Jumblatt, Lester R Brown, Market

Jumblatt has,it seems, ended his flirtation with Bushism 'nation building' and swung Druze behind Hezb backed pm Makati.     Michel Aoun's Christians are also inline. Hezb ascendant. Netanyahoo will feel the need to invade.    Palestinian papers may have finished the PA. Iran rules OK.
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News:
Aoun's bloc nominated Mikati for premiership
iloubnan
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Walid Jumblatt, the influential Lebanese leader of the Druse sect who heads an 11-member bloc in Parliament, has announced his support of the Hizbullah-backed prime minister candidate Nijab Mikati, Reuters reported Monday.
jpost
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Telecoms tycoon Najib Mikati, who is backed by Shi'ite group Hezbollah and its allies, was set to lead Lebanon's new government after he won backing from Druze leader Walid Jumblatt.
...55-year-old Mikati....a wealthy Sunni businessman with close ties to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad...
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Mikati began building his Investcom business in the midst of Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war. He sold his telecoms interests to South Africa's MTN Group for $5.5 billion in 2006.

Fortunes once were steel, then computers, now phones. he next fortunes where? biotech? that got burned when Clinton/Blair gave Venter his marching orders over patenting the human Genome in 2000. If BillGates actually gets C4 metabolism into wheat he may get a second fortune. Prediction: It aint that easy. We may see the Olduvai-collapse before we get a grip on plant metabolism.


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Turn off that PC as the SecurityPolizi burst in the door...
but if they have canned air...

Most people know that the contents of RAM are lost when a machine powers down. ... various forms of RAM take anywhere from 2.5 to 35 seconds to reach a null state (newer RAM got there faster) ... temperature-dependent; dropping the RAM to -50°C cut the rate at which memory was lost to 0.1 percent per minute. If ... by turning a canned air dispenser upside-down and spraying it on the RAM chip. Dropping the chip in liquid nitrogen kept the error rate at a similar level for up to an hour.
... turned these on most of the common encryption methods, including TrueCrypt and dm-crypt, as well as Mac OS-X's FileVault and Vista's BitLocker. Using an external USB drive, the authors were able to identify and extract the key and mount a BitLocker-encrypted volume in about 25 minutes.
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Lester R Brown Worldwatch Sciam May 2009
Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?

The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries...
[as opposed to Agrimonde optimism ... below ]
People in low-income countries where grain supplies 60% of calories, such as India, directly ca 500g/day.. In affluent countries.. nearly four times that much,.. 90% .. indirectly as meat, milk and eggs from grain-fed animals.
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A fourth of this year’s U.S. grain harvest—enough to feed 125 million Americans or half a billion Indians... will go to fuel cars.
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As water tables have fallen and irrigation wells have gone dry, China’s wheat crop, the world’s largest, has declined by 8% since it peaked at 123 million tons in 1997. In that same period China’s rice production dropped 4%. The world’s most populous nation may soon be importing massive quantities of grain.
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India: Electricity blackouts are reaching epidemic proportions in states where half of the electricity is used to pump water from depths of up to a kilometer
[Water shortage: once you get the numbers, you start to worry]
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earth
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from Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by Lester R. Brown
© 2008 Earth Policy Institut written October 2007:
Between 1950 and 1990, world grain
yield per hectare climbed by 2.1% a year .. From 1990 to 2007, however,
it rose only 1.2% annually..................
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India has built the world’s largest dairy industry almost entirely on roughage—wheat straw, rice straw, corn stalks, and grass gathered from the roadside. Even so, the value of the milk produced each year now exceeds that of the rice harvest. [some urea supplements?]


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"Charles S. Peirce"
"Facts cannot be explained by a hypothesis more extraordinary than these facts themselves; and of various hypotheses the least extraordinary must be adopted."
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McDonalds unsuccessful seven-year effort to invest in Tunisia in the 1990s…. Their investment, however, was scuttled by a last minute intervention by First Family personalities who reportedly told McDonalds representatives that “they had chosen the wrong partner.” The implication was clear: either get the “right” partner or face the consequences: McDonalds chose to pull out completely at great cost.
aftenposten
The only other Maccas retreat instance I know of was the closure of the King St Newtown maccas around 1998.
- Newtown had resisted gentrification to an extraordinary degree, and the louche dreads lounging for hours rendered the atmosphere so un-family-clean&;bright that Maccas closed the place.

50% of the country’s economic elite was somehow related to President Ben Ali
google
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To Market To Market to buy a fine Pig...
I predict, sadly, that we are headed back to Feudalism (How far back down the progress tree do You think we'll fall? Steam trains? Olduvai flint knapping?]
I distrust familial power transmission. Even if its by my heroes (Fidel, Muammar K.)

Suggestion: a president with little power - Like Ireland
and a committee of 5 or so to make decisions (who was it that said that if a committee gets to 20, a splinter group of 5 will split off, to make the real decisions?]
Term limits (one of the good features of USA)
Voted on I guess.
Single party, - once a decent constitution has been forged, why have more than one? To prevent nepotism, to prevent undue influence by usurers and rentiers?
How's that working out for you now?

The constitution should feature Enterprise tempered by social control.
CP never built a decent shoe. Capital shackles people to absurd mortgages.
I see people buying $6000 fridges, they darent admit its simple gross acquisitive needless greed, they'll tell you "it adds to the value of the house" which they will sell, one day, when its value is ???
and the fridge will add how much to that?

the "Market" is great for buying fish.[ mega-Market disastrous for fish stocks,but] But Rentiers benefit from the value created by the polity of a city.
Logically the high rental ought to go to the City...
I need to pay some ridiculous rent to be near some absurd job...
But CP notoriously never built enough decent housing (is 100m² decent? 200m²?)
and breaking up collective farms in China and Vietnam zoomed grain production.
Secure documented leases, not subject to local officials grabbing them, seems to be the thing in PRC.
In India the extreme swing: Poor farmers live in dread of a failed harvest, whereupon the Bank will seize their 'title'.
Ecological sensibility must override Corporate secrecy.

Privatisation of social assets does 2 things: Boosts Executives salaries hugely, and covers the workings in a secret veil of "commercial confidentiality".

suggestion: all movements across boundaries to be public. Ie every factory input and output.
Energy accounting. Entropic accounting (aka 'pollution')

The great advantage of Capital over CP is possibility to fail. A CP shoe factory has no mechanism of halting, unless the minister who started it decides to close it. Under CP how does that work?

Evolution & development depends more on failure than on creation. CP and Capital both start enterprises in roughly the same way. A commissar or a bank executive agrees to finance an enterprise. The difference is that under Capital the enterprise may fail. Unless its too big to fail... 2008 anyone?

Usury, interest upon interest, dont trust it.
Fantastic energy consumption: 300kph trains, 100kph cars, 900kph jets Capital does fine making these, but speed is a drug.
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Ireland.. wind energy output of 1250MW powering over 800,000 homes ...
Just five years ago, our transmission operator would have said we could not technically reach 35% renewables penetration on our national grid. But it has.

- Can we please stop measuring energy in units of "homes"??? (this example = 1.6kW, parsimonious cf the common 2kW)
Also can we please stop measuring width in "human hair" is that 50 microm or 100 micron??
- It would a world of good if people learned to use proper units and powers of 10.
human hair: 17 to 181 µm (millionths of a meter).
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Madgascar as a case study: Sell your land offshore, start a revolution...

2009 a deal in Madagascar to provide South Korea with 1.3 million hectares has been linked to the coup which overthrew former president, Marc Ravalomanana.
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November 19, 2008
South Korea's Daewoo has signed a 99-year lease for half of Madagascar's arable land, reports the Financial Times. The firm expects to pay "nothing" for the lease.
mongabay
The development will likely stoke environmentalists' fears that agricultural expansion will come at the expense of Madagascar's biologically-rich ecosystems that are home to rare and unique species of lemurs, frogs, and reptiles. Daewoo has done little to allay these concerns.

"It is totally undeveloped land which has been left untouched," the Financial Times quoted Hong Jong-wan, a manager at Daewoo, as saying.
now theres a distinct contray ethos: Untouched Land is either
1)  terrific, leave it alone   
or:
2) terrible, in need of mega-industrial slash/clear/plough
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oil palms galore??
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2009 50% of children in Madagascar "suffer retarded growth due to a chronically inadequate diet," according to the World Food Programme.
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wikip:..2009, backed by Andry Rajoelina, former mayor of Antananarivo, became violent with more than 170 people were killed. ... Ravalomanana resigned on 17 March 2009...The military called the move by Ravalomanana a "ploy" and said that it would support Rajoelina as leader.Rajoelina had already declared himself the new leader a month earlier and assumed the role of acting President, appointing Monja Roindefo as Prime Minister...
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the EU doesnt like it:
Madagascar has largely been cut off, diplomatically and economically, since a March 2009 coup toppled the elected government of President Marc Ravalomanana. That coup was led by a young popular disc jockey, Andry Rajoelina, who has governed the country as head of the High Authority of the Transition, backed by the Madagascar military.

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RSA doesnt lkike it:
2009 The Southern African Development Community (SADC) on Wednesday condemned the formation of a new government by Madagascar's interim president Andry Rajoelina,\
- gotta check out these SADC guys... are they from that notorious Gangster/IMF state RSA???
no its a bunch: "the 15- nation bloc on Monday suspended the island..."
- seems that Capital is severely pissed off with Andry...
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23/3/09
Rajoelina's supporters staged seven weeks of near-daily protests that eventually toppled ex-president Marc Ravalomanana last week.
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ccording to Rajoelina's Prime Minister Monja Roindefo, the transfer of power was not a coup d'état but instead "the direct expression of democracy, when representative democracy does not express itself through the institutions". Rajoelina was officially sworn in on 21 March before a crowd of 40,000 supporters.
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slaves-of-madagascar

nickel-cobalt mine .. maybe the EU likes Nickel?
or maybe they just think it was a good, commercial, deal to give Daewoo half of that "untouched' land
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Jan. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Madagascar is in talks with China International Fund Ltd. to create a holding company that will invest in projects - oh oh, greedy fingers still  reaching for that "untouched" land ?
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21Nov2010
.. attempted coup on Madagascar has been defused without bloodshed,...
Camille Vital,(thats 'Prime Minister Brigadier General Albert Camille Vital' to you..) the prime minister, told reporters on Saturday that 16 army officers had surrendered, ending an impasse that began on Wednesday when the soldiers declared they were taking over from Andry Rajoelina.
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On 20 December 2009, Vital was named Prime Minister by the President Andry Rajoelina, succeeding Eugène Mangalaza.[1]
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24 November 2010 ..Leaders in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have again shown their allegiance to Robert Mugabe,

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16 Jan 16, 2011 -..
The administration (sic) in Somalia's separatist region of Somaliland has remained quiet as unidentified foreign soldiers helped arrest terror suspects (sic) in a major town, Radio Garowe reports.
..Friday night around 10pm local time when Somaliland police raided a house and arrested five ..
Local residents in Burao...told Garowe Online that an unidentified aircraft flew overhead Burao several times and landed at the town's small airstrip ahead of the police raid.

...witnesses described the soldiers and the military equipment as British or another Western country.
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On Sunday, local reports said that the suspects were transferred to a prison in Hargeisa, capital of the separatist region of Somaliland.
One of the five suspects hails from Somaliland region and was identified as Saleban Mohamed Hussein Naleye, while the remaining suspects "came from Mogadishu,"..
Burao, up near Djibuti, where USG is very touchy about its spy-plane base...
you'll end up head-down in a bucket in Gitmo if you show more than a passing interest...