Bob Morris @ Feb 17th 2008 23:06 - Category: Unfiled Tags: beef recall;
Is anything safe to eat any more? (And how will they dispose of the meat?)
The Humane Society of the United States posted the video on YouTube, and that’s what sparked the recall.
The undercover video, shown on television and on YouTube and other video Web sites, has caused an uproar since its release on Jan. 30.
Bob Morris @ Feb 17th 2008 19:49 - Category: Unfiled ;
The price of ammo here in the US is soaring, a direct result of copper shortages due to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Bob Morris @ Feb 17th 2008 16:29 - Category: Credit crisis Tags: credit default swaps;
Credit default swaps are, in effect, insurance on bonds. The seller pays the buyer a fee, the buyer agrees to pay if a default happens. However, this market is so unregulated and CDS get re-sold so often that the original seller may have trouble determining who owns it if they have a claim. Or they may find the current owner can’t possibly pay.
It would be as if homeowners, facing losses after a hurricane, could not identify the insurance companies to pay on their claims. Or, if they could, they discovered that their insurer had transferred the policy to another company that could not cover the claim.
Oh, the market for CDS is now $45 trillion, twice the size of the US stock market. Which should give some idea of the magnitude of the problems in this wobbling and unstable market.
Bob Morris @ Feb 17th 2008 13:35 - Category: Election 2008 Tags: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton;
“They need to send him out of the country for a long, long time. I am angry at Bill Clinton and I think there are other Hillary people who are angry at Bill, who felt that she was running a very good, solid campaign — she wasn’t the exciting one, but she was the solid one — and then he came in and made it nasty, and single-handedly pushed away black voters.”
– A superdelegate supporting Sen. Hillary Clinton, quoted by the Baltimore Sun, adding the former president “has screwed this thing up for her big-time.”
Maybe. Or maybe that’s just part of the plan. She plays soft cop, he plays hard cop. She apologizes when he gets nasty, promises to rein him in, but doesn’t. Except the plan isn’t working, is it?
Does anyone actually believe Hillary couldn’t shut Bill up if she wanted to? The country deserves better than this.
Bob Morris @ Feb 17th 2008 10:46 - Category: Unfiled Tags: Venezuela;
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has threatened to cut off oil sales to the U.S., said reports that making such a decision would hurt his country’s economy are false, and that Venezuelan oil can be sold anywhere.
Well of course it can. And by the same measure the US can buy oil anywhere, including from whoever Venezuela sells it to. At any given time, oil trades at the same price worldwide.
Bob Morris @ Feb 17th 2008 07:15 - Category: Unfiled ;
Stymied by the government’s failure to provide adequate schooling and thwarted by an economy without jobs to match their abilities or aspirations, they are stuck in limbo between youth and adulthood.
In their frustration, the young are turning to religion for solace and purpose.
Religion can sometimes be a powerful force for good but when governments fail to provide and competing social institutions do not exist, then religion (or drugs or crime) will fill the void.
Bob Morris @ Feb 17th 2008 03:36 - Category: Climate change, Peak oil ;
Excerpts from an online chat with futurist / sf author Bruce Sterling on the State of the World 2008.
Moderator: The real question is how adaptable or fragile civilian institutions are to a rapid rise in the price of oil/rapid decline in supply
Sterling: I agree, but my problem with Peakists is that they’re desperately eager to prove that civilian institutions are fragile, mostly because they’re weird cranks who’ve never found one they like.
Some of whom seem positively wed to and delighted by the possibility of the end of society as we know it. Like some End Timers and Marxists, they want the current order to collapse, seemingly unaware that it will fall on them too.
M: Will the financial system go into cardiac arrest?
S: It might, but the financial system isn’t the heart of a civilization. Communism went into cardiac arrest. The GDP of Russia dropped something like 30 percent, the whole shebang was privatized to mobsters… The Asian financial system went into cardiac arrest a couple of years ago.
Yet they all just kept on keeping on, didn’t they?
M: Would we be able to raise sufficient quantities of food and get them to market?
S: Cuba had a peak oil experience when the Soviets stopped shipping it. The average Cuban lost thirty pounds, or so I’m told. It was a calamity of sorts, they called it the “special period.” Cuba is still there.
Cuba by necessity then went to organic gardening and locally produced food on a mass scale. That’s how they fed themselves now and once the blockade is lifted, will genuinely have quite a lot they can teach the rest of us about low petroleum farming.
M: Presumably there is a rate of change in price/supply that society can accommodate fairly gracefully, and no doubt a point at which the rate of change becomes uncomfortable, and another point at which it becomes catastrophic.
S: There’s also a rate of change of zero when oil is no longer consumed, and that would be the victory condition. So, anxiously wondering whether a loss of oil is merely bad or catastrophic is a little short-sighted. Oil has to go away like whale-oil went away.
M: Which scenarios are most likely? Is there anything we can do to influence the likelihood of a better outcome — and if so, how much influence can we have?
S: Stop using oil. Coal is worse, mind you.
M:What about the possibility of exporting economies like Mexico simply consuming all the oil they produce as they grow?
S: Texas does that already.
Texas also has their own internal electricity production and grid. They don’t need power from anyone else. Smart.
M: Examining the end stages of the Third Reich doesn’t provide us with much guidance.
S: If you wanna talk catastrophe, it’s important to have a coherent understanding of genuine historical catastrophes, not make-believe pipe-dream catastrophes that serve to feed somebody’s cornball apocaphilia.
Or, if you wanna explore the mental space of ALL POSSIBLE catastrophes, you can try this:
http://openthefuture.com/2006/12/an_eschatological_taxonomy.html
in which peak oil would barely register as a “class zero.”
This is Sterling’s key point. The human race will survive global warming and peak oil. Indeed, governments and private industry are just now beginning a huge mobilization and shift to a low carbon, renewable energy economy. This process will continue and speed up. Will there be speed bumps along the way? Sure. Like the human race hasn’t faced lots of them before?
Bob Morris @ Feb 17th 2008 00:17 - Category: Peak oil ;
Matthew Simmons, chairman of energy industry investment bank Simmons & Co. in Houston, spoke to Bloomberg News in Jan 2007 about how we need to prepare for peak oil now. Not only is production lessening across the planet, the vast bulk of US offshore fleet of drilling rigs is at or near the end of its lifespan and new ones aren’t being built fast enough to replace them.
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