Month: Sep 2010

Weep for this fish

And maybe weep for the planet

The New York Times recently published a thought-provoking article on the development of farming for the Atlantic bluefin, the world’s largest tuna.

Bluefin Tuna

This is a magnificent fish, as a National Geographic website details:

The Atlantic bluefin tuna is one of the largest, fastest, and most gorgeously colored of all the world’s fishes. Their torpedo-shaped, streamlined bodies are built for speed and endurance. Their coloring—metallic blue on top and shimmering silver-white on the bottom—helps camouflage them from above and below. And their voracious appetite and varied diet pushes their average size to a whopping 6.5 feet (2 meters) in length and 550 pounds (250 kilograms), although much larger specimens are not uncommon.

The NYT article was written by Paul Greenberg who is the author of “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food.”  See his website.

Here’s some of what was written in that NYT article:

IN the wide expanse of the wild ocean, there is perhaps nothing more wild than the world’s largest tuna — the giant Atlantic bluefin. Equipped with a kind of natural GPS system that biologists have yet to decode, the bluefin can cross and recross the Atlantic’s breadth multiple times in the course of its life. Its furious metabolism enables the fish to sprint at more than 40 miles an hour, heat its muscles 20 degrees above ambient, and hunt relentlessly at frigid depths in excess of 1,500 feet.

I didn’t realise that these fish are warm-blooded, a rare trait among fish, but the more important fact is that a bluefin tuna is likely to eat between 5 lbs (2 kg) and 15 lbs (6 kg) of wildfish for every pound of body.  Thus a fully grown bluefin of around 550 lbs (250 kg) represents a diet of anywhere between 2,750 and 8,250 lbs (340 -3,750 kgs) of wildfish. Back to the Greenberg article:

The Stanford economist Rosamond Naylor pointed out in a recent paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that there was not too much room for adding species to the world’s aquaculture portfolio.

“Most forage fisheries,” Ms. Naylor wrote “are either fully exploited to overexploited or are in the process of recovering from overexploitation.”

If she is right — and if bluefin tuna farming is ramped up to the level of salmon farming, which produces more than two billion pounds a year — the effect on forage fish, the foundation of the oceanic food chain, could be devastating. A worldwide overharvest of forage fish could damage not just bluefin tuna populations but other important commercial species that also rely on these fish for sustenance.

In other words Rosamond Naylor is warning us, all of us that eat fish, that we could put at risk the entire ocean’s food chain.  And what scares me is that humans have shown a real propensity to put their short-term needs totally above any long-term protection of the planet we all live on.  How crazy is that!

The NYT article closes thus:

If Atlantic bluefin is not farmed, it will most likely become an even more scarce luxury item. Global fishing moratoriums on the species have been proposed (and then rejected by the many nations that catch bluefin). But other options being discussed include drastically reducing fishing quotas in the next few years and closing spawning grounds in the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico to fishing entirely.

Perhaps, in the end, this is what the Atlantic bluefin tuna might really need. Not human intervention to make them spawn in captivity. But rather human restraint, to allow them to spawn in the wild, in peace.

Amen to that.

By Paul Handover

Chilean mine rescue – update

At last some recent news.

One of the problems of our modern media is that there is so much competition for news that old stories frequently just seem to disappear.

So it was delightful to find in last Saturday’s Daily Telegraph news that the rescue shaft had achieved a very important milestone – the pilot shaft, 12 inches in diameter, had broken through to the chamber where the miners patiently wait for their rescue.

Rescuers working to release 33 trapped Chilean miners have achieved a pivotal breakthrough by drilling an escape shaft through to the underground chamber occupied by the men.

Anyway, full story is here

And, of course, life does go on as this video clip happily illustrates.

By Paul Handover

Dogma, Lies and Truth ….

Humans are often both so funny and tragic at the same time  that one does not know whether to laugh or cry on hearing a particular news item. Thus it was for me when reading about Cuba’s apparent ideological U-turn.

The Cuban dogma of the last 50 years has been “State good; private bad.” This is familiar “Communist” territory, so Cubans have been born, grown up and died while being told that “capitalism” was evil, private ownership was bad and that the state was best suited to running everything.

This then was “the truth” for 50 years. But suddenly, amazingly, it seems that this was NOT the truth after all, since now entrepreneurship is to be encouraged in a bid to breathe life into the dinosauric Cuban economy. So, for 50 years Cuba was living a lie? And if so, will those responsible take the blame for these lies?

Errrrmmmm … the heirs and cronies of the apparent lie of over 50 years are the very same people (apart from the conveniently-sidelined Fidel himself, who can of course take the blame whether explicitly or implicitly) who are now proclaiming a new “truth”. So are they admitting their lie, or to be charitable – since XMAS is approaching – their total wrongness?

This is of course the big problem for those enforcing dogma. If there comes a time when the dogma is so manifestly absurd that it has to be changed then the long-time enforcers of the ridiculous are clearly seen to have been wrong for as long as the dogma has been enforced. And of course, the LONGER the dogma has gone on the MORE wrong the enforcers of same are seen to be. So for the dogma-enforcers there is every incentive to NEVER admit the nonsensicality of the dogma, whatever the evidence. Hence the ossification of dogma, when in the end enforcing the dogma is seen as more important than the actual dogma itself.

This is also one reason for the extraordinary conservatism that Humans are often “guilty” of. “Why do we do it that way?” -> “Errrmmmm … we’ve ALWAYS done it that way …”

Well, some credit has to go to the Cuban regime for admitting – tacitly or otherwise – that the last 50 years’ dogma was wrong. Kind as I am,  I do not use the word “idiotic”, though some would say that would be more appropriate …… Kind? Am I too kind in giving them any credit at all? After all, in a dictatorship, the only true definition of “truth” is “that which the leadership says is true.”

I haven’t worked out yet whether they are using the common ploy of dogma-changers, the only one in fact that gets them off the hook. This is to say: “Yes, we’ve always believed A was good and B was evil and now we believe the opposite. This is because CIRCUMSTANCES HAVE CHANGED.” Has anyone worked that out yet? The problem with the “Circumstances have changed” argument is of course that circumstances are ALWAYS changing and so dogma PER SE would seem to be a ludicrous way to manage our lives.

Well whatever, the latest pronouncements could have been made by the British centre-right Coalition Party rather than the old-style Cuban Communist Party:

“Our state cannot and should not continue maintaining companies, productive entities, services and budgeted sectors with bloated payrolls [and] losses that hurt the economy,” said the official Cuban labour federation, which announced the news.

George Osbourne, rightist British Chancellor of the Exchequer, would have been quite proud of that newsbite.

One has to wonder how this redefining of “the truth” will go down with the Cuban people. As has been argued, the main problem with changing the dogma is that you have to admit being wrong before, and often massively and for many years. And the longer-term ticking time-bomb is that once you allow questioning of the dogma then you open a door to the questioning of everything. This is why people who enforce dogma don’t really like any sort of questioning whatsoever. Encouraging it is like opening Pandora’s box; where will it all end? And the most hideous question of all of course is: “Don’t we deserve more say in our own government.” or – in the case of a “world-religion”, “Is the whole basis of our “beliefs” (for which we are prepared to kill people for) plain WRONG? Have we been living a LIE for over 1500 years? ” This question is a terrible one for individuals to face, so terrible that their leaders will do ANYTHING to prevent them ever facing it, including of course kill them if the questioning becomes too loud.

This is the real reason why dictatorships don’t like questioning of any kind; mindless sheep would be their preferred populace. A populace that asks too many questions is – frankly – to be avoided like the plague. They are currently plagued in Iran by sheep with very much a mind of their own, which is why oppression is great and increasing of course.

Anyway, I for one rejoice at the Cuban change of direction, even though one has often seen leaders tempted to open Pandora’s box only to violently slam it shut again when they see what starts to happen.

I always admired the Cuban revolution; chucking out a nauseating “Capitalist” mafiosi-style American-backed regime. The problem has been the extreme ossification of Cuban political and economic thought and development since the day Castro took over. Are better days ahead and will Cuba one day end up as a role-model for South America, much as Scandinavia is for the world in general?

The comic in all this? Listening to previous apologists for the former “lie” having to find linguistic justifications for their previous wrongness. This is marvellous for lovers of language as the arts of spin are brought fully into play justifying the previously unjustifiable.

The tragic? Knowing that the livers of the previous lie suffered both from living a lie and from the practical consequences of it, in Cuba’s case a quite unnecessarily high level of poverty in many areas even if there were some compensating factors. As Cuban apologists often say (said?) “The people may be poor but they are happy.” We might say (I assume): “Better to be much better-off and also happy ….”

PS Is the Pope watching all this (and the Islamic hierarchy come to that?) There is plenty of room for dogma change in the Vatican and Mecca …..

By Chris Snuggs

I salute this guy!

Karl Denninger of Market Ticker is brilliant

Karl D

I say that not because I have sufficient financial knowledge to evaluate his writings from a technical point of view but because he puts in huge effort, I mean hundreds of hours a month, to support his perspective.

Anyway, do bookmark his website/blog – it’s here.

An article published on the 10th demonstrates both Denninger’s commitment to his audience and some very specific dangers potentially coming out of Europe.  Called “A Round-Up Of Current Idiocy” it includes this conclusion:

Since we keep drinking more as an economy (debt and deficits) the violence and incidence of these “undesirable outcomes” is going to continue to increase.  We had one nasty in 2000, and then again in 2007.  From the so-called “recovery” (2003) to the onset of the last mess was about four years.  We’re now about two years in from the so-called “bottom” of this latest train wreck (Lehman), and if we keep on-path, and we are as the below chart shows, our fuse should go inside the box for this next mess somewhere between now and the end of 2011.

I hope you’re ready, because this next one, coming with no real recovery having taken place in employment or private economic activity, may be the one that takes us well beyond the misery we suffered in the 1930s.

And if it does, it will be our – that’s right – our – fault, since we simply will not accept that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Note the copyright please.

Despite it being quite a technical piece with some aspects that weren’t clear to me, no surprise!, it’s still got many important messages for all those concerned about our savings and assets.  Do read it.

Well done, Karl.

By Paul Handover

It’s all Irish!

But this time it’s NOT Irish humour.

Brits will be well aware that the Irish have been the source of many funny stories and ‘Irish’ humour is still a favourite with the English.

But this piece from Baseline Scenario is very troubling, and that’s putting it mildly.

The excellent article, as they all are from Baseline, is here.

I stole a small extract to underline the import of what BS are writing about.

However, let’s be clear: Europe’s headache remains large, and this should concern all of us – just look at Ireland to see how misunderstood and immediate the remaining dangers are. Ireland’s difficulties arose because of a massive property boom financed by cheap credit from Irish banks. Ireland’s three main banks built up loans and investments by 2008 that were three times the size of the national economy; these big banks (relative to the economy) pushed the frontier in terms of reckless lending. The banks got the upside, and then came the global crash in fall 2008: property prices fell more than 50 percent, construction and development stopped, and people stopped repaying loans. Today roughly one-third of the loans on the balance sheets of major banks are nonperforming or “under surveillance”; that’s an astonishing 100 percent of gross national product, in terms of potentially bad debts.

(That’s my italics, by the way.)

Anyway, do read it in full – it’s got important implications.

And then give yourself a proper laugh at the wonderful sense of humour that comes across from the Irish Sea ….

By Paul Handover

What next!

A dog playing pool in the USA!

(This week is a tough one for me with no internet access until the 18th.  So I’m quickly offering items from elsewhere that have caught my eye.)

Nothing to add!

By Paul Handover

Where’s your bin?

All at sea, Sir!

(This week is a tough one for me with no internet access until the 18th.  So I’m quickly offering items from elsewhere that have caught my eye.)

Courtesy of BBC News

A life at sea - well sort of!

Lifeboat crews have made an unusual rescue off the coast of Anglesey – an 81-year-old man and a wheelie bin.

The man had gone out in a small inflatable dinghy to recover his neighbour’s bin which had swept out to sea in strong winds, in a high tide.

He was blown about a mile off Red Wharf Bay until Moelfre inshore lifeboat was launched to rescue him.

He was picked up suffering from mild hypothermia and taken to hospital in Bangor by ambulance.  The crew said the man was not wearing a life jacket or waterproof clothing. His dinghy was also half full of water because of the sea conditions.

The Moelfre crew then went back out to tow in the dingy and wheelie bin, which was still half full of rubbish.

Moelfre lifeboat station spokesman Dave Massey said: “Everyone at the Moelfre lifeboat station wishes the gentleman a speedy recovery.

“The volunteer lifeboat crews at Moelfre have dealt with a wide variety of emergency calls over the years but I am sure that this is the first time we have been involved in towing in a wheelie bin.”

The Welsh coastline was hit by some of the highest tides of the year on [last] Friday.

By Paul Handover

Power of peace

This week is a tough one for me with no internet access until the 18th.  So I’m quickly offering items from elsewhere that have caught my eye.

Seriously being at rest!

Here’s another thoughtful, and powerful, reminder of the power of peace from Zen Habits.

‘The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.’~Thich Nhat Hanh

These days we have an abundance of luxuries, but I’ve found that excess actually decreases my enjoyment of life.

Sure, we can get massive amounts of rich foods, feasting to our heart’s content, stuffing ourselves in alarming displays of gluttony … but is that really enjoyable on a regular basis?

And yes, television can be fun, and so can ridiculously large parts of the Internet, but if it’s always on, if we’re always connected, doesn’t that lower the fun factor?

Excesses lead to all kinds of problems, but the biggest problem is that life is less enjoyable.

I’ve been finding that simplifying things means I can savor life more fully.

Savoring life starts with a mindset. It’s a mindset that believes that excess, that rushing, that busy-ness, that distractedness, isn’t ideal. It’s a mindset that tries instead to:

  • simplify
  • do & consume less
  • slow down
  • be mindful & present
  • savor things fully

It’s the little things that make life enjoyable: a walk with a loved one, a delicious book, a chilled plum, a newly blooming tree.

And by simplifying, we can savor life to the fullest.

Some ideas I’ve been considering lately:

1. Coffee: Instead of ordering a latte, mocha, cappuccino with whipped cream and cinnamon and shavings … simplify. Just get pure, good coffee (or espresso), brewed fresh with care and precision, with quality beans, freshly roasted. Make it yourself if you can. Drink it slowly, with little or nothing added, and enjoy it thoroughly.

2. Tea: I recently had tea with Jesse Jacobs, the owner of Samovar Tea Lounge, and he poured two different teas from tiny tea pots: Nishi Sencha 1st Flush and Bai Hao Oolong tea. It was fresh, hand-made tea from real leaves, not a tea bag, and it was simply delicious. Drink it slowly, with your eyes closed, fully appreciating the aroma … wonderful.

3. Workouts: I’ve been a fan of simpler workouts recently. While others might spend an hour to 90 minutes in the gym, going through a series of 10 different exercises, I just do 1-3 functional exercises, but with intensity. So I might do some sprint intervals, or a few rounds of pushups, pullups, and bodyweight squats. Or 400 meters of walking lunges. Let me tell you, that’s a simple but incredible workout. Another I like: five rounds 85-lb. squat thrusters (10 reps) alternated with pushups (10 reps). Today’s workout was three rounds of 15 burpees and 800-meter runs. No rest unless you need it. These are great workouts, but very simple, and very tough. I love them.

4. Sweets: I used to be a sugar addict. Now I still enjoy an occasional dessert, but in tiny portions, eaten very slowly. What I enjoy even more, though, is cold fruit. A chilled peach, some blueberries, a few strawberries, a plum: eat it one bite at a time, close your eyes with each bite, and enjoy to the fullest. So good.

5. Meals: While the trend these days is super-sized meals of greasy, fried things (more than two people need to eat actually), I have been enjoying smaller meals of simplicity. Just a few ingredients, fresh, whole, unprocessed, without chemicals or sauces. My meals usually include: a breakfast of steel-cut oats (cooked) with cinnamon, almonds, and berries; a lunch of yogurt, nuts, and fruit; a dinner of beans or tofu with quinoa and steamed veggies (or sauteed with garlic and olive oil). These simple meals are better because not only are they healthy, each ingredient can be tasted, its flavor fully enjoyed.

6. Reading: While the Internet is chock full of things to read, I’ve been enjoying the simplicity of a paper book, borrowed from the library or a friend (borrowing/sharing reduces natural resources consumed). When I read online, I read a single article at a time, using either the Readability or Clippable bookmarklet to remove distrations, and in full-screen mode in the Chrome browser (hit Cmd-Shift-F on the Mac version or F11 in Windows). It’s pure reading, no distractions, and lovely.

Colbert Good, Keynes Not So Smart

Another hugely interesting article from Patrice Ayme

Patrice is a good friend of this Blog so it pleases me very much to point you towards a recent article on Patrice’s own Blog.  Here’s the abstract:

Obama is well on his way to become one of the most unaccomplished presidents of the USA, ever. This is made worse, because we are at a crucial juncture of history, and the USA is in leadership position. When the car is travelling fast, and the leader is asleep at the wheel, it will not just end in the ditch.

The little smoke and mirrors Obama threw up, will be easily reversed by the republicans, as planned. So, in the end, Obama will turn up as just an extension of Bush, without the smirk… nor the originality. By choosing the same ideological, Goldman Sachs team, that implemented plutocracy under Clinton, Obama asked those who put the car in the ditch, to get it out, not understanding that they were still drunk in their quest to selfish profit.

This story presently unfolding has been seen before; it was Great Depression II, the great depression of the 1930s. It was the stall after the deliberately engineered bubble of the 1920s.

The West got out of it by massive state enforced job programs, started under president Hoover (Hoover dam, Empire State building, etc,) and pursued by FD Roosevelt (Grand Coulee dam, etc.) and Hitler (Autobahn system, copied by Eisenhower in the 1950s, and everybody else since).

Millions got employed directly by the government and the massive mobilization of WWII did the rest, followed by the GI Bill in 1945. Europe had massive state organized and financed economic activity, led by the US Marshall plan (Marshall was the US chief of staff during WWII, and Secretary of State of Truman). Europe, traumatized by what had happened also made important institutional changes, oriented towards welfare, such as free health care. Sully’s plan of circa 1600 for a “Very Christian Council of Europe” was also implemented.

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(Labeling used on aid packages.)

The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program,ERP) was the primary program of the USA for rebuilding and creating a stronger economic foundation for the countries of Europe (1947–51). Efforts focused on modernizing European industrial and business practices using high-efficiency American models (themselves learned from French industrialists to implement American production of the 75mm gun, the mainstay of French artillery in WWI).

All this help and investment, in the USA and Europe, was paid bymarginal tax rates on income as high as 90% in the USA (under US president Ike).

Right, now, instead, the richest Americans pay the lowest tax rate (15%), and wealth has not been so concentrated in a century (a century ago, great spaces and freedom were another form of wealth, at least in the USA, which have now disappeared).

Starting in 1996, a succession of ever larger bubbles, following part of Keynes’s ideas, has injected more and more money in the economy, money which came neither from savings nor production, but mostly borrowed from aliens, and, increasingly, the Chinese.

Robert Reich (UC Berkeley), who lost to Robert Rubin (Goldman Sachs) the debate on the economic strategy to pursue in the Clinton administration, wrote an essay in the New York Times, “How to End The Great Recession”, reflecting the approach that wealth needs to be redistributed. Reich mentioned what I have long observed: the real (inflation adjusted) median income has been going down for thirty years now. This is worse than what happened during Great Depression II. So this is Great Depression III, not just another recession.

I approve of Reich’s anti plutocratic approach, of course. As he says: “The Great Depression and its aftermath demonstrate that there is only one way back to full recovery: through more widely shared prosperity.”… However, this is not the whole story.Redistribution is good, however production is necessary.Keynes, as we will see, is about throwing money to the people, as the Roman emperors invented. That is not about meaningful employment.

Obama’s ineptitude is not all his fault. The economic advice he got, even from his opponents, has been terrible. For example, Krugman, whom I approve a lot of, wanted, like Romer (the ex-chair of economic advisers) a bigger stimulus. And so did I.

But stimulating what? How? To which aim? Most of Obama’s stimulus was wasted on short term alleviation of long term structural defects, exactly the sort of trap one does not want to fall into (French socialists fell into that very trap in the recent past, with the result that the income tax started to fully go to paying the interest on the French national debt).

The USA stimulus ought to have targeted to jump start a big energy infrastructure first, followed by a massively innovative scientific industry, modeled after the military industrial complex (the only thing the USA does really well nowadays, besides plenty of hot air). Instead, the debate in economic theory has been pretty much Keynes (somewhat of a neo-stupid, see below) versus Hayek (a pro-plutocratic neo-fascist who influenced the Chicago school’s meta principle that GREED, AND ONLY GREED, MAKES GOOD).

However, the military-industrial complex of the USA, by now, by far, the most competitive part of its economy, is not run according to Hayek, or Keynes. It is run along the lines defined by Jean Baptiste Colbert. That ought to be a hint, but no main stream American economist has picked it up.

American economists in good standing do not know who Colbert was, perhaps because he thrived when Indians were outnumbering European colonists in North America, and studying history is not as important than learning sports, and to learn to agree with one’s peers, in American schools.

Colbert started his career, and this is overlooked, overlooking the military, at the grand old age of 21. Colbert branched off into economy and finance much later, after helping to send the hyper rich “superintendent of finances”, Fouquet, to jail, for life.

The American economist Paul Kennedy, in a book about The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers, basically expounded, as his theory, what was pretty much Colbert’s theory and practice(unsurprisingly, Kennedy does not talk about Colbert too much, and got rewarded with a prize for his depth and originality).

Colbert had perfectly understood that Great Power status necessitated a Great Economy. Thus Colbertism could be viewed as the highest form of militarism. Just like the USA is itself the highest form of militarism which ever was. Notice the rapprochement. Not to make fun of it: the position of Europe and the USA is unstable, just as the entire world economy, society and military situations are all simultaneously unstable, and military superiority is what keeps thing together, right now (unfortunately it is courting defeat in Afghanistan).

Colbert was actually following the model implemented, with spectacular success, by Henri IV and his economy and finance minister, Sully, a protestant military engineer, around 1600 CE, with state financed canals, silk factories and free markets.

Why are great powers great powers? Because they have achieved a technological superiority gradient, and have enough numbers to sit on top of it. Numbers are not everything: the Mongols carved the world’s largest empire in a few years, and with 200,000 warriors. “Technology” here is meant in the full etymological sense: any specialized discourse.

If we want to keep a superior lifestyle in the empire of the West, and a stable planet, it is high time to recover such a gradient, which is, basically, an intelligence gradient. Thus it is high time to redistribute the sort of economy which makes the military industrial complex of the USA so superior, namely COLBERTISM MODERNIZED.

***

The full article is here

Well worth reading.

By Paul Handover