New Zealand – redux

May 24th, 2008

– I’ve written a fair amount about New Zealand on this blog over the last few years. My wife and I intend to retire there, so I have a special interest in the place. Below is an article from the New Zealand Herald about why folks are drawn to New Zealand.

– – – – – – – – – – –

Lifestyle biggest drawcard to NZ

New Zealand’s relaxed lifestyle is the leading reason people come here to live, according to new statistics.

Statistics New Zealand’s longitudinal immigration survey put lifestyle (44 per cent) at the top of the list of reasons people want to live here.

The climate or clean and green environment came in second at 40 per cent, with a desire to provide a better future for children following at 39 per cent.

The survey showed 93 per cent of permanent migrants indicated they were satisfied or very satisfied with life in New Zealand, while almost the same amount said they planned to stay for three years or more.

More… ➡

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Posted in General, New Zealand, Personal | 2 Comments »

080523 – Reading

May 24th, 2008

“Some physicists still find quantum mechanics unpalatable, if not unbelievable, because of what it implies about the world beyond our senses.   The theory’s mathematics is simple enough to be taught to undergraduates, but the physical implications of that mathematics give rise to deep philosophical questions that remain unresolved.   Quantum mechanics fundamentally concerns the way in which we observers connect to the universe we observe.   The theory implies that when we measure particles and atoms, at least one of two long-held physical principles is untenable.   Distant events do not affect each other, and properties we wish to observe exist before our measurements.   One of these, locality or realism, must be fundamentally incorrect.”

– From Seed Magazine, “The Reality Tests” by Joshua Roebke, June 2008

Posted in General, Personal, Science | No Comments »

Immigration consequences

May 23rd, 2008

– A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on Immigration and Assimilation. There was a lot of response to that piece and I intend to revisit that topic in more depth in the future.

– Least anyone misunderstand me, I am not anti-immigration. I am simply pointing out that immigration must be managed by the receiving society for its own good. Why? Because unlimited immigration can lead to social instability.

– I’ve snagged the following stories from the world press over the last few days. What all of them would seem to have in common are the economic stresses caused by immigration rates that are too high or clashes between the cultural beliefs and behaviors of unassimilated immigrants and the receiving culture.

– Switzerland – ➡
– Korea – ➡
– South Africa – ➡
– Germany – ➡
– France – ➡
– Saudi Arabia – ➡ <– this one’s ironic

– I said the last one is ironic because I geneally don’t think of Saudi Arabia as being a welcoming place for people from dissimilar cultures.

– And that brings up a very interesting question that I’ve never seen the answer to: Has anyone seen a list or a map that shows the immigration openness of the world’s various countries?

– I’ve heard, for example, that Japan simply doesn’t allow immigration unless one marries a Japanese citizen.

– What I’m driving at here is a way to get at or see reciprocity. How do the countries which send a lot of folks elsewhere respond when folks want to come to them? I.e., are the various north African and middle eastern countries that export so many people into Europe equally receptive and tolerant when Europeans want to come to them?

– If you know of any graphics or lists that address this question, please share them.

– And just to show that the news is not all bad, there’s this: ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Immigration Stress, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

GM crops are not the answer to world hunger

May 23rd, 2008

Last week, chinadialogue columnist Taige Li explored whether genetic modification can increase crop yields. Emma Hockridge responds, and argues that oil-intensive biotechnology will not ease the global food crisis.

With soaring food prices around the world, there has been a renewed recent interest in whether the world can feed itself. This question is not a new one, and many organisations have been talking about the need to radically change our food and farming system to one which is more sustainable for many years.

The current industrial agricultural system, which has been in place for around 60 years, is wholly reliant on oil- and gas-intensive inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides.

The recent spate of media attention has given the pro-genetic modification (GM) lobby an opportunity to hijack the debate and attempt to persuade people that there is some mileage in this outdated debate. Although the GM industry has been promising huge benefits as a result of this technology for many years, the truth is that none of these claimed benefits have come to fruition. GM crops do not produce higher yields, use fewer pesticides, or do anything to assist people in developing countries.

It is obviously upsetting for the GM industry – and others who have a blind faith in the capacity of complex, high-tech solutions to solve every problem – to have their beliefs challenged by reality. This is what has happened to true believers in GM crops. Out in the fields of North America, while GM crops resistant to sprays or capable of killing insects have made life simpler for big farmers, they have not – according to the US department of agriculture – increased yields. In farmer’s fields in India, GM crops have not increased yields and have sometimes failed – with catastrophic consequences.

More… ➡

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, CrashBlogging, Food Shortages, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Ghost in your Genes – PBS – NOVA

May 22nd, 2008

– I watched a PBS NOVA special tonight entitled, “Ghost in your Genes“. The NOVA series is always a favorite with us and this was no exception.

– It was about the ‘Epigenome’. The word means, ‘above the genome’. As they explained, the way to think about this is that the genome is like the computer’s hardware and the Epigenome is like the software, above, that tells the hardware/genome what to do. This wasn’t particularly new to me as I’ve been following the developments these last few years as biologists have been discovering the RNA control systems that coexists and perhaps even preceded the DNA systems within our genetics.

– What was new and scary was the idea that what happens in one generation can effect the health outcomes in another generation. They had one study where they connected whether the human grandparents had experienced famine during critical times in their development and how those events in the lives of the grandparents had affected the health of their grandchildren.

– They showed how exposure to pesticides on one generation of rats could produce effects in the next four generations of their offspring.

– I couldn’t help but think about the many thousands of untested chemicals that we humans have unleashed on ourselves and the biosphere.

– They said that if someone chooses to smoke of drink, they used to be able to say, “It’s my body, I can take the risk if I want.” But now, it may be revealed that one’s actions can reverberate down through generations of your progeny.

– I also remembered a science fiction story I’d read within the last few years wherein human fertility in the future has dropped so far that only one couple in a thousand can create a viable child. In that world, humanity is literally wasting away off the planet as old age captures the vast majority of the population.

– It’s happening to the frogs and other amphibians. Something is happening to the bees. Why do we think we’re going to be immune to the chemical havoc we’re unleashing into the biosphere.

– All of this makes me think New Zealand may not be far enough to run. Maybe the Falkland Islands would be a better choice for those who want to avoid death by chemistry.

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Posted in General | 3 Comments »

Former Prosecutor: ISP Content Filtering Might be a ‘Five Year Felony’

May 22nd, 2008

– If you don’t know what ‘Net Neutrality’ is then this might be a good place to tune in. For an introduction, follow this link: ➡Net Neutrality

– I’ve written/posted several times on this subject. Follow these links to see my previous posts on this: ➡ ➡ ➡ ➡

– This issue is just going to get hotter and hotter as the corporations try to capture the Internet for their own monetary profit and political power. All the other media have been co-opted; newspapers, magazines, radio, T.V. The Internet is the only free media left.

– Watch this space (because it could vanish…). Or, as Joni Mitchell says in her song, “You don’t know what you got, ’til it’s gone.”

= = = = = = =

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut — Internet service providers that monitor their networks for copyright infringement or bandwidth hogs may be committing felonies by breaking federal wiretapping laws, a panel said Thursday.

University of Colorado law professor Paul Ohm, a former federal computer crimes prosecutor, argues that ISPs such as Comcast, AT&T and Charter Communications that are or are contemplating ways to throttle bandwidth, police for copyright violations and serve targeted ads by examining their customers’ internet packets are putting themselves in criminal and civil jeopardy.

“These ISPs are getting close to the line of illegality and may be violating the law,” Ohm told conference goers at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference Thursday.

Charter’s proposed test of a system that eavesdrops on the URLs its customers visit, in order to serve them targeted ads, has already spurred a powerful Congressman to question whether the scheme would violate the Cable Act. For its part, Comcast’s heavy-handed throttling of peer-to-peer sharing by sending fake stop messages to its customers has the Federal Communications Commission holding hand-wringing public hearings over whether it should ban the practice as being inconsistent with its open network principles.

More… ➡

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Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, Culture - How not to do it | No Comments »

Indiana Man Operates Oil Well in Backyard, Producing Three Barrels of Crude a Day

May 22nd, 2008

SELMA, Ind. —  It’s just a drop in the global oil bucket, but an eastern Indiana man is operating an oil well in his backyard in an effort to capitalize on soaring crude prices.

Greg Losh’s rig produces three barrels of crude oil a day, though he told FOX News that he hasn’t started selling it yet. For now, he and his partners are keeping it in storage containers.

He declined to say how much oil they’ve collected in the two weeks they’ve been pumping.

But as oil is going for about $127 a barrel on the international market, three daily would yield just under $400 a day for Losh on the global spot market — or 1/100,000 of the daily production increase the Saudis agreed to earlier this month.

More… ➡

 

Posted in And Now for Something Completely Different, CrashBlogging, Peak Oil, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Imbalances of Power

May 21st, 2008

by Thomas Friedman – New York Times

It is hard to remember a time when more shifts in the global balance of power are happening at once — with so few in America’s favor.

There has been much debate in this campaign about which of our enemies the next US president should deign to talk to. The real story, the next president may discover, though, is how few countries are waiting around for us to call. It is hard to remember a time when more shifts in the global balance of power are happening at once — with so few in America’s favor.

Let’s start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned on this administration is not the failure to make Iraq work, as devastating as that has been. It will be one with much broader balance-of-power implications — the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy.

It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break (more…) than ask the American people to drive 55 miles an hour, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from, what he called, our “addiction to oil.”

The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world — the US economy — to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states — from Russia to Venezuela to Iran — that are reshaping global politics in their own image.

If this huge transfer of wealth to the petro-authoritarians continues, power will follow. According to Congressional testimony Wednesday by the energy expert Gal Luft, with oil at $200 a barrel, OPEC could “potentially buy Bank of America in one month worth of production, Apple computers in a week and General Motors in just 3 days.”

More… ➡

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Afghan student in torture claim

May 20th, 2008

– I wrote about this case previously back on February 1st, 2008.   I said then, and remind you now, that this is the government we (the US) put into power and are supporting in Afghanistan.

= = = = =

An Afghan student journalist who was sentenced to death for blasphemy has told an appeals court that he confessed after being tortured.

Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh was convicted in January of insulting Islam.

But at the appeals court in Kabul the 24-year-old insisted he was innocent of all the charges.

He said he was tortured into confessing that he had disrupted university classes by asking questions about women’s rights under Islam.

He was also convicted of distributing an article on the same subject, and adding three additional paragraphs.

He told the crowded, hour-long appeal hearing: “As a Muslim … I never allow myself to do such a thing. These are totally lies.”

Kambakhsh’s death sentence was handed down during a closed-door trial, which drew condemnation from parts of the international community.

More… ➡

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Posted in Culture - How not to do it, Religion - The Wrong Way | No Comments »

Why Grassroots Initiatives Can’t Fix Climate Change

May 20th, 2008

A grassroots approach alone won’t make the earth stop warming

by the Editors (Scientific American magazine)

Have you heard enough already about global warming? It’s so … last year’s news! Plenty of people are “doing something” about it. Becoming carbon-neutral has gone as mainstream as Girl Scout cookies; help is on the way. Can we move on, please?

Unfortunately not. For all the consciousness-raising value of grassroots initiatives,  the world is still far from squarely facing up to the issues. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama promise on their Web sites to reduce carbon emissions to just 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2050—a laudable goal. But because what matters is the load of greenhouse gases in the entire atmosphere, reaching those numbers would be hard, to say the least, for the U.S. to do alone. John McCain’s Web site simply offers “commonsense approaches to limit carbon emissions by harnessing market forces that will … see to it that … all nations do their rightful share.”

If the candidates’ statements—perhaps out of political necessity—are short on specifics, the reason is partly that much of the electorate still finds it hard to grasp the size and urgency of the problem. Like the naive passengers on board an ocean liner, who lean carelessly over the rail as their ship drifts into an iceberg, most of us are oblivious to the magnitude of the impending disaster. The separation closes too slowly for us to appreciate the force of the coming crunch.

More… ➡

Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

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