending attack on Iran have been rife for three years now. Here's the latest in Tuesday's Asia Times online.

The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.

Two key US senators briefed on the attack planned to go public with their opposition to the move, according to the source, but their projected New York Times op-ed piece has yet to appear.

The source, a retired US career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state still active in the foreign affairs community, speaking anonymously, said last week that that the US plans an air strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The air strike would target the headquarters of the IRGC's elite Quds force. With an estimated strength of up to 90,000 fighters, the Quds' stated mission is to spread Iran's revolution of 1979 throughout the region.

Targets could include IRGC garrisons in southern and southwestern Iran, near the border with Iraq. US officials have repeatedly claimed Iran is aiding Iraqi insurgents. In January 2007, US forces raided the Iranian consulate general in Erbil, Iraq, arresting five staff members, including two Iranian diplomats it held until November. Last September, the US Senate approved a resolution by a vote of 76-22 urging President George W Bush to declare the IRGC a terrorist organization. Following this non-binding "sense of the senate" resolution, the White House declared sanctions against the Quds Force as a terrorist group in October. The Bush administration has also accused Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program, though most intelligence analysts say the program has been abandoned.

An attack on Iraq would fit the Bush administration's declared policy on Iraq. Administration officials questioned directly about military action against Iran routinely assert that "all options remain on the table".

Worldwide Energy Costs Increased $6 TRILLION by War in Iraq

The invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US has trebled the price of oil, according to a leading expert, costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone.

The oil economist Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), told The Independent on Sunday that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war.

He spoke after oil prices set a new record on 13 consecutive days over the past two weeks. They have now multiplied sixfold since 2002, compared with the fourfold increase of the 1973 and 1974 "oil shock" that ended the world's long postwar boom.

Goldman Sachs predicted last week that the price could rise to an unprecedented $200 a barrel over the next year, and the world is coming to terms with the idea that the age of cheap oil has ended, with far-reaching repercussions on their activities.

Dr Salameh, director of the UK-based Oil Market Consultancy Service, and an authority on Iraq 's oil, said it is the only one of the world's biggest producing countries with enough reserves substantially to increase its flow.

Production in eight of the others -- the US, Canada, Iran, Indonesia, Russia, Britain, Norway and Mexico -- has peaked, he says, while China and Saudia Arabia, the remaining two, are nearing the point at of decline. Before the war, Saddam Hussein's regime pumped some 3.5 million barrels of oil a day, but this had now fallen to just two million barrels.

Dr Salameh told the all-party parliamentary group on peak oil last month that Iraq had offered the United States a deal, three years before the war, that would have opened up 10 new giant oil fields on "generous" terms in return for the lifting of sanctions. "This would certainly have prevented the steep rise of the oil price," he said. "But the US had a different idea. It planned to occupy Iraq and annex its oil."

Gas Jacking?

So a month ago, it was about construction site and abandoned house copper jackings. Now it's down to straight up gas jackings. I don't mean the tried and true drive-offs no, that's a dignified old-school method for uncompensated fuel appropriation.

And it's not about siphoning either. With locked caps and sensor balls in the tank, those are increasingly difficult to accomplish. This new maneuver is straight out of the methhead's cookbook of high-risk, low thought, low yield hardscrabble crime and criminality. Gas thieves puncture tanks, steal fuel; SUVs easier targets;

"What made this particular method so dangerous and concerning for us was the way in which they were doing it — using cordless drills to puncture holes in these tanks," he said of the rash of cases his department has investigated this spring. "The heat, friction generated could have easily sparked a fire. It just made for a dangerous situation for the suspects and the community."

Tank puncturing has yet to reach the radar screens of law enforcement organizations such as the National Sheriffs' Association, or the Automotive Service Association, a group that represents independent garage operators.

If you're still rolling around in a big old gas guzzling truck, best to check underneath on the regular and keep your eyes peeled for scurvy looking types roaming the neighborhood with gas cans....,

ExxonMobile Shareholder Activism

So I've been tracking the theme of responsible corporate governance for a minute or two. Starting with the hopeless, let's boycott ExxonMobile hoax, on to the Rockefeller family shareholder resolutions, and then the likely real threat to reptilian supremacy in the executive suite, bounty-hunting trial lawyers.

Wednesday is showtime, when the potentially rancorous shareholder meeting will take place in Dallas. Comes now to the fray a new entrant, this one on the side of the dragons vs the would be dragon-slayers;

It could be the nuclear option to silence rebellious investors. A libertarian activist has hit back at ExxonMobil's environmental critics by tabling a resolution that would outlaw shareholder social activism.

The Free Enterprise Action Fund, which controls $11m (£5.5m) of assets, has proposed amending Exxon's articles of association to prevent the oil company's shareholders from putting forward advisory resolutions at annual meetings.

The fund's managing partner, Steven Milloy, opposes a coalition led by the Rockefeller family that is calling on Exxon to pay more attention to global warming. "They're not bona fide shareholders," Milloy says. "They're not shareholders who are invested in Exxon because they think it's a good investment - they're shareholders who want to use Exxon to advance their social and political agenda."

Libertarian? Not so much. Looks for all the world to me like a corporate political action committee - which instead of working the public polity, is focused on political action within the ranks of voting shareholders. Interestingly, the Fraternal Order of Police has also sided with the reptilians, as well;

The National Fraternal Order of Police, which represents public safety officers who have pensions invested in Exxon Mobil, has publicly opposed the shareholder effort to change company policy.

"By splitting the jobs of chairman and chief executive officer, by imposing rigid, ideologically based conditions on the company's future operations," the organization wrote in a letter to Tillerson, the reform effort "would hamstring Exxon Mobil's profitability and growth."

Law and order every time....,

Warsocialism and the Price of Oil

Oil Wars - Not only are the raging wars in the Middle East responsible for energy price inflation, they are also responsible for price inflation of many other commodities, especially grains and other foodstuff, whose production and transportation depend on fuel. According to the World Bank, food prices have more than doubled over the past three years. The price of rice, the staple for billions of Asians, is up 147% over the past year alone. The mounting food prices have caused hunger and deadly violence in many countries, including Haiti, Egypt, Thailand, Indonesia, Senegal, and Malaysia.[...]

Neoconservative forces in and around the Bush administration and beneficiaries of war dividends—wishing to deflect attention away from war as the main culprit for the skyrocketing energy prices—tend to blame secondary or marginally relevant factors: OPEC, China and India for their increased demand for energy, or supply-demand imbalances in global markets.[...]

It is not surprising, then, that many elected officials with input or voting power in the process of the appropriation of the Pentagon budget find themselves in the pocket of defense contractors. Neither is it surprising that these dubious relationships should serve as breeding grounds for the near legendary levels of waste, inefficiency, and corruption that surround the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Two major conclusions follow from this discussion. The first is that, as pointed out earlier, war and political instability in the Middle East are the major driving forces behind the soaring price of oil; and that, therefore, to contain or reverse the rising trend of energy prices requires bringing U.S. troops home. The second conclusion is that achievement of this goal, the goal of ending U.S. wars of aggression, is possible only if (a) money or profits are taken out of war, and (b) money is taken out of elections.

Micro-Insurgencies.....,

Came across a very interesting group blog this weekend, called we can do better. The post quoted here is a translation of a french news story about the U.S. housing foreclosure crisis. With amazement in his voice, the French newsreader announces the gruesome details of homelessness in the United States: "During the US election campaign the number of evictions continues to rise, even to double, as the credit crisis affects more and more people. In the American way, unfeelingly, the bailiffs arrive, put the furniture on the footpath, and the only thing left for the evicted families is their eyes to weep with."

A woman interviewee says, "When I telephoned the credit society, they said, "Well, if you can no longer pay, just leave the keys for us and go outside."

But finally people are beginning to revolt against these insane impositions by their mere fellows in a financial system which is no longer serving the community!

Although so many more people are returning their keys, they are first "meticulously vandalising" the houses they are forced to leave. "Systematic destruction of walls, toilets, electrical wiring, decorations - they destroy everything, with rage in their hearts to avenge themselves."

A bailiff describes his experience: "We have found toilets destroyed by sledge-hammers. People have disemboweled pipes to make them leak; they have cut the wires to the air-conditioners and pulled wiring out of the light fittings."

And it's working: these vandalised properties become unsaleable, even at half-price. Of course this means that cancelling mortgages is costing the banks a lot of money. So now they have begun to pay people bonds if they leave their houses in good condition.

Commentary from newsreader: "Yet the simple solution of renegotiating credit simply doesn't seem to occur to anyone!"

Report based on "Etats-Unis : la crise des subprimes poussent les Américains à quitter leur maison et parfois à la saccager" 20h15m32s, from France2 News 25-5-08, 20h15m32s

Military Theoconservatism

The Yurica Report has done yoeman's work for several years detailing the extent to which dominionism has infiltrated and infected the U.S. armed services. This past week, there was a local story detailing what it can be like, on the ground.

An atheist soldier from Fort Riley says his higher-ups in Iraq didn’t like his non-Christian ways.

Army Spc. Jeremy Hall did two tours in Iraq, saw his share of fire and came back in one piece. Too bad he needs a bodyguard to keep his fellow soldiers from attacking him now that he's back in the States.[...]

Fort Riley command, worried that Hall was in danger of being attacked by one of the more fervent Christian soldiers, has sometimes assigned him a guard to accompany him on and off the base.

Hall's lawsuit doesn't ask for money. Eye says Hall's main goal is to prod the military to issue an order that forbids soldiers from discriminating or persecuting non-Christians. "You can't use someone's atheism or religious beliefs as a means to judge their performance. I don't for a moment anticipate the Christian dominionist faction is going to change their views because of that, but I would expect that the chain of command still means something."