Dolphin Log

A plague eradicated!

2010-10-15T09:15:00.000-05:00

Scientists have eradicated a killer virus in the wild, only the second time such a feat has been achieved in human history.

Researchers at the UN said today that rinderpest, a virus that causes devastating cattle plague, has been wiped out, the first time such an announcement has been made since the end of smallpox more than 30 years ago. [guardian.co.uk]

Rinderpest was a disease that was global in spread and could kill 80% of infected cattle and buffaloes in short order leading to massive economic upheaval and starvation.

The eradication effort was started only in 1994 by the UN, and now 16 relatively short years later, its gone. What other viruses can this be done with? What an exciting thought.

Nobel Peace Prize

2010-10-08T09:39:00.000-05:00

Here is an exerpt from the nomination letter by Kwame Anthony Appiah for Liu Xiaobo earlier this year. It gives a nice summary of what he has done and stood for:

Liu’s writings express the aspirations of a growing number of China’s citizens; the ideas he has articulated in his allegedly subversive writings, ideas that are commonplace in free societies around the world, are shared by a significant cross section of Chinese society. Charter 08, for example, is a testament to an expanding movement for peaceful political reform in China. This document, which Liu co-authored, is a remarkable attempt both to engage China's leadership and to speak to the Chinese public about where China is and needs to go. It is novel in its breadth and in its list of signers—not only dissidents and human rights lawyers, but also prominent political scientists, economists, writers, artists, grassroots activists, farmers, and even government officials. More than 10,000 Chinese citizens have endorsed the document despite the fact that almost all of the original 300 signers have since been detained or harassed. In doing so they, too, exhibited exceptional courage and conviction. One of them, for example, a teacher in Yunnan province, reported that police contacted her three times asking her to renounce the Charter and proclaim the signer was some other person with the same name. She refused. To stand up for Liu Xiaobo is to stand with a growing number of men and women like her in China; to stand with all those who advocate for peaceful change in the world’s most populous nation.
In fact, Liu Xiaobo is the kind of figure governments suppress at their peril. While he was a young university professor, Liu was a major protagonist in the final days of the Tiananmen Square protests, and, as I have already said, he is widely credited with preventing far greater bloodshed when government troops moved into the square. Liu admonished the students to make their own movement more democratic; he disarmed a group of workers who appeared with guns to protect the student demonstrators (there is stirring news footage of him seizing a rifle and smashing it at a Tiananmen rally shortly before the crackdown); and he helped persuade students to evacuate the square in the final hours. Deeply committed to non-violence and democracy, Liu has been able both to articulate and to channel the frustrations of the Chinese people for more than two decades. Stifling such a voice does nothing to address those frustrations, which one way or another will eventually find expression. China has, indeed, moved increasingly towards democracy and freedom in the last few decades. [foreignpolicy.com]

Performance Anxiety

2010-09-24T10:52:00.000-05:00

Underperforming can come from what we think is expected of us. Here's some research and a new book by a U of C professor - this is fascinating stuff:

In Choke, Beilock describes research demonstrating that high-achieving people underperform when they are worried about confirming a stereotype about the racial group or gender to which they belong. These worries deplete the working memory necessary for success. The perceptions take hold early in schooling and can be either reinforced or abolished by powerful role models.
In one study, researchers gave standardized tests to black and white students, both before and after President Obama was elected. Black test takers performed worse than white test takers before the election. Immediately after Obama’s election, however, blacks’ performance improved so much that their scores were nearly equal with whites. When black students can overcome the worries brought on by stereotypes, because they see someone like President Obama who directly counters myths about racial variation in intelligence, their performance improves.
Beilock and her colleagues also have shown that when first-grade girls believe that boys are better than girls at math, they perform more poorly on math tests. One big source of this belief? The girls’ female teachers. It turns out that elementary school teachers are often highly anxious about their own math abilities, and this anxiety is modeled from teacher to student. When the teachers serve as positive role models in math, their male and female students perform equally well. [news.uchicago.edu]

China overtakes Japan

2010-08-16T09:46:00.000-05:00

In the reporting of quarterly GDP figures, China surpassed Japan as the world's second largest economy. Both are still very far behind the US, but this is further demonstration of the global shift in economic power. That said, China still has a GDP per capita which is less than 10% of the US.

After three decades of spectacular growth, China passed Japan in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, according to government figures released early Monday.

The milestone, though anticipated for some time, is the most striking evidence yet that China’s ascendance is for real and that the rest of the world will have to reckon with a new economic superpower.

The recognition came early Monday, when Tokyo said that Japan’s economy was valued at about $1.28 trillion in the second quarter, slightly below China’s $1.33 trillion. Japan’s economy grew 0.4 percent in the quarter, Tokyo said, substantially less than forecast. That weakness suggests that China’s economy will race past Japan’s for the full year.

Experts say unseating Japan — and in recent years passing Germany, France and Great Britain — underscores China’s growing clout and bolsters forecasts that China will pass the United States as the world’s biggest economy as early as 2030. America’s gross domestic product was about $14 trillion in 2009.

“This has enormous significance,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It reconfirms what’s been happening for the better part of a decade: China has been eclipsing Japan economically. For everyone in China’s region, they’re now the biggest trading partner rather than the U.S. or Japan.”

For Japan, whose economy has been stagnating for more than a decade, the figures reflect a decline in economic and political power. Japan has had the world’s second-largest economy for much of the last four decades, according to the World Bank. And during the 1980s, there was even talk about Japan’s economy some day overtaking that of the United States.

But while Japan’s economy is mature and its population quickly aging, China is in the throes of urbanization and is far from developed, analysts say, meaning it has a much lower standard of living, as well as a lot more room to grow. Just five years ago, China’s gross domestic product was about $2.3 trillion, about half of Japan’s...

Its per capita income is more on a par with those of impoverished nations like Algeria, El Salvador and Albania — which, along with China, are close to $3,600 — than that of the United States, where it is about $46,000.

Yet there is little disputing that under the direction of the Communist Party, China has begun to reshape the way the global economy functions by virtue of its growing dominance of trade, its huge hoard of foreign exchange reserves and United States government debt and its voracious appetite for oil, coal, iron ore and other natural resources.

China is already a major driver of global growth. The country’s leaders have grown more confident on the international stage and have begun to assert greater influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with things like special trade agreements and multibillion dollar resource deals. [NYTimes.com]

Crumbling?

2010-08-10T09:58:00.000-05:00

Krugman's column yesterday was quite interesting. His thesis is that the federal government, which can borrow at about 1%, should be assisting state and local governments to provide critical services, like education and infrastructure maintenance. On the other hand, I've seen charts which show what the interest on the US's debt will be over the next 50 years (astronomical).

Thoughts? Opinions?

Underwater flying

2010-07-23T12:04:00.001-05:00

Pictures of Rays from NationalGeographic.com

Mr. W

2010-07-21T11:59:00.000-05:00

Environmental Disasters

2010-07-19T15:12:00.000-05:00

As we're on the edge of our seats about the BP spill in the gulf, the Nigerian Delta has experienced the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every year since the 1960's. Foreign Policy lists 5 on-going environmental disasters, from underground coal fires in China and Pennsylvania, which produce 2-3% of global greenhouse gas every year to the Eastern Garbage Patch, which is a mess of garbage and plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean larger than the size of the continental US and about 100 feet deep.

What you need for summer

2010-06-06T20:28:00.000-05:00

I just invented a fabulous drink:

1. Put watermelon chunks and some Pimms in a blender
2. Blend
3. Drink

You heard it here first....

Black Swans

2010-06-02T10:11:00.002-05:00

Another interesting article from foreignpolicy.com, speculating on what kind of excitement we could see this summer. (And this was written last week, before the weekend's events off Gaza). Here is the beginning, click here for the whole article.

1. Wars of Summer, Part I: The Koreas
As we've seen just in the past couple of days, "engagement" doesn't seem to be doing the trick with North Korea. When you have two countries that have been pointing guns at each other for half a century and one of them is run by the kind of guy who makes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad look like Albert Schweitzer trouble is always just a Dear Leader moodswing away. When one of those countries starts firing torpedoes at the other, that raises the temperature a bit ... and when that same country has a diplomatic tantrum because its neighbor actually doesn't like having its ships sunk, you get a sense of how off-balance and dangerous the whole thing is. (You also get dictionary editors everywhere rushing to insert North Korea's reaction into the official definition ofchutzpah right where "burying your husband in a rented suit" used to be.) While most people assume this is just one of those periodic Korean peninsula hiccups, you never know.
2. Wars of Summer, Part II: Somalia, Yemen, etc.
These places are just two examples of plenty where conditions are chronically horrible and getting worse. If you're going to worry about the Koreas where the stakes are high and both sides would pay an unimaginable price for a conflict, don't rule out conflicts in places where everyone has a gun and life is cheap.
3. Wars of Summer, Part III: Israel, Syria, Lebanon
Speaking of places not to rule out, over the years few places have proven themselves more reliable breeding grounds for warfare than the borders of the state of Israel. And tensions are rising along the most northern of these as we speak. The Israelis are worried about growing stockpiles of missiles being deployed in Lebanon, new missile capabilities in Syria and Iranian mischief in both places. Of all the possibilities for tensions turning to a shooting war this summer, this one may top the list. And, what a great distraction it would make from Iran's nuclear issues (or what great cover for an Israeli strike against the Iranians who are paying for the missiles and underwriting Hezbollah trouble-makers in Lebanon and elsewhere).

Afghanistan in the '50s

2010-06-01T10:01:00.000-05:00

There's an amazing set of pictures on foreignpolicy.com looking at Afghanistan in the 1950s and '60s, showing that it has not always been this "medieval" place of thugs and misogynists we see today, at least not in Kabul.

Privacy - moving in many directions

2010-05-20T09:19:00.000-05:00

There are two big news items about privacy today. The first is that the new coalition government in the UK is going to do away with systems that would collect masses of data about its citizens. The other is concerns directed at Google for its face recognition software that some fear would make stalking and surveillance too easy.

There's also the dichotomy here of information that governments hold versus what is available publicly on the internet. The British government is far more meddlesome that most and a correction is certainly warranted. I hope this is indicative of a trend away from big government data bases of personal information.

Over dinner last night, we were discussing the future of privacy. What will it look like in 20-30 years when the Facebook generation, people who have grown up putting their every movement, thought and picture into the public eye, are making the rules. For them, sharing masses of information is the norm. Given that fundamentally new baseline expectation, what will privacy look like. Either, privacy will continue to erode, or there will be some event which triggers a massive backlash against sharing private information. I think the first is more likely.

Oil Spill

2010-04-30T09:44:00.001-05:00

The oil slick may be reaching the shore of Louisiana today, endangering wildlife as well as an enormous oyster cultivation industry. BP has said it would welcome military/national guard intervention, which has been discussed by Louisiana's governor.

I've avoided writing about it because I just didn't want to think about it at all.

For more from NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/us/01gulf.html

From National Geographic: Gulf Oil Spill Pictures: Aerial Views Show Leak's Size

Leap-frogging

2010-04-29T09:37:00.000-05:00

When you don't have the bother of pre-existing infrastructure, like Mongolian nomads, you can skip right to solar-powered satellite telephones.

Nomad Photos -- National Geographic

On a lighter note....

2010-04-27T09:40:00.000-05:00

I bring you, 10 Tragic Moments in Pants. The only one I disagree with is the Skort - yes, I have proudly worn them.

WTF?

2010-04-24T09:57:00.000-05:00

North Korea may be blowing up South Korean warships IN South Korean waters! What is Kim Jong-Il playing at?

IT WAS a dignified address. Before wiping tears from his eyes with a folded handkerchief, President Lee Myung-bak... read out the names of 46 sailors who died last month when their ship, the Cheonan, exploded in South Korean waters. He carefully avoided pinning the blame on anyone, but on April 22nd, Yonhap, South Korea’s news agency, reported that the government’s military-intelligence agency, using intelligence gathered jointly with America, had concluded the regime in North Korea had deliberately attacked and destroyed the 1,200-tonne warship.
Even if tangible evidence of North Korean involvement emerges, the president’s caution on April 19th will nevertheless be understandable. Hot-blooded retaliation against a nuclear-armed despot would be fraught with danger for the peninsula, and for relations between America and China, the main backers of south and north respectively.
But ever since a preliminary investigation of the Cheonan’s salvaged stern concluded that the blast did not come from on board the vessel, suspicions have turned towards North Korea. This, analysts say, puts Mr Lee in the most delicate position of his two-year-old administration. If the suspicions prove correct, a tough response would be expected and perhaps unavoidable...
So far, the regime in Pyongyang has only indirectly denied involvement. After three weeks of silence on the incident, it said on April 17th in a news report: “Failing to probe the cause of the sinking of the ship, the puppet military warmongers, right-wing conservative politicians and other traitors in South Korea are now foolishly seeking to link the sinking with the North at any cost.” A non-denial denial. [economist.com]

Religious Zealots with no sense of humor

2010-04-23T10:17:00.003-05:00

George and I never watch South Park, but about 2 days ago we stopped as we were flipping through the channels. Little did we realize it would prove to be news-worthy.

All I can say is that it's clear there are some people with ZERO sense of humor.

Energy for Brazil

2010-04-23T10:08:00.003-05:00

The vast majority of Brazil's energy already comes from hydropower and they're looking to add the world's third largest hydropower project. The cast of Avatar has been protesting in the Amazon, but the auction went ahead this week, and the Belo Monte project will be built.

The fundamental question is how to walk the line among environmental preservation, forcible relocations and economic development. Some of the fundamental problems with developing hydropower in the Amazon are that in many places the river carries quite a large load of silt, which will eventually diminish the power generation, and that because the Amazon is so far from where the power will be consumed, the line losses in transmission can be 20-30%.

Brazil’s rapidly growing economy needs more energy, preferably renewable. The scale of the dam—it will be the world’s third-largest hydroelectric station after China’s Three Gorges and Brazil’s own Itaipu—is epic. So is the investment, of at least 19 billion reais (nearly $11 billion). But ever since the engineers in Brasília rolled out the blueprints for damming the Xingu two decades ago, the project has attracted powerful opposition.
Environmental groups and river dwellers say Belo Monte will flood vast patches of rainforest while desiccating others. “The forest is our butcher shop, the river is our market,” Indian leaders wrote in a newspaper. They were aided by greens from Europe and the United States, including the tribes of Hollywood. James Cameron, a film director, flew in to daub his face in red paint, hug an Indian and join the protest...
Yet greens were not alone in their lack of enthusiasm for the project. Some of the country’s leading builders, such as Odebrecht and Camargo Corrêa, pulled out of the auction, convinced that the government-dictated power rates, capped at 83 reais ($47) per megawatt-hour, were too low to assure a fair return on their investment. (The winning consortium offered a slightly lower rate.) The government had to pledge billions of dollars in soft loans and tax breaks to lure bidders. Even so, two firms in the winning consortium immediately dropped out, apparently because they thought the tariff too low.
Not since a military government quartered the Amazon basin with roads, dams and settlements in the 1970s has Brazil seen such a row over the rainforest. Ironically, Belo Monte is a project shaped by the lessons of the past, drawn and redrawn to cull the power of the forests without razing them. That challenge—developing the wilds and having them too—is in many ways the riddle of modern Brazil. The rest of the developing world is watching closely to see whether it can be solved.
A generation ago similar protests over an earlier version of the same dam—known then as Kararao—forced officials to rethink their strategy. They came up with Belo Monte. It was not just a marketing ploy. Instead of building a great wall across the Xingu to create a massive reservoir, Belo Monte is designed as a run-of-river dam, a technique that harnesses the natural flow of the river to drive the turbines. [economist.com]

Rahmbo for Chicago?

2010-04-22T10:10:00.000-05:00

The subject of Emanuel running for mayor was brought up on last night's episode of Charlie Rose on PBS. Rose asked the former Congressman from Chicago's North Side if there's any other job he'd like in government and Emanuel said he'd like to run for mayor of Chicago. That is, if the current mayor, Richard Daley, does not seek re-election.

Emanuel said he misses having contact with constituents. He also emphasized he loves being the president's chief of staff. [http://www.wbez.org/Content.aspx?audioID=41432]

I'm not sure Chicago needs a partisan bull-dog for mayor. Well, we now have a non-partisan cult-of-personality, so take your pick.

A nascent Slow Travel movement?

2010-04-20T09:14:00.001-05:00

As one who has just had a trip to the Riviera cancelled because of uncooperative volcanos, who shall remain nameless, the following article caught my eye:

Governments, businesses and most travelers, irritated by disrupted itineraries and worried about lost productivity, are delighted to see planes back in the sky. But I, for one, wish this blessedly jet-free interlude could have continued a little longer. In the eccentric, ground-level adventures of some stranded passengers — 700-mile taxi rides through Scandinavia, for instance, perhaps a horse-drawn stagecoach over the Alps if things got really desperate — I’m reminded of the romance we trade away each time we shuffle aboard an airplane. [nytimes.com]

If only I'd booked the QE2 in the first place...

Burma with nukes!

2010-04-16T10:51:00.005-05:00

Even as President Obama won agreement from world leaders this week to block the spread of nuclear weapons, the United States is facing a new—and unexpected—nuclear foe: Burma.
National-security officials tell The Daily Beast that U.S. spy agencies and their Asian counterparts have stepped up surveillance of potential nuclear sites in Burma in recent weeks in light of evidence that suggests the country’s brutal junta is trying to buy nuclear-weapons technology from North Korea. [dailybeast.com]

Fatwa against Terrorism

2010-04-16T08:48:00.000-05:00

The jihadists, it seemed, had just added a new target to one of their death lists. His name is Tahir ul-Qadri, and he's no government official. He's one of Pakistan's leading Islamic scholars, an authority on the Quran and Islamic religious law.
It's no wonder the terrorists want to see Qadri dead. Last month he promulgated a 600-page legal ruling, a fatwa, that condemns terrorism as un-Islamic. A few Western media outlets gave the news a nod, but the coverage quickly petered out. And that's a pity, because the story of this fatwa is just beginning to get interesting. "I have declared a jihad against terrorism," says the 59-year-old Qadri in an interview. "I am trying to bring [the terrorists] back towards humanism. This is a jihad against brutality, to bring them back towards normality. This is an intellectual jihad." This isn't empty rhetoric. Last year militants killed one of Qadri's colleagues, a scholar named Sarfraz Ahmed Naeem, for expressing similar positions. [foreignpolicy.com]

Worth seeing again

2010-04-15T10:18:00.000-05:00

You've got to love our elected representatives, who think that islands can tip over. Has this guy ever been to an island?

Hats off to Adm. Willard for not laughing out loud. I wouldn't have been able to manage this with a straight face.

And the appropriate response...

2010-04-15T10:05:00.002-05:00

Guam anti-capsize relief program - funny.

Central Asia Primer

2010-04-15T08:20:00.001-05:00

Here's a nice summary of the situation in Central Asia, as well as on how the US views the region:

U.S. policymakers increasingly view Central Asia as a transit point to somewhere else. It is a region through which oil and natural gas flow to Europe, reducing U.S. allies' dependence on Russian energy supplies. It is a region through which fuel, food, and spare parts flow to surging U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, reducing their dependence on a precarious Pakistani supply route. Officials and policy experts even have a new name for this region that captures its status as a logistical intermediary, rather than a set of distinct countries that matter in their own right: They call it the "Northern Distribution Network."

Remember - Putin was KGB

2010-04-13T08:35:00.000-05:00

I can't even imagine the national trauma that Poland is going through and how this is going to effect the country for years to come. Many have noted how suddenly warm and fuzzy Putin is towards the Poles. Amazing that he has to actively demonstrate that he isn't responsible for the elimination of the top of Poland's government.

Russia's never been known for its smooth diplomacy, or its empathy. So what was going on?

Kremlin-watchers say Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev were determined to quash speculation that Russia was responsible for the disaster. "This was a natural PR move, designed to neutralize any possible speculation about this very delicate and tragic event," said Yevgeny Volk, head of the Moscow office of the Heritage Foundation.
The matter is especially sensitive because the crash that killed Kaczynski took place as he was about to mark the 70th anniversary of a grim event that continues to poison Russian-Polish relations: the 1940 massacre of 22,000 Polish officers, Stalin's effort to decapitate the Polish leadership during the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland. [foreginpolicy.com]

Water - where is it?

2010-03-23T08:22:00.000-05:00

Did you know that yesterday was World Water Day? It seems like water is getting higher visibility these days, from the Chairman of Nestle giving dire warnings to National Geographic devoting this month's issue to it.

Here is an interesting map showing where the water is. I'm pretty comfy here on the shores of the Great Lakes, but most of the rest of the world is not in as easy a situation.

Freedom to Fail

2010-03-22T11:13:00.000-05:00

From last week's Time magazine...

At this point, freedom to fail probably ranks right around freedom to remove your own appendix.
That's a pity, because failure is one of the most economically important tools we have. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate failure; it should be to build a system resilient enough to withstand it. Our bankruptcy system's generosity, for instance, has been convincingly linked to higher rates of entrepreneurship.

Green Meanie

2010-03-17T11:20:00.000-05:00

You all know my green leanings and interest in energy security & conservation. This article in the Telegraph tells you about the real me. (Just kidding, but it's quite funny.)
Hat tip: Dad.

Do Green Products Make Us Better People?, a paper in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science, argues that those who wear what the authors call the "halo of green consumerism" are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. Faced with various moral choices – whether to stick to the rules in games, for example, or to pay themselves an appropriate wage – the green participants behaved much worse in the experiments than their conventional counterparts. The short answer to the paper's question, then, is: No. Greens are mean.

The authors, two Canadian psychologists, came up with an intriguing explanation for this. "Virtuous acts," they write, "can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviour." It's the yin-yang theory of psychology, or "compensatory ethics", to give it its proper name. Buy an organic potato, then go home and beat your wife with The Guardian. Hop smugly into a green hybrid car, then use it to run over little old ladies doing their shopping.

This "moral balancing" argument, however, clearly has its limits. Most people are sufficiently balanced without having to swing to opposite ends of the moral spectrum. We can give money to charity without dipping into the company till at the same time. Every good act doesn't necessitate a bad one. To every action, there is not an equal and opposite reaction. Buying an expensive courgette with a bit of mud on it need not turn you into a tyrant.

...

As with the worst type of religious zealot, there is nothing more annoying than the zeal of the converted, especially when it is tainted with the hypocrisy of self-righteousness. As we report today, people are more likely to buy environmentally friendly produce in shops than on the internet. Being seen to be green is more important than anything else. I wonder whether that will change if it now becomes a case of being seen to be mean.

...

And now, at last, we have confirmation that they're tight as well. They might be willing to pay over the odds for a lovingly tended carrot, but in every other area of normal human activity, their greenness is merely a mask for miserliness. The wind turbine, the tandem bike with a dangerous little buggy on the back for the twins, the self-denying holidays in Wales… Get a boiler! Get a car! Get out of here!

We have been kind to these unkind people for far too long. Now that their halo has fallen and they can no longer boast their green credentials as a shorthand for moral superiority, it is time to fight fire with fire. How about a little compensatory ethics of our own? Double the tax on organic food as a deterrent; it is clearly a starter drug to a lifetime of amorality. Stop and search anyone in a Prius. Conduct dawn raids on north London allotments. Otherwise, one can only imagine the sort of dystopia that would ensue if these mean little green men were allowed to run amok.

Oil demand rising

2010-02-25T09:20:00.000-06:00

This article seems to say that we won't see the wild swings in oil prices that we saw in the 2000s, which is good. Economies can survive and thrive with high oil prices. The thing that kills them is unpredictable oil prices. If this is really the case, it's good news. Also interesting that Daniel Yergin believes that developed countries have hit their peak oil demand, because any further energy growth demand will be satisfied by renewables.

Chinese oil demand is once more growing fast, rebel militants are threatening to attack pipelines in Nigeria, and tensions are again rising in the Gulf. Recent headlines are increasingly making it seem like 2003 all over again.

Now, as much of the world emerges from recession and as geopolitics and threats to energy supplies return to the fore, oil consumption is expected to rebound again, driven mostly by Asia and the Middle East.In recent times, oil has taken a back seat while the world has focused on the recession. As economies slowed, oil demand fell for two consecutive years, the first time that has happened since the early 1980s.

But the market is better equipped to handle the stresses this time around.
Thanks to the slowdown in energy consumption, OPEC producers now hold an estimated six million barrels a day of spare capacity, equal to roughly 7 percent of current demand, much of it in Saudi Arabia alone.

Such a cushion should shield the market from the wild excesses of the 2003-8 period, when prices rose as demand expanded, supplies fell, and spare capacity dwindled to a precariously slim level of well under two million barrels per day.

Yet considerable uncertainties remain. How fast will production drop in many of the world’s more mature regions, including Mexico and the North Sea? Will Russia surprise with another increase in its production this year? How effective will OPEC producers be in managing the market? And perhaps most importantly, how fast will demand grow?

In large part, the answer to many of these questions lies in what happens next to two countries that will be increasingly crucial in shaping the direction of oil markets well into the next decade: China and Iraq. Each captures the challenges that oil companies, OPEC producers and policy makers face in meeting energy demand and managing global supplies in the long term.

Work - alas

2010-02-24T11:33:00.002-06:00

Great quote:

“Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Thomas Edison

Vertical Farming

2010-02-23T09:45:00.000-06:00

I've got a client who is thinking about vertical farming, so I've been looking into it. And what better way to introduce the topic than Colbert? (and despite what it says, this video is available and works just fine.)

Chavez is at it again

2010-02-22T09:23:00.000-06:00

Working towards civil war? This guy is scary.

President Hugo Chavez's socialist government is creating peasant-based militias throughout Venezuela's rural, agricultural-rich regions, raising fears of confrontation among the country's cattle ranchers and landholders.
The armed groups, organized by Venezuela's military, will be responsible for protecting poor farmers from vigilante groups allegedly organized and financed by cattlemen and wealthy landowners, Chavez wrote in a newspaper column published Sunday.
"Faced with the onslaught against peasants through an escalation of aggressions, sabotage and hired killings by the most reactionary forces of our society, the duty of the state ... is to protect the poor farmers," Chavez wrote.
The newly formed militias will also help the military prepare for a possible foreign invasion, said Chavez, who has repeatedly warned that the U.S. military could invade Venezuela to seize control of its immense oil reserves. U.S. officials deny that any such plan exists.
The government claims that more than 300 peasants have been killed — purportedly by mercenaries for wealthy landholders — since authorities launched a sweeping land reform initiative in 2001.
Landowners and cattle ranchers dispute those claims, saying Chavez's administration is wrongly attempting to vilify them as a means of gaining political clout among the country's poverty-stricken farmers. They vehemently deny hiring vigilantes to drive away or kill peasants, who occasionally squat on their lands or steal cattle. [news.yahoo.com]

Allegory

2010-02-21T08:22:00.000-06:00

I hope that you have all seen the movie Avatar, preferably in 3D. I've even thought about going back to see the IMAX version.

Most critics said, and I don't disagree, that with such emphasis on 3D visuals, you can't really expect the characters to be three dimensional as well. That aside, apparently the struggle of the Na'vi has been compared to a dizzying number of other causes and trends.

Palestinian protesters in the town of Bilin dressed up as Na'avi recently to protest the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
Bolivia's leftist President Evo Morales has praised Avatar as a "profound show of resistance to capitalism and the struggle for the defense of nature."
Chinese bloggers have compared the film's story to the exploitation of Chinese citizens by government-backed real estate developers -- a factor that may have contributed to the film being pulled from Chinese theaters.
Activists ran ads in the Hollywood newspaper Variety comparing the Na'avi to India's forest-dwelling indigenous tribe, the Dongria, whose territory is now threatened by a planned bauxite mine.
Environmentalists Lori Pottinger compared the story of Avatar to the Brazilian government's plans to build dams in the Amazon Basin.
Russian Communists described the film as an attempt to justify Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize.
New York Times columinist Ross Douthat called the movie "an apolologia for pantheism."
David Boaz of the libertarian Cato Institute says the movie is about "defending property rights".
Last but not least, Cameron himself says the movie is an allegory about the U.S. war on terror.

Utah, cutting back on high school

2010-02-18T09:27:00.000-06:00

So, I can't quite imagine a worse way to cut costs than jeopardizing the future by cutting back on education. Although, in some ways you do wonder what we're teaching in high school at all. 100 years ago, it was expected that by the time you got out of high school you actually knew something. My grandfather graduated from a one-room school house in rural Pennsylvania with Greek and Latin and went on to have several patents. I certainly didn't know that much by the time I left high school in a good suburban school district and I imagine that fast-growing Utah doesn't teach their kids as much as I got taught. Now some nutter wants to cut out 12th grade. What do you think?

A Utah lawmaker has proposed a cost-cutting measure to keep high school students from slacking off in their senior year -- eliminate 12th grade.

A Utah lawmaker says too many 12th graders spend the year "playing around." As part of a cost-cutting measure, Republican State Senator Chris Buttars has proposed eliminating a fourth year of high school statewide.

(Getty Images)

Republican State Senator Chris Buttars earlier this month proposed ditching a fourth year of high school statewide, calling 12th grade a time for "nothing but playing around."

Addressing the Utah State Senate's Public Education Appropriations Subcommittee meeting, Buttars said cutting high school back to three years would save the strapped state $102 million annually.

"You're spending a whole lot of money for a whole bunch of kids who aren't getting anything out of that grade," Buttars said. "It comes down to the best use of money."

Buttars' has since diluted his proposal, saying that eliminating 12th grade should be an option available to students. [abcnews.go.com]

Troubles in Greece and everywhere

2010-02-17T12:17:00.000-06:00

Greece has roughly the population and probably a lower GDP than the City of Chicago, and yet its financial troubles are affecting the US economy. Because there is so much uncertainty about the Euro, the dollar is strengthening, which makes US exports more expensive to the rest of the world.

It looks like Greeks are unwilling to do what it takes to pull themselves out of this mess. The Finance Ministry employees, who, of all people, should understand the severity of the problem and the ways to fix it are on strike, protesting pay cuts. And, yes, George is making sure people know he is Cypriot, not Greek, these days.

A week of labor protests in Greece began with workers from the finance ministry protesting salary cuts as part of the finance minister's ambitious three-year austerity program.

The four-day strike by Finance Ministry officials is expected to affect services ranging from Greece's statistics office to operations at the country's market watchdog, the Hellenic Capital Markets Committee.

At the same time, and more disruptively, thousands of customs officials have declared their own three-day strike starting Tuesday, while tax officials will hold a one-day strike Wednesday.

On Thursday, taxi drivers will also hold a one-day strike, their second in less than a week, while fuel truck drivers have also threatened a walkout for this week.

"What we are protesting is the reduction in wages and also the elimination of the autonomous tax rate enjoyed by ministry employees," said Yiorgos Samaris, president of the Federation of Unions of the Finance Ministry, known as OSYO.

The three-day strike by customs officials is likely to be the most painful strike of the week. The closure of ports and border crossings has sparked fears of crimped exports and imports sorely needed by a country in its worst recession in 16 years. [WSJ.com]

Evil Buzz

2010-02-12T08:57:00.000-06:00

As a long-time and devoted gmail user, this news about Buzz is really disturbing. Do I need to change my primary personal email account? What happened to the corporate motto: Do no evil?

Unless you tinker withBuzz's settings, a partial list of your most-emailed Gmail contacts might beautomatically made public (see this post over at SiliconAlley Insider; it appears that contacts are made public to those whoalready had a Google Profile account before Buzz; also seethis excellent andvery angry post at CNet for additional background).
Yes, that's right: without you ever touching Google Buzz'sprivacy settings, the entire world may know who you correspond with (yes,including that secret lover of yours and that secret leaker in the WhiteHouse).
Nevertheless, I am extremely concerned about hundreds of activists inauthoritarian countries who would never want to reveal a list of theirinterlocutors to the outside world. Why so much secrecy? Simply because, manyof their contacts are other activists and often even various "democracypromoters" from Western governments and foundations. Many of thosecontacts would now inadvertently be made public.

If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I wouldimmediately dispatch my Internet geeksquads to check on Google Buzz accountsfor political activists and see if they have any connections that werepreviously unknown to the government. They can then spend months on end drawingcomplex social circles on the shiny blackboards inside secret policeheadquarters.

Incomplete Manifesto

2010-02-10T09:50:00.000-06:00

The Academy for Global Citizenship, a charter school where I serve on the board, is developing a zero net-energy building for our permanent home. We have some great pro-bono work being done by the the OWP/P Architecture firm in Chicago. They're bringing together a huge number of people to collaborate on this project at a meeting later in the spring. One of those is Bruce Mau, who is a frequent collaborator with Frank Gehry. I checked out his web site this morning and came across his Incomplete Manifesto that guides the work of his studio. Some of the ideas are very interesting, and even if you know them already, good to be reminded.

By the way, if anyone has any ideas on who'd like to contribute to a capital campaign for this project, let me know. No idea is too crazy.

11. Harvest ideas.
Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas
to applications.

12. Keep moving.
The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down.
Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool.
Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions.
Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate.
The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ____________________.
Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas
of others.

18. Stay up late.
Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor.
Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

Illinois Politics

2010-02-08T01:32:00.002-06:00

A friend of mine recently calculated that, based on the number of unsolved murder cases, an Illinois governor is more likely to go to prison than a murderer. Yep, you heard that right.

And in more Illinois politics news Scott Lee Cohen, who was just chosen as the Democratic nominee for Lt. Governor in the primaries last week, apparently is another criminal-in-waiting. Oh, right, he's actually already pretty criminal. Why didn't we know this stuff 10 days ago?

If the long, long, long list of stories about Scott Lee Cohen are true, he's got the fondness for steroids of a Mark McGwire, the domestic abuse track record of a Charlie Sheen and the eye for hookers of an Eliot Spitzer. But wait! There's more! He's had tax troubles! His ex-wife accused him of adultery! Truly, the Democratic nominee for Illinois lieutenant governor appears the very definition of a Frankendouche. [salon.com]

Believe it or not...

2010-02-06T15:13:00.003-06:00

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the world's most widely-produced, street-legal electric car to date. It's the Sebring-Vanguard CitiCar and was introduced in 1974. [businessweek.com]

Overturn Don't Ask, Don't Tell

2010-02-03T09:48:00.003-06:00

Here's a quote by Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

“I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Mullen said during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on dropping the archaic “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. “For me personally, it comes down to integrity — theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.”

Bravo! So now when is Obama going to do the right thing? The thing he said he would do when he was campaigning for the gay vote and get rid of this ridiculous policy? As Mullen says, "it comes down to integrity."

Levity & Wisdom...

2010-02-01T13:02:00.001-06:00

... from Yogi Berra:

We made too many wrong mistakes.

When you arrive at a fork in the road, take it.

You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six.

You can observe a lot by just watching.

You should always go to other people's funerals, otherwise, they won't come to yours.

You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you.

You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get there.

Davos - Big Oil

2010-01-30T13:24:00.001-06:00

The folks gathered at Davos don't think that a cap and trade bill will be passed in the US in the next six months (and the odds of it being passed in the run-up to the mid-term elections are non-existant.)

As world leaders gather to discuss economic problems during the Davos talks, energy execs are calling for a new peak in oil production, and others cite bleak hope for any global climate deal.
Davos, a Swiss ski resort, is the location of the World Economic Forum, which runs through Jan. 31.
At a dinner on alternative energy, about 100 were in attendance, and when asked to raise their hands if they thought a U.S. climate bill would pass Congress before June, no one raised their hand, reports Foreign Policy. About 60 of those in attendance were Americans.
That view is contradicted by Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, who said that he still expects cap and trade to take shape in the U.S., reports Reuters. Rogers said that the Democrats’ loss of a seat in Massachusetts was far from the death-knell, that instead a stronger, more bipartisan approach to climate legislation may emerge.
Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, said that there is a “supply challenge” for the oil industry that will necessitate an extra 15 million barrels of oil a day over the coming 20 years, reports the Telegraph. The world currently is producing about 84 million barrels a day. While demand for oil is fading in the U.S. and Europe, it is rising rapidly in Asia.
Hayward said that natural gas extracted from shale or methane reserves is a “game changer” in the U.S. energy market... [environmentalleader.com]

Purple Pictures

2010-01-29T06:31:00.002-06:00

These are for Anny since I can't join you this afternoon.

The Carbon Debate

2010-01-29T06:06:00.002-06:00

Well, things are moving along, with or without Congress. You know it's real when the SEC gets involved.

The ultimate fate of carbon policies may be up in the air. But utilities and industrial enterprises are still under pressure to report their climate-related activities to investors.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has voted 3-2 along party lines to force companies to consider their potential exposure to climate change when it comes to filing their financial statements. While the position is one that the Obama administration has advocated, its genesis formed a few years earlier as investor and environmental groups joined hands to petition the body for uniform rules.
"The transition to a carbon-constrained economy is underway, and public access to material information concerning the risks and opportunities that companies face, and their means of addressing those risks and opportunities, is vital to investors," writes the California Public Employees' Retirement System.
The group, which asked the SEC more than two years ago for guidance, says that disclosure should include corporate policies and governance structures related to climate change as well as a tabulation of the registrant's current and forecasted greenhouse gas emissions. As such, investors need to know what the potential financial risks may be along with any climate change-associated litigation. [energycentral.com]

Ahh!

2010-01-26T12:24:00.001-06:00

Here is a beautiful slide show of Greece by National Geographic. Just thought these could bring light to your winter day.

10 Global Leaders to Watch

2010-01-24T12:11:00.002-06:00

Newsweek and the Eurasia Group have compiled a list of the 10 global leaders to watch in 2010 and while some of them are obvious (Obama, Putin), others are names that are new to me, such as Olli Rehn (the European Commissioner) or Ashfaq Kayani (Pakistan's top military officer.)

Building, not Re-Building in Haiti

2010-01-20T15:05:00.002-06:00

Haiti's infrastructure and economy were so poor even before the earthquake that building from the ground up seems the right way to go [foreignpolicy.org]:

In Haiti, neither relief nor reconstruction will be enough: Restoration should not be the goal. The earthquake is not the first natural catastrophe that Haiti has faced. In 2008, four hurricanes wreaked devastation. Since 1994, five major natural catastrophes, an average of one every three years, have hit Haiti's population centers. Worse, these spikes of disaster have punctuated a long-term downward drift. To exit from this spiral, relief is not enough: A coordinated and targeted multibillion dollar Haiti fund now has to bring real hope of change to the country's youth.
Crucially, the fund's mission would not be reconstruction, but paving the way for lasting change. This means spreading opportunity and generating jobs in urban centers less vulnerable to storms, floods, and seismic activity. It means communicating clear targets and progress daily to a public in need of good news. It means modernizing agriculture so farmers can earn a decent living. The promise of food and shelter in Port-au-Prince might otherwise perversely attract rural migrants from the impoverished Central Plateau, adding to a drain on resources and further diminishing local food production at a time when it is most needed. Meanwhile, existing development plans must be scaled up to the new realities and swiftly set into motion.
Over the past year, Haiti has emerged as a country that holds real economic potential in areas as diverse as tourism, light manufacturing, biodiesel, and agriculture. Strategic investments in these sectors will ensure that Haitians can better help themselves once the humanitarian relief has moved on.

Anti-Christian as well as anti-American?

2010-01-17T23:25:00.002-06:00

I was thinking about the underpants bomber and his choice of targeting the US on Christmas day. This struck me as having an anti-Christian message, in addition to the obvious anti-Americanism. It makes me wonder if there is anti-Christian, as distinct from anti-American, rhetoric in al-Qaeda and Islamic messages. If so, what are the implications for Christian and other religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries? Should we expect an up-tick in anti-Christian violence to come? For example, in Egypt, where 10% of the population are Coptic Christians, 6 Copts were killed on Coptic Christmas Eve in early January. I wonder if there's a study or a watch group that counts episodes of religious violence. Does anyone know?

So, I've looked it up and found that someone has beat me to the punch on writing about this, but only by a few days.

Here's an excerpt from an article that appeared in The Guardian just 5 days ago:

Violence against Christians as representatives of the "crusader west" is also an aspect of what French author Gilles Kepel has described as the far bigger civil war, or fitna, raging within the Islamic world itself.
Yet hostility also arises, in a fundamental sense, from Muslim perceptions of western aggression against Islam, be it the war in Afghanistan, domineering western economic and cultural behaviour, attempts to ban veils, offensive cartoon caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, airline and immigration profiling, or systemic, unchecked and arguably worsening discrimination and harassment of Muslim minorities living in western nations.
To have a chance of overcoming this widening gulf, the west may have to put its own house in order first. One proposed path is wider adoption of Karen Armstrong's new Charter for Compassion, a "spiritual document for the world", whose guiding idea is that while almost every religion has a history of intolerance, all have traditions of compassion that rise above hatred.
For faithful believers of all descriptions, the charter offers a golden rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Chicago's debt to Haiti

2010-01-14T09:56:00.001-06:00

I was walking along Michigan Avenue last night and passed by a new statue of the founder of Chicago, Jean-Baptiste DuSable, a Haitian. He built a trading post at the confluence of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River.

In its hour of need, Chicago should make a visible contribution in recognition of our connection.

Funny Eggs

2010-01-12T13:37:00.000-06:00

One man's story of frying his first egg. Read the whole thing on Salon.com.

It was not until after graduating college that I found myself entering that strange, downmarket neighborhood of the house called the kitchen to do anything besides light a cigarette off the stove. The place was mainland China, where I was teaching English. Cholera had descended on the city, leading police to close the restaurants most popular with Westerners. Rather than brave the more modest noodle and dumpling houses, which in general tone resembled the sort of barrio body shop that deals strictly in cash, I lived on peanuts, which were grown locally and sold for about 10 U.S. cents per pound. For variety, there was watermelon, tea and a type of dry biscuit whose name in English -- Fancy Smell -- appeared helpfully on the package beside an image of Shou Xing, the Chinese god of longevity.

What makes a terrorist?

2010-01-11T16:32:00.002-06:00

Why would a wealthy and educated young man like Umar Farouk Abdulmatallab, the underpants bomber, want to become a terrorist? [hat tip: Caroline]

Former CIA case officer Marc Sageman has made one of the most thorough analyses of al-Qaeda networks ever conducted. He assembled more than 500 profiles of individual terrorists, their personal characteristics and motivations, how they were recruited and how they are organised.

What he discovers is that terrorists are most likely to be motivated not by disadvantage but by a sense of moral disgust.

He sets out four stages by which this radicalisation normally happens.

It is sparked when the individual reacts to stories of Muslim suffering around the world with moral outrage. Some of those who feel outraged will progress to the second stage, in which they interpret that suffering in the context of a wider Manichaean war between Islam and the West.

Of those who take that view, a minority will progress to the third stage, in which their smouldering resentment will be fuelled by bad personal experiences in western countries, such as discrimination, inequality or just an inability to get on despite good qualifications.

Of those who undergo these three stages, fewer undergo the fourth, in which the individual joins a circle of friends which becomes like a family closed to the outside world, which shuts out the critical thinking which might challenge the radical worldview. They read, listen to and watch only material which stokes their view of the world and prepares them for action and, in some cases, the murder of innocents.

Why does all this matter? It matters because we cannot beat the radicalisation which leads to terrorism unless we first understand it. [Kennedy School of Government, Harvard]

How cool is this?

2010-01-10T00:24:00.000-06:00

From National Geographic, but if you like this, check out NASA's picture of the day, which you can subscribe to.

Another Top 100 List

2010-01-08T14:31:00.000-06:00

This time it's 100 things to watch for 2010, mostly marketing and business trends:

3. Alternative Measures of Prosperity
France’s Joie de Vivre Index, initiated by President Nicolas Sarkozy, is intended to provide a better assessment of well-being than the classic measure of economic health, the GDP. Look for more countries or companies to embrace alternative measures of prosperity, such as the Triple Bottom Line of people, profits and planet.

4. Alternative Metals in Jewelry
With gold prices volatile in recent years, Asian jewelry makers are turning instead to precious metals like palladium and titanium. China’s imports of palladium have been rising steadily; look for more jewelry manufacturers to choose it over gold.
5. Bacon Everywhere
Bacon is being spotted in everything from cocktails (made with bacon-infused liquor or the new Bakon Vodka) to desserts, including bacon-and-egg ice cream at the famous Fat Duck in the U.K., a bacon chocolate bar from Vosges Haut-Chocolat and Lollyphile’s maple-bacon lollipop.

#5 is right on - I was given a bacon dark chocolate bar as part of a Christmas present. Haven't quite had the nerve to taste it yet, though.

New Year reminder

2010-01-07T13:17:00.000-06:00

A week into the new year, it's good to be reminded of the opportunity before us (you can mentally substitute "person" for "man" in the following quote - I did):

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each New Year find you a better man.
-Benjamin Franklin

Yemen

2010-01-06T10:39:00.005-06:00

I've always been attracted to the pictures I've seen of Yemeni cities, like this one from foreignpolicy.com. The underpants bomber got his training here and it is one of the poorest and least literate countries in the Arab world. A 2007 figure for unemployment in Yemen was 40%!

The largest Yemeni population in the US is around Detroit. Strange that that was the underpants bomber's target.

100 Global Thinkers

2010-01-05T07:09:00.002-06:00

Foreign Policy magazine has come up with its first ever list of the top 100 Global Thinkers. The first two are Bernanke and Obama, which is perhaps predictable. The third one is a name I've never heard before! Zahra Rahnavard. Who is that? She is the wife of Iranian opposition leader Mousavi and was the brains behind his campaign and the Green Revolution. The governor of the People's Bank of China comes in at #9, and the editor of Wired magazine at #24.

I encourage you to check out this list. It's very interesting.

Green Wall

2010-01-02T23:59:00.001-06:00

China built its famous Great Wall to keep out marauders. Now, millennia later, a "Great Green Wall" may rise in Africa to deter another, equally relentless invader: sand.

The proposed wall of trees would stretch from Senegal to Djibouti as part of a plan to thwart the southward spread of the Sahara, Senegalese officials said earlier this month at the UN's Copenhagen climate conference...

Trees are almost always formidable foes against encroaching deserts, said Patrick Gonzalez of the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Forestry.

That's because stands of trees act as natural windbreaks against sandstorms, and their roots improve soil health—especially by preventing erosion. ...

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo first proposed the idea of a desert-blocking wall in 2005, and it was approved by the African Union in 2007.

All 11 countries that would house the Great Green Wall have pledged to help fund the project.

But the wall has been slow to break ground: Of the 4,350 miles (7,000 kilometers) it needs to cover, only about 326 miles (525 kilometers) have been planted so far, all within Senegal.

In Copenhagen, President Wade emphasized that he has made the wall a priority, and he has already asked scientists working on the project to choose species hardy enough to survive in arid conditions without maintenance. ..

More than 70 percent of Africa's poor depends on farming, according to the IPCC.

But drought, desertification, and other climate-related disasters are forcing many farmers to abandon their lands, spurring a heavier flow of immigrants out of central and North Africa.

The 9.3-mile-wide (15-kilometer-wide) wall of trees would improve the surrounding, now-degraded soils, allowing farmers to again grow crops and more easily raise livestock in the region.

Senegal also plans to dig rainwater reservoirs along its portion of the wall—virtual lifesavers in a region where rain falls only three months out of the year, supporters say....

The gigantic tree barrier would also trap some atmospheric carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, and produce a refuge for native animals and plants.

Some of the trees themselves may become valuable crops.

The native acacia senegal tree, which is to be a staple plant in the Great Green Wall, produces gum arabic, a main ingredient in consumer products such as cosmetics and soft drinks.

Farmers could collect the sap and even sustainably harvest some of the wood to make tools or produce charcoal, Senegalese environment advisor Djeng said.

A solution to many problems at once. I love these. [nationalgeographic.com]

Music

2009-12-29T12:51:00.000-06:00

Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music. ~Ronald Reagan

Poverty & Unemployment in Afghanistan

2009-11-19T07:16:00.000-06:00

A poll was taken in Afghanistan by Oxfam asking Afghans the cause of the conflict in their country. Here are the results:

I went to a talk a few days ago by Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute who said that the strongest risk factor for a failed state is the rate of unemployment, especially among young men. Check out his new book: Plan B 4.0, which you can even download for free.

Fun with Leaves

2009-11-18T10:24:00.003-06:00

On a lighter note, check out these fantastic pics on NYTimes.com.

The rise and fall of the US vis a vis China

2009-11-16T10:07:00.000-06:00

Check out the relative proportions of world GDP for China and the US over time, especially the first one from 1820. I had no idea. [ft.com]

The rest of the article fleshes out the implications:

As US president Barack Obama begins a tour of Asian capitals, the standard assumption in the west is that his meetings will be with leaders of nations that rank as America’s junior partners. Yet the reality is more complex. Amid the rubble of the financial crisis, the US position as singular superpower and global economic top dog looks increasingly under threat.
Those who take pleasure in America’s discomfort point out that this global economic colossus has become shackled to the world’s largest pile of international debt and pulled down by a sinking currency. By common consent China is the chief beneficiary of the financial debacle and a serious challenger to US hegemony.In particular, when he reaches Beijing next week, nothing will be able to disguise the fact that Mr Obama is paying a visit to his country’s biggest creditor.
Since economic might so often goes hand in hand with military strength, this shift in economic power, along with the recent weakness of the dollar, has been heralded as a harbinger of US national decline.

How we live

2009-11-15T09:27:00.001-06:00

Check out this very interesting photo essay on ForeignPolicy.com:

In 2008, the number of people living in cities for the first time exceeded those in rural areas worldwide, a historic turning point. One-third of urban dwellers, approximately 1 billion people, live in slums. The United Nations predicts that number will double in the next 25 years....

"No matter what economic condition people are living in, not only do we need to create shelter over our head, but to create a home."

Why won't Obama go?

2009-11-14T11:04:00.000-06:00

Perhaps Obama is wavering on going to Copenhagen for the climate talks so that he doesn't further alienate the Republicans he wants support from on the Health Care issue. Thoughts?

For the past two years, 192 countries have participated in talks on the pressing issue of climate change, which will culminate in the Copenhagen summit next month. So far, more than 40 heads of state have agreed to attend, to act as negotiators and more importantly to demonstrate a firm commitment to ambitious targets. The growing list includes Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
But the RSVPs seem lost in the mail for the leaders of the countries considered to be the lynchpins of the deal -- China, the United States, and India. Hu Jintao, Barack Obama, and Manmohan Singh haven't committed yet -- and they should. This summer, Obama indicated he would not attend because Congress has not yet passed climate change legislation. He's since waffled a bit, saying he would if his appearance would close the deal. It's weak tea, and those calling for him to attend include Al Gore and Brazil's da Silva, who used his weekly radio address to implore Obama and Hu to make the trip.
It is less likely that Hu or Singh will attend. Their developing countries have been good negotiators, but reticent to commit to ambitious targets. (China recently called for keeping the Kyoto protocol instead.) If Obama commits, though, they would be a lot more willing -- and that should be reason for the U.S. leader to consider heading across the pond.
In other climate news, the International Energy Agency released its full World Energy Outlook yesterday. One choice doomsday passage:
For every year that passes, the window for action on emissions over a given period becomes narrower -- and the costs of transforming the energy sector increase. We calculate that each year of delay before moving onto the emissions path consistent with a 2°C temperature increase would add approximately $500 billion to the global incremental investment cost...A delay of just a few years would probably render that goal completely out of reach.

Deforestation slowing in Brazil

2009-11-13T09:41:00.003-06:00

The number of acres cut in the Amazon this year are the lowest since the government started tracking it in 1988. If you want to take a cynical view, though, it is for the same reason the US has had a major reduction in green house gas emissions in the past year: macro-economic forces. This news is also a bit like unemployment in the US: it's getting worse more slowly.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon dropped nearly 46 percent from August 2008 to July 2009 — the biggest annual decline in two decades, the government said Thursday.
Analysis of satellite imagery by the National Institute for Space Research shows an estimated 7,008 square kilometers (2,705 square miles) of forest were cleared during the 12-month period, the lowest rate since the government started monitoring deforestation in 1988.
"The new deforestation data represents an extraordinary and significant reduction for Brazil," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silvasaid in a statement.
The numbers have been falling since 2004, when they reached a peak of 27,000 square kilometers (10,425 square miles) cleared in one year, according to the space research institute.
The government credited its aggressive monitoring and enforcement measures for the drop, as well as its promotion of sustainable activities in the Amazon region, an area in northern Brazil the size of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River.
But Paulo Gustavo, environmental policy director of Conservation International, said a major factor is the drop in world prices for beef, soy and other products that drive people to clear land for agriculture in the rainforest.
"The police control has improved a little, there has been success in controlling deforestation," Gustavo said. "But the main factor is the drop in commodity prices, which are the main factor in speeding up or slowing deforestation." [news.yahoo.com]

Just what the world needs...

2009-11-10T17:30:00.002-06:00

Venezuela and Russia say they are working on a series of agreements for Moscow to provide the South American country with technology for the development of industries ranging from robotics to biochemistry.
Venezuela's science and technology minister, Jesse Chacon, says the agreements will likely be signed next year.
Russian authorities have presented more than 5,000 technological projects for Venezuela's consideration.
Chacon says the transfer of nuclear technology is not among the projects that were presented at a forum in Venezuela's capital Monday — even through Russia plans to help Venezuela develop nuclear energy to produce electricity. [news.yahoo.com]

Fort Hood

2009-11-07T13:00:00.001-06:00

“When a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal,” said Victor Benjamin II, 30, a former member of the Army. “But when a Muslim does it, they call it jihad." [NYTimes.com]

Non-proliferation, Rogue States aren't the Problem

2009-11-02T11:45:00.001-06:00

But there's just one problem: The United States is looking for nukes in all the wrong places. Nuclear terrorism won't come from countries; it will come from vast networks of operatives with only tenuous links to states. Nor are terrorists likely to get their nuclear material from rogue regimes. Far more probable is that they will steal it or obtain it through the growing global black market. If this is to be prevented, the United States and its allies will have to give their counterproliferation mindset a sweeping overhaul.
Today's terrorist threats are far less tangible than the traditional, state-centric security ones embodied by such countries as Iran, North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel. Rather than diplomatic channels, terrorist networks use advanced information technology to advance their ideology, goals, and missions. They are bound by none of the norms and restraints of states. [ForeginPolicy.com]

Is Ahmadinejad Jewish?

2009-10-07T16:35:00.002-05:00

Whether the rumors are true or not, they will impact Ahmadinejad's stance on the Middle East. FP.com suggests he'll have to remain hardline or become even more anti-Israel in order to demonstrate that his family background is as he says it is.

But in the end, the rumor is almost as powerful as the truth when it comes to shaping Ahmadinejad's actions at home and abroad. None of the accounts suggest he had any active participation in the choices allegedly made by his parents while he was still a child. Yet even suggestions of not having been Shiite for many generations -- despite his mother's family claiming descent from Islam's prophet Muhammad -- undercuts Ahmadinejad's legitimacy in the eyes of many conservative Iranians.

Ultimately, on the domestic front in Iran, the whole issue plays into the widening chasm between the mullahs and Ahmadinejad, some of whom have challenged his family's Muslim lineage and piety for years. His oft-questioned background also may explain why he and the many relatives he appointed to high office are working hard to create a secular yet still autocratic state, moving away from the theocratic oversight of politics.

On the international front, the problem of Ahmadinejad's past produces other complications. As his heritage becomes a more public question, it only makes it less likely that he can find accommodation with Israel without compromising himself in Muslim eyes. To protect and further his political career, Ahmadinejad will only be more compelled to reaffirm his Shiite identity by presenting himself as the champion of Muslim and Palestinian rights over Jewish and Israeli ones.

Consequently, Ahmadinejad's Jewish background, if it does exist, will only make peace in the Middle East and compromise with the United States less likely on his part. And in endeavoring to deflect and vitiate complications -- actual or imaginary -- from his past, the Iranian president continues to sully his nation's image and tarnish his own legacy.

Yes, we currently subsidize fossil fuels!

2009-09-25T10:55:00.001-05:00

This seems like a no-brainer. How did this not happen sooner?

Group of 20 leaders are close to an agreement on phasing out subsidies for fossil fuels in an effort to curb global warming, though no fixed dates have been set, reports Reuters.
Several G20 countries subsidize fuel such as coal and oil, at a cost of about $300 billion, to keep prices artificially low for consumers, which boosts both demand for hydrocarbons and emissions, reports Reuters.

Obama aide Michael Froman told Reuters that phasing out fossil fuel subsidies worldwide could cut greenhouse gases by up to 12 percent by 2050, citing estimates by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Energy Agency. He said United States would agree to the cuts as well.

Ever wonder what Swedes do during those long winters?

2009-09-24T08:56:00.000-05:00

STOCKHOLM – “I saw a wonderful statue earlier. I always knew it was there, but today I measured it and soon we’ll knit a sweater for it. We’ll meet up on site to stitch it and take a picture for our blog.”

Maskan (“the stitch”), one of three code-named female founders of the Stockholm “guerrilla knitting” group, Stickkontakt, is telling me about their upcoming knitting graffiti action. Inspired by the Houston group, Knitta Please, Stickkontakt decorate everything from lampposts and bins to park benches and tree trunks with colorful yarns. “We often have political messages,” Maskan tells me. “But sometimes we don’t. Once, we decided to celebrate Sweden’s few female statues by dressing up four of them as super heroines.”

There is a zero tolerance policy for graffiti in Stockholm; any unauthorized street art must be removed within 24 hours. But that hasn’t dissuaded guerrilla knitters.

“We’re hoping that our actions – which can hardly be called vandalism – will serve as a kind of gateway to making people more open to street art in general,” says Maria, cofounder of another knitting graffiti group called Masquerade.

Maria and her friend Lina, the other cofounder of Masquerade, see knitting graffiti as fun, harmless, quirky, and soft, with the potential for a global impact. In fact, they recently returned from a trip where they used knitting graffiti to “tag” along the Trans-Siberian railway in Russia, Mongolia, and China. [csmonitor.com]

Crowd-sourcing

2009-09-23T08:03:00.005-05:00

You know that I'm a foodie and this article would have appealed to me anyway, but the thing that really caught my attention is the word "crowd-sourcing". I guess that's the verb for how a wiki is created. I would say that evolutionary improvement can be made through the "crowd-sourcing" of a recipe, but that's not the way to make revolutionary steps or to produce real novelty or innovation. So, what do you think of the word? And what do you think of the process it describes?

AS the digital age seeps into the kitchen, it’s time to reconsider whether too many cooks spoil the broth.

Crowd-sourcing recipes — corralling a group of strangers on the Internet to create and edit a bank of recipes — is gaining popularity and investors.
The idea is that a thousand cooks can come up with a better recipe than any single chef.
Some cooks argue that the collective process strips recipes of their personality and their provenance. But backers believe they are creating a new authority for cooking: the Wikipedia of recipes. [NYTimes.com]

happy birthday to me!

2009-09-19T10:06:00.000-05:00

Norman Borlaug - Father of the Green Revolution

2009-09-18T11:07:00.002-05:00

Norman Borlaug, who revolutionized agriculture, increasing crop yields to feed millions of people died last week. As the world continues to confront expanding populations and increasing environmental degradation, what will be the next wave of agricultural innovation?

Here's a bit of his obituary from Economist.com:

As a boy, he hadn’t known what hunger was. He came from a small Norwegian farm in Iowa, the land of butter-sculptures and the breaded tenderloin sandwich. But on his first trip to “the big city”, Minneapolis, in 1933, grown men had begged him for a nickel for a cup of coffee and a small, dry hamburger, and a riot had started round him when a milk-cart dumped its load in the street. He saw then how close to breakdown America was, because of hunger. It was impossible “to build a peaceful world on empty stomachs”.

Crop diseases drew his attention first, inspiring him to turn from forestry to plant pathology under Charles Stakman, a lifelong mentor, at the University of Minnesota. Rusts especially exercised him: how they lived, under the green live tissue of stems, how they spread, travelling for miles on the jet stream, and how they fell from the sky to infect even the healthiest crop, if the moisture and temperature were right. Rust had devastated the Midwest in the 1930s, and Mexico shortly before he went there. So Mr Borlaug first bred wheat cultivars for rust-resistance, a ten-year task, and then crossed them with Norin, a dwarf Japanese variety, to produce a shorter, straighter, stronger wheat which, when properly charged with water and fertiliser, gave three times the yield.

This was the wheat that swept India in its “Green Revolution”, raising yields from 12m tonnes in 1965 to 20m by 1970, causing the country to run out of jute bags to carry it, carts and railcars to transport it, and places to store it; that made Pakistan self-sufficient in wheat by 1968; that almost doubled yields even in Sudan, on the edge of the Sahel. The famines and huge mortality that had been predicted for the second half of the 20th century never came to pass. More food led not to more births, but fewer, as the better-fed had smaller families. Global grain production outpaced population growth, and Mr Borlaug won the Nobel peace prize in 1970 for saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Greens attacked him, saying his new varieties used too much water and costly chemical fertiliser; his link with DuPont was noted. They complained that traditional farming was disrupted and diversity replaced by monoculture. Mr Borlaug called them naysayers and elitists, who had never known hunger but thought, for the health of the planet, that the poor should go without good food. Higher yields, he pointed out, saved marginal land and forest from farming. Inorganic fertiliser just replaced natural nutrients, and more efficiently than manure. As for cross-breeding, Mother Nature had done it first, cross-pollinating different wild grasses until they produced a grain that could eventually expand into modern bread.

Genetic engineering of plants greatly excited him. The risks, he said, were rubbish, unproven by science, while the potential benefits were endless. The transfer of useful characteristics might now take weeks, rather than decades. More lives would be saved. The gene for rust-resistance in rice, for example, might be put into all other cereals. He hoped he might live to see it.

Meanwhile what he called the “Population Monster” was breathing down his neck, or rather ticking, like Captain Hook’s crocodile. Every second brought two more people, crying to be fed. By 2050, he wrote in 2005, the world would need to double its food supply. Some 800m were malnourished as it was. Mr Borlaug loved to talk of reaching for the stars, but his day-to-day motto was an earthly one. Get the plough. Start growing now.

What do France and Bhutan have in common?

2009-09-16T13:56:00.000-05:00

From ForeignPolicy.com. What do you think? Is it valid, good or reasonable to measure Gross National Happiness? Well-Being per Capita?

Nicolas Sarkozy's government is rolling out a "revolutionary" new economic indicator:
France plans to include happiness and well-being in its measurements of economic progress, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday, beckoning other countries to join in a "revolution" in the way growth is tracked after the global economic crisis. [...]
France — whose growth has lagged its peers in recent decades according to standard measures — will also try to convince other governments to change their economic tracking, Sarkozy said
"A great revolution is waiting for us," he said. "For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos."
"The crisis doesn't only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so," he said.
One minor quibble: Sarkozy should really give some credit to King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck of Bhutan, the true pioneer of gross national happiness.
Skeptics can (and will) look at this new innovation as a ploy for France to "juke the stats," since its short workweek and social benefits look a lot more impressive than its GDP growth.
That aside, the transformation of Sarkozy's economic message has been pretty astounding. The president came to power promising privitization and economic modernization and was lambasted by French left-wingers for his attachment to "Anglo-Saxon" economic models. But since the economic crisis (and his own popularity crisis) he's made a habit of attacking the Anglo-Saxons for their free-market orthodoxy and consulting with market-skeptics Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz on new economic indicators.
Where have you gone, Sarko l'Américain?

Health care vs. Free trade?

2009-09-15T09:05:00.002-05:00

Here's a trade-off that will not be good for us. From Economist.com:

ALTHOUGH Barack Obama alarmed free traders last year with protectionist-sounding pronouncements on the campaign trail, such as one about the need to renegotiate NAFTA, optimists among them dismissed this as mere posturing designed to placate restive trade unions. Yet a decision by the White House to impose punitive tariffs (35% for the first year, falling by five percentage points a year, to 25% in the third year) on Chinese-made pneumatic tyres now raises serious doubts about Mr Obama’s commitment to free trade...
Simon Evenett, a trade economist at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, argues that Mr Obama’s decision is a clear affirmation of the power of American labour unions in shaping its trade policy. It appears that Mr Obama is desperate to shore-up support from unions and the left of the Democratic Party for health-care reform—his most pressing domestic concern—and is prepared to risk repercussions on trade.

If so, heightened economic tensions between America and China are a heavy price to pay. Mr Prasad says that “an escalating trade war between these two large economies has the potential to disrupt the world trading system”. The China-America spat also comes soon before the leaders of the G20, the group of big rich and emerging economies, meet in Pittsburgh on September 24th. Global co-operation has been crucial amid efforts to encourage economic recovery. It would be a tragedy if it that were derailed by posturing over tyres and chicken.

Einstein Quote of the Day

2009-09-13T10:14:00.001-05:00

I've always held a special place in my heart for math, and this quote sums it up:

One reason why mathematics enjoys special esteem, above all other sciences, is that its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable, while those of other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being overthrown by newly discovered facts.

Crocs: On life support

2009-08-19T11:55:00.000-05:00

Crocs are on the decline and the company teetering on the brink. [Salon.com] Say it ain't so!

"For a while, they were just right there, in the middle of American culture," says Richard Polk, the owner of Pedestrian Shops and ComfortableShoes.com, based in Boulder, Colo. Polk's store was the first real shoe store to stock the crazy-looking plastic shoes, a few years back, when they first roared out of nearby Aurora to take the world by storm. Polk was a believer; not only did his shop get on the bandwagon early, but he also wore a pair all through a campaign for Boulder City Council in 2005. Yet looking back, even he can't quite believe it. "It was amazing -- here you got grown-ups talking about serious stuff, wearing royal blue shoes," Polk says. "I don't think that'll ever happen again."
Which is sort of the problem for Crocs Inc. now. Reports about the company's future look bleak -- it lost $185.1 million last year, shed 2,000 jobs, and revenue in the first quarter of 2009 declined by 32 percent. And yes, you read that right -- they had grown so big so quickly that they laid off 2,000 people. Just three years ago, Crocs went public in a splashy stock offering, raising $200 million; now it trades at about three bucks a share, down from a high of nearly $70 in October 2007. Analysts wonder whether a scheduled September debt payment will do the firm in.

Road Trip!!!

2009-08-18T11:39:00.001-05:00

I don't know what language this is in, but I know that in just 6 days these folks have seen Hershey, PA, NYC, Niagara Falls, Cedar Point in Ohio and Chicago. That's a lot of ground to cover.

Click on the link above to check out their blog...

Resources on Afghan elections

2009-08-17T11:31:00.003-05:00

If you want to read up on the elections in Afghanistan on Thursday, here are special sections on the topic:
Financial Times
Al Jazeera

Swiss healthcare in the US

2009-08-17T11:27:00.001-05:00

A rundown by Paul Krugman on the different ways countries provide healthcare:

Every wealthy country other than the United States guarantees essential care to all its citizens. There are, however, wide variations in the specifics, with three main approaches taken.
In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false. Like every system, the National Health Service has problems, but over all it appears to provide quite good care while spending only about 40 percent as much per person as we do. By the way, our own Veterans Health Administration, which is run somewhat like the British health service, also manages to combine quality care with low costs.
The second route to universal coverage leaves the actual delivery of health care in private hands, but the government pays most of the bills. That’s how Canada and, in a more complex fashion, France do it. It’s also a system familiar to most Americans, since even those of us not yet on Medicare have parents and relatives who are.
Again, you hear a lot of horror stories about such systems, most of them false. French health care is excellent. Canadians with chronic conditions are more satisfied with their system than their U.S. counterparts. And Medicare is highly popular, as evidenced by the tendency of town-hall protesters to demand that the government keep its hands off the program.
Finally, the third route to universal coverage relies on private insurance companies, using a combination of regulation and subsidies to ensure that everyone is covered. Switzerland offers the clearest example: everyone is required to buy insurance, insurers can’t discriminate based on medical history or pre-existing conditions, and lower-income citizens get government help in paying for their policies.
In this country, the Massachusetts health reform more or less follows the Swiss model; costs are running higher than expected, but the reform has greatly reduced the number of uninsured. And the most common form of health insurance in America, employment-based coverage, actually has some “Swiss” aspects: to avoid making benefits taxable, employers have to follow rules that effectively rule out discrimination based on medical history and subsidize care for lower-wage workers.
So where does Obamacare fit into all this? Basically, it’s a plan to Swissify America, using regulation and subsidies to ensure universal coverage.

Water on the dancefloor

2009-08-16T16:41:00.001-05:00

I don't usually get too scientific on you, but I thought this was interesting. Did you know that scientists are still making discoveries about the molecular structure of plain old liquid water?

"One can visualize this as a crowded dance restaurant, with some people sitting at large tables, taking up quite a bit of room—like the tetrahedral component in water—and other people on the dance floor, standing close together and moving slower or faster depending on the mood or 'temperature' of the restaurant—like the molecules in the disordered regions can be excited by heat, the dancers can be excited and move faster with the music," Nilsson said. "There's an exchange when people sitting decide to get up to dance and other dancers sit down to rest. When the dance floor really gets busy, tables can also be moved out of the way to allow for more dancers, and when things cool back off, more tables can be brought in."

This more detailed understanding of the molecular structure and dynamics of liquid water at ambient temperatures mirrors theoretical work on "supercooled" water: an unusual state in which water has not turned into ice even though it is far below the freezing point. In this state, theorists postulate, the liquid is made up of a continuously fluctuating mix of tetrahedral and more disordered structures, with the ratio of the two depending on temperature—just as Nilsson and his colleagues have found to be the case with water at the ambient temperatures important for life.

"Previously, hardly anyone thought that such fluctuations leading to distinct local structures existed at ambient temperatures," Nilsson said. "But that's precisely what we found."

This new work explains, in part, the liquid's strange properties. Water's density maximum at 4 degrees Celsius can be explained by the fact that the tetrahedral structures are of lower density, which does not vary significantly with temperature, while the more disordered regions—which are of higher density—become more disordered and so less dense with increasing temperature. Likewise, as water heats, the percentage of molecules in the more disordered state increases, allowing this excitable structure to absorb significant amounts of heat, which leads to water's high heat capacity. Water's tendency to form strong hydrogen bonds explains the high surface tension that insects take advantage of when walking across water.

Marshall Plan for Africa

2009-08-14T17:38:00.001-05:00

Since decades of aid haven't had much effect, here's an old idea with a new application from FP.com.

Just six months into his term, U.S. President Barack Obama is already modeling himself after the country's most transformational Democratic leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits Africa this month, now would be the perfect time to follow in the steps of Roosevelt and his secretary of state, George Marshall, by announcing a second Marshall Plan. More than half a century after the United States helped rebuild a war-torn Europe, it's time Africa got the same chance.

The Marshall Plan was fundamentally different from the aid that Africa has received over the past four decades. The Marshall Plan made loans to European businesses, which repaid them to their local governments, which in turn used that revenue for commercial infrastructure -- ports, roads, railways -- to serve those same businesses. Aid to Africa has instead funded government and NGO development projects, without any involvement of the local business sector. The Marshall Plan worked. Aid to Africa has not. An African Marshall Plan is long, long overdue.

Bush's trust in Musharraf (remember, he trusted Putin, too)

2009-08-13T10:11:00.003-05:00

The US is funding Pakistan to arm itself against India - not what I want my tax dollars to go for.

"When [Musharraf] looks me in the eye and says, ... 'there won't be a Taliban and won't be al Qaeda,' I believe him, you know?" So said George W. Bush of then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in September 2006. The U.S. president's trust had been forged in a deal made five years earlier: Pakistan would train, equip, and deploy its Army and intelligence service in counterterrorism operations, and Washington promised to reimburse its partner with billions of dollars in weapons, supplies, and cold hard cash. The plan was simple enough, and since 2001, the United States has lived up to its pledge, pouring as much as $12 billion in overt aid and another $10 billion in covert aid to Pakistan.

But today, as the Obama administration re-examines the deal, there is devastating evidence that the billions spent in Pakistan have yielded little in return. For the last eight years, U.S. taxpayers' money has funded hardly any bona fide counterterrorism successes, but quite a bit of corruption in the Pakistani Army and intelligence services. The money has enriched individuals at the expense of the proper functioning of the country's institutions. It has provided habitual kleptocrats with further incentives to skim off the top. Despite the U.S. goal of encouraging democratization, assistance to Pakistan has actually weakened the country's civilian government. And perhaps worst of all, it has hindered Pakistan's ability to fight terrorists....
Pakistan did not use the majority of the funds for the agreed objective of fighting terrorism. Instead, the money was used in the way it has been for the last six decades: to train and stock the Army for conventional warfare, with India viewed as the main threat. The Army spent the vast majority of U.S. funds on types of military equipment that are practically useless against terrorists. It bought an air defense radar system costing $200 million, for example, even though the terrorists in the frontier region have no air capability. The military bought F-16 fighter jets, aircraft-mounted armaments, and anti-ship defense systems. And the U.S. Department of Defense signed off on it. [FP.com]

Good News from Gaza

2009-08-09T08:52:00.000-05:00

5000 kites = world record

Green Buddhist School in Ladakh

2009-08-08T09:14:00.001-05:00

More from BuddhistArtNews.com, my new favorite source, news of an award winning ultra-green school in Ladakh, which is quite a poor corner of India that borders China and is the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir. I visited there in 2004 for a week after a business trip to India. During one of my day trips from Leh, I crossed the 3rd highest pass in the world - serious altitude. There was an Indian Army post there and the soldiers from very warm Punjab were so delighted to see anyone that they invited us in for tea. But I digress...

Here's the cool school:

Barely 15 km southeast of Leh, the hilly headquarters of Ladakh district in Jammu and Kashmir, lies one of India’s most innovative “green” schools that operates on solar power and draws on natural elements to provide “sustainable education” to poor children.
The earthquake-resistant Druk White Lotus School, made of local sandstone, poplar and willow wood, steel, glass and solar panels, straddles a sandy stretch of cold desert in Shey village, flanked by barren mountains.

The school, a seat of education that blends the traditional Ladakhi culture, Buddhist philosophy and modern learning modules, is the winner of three World Architecture Awards - for the best “Asian Building”, the best “Green Building” and the best “Education Building”.

Buddha in the Swat Valley

2009-08-07T09:50:00.002-05:00

There's a lull in the fighting in the Swat Valley of northwestern Pakistan right now, but many think that the problems with the Taliban there are not over. I first heard of the Swat Valley when I was in graduate school when I was looking at the spread of culture and religion through Central Asia. Gandharan art flourished in the Swat Valley as Buddhism from the south met with Greek artistic influence from the west creating a beautiful sculptural tradition.

A bit of background from BuddhistArtNews.com:

For centuries, the Swat River valley was a Buddhist haven. According to tradition, Buddha himself journeyed to Swat during his last reincarnation, and preached to the local villagers. And by the 6th-century A.D, Buddhist pilgrims from as far away as China flocked to the Swat valley, a beautiful lush land of orchards and rushing mountain streams. One early Chinese account describes as many as 1400 Buddhist monasteries perched along the valley walls in the 7th century.
Devout Buddhist artists left an incredibly rich legacy in Swat. Since the valley lay along a major route of the Silk Road—which stretched from China to the Mediterranean—they were greatly influenced by ideas from elsewhere, and gracefully blended foreign styles in their art. They chiseled beautiful, haunting statues of Buddha into the cliffsides, and left many stupas and other Buddhist relics scattered across the countryside.
The region’s new Taliban rulers regard this legacy, and particularly the images of Buddha, as an affront to Islam, and they have already taken action against them. In 2008, they set off dynamite charges to erase the face of a 23-foot-high Buddha carved into a cliff near Jehanabad in the Swat River valley, an act of terrible vandalism that recalled the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by Afghanistan’s Taliban. In a separate attack, they badly damaged parts of the Swat Museum—which which holds an important collection of Buddhist art—and issued threats to the staff of the museum.

None of this, of course, bodes well for the fate of the Swat’s rich cultural legacy in years to come. But the international community was outraged by the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and in 2003, UNESCO issued a “Declaration concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage. In part, this declaration stipulates that “States should take all appropriate measures to prevent, avoid, stop and suppress acts of intentional destruction of cultural heritage…. “

Pakistan’s government is clearly caught between a rock and a hard place now, with Taliban militants breathing down its neck, less than 100 miles from Islamabad. But I, like many others, sincerely hope that it will not abandon its responsibility to protect Swat’s rich cultural legacy, particularly in these very trying times.

China's new work groups

2009-08-06T09:09:00.000-05:00

Spurred by the unlikely success of a factory-turned-art-space in Beijing called 798 and a desire to diversify the economy, cities across China are converting dozens of abandoned factories into art galleries, industrial-chic office space, and entertainment destinations. Many that aren't yet repurposing old industrial sites are drawing up plans – motivated by hope of profits or fear of criticism from higher-ups for failing to follow the latest trends in city development.

"China's investing heavily in the knowledge worker writ large, and this has become another part of that investment," says Eugenie Birch, chair of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of City and Regional Planning. "And when China does something, it does it at full force."

The 'creative industry' concept, born overseas in the mid-1990s, took hold here a few years ago, when government leaders began referringto it in speeches and planning documents.

Projects are springing up across China, from Shenzhen to Hangzhou to Chengdu. They aim to attract artists, architects, photographers, designers, and advertising firms – the core of what China has labeled "the creative industry." Beijing has more than 20 such districts, and Shanghai more than 70, though not all are factory conversions.

The Yangcheng project, conceived two years ago, is one of at least seven large-scale projects in Guangzhou under construction, with varying degrees of official support. They include a former plastics factory and a shipping warehouse. All offer cheap rent and cavernous workshops.

"We've been opening up our economy for so many years, and it's all been so fast, but it's reached a level where we need to change our development strategy," says a spokeswoman for one of the city's larger creative industry zone projects, who cited company policy against speaking with foreign media in requesting anonymity. "The whole economy has to change to develop this higher-level work." [Christian Science Monitor]

The Future of Iran as a Republic

2009-08-05T08:41:00.000-05:00

Interesting overview and op-ed from Al Jazeera...

Thirty years after the Islamic Revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran - if one can still call it a republic - is at a crossroads.

What has been manifesting itself on Iran's streets since the disputed presidential elections is not only the electorate's collective feeling of injustice and rage, but also the religious-political elite's underlying divide over the future of the velayat-e faqih and its entire political system....
Unfortunately, by committing itself to the rule of law and playing by the rules, the reformist movement [from 1997 to 2005] never questioned the very foundations of Iran's ambiguous political system and ultimately failed to change what one could call power-based law into rights-based law.

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president in 2005, the extent of human rights violations in Iran intensified dramatically.

Iranians had not only lost an advocate of liberties and democracy, but were now faced with a government which aimed to achieve the very opposite by implementing the original radical Islamist tenets of the Revolution.

Militarisation of politics

The chief architect of Ahmadinejad's ideology is the hardliner cleric Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi.

Time and again, Yazdi has questioned the legitimacy of the concept of republic within an Islamic system and he continues to advocate totalitarian rule of the jurist consult over the people, who he considers unable to form any social contract with the state.

The Taliban's Code of Conduct

2009-08-04T09:30:00.000-05:00

The Taliban has published a new manual to help codify and standardize military procedures. Very interesting reading from Al Jazeera:

Al Jazeera has obtained a copy of the Taliban's new military code of conduct, approved by Mullah Omar, its Afghan leader.

It appears to be an attempt to consolidate a disparate movement.

Following are some key quotes that outline the new code of conduct:

On asylum:

"Every Muslim can invite anyone working for the slave government in Kabul to leave their job, and cut their relationship with this corrupt administration. If the person accepts, then with the permission of the provincial and district leadership, a guarantee of safety can be given."

On prisoners:

"Whenever any official, soldier, contractor or worker of the slave government is captured, these prisoners cannot be attacked or harmed.

"The decision on whether to seek a prisoner exchange, or to release the prisoner, with a strong guarantee, will be made by the provincial leader. Releasing prisoners in exchange for money is strictly prohibited."

"If the prisoner is a director, commander or district chief or higher, the decision on whether to harm, kill, release or forgive them is only made by the Imam or deputy Imam."

If a military infidel is captured, the decision on whether to kill, release or exchange the hostage is only to be made by the Imam or deputy Imam."

On civilian casualties:

"Governors, district chiefs and line commanders and every member of the Mujahideen must do their best to avoid civilian deaths, civilian injuries and damage to civilian property. Great care must be taken."

On suicide attacks:

"Suicide attacks should only be used on high and important targets. A brave son of Islam should not be used for lower and useless targets. The utmost effort should be made to avoid civilian casualties."

On unity:

"Creating a new mujahideen group or battalion is forbidden. If unofficial groups or irregular battalions refuse to join the formal structure they should be disbanded. If a governor or leader has in the past had a unit or active group in another province, they should bring it to the attention of the leader of that province. That leader should then take over command of the group."

On relations with the Afghan people:

"The Mujahideen have to behave well and show proper treatment to the nation, in order to bring the hearts of civilian muslims closer to them. The mujahideen must avoid discrimination based on tribal roots, language or their geographic background."

Hugo Chavez, State Sponsor of Terrorism

2009-08-03T09:17:00.002-05:00

This guy just gets more and more appalling:

Despite repeated denials by President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan officials have continued to assist commanders of Colombia’s largest rebel group, helping them arrange weapons deals in Venezuela and even obtain identity cards to move with ease on Venezuelan soil, according to computer material captured from the rebels in recent months and under review by Western intelligence agencies.

New evidence points to collaborations between members of the Venezuelan government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. A Colombian soldier inspected the area after an aerial bombardment against the FARC in July.

The New York Times

One message discussed a plan for an arms deal in Amazonas.

The materials point to detailed collaborations between the guerrillas and high-ranking military and intelligence officials in Mr. Chávez’s government as recently as several weeks ago, countering the president’s frequent statements that his administration does not assist the rebels. “We do not protect them,” he said in late July.
The new evidence — drawn from computer material captured from the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC — comes at a low point for ties between Venezuela and Colombia. Mr. Chávez froze diplomatic relations in late July, chafing at assertions by Colombia’s government that Swedish rocket launchers sold to Venezuela ended up in the hands of the FARC. Venezuela’s reaction was also fueled by Colombia’s plans to increase American troop levels there. [NYTimes]

Food as Movie Star

2009-08-03T08:34:00.000-05:00

It's not getting great reviews, but there's no way I'm going to miss seeing Julie & Julia when it opens next week. Here's an interesting article on how the food gets portrayed...

Although movies have long relied on half-cooked turkeys colored with motor oil, fruit made of plastic, and ice cream carved from Crisco, food in film is increasingly edible and even delicious.
“Everybody thinks it’s all shellacked,” said Colin Flynn, a New York-based chef and stylist who worked with Ms. Spungen on the film. “In the ’70s and ’80s it was more like that. Food looked more like Plasticine. Nowadays it’s almost always real food.”
For food stylists, most of whom began as cooks, it’s a welcome change. It’s also good for audiences, who have become more sophisticated about food and expect more realistic images. And directors believe that well-prepared food can improve the actors’ performances and the look of the final scene.
“The challenge always is making it seem delicious and hyper-real,” said John Lyons, president of production for Focus Features. “If it doesn’t look hyper-real, it doesn’t work in the movie.”
That means a dish needs to be fresh-looking and well-prepared to begin with, and then enhanced with a bit of oil here and a little fake steam there.

Work & Television

2009-08-02T08:18:00.002-05:00

A study in the NY Times shows how people use their time over the course of a day. Click on the link and notice that the area for Television is about as big as the area for Work. So, obviously not every individual spends as much time watching TV as working, but for this group of people surveyed, they did.

That is a major underutilization of talent.

The Quiet Phase in Iran

2009-07-07T02:43:00.000-05:00

Green popping up in unexpected places and life on the ground in Tehran...

And on the 13th day Michael Jackson died. Voice of America and BBC Persian are back up, if intermittently, and we crowd around like the rest of the world for the latest news. It is almost a relief. Being a full-time revolutionary is hard work, difficult to sustain. Seeing the non-stop coverage, the obvious distraction of his passing, we grimly joke that Michael was a martyr for the cause. At least he had the decency to delay his death until the worst violence had already passed....
Every young person I see I wonder, What were you doing three weeks ago? Who were you then? I look for signs of subversion. A girl wears a green headscarf. A kid shifts gears in his Kia Pride with an arm encased in a green cast. What does it mean? Together, in a crowd, the color green added up to something. Alone, spread apart and without context, they are just moments of coincidence. [Salon.com]

The White House Kitchen Garden

2009-07-06T01:50:00.002-05:00

Michelle Obama's garden is producing lettuce, peas, eggplants and all sorts of other good things. As this article in Salon argues, she is just bringing more visibility to a movement that has been growing for some time. Americans are starting to be more interested in where their food comes from, how its grown and in cooking it themselves.

The Europeans have been doing this for a long time, as evidenced by the Slow Food movement and popular demonstrations around food policy.

I'm missing my garden plot while I'm on vacation. I hope my lettuce will not have bolted by the time I come home, but I'll be so excited to see the progress of my tomatoes and green beans.

Bam!

2009-06-28T17:31:00.001-05:00

I visited the Fancy Food Trade Show today in NY. I was served a small cup of pasta and sauce by none other than Emeril Lagasse. I wish I'd thought to take a picture.

Cap & Trade $175/household/year

2009-06-24T09:41:00.000-05:00

The Waxman-Markey bill which would establish a carbon cap and trade system in the US is coming up for a vote fairly soon. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will cost on average $175 per household.

By annually reducing the supply of these permits, the cap-and-trade legislation written by House Democrats Henry Waxman of California and Ed Markey of Massachusetts would lower the limit on greenhouse gases to 17 percent less than 2005 levels by 2020, according to Bloomberg News.

The CBO analysis estimates that the legislation will cost the richest U.S. households $245 a year, and the poorest will see gains of $40 a year. [environmentalleader.com]

Is it worth it? Is it worth it if we can prevent massive global displacement? One of the front page articles in this weekend's FT, contained the following:

Estimates of the number of environmental refugees in 2050, when the global population is expected to peak at 9 billion and the planet is forecast to be in the throes of a 2°C-or-more temperature rise, vary between 50 million and 1 billion people. But the most commonly repeated number – included in Britain’s 2006 Stern Review – is between 200 and 250 million, or around 10 times the number of refugees and internally displaced persons in the world today.

History of Coffee

2009-06-23T10:51:00.002-05:00

We sit down to a cup every morning and perhaps enjoy a few more throughout the day. Here's the backstory with some juicy tidbits:

The modern coffee drink was invented at the end of 15th century, when roasting and crushing the coffee beans over open fires before extracting them with hot water became the accepted methodology. The Turks claimed coffee to be an aphrodisiac and husbands kept their wives well supplied. If the husband did not supply coffee, it was a legitimate cause for a wife to divorce. Coffeehouses became the social centers, competing with mosques for attendance. As gathering places for political activity and sedition, they banned several times over the next few decades, but they kept reappearing. Eventually a solution was found when coffeehouses and coffee were taxed...

At one point in the mid-16th century, Sultan Murat IV closed them all; they were to remain dark until the last part of the century. But as soon as the Sultan’s edict went into effect, the coffeehouse owners packed up and re-opened their businesses elsewhere, including Venice, Greece and the European continent. Ever notice how Greek coffee is exactly the same as Turkish coffee? The Viennese, not enjoying the grounds in their coffee, invented filtration...

Nevertheless, the Arabians closely guarded their coffee production in order to maintain their complete monopoly. Government policy forbade export of any fertile beans, so that coffee could not be cultivated anywhere else. (The coffee bean is the seed of the coffee tree, but when stripped of its outer layers it becomes infertile.) The Dutch eventually acquired some live shrubs or beans in 1616 and brought them back to Holland where they were grown in greenhouses. Another story tells of a Moslem pilgrim from India named Baba Budan, who secreted seeds out of Arabia in 1650 and planted them in the hills in Mysore, India where they flourished...
The Arabs were known to drink so much coffee that the Christian church denounced it as “the hellish black brew.” But Pope Clement VIII found it so delicious that he baptized it and made it a Christian beverage, saying “coffee is so delicious, it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”

At first coffee was mainly sold by lemonade vendors and was believed to have medicinal qualities. Coffeehouses appeared as meeting places for men. The first opened in Oxford in 1650, in London in 1652, in Paris in 1672, in Vienna in 1675. The first coffeehouse opened in Venice in 1683... But then, coffee houses spread quickly across Europe, becoming centers for intellectual exchange. Many great minds of Europe met in the forum, over the beverage.

The largest insurance company in the world, Lloyd’s of London, began as a coffeehouse. It was started in 1688 by Edward Lloyd, who prepared lists of the ships that his customers had insured.

What would Kim Jong-un do?

2009-06-16T11:01:00.000-05:00

Here's a nice examination of how the world might look to the North Korean heir-apparent:

But, if one wants to anticipate and understand the opponent's next move, it's useful to peer at the board from his perspective. And a glance at that board reveals that North Korea's nuclear weapons keep its leader out of that rat-hole, the gallows rope off his neck, and his children alive.
There is always the chance that Kim Jong-il's successor will be a historic reformer who decides to end the tyranny he has inherited, turning over his country and his family's future to the South, praying that its mercy keeps him off the gallows. But more likely, he'll just take over the family business of running North Korea. For those who wonder how he might think about nuclear weapons, look at that chessboard from Pyongyang's perspective and ask yourself: What would your move be?

Happiness in Business

2009-06-15T10:42:00.004-05:00

This was developed for entrepreneurs building their companies, but I think it is applicable for everyone.