Tag: failedstate

Economic Nationalism

Such naked protectionism may violate international trade rules. But another perverse idea floating around Capitol Hill is to limit stimulus-related purchases to countries that have signed the World Trade Organisation’s agreement on government procurement. A treaty set up to encourage non-discrimination in government purchases would thus be twisted to bar the American government from buying goods from countries such as China and India.

the morons have learned nothing from last time.

Library of Lost Dreams


This is a building where our deeply-troubled public school system once stored its supplies, and then one day apparently walked away from it all, allowing everything to go to waste. The interior has been ravaged by fires and the supplies that haven’t burned have been subjected to 20 years of Michigan weather. To walk around this building transcends the sort of typical ruin-fetishism and “sadness” some get from a beautiful abandoned building. This city’s school district is so impoverished that students are not allowed to take their textbooks home to do homework, and many of its administrators are so corrupt that every few months the newspapers have a field day with their scandals, sweetheart-deals, and expensive trips made at the expense of a population of children who can no longer rely on a public education to help lift them from the cycle of violence and poverty that has made Detroit the most dangerous city in America. To walk through this ruin, more than any other, I think, is to obliquely experience the real tragedy of this city; not some sentimental tragedy of brick and plaster, but one of people.
Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition. Mushrooms thrive in the damp ashes of workbooks. Ailanthus altissima, the “ghetto palm” grows in a soil made by 1000s of books that have burned, and in the pulp of rotted English Textbooks. Everything of any real value has been looted. All that’s left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential.

that picture captures the state of american high school education perfectly

Against Ethanol

Gasoline alternatives will boost CO2 levels and aggravate global warming.

Of course. fucking corn mafia

The prices mainly reflect changes in demand—not problems of supply, such as harvest failure. The changes include the gentle upward pressure from people in China and India eating more grain and meat as they grow rich and the sudden, voracious appetites of western biofuels programmes, which convert cereals into fuel. This year the share of the maize (corn) crop going into ethanol in America has risen and the European Union is implementing its own biofuels targets. To make matters worse, more febrile behavior seems to be influencing markets: export quotas by large grain producers, rumours of panic-buying by grain importers, money from hedge funds looking for new markets.

I can’t believe Obama is believing the ethanol nonsense.

“fuel-efficient cars and alternative fuels like E85, a fuel formulated with 85% ethanol, represent the future of the auto industry. It is a future American car companies can attain if we start making some tough choices now.”

The average Iowa farm has the potential to feed 3500 people per km2. But planted with nothing but corn — and with almost all of that corn going to ethanol production and the feeding of animals — the same land can only feed 744 people per km2.

On all the ethanol and similar nonsense.

The biomass industry—selling ground-up tree pellets to European power plants—is an economic boon to the South, but experts worry its growth is terrible for the planet. Will the Biden administration decide it’s climate-friendly?

2008-07-03:

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75%

Subsidies kill.
2022-03-06:

But whatever the (slim-to-none) merits of that argument in 2007, its merits are 0 in 2022, when the United States has become the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. And though ethanol may have some small environmental advantages over gasoline, those arguable benefits are nullified by ethanol’s terrible toll on world food output.

It may take some time and government assistance to rotate US farmland back from corn-for-fuel to food crops. But unfortunately, the war in Ukraine may last for a long time. If food-importing nations in Asia and the Middle East could be assured that more American wheat, barley, and sunflower oil would be heading their way in 2023, and that more corn would be available for animal feed rather than burned up as automobile fuel, wiser US farm policy could even help consolidate global support for Ukraine.

Ending the ethanol mandates and subsidies will boost world food supply. More food supply will reduce price pressures. Less pressure on food prices will remove a Russian weapon of intimidation.

MTA at fault

It is safe to assume that hearings will be held, studies will be conducted and recommendations will be made in the wake of the extensive transit disruptions in today’s morning commute. “3 years ago we had a rainstorm in September and the same thing happened, but nothing like today, so it’s obviously gotten worse than from just 3 years ago. And apparently, nothing was done to ameliorate or upgrade the system. The nerve of the MTA asking for a fare hike while this is going on.”

MTA = unionized assholes