Yahoo is evil, Voting is good, Pipelineistan, Food First

Yahoo is evil

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has a suggestion for Yahoo. Divest yourself of Alibaba, the largest shark finning company in the world. Yahoo owns 40% of this destructive and merciless corporation.
That in addition to Yahoo's slavish kow-towing to the Chinese government makes this company one of the most unethical corporations in the world.
"I hope they go under," said Captain Paul Watson. "Yahoo is contributing to the extinction of world shark populations – they are arrogantly wiping the seas clean of sharks. I look at the graph of their losses and I smile – it serves them right."
myspace

After years with yahoo email, I am faced with the onerous job of migrating to google, because yahoo have sold out to spammers.
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ukiyoe-gallery
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Voting is a good
I may vote, for the first time in my life. Getting so carried away by election fever.
Labour candidate Grant Robertson has a bloke partner, or a blokes name anyway, Nationals candidate is Franks, an ultra-right guy who wants discrimination against gays allowed. Me, I'm not that big on gay rights, Sure would hate to see my hipag sister, or my gay cousins discriminated against, but. So I guess I'll have to drag my sorry progressive arse along to help newbie Robertson along. I would prefer to vote for Sue K, the Green, a star in the NZ firmament since the 70s. But mmp does let me tick her party.
Ethics aside, Heather Roy ACT would be the most highly nailable candidate.

Voting as an ethical action. One vote never matters, but ethics is about the sort of person you want to be. Thats the athiest credo in a phrase. A lot of peop;le want to be rich, but nobody wants to be greedy and grasping.

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Przewalski horses at Chernobyl - these images come and go on the internets
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Pipelineistan cont...
The Azeri government boasts that between now and 2013, when its Absheron peninsula reaches its peak oil production period, it will earn $100bn..
And it is for this reason that Azerbaijan has become a close friend of the West. [??? what?? with $100bn who needs da west? get super rich, and youre automatically a close friend of Batman??]
....The steady, but heavy-handed rule of Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, provides a degree of stability in this region that the US is keen to sustain. [USA sure likes those "heavy hands"]
Aliyev has so far provided a reliable supply of oil through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline to the West, ...during the Russia-Georgia war, when the BTC pipeline was out of operation, Azerbaijan diverted some of its oil supplies to Russia and Iran ... since the end of the conflict and the resumption of supply through the BTC pipeline, Baku has actually continued to supply oil south to Iran and north to Russia.
aljazeera

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Israel free of Russia?
jcpa
* Israel today is at the height of a revolution whose main focus is the integration of natural gas into the electricity and industrial sectors. The desalination plant in Ashkelon, which is one of the largest in the world, is using natural gas,....
.. the Med Stream, which is planned to contain three pipelines. One is for crude oil, meaning that what arrives through the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline or the Samsun-Ceyhan pipeline will continue on to Israel. The second pipeline will be for natural gas. .
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the natural gas pipeline would be the continuation of: 1. the BTE natural gas pipeline (Baku – Tbilisi –Erzerum) which conveys Azerian gas from the immense reservoirs of the Caspian Sea (the Shah – Deniz gas field); another option being considered is that in the future it would convey Kazakh and / or Turkmen gas; and / or 2. The Blue Stream pipeline which delivers Russian gas via the Black Sea.
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OK it seems that The term "Caspian Pipe" may mean just that, a pipe under the Caspian sea, which would not cross Russia at all...?
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Astana, 24 April 2007 - Kazakhstan's government could join a proposed gas pipeline linking the energy-rich Caspian to Europe, bypassing Russia, if the project meets the country's economic interests, the premier said.

The $6-billion pipeline project is an extension of the South Caucasus pipeline, linking Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, and is expected to run from Turkey to Austria via Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. The project would transport Central Asian gas to Europe and is seen by the European Union (EU) as a way of diversifying energy supplies away from Russia..
The 2,113-mile pipeline across the Caspian is scheduled to be built beginning from 2008 and go on stream in 2011. ... annual capacity of 30 billion cubic meters is seen as a rival to Russian Gazprom's Blue Stream-2, which will use Turkey as a transit point for exports to the EU and have a capacity of 8 billion cubic meters and a commissioning date of 2012.
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bigcampaign.org
Israel supplies 90 percent of its oil need from the Black Sea and carries crude to Israeli ports by ships.
Does this mean that Israel will no longer be dependant on Russia for energy?
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10 Oct 2008
Baku. Elmin Ibrahimov – APA-ECONOMICS. Crude oil from Kazakhstan’s Tengiz oilfield will be pumped into Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline (BTC) from the second half of October, reaching the Turkish port of Ceyhan for leading in mid-November, BP said on its website.
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Princely Caspian pipedreams to free Israel and EU from Russian Bear hands on the valve...

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- this route through Russia may be obsolete - the new "Caspian Pipe" may be under the Caspian Sea.
The Caspian pipeline passes through Russia.
Due to low capacity , they started out using trains...7,000 oil cars and 3,000 liquefied-natural-gas cars, sending out a half-dozen trains a day toward four Russian ports on the Black Sea. It remains the world's largest rail-based oil-transport system....
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I dont know where the Caspian pipeline is at today:
The Caspian pipeline agreement provides for modernizing the old Central Asia-Center pipeline, running from Begdash in Turkmenistan to Beineu in Kazakhstan, with an annual projected capacity of 10 billion cubic meters of gas in 2009-2010.

During the second stage in 2010-2017, the partners will prolong the pipeline to Aleksandrov Gai on the Russian-Kazakh border, with a capacity of 20 billion cubic meters, which will increase the total capacity of the pipeline to 30 billion.
Russian Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko said that the Caspian pipeline would be built by 2010, with each side making investments independently of others.
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(www.defsec.info) - During the lat.est visit of Aleksey Miller, head of Gazprom in Turkmenistan they agreed to boost capacity of the [planned ] Caspian Pipeline from 20 to 30bn cu m/y.
the planned Caspian Pipeline (slated to go on stream in 2010) from 20 to 30bn cu m per year.
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"The basic provision is that each partner shall build the part of the pipeline assigned to it. Turkmenistan will build 300 km (186 miles) of the pipeline and Kazakhstan, 1,500 km (932 miles). Russia's part will be the shortest, only a few dozen kilometers, but it should include a junction," Khristenko said.
[I dont understand how Russia has "only a few dozen km" - they must be talking about a different pipe from that in the map below
- does that "few km" allow the Bear to clench the pipe?]
.Although the new pipeline has been planned to have a capacity of 30 billion cubic meters a year, it will transport only 20 billion . Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan have pledged to provide up to 10 billion cubic meters of gas each.
rian
caucaz
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The whole PipeLineIstan thing obviously needs elucidation ... obscure hundresd of billions make me nervous

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Bill Hamilton
lavoisier
Bill Hamilton was not a New Zealander despite RNZ and BBC claims. His father was, according to wikip, but Bill was born in Egypt and never lived in NZ, so only very tenuously a kiwi. Check out the chapter on Egypt, parasites and incest on Google books

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Food First

Food prices are set largely by commodities futures. There are several types of players on commodities markets, from the traditional “hedgers,” farmers and food companies that use futures to hedge against the uncertainties inherent in agriculture, to speculators, who bet on the short term up and down swings of the markets, and index investors, who seek long-term investments by hoarding futures contracts for extended periods and betting on the continued rise of commodity prices.

In the past ten years of deregulation, futures markets have actually created market volatility. Unregulated trading in the U.S. was authorized by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which removed position limits and disclosure requirements, essentially opening the door to unlimited speculation. Since the passage of the act, the total holdings of commodity index investors on regulated U.S. exchanges have increased 25 times, from $13 billion in 2003 to $317 billion as of July 2008; in the same time frame, commodity prices have tripled.(6) As of April 2008, index investors owned approximately 35% of all regulated corn futures contracts in the U.S., 42% of all soybean contracts, and 64% of all wheat contracts, compared to minimal holdings in 2001.(7)

I am abandoning technorati tags, they often ignore me, and google blog search beats the band, why should I need propriatary 'tags' in an age of intellligent search engines?

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