Month: July 2008

Food Industry News:

The growth of the global middle class is expected to increase to 1.2 billion by 2030, triple the 2005 level. U.S. exporters believe this growth in wealth over the next 12 years will provide continued strong demand for high-valued agricultural products from the United States such as meat, fruits, nuts, and vegetables.

U.S. exports grew 21 percent in the first 4 months of the year.

In 2007—and so far in 2008—agricultural exports have reached record levels. The weak U.S. dollar and growing Asian economies have increased demand for high-valued U.S. agricultural products that are moved in containers.

Did you know railroads are charging the same amount to move empty containers as full containers?

The India Daily reports:

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has created disaster for the American economy. The Wall Street trader just did not understand the precarious condition of the housing and mortgage market.

…what the Bush Administration has done since 2001 is called “protected socialism to enrich the rich”.

Simply put they have done everything to help the ‘rich by inheritance’ go richer.

However, whenever the rich made mistakes, they became the biggest socialist economy to back their mistakes with common people’s hard earned tax money.

But maybe there’s an opportunity for Americans too. The conclusion of the article says:

Paulson’s failure will end Wall Street’s dominance in American politics – misguided and misinformed policies take its toll.

We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change. – Al Gore

“Geothermal sources could supply Germany’s electricity needs 600 times over,” said Werner Bussmann, CEO of the German Geothermal Association.

About 150 geothermal power plant projects are in the pipeline representing an investment of 4 billion euros. The best geothermal generation opportunities in Germany are located in southern Bavaria — where water of temperatures of 140°C or hotter can be found 5,000 meters below the ground. [link]

Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki said Barack Obama’s timeframe for a withdrawal from Iraq is the right one. more…

Answer: Yes

Remarkable readiness and response from a supposedly languishing industry!

Thirty-six new reactors are currently being built worldwide, while another 81 are in the planning stages.

Germany’s Speigel investigates:

• The US Goes Nuclear: Prefab Reactors and Longer Life-Spans
• Atomic Turkey: Nuclear Power in the Earthquake Zone
• Switzerland: Putting Nuclear to the Vote
• United Kingdom: The British Atomic ‘Green Revolution’
• Russia Eyes the Atom: The Monologue of Nuclear Power
• Japan Unshaken: An Archipelago of Staunch Nuclear Supporters
• China’s Race for Nuclear: An Energetic Newcomer

The French are in the midst of a renaissance of the tram as an antidote to traffic jams and gridlock – and the costs are much easier for citizens.

Tram lines are now operating at full capacity. Passengers who park at a “Park & Ride” lot pay a single price of €2.70 ($4.30) and receive a ticket valid for both parking and the tram. And for each car parked in the lot, up to four passengers can be rewarded with tram tickets at no extra charge.

In almost two dozen French cities, trams have become the hallmark of urban transformation. Nantes and Grenoble were the first cities to bring back what many had long considered to be an outmoded form of transportation. Since then, Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand, Marseille and even the southern part of Paris have also welcomed back urban rail lines. Lille and Lyon are looking into the idea; Caen, Brest, Nancy, and Toulon are in the planning stages. Throughout France, the network of tracks is set to grow to 576 kilometers (358 miles) by 2015.

Story here.
Photo gallery here.

Prime Minister of the UK Gordon Brown has backed Barack Obama in the “war on terror” and made a historic shift of policy and troops.

You won’t believe this, will you? This picture is your nervous system.

It’s on exhibit as part of dozens of displays of animals and human bodies traveling the world.

To permanently preserve bodies, plastination [wiki] replaces water and fat with plastic. The displays do not smell or decay, and even reveal microscopic properties of the original.

Link to BodyWorlds.

Link to photo series at IHT.

Johann Hari at The Independent writes a superb summary of errors as viewed by the 6 billion watching this election from outside the USA:

We have everything to fear from McCain

Yessir: if you liked the credit crunch, you’ll love McCainomics.

Freddie Mac CEO Richard Syron is paid $18.3 million, up 24% from a year ago. Six other executives or former executives made at least $2 million last year

At Bill Moyers’ review of the economy, Cuyahoga County treasurer Jim Rokakis said:

“Back in the old days when there was no sheriff in town, people would rob the banks. Well, here we are in the modern day era, and there’s no sheriff in town. The banks were robbing the people…

I learned a hard lesson: I learned that the Fed really is there to protect banks, and not to protect the consumers.”

---

Update:
Moyers’ contest is to bring us to our senses, and he’s not afraid to say we’re dimwits.

We can have grand days ahead I think while we throw out the libertine, stop usury, build our communities and restore liberty.

One of our first tasks is to put a wallop on our current class of politicians and the brigands both on Wall Street and downtown. What’s so difficult?

The opposition steers media to doubt Obama’s foreign policy, but he’s already built a foreign policy team of more than 300 top advisors!

Real journalism.

Unlike George W. Bush, who entered the presidential race in 2000 with scant exposure to national security issues, Obama has served since his election to the Senate in 2004 on the Foreign Relations Committee and has had a running tutorial from aides steeped in the issues.

His campaign says that he is well prepared and that he often alters and expands on the talking points provided to him by his foreign policy advisers.

To shave costs, airlines may no longer provide hotel vouchers to stranded passengers. On the bright side, sleeping at airports might become a new profit center to offset jet fuel prices.

Once George W. is out of the White House, he’s building a “legacy polishing” institute – a presidential library and think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas at the cost of half a billion dollars.

From dems.gov, the Democratic Caucus, found at Dvorak’s.

“Maybe market forces alone can deprive people of freedom.”

Many are picking up on an essay by NotPhil on free markets. I found it a comfortable read that exposes some of the errors we’ve made while deregulating laissez-faire bullies.

“Scholars have begun to doubt that free markets lead to freedom. They’ve correlated the extent of market regulation in a nation to the extent of human rights abuses that occur in that nation. And they’ve found that there is, in fact, a clear correlation, but it’s not the correlation they had been told to expect.

“Apparently, the freer the market, the less free the people.

“But how could this be?

“Throughout the Cold War, we were told that free markets are democratic, while anything else is authoritarian. After all, what could possibly be a better way to vote than by voting with your dollars? Is there really a reason to think that unhampered markets might hamper human rights? Surely, only government interference can deprive people of freedom.

“But maybe the word free means something different for markets than it means for people, and, maybe, markets aren’t as benevolent as we’ve been told.

“Maybe there’s a reason citizens keep demanding that their governments reign in the activities of domineering market players.”

Andy Himes on Poetry, and the Beginning of Voices in Wartime

We need the language of poetry and art to talk about matters of the human heart. In political debate, you can use fraud and lies, twisted statistics and warped logic, and you can still be very successful. You can use fear and false accusations as weapons. But I don’t think it’s possible to create a great poem unless you are telling the most powerful truth you know.

California alone uses more gas than China. [wired]

There are 24 empty houses for every homeless person in America. [treehugger]

Rep. Jay Inslee in opposition to wiretaps:

Have we forgotten what our ancestors have done in the cause of liberty? Don’t we realize there are some lines we can never cross? Don’t we realize we should never legitimize illegal violations of America’s privacy rights, which this bill does? This bill says if the telecommunication companies violated America’s privacy willfully, knowingly, knowing it was illegal, we are giving them immunity. Where is the excuse for that? We have got to know the law is our ultimate guardian of liberty, and those on this side have accused us of having a pre-9/11 mentality. Let me remind them that July 4, 1776, was pre-9/11. And heaven help us the day that those values are shucked aside at the service of fear.

“I have never seen an opportunity for the country like the one that’s emerging now.” – Al Gore [MSNBC]

John McCain has bounced along the hallways in Washington so many years his sense of reality and issues is as old as the walls. A conservative supporter at HuffingtonPost looks critically at McCain’s so-called Town Hall meetings and finds only staging and sloppy meandering:

In answer to a question about buying gas, the Senator typically ranges far afield and wanders (no surprise) into one of his favorite topics, Iran. “As you also know, in recent days they [the Iranians] have tested missiles which could probably, in some ways, deliver a nuclear weapon, so it’s very serious, a very serious situation. Now I believe that we are seeing a positive response from our European friends. I suggested a long time ago a League of Democracies, and it’s very clear that Russia and China, especially Russia, will veto significant measures which will impact the behavior of the Iranians. Now I regret that. And I regret some of the recent behavior that Russia has exhibited, and I will be glad to talk about that later on, including the reduction of oil supplies to Czechoslovakia after they [the Czechs] agreed with us on missile defense system, etc.”

…
John McCain says, “I think that you are right. I think that the American people are beginning to understand more clearly that this huge transfer of $700 billion a year of your money is one of the greatest transfers of wealth in history. And it is a national security issue, my friends. It is an environmental issue, clearly an economic issue. But we can’t afford this as far as our national security is concerned — that money goes — you mentioned a couple of them, Venezuela, ah, some other countries that — that are clearly not our friends, and there is compelling evidence that some of that money ends up in the hands of terrorist organizations. So it is a national security issue. And I would be glad to identify them, although the American people, whom we tend sometimes to underestimate, have figured a lot of this out.”

…
McCain adds a stunner. “The first telephones cost a thousand dollars and they were about that big! We all remember that!”

I’m surprised there’s been little research on how pet foods affect aggression or behavior!

“When we are considering how a dog is behaving, we really should be considering what is inside the stomach.”

Emmy Koeleman writes at AllAboutFeed that animal welfare studies are showing several improvements are “boosting the immune system and reducing stress.”

She also points to Professor Wouter Hendriks for his work on pet nutrition.

A study in dogs (Dodman et al. (1996)) showed that territorial aggression scores were lower (p = 0.035) for medium- and low-protein diet compared to high protein diet.

However, the effects that commercial pet foods have on pet behavior are still largely unknown.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates renewed his call Tuesday for more spending on U.S. diplomacy and international aid, saying the U.S. government risks “creeping militarization” of its foreign policy by focusing its resources on the Pentagon. [LATimes]

Well, Bush has no other friends or supporters.

A wind turbine can power up to 600 homes, but 600 homeowners can’t get together to own a wind turbine. Why?

Because federal law makes local ownership virtually impossible.

The federal wind tax credit of 2 cents per kilowatt-hour can be taken only against taxes on passive income. Passive income does not include wages or salary; it only counts income from investments or real estate. Most Americans do not have any passive income. Those who do have very little. Thus wind turbines are financed by a handful of firms that attract investments from a few hundred or a few thousand wealthy individuals who can use the tax incentives.

The federal wind-energy incentives — up for renewal this year — discriminate against local ownership and favor absentee ownership.

They also severely restrict the number of investors who can finance wind-energy generators.

Changing the incentives would pave the way for rural Americans to own wind turbines and for the economic benefits of wind energy to truly accrue to the host community’s advantage. It would reward self-reliance. And it would level the playing field for average citizens.

[story]