Month: June 2008

Fears Of Anarchy From Fuel & Food Shortages

FT.com / World – Instability fear forces strategic threat rethink
During the past few weeks senior officials have quietly begun to shift their emphasis of the fuel and food crisis from viewing it as purely a humanitarian and social problem to a concern that governments could fall as hungry and fuel-deprived people take their anger to the streets.

Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Programme, has warned that riots in more than 30 countries were “stark reminders that food insecurity threatens not only the hungry but peace and stability itself”. She added that only seven meals separated civilisation from potential anarchy and that some of the world’s “gold-standard, new, fledgling democracies” were under the most pressure.

Turkey Tries To Modernise Islam’s Teachings

The New Face of Islam | Print Article | Newsweek.com
Mehmet Aydin, who first conceived the Hadith project four years ago, when he was Turkey’s minister of state for religious affairs, says it is obvious that in the seventh century, the time of the Prophet, life was very different. One Hadith, for instance, forbids women from traveling alone. In Saudi Arabia, this and other sayings are given as a reason women should not be allowed to drive. “This is clearly not a religious injunction but related to security in a specific time and place,” says Gormez. In fact, the Prophet says elsewhere that he misses those days, evidently in his recent memory, when women could travel alone from Yemen to Mecca. In its first three centuries “Islam was interacting with Greek, Iranian and Indian cultures and at every encounter [scholars] reinterpreted Islam according to new conditions,” says Gormez. “They were not afraid to rethink Islam then.” Continue reading “Turkey Tries To Modernise Islam’s Teachings”

$$$ Not Worth The Paper They Are Printed On

Business Photo Slideshows – Portfolio.com
As Americans worry about the rate of inflation exceeding 4 percent, we should consider Zimbabwe, where the inflation rate broke the shocking 100,000 percent mark and the country released a 10 million-dollar note (now valued below $4 on the black market). But Zimbabwe’s currency is hardly the only one inflated beyond reason.

Click on the link to the Portfolio.com site to see a slide show of other worthless currencies.

Bad Boys Do Get The Girls

Bad guys really do get the most girls – sex – 18 June 2008 – New Scientist
Bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the “dark triad” persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs.

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, these traits would be highly detrimental for life in traditional human societies. People with these personalities risk being shunned by others and shut out of relationships, leaving them without a mate, hungry and vulnerable to predators.

But being just slightly evil could have an upside: a prolific sex life, says Peter Jonason at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

Continue reading “Bad Boys Do Get The Girls”

Blaming speculators is fun, easy and wrong

Blaming speculators is fun, easy and wrong: James Saft | Special Coverage | Reuters
There has been an explosion in marginal demand from Asia and emerging markets. And in many markets, notably oil, large producing nations may not see it in their best interests to maximize production, especially given the low rates of return now on offer for the money their oil will fetch. Companies too are being slow to ramp up production, preferring what they see as a safer strategy of buying back shares and paying out dividends.

U.S. monetary policy, moreover, is calibrated for an exhausted consumer and a fragile banking system at home, rather than the ongoing booms in Shanghai and elsewhere. U.S. interest rates are negative in real terms, which stimulates demand around the world, not just in hard-hit Florida and Nevada. Continue reading “Blaming speculators is fun, easy and wrong”

This Credit Crunch Reverberates

Paradise lost | Economist.com
For nine months now, banks have been in a panic: hoarding cash, nervous of weaknesses in their own balance-sheets and even more nervous of their counterparties. More damaging still, money-market funds have steered clear of banks as well. The drying-up of liquidity not only created havoc in the backrooms of the financial system. It also wrecked the front door, thanks to the dramatic collapse of Bear Stearns, an 85-year-old Wall Street investment bank that was bought for a song by JPMorgan Chase in March. The Federal Reserve offered emergency funding to the investment banks for the first time since the 1930s, and there were bank bail-outs in Britain and Germany too.

The economic effects are set to be just as striking. According to a study of previous crises by Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Ken Rogoff of Harvard, banking blow-outs lop an average of two percentage points off output growth per person. The worst crises reduce growth by five percentage points from their peak, and it takes more than three years for growth to regain pre-crisis levels.

Mending Ozone Hole May Worsen Climate Change

Environmental Catch-22?: Mending Ozone Hole May Worsen Climate Change: Scientific American
For decades, these winds have been speeding up near Antarctica; repairing the ozone would weaken the winds, he says, and shift them back toward the equator, affecting weather in the entire Southern Hemisphere, including Antarctica as well as Australia, parts of Africa and South America.

This also means Earth’s southernmost continent might experience even more warming in future as the winds continue to shift and allow relatively warmer air to cover it, potentially speeding the melting of ice shelves. In addition, if there were no hole, the replenished ozone would trap even more heat as greenhouse gas concentrations also rise, according to Polvani.

Atmospheric scientist Judith Perlwitz of the University of Colorado at Boulder and her colleagues reached a similar conclusion, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. No one has factored in the role that the ocean—critical to the regulation of Earth’s temperature—would play if the ozone hole is closed.