“Productive agricultural land with water on site, will be very valuable in the future.”
September 15th, 2010Via: Telegraph:
The neo-colonial rush for global farmland has gone exponential since the food scare of 2007-2008.
Last week’s long-delayed report by the World Bank suggests that purchases in developing countries rose to 45m hectares in 2009, a ten-fold jump from levels of the last decade. Two thirds have been in Africa, where institutions offer weak defence.
As is by now well-known, sovereign wealth funds from the Mid-East, as well as state-entities from China, the Pacific Rim, and even India are trying to lock up chunks of the world’s future food supply. Western agribusiness is trying to beat them to it. Western funds – many listed on London’s AIM exchange – are in turn trying to beat them. The NGO GRAIN, and farmlandgrab.com, have both documented the stampede in detail.
Hedge funds that struck rich ‘shorting’ US sub-prime have rotated into the next great play of our era: ‘long’ soil. “Productive agricultural land with water on site, will be very valuable in the future. And I’ve put a good amount of money into that,” said Michael Burry, star of ‘The Big Short’.
Research Credit: Lagavulin
Chase.com Down in Lengthy Crash
September 15th, 2010Update: Down Again
Via: Bloomberg:
JPMorgan Chase & Co., whose website failed today for the second time this week, will refund late fees and help fix other problems for the 16.6 million online customers unable to access their accounts.
—End Update—
It’s back up.
Via: CNN:
Chase’s online banking website has been offline for most of Tuesday, a prolonged outage the company blamed on unspecified “technical issues.”
The service went down sometime Monday night, Chase spokesman Tom Kelly said. “We’re working on it, it’s a top priority,” he added.
Chase has more than 16.6 million active online customers.
In the meantime, Chase is encouraging those customers to conduct their business at local bank branches and ATMs, or to use the company’s phone service, which remains unaffected by the crash.
Federal Economic Stimulus Money Funds Genital-Washing Lessons in South Africa
September 15th, 2010Via: Minyanville:
As part of a larger $12 million HIV study by UCLA researchers, a grant using $823,200 in federal stimulus money was spent on examining “the feasibility and acceptability of a post-coital male genital hygiene procedure, which participants will be asked to practice immediately post-coitus or at least 12 hours after” among uncircumsized men in Orange Farm, South Africa.
Huge Fish Kill Reported in Plaquemines Parish
September 15th, 2010Look at the photos.
Via: Times-Picayune:
Plaquemines Parish officials have asked state wildlife officials to investigate what they said is a massive fish kill at Bayou Chaland on the west side of the Mississippi River late Friday.
Photographs the parish distributed of the area shows an enormous amount of dead fish floating atop the water.
The fish kill was reported to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries and the cause has not yet been determined, the parish said. The fish were found in an area that has been impacted by the oil from the BP oil spill, the parish said.
The dead fish include pogies, redfish, drum, crabs, shrimp and freshwater eel, the parish said.
Gold: Record High
September 15th, 2010$1275.70
Putin, Berlusconi ‘Joke’ About Ruling Until They Are 120 Years Old
September 13th, 2010Mmm hmm.
Via: AFP:
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi cracked jokes about hanging on to power to well past 100, during a relaxed meeting in Russia, TV pictures showed Saturday.
Berlusconi, 73, was visiting Putin at his residence at Novo Ogarevo, near Moscow.
The NTV station reported that during a forum at Iaroslavl, north of the capital, Berlusconi had said Friday he was going to finance research into dramatically extending life expectancy.
“So we’re going to live until 120?” Putin asked him with a smile, as the two men relaxed in armchairs.
“It seems so, yes,” Berlusconi replied, according to the Russian-language translation offered by NTV.
“But that would be an average age, mind. I’m told that leaders will have an even longer life,” he added.
“So we will be prime ministers until we are 120 years old?” Putin, 57, whose country is near the bottom of the world’s life expectancy league, quipped.
Berlusconi said he thought not, because that involved a lot of work and they were getting tired.
Related:
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Vladimir Skulachev’s Fountain of Youth
‘There’s a joke among executives whose livelihoods depend on Foxconn: In 20 years, there will be only two companies. Everything will be made by Foxconn and sold by Wal-Mart.’
September 13th, 2010As I read this breathtaking account of Foxconn and its founder, Terry Gou, it kept reminding me of Hunter S. Thompson’s drug addled evening at the Circus-Circus casino in Las Vegas. Here’s an excerpt from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to help put you into the right frame of mind to read about Gou’s empire and the bizzaro world of electronic device manufacturing in China:
The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos…but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space. Right above the gambling tables the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers are doing a high-wire trapeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego…so you’re down on the main floor playing blackjack, and the stakes are getting high when suddenly you chance to look up, and there, right smack above your head is a half-naked fourteen-year-old girl being chased through the air by a snarling wolverine, which is suddenly locked in a death battle with two silver-painted Polacks who come swinging down from opposite balconies and meet in mid-air on the wolverine’s neck…both Polacks seize the animal as they fall straight down towards the crap tables—but they bounce off the net; they separate and spring back up towards the roof in three different directions, and just as they’re about to fall again they are grabbed out of the air by three Korean Kittens and trapezed off to one of the balconies.
This madness goes on and on, but nobody seems to notice. The gambling action runs twenty-four hours a day on the main floor, and the circus never ends. Meanwhile, on all the upstairs balconies, the customers are being hustled by every conceivable kind of bizarre shuck. All kinds of funhouse-type booths. Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull-dyke and win a cotton-candy goat. Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. “Say whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t worry about that. Remember you’ll be two hundred feet tall.”
Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half—asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world: “Woodstock Über Alles!”
We will close the drapes tonight. A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball. Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.
But nobody can handle that other trip—the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.
There. Now you’re ready for a look inside Foxconn, which, by the way, is a great place to work, by Chinese standards.
And don’t miss the gallery image of the nets placed outside company buildings to catch workers who try to leap to their deaths.
Via: Bloomberg:
On a crushingly hot mid-August day at Foxconn’s Longhua factory campus in Shenzhen—where a dutiful army of 300,000 employees eats, sleeps, and churns out iPhones, Sony (SNE) PlayStations, and Dell (DELL) computers—workers indulged in a rare moment of celebration. First, there was a parade, an Alice in Wonderland spectacle of floats, blaring vuvuzelas, and workers dressed up as Victorian ladies, geishas, cheerleaders, and Spider-Men. This was followed by a two-hour rally inside a vast sports stadium featuring acrobats, musical performances, fireworks, and life-affirming testimonials punctuated by chants of “treasure your life” and “care for each other to build a wonderful future.”
It was hardly a spontaneous outpouring. Rather, it was a joint production of employee unions and management at Hon Hai Precision Industry, the flagship of Foxconn Technology Group, as part of an effort to mend the collective psyche of a Chinese workforce that numbers more than 920,000 across more than 20 mainland factories. The need to do so became apparent after 11 Foxconn employees committed suicide earlier this year, most of them by leaping from company-owned high-rise dormitories.
Oil from BP Spill Pooled on Bottom; Oil Found as Far as 70 Miles from Site; Only Bacteria Seen Alive in Samples
September 13th, 2010Via: ABC News:
Oil from the BP spill has not been completely cleared, but miles of it is sitting at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a study currently under way.
Professor Samantha Joye of the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia, who is conducting a study on a research vessel just two miles from the spill zone, said the oil has not disappeared, but is on the sea floor in a layer of scum.
“We’re finding it everywhere that we’ve looked. The oil is not gone,” Joye said. “It’s in places where nobody has looked for it.”
All 13 of the core samples Joye and her UGA team have collected from the bottom of the gulf are showing oil from the spill, she said.
In an interview with ABC News from her vessel, Joye said the oil cannot be natural seepage into the gulf, because the cores they’ve tested are showing oil only at the top. With natural seepage, the oil would spread from the top to the bottom of the core, she said.
“It looks like you just took a strip of very sticky material and just passed it through the water column and all the stuff from the water column got stuck to it, and got transported to the bottom,” Joye said. “I know what a natural seep looks like — this is not natural seepage.”
In some areas the oily material that Joye describes is more than two inches thick. Her team found the material as far as 70 miles away from BP’s well.
“If we’re seeing two and half inches of oil 16 miles away, God knows what we’ll see close in — I really can’t even guess other than to say it’s going to be a whole lot more than two and a half inches,” Joye said.
This oil remaining underwater has large implications for the state of sea life at the bottom of the gulf.
Joye said she spent hours studying the core samples and was unable to find anything other than bacteria and microorganisms living within.
“There is nothing living in these cores other than bacteria,” she said. “I’ve yet to see a living shrimp, a living worm, nothing.”
Studies conducted by the University of Georgia and the University of South Florida caused controversy back in August when they found that almost 80 percent of the oil that leaked from BP’s well is still out in the waters of the Gulf.
Their report stood in stark contrast to that of the federal government, which on Aug. 4 declared that 74 percent of the oil was gone, having broken down or been cleaned up.
Dekalb County Sues Farmer for Growing Too Many Crops
September 13th, 2010Via: WSBTV:
DeKalb County is suing a local farmer for growing too many vegetables, but he said he will fight the charges in the ongoing battle neighbors call “Cabbagegate.”
Fig trees, broccoli and cabbages are among the many greens that line the soil on Steve Miller’s more than two acres in Clarkston, who said he has spent fifteen years growing crops to give away and sell at local farmers markets.
“It’s a way of life, like it’s something in my blood,” said Miller.
In January, Dekalb County code enforcement officers began ticketing him for growing too many crops for the zoning and having unpermitted employees on site.
Miller stopped growing vegetables this summer and the charges were put on hold as he got the property rezoned.
Two weeks after approval, however, his attorney said the county began prosecuting the old charges, saying he was technically in violation before the rezoning.
Research Credit: EB
Stimulus: Obama to Pitch $60B Saudi Arms Deal to Congress; Largest Arms Deal Ever
September 13th, 2010You want Hope and Change? We got Hope and Change.
Step right up.
Via: Wall Street Journal:
The Obama administration is set to notify Congress of plans to offer advanced aircraft to Saudi Arabia worth up to $60 billion, the largest U.S. arms deal ever, and is in talks with the kingdom about potential naval and missile-defense upgrades that could be worth tens of billions of dollars more.
The administration plans to tout the $60 billion package as a major job creator—supporting at least 75,000 jobs, according to company estimates—and sees the sale of advanced fighter jets and military helicopters to key Middle Eastern ally Riyadh as part of a broader policy aimed at shoring up Arab allies against Iran.
