Sweet US crude for August delivery rose by more than $3 in New York to $142.99 while North Sea Brent crude futures reached $143.99.
The latest increase in oil prices was blamed on rising tension between Iran and Israel and expectations of further falls in the value of the dollar - oil is often bought to hedge against a falling greenback. Statements out of Iran by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards threatening to block the passage of free shipping through the narrow Straits of Hormuz through which 40% of the world’s oil is exported if Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear installations are clearly disrupting the traders.
The World Values Survey was released today and once again the Danes are the world’s happiest people. Had the survey been taken today, Spain, newly crowned European champions, might have overtaken the Danes. Puerto Rico finished second. Colombia third.
Surprised? I can’t speak to Puerto Rico but why are Colombians who have suiffered so much so happy?
We are very family-centered. You talk about family values in the United States. But I talk to my mother every day. If I lived in Colombia, which seems increasingly likely that I am going to be doing so again in the near future, I’d see my family on near daily basis. And we are about average for Colombians. I have an American friend, gay, who is partnered with a Colombian. His family lives here down in Fremont. He goes down every Sunday for a family lunch. My friend asked me for help in stopping this tradition. I said “honey, you didn’t just marry a Colombian, you married his family. For better or worse, you’re part of them now.” I don’t think he was reassured. They are still together and still making the trip down to Fremont every Sunday.
Our family gatherings remain quite the events. My partner loves them but we live here so he thinks they are special because we happen to be visiting. They are not. They pretty much happen every weekend at the country home of one of us. The numbers will vary from week to week but generally they run past 20 people. There’s food, conversation and gossip, laying in a hammock for an afternoon reading a book, music and dance. What is there not to be happy about?
Colombians are also rather dance crazy. I will often drag his sorry butt out of a chair to dance a tune then and again. He protests at times but he always end up smiling. It doesn’t take much to be happy.
Here’s my advice to Americans, stop chasing iPhones and DVD players and start chasing your mother-in-law around the kitchen table giving her a big fat kiss when you catch her.
A great lady is dead. Most people are probably not familiar with her and it’s a damn shame! The Guardian has a good obituary:
“Ruth Cardoso, who has died aged 77, was a leading Brazilian anthropologist and former first lady renowned for her pioneering work with the poor. Despite her prominent public position, she was notorious for her discretion, avoiding the press and rarely giving interviews. But when she did speak one idea was ever present: that, for Brazil to progress, an understanding of its historical and sociological roots was fundamental. “We have only advanced because we have history,” she told a local TV station shortly before her death.
Born in Araraquara, Cardoso studied at the University of São Paulo. After graduating in 1953, she married Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a sociologist whom she had met during her student days and who went on to become the Brazilian president. Following the 1964 military takeover, Ruth and her husband were forced into exile, living in France, Chile, the US and later the UK, where she became an associate scholar at the Centre of Latin American Studies, Cambridge. (…)
She also became one of the first Brazilian academics to carry out detailed studies of the country’s favelas or shanty towns, settlements that were not included on many city maps until the 1990s. She played a fundamental role in pushing impoverishment and marginalisation on to the academic agenda.
In 1995, during the first year of her husband’s presidency, she seized the opportunity to put her ideas into practice, creating Comunidade Solidária (Community Solidarity) a project which, among other things, brought literacy to 3 million young Brazilians. Her innovative use of public-private partnerships in the fight against poverty, illiteracy and hunger, developed during the period of her husband’s rule, are now seen by many as the basis of Bolsa Familia, a wide-reaching aid programme implemented by Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and which is today being replicated in numerous Latin American and African countries.
A staunch feminist who supported a woman’s right to abortion, Cardoso reputedly hated the term “first lady”, which she described as being an unnecessary Americanism. “A first lady is a human being, not a Barbie,” she told the influential news magazine Veja. (…)
Though her husband was no longer in office, “Dona Ruth” vowed to continue her social crusade, creating an NGO called Comunitas, which worked with education and vocational training, and supported small business initiatives in poor rural areas.”
Entrevista com Dra. Ruth Cardoso realizada durante o X Congresso Internacioanal de Cidades Educadoras no dia 26 de maio de 2008. Antes de tudo, o Brasil e o globo pierde uma dama digna prudente sensible, um exemplo da mulher contemporânea. O Brasil perdeu uma grande mulher. Se lamenta a morte de dona Ruth Cardoso.
Are good intentions enough qualifications to be President? What legislative accomplishments does Barack Obama have? What accomplishments of any kind for that matter? Two best selling books that seem part fiction. Are these accomplishments enough? How many jobs has he created? Is his knowledge on economics or foreign affairs really up to par when he makes gaffe after gaffe? How many other members of the Senate for example did not know that the United States embassy in Israel is in Tel Aviv and why it is there and not in Jerusalem? Why didn’t Barack Obama know that? Can you take him at his word when he repeatedly backtracks and flipflops on anything and everything?
How dangerous is Barack Obama? More dangerous than George W. Bush, in my view.
Last Friday, Bill Moyers tackled briefly the problem of oil. If you didn’t think that the Iraq War was about oil, you will after watching this clip. If you don’t realize that oil and gas companies control our government, you will after watching this clip. And oil and gas companies have their chosen one ready to lead the next term. Beware of Barack Obama and his oil and gas connections. They are lethal.
It is a scary concept and most people have never even thought about what it means for the world to run out of oil. First of all, what is oil? Oil is a hydroncarbon, that is it is a molecule composed of hydrogen and carbon. The most simple oil molecules are strings of carbon atoms with hyrdogen atoms at the ends. A single carbon atom with a few hydrogen atoms is methane, a light gas. A chain of three carbons and it’s propane. A four carbon chain and it’s butane. Eight and it’s octane for your tank.
Oil is also something made on a geological time scale. Ultimately, the hydrogen energy trapped in the Earth came from the Sun hundreds of millions of years ago and became trapped first inside a carbon lifeform that died and fell into a shallow sea accumulating into a slime along with other dead organisms before getting covered by some rock form and pressed downward towards the Earth’s molten core where that slime gets cooked over time into a sludge we call oil. It’s taken hundred of millions of years to make and we will consume all of it in less than 250 years.
Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner.
– Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988
Are humans smarter than yeast? On one level, yes. We can manipulate our environment to some degree to our advantage. On another level, no. It won’t do us much good when we fall victim to a law of nature called “overshoot and collapse.”
In biological terms, overshoot and collapse is the tendency of any population to grow exponentially, at x per cent a year, until said population overshoots its resources (land, food and water) and then collapses. A few factors can keep a population in check, predation for example. We don’t have any. There’s no one keeping us in check. There aren’t enough great whites, burmese pythons or siberian tigers on the planet to make .001% dent in our numbers. Normal predation rates of say zebras by lions are more in order of 5% per year. That is out of a herd of 100 zebras, 5 will fall prey to lions in any given year. Lions are the primary predators for zebras but zebras have other secondary predators such as hyenas, crocodiles, leopards, wild dogs and cheetahs. Even a pyhton can take a colt now and then. Humans are not on any one’s lunch menu as a regular item. Blue plate special very now and again. So we are prone to overshoot and collapse tendencies. We have done it before and are headed that way again. Talk to any Anastazi lately? How about a Mayan? But those were localized collapses affecting human populations in a very small area. The next one will be global because the problem is now global.
Exponential growth rates tackle doubling of any factor. To determine how fast something will double, 70 divided by the rate of growth will provide the answer. For example, a country growing at 2% a year will double in size in 35 years — 70/2 = 35. A country growing at 7% (70/7 = 10) will double in ten years. I’ll point this out since I do not have any children and I am an evolutionary dead-end but the likelihood of a human overshoot and collapse by 2030 is approaching 100%. The current population growth rate is 1.14%. It doesn’t sound like much does it? Now do the math (70/1.14). 61 years. That means that in 2068, the population of the planet should hit 13 billion. It won’t becuse society should begin to collapse when another biological law kicks in — carrying capacity.
Carrying capacity is the supportable population of an organism, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available within an ecosystem is known as the ecosystem’s carrying capacity for that organism. Most biologists and energy specialists put that number somewhere between eight and nine billion. Exceed carrying capacity and collapse ensues.
So it is important to look at our economic model in these terms. We are a sowing the seeds of our own destruction.
US Presidential candidate John McCain will come visit us tomorrow in Cartagena. It’s not an insignificant gesture and Colombians, both here and in the United States, have taken notice of who is saying what. There’s Barack Obama in Philadelphia back in April getting his facts wrong on the number of trade unionists being killed in Colombia on an annual basis. That “gaffe” prompted a Colombian diplomatic response to the US State Department demanding that US Presidential candidates show Colombia some respect by at least getting their fact rights. Beyond facts however, there is understanding the nuance of foreign policy.
Here’s Barack Obama on March 3, 2008:
“The Colombian people have suffered for more than four decades at the hands of a brutal terrorist insurgency, and the Colombian government has every right to defend itself against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The recent targeted killing of a senior FARC leader must not be used as a pretense to ratchet up tensions or to threaten the stability of the region. The presidents of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela have a responsibility to ensure that events not spiral out of control, and to peacefully address any disputes through active diplomacy with the help of international actors.”
Compared to this statement by John McCain:
“Colombia continues to face enormous challenges, and we have seen some real successes in fighting narco-terror and establishing its authority. Unfortunately, these successes are endangered by Democrats who oppose providing military aid to a democracy under siege and want to turn their back on the free trade agreement negotiated with our strongest ally in Latin America. I intend to fight for Plan Colombia and for a free trade pact with Colombia. You don’t build strong alliances by turning your back on friends. Colombia is a country too big and too important to fail, and we need to ensure success.
Obama talks platitudes. McCain talks realities. For Latin Americans living in the United States, can it be any clearer who is our friend and who is not? For Latin Americans living in the United States, can it be any more evident who understands foreign policy issues and who does not?
Here is the Monday, June 30th, 2008 edition of interesting reads and events from around the world.
Iraq Opens Its Oil Sector to Foreign Investment
Iraq opened international bidding for eight enormous oil and gas fields Monday, paving the way for investment in a nation with some of the world’s largest petroleum reserves. More from the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal.
African Union Summit
Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga on Monday called for the suspension of Robert Mugabe from the African Union, until he allows a “free and fair” election. More from All Africa News and from the New York Times.
Ex Head of Chile’s DINA Sentenced for 1974 Murder of General Prats
General Manuel Contreras, the former head of Chile’s Intelligence Services, the DINA, was sentenced to two life prison sentences today for his role in the assassination of the former Chilean Army Chief of Staff in 1974 then in exile in Buenos Aires. From the Miami Herald.
A Chilean judge sentenced the country’s former intelligence chief, retired Gen. Manuel Contreras, to two life prison sentences Monday for masterminding the 1974 assassinations of former army chief Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife.
The historic decision, which can be appealed, helps to close one of the most notorious chapters of the 1973-1990 regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet, which ordered the politically motivated deaths and disappearances of some 3,000 people.
Pinochet’s replacement of Prats as army chief set the stage for the 1973 coup that ousted socialist President Salvador Allende. The Pinochet regime then sent U.S. citizen Michael Townley to plant a bomb under Prats’ car in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Prats had sought refuge. Townley went on to assassinate former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington.
The Saga of Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim
Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister and finance minister now leading Malaysia’s resurgent opposition coalition, is once again in a fight for his political life after being charged with new sexual perversion allegations. Stories from the Asia Sentinel and the Wall Street Journal.
France Assumes European Union Presidency Tomorrow
It’s an opportunity for French President Nicolas Sarkozy to have a lasting imprint on Europe or it may be his final dance of the macabre, a failed Presidency. Saying “something isn’t right” with Europe, President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday called for profound changes in building the European Union as France was poised to take the helm of the 27-nation bloc. Sarkozy isn’t tipping his hand, however. Stories from International Herald Tribune, the UK Guardian, and The Times of Malta.
Via the Guardian, the surveillance society is going global:
“A comprehensive transatlantic pact clearing the way for the unprecedented supply of private data on European citizens to the American authorities is to be promoted by France in support of the US-driven campaign to combat terrorism and transnational crime.
The French government is expected to use its six-month presidency of the EU, starting tomorrow, to build on 18 months of confidential negotiations between Washington and Brussels aimed at clearing the complex legal obstacles to the exchange of personal information with the Americans.
The controversial proposed pact, a “framework agreement” on common data protection principles, is likely to enable the Americans to access the credit card histories, banking details and travel habits of Europeans, although senior officials in Brussels deny US reports that the Americans will also be able to snoop on the internet browsing records of Europeans.”
Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike President Sarkozy and his administration? (more…)
