Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Very Well Said..........................
"This matter of national defense would take on an entirely different aspect if people could be brought to understand that the only government they need to defend themselves against is their own government, and that the only way to defend themselves against it is by constant distrust and vigilance." -Albert Jay Nock
Nicely Said.....................
"The free market can't solve every problem; but government hasn't solved even one problem yet." -Harry Browne
A Tunnel Under Long Island Sound...Hmmmmmmmmmmm
A private developer has bid to build the world’s longest highway tunnel, across the Long Island Sound. The New York State Senate is currently reviewing Vincent Polimeni’s proposal to construct a privately owned, 16-mile tunnel from Oyster Bay, Long Island, to Rye, N.Y. Polimeni budgeted the project at around $10 billion, the cost of which he intends to recuperate by charging drivers $25 each way and selling advertising on the tunnels walls. The project, to our delight, has managed to piss off a variety of special interest groups. Residents near Rye and Oyster Bay are protesting, asserting that traffic congestion has already reached critical mass. The state government, too, is pacing nervously, wondering aloud if they ought to allow a privateer such, umn… power, and, if so, how they’ll get their hands on the lion’s share of profits.
The “infrastructure and construction” communities are, no doubt, salivating… a 16-mile underwater tunnel would take a bit of manpower, concrete and steel, to say the least. Although they’re probably not salivating nearly as much as they were before and during the Big Dig in Boston. Heh. Not nearly as much graft on a private project, we suspect.
In the ’70s, Robert Moses, the father of New York City bridge construction, was a breath away from convincing Nelson Rockefeller to build a bridge almost identical to Polimeni’s tunnel. Rockefeller bailed, but only in fear of public backlash ruining his re-election prospects. We’ll keep you updated as to how it works out this time around…
The “infrastructure and construction” communities are, no doubt, salivating… a 16-mile underwater tunnel would take a bit of manpower, concrete and steel, to say the least. Although they’re probably not salivating nearly as much as they were before and during the Big Dig in Boston. Heh. Not nearly as much graft on a private project, we suspect.
In the ’70s, Robert Moses, the father of New York City bridge construction, was a breath away from convincing Nelson Rockefeller to build a bridge almost identical to Polimeni’s tunnel. Rockefeller bailed, but only in fear of public backlash ruining his re-election prospects. We’ll keep you updated as to how it works out this time around…
Doug Casey's Take On South Africa
Last week’s electricity pinch in South Africa may be much more than the usual African “here today, gone tomorrow” crisis:
“The bad news out of South Africa,” reads Casey's Daily Resource PLUS, “which affected platinum mostly, will have an ongoing and profound impact on gold, as well. The country's major miners, already struggling with stagnating production, have been hit with severe power outages that have forced mine closures.
“Leading miners, including Gold Fields and AngloGold Ashanti, halted operations on Friday after the companies agreed to curtail use of electricity as the state-run utility, Eskom, struggles to generate enough power to meet the country's basic needs. There just isn't enough left over to protect workers who need all the juice they can get when toiling as deep as 2 miles down.
At least when the power goes out in our office... nobody gets killed. Holy crap.
“The present emergency is estimated by the companies to last as long as two-four weeks. All told, about 29,000 ounces of gold and 19,000 ounces of platinum production will be lost every day of the shutdown. And looking further out, Eskom flat out stated that problems will persist until ‘at least 2013.’
“The gold market hasn't even begun to contemplate what this means,” Casey concludes. “This week could be a doozy.” Look for gold to continue its march toward $1,000.
“The bad news out of South Africa,” reads Casey's Daily Resource PLUS, “which affected platinum mostly, will have an ongoing and profound impact on gold, as well. The country's major miners, already struggling with stagnating production, have been hit with severe power outages that have forced mine closures.
“Leading miners, including Gold Fields and AngloGold Ashanti, halted operations on Friday after the companies agreed to curtail use of electricity as the state-run utility, Eskom, struggles to generate enough power to meet the country's basic needs. There just isn't enough left over to protect workers who need all the juice they can get when toiling as deep as 2 miles down.
At least when the power goes out in our office... nobody gets killed. Holy crap.
“The present emergency is estimated by the companies to last as long as two-four weeks. All told, about 29,000 ounces of gold and 19,000 ounces of platinum production will be lost every day of the shutdown. And looking further out, Eskom flat out stated that problems will persist until ‘at least 2013.’
“The gold market hasn't even begun to contemplate what this means,” Casey concludes. “This week could be a doozy.” Look for gold to continue its march toward $1,000.
20% Inflation? The Numbers Don't Lie!
The Fed has turned its back on inflation, Here are some items that you won't see in the CPI data...
These are the things we talk about all the time in that an individual can feel the inflation eating away at his wallet. These are just some simple food items... I'm not even talking about things like tuition... insurance... medical... gas… movie tickets... and so on.”
These are the things we talk about all the time in that an individual can feel the inflation eating away at his wallet. These are just some simple food items... I'm not even talking about things like tuition... insurance... medical... gas… movie tickets... and so on.”
House Sales Worst In History
In 2007, new home sales suffered their worst yearly decline in history, reported the Commerce Department today. December sales registered an annual rate of 604,000 in the last month of 2007, down from 634,000 in November, thus bringing the total new home sales number for 2007 to 774,000. That’s a 26% drop from 2006’s 1.05 million new homes sold… the biggest annual drop since the government began tracking new home sales in 1963. The median price of such homes also fell by a massive margin… down over 10% from 2006, from $244,700 to $219,200. So let’s take a second to absorb all of 2007’s housing data… The NAR reported the first ever annual decline in the average existing home prices, along with the largest fall in the pace of existing home sales in 27 years. Then the Census Bureau told us housing starts posted their biggest decline in 27 years. Now this, from the Commerce Dept: the worst year for new home sales on record.
Yikes…
Yikes…
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Topsoil In Trouble Too
The lowdown on topsoil: It's disappearing
Disappearing dirt rivals global warming as an environmental threat
Tuesday, January 22, 2008Last updated 7:57 a.m. PT
By TOM PAULSONP-I REPORTER
The planet is getting skinned.
While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.
Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil -- the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.
"We're losing more and more of it every day," said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. "The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture."
"It's just crazy," fumed John Aeschliman, a fifth-generation farmer who grows wheat and other grains on the Palouse near the tiny town of Almota, just west of Pullman.
"We're tearing up the soil and watching tons of it wash away every year," Aeschliman said. He's one of a growing number of farmers trying to persuade others to adopt "no-till" methods, which involve not tilling the land between plantings, leaving crop stubble to reduce erosion and planting new seeds between the stubble rows.
Montgomery has written a popular book, "Dirt," to call public attention to what he believes is a neglected environmental catastrophe. A geomorphologist who studies how landscapes form, Montgomery describes modern agricultural practices as "soil mining" to emphasize that we are rapidly outstripping the Earth's natural rate of restoring topsoil.
"Globally, it's clear we are eroding soils at a rate much faster than they can form," said John Reganold, a soils scientist at Washington State University. "It's hard to get people to pay much attention to this because, frankly, most of us take soil for granted."
The National Academy of Sciences has determined that cropland in the U.S. is being eroded at least 10 times faster than the time it takes for lost soil to be replaced.
The United Nations has warned of worldwide soil degradation -- especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where soil loss has contributed to the rapidly increasing number of malnourished people.
Healthy topsoil is a biological matrix, a housing complex for an incredibly diverse community of organisms -- billions of beneficial microbes per handful, nitrogen-fixing fungi, nutrients and earthworms whose digestive tracts transform the fine grains of sterile rock and plant detritus into the fertile excrement that gave rise to the word itself ("drit," in Old Norse).
As such, true living topsoil cannot be made overnight, Montgomery emphasized. Topsoil grows back at a rate of an inch or two over hundreds of years. Very slowly.
"Globally, it's pretty clear we're running out of dirt," Montgomery said.
Ron Myhrum, state soil scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's office in Spokane, agreed that global soil loss is a huge problem. But Myhrum said erosion rates in the Northwest region have improved recently because of better conservation farming practices, including federal payments to farmers to leave some natural ground cover in highly erodible areas.
"We don't have the kind of dust storms here we used to have," Myhrum said. "What's more alarming to me than erosion is conversion of farmland to urban use."
That is indeed another way to lose soil -- paving it over. Judy Herring, manager of King County's farmland preservation program, said the county has lost 60 percent of its farmland since the 1960s. In 1979, Herring said, voters approved a bond program that buys back farmland to protect it from development (and has done this for 13,200 acres so far).
But while some land is lost to development, pollution or changing weather patterns, Montgomery, Reganold and others say global soil loss is a crisis mostly rooted in agriculture.
"Erosion rates have improved here, but that doesn't mean they're good," Reganold said. Topsoil clearly is still being stripped off faster than it can be regenerated, he said.
Aeschliman, the Palouse farmer, a stocky and energetic man who doesn't seem to notice that he's in his 60s, stood on a dirt road looking at the difference between his land and that of a neighbor. Because most neighbors are relatives, he did not provide any names here.
"Just look at that!" he bellowed, pointing to a series of water-carved cracks and gouges running down a recently tilled field of wheat. Every year, he said, these fields are tilled and the rains come, washing the soil down into the road so deep the county routinely has to dig it out. The rest of the soil runs off to the Snake River and, eventually, to the Pacific.
"Here, look at this stuff," Aeschliman said as he held up a handful of the fine brown silt that had eroded off his neighbor's (cousin's) hillside. "Now, look over here."
He walked across the road to his no-till wheat field. Unlike the rolling hills of loose dirt on the tilled field, Aeschliman's field looks more like a shag rug, with its rows of dead wheat stubble. He reached down into the dirt and pulled out a coarsely textured, much darker clump of dirt, roots and debris.
"This soil is full of worms, bacteria and all sorts of life," Aeschliman said. "And it stays put. That stuff over there (waving his thick hand back behind him) is just powder, brown dust. It's dead. There's no worms, no life in it."
Thirty years ago, Aeschliman was one of the first in the Palouse to grow his grains using no-till farming methods. He's an ardent no-till proselytizer today, but he didn't abandon tilling the fields based on some organic epiphany or desire to save the world.
"I just got tired of all the mud," Aeschliman said. The family home, built in the 1880s, sits at the base of a long drainage off the rolling wheat fields. Every spring, with the tilling and the rain, his home would be a foot deep in muddy runoff.
No-till farming could do a lot to reduce topsoil erosion, Reganold said, but it's not without its downsides. Switching to no-till farming requires heavy upfront investment and learning new techniques, he said, and also tends to depend more on herbicides because the weeds are no longer controllable by plowing them into the soil.
Organic farming methods also can reduce soil loss, Reganold said. He cited his own research, which has shown a marked increase in soil health, water retention and regrowth when organic methods are used rather than the traditional methods.
A regional association of farmers and other proponents of no-till agriculture, also known as direct-seed farming, is holding its annual meeting in Kennewick next week. Aeschliman is one of the founders of the organization, the Pacific Northwest Direct Seed Association, and is happy to see that no-till farming is growing in popularity.
"It's both good for the soil and good for your pocketbook," he said.
Disappearing dirt rivals global warming as an environmental threat
Tuesday, January 22, 2008Last updated 7:57 a.m. PT
By TOM PAULSONP-I REPORTER
The planet is getting skinned.
While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.
Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil -- the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.
"We're losing more and more of it every day," said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. "The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture."
"It's just crazy," fumed John Aeschliman, a fifth-generation farmer who grows wheat and other grains on the Palouse near the tiny town of Almota, just west of Pullman.
"We're tearing up the soil and watching tons of it wash away every year," Aeschliman said. He's one of a growing number of farmers trying to persuade others to adopt "no-till" methods, which involve not tilling the land between plantings, leaving crop stubble to reduce erosion and planting new seeds between the stubble rows.
Montgomery has written a popular book, "Dirt," to call public attention to what he believes is a neglected environmental catastrophe. A geomorphologist who studies how landscapes form, Montgomery describes modern agricultural practices as "soil mining" to emphasize that we are rapidly outstripping the Earth's natural rate of restoring topsoil.
"Globally, it's clear we are eroding soils at a rate much faster than they can form," said John Reganold, a soils scientist at Washington State University. "It's hard to get people to pay much attention to this because, frankly, most of us take soil for granted."
The National Academy of Sciences has determined that cropland in the U.S. is being eroded at least 10 times faster than the time it takes for lost soil to be replaced.
The United Nations has warned of worldwide soil degradation -- especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where soil loss has contributed to the rapidly increasing number of malnourished people.
Healthy topsoil is a biological matrix, a housing complex for an incredibly diverse community of organisms -- billions of beneficial microbes per handful, nitrogen-fixing fungi, nutrients and earthworms whose digestive tracts transform the fine grains of sterile rock and plant detritus into the fertile excrement that gave rise to the word itself ("drit," in Old Norse).
As such, true living topsoil cannot be made overnight, Montgomery emphasized. Topsoil grows back at a rate of an inch or two over hundreds of years. Very slowly.
"Globally, it's pretty clear we're running out of dirt," Montgomery said.
Ron Myhrum, state soil scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's office in Spokane, agreed that global soil loss is a huge problem. But Myhrum said erosion rates in the Northwest region have improved recently because of better conservation farming practices, including federal payments to farmers to leave some natural ground cover in highly erodible areas.
"We don't have the kind of dust storms here we used to have," Myhrum said. "What's more alarming to me than erosion is conversion of farmland to urban use."
That is indeed another way to lose soil -- paving it over. Judy Herring, manager of King County's farmland preservation program, said the county has lost 60 percent of its farmland since the 1960s. In 1979, Herring said, voters approved a bond program that buys back farmland to protect it from development (and has done this for 13,200 acres so far).
But while some land is lost to development, pollution or changing weather patterns, Montgomery, Reganold and others say global soil loss is a crisis mostly rooted in agriculture.
"Erosion rates have improved here, but that doesn't mean they're good," Reganold said. Topsoil clearly is still being stripped off faster than it can be regenerated, he said.
Aeschliman, the Palouse farmer, a stocky and energetic man who doesn't seem to notice that he's in his 60s, stood on a dirt road looking at the difference between his land and that of a neighbor. Because most neighbors are relatives, he did not provide any names here.
"Just look at that!" he bellowed, pointing to a series of water-carved cracks and gouges running down a recently tilled field of wheat. Every year, he said, these fields are tilled and the rains come, washing the soil down into the road so deep the county routinely has to dig it out. The rest of the soil runs off to the Snake River and, eventually, to the Pacific.
"Here, look at this stuff," Aeschliman said as he held up a handful of the fine brown silt that had eroded off his neighbor's (cousin's) hillside. "Now, look over here."
He walked across the road to his no-till wheat field. Unlike the rolling hills of loose dirt on the tilled field, Aeschliman's field looks more like a shag rug, with its rows of dead wheat stubble. He reached down into the dirt and pulled out a coarsely textured, much darker clump of dirt, roots and debris.
"This soil is full of worms, bacteria and all sorts of life," Aeschliman said. "And it stays put. That stuff over there (waving his thick hand back behind him) is just powder, brown dust. It's dead. There's no worms, no life in it."
Thirty years ago, Aeschliman was one of the first in the Palouse to grow his grains using no-till farming methods. He's an ardent no-till proselytizer today, but he didn't abandon tilling the fields based on some organic epiphany or desire to save the world.
"I just got tired of all the mud," Aeschliman said. The family home, built in the 1880s, sits at the base of a long drainage off the rolling wheat fields. Every spring, with the tilling and the rain, his home would be a foot deep in muddy runoff.
No-till farming could do a lot to reduce topsoil erosion, Reganold said, but it's not without its downsides. Switching to no-till farming requires heavy upfront investment and learning new techniques, he said, and also tends to depend more on herbicides because the weeds are no longer controllable by plowing them into the soil.
Organic farming methods also can reduce soil loss, Reganold said. He cited his own research, which has shown a marked increase in soil health, water retention and regrowth when organic methods are used rather than the traditional methods.
A regional association of farmers and other proponents of no-till agriculture, also known as direct-seed farming, is holding its annual meeting in Kennewick next week. Aeschliman is one of the founders of the organization, the Pacific Northwest Direct Seed Association, and is happy to see that no-till farming is growing in popularity.
"It's both good for the soil and good for your pocketbook," he said.
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