For the Doomsday Quadruplets* to inspire a run on the banks;
Canada has the world’s soundest banking system, closely followed by Sweden, Luxembourg and Australia, a survey by the World Economic Forum has found as financial crisis and bank failures shake world markets.
[CD Howe economist] Jack Mintz does not sound as supportive of the Liberal Green Shift as the Liberals make him out to be. What I would like to note two things. In terms of the tax itself, Mintz does not seem to think the Green Shift would obtain the targets the Liberals need to obtain to meet the Kyoto Accord. Secondly Mintz seems to think that the Conservative plan is much more effective at the real goal of meeting the targets themselves.
A tangentially related 25 billion dollar mystery…
[the Liberals] say they will borrow $25 Billion to fund post secondary education, but this will somehow be done outside the Government of Canada spending envelope and promised debt reduction.
Goldman Sachs said $175 crude “represents the price level required to maintain trend economic growth against our anemic supply growth forecasts, assuming growth in the US re-accelerates early next year”.
An industry expert last month claimed oil prices could top $300 per barrel within the next five years, describing current highs of $100 a barrel as “cheap”.
“Oil for June delivery settled at $118.75 a barrel Monday on the New York Mercantile Exchange after earlier touching a record $119.93. Longer-term oil futures, dated for 2013, now trade at $108 a barrel, a strong indication that investors see little cause for prices to drop in the next five years – partly because of low expectations about production growth.
The outlook for oil supplies “signals a period of unprecedented scarcity,” an analyst at CIBC World Markets, Jeff Rubin, said last week.”
The CEO of France’s Total SA predicted Wednesday that oil prices will stay high for a long time and said consumers should get used to it. […] “The price of hydrocarbons will stay high for a long time,” he said, adding, “There will not be any more oil at the end of this century” than there is now.
“Tighter credit does two things. It slows down global economic growth and, by definition, it also slows down energy demand,” said Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst for Oppenheimer & Co.
The nation’s economic prospects were much stronger a year ago, he said, when oil was trading at $75 a barrel and gasoline sold for an average of $2.77 a gallon nationally and $2.99 a gallon in California.
Oil could drop as low as $60 a barrel by the end of the year, Gheit said.
Now excuse me while I go take a nap until the doomsday-depression crowd is finished with their 15 minutes.
Update: Related.
Another photo essay from Afghanistan, by MIchael Yon.
Related – How you can help support independent journalism.
Here’s what you get when a journalist with too much disposable income gets his hands on the topic of gasoline taxes;
“Take a Sunday drive and your car emits various gases, including carbon dioxide.”
Driving about on a Sunday for recreation is one of my favourite pastimes. I sometimes start my truck and let it idle after a fill, too – just to burn off the excess.
C. Langmann introduces this helpful response, complete with peer-reviewed sources and diagrams;
The English language is one of connotation, and some words like “stupid” should be applied carefully, but when warranted, applied definitively. What Dan Gardner tries to imply in this recent article is that Stephen Harper is stupid, even though he has a degree in Economics, by flogging him with an interview with the renouned Economist, Dr. Greg Mankiw.
Stupid is defined by Websters as acting in an unintelligent or careless manner, or lacking intelligence or reason.
As the old adage suggests, “While leaving the house to call someone stupid, be sure you don’t bang your head into a mirror along the way.”
Read the whole thing – particulary if your name begins with “Dan” and ends with “Gardner”.
[H]ouse prices have increased over the last year in 30 states, including increases of above 4% for two states (OK and WY), and increases at or above 3% for 12 states (OK, WY, TX, OK, SD, ND, MS, AL, NC, SC, KY, WV). Finally, more than half of the states (27) have experienced home price increases of 1% or greater, and 30/50 states have experienced price increases over the most recent year (2007:Q2 to 2008:Q2).
Witness the Associated Press pound the good economic news into the 2008 campaign ground;
WASHINGTON (AP) — The economy pulled out of a dangerous rough patch in the spring, thanks largely to strong exports, but the rebound isn’t expected to last. Economic slowdowns overseas could make exports tail off just as Americans are hunkering down after the bracing impact of rebate checks wanes, plunging the country into another rut later this year.
“There will be heavy sledding for the U.S. economy during the next couple of quarters,” predicted Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Bank of America’s Investment Strategies Group.
Gross domestic product, or GDP, grew at a 3.3 percent annual rate in the April-June quarter, its fastest pace in nearly a year, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. The revised reading was much better than the government’s initial estimate of a 1.9 percent pace and exceeded economists’ expectations for a 2.7 percent growth rate.
I say that when the Great Bush Depression finally hits, we eat the journalists first.
“I wonder what will happen when we finally reach our goal of thoroughly ruining our country — its economy, its credibility and its social values — and are in need of help from the very people we are killing.”
“Do not remain in treated area.”
There’s something about a combination insecticide/room deodorizer that makes me grateful.
… the son of Hitler’s favorite architect and the designer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, to design the master plan for the Beijing Games, China’s government has itself alluded to the radical politicization of aesthetics that was a hallmark of 20th-century totalitarianism.
Like those regimes, whether fascist or communist, China’s leaders have sought to transform public space and sporting events into visible proof of their fitness and mandate to rule.
Speer’s commission was to lay out a master plan for the access to the Olympic complex in Beijing. His design centered on the construction of an imposing avenue to connect the Forbidden City and the National Stadium in which the opening ceremony will take place. His father’s plan for “Germania,” the name Adolf Hitler selected for the Berlin that he planned to construct after World War II, also relied on such a mighty central axis.
Via Mick Hartley.
[A] 2006 report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) had already suggested that for the EU to meet its 10 per cent target from home-grown biofuels would require a staggering 70 per cent of arable land to be taken out of food production… Yet, in attempting to show that enough acreage would be available to meet the new biofuels target, the officials indulged in “Enron accounting”, using the same areas of land three times.
(h/t to reader Harry B.)
T. Boone Pickens’ * real investments are in candle futures;
E.on is Germany’s largest utility company. Here is their 2005 Wind Report in pdf. I would recommend to everyone to read it. Sometimes they can use the wind power and sometimes they can’t, and because their effective usage is so low, they have to keep building traditional power plants. In 2004 the average feed-in to the grid varied between about one third and zero percent of the load. Obviously that sort of performance places upper limits on usage. I quote:
As wind power capacity rises, the lower availability of the wind farms determines the reliability of the system as a whole to an ever increasing extent. Consequently the greater reliability of traditional power stations becomes increasingly eclipsed.
As a result, the relative contribution of wind power to the guaranteed capacity of our supply system up to the year 2020 will fall continuously to around 4% (FIGURE 7). In concrete terms, this means that in 2020, with a forecast wind power capacity of over 48,000MW (Source: dena grid study), 2,000MW of traditional power production can be replaced by these wind farms.The rest of the report comments on the grid problems and the need for specialized control of wind turbines, plus upgrade of the transmission lines and grid to deal with the pulsing of wind power. They have invested in programs to predict and control it, but they haven’t produced much effect. Now they are looking to replace the older turbines with newer, taller ones and to move offshore for more reliable winds. At the end of the report they discuss the potential for grid instability, and cheerfully note that if they are not careful, they may blow up pieces of the Polish, Netherlands and Czech power supply.
Apparently, all those pesky engineers who hang out* around here are right!
(Lots more at the link.)
Update – for those who are disappointed that progress in Iraq isn’t being reported by our mainstream press, be patient. I predict only a few more weeks shall pass before photos like this are gracing the CBC National, while Peter Mansbridge gravely reports that the “Bush-led invasion of Iraq brings fears of spiraling rates of obesity and heart disease…”
… when President Bush announced his new strategy for Iraq, very few people predicted that General Petraeus and our military would prevent what appeared to be a certain civil war, or guessed that our Marines and GIs in Anbar would find tribal sheiks who would displace Al Qaeda from their fiefdom in western Iraq. Now provincial elections for this year and federal ones for 2009 are on schedule. Today the Iraqi military, which two years ago was corrupt and infiltrated with terrorists, wins battles in Basra against Shiite criminal gangs affiliated with Moqtada al Sadr. There is a joke going around Basra that the Iraqi military is willing to offer training to the British forces who abandoned that fight in 2006.
The Iraqi government has met all but two of the political benchmarks Democrats trumpeted as proof of defeat six months ago. The casualty statistics for Iraq are now in the range of the first months of the war. Michael Yon, one of the best war reporters of his generation, on Tuesday put it thus: “A fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it’s time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.”
Related – “Leading any way the wind blows”
“I guess you don’t drink and shoot mice at the same time,”
(Sorry for the glitch – original post is now restored.)
Portions of this fall under the “too much information” advisory, but it’s interesting, nonetheless;
Unlike, say, the nerve fibres for pain, each of which covers a millimetre-size territory, a single itch fibre can pick up an itchy sensation more than three inches away. The fibres also turned out to have extraordinarily low conduction speeds, which explained why itchiness is so slow to build and so slow to subside.
Other researchers traced these fibres to the spinal cord and all the way to the brain. Examining functional PET-scan studies in healthy human subjects who had been given mosquito-bite-like histamine injections, they found a distinct signature of itch activity. Several specific areas of the brain light up: the part of the cortex that tells you where on your body the sensation occurs; the region that governs your emotional responses, reflecting the disagreeable nature of itch; and the limbic and motor areas that process irresistible urges (such as the urge to use drugs, among the addicted, or to overeat, among the obese), reflecting the ferocious impulse to scratch.
Now various phenomena became clear. Itch, it turns out, is indeed inseparable from the desire to scratch. It can be triggered chemically (by the saliva injected when a mosquito bites, say) or mechanically (from the mosquito’s legs, even before it bites). The itch-scratch reflex activates higher levels of your brain than the spinal-cord-level reflex that makes you pull your hand away from a flame. Brain scans also show that scratching diminishes activity in brain areas associated with unpleasant sensations.
But some basic features of itch remained unexplained—features that make itch a uniquely revealing case study. On the one hand, our bodies are studded with receptors for itch, as they are with receptors for touch, pain, and other sensations; this provides an alarm system for harm and allows us to safely navigate the world. But why does a feather brushed across the skin sometimes itch and at other times tickle? (Tickling has a social component: you can make yourself itch, but only another person can tickle you.) And, even more puzzling, how is it that you can make yourself itchy just by thinking about it?
From the hard core bastion of right-wing, pro-Bush reportage – Spiegel;
Pork is available in Baghdad once again. Not just in the Green Zone, where US diplomats can enjoy their spare ribs and Parma ham, but also across the Tigris River, in the real Baghdad, at “Al-Warda” on Karada Street. Bassim Dencha, 32, one of the few Christians remaining in Iraq and the co-owner of Baghdad’s finest supermarket, has developed a supply line from Syria. As a result, he now has frozen pork chops and bratwurst arranged in his freezers, next to boxes of frozen French fries and German Black Forest Cakes. And the customers are buying.
[…]
Two kilometers down the street, business is booming late into the night at Ali Lami’s roadside snack bar. Before the war the establishment, a Baghdad institution, was a favorite hangout for former dictator Saddam Hussein’s henchmen and United Nations weapons inspectors alike. Today professors and students from the university, which is once again open every day, come here to eat shawarma, an Arab fast-food dish consisting of shaved meat and salad served in pita bread.
This fall the manager, Rassak Rashid, 44, plans to open an outdoor seating area in a grove of palm trees behind the snack bar. The lanterns are already hanging in the trees. “Maybe then the police will stop telling our customers to get off the street,” says Rashid.
It’s a link worth passing along to your friends, and those email addresses they provide at our local and national media outlets. Let them know that you know what they don’t want you to know.
h/t Bookworm Room.
When our* best talent moved to the US….
Anybody who believes the current Supreme Court looks like America needs to take a few more trips on a Greyhound bus. All the judges are white and/or old; most are both.
A toss away comment from an sloppy op-ed? Not quite. This is Dahlia Lithwick’s “User’s Guide” to the Supreme Court – in Newsweek.
h/t Brutally Honest