Author: Brian

Too much marketing hype can harm sales.

In a study published in the March issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, a team led by UGA Terry College of Business assistant professor Vanessa Patrick finds that people take notice when they feel worse than they thought they would, but—oddly—not when they feel better than expected. The message for marketers, Patrick said, is that too much hype can hurt a company when people realize that their expectations haven’t been met.

The story shows that “affective misforecasting” really has to do with emotions and not with product performance. Misforecasting can be minimized simply by creating a more realistic expectation of the future.

The US has lost its position as the world’s primary engine of technology innovation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.

The US is now ranked seventh in the body’s league table measuring the impact of technology on the development of nations.

A deterioration of the political and regulatory environment in the US prompted the fall, the report said.

The top spot went for the first time to Denmark, followed by Sweden. [story at BBC]

Photo from the Ontario SPCA

Found at How to Save the World

A similarly wonderful photo here
of a yellow lab nurturing a very young fawn.

Poor girl, with perhaps unwise friends and advocates; so blue, and perhaps merely mistaken enough to die….

Here are the scans of the medical examiner’s autopsy findings of Anna Nicole Smith.

Not a suicide and in the care of at least three doctors, Smith died of drugs.

She had 10 prescriptions in her, but not an overdose.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0326071anna1.html

“I live in a 25-room mansion, I have my own $6 million yacht, I have my own private jet and I have my own helicopter and I have seven luxury automobiles.”, says one evangelist.

The popular Kenneth Copeland of Kenneth Copeland Ministries lives in a large mansion in Texas. He recently asked his audience to help him spread the gospel by giving him $20 million to buy a new jet.

Trinity Broadcasting sits on a $340 million cash hoard, and owns houses in an exclusive Orange County, Calif., community hidden behind very regal gates – one mansion worth about $4 million, and an even bigger one — over 10,000 square feet — that’s worth about $6 million. The Crouches also travel the world in a jet worth a reported $7 million.

Stewardship Partners is a $3.5 billion “christian’ investment fund.

There are at least 28 Christian groups, including some of the most successful televangelists in America, that have little or no financial transparency. (Click here to see the full list.) There’s a backlog of 500 groups that ought to be investigated.

ABC News is covering how millions of christian donors are sending their dollars to prop up hundreds of misleading christian charities and evangelist hustlers. [Finally, as if this were a deeply hidden issue… ]

Tail wagging sends a different message depending on the direction of the wag.

By examining dogs’ interactions with people and other animals, scientists have found that a dog wags its tail to the right when it spots someone or something familiar such as their owner and to the left when it feels threatened.

The bias is subtle, requiring video analysis to spot, and not obvious enough for you to tell whether the next dog you meet is going to lick your face or turn tail. The study of wagging could be used in animal welfare to help vets to gauge an animal’s state of mind.

Shown a human, tails wagged consistently to the right. They carefully studied the tail wagging angle and ignored twitches of less than three degrees overall, “which were plausibly not correlated to wagging”.

They found that the unfamiliar person elicited less wagging than the owner, and the cat the least wagging of all, though still slightly to the right – probably because the dog was so keen to give chase that it was distracted.

Shown a large, unfamiliar and intimidating dog, the dogs wagged their tails more to the left.

Dogs also wagged to the left when on their own without anyone to look at, suggesting that they like company.

In dogs, as in humans, the left side of the brain is involved in signaling to approach something while the right side advises retreat.

Dogs are already known to prefer to use one paw over the other – most male dogs are left-pawed, whereas females show a lesser tendency to right-pawedness.

link to story
more at the Daily Telegraph

Soul of the corporation, scourge of the corporation

Mary Minnick is the outgoing CMO at the Coca-Cola Company. To judge from the press reports, it sounds as if she might belong to the category of change agent. Here’s what she had to say this week in the Financial Times.

Change is uncomfortable, just as a human characteristic and for organisations as a whole. It’s challenging, it’s complicated, and it doesn’t always make people comfortable.

Minnick pursued change anyhow. As she told shareholders. “I tend to be quite discontented in general. It will never be fast enough or soon enough or good enough.”

And we may judge how far she was prepared to transform the Coke paradigm, when she says,

All the work we did suggested that consumers are using beverages in dramatically different ways, ranging from disease prevention, to hydration, to weight reduction, to relaxation, to relieving stress and to fortification of nutrition.

Change agents of this kind don’t stay for very long. Ms. Minnick lasted 20 months. But then that is perhaps the very nature of their contribution to the corporation. They so upset the apple cart, they can’t stay for very long.

What’s weird is that the new corporation is going to need these kinds of people. As things speed up, as the corporation grows cloudier, both continuity and discontinuity are called for in equal measure. As things speed up, as change grows more intense, it is really hard sometimes to remember what the corporation stands for. How useful to have a “soul of the corporation” person around to remind us.

Bring in the revolutionary. (And make sure the pay package is rich, because they won’t be here for long.)

purposivedrift is enthused about Grant McCracken, who delves in economics and complexity theory, holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and has taught at the Harvard Business School. McCracken writes about fearless noticing:

“…I found myself telling these young planners about the time I sat beside Marshall Sahlins, professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, as he read one of my papers. Professor Sahlins was traveling at speed through my paper, not because it was well written but because not even bad writing could slow him down. Suddenly, he stopped absolutely dead in his tracks and said, ‘hm, I wonder why that is.’

“I was watching a very smart man acknowledge the limits of understanding. You could almost hear him thinking, ‘why can’t I think this?’

“This is the secret of noticing. Spotting things that defy expectation, things that don’t ‘compute.’ The temptation for the rest of us is to ‘fake the results’ and assimilate the anomalous to existing categories.”

McCracken asserts, “Good noticers are fearless noticers.”

Years ago I coined an equation to help describe ‘why can’t I think this?’.

information overload equals information retrieval

I began to think that when the mind encounters a limit of its intelligence, it instantly begins to gather additional resources, seemingly diverting blood flow and energy from other parts of our body inducing a temporary queesiness, a quick exhaustion often called ‘information overload’.

But I also noticed that though ‘information overload’ may be a true and real feeling, it wasn’t the brain that was feeling it; the queesiness was elsewhere. Instead, new material was being formulated, bringing some new likelihood to learning – often much much later.

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One of my favorite exercises in thinking is to gaze into a stary night, propelling along tube after tube of photons toward the vast calendar of stars, where only moments pass until I am utterly overwhelmed and instantly ignorant! There is a simultaneous and distinct event – reaching the limit of intelligence within my puny momentary center of infinity – where thinking seems to stop. Is this when new information gathers?

along the way from plankton to pulsar…

To live with life an ally
and all the earth its winking crew
and all the heavens supervise.

I received honors grades for a photo essay I submitted when a student called ‘the moment is infinity’, but as a typical student, I lost the book during one of too many times moving from place to place. Anyone find it?

May we, as if a star, use our hope to breathe:

When the self can loft the mind and, hence, the mind does wire the body in some mimic’d perfection, it is as if all spills upon us, both inside and out, pouring what’s best called adventure to test the courages.

Here’s to recognizing amidst the blinding dark infinity
the sweet triumph of every step we carve from this froth of earth.

Shoppers team up for better deals
Chinese shopping craze: consumers meet up in shops at a coordinated
time, literally mobbing the seller and negotiating a group discount on the spot.

www.springwise.com/weekly/2007-03-15.htm#tuangou

Update:
A new tuangou or team buying site has launched in the UK – http://storemob.com/

The Wall Street Journal cites problems with corn fuel.

Ethanol receives a 51-cents-a-gallon federal subsidy.

But a backlash has been brewing in towns across the Midwest.

Fights have broken out in Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas and several towns in Wisconsin.

Opponents complain that ethanol plants deplete aquifers, draw heavy truck traffic, pose safety concerns, contribute to air pollution and produce a sickly-sweet smell akin to that of a barroom floor.

Robert Dineen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, a Washington trade group, was quoted as saying, “Generally, communities look at these plants as local economic engines.” The story says that the plants bring jobs and have dramatically raised corn prices and farmland values. Many ethanol plants have paid rich dividends to investors, who often include local farmers and other residents.

But experts hotly debate whether renewable fuels offer a panacea for the world’s energy needs. As with ethanol derived from corn — which slurps up water — many alternative fuels are creating environmental problems of their own.

In Indonesia, Malaysia and Canada, forests are being slashed for energy-yielding crops or other unconventional fuels. In India, environmentalists say, water tables are dropping as farmers boost production of ethanol-yielding sugar.

As the rush to build ethanol plants continues in the U.S. — there are 114 in operation, 80 under construction and many more in planning stages — clashes with locals are multiplying.

One of the key tenets of relativity is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

The reason for this is that objects become heavier, or more massive, the faster they go, with the mass approaching infinity as the object approaches the speed of light.

In an atom, where electrons race around the nucleus like buzzing bees, the velocity of an electron doesn’t get anywhere near the speed of light until the atomic nucleus fills up with lots of positively charged protons – the negatively charged electrons have to move faster to keep from being pulled into the highly positive nucleus. This occurs in the transition metals of the periodic table of elements, metals ranging from tantalum and tungsten to platinum and gold. In a gold atom, with 79 protons in the nucleus, the 79 electrons whip around the nucleus at about half the speed of light.

The net effect is that gold’s electrons are much heavier and are pulled in closer to the nucleus, lowering the energy levels and making the atom more compact.

According to this hypothesis, gold’s s shells, which are its lowest energy spherically symmetric electron shells, contract. This shields the electrons in outer, asymmetric p and d orbits from the nuclear charge, allowing them to expand slightly. In gold, the contraction of the outermost (6s) shell and the expansion of the next-inner (5p) shell reduces the energy difference between the two to the equivalent of a photon of blue light.

This allows gold to absorb blue light and, thus, look yellow. Silver, because it exhibits a much less dramatic effect, is unable to absorb any visible light and is totally reflective.

http://www.physorg.com/news93872243.html

www.dissidentvoice.org claims many dedicated rants against the Iraq war, and against war in general.

Americans aren’t taught in school about Smedley Butler, an important figure in United States history who spent thirty-three years in the Marine Corps before retiring as a major general in 1931.

Widely respected (he’s one of only two Marines to win the Congressional Medal of Honor twice), he was recruited in 1933 by fascism-admiring, über-rich American businessmen to lead a coup against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Imagine their surprise when Butler reported the plan to a congressional committee instead. Though the committee’s final report corroborated Butler’s testimony, no further action was taken.

Bluntly honest, Butler frequently spoke after his retirement to gatherings sponsored by “veterans, communists, pacifists and church groups” (Wikipedia) in which he made no bones about the masters he truly served during his career.

Probably Butler’s best-known quote comes from a 1935 issue of Common Sense, a socialist newspaper:

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.”

In 1935, Butler penned a damning, no-frills booklet, War is a Racket

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People have not been horrified by war to a sufficient extent … War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today. – John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The “Art of Loving” by Erich Fromm [wiki] [bio] was a best seller in humanist circles from the 50s to the 70s.

Jumping from a post at wood s lot, I found a thorough narrative about Erich Fromm posted by one of Fromm’s students and associates.

For instance, Fromm is describing psychoanalytic diagnosis at a 1963 class at the Mexican Institute:

The analyst should determine first, the symptoms, goals and pathology of the patient. What is the type and the degree of pathology, e.g. regressive symbiosis, narcissism, and/or destructiveness? Fromm advised that most conflicts presented by the patient are screens. The analyst cannot help the patient decide whether or not to get divorced or leave a job. These hide the deeper conflicts, which Fromm sometimes called the secret plot. An example is Ibsen’s Peer Gynt: the modern alienated man who claims he wants to be free and express himself but really wants to satisfy all his greedy impulses and then complains that he has no self, that he is nothing and nobody.

The prognosis is better if the patient’s goal is to achieve health in terms of increased capability for freedom and loving relationships, rather than getting help to solve a specific problem which may be merely a symptom of the failure to maintain the cover story.

Second, the analyst should determine the strength of the resistance. He suggested a test of telling the patient something which appears repressed, indicated by a slip of the tongue, a contradiction, or a dream. If there is a positive reaction, the prognosis is better. If there is anger or the patient doesn’t hear, the prognosis is very bad. Fromm considered a sense of humor the best indication of a positive prognosis. Lack of it was an indication of “grave narcissism”. Humor is the emotional side of reason, the emotional sense of reality. Fromm himself had a keen sense of humor with a taste for the sardonic. He loved good jokes.

Third, the capacity for insight is another indication of good or bad prognosis. The analyst should make small tests, such as “You complain about your wife. Perhaps you are afraid of her.” It is a bad sign if the patient either denies an interpretation too quickly or submissively agrees to everything the analyst suggests.

Fourth, what is the degree of vital energy? Is the patient capable of waking up? A person can be quite crazy, yet have the vitality essential for transformation.

At this time, Fromm was no longer claiming that neurotics were healthier than normal people. However, he did maintain that some patients with a severe psychopathology had a better prognosis than those with milder pathology. The key diagnostic factor was the patient’s creative potential or ability to struggle against the pathology.

Fifth, has the patient shown responsibility and activity during his or her life? Fromm contrasted obsessive responsibility with the ability to respond to challenges. If the patient always escapes with a magical, irresponsible flight, analysis is not impossible, but extremely difficult.

Sixth, is there a sense of integrity? This refers to the difference between a neurotic and psychopathic personality. Does the patient accept a truth once experienced? Or is there a quality of bad faith, wiggling away from inconvenient truths, a bad sign for prognosis.

Michael Maccoby says about his ally,

“Although he introduced many American intellectuals of the 40s and 50s to the relevance of psychoanalysis to understanding 20th century social pathology, typical intellectuals of today think of Fromm, if at all, as a critic of the mass consumer society.

A smaller number recognize the contribution he made in Escape from Freedom to understanding the psychic appeal of fascism, an understanding relevant to current events in Russia and the Balkans.

But relatively few appreciate his most valuable and original legacy: understanding human character in relation to society.”

Maccoby concludes:

“As a student of Fromm, I believe the task remains of integrating the analytic and the prophetic voices, the understanding of what is and what can be with a compelling vision of what ought to be in order to create a better life and a more humane world.”

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch.

Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit. – e.e. cummings

Twenty per cent of our corn is now sold for use as ethanol, blended into gasoline.

Over the last year wholesale corn prices have roughly doubled.

Food companies are warning that high corn prices will feed through to everyone’s grocery bills.

The price of agricultural land has started to rise.

The use of ethanol is government subsidized.

This trade-off between greener fuels and higher food prices is one of several difficult issues thrown up by the rapid development of the biofuels industry.

The world has already witnessed the absurdity of virgin rainforests in Asia being torn down to make way for palm oil plantations.

Palm oil, like corn, has become hugely profitable because of demand from biofuel producers.

But the environmental benefits of the biofuels are outweighed by the loss of the rainforests.

Biofuels can make a contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

But the processes by which they are produced need to be kept under constant review to make sure that they do not have perverse consequences.

And that includes forcing up the price of essential foods.

Story at the BBC

Our buildings produce 100 million metric tons of carbon more than our cars do, according to architect Edward Mazra, who founded www.architecture2030.com to lay out a plan to the building / designing community for building and renovating our buildings to be carbon neutral by 2030.

Buildings consume 40 percent of the world’s resources and produce 48 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions, according to Mazra.

Livestock – predominantly cattle – are responsible for a fifth of all emissions which is more greenhouse gas emissions than all the transport on earth [earlier interesting post].

The Guardian reports on a new pill to trap some of the energy from the methane, which is naturally produced in the fermentation process when a cow digests grass and is later mostly burped out through their mouths.

Cut down on flying, sell the car and recycle your bottles. But if you really want to tackle global warming, you should stop your cow from burping.

According to scientific estimates, the methane gas produced by cows is responsible for 4% of greenhouse gas emissions.

And now, German scientists have invented a pill to cut bovine burping.

The fist-sized plant-based pill, known as a bolus, combined with a special diet and strict feeding times, is meant to reduce the methane produced by cows.

FAO report,
“Livestock’s Long Shadow”- Celsias report
“The Cow – Public Enemy Number One?”

More on poop power:

Backyard Biogas
GEI trains farmers to manage and maintain the “upfloating” biogas systems, small tanks that employ simple technology and require only one cow or three pigs to provide 1–2 five-person households with year-round heating and cooking fuel.

Each cubic foot of methane has about l,000 BTUs. A gas stove burner produces 8,000 BTUs. It’s possible to produce about 45 cubic feet of gas from one day’s manure from a 1000 pound cow, theoretically operating 5 burners.

The University of Florida calls this approach an “animal manure management system“

“It’s not often that one technology can solve several major problems, but our innovative animal manure management system is a sustainable option for dairies and other livestock operations that produces renewable energy and protects the environment.”

There are billions of livestock – predominantly cattle – responsible for an astonishing proportion of global warming gases – 18 per cent of the total – a fifth of all emissions – which is more greenhouse gas than all vehicles produce.

Canadian researchers have achieved what they say is a major technological breakthrough in the field of medical robotics. They have succeeded for the first time in guiding, in vivo and via computer control, a microdevice inside an artery, at a speed of 10 centimetres a second. read more

We must be careful not to overstate the case. Let us not forget that in this situation it must be noted: nothing could be further from the truth. Because, as they say, it is the exception that proves the rule. Of course, rules are made to be broken and so, in this case, we must make allowances. For the time being, all we can state with certainty is that, given this set of assumptions, all things will be equal. Context is everything. Thus, this is not the final word on the subject. And yet, because of the foregoing doubts, we must be doubly sure. So, in light of current developments and taking stock of all our cultural preconceptions, the conclusion is neither obvious nor buried. It is conditioned by the very factors that condition us all. Beneath all this lies the substratum of unreason, which itself provides the basis for all knowledge. And lest we make too much of this, we must avoid the temptation of turning to speculation, to specious imagining, as it were. We must steer clear of that pathway at all costs—or at least in most instances. In that eventuality, the two sides are further apart than ever. And yet they are closer and closer. Bridging that gap is our task here, and yet we must be careful: a bridge built on quicksand will sink in a snap. It is best to avoid such constructions. Considering the preceding, we must put aside all pretense. The answer lies in the dispassionate pursuit of the truth, wherever that takes us. We must not fail to mention that, generally and in specific, the road is long and hard. Suppositions must be avoided and, conversely and in equal proportion, we cannot avoid them. A house of cards will not sink in the sand but a slight wind will blow it down. The situation, then, is perilous. However, we must press on. Indeed, it is only through that propulsion, that forward seeking movement, that we will find, ultimately (or penultimately), in the worst or best possible case scenarios, that unmistakable aura of glacial impenetrability. Then, and only then, given the parameters outlined above, will there be enough data to suggest a course of action (and its equal and opposite reaction) leading us to a state of wide-eyed suspicion. To put it simply: on or about or perhaps with or above all. Needless to say, this does not always hold true. Sometimes, it is true, it is untrue, depending on circumstances and freak accidents and natural disasters and acts of God. Next to nothing is inessential. We arrive, then, at the central conundrum—-and we must be very careful with words here so as not to state more than we actually know. To recapitulate: given the current state of knowledge, taking into account our biases, and rolling with the punches, we can draw one almost inescapable conclusion from our diverse and disparate researches into our subject. To wit: we must be careful not to overstate the case. Let us not forget that in this situation it must be noted: nothing could be further from the truth.

at grand hotel abyss

Robert Neuwirth has a thing for squatters.

This good fellow – who spent two years living in squatter communities in four continents – compiles research in his book on the struggles and successes of some of the world’s most resourceful poor people, among the one billion urban squatters in countries like Brazil, India, Kenya and Turkey.

Neuwirth is able to dismantle many common preconceptions about the so-called slums in which they live.

His blog at Squattercity reveals years of insightful posts.

Urban squatters – families that risk the wrath of governments and property owners by building dwellings on land they don’t own – represent one out of every ten people on the planet.

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“Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.”
This old proverb makes all judgment impossible,
for we judge someone only because, in fact,
we cannot put ourselves in his place.
– E. M. Cioran, (1911–1995)

Barry Lopez is the author of a dozen books, including Desert Notes, Of Wolves and Men and Arctic Dreams (for which he won a National Book Award).

He said,

“The Enlightenment ideals of an educated mind and just relations among differing people have become problematic in our era because the process of formal education in the West has consistently abjured or condemned non-Western ways of knowing, and because the quest for just relations still strains at the barriers of race, gender and class.

If we truly believe in the wisdom of Enlightenment thought and achievement — and certainly, like Bach’s B-Minor Mass, Goethe’s theory of light or Darwin’s voyage, that philosophy is among the best we have to offer — then we should consider encouraging the educated mind to wander beyond the comfort of its own solipsisms, and we should extend the principle of justice to include everything that touches our lives.

I do not know how to achieve these things in the small valley where I live except through apprenticeship and the dismantling of assumptions I grew up with.

The change, to a more gracious and courteous and wondrous awareness of the world, will not come in my lifetime, and knowing what I know of the modern plagues — loss of biodiversity, global warming, and the individual quest for material wealth — I am fearful.

But I believe I have come to whatever I understand by listening to companions and by trying to erase the lines that establish hierarchies of knowledge among them.

My sense is that the divine knowledge we yearn for is social; it is not in the province of a genius any more than it is in the province of a particular culture. It lies within our definition of community.

Our blessing, it seems to me, is not what we know, but that we know each other.”

at resurgence

And Lopez also said this:

“The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves.”

Giving people a chance to let their minds wander can actually be quite good for productivity.

Mind wandering is actually how the brain tries to increase productivity, by making use of “spare cycles” to continually work on random problems even when it’s not the immediate focus. The fact that the wandering sometimes is unproductive is simply a natural side-effect of that. Basically, it’s a recognition that not everything we’re doing requires full attention — and perhaps “continuous partial attention” is how are brains were originally wired for some very good reasons.

more at techdirt

Americans consume 140 billion gallons of gasoline a year.
That will grow to 161 billion gallons by 2017 without change.

It may be we are prematurely trumpeting biofuel. The facts are slowly becoming clear, and doubts remain.

Without sugar crops, the USA is increasing starch crops – corn – which may place serious inflationary pressures on feed and food, threatening our precarious dollar. But we cross our fingers by promoting hi-tech and emerging research that may brew fuel from a greater variety of plant material, such as grass.

The Des Moine Register agrees that

“Making ethanol from something other than corn, such as crop residue or switchgrass, would lessen climate change.”

but,

“Harvesting, storing and trucking massive amounts of non-corn biomass could make it uneconomical to make ethanol from other sources such as stover — stalks, husks, cobs — left after corn is harvested.

and another but,

“Some Iowa farmers already know what it takes to grow crops like switchgrass for energy, one of our hoped trump cards, and their experience raises questions about the feasibility of turning biomass into motor fuel.”

plus,

Switchgrass costs nearly twice as much as corn

corn: $35 per ton
switchgrass: $60 a ton
plus it costs another $25 for storage and transportation costs,
and then farmers will need an additional $30 to $40 a ton in profit to make it worth their while

Update:

Sugar cane is ideal for making ethanol and has a long history in Hawai’i, but it is an especially thirsty plant.

It takes as much water to grow 10,000 acres of sugar cane as it does to keep 67 golf courses green.

Experts estimate Hawai’i will need to increase sugar cane acreage by more than 80,000 acres by 2020 to meet local demands for ethanol. To quench Hawai’i’s thirst for ethanol, the state’s sugar cane industry would need to at least triple in size…

Hawai’i’s large landowners abandoned sugar cane in the past two decades. As they exited the business, the water previously used to irrigate their fields was diverted to other purposes.

Returning that water to the fields will likely draw opposition.

Growers are nervous if they don’t have a long-term contract on water…
If you can’t get water to crops, you’re dead in the water…
This is a huge issue that has barely touched the surface…

Next year’s headlines will mark an era of water wars. – Hydrodomus 2007

Ali Abunimah:

Over the years since I first saw Obama speak I met him about half a dozen times, often at Palestinian and Arab-American community events in Chicago including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which Edward Said was the keynote speaker. In 2000, when Obama unsuccessfully ran for Congress I heard him speak at a campaign fundraiser hosted by a University of Chicago professor. On that occasion and others Obama was forthright in his criticism of US policy and his call for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing.

As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.” He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, “Keep up the good work!”

But Obama’s gradual shift into the AIPAC camp had begun as early as 2002 as he planned his move from small time Illinois politics to the national scene. In 2003, Forward reported on how he had “been courting the pro-Israel constituency.” He co-sponsored an amendment to the Illinois Pension Code allowing the state of Illinois to lend money to the Israeli government. Among his early backers was Penny Pritzker — now his national campaign finance chair — scion of the liberal but staunchly Zionist family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain. (The Hyatt Regency hotel on Mount Scopus was built on land forcibly expropriated from Palestinian owners after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967). He has also appointed several prominent pro-Israel advisors.

Obama has also been close to some prominent Arab Americans, and has received their best advice. His decisive trajectory reinforces a lesson that politically weak constituencies have learned many times: access to people with power alone does not translate into influence over policy. Money and votes, but especially money, channelled through sophisticated and coordinated networks that can “bundle” small donations into million dollar chunks are what buy influence on policy. Currently, advocates of Palestinian rights are very far from having such networks at their disposal. Unless they go out and do the hard work to build them, or to support meaningful campaign finance reform, whispering in the ears of politicians will have little impact. (For what it’s worth, I did my part. I recently met with Obama’s legislative aide, and wrote to Obama urging a more balanced policy towards Palestine.)

If disappointing, given his historically close relations to Palestinian-Americans, Obama’s about-face is not surprising. He is merely doing what he thinks is necessary to get elected and he will continue doing it as long as it keeps him in power. Palestinian-Americans are in the same position as civil libertarians who watched with dismay as Obama voted to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act, or immigrant rights advocates who were horrified as he voted in favor of a Republican bill to authorize the construction of a 700-mile fence on the border with Mexico.

via Business As Usual, Obama Brand