I would just like to put this link out there for anyone that is tired of mainstream news coverage. It's independent and funded by donations only and is a refreshing look at world affairs not sensationalized by spin and corporate power. Check it out!

The Real News Network

Peace,
Grant

A lot of people have been asking me about the apparently low price of oil these days. Some have argued that we are not near peak oil after all, and that the huge price spike seen this year was not something to worry about. In June the price of oil spiked to $147/barrel and it didn't show any signs of letting up. Now, the price of oil is in the 50's, as it was in early 2005. So, we're off the hook right? I don't think so. Peak oil has everything to do with supply, not demand. It's about reaching a point where all the "good stuff" is gone and oil, thus becomes more expensive to extract and refine.

The recent drop in oil prices is due solely to demand destruction, or the fact that we are in a global recession. Let's face it. Germany even declared official recession today. So, bidders on oil futures tend to back off investing in oil when they expect demand to fall. Thus, as demand falls, so too does the price of oil. Oil futures have dropped so much, in fact, that OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries - whom are mostly comprised of Middle Eastern countries) has voted to decrease production, to help bring the price back up, to cover their interests. So far, it hasn't worked.

In any case, gas is cheaper now, and maybe it's a good time to fill up your oil heating furnace for the winter. Personally, I think we are at a crossroads of oil price stability/volatility, where extraneous economic conditions and geopolitical pressure, in addition to general supply and demand issues are thrusting us into a future of inestimable prices. So, what about peak oil? First of all, I maintain that we have passed global, all-time peak oil production. Although, I could be proven wrong. The local maximum in oil production rate occurred in May 2005 and it hasn't gone back that way since. Could that be the all-time peak? I think so. In principal, we could pump more than that again, but it doesn't seem likely. Economic conditions are giving OPEC a break (production-wise) in that they can safely decrease production, to affect the price of oil and bolster their profits somewhat.

So, the pressure is off OPEC to pump more, more, more, to bring the price down. Occidental economic conditions have taken care of this for them. But, ultimately, it's all relative. If global currencies are devalued, how much reprieve can depressed oil futures give us anyway? Time to go back to nature. Time to power down.

Having said all this, Spain is in recession as much as the rest of Europe, but there is still no sign of a slowdown. There are just as many cars on the roads, just as many plastic made-in-China products on the shelves but there are more people out of work and the price of food has not gone back down. I think it will take real, at-the-pump shortages and "out of gas" signs before people start to modify their behavior.

Peace,
Grant

One thing I really like about living in Catalonia is the concept of "The Village". It's certainly not a new concept, but it is one living arrangement that has stood the test of time. There are not many places I would classify as villages in North America. But, Wakefield, Quebec does come to mind. In the few years I have been living in Spain, I would define the Village as small, densely populated, surrounded by farmland, 100% walkable and with a central street containing the majority of businesses, which are for the most part, family owned and operated "Mom and Pop" type establishments. The main grocery store here in our village isn't referred to by its corporate name, but rather the name of the house where it has been for decades, Cal Salvador (equal I suppose to "Chez" Salvador, in French). The Village is, above all, community based, with an emphasis on publicly accessible squares, parks, sports locales and periodic fiestas!

This sense of community occurred to me poignantly the other day when I walked out of the house onto the narrow sidewalk separating us from the street. I heard one of the neighbours, a guy named Cairot (who is about 80 and has been living here for his whole life and loves to chat) mentioning to another man who was making some sort of inquiry, to "talk to that guy, he's the one"... meaning me of course. We started chatting and I soon realized that he was looking for work. But not just any work. Not work paid in cash. Work paid in fruits and vegetables.

You see, we have a slice of land in this old house that, much to my chagrin, I do not have time to maintain properly. I have managed to grow a few tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, brussel sprouts, scant types of beans and eggplant. The sense of accomplishment in growing your own food is unparalleled. But, I have been in a constant battle with the "malas hierbas" or "evil herbs", that is... weeds! This summer I put in an honest effort when I could, trimming and pulling weeds, hoeing and raking, fertilizing and even setting up a timed mini-irrigation system, but I just cannot keep those nasty weeds in check. Forget about herbicides (something a friend of mine here jokingly refers to as "inevitable chemical warfare"), it ain't gonna happen!

Anyway, so starting next week, Señor Julio will start working the land. He has plenty of tools, including even a rototiller so, I expect that together we will be able to start from a clean slate, weed-wise. I will keep you updated on the life of Me and Julio down in the backyard...

In our garden there is an orange tree (suitable only for marmalade or orange-ade due to the fact they are so sour). But the tree yields hundreds of fruit. Right now, as I look outside, they are still green. In a few months we shall start that harvest and begin bottling some marmalade. In the spring, the orange tree flowers and leaves a wonderful scent in the air, attracting a variety of pollen spreading insects. There are three other fruit bearing trees: the pomegranate, the persimmon and the palm tree. We haven't tried the dates from the palm tree yet. But the birds love them when they fall on our balcony, pecking them apart and leaving the seeds for us to sweep up. As far as the garden goes, there are still a few tomatoes left from the summer, but they don't ripen too fast now. The eggplant and peppers are still going strong though and the brussels sprouts (pictured) turned out nice and required little maintenance.
So, my main point of this blog is the sense of community that I feel here. The streets are small, so it's hard to pass someone you know without saying "hola", even if they are on the other side. The great thing about my new garden arrangement is that it's win-win. We will work the earth together and share the harvest. Stay tuned.

Peace,
Grant

A great article by James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and Geography of Nowhere. This is from his weekly blog.

Peace,
Grant

November 3, 2008
A Nervous Nation

This is a nervous nation. Though I'm usually allergic to paranoia, something makes me think that there's a back office in the US Treasury that is buying the entire Dow Jones Industrial Index at opportune moments -- like fifteen minutes before the closing bell -- at the direction of Mr. Paulson. He seems to easily spend $50 billion a day on other dubious hand-outs. At that scale, buying the whole Dow would just take his walking-around money. The idea behind it, my paranoid fugue goes, is to jack up the stock market enough around election day to give the dimmer members of the voting public the idea that the financial fiasco is over and happy days are here again. You can't put this past the Republican party, despite John McCain's friendly turn on Saturday Night Live, consorting with "the enemy" for laughs.
Apart from that, McCain has run the flat-out most scurrilous campaign I've ever seen, despite his reputation as a war hero and a sterling fellow among the senators. He's run a campaign of malicious innuendo and slander, seemingly aimed at voters who would have trouble qualifying for the Special Olympics. And you have to wonder whether he actually requested Vice-president Dick Cheney to lay that "kiss-of-death" endorsement on him at the last moment. It could only have been better if Mr. Cheney borrowed some trick-or-treater's Darth Vadar costume for the grand occasion.
What many people are nervous about, of course, is the chance of shenanigans with the voting tally. Just one minor feature of the general paralysis gripping this society has been our inability to get rid of those mischievous Diebold computerized voting machines that leave no paper trail. By the way, these touchscreen voting units are an example of the diminishing returns of technology. There was nothing wrong with the old mechanical units, but by making over-investments in complexity we've just created more problems for ourselves. This ought to be a warning to those in the thrall of techno-triumphalism.
People are nervous not just because Mr. Obama might be swindled out of a victory, but because John McCain might get elected. Credibility in his judgment dissolved about eleven minutes after he picked the Bombshell from Wasilla to be a heartbeat away from the oval office. Anyway, the Republican Party needs to crawl off to a dark hole somewhere and either pupate into something better or die -- as the Whigs did in 1856. The Republican Party is not through wrecking America. They have three more months to destroy the US dollar and the economy that runs on it. And with Mr. Paulson shoving out pallet-loads of bundled dollars to the likes of JP Morgan, so they can continue doing the very thing that provoked this financial fiasco -- lending money recklessly to anyone with a pulse-- they might just "get her done!"
Other people are afraid that Mr. Obama will hand out bales of money, too, only to a different class of people. I suppose he will. I hope he will show restraint and apply it to public works that benefit all Americans -- such as my pet project of restoring passenger railroad service so people don't have to drive, for instance, from Atlanta to Louisville or Cleveland to Columbus. Even so, the new President will face not only a tide of woes created by his predecessor, but very likely, too, an obese and ineffectual federal bureaucracy unable to carry out even well-intentioned programs.
He will take office in what may be the darkest economic year this country has ever faced. 2009 shows every sign of being worse than this one, with house foreclosures and car re-pos accelerating, companies hemorrhaging jobs, oil prices heading back up (with shortages possible), and a large new group of the formerly middle class growing restive and sore in the background. It will be an historic act of governance if he can keep the lid on all this. Many people will be worrying, of course, whether he will even survive. The ghost of JFK and the dashed hopes he represented (however real or illusory) still haunt this nation.
Apart from the awful debt deflation and probable rebound hyper-inflation that will whipsaw the nation cross-eyed, the new president will face the energy question. I hope he learns the fundamental lesson: that the only way we can hope to become "energy independent" is to severely reform our car-dependent living arrangements and live more locally. Anybody who believes we're going to run the interstate highways and WalMart on solar, wind, tar sands (which belong to Canada, by the way), oil shale, methane gas, algae-diesel, or used fry-max® is going to be disappointed. We'll have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently -- in traditional towns, villages, cities (scaled smaller, to a lower energy diet), as well as a productive agricultural landscape that will require more attention from live human beings (and maybe help from our friends, the animals).
Much of the real work of the next president will be guiding a transition out of obsolete habits, practices, and expectations that we must shed whether we like it or not. The painful downscaling of the financial sector, from a bloated 20+ percent of the US economy back to something more in the 5 percent range, is only the first of these agonies. The transition away from suburbia -- our tragic misallocation of resources in an infrastructure for daily life with no future -- will be even more harrowing because of the psychology of previous investment, which will provoke a misguided effort to sustain the unsustainable, and squander our dwindling resources in the process.
I reject the label "gloom-and-doomer" where these difficult transitions are concerned. There's a lot about the way we live now that is disgusting, degrading, demoralizing, and socially toxic -- from our suicidal diet of processed fat, salt, and corn syrup byproducts to the spiritually punishing everyday realm of the highway strip to the fantastic loneliness and alienation of a people made hostage to a TV-consumer nexus of corporate colonialism. Were done with that. We just don't know it yet. Mr. Obama may not know it, either, but he is a trustworthy soul to hold our hands as we enter this unknown territory.

I made a promise to myself not to get too political in these blogs, but I couldn't resist putting up a link to this site on the Economist.com:

http://www.economist.com/vote2008/

For those of us who are not American and of course can't vote in an American election, but are otherwise interested in American politics, now you can vote! Well, sort of... this interactive site allows you to cast your virtual vote for either John McCain or Barack Obama, no matter what your nationality or place of residence.

I put this site up here not so much to comment on politics, but rather to let the numbers speak for themselves. The ongoing poll results are listed by total, and by country. So, in this respect the numbers speak volumes about the demographics of world public opinion toward America and its significant influence in the world.

Peace,
Grant

I mentioned in a previous blog, "Fractals and Self-Organized Criticality" about the fractal nature of many natural systems. That is, the self-similarity observed in nature over many scale lengths. It turns out that fractals can be quite useful to describe financial systems as well. However, they are rarely used and this leads to many misconceptions about the markets. Let me explain.



When we discuss variability or probability distributions, we generally resort to simple Gaussian statistics ("bell curve" statistics). That is, when you take a sample, say, a population and plot out something such as their heights on an xy plot, there are some very tall people, some very short, but basically, there is an average height and the curve looks something like a church bell. Hence the name. This works very well for heights or weights or university grades or other such things that vary within set limits. Therefore, we don't have to worry about a single mile-high person messing up our nice bell curve. There are natural limits imposed on human heights, as it were. However, other statistical distributions are not necessarily confined to any arbitrary limit. Such is the case with the market. But, much to our misfortune, fractal statistics are almost never used to describe or explain the behaviour of the markets. We are shown graphs or pie charts of historical trends or mathematical predictions about future market tendencies. So, how much faith can we have in our financial advisers, the majority of which have never studied fractal distributions in relation to the free market economy?

There has been a lot of buzz these days about the economy. This year started off with spiking oil prices (some 50%), and talk about a global recession. Now, the rhetoric has gone from recession to depression or even collapse. What's going on here? What do I do with my investments? Should I be putting my money in my mattress? How will the price of oil effect the price of food or other economic needs? I must admit that I am far from qualified to comment satisfactorily on the implications of global economic collapse. However, I will say that I am pessimistic about the future of civilization continuing on in the way it has been during the "cheap oil fiesta" we have been fortunate to live through over the past 150 years or so. The turmoil we see in the markets now is heavily related to the price of oil, but also to the laissez-faire free market economics and its misleading mathematical foundation. The future may be one of energy shortages, but it doesn't have to be bad. Civilization has persisted for thousands of years without the gadgets we are familiar with today, including the laptop I am typing this on. But, I am optimistic that we will adjust to our new set of circumstances, live more locally and be happy with less "cargo". :)

I drew most of the information for this blog in the form of a summary (as I understand it) from an article I read by Benoit Mandelbrot and Nassim Nicholas Taleb called, - "How The Finance Gurus Get Risk All Wrong". Benoit Mandelbrot is a mathematician and is celebrated as the "father of fractals". It's a short article... check it out if you're interested.

Peace,
Grant

Here, I put a great article by Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute. This guy has some great progressive ideas for the world. Check it out and you can even download his book (Plan B 3.0) for free in PDF format. Or, sign up for his regular mailing list (where I received this essay). Find it all at www.earthpolicy.org and help make a change.

Peace,
Grant


INCREASING EQUALITY BY EDUCATING EVERY CHILD
Lester R. Brown

The social and economic gap between the world’s richest 1 billion people and its poorest 1 billion has no historical precedent. Not only is this gap wide, it is widening. The poorest billion are trapped at subsistence level and the richest billion are becoming wealthier with each passing year.

One way of narrowing the gap between rich and poor segments of society is by ensuring universal education. This means making sure that the 72 million children not enrolled in school are able to attend. Children without any formal education are starting life with a severe handicap, one that almost ensures they will remain in abject poverty and that the gap between the poor and the rich will continue to widen. In an increasingly integrated world, this widening gap itself becomes a source of instability. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen focuses the point: “Illiteracy and innumeracy are a greater threat to humanity than terrorism.”

In the effort to achieve universal primary education, the World Bank has taken the lead with its Education for All plan, where any country with a well-designed plan to achieve this goal is eligible for Bank financial support. The three principal requirements are that a country submit a sensible plan to reach universal basic education, commit a meaningful share of its own resources to the plan, and have transparent budgeting and accounting practices. If fully implemented, all children in poor countries would get a primary school education by 2015, helping them to break out of poverty.

Some progress toward this goal has been made. In 2000, some 78 percent of children were completing primary school, while by 2005 this figure reached 83 percent. Gains have been strong but uneven, leaving the World Bank to conclude that only 95 of the 152 developing countries for which data are available will reach the goal of universal primary school education by 2015.

Poverty is largely inherited. The overwhelming majority of those living in poverty today are the children of people who lived in poverty. The key to breaking out of the culture of poverty is education--particularly the education of girls. As female educational levels rise, fertility falls. And mothers with at least five years of school lose fewer infants during childbirth or to early illnesses than their less educated peers do. Economist Gene Sperling concluded in a 2001 study of 72 countries that “the expansion of female secondary education may be the single best lever for achieving substantial reductions in fertility.”

Basic education tends to increase agricultural productivity. Agricultural extension services that can use printed materials to disseminate information have an obvious advantage. So too do farmers who can read the instructions on a bag of fertilizer. The ability to read instructions on a pesticide container can be life-saving.

At a time when HIV is spreading, schools provide the institutional means to educate young people about the risks of infection. The time to inform and educate children about the virus and about the lifestyles that foster its spread is when they are young, not when they are already infected. Young people can also be mobilized to conduct educational campaigns among their peers.

One great need in developing countries, particularly those where the ranks of teachers are being decimated by AIDS, is more teacher training. Providing scholarships for promising students from poor families to attend training institutes in exchange for a commitment to teach for, say, five years, could be a highly profitable investment. It would help ensure that the teaching resources are available to reach universal primary education, and it would also foster an upwelling of talent from the poorest segments of society.

Gene Sperling believes that every plan should provide for getting to the hardest-to-reach segments of society, especially poor girls in rural areas. He notes that Ethiopia has pioneered this with Girls Advisory Committees. Representatives of these groups go to the parents who are seeking early marriage for their daughters and encourage them to keep their girls in school. Some countries, Brazil and Bangladesh among them, actually provide small scholarships for girls or stipends to their parents where needed, thus helping those from poor families get a basic education.

As the world becomes ever more integrated economically, its nearly 800 million illiterate adults are severely handicapped. This deficit can best be overcome by launching adult literacy programs, relying heavily on volunteers. The international community could offer seed money to provide educational materials and outside advisors where needed. Bangladesh and Iran, both of which have successful adult literacy programs, can serve as models.

An estimated $10 billion in external funding, beyond what is being spent today, is needed for the world to achieve universal primary education. At a time when education gives children access not only to books but also to personal computers and the Internet, having children who never go to school is no longer acceptable.

Few incentives to get children in school are as effective as a school lunch program, especially in the poorest countries. Since 1946, every American child in public school has had access to a school lunch program, ensuring at least one good meal each day. There is no denying the benefits of this national program.

Children who are ill or hungry miss many days of school. And even when they can attend, they do not learn as well. Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia University notes, “Sick children often face a lifetime of diminished productivity because of interruptions in schooling together with cognitive and physical impairment.” But when school lunch programs are launched in low-income countries, school enrollment jumps, the children’s academic performance goes up, and children spend more years in school. Girls benefit especially. Drawn to school by the lunch, they stay in school longer, marry later, and have fewer children. This is a win-win-win situation. Launching school lunch programs in the 44 lowest-income countries would cost an estimated $6 billion per year beyond what the United Nations is now spending to reduce hunger.

Greater efforts are also needed to improve nutrition before children even get to school age, so they can benefit from school lunches later. Former Senator George McGovern notes that “a women, infants and children (WIC) program, which offers nutritious food supplements to needy pregnant and nursing mothers,” should also be available in the poor countries. Based on 33 years of experience, it is clear that the U.S. WIC program has been enormously successful in improving nutrition, health, and the development of preschool children from low-income families. If this were expanded to reach pregnant women, nursing mothers, and small children in the 44 poorest countries, it would help eradicate hunger among millions of small children at a time when it could make a huge difference.

These efforts, though costly, are not expensive compared with the annual losses in productivity from hunger. McGovern thinks that this initiative can help “dry up the swamplands of hunger and despair that serve as potential recruiting grounds for terrorists.” In a world where vast wealth is accumulating among the rich, it makes little sense for children to go to school hungry.

Most honest scientists would admit that at the core of what they do is an effort to understand the world around us; how nature works. In his book of the same name, Per Bak, a Danish physicist explains the theory of self-organized criticality (SOC). Historically, physics was always about finding ground truth, describing the natural laws that explain what we observe in every day life. It was even thought to be deterministic, such that, in principal, everything could be known.



Science has done much for society, good and bad, and the scientific method as it is, is very powerful, yet limited by its reductionist strategy. That is, mentally breaking a problem down into smaller and more isolated parts, and then applying this to the system as a whole. I have been recently been researching Emergence in complex systems. That is, using the reductionist method to a point, but keeping in mind its limitations. Per Bak would maintain that nature is a delicate balance always poised to unpredictably collapse in various ways. He gives the analogy of a sandpile. Think of a situation where you have a pitcher of sand, and you can pour out one grain at a time onto a flat table. At first, the sand grains fall and remain stable, then after a while, they pile up and up and the pile grows. But, after not too long, the pile cannot grow higher. Little sand "avalanches" of any scale begin to happen to stabilize the system again and then, as you add more, this pile will grow out, but keep the same proportional size.

He says that this analogy describes a lot of things in nature, like climate, the occurrence of wars and the economy. Take the economy... it might grow and grow due to our efforts, but it will show various size "avalanches", or recessions. Some can be small, as in the hourly fluctuation of stocks, others can be large, like a depression. The size of these collapses is stochastic... their occurrence is not predictable.

We cannot fully predict the trend of nature. We have influence, but only within a relatively small sphere. Nature tends toward disorder (the second law of thermodynamics), so collapses must happen, but when... we don't know. Indeed, we CAN'T know. Earthquake occurrences are another example of non-linearity in nature. Many times they are small, sometimes they are big. The open-ended scale of the magnitude of earthquakes (or of stocks), are called fractals. They were first described, actually quite recently, by Benoît Mandelbrot. Fractals exhibit self-similarity over all scales. We think of fractals as art, and they are quite symmetric and artisic, but this type of self-similar pattern is seen all across nature, from stocks to snowflakes, ferns or the coastline of Britain. What is the underlying symmetry of the universe that is manifest in these natural patterns? At a fundamental level I think it is perhaps related to the magnitude of the four forces of nature, gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces. Why do these forces have the seemingly "tuned" values they have? I don't know, but in any case, if they were any different, even by a minuscule fraction of one percent, the universe would not have evolved life as we know it, or perhaps not at all.

If any of this stuff interests you, check out the links above. I have also been put on to a book by a good friend of mine, Darren Roach, called: The Hidden Connections: Integrating The Biological, Cognitive, And Social Dimensions Of Life Into A Science Of Sustainability. I have yet to read it, but I trust his recommendation. Check it out!

Peace,
Grant

I got this video from a most unlikely location, "Astronomy Picture of the Day", a great website with some conscious raising images of our planet and universe. But, today it featured a video of a guy named Matt Harding who is traveling around the world dancing with different peoples and however slowly, bridging divisions between us. Happiness is universal and knows no borders, language barriers or otherwise. What exactly is happiness? Explore its meaning starting with this video and the above link.

Have a happy summer! :-)

Peace,
Grant

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/336722