On Killing Afghan Civilians and Nuking Iran: What Reddit says People are Reading
From Reddit.com on Saturday:
Afghan governor says US air strikes killed 22 civilians.
If only we could nuke Iran. Ron Paul says he has heard colleagues in Congress openly talk about using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran.
The World Bank estimates that biofuels have caused food prices to rise 75 percent, much more than earlier estimated. Translation: ethanol, which costs almost as much to produce as just buying petroleum would, is evil because it causes hunger among poor populations.
For an idea what this statistic means practically, watch this report on hunger in Haiti at Aljazeera International:
Gary Brecher explains guerrilla war to the pundits, about how they are in it for the long run, and Washington's periodic waves of optimism are doomed to crash on the shore of dug-in, determined men with bombs and AK-47s willing to deploy them for the rest of our lives.
The anthrax used in the terrorist mailings of 2001 almost certainly came from the bioweapons labs at Ft. Detrick. Yeah, and those attacks came after September 11, too, which means it isn't true that there have "been no attacks" since al-Qaeda on Bush's watch.
The US Federal Reserve is not counting the cost of food and fuel in its inflation estimates. Yeah, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't count the unemployed in the unemployment figures either. They just count people who have been in between jobs and are still looking for employment for less than a certain period. After that time, if they don't find a job, they aren't unemployed any more, even if they never ever find another job. They are in a third category, of "not in the labor force." The period after which you are dropped from the "unemployed" category has shrunk over time; the Reagan administration produced sunny statistics by redefining a lot of people as not in the work force. As did the Clinton administration. The BLS calls this phony number U3 and actually provides measures closer to reality as well, but the press usually only reports U3.
[Econoclast explains all this from a professional economist's point of view in the comments. I fear I continue to maintain that the numbers are used ideologically by administrations for political purposes and understate what a layman would mean by things like inflation and unemployment in part to make voters happy with the status quo. I've had colleagues who've worked for the government who have come back with horror stories about how they were ordered to tinker with the statistics, not by falsifying but by framing. But that is a philosophical issue. Thanks to Jim Devine for clarifying.]
Gas station with sense of humor.
Can a freight train really move a ton of freight 436 miles on a gallon of fuel?
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/05/2008 12:14:00 PM
Click to join Infoco
17 Comments:
Not only are the inflation and unemployment numbers 'gamed' but this bit of news ought to concern everyone:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ju2_TprBDgMK4y38J6ORzpO5Ym-wD91LUIM00
"The frightening thing is they say they are taking no options off the table, even nuclear first strike." The Congressman stated.
Paul believes from talking with his contacts in and around Congress that a strike on Iran has already been green lighted.
"That is my sense because the Democratic leadership in the House are proposing no resistance whatsoever, we saw this when a supplemental bill came up and the President asked for $107 billion for the war, the Democrat leadership gave them $162 billion.
It is still totally bewildering to me when I see men and women in the Congress that I know and like doing this just to get along. Most of them will say "I agree with you on all you say but the Iranians are bad people and they might attack us some day... I hear members of Congress saying 'if we could only nuke them'."
Alexander Cockburn burlesques his betters, comparing those who look for salvation from the Democrats to Blaise Pascal, who said that he'd be a fool not to make a finite bet with an infinite payoff. Blaise was talking about hope. Not hopeless Democrats.
It does seem that people are still hoping against hope that somehow change can be had without changing.
It cannot.
Barr/Gravel/McKinney/Nader. Nader has embraced the NI4d, and Mike has made a very nice video invoking our Declaration of Independence.
Don't wait for "buyers' remorse" to set in on January 20. Start working now for real change, not the media variety. A clean suit will be indistinguishable from the old in minutes as the slide down the slippery slope continues.
We don't have to wait 'til we wake up in the gutter.
Re the 'unsolved' lethal 2001 anthrax attacks, using the Ft Detrick USAMRIID Ames strain, against democratic senate leadership, broadcast TV networks, and the WH mail room.
What a convenient steppingstone that was, pushing the first "Patriot Act" past Leahy and Daschle's Senate majority, and bridging the post 9/11 panic into preparations for invading Iraq- to look for WMD and al Qaeda.
Whether the 'person of interest' FBI 'Amerithrax' investigation was a red herring or not, Steve Hatfill's contract activities merit serious investigation by the Senate. Hatfill worked with SAIC in war-gaming domestic posting of bioterror agents, years before 9/11. While under FBI investigation in 2002, he was reported to have actually designed, built and delivered a full scale working 'training aid' model of the 'curveball' trailer-lab to Ft. Bragg's Delta Force.
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/Bioter/antigermtraining.html
Translation: ethanol, which costs almost as much to produce as just buying petroleum would, is evil because it causes hunger among poor populations.
According to a colleague of Dr Cole, Dr Bruce Dale in East Lansing, the food vs. fuel argument has been co-opted by the petroleum, nuclear energy and livestock industries. In reality, 90% of the total U.S. corn crop is used for animal feed and has been for years.
The fuel of today and the future is cellulosic ethanol (CE) of course, which is produced from non-edible biomass such as agriculture and forestry waste (corn stalks, corn cobs, wheat straw, bark and wood chips, etc.) and native, non-edible species that will grow on marginal and poor soil in areas of the United States that have never been agriculturally productive.
However, the appetite Americans have for animal flesh and animal products consumes far more of the domestic corn crop than ethanol does.
Just to keep things in perspective:
Total U.S. Corn Production:
~10% used for direct human consumption (sweet corn)
~90% used for livestock feed (field corn)
* Corn kernel ethanol is made from field corn, i.e. animal feed.
"We grow animal feed, not human food in the United States," [Dr Bruce] Dale said. "We could feed the country's population with 25 million acres of crop land, and we currently have 500 million acres.
Most of our agricultural land is being used to grow animal feed."
"Ethanol production has been linked to a rise in the price of everything from tortillas to gummi bears. Unfortunately, this argument is very nearly ridiculous. The fact is that very little U.S. corn (about 10 percent) is fed directly to people; most of it is fed to animals." -- Dr Bruce Dale, Professor of Chemical Engineering, Michigan State University
==> Diets are changing radically in nations such as China, India, Brazil and Russia, where economic growth has boosted meat consumption. In China, it is up by 150 per cent since 1980. In India, it has risen by 40 per cent in the past 15 years. The demand for meat from across all developing countries has doubled since 1980.
==> Because cattle and chickens are fed on corn -- it takes 8kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef -- the price has risen
If we cut back slightly on the number of porterhouse steaks, cheeseburgers and chicken breasts we eat and cut back on the size of our livestock herds just a bit that would easily compensate for the animal feed that's being used to make ethanol. Corn kernel ethanol is going to be phased out in the near future anyway. Then everybody can eat steaks and pork chops and chicken again to their heart's content and the livestock farmers can increase the size of their herds to whatever suits them.
I live in Nevada. There are many thousands of square miles in the desert west and southwest that is considered practically useless land -- it produces virtually no food and it supports virtually no commercial agriculture. That land WILL however support several native species that are suitable for ethanol production, and those species require very little water, fertilizer or human attention. Just to name two types there is oleander (Nerium oleander, syn. N. indicum) and various sagebrushes (genus Salvia). Both species are perennial tree/bushes, they coppice well and new growth can be harvested from individual plants every two to five years.
There is sufficient desert land in the U.S. west and southwest, much of it owned by the U.S. government, to plant billions of, say, hardy and fast growing oleander or sage bushes for CE conversion. That land is not utilized for food agriculture now and it never has been.
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Nickel and dime jobs that cannot possibly support a family but might marginally support one person in a rented room (many fast food and retail sales positions for instance) are counted as "employment."
So many millions of people who are barely keeping a roof over their heads, eating cheap junk and on the edge of financial ruin at all times are hardly comforted by perky Establishment media reports of "low unemployment."
Here's an interesting fact: As of 2006
42.7% of the U.S. population earned less than 25K per year, and
71% earned less than 50K per year.
(A condensed table of the poorly organized U.S. Census bureau figures is available at wikipedia.)
.
Biofuels as such, do not increase food costs nor decrease supplies, nor do they waste energy nor contribute to global warming.
It is the use of FOOD to make biofuel that causes the problems.
The US ethyl alcohol (ethanol) fuelstock is made from fermenting feed corn, exactly like making whisky. This is a terrible (but enormously profitable) idea.
Likewise, biodiesel is usually made from soybeans.
Different kinds of alcohols and other biofuels can and should be made from crop and other organic RESIDUES and WASTES from agriculture, industry, cities or nature (with the materials returned to the soil after processing), or cropping of replanted prairies on marginal land, and NOT mono-plantations of GMO food-to-fuel crops.
BTW - I do not advocate switchgrass plantations, but naturalistic diverse species crops. For example: http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/news_details.php?release=061207_3059&page=UMNN
What we need to fight is processes used by mega-corps like ADM, and not to broadbrush smear an indespensible and invaluable forever renewable solar fuel.
yale
That is the "core inflation" number which was put into effect by who else, Clinton. It does not count food and energy. To use it will distort the figures....sending them upward.
He wanted to reduce Social Security cost of living raises that are tied to that figure. Also employed who had Cost of Living contracts.
It is estimated that if the true number was used everyone's SS would double.
Question: If everyone loses their job and their unemployment runs out does that mean our unemployment will be 0%?
Almost all the numbers reported by the goverment has been fix......downward.
Also a few months ago we stopped reporting the M3 which is the money supply....I'll let you guess why.
The World Bank study is as bogus as WMD in Iraq. In the US hay is one of the four major crops. Hay prices are through the roof. Hay isn't used in biofuels. Neither is wheat, barley, etc. The US has virtually no biodiesel so it cannot be the reason for record high soybean prices. Regarding sugar - only its waste is used to make biofuels; so how does that drive up the price of sugar? Historically adjusted, corn, wheat and soybean prices remain well below their highs. Commodities are cyclical. The World Bank study is crap. http://www.321gold.com/editorials/wright/wright062708.html
Apparently the Iraqi army didn't quite believe self-described "war nerd" Gary Beecher's commentary on the Sadrists, written in April, 2008 (link below). Beecher wrote "I have to keep saying over and over, the purely military hardware aspect of this sort of war is the least important factor of all. The Iraqi Army/SIIC militia had the weaponry on their side, and they still got their asses kicked by the Sadrists, because the Sadrists were defending their home neighborhoods, those stinking slums that mean the whole world to people who live there. Victory in insurgency is a matter of morale, and you build it slowly, the way Mao said, by helping the locals in their dull little civvie lives." Link:
http://www.alternet.org/story/81147/?ses=8e2882448c75683f547cf77a2a4489c5
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Ten Years Ago, Osama Bin Laden Demanded Barrel Of Oil Should Cost $144
sittin' in his cave ( or not ), laffin', laffin', laffin' his turbaned fannie off.
thanks for the link to Gary Brecher, the War Nerd. that guy really gets down in the weeds with his commentary / analysis - good stuff !! his discussion of the ass-kicking that Hezbollah gave to the zionists in the last skirmish was hilarious.
People are counted as unemployed if they are without a job, available to work and have "actively" looked for work sometime during the four weeks preceding the time they are interviewed in the monthly household survey conducted the U.S. Census Bureau. As long as one is able, available and actively looking for work, you are counted as unemployed. I should add that unemployed status has nothing to do with the receipt of Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits. Even those who exhaust UI benefits are still counted as unemployed - provided they are actively looking for work. You can labor force status definitions at http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_faq.htm
It is true that if someone stops looking for work or only engages in passive job search activities, such as viewing want ads, they would be classified as not in the labor force. The U-3 definition does restrict unemployed to those actively looking for work but the BLS does publish the U-7 unemployment rate (9.9 percent in June) - see http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm
During the Clinton Administration, the discouraged worker definition was tightened to only include those who had looked for work sometime during the previous 12 months. This change resulted in the number of discouraged workers dropping from over 1 million to a few hundred thousands.
Inflation and Unemployment statistics are not "gamed". They are reported on very poorly by the media and widely misunderstood by the public-and apparently even some of the very well educated public who ought to know better.
The most widely reported inflation rate includes changes in energy and food. The core inflation rate, also reported does not.
The official unemployment rate is the percentage of all peopel in the labor force who have actively sought work in the last week and have not worked at all. It's primary use is to measure changes in levels of unemployment due to fluctuations in aggregate demand.
The rationale for computing and methods for computing these and other statistics collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is available in any basic Principles of Macroeconomics test.
I trust people will pardon my frustration. But there has been a significant spread of people who should know better repeating the view that the statistics are "cooked".
My own sense is that things are bad and that a casual glance at the statistics might lead people to falsely conclude things are sort of OK.
In order to understand what is going on in the economy, it takes compiling and tracking several measures over time.
I don't see a place to identify oneself-so, for identification purposes:
Clifford "Chip" Poirot
Associate Professor of Economics
Shawnee State University
Afghan governor says US air strikes killed 22 civilians.
That was yesterday. US Air Strikes killed another 20 today.
The US is purposefully conducting a war against civilians. A serial war crime. The US Armed Forces are designed and optimised to kill civilians. It has become the American way of war.
The World Bank biofuels report is for the Zoellick, who got Wolfowitz's sinecure.
It is supposed to appeal to the new Arab money power.
It's an open secret that OPEC is really afraid of biofuels.
Dear Professor Cole (Juan?),
Do you mind if I correct your economics? I'm a professional economist (a professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles).
Your write: > The US Federal Reserve is not counting the cost of food and fuel in its inflation estimates.<
This is NOT true. You are referring to the _core_ inflation rate,
which is not the easily-available inflation rate that is an effort to
measure the impact of inflation on consumers. The latter (based on
either the consumer price index or the "consumer expenditure deflator"
-- don't ask) tells us how our incomes lose purchasing power over
time. The Fed uses it for that purpose.
The former (the core rate) is an effort to gauge the persistent
inflation rate. It's a method used to get half a handle on what's
going to happen in the future. (It's obviously impossible to predict the future.) The Fed uses the core rate as a guide
to policy. The food & fuel prices are well-known for being volatile:
not only do they rise steeply but they also fall steeply. (Yes, oil prices fall. Consider 1986.) The idea is that Fed's Open Market Committee does not want to respond to a temporary rise in oil and food prices by raising interest rates and causing a slowdown or recession. They only want to do that in response to longer-lasting (core) inflation.
Of course, none of this a science (like poli sci, right? ;-)). It's an art. The core rate may not measure persistent inflation very well, just as the broader rate is not extremely good at measuring the
decline of our dollars' purchasing power. (The problem is not the
omission of food & fuel, but more technical problems, based on the
so-called Boskin reforms, named after a GOP economist).
By the way, if the real inflation rate is higher than the estimated version, that means that the Open Market Committee will step on the monetary brakes more readily.
> Yeah, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't count the unemployed in the unemployment figures either. They just count people who have been in between jobs and are still looking for employment for less than a certain period. After that time, if they don't find a job, they aren't unemployed any more, even if they never ever find another job. They are in a third category, of "not in the labor force." The period after which you are dropped from the "unemployed" category has shrunk over time; the Reagan administration produced sunny statistics by redefining a lot of people as not in the work force. As did the Clinton administration. The BLS calls this phony number U3 and actually provides measures closer to reality as well, but the press usually only reports U3.<
It's not a phony number. The Reagan "reforms" were extremely small.
The reason why it's not a phony number is that the various measures of the unemployment rate that the BLS uses all move together over the
business cycle (with some differences in amplitude). The unemployment rates are not really good measures of the cost of low economic activity (low gross domestic product) as much as
measures of _changes_ in those costs.
In any event, we shouldn't pay much attention to changes in the
unemployment rate from month to month unless they are relatively big (half a percentage point or more). Year-to-year changes are more meaningful. On top of that, most macroeconomists don't pay as much attention to the unemployment rate these days as to the number of people employed by the private sector (because it's more accurately measured). The
problem with that number is that it normally rises with the population, so even better is the employment/population ratio. That
ratio suggests that we're in a serious mess.
The real problem with the government's statistics is how people -- especially in the media -- interpret them. For example, most journalists treat all increases in "real" Gross Domestic Product as a "good thing." But that's nonsense. GDP is only a measure of market activity (stuff bought and sold) and thus misses the costs of pollution and a lot more. It's not a measure of what's good for humanity or how happy people are.
I wouldn't believe Kevin Phillips on economic subjects if I were you.
--
Jim Devine a.k.a. James G. Devine / Economics Department / Loyola
Marymount University / Los Angeles, CA 90045
310 338-2948 off.
Re that last little aside about train miles per gallon: I think the more relevant stat is to turn it around the other way: how many gallons of diesel does it take to move the average train one mile?
The answer, for at least one very major U.S. railway: 9
When you consider that the average train is something like 8,000 tons, that is pretty darn good.
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