It’s fair to say, BHO is no LBJ at least in terms of persuasion techniques. Each President, no doubt, has their own style. LBJ’s style known as “The Treatment”, of course, is lore.

The Treatment could last ten minutes or four hours. It came, enveloping its target, at the LBJ Ranch swimming pool, in one of LBJ’s offices, in the Senate cloakroom, on the floor of the Senate itself — wherever Johnson might find a fellow Senator within his reach.

Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint and the hint of threat. It was all of these together. It ran the gamut of human emotions. Its velocity was breathtaking, and it was all in one direction. Interjections from the target were rare. Johnson anticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius of analogy made The Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.

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Ethanol manufacturers are expected to use 3.6 billion bushels of corn, or about a third of the US corn crop during 2008/09 marketing year. This is an increase of about 7 percentage points up from about quarter of the US corn crop the prior marketing year. As I have noted previously, ethanol from corn has a horrible ROE (Return on Energy). Corn ethanol only nets 1.3 times the fossil fuel energy required to produce it.

From All About Feed:

A study by Informa Economics forecast ethanol to climb to 34% of US corn production in 2009.

Nearly 80% of the 820 farmers surveyed at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual meeting in San Antonio said ethanol was beneficial for agriculture, but 17% of respondents said it did more harm than good.

The Farm Bureau is the nation’s largest farm group, representing producers of cattle and hogs as well as growers of cotton, wheat and corn.

Lower oil demand and the financial problems in the ethanol sector might depress corn use for ethanol. The Reuters poll found that still about 55% expected some of their corn crop to go toward production of the renewable fuel this year.

Ethanol has been sharply criticized by the food industry and aid groups for diverting corn away from livestock and food makers, pushing world food prices up.

Higher feed costs
Farmers were aware of the criticism, and 35% said ethanol’s biggest impact was creating higher livestock and feed costs as well as higher food prices.

Farm and biofuel groups, along with the US Department of Agriculture, have deflected that criticism, saying factors other than ethanol are primarily to blame, including volatile oil prices and increased global food demand.

Slow growth
After years of rapid growth, ethanol has begun to show its age. But the government’s so-called renewable fuels standard, which requires the use of 11.1 billion gallons of renewable fuels in 2009, should help growth during the next few years. But some analysts and the Renewable Fuels Association, which represents the industry, are forecasting consolidation among ethanol firms due to tighter operating margins and less demand because of a drop in gasoline use.

USDA has cut its projection for corn used for ethanol by 400 million bushels in two months to reflect these concerns.

Coincidentally today an editorial from the New York Times on America’s Energy Inefficiencies. We cannot afford mistakes of this magnitude.

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Entropa, the controversial artwork by Czech artist David Cerny, proves inspirational for other artists. Take a look at this cartoon by Dutch political cartoonist Ruben L Oppenheimer, for example. For more on his work: Ruben L. Oppenheimer.

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Al Jazeera explores the investigation into the 1994 murder of Italian journalist Ilaria Alpi who was investigating arms trafficking and the illegal disposal of toxic waste off the coasts of Somalia.

From Net Nomad:

Some people say she had information about the Italian military selling guns to the warlords. Some say she had information about the torture and killing of Somali prisoners by Italian soldiers. And now some people say she had information about al Qaeda in Somalia. All I know is this:

Forty five minutes after I first met Ilaria Alpi, she was dead, slumped in a puddle of her own blood in the back seat of a white Toyota pickup truck.

We had spoken briefly inside the high-walled compound of the Sahafi hotel, the journalists’ hotel, in Mogadishu. She told me she was a television correspondent from Italy and had just returned from a town in northern Somalia, a place she heard I knew well. But Ilaria had no need to introduce herself; I already knew of her. She stood out in Mogadishu. She was a small, serious 32-year old Italian reporter who fearlessly stuck her microphone in the faces of UN officials, military commanders and Somali warlords. While a lot of TV reporters spent more time fixing their hair than studying the country, Ilaria made her name by working the streets, using fluent Arabic and stubborn resolve to dig into places that few other journalists saw.

Ilaria asked me if I’d have a free moment to talk that evening. She seemed shy, almost apologetic about imposing on my time. I assured her that it was no problem, and that I’d be willing to talk with her whenever she wanted, even immediately if it would help. She couldn’t talk right then, she said. There was someplace she needed to be.

I collected my crew, the driver and two armed bodyguards who shadowed me every moment I was outside the hotel compound, and we headed off to the northern part of the city. Ilaria and her cameraman, Miran Hrovatin, climbed into their Toyota pickup with a driver and gunman and also drove north. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon in Somalia, just after lunch when a blanket of midday heat keeps the sandy rubble-strewn streets of Mogadishu empty and menacing. I set off on my rounds, trolling for stories and information. To that end I dropped in at the home of a Somali friend, a young former guerrilla fighter who from time to time passed along some valuable intelligence. On this particular day he didn’t have much to offer. His sister served us tea in the shade and we were relaxing, talking about nothing of consequence, when we heard the short bursts of gunfire. We kept silent for a moment, listening to hear if the shooting was going to escalate. But nothing more happened, and we didn’t give it another thought.

It wasn’t until early evening when I returned to the Sahafi that I heard the news. “It’s Ilaria,” my friend Carlos Mavroleon said to me as I walked into the lobby. “They’ve killed Ilaria.”

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