Tropical forests & Climate change

SUBHEAD: NASA finds tropical forests absorbing more carbon dioxide than previously thought .

By Nadia Prupis on 4 January 2015 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/01/04/nasa-tropical-forests-key-fighting-greenhouse-gases)


Image above: Photo of tropical forest. From original article. Photo by Leonard S. Jacobs.

Tropical forests have emerged as a crucial factor in the fight against climate change, according to a new NASA-led study published Friday which finds that they are absorbing carbon dioxide at a far higher rate than previously thought.

As atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases have continued to rise, tropical forests, like those found in Malaysia, have been absorbing roughly 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide out of a total global absorption of 2.5 billion, NASA found.

Those rates are not only higher than previously estimated, they are also higher than those of the vast boreal forests found in northern regions like Canada and Siberia—which are diminishing.

"This is good news, because uptake in boreal forests is already slowing, while tropical forests may continue to take up carbon for many years," said Dr. David Schimel, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory senior research scientist and lead author of a paper on the study.

Forests use human-made emissions to grow faster, which in turn reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—an effect known as carbon fertilization. They also remove up to 30 percent of airborne human emissions through photosynthesis. If those processes slowed down, the rate of global warming would increase.

Why was it important to determine which kind of forest are more adept at that process?
Because the answer "has big implications for our understanding of whether global terrestrial ecosystems might continue to offset our carbon dioxide emissions or might begin to exacerbate climate change," said Britton Stephens, co-author of the study and a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Schimel added, "All else being equal, the effect is stronger at higher temperatures, meaning it will be higher in the tropics than in the boreal forests."

The problem lies in other harmful impacts of climate change that also affect forests. Warming temperatures decrease water availability and increase larger and more frequent wildfires—which, in turn, release large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Still, NASA's discovery is largely auspicious. "What we've had up till this paper was a theory of carbon dioxide fertilization based on phenomena at the microscopic scale and observations at the global scale that appeared to contradict those phenomena," Schimel said. "Here, at least, is a hypothesis that provides a consistent explanation that includes both how we know photosynthesis works and what's happening at the planetary scale."

The study is groundbreaking in its methodology, as it is the first to use a variety of models, technology, and data to create an "apples-to-apples" comparison carbon dioxide estimates between forests, NASA explained.

By using computer models of ecosystem processes, inverse models of atmospheric concentrations, satellite images, and other data and analysis, the researchers were able to determine the accuracy of their results "based on how well they reproduced independent, ground-based measurements."

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Incomprehensible TPP Secrecy

SUBHEAD: It is incomprehensible that the leaders of major corporate interests are writing the TPP.

By Deirdre Fulton on 5 January 2015 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/01/05/incomprehensible-secrecy-sanders-demands-release-trade-agreement-text)


Image above: The Council of Canadians outside the Delta Ottawa City Centre on July 7, 2014 to draw attention to the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership talks taking place inside. From (http://www.canadianprogressiveworld.com/2014/07/09/secretive-critical-talks-tpp-happening-ottawa/).

'It is incomprehensible to me that the leaders of major corporate interests are actively involved in the writing of the TPP, while the elected officials of this country have little or no knowledge as to what is in it,' says senator Bernie Sanders

With Congress on the verge of taking up the controversial, corporate-friendly Trans Pacific Partnership, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is demanding that the chief trade representative for the United States turn over the full text of the proposed trade agreement.

"It is incomprehensible to me that the leaders of major corporate interests who stand to gain enormous financial benefits from this agreement are actively involved in the writing of the TPP while, at the same time, the elected officials of this country, representing the American people, have little or no knowledge as to what is in it," Sanders said in a letter (pdf) sent Monday to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman.

"Members of Congress must have the opportunity to read what is in the TPP and closely analyze the potential impact this free trade agreement would have on the American people long before the Senate votes to give the President fast track trade promotion authority."

Proponents of the pact, which would encompass 12 nations that represent 40 percent of the global economy, are pushing for a fast-track process that would hand over negotiating authority to President Barack Obama, who supports the deal. Critics claim the TPP poses threats to civil liberties, workers rights, public health, food safety, and global financial stability.

Sanders asked Froman to respond to his letter by January 16, 2015. If his request is denied, the senator vowed to introduce legislation that would require that the contents of any trade agreement that the U.S. is negotiating would have to be made public at the request of any member of Congress.

In addition, if Sanders' request is turned down, he asked Froman to spell out the legal basis for the denial.

"Please also explain why you think it is appropriate that the representatives of the largest financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, media conglomerates and other major corporate interests not only have access to some of these documents, but are also playing a major role in developing many of the key provisions in it," Sanders added. "Meanwhile, the people who will suffer the consequences of this treaty have been shut out of this process."

Just last week, Sanders penned an essay outlining the top ten reasons why the TPP must be defeated.

In December, a coalition of close to 50 groups called on trade ministers of countries negotiating the TPP to publish the current draft of the agreement, as well as all nations' negotiating positions.

So far, the only details that have been made public have come from leaked documents—representing a lack of transparency that Sanders described in his letter as "very troubling."

See also:

Ea O Ka Aina: The Pacific Pivot 6/26/14
The TPP which locks signatory nations  into a U.S. dominated trade framework.

Ea O Ka Aina: Earthday TPP Fukushima RIMPAC 4/22/14
Excuse us while we turn the Pacific Ocean into a radioactive ashtray.

Ea O Ka Aina: TPP true colors 2/26/14
The plan behind the TPP is to replace national sovereignty with multinational corporations.

Ea O Ka Aina: TPP - Poison for Resilience 1/15/14
Congress is about to vote on whether to fast-track the treaty to hand sovereignty to corporations.

Ea O Ka Aina: TPP - Corporate Domination 1/13/14
TPP is a dream of the 1% - A stealthy policy being pressed by corporate America.

Ea O Ka Aina: TPP is NAFTA on steroids 11/24/13
President Obama wants Congress to reauthorize TPP and negotiations in the future.

Ea O Ka Aina: With TPP Big Pharma & GMOs gain 11/14/13
WikiLeaks blew open the secret negotiations behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Ea O Ka Aina: TPP & GMO labeling ban 10/18/13
Do leaked sections of the TPP's secret text suggest a ban on GMO labeling?

Ea O Ka Aina: TPP revealed once more 8/29/13
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not about free trade. It's a corporate coup d'etat--against us!

Ea O Ka Aina: Green Shadow Cabinet 6/19/13
The Green Shadow Cabinet stands united in opposition to the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership

Ea O Ka Aina: Obama & Multi-Nationals in Pacific 11/25/12
Public interest groups have been warning that the TPP could result in millions of lost jobs.

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Kunstler Forecast 2015

SUBHEAD: Americans face life in the breakdown lane as the wheels come off the American Dream.

By James Kunstler on 4 January 2015 for Kunstler.com -
(Ihttp://kunstler.com/forecast/forecast-2015/)


Image above: Detail of photo of nearly abandoned Detroit suburban street. From (http://thehiat.blogspot.com/2012/02/motorless-city-of-detroit.html).

“Don’t look back — something might be gaining on you,” Satchel Paige famously warned. For connoisseurs of civilizational collapse, 2014 was merely annoying, a continued pile-up of over-investments in complexity with mounting diminishing returns, metastasizing fragility, and no satisfying resolution. 

So we enter 2015 with greater tensions than ever before and therefore the likelihood that the inevitable breakdown will release more destructive energy and be that much harder to recover from.

I don’t know how anyone can trust the statistical bullshit emanating from our government reporting agencies, or the legacy news organizations that report them. Yet the meme has remained firmly fixed in the popular imagination: the US economy has recovered! GDP grows 5 percent in Q3! 

Manufacturing renaissance! Energy independence! Cleanest shirt in the laundry basket! Best-looking house in a bad neighborhood…!

¡No hay problema!

This is simply the power of wishful thinking on display. No one — with the exception of a few “doomer” cranks — wants to believe that industrial civilization is in trouble deep. The staggering credulity this represents would be a fascinating case study in itself if there were not so many other things that demand our attention right now. 

Let’s just write this phenomenon off as the diminishing returns of career log-rolling in politics, finance, media, and academia. All the professional “thought-leaders” pitch in to support the “hologram” of eternal progress that issues their paychecks and bonuses. This culture of pervasive racketeering that we’ve engineered has made us obtuse. 

The particular brand of stupidity on display also points to another signal vanity of our time: the conviction that if you measure things enough, you can control them.

I’m of the view that the measurers only pretend to measure and can only pretend to control things, especially in the most fragile of the systems that we depend on for running all the other systems of techno-industrial economic life: finance. The pretense has endured a lot longer than many of us had expected. 

The legerdemain employed by banking officials and their handmaidens was greatly augmented by the sheer wish that fragility (i.e. risk) had been successfully and permanently banished from the universe. That “magic” at least sustained a universal faith in currencies until the middle of last year when so many monies went south — except the dollar, levitating on blowback of the deflationary wind flattening everything else.

All this unreality in money and markets should be expected in the conditions just preceding systemic collapse of an entire trans-national industrial civilization, just as one should expect societies to construct their most grandiose monuments to themselves shortly before collapse. 

The Mayans R Us. 

One year, they were cavorting bloodthirstily atop their garish painted pyramids and a generation later the jungle was stealing back over the temple steps and the population was a tenth of its former size. The same thing is going to happen to us, except there will be a hell of a lot more worthless, toxic debris left on the landscape.

Of course, even that is a more long-term projection than the exercise at hand calls for, viz., the forecast for measly little 2015. So without further throat-clearing, permit me to break it down for you:

Finance and Banking
As 2014 closed out, that kit-bag of frauds, swindles, Ponzis, grifts, bait-and-switches, and three-card-monte scams is looking at least as wobbly as it did in 2007 when Wall Street was busy manufacturing booby-trapped MBSs and CDOs. 

Except we know the true aggregate risk at stake has only grown larger and more hazardous due to all the strenuous efforts by authorities since the panic of 2008 to evade any natural process for clearing mal-investment and debt gone bad. A lot of that stank was simply shoveled into the Federal Reserve’s basement, where it sits to this day, composting steamily. 

As to be expected (and averred to in my previous books and blogs) financial repression, market intervention, and statistical distortion will produce ever more financial perversity. That is the hazard in decoupling truth from reality. Imposed dishonesty will always express itself in unexpected ways. 

Who expected the price of oil to fall by nearly half in a few months? (More on that below.)

These days, perversity expresses itself in a morbidly obese dollar gorging on junk while bulimic currencies elsewhere projectile-vomit their value away as the economies attached to them die of malnutrition. 

Perhaps this comes as a surprise to central bankers standing at their control panels like recording engineers at the soundboard, tweaking all the dials and slides expecting to achieve a perfect repressive inflation rate of 2-plus percent so they can melt away the onerous debt of sovereign balance sheets and Too Big To Fail banks — incidentally squeezing the citizenry of purchasing power in small annual increments that add up, after a while, to worthless money. 

They did manage to extend the inflation of stock market indexes another year, which the public is supposed to interpret as “prosperity.” 

Half a trillion dollars in stock buybacks of S & P companies were executed in 2014, much of it done with money, i.e. “leverage,” borrowed at zero interest. Stock buybacks boost share prices, of course, but they don’t represent any real increased value in a given company. They’re just snakes eating their own tails.

The belief that the world’s “reserve” currency is an implacable force, and that central bankers are omnipotent has made this trade appear to be an irresistible trend — Don’t fight the Fed! Since it’s a matrix of fraud based on thin air money detached from real productive activity, it is certain to blow up. And since 2015 is seven years past the last blowup, it can happen any time. 

All it requires is some small slippage somewhere, that one equivalent extra grain of sand or snowflake to bring the accumulate mass of false value down in a financial earthquake or avalanche. 

That obese dollar has been gorging on the equivalent of cheez kurls and Little Debbie Snack cakes, so it only grows more diseased as it gains weight. Sentient observers cannot fail to notice the advancing sickness.

Meanwhile, the US is stupidly waging currency war against other nations that can only blow back by incurring the animosity of every trading partner we have on the only planet available to live on. In 2015, I expect Russia to enlist China’s aid in undermining the dollar’s reserve status. 

Both countries have weaponry in the form of cash reserves and gold in their vaults. They also have the computer hacking expertise to start seriously messing with US markets — as much Fed technicians and TBTF bank algos do — bringing on mysterious flash crashes, derivatives “accidents,” and other abnormal events that will leave even the Goldman Sachs MIT graduates scratching their heads. 

Such hacking may accomplish what years of arrant market interventions by US technicians failed to produce: a deadly loss of faith on all the institutions that govern money and markets. Then the US will be the cleanest shirt in a laundry basket that is on fire.

The dollar these days represents two kinds of capital. The first is the stuff that the US has built and invested in since, say, the end of World War Two: a wasteland of aging and decrepitating suburban sprawl, that is, the infrastructure of a living arrangement with no future, the greatest entropic sink in human history. 

It extends to whole cities and their subsystems, e.g. the hell-hole of Las Vegas with Hoover dam and the dwindling reservoir of Lake Mead. Before mid-century, Las Vegas will be as desolate as Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. 

Try to imagine the money that went into building all that stupid shit in the desert. In another decade, across America, the housing subdivisions and commercial highway strips filled with tilt-up box stores, muffler shops and burger dispensaries will retain less value than the pyramids of Palenque had for the Mayans after their society rolled over and died. 

The so-called real economy is a New Age serfdom of burger fryers and janitors, indentured to that entropic sink. Below them is a widening slough of methedrine, child abuse, and tattoo art on its way to becoming Soylent Green. To put it bluntly, the dollar is entropy’s algo bitch.

The second kind of capital the dollar represents is the imaginary value based on sheer lying, making shit up, and borrowing from a future that has no chance of being paid back. This is the capital ginned up on “American exceptionalism” and “energy independence,” fairy tale memes functioning as collateral for the aforementioned malinvestments that add up to “The American way of life.” 

This capital has no substance, since it is just made up of intellectual and emotional dishonesty. This is the kind of constructed narrative that addicts and other functional cripples resort to to justify their behavior, and the fragility of it will sooner or later lead to the well-known condition of “hitting bottom.” 

That is the event horizon where the remnants of America enter what I call the World Made By Hand. It will be the greatest socio-economic shift since the fall of Rome, only much swifter.

Oil
It really deserves a sub-category of its own because it is the primary resource of our techno-industrial society and its troubles lie behind much of the present disturbances of our times. 

Despite the triumphal agitprop of the past few years, peak oil is for real. It just manifests more strangely than most people thought, namely, the simpleminded idea that it would only show up as ever-rising prices. 

No, I made point in The Long Emergency (2005) — and other commentators did too — that peak oil would manifest as volatility. And so since the actual moment of peak conventional crude around 2005, we’ve seen pretty wild oscillations in the price of oil. This is due to the harsh reality that the price people and enterprises can afford to pay for increasingly harder-to-get oil is less than the price that makes it possible to get it. 

This sets up a yo-yo-ing instability in economic performance that exacerbates even normal wave patterns in the business cycle (which are, in turn, aggravated by banks and governments’ interventions such as ZIRP to suppress those cycles). Below $70-a-barrel the producers go broke; above $70-a-barrel the customers go broke. 

So the price wobbles up and down as financial Ponzis like shale oil are introduced onto the scene in the hope that debt finagling and mineral rights leasing scams can substitute for physics and geological reality. 

One trouble with this is that each violent oscillation generates more economic and financial destruction. Activities like motoring, aviation, manufacturing, and retail are badly affected and the entire financial system is made more fragile by worsening increments. 

Most importantly, the cost structure of the oil industry itself gets battered to a degree that fewer companies can survive to produce the remaining oil.
The big story for 2014 was the crash of oil prices. It is yet being celebrated in other blogger’s 2015 forecasts as a boon to America. 

Wait until they find out that almost all of the “good jobs” added in recent years were associated with the shale drilling industry that is now being put out of business by low oil prices. 

Wait until they find out how the failure of junk bond financing thunders through the bond markets and the savage wilderness of derivatives — and ultimately into their ruined pension funds. 

Wait until they discover that it was but a symptom of the compressive deflationary depression now gripping the entire techno-industrialized world.

Here are my financial forecast particulars for 2015:

• Early in 2015 the ECB proposes a lame QE program and is laughed out of the room. European markets tank.

• Greek elections in January produce a government that stands up to the EU and ECB and causes a fatal slippage of faith in the ability of that project to continue.

• Second half of 2015, the rest of the world gangs up and counter-attacks the US dollar.

• Bond markets in Europe implode in first half and the contagion spreads to the US as fear and distrust rises about viability of US safe haven status.

• Derivatives associated with currencies, interest rates, and junk bonds trigger a bloodbath in credit default swaps (CDS) and the appearance of countless black holes through which debt and “wealth” disappear forever.

• US stock markets continue to bid upward in the first half of 2015, crater in Q3 as faith in paper and pixels erodes. DJA and S & P fall 30 to 40 percent in the initial crash, then further into 2016.

• Gold and silver slide in the first half, then take off as debt and equity markets craters, faith in abstract instruments evaporates, faith in central bank omnipotence dissolves, and citizens all over the world desperately seek safety from currency war.

• Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, DeutscheBank, SocGen, all succumb to insolvency. American government and Federal Reserve officials don’t dare attempt to rescue them again.

• By the end of 2015, central banks everywhere stand in general discredit. In the US, the Federal Reserve’s mandate is publically debated and revised back to its original mission as lender of last resort. It is forbidden to engage in further interventions and a new less-secretive mechanism is drawn up for regulating basic interest rates.

• Oil prices creep back into the $65 – $70 range by May 2015. It is not enough to halt the destruction in the shale, tar sand, and deepwater sectors. As contraction in the failing global economy accelerates, oil sinks back to the $40 range in October…

• …unless mischief in the Middle East (in particular, the Islamic State messing with Saudi Arabia) leads to gross and perhaps fatally permanent disruption in world oil markets — and then all bets are off for both the continuity of advanced economies and for peace between nations.

Geopolitics
The signal event of 2015 will be the disintegration of Tom Friedman’s global economy, the trade and banking relations we have known for about a quarter century, especially the frictionless flow of goods and capital between East and West. 

The tactical blunders of the USA and its Euro-partners drive the so-called emerging markets, led by China’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization, into a skein of work-arounds to undermine and avoid the US dollar trade. They don’t exactly replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency but the workarounds lead to a period of worldwide currency turmoil that can only be resolved by monies being at least partially backed by gold. 

Both China and Russia will continue to work to convert their dollar reserves into Gold whenever possible. Meanwhile, America and Great Britain’s campaign to discredit and devalue gold will only permit their rivals to acquire more at a cheaper price.

The rest of the world is sick of America’s interventionist shenanigans and its moronic exported culture of burgers, Grand Theft Auto, and twerking Jezebels. They are aided by America’s own obdurate foolishness and poor strategic choices, for instance the blowback from the Ukraine misadventure of 2014. 

Who in the White House, Pentagon, or State Department thought it was a great idea to undermine the fragile stability of Ukraine? Is there any question that Ukraine was ever not in Russia’s sphere of influence? Or that Russia would allow it to be dragooned into NATO and used as a forward base for American firepower? Dmitry Orlov’s explanation for all this is the most cogent on the web:

“What the Anglo-imperialists were paying for in corrupting Ukraine’s politics was a ring-side seat at a fight between Ukraine and Russia. And what they got instead is a two-legged stool at a bar-room brawl between Eastern and Western Ukraine.”

Read the whole darn thing; it’s not long.

We succeeded in turning a marginally-bankrupt, marginally-independent nation into a complete basketcase that is going Dark Age as I write — no money, no work, no fuel, no heat, no food, no prospects. Having completely botched the operation, and misplayed the game against Russia’s Putin — and Russia’s legitimate interest in a stable next-door neighbor — the US will now abandon Ukraine. 

It will be forgotten as surely as the US-sponsored Ukrainian air force’s role in the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 — the incriminating details of which were buried by the Dutch investigating officials. Eventually, the Russians will have to care for the dying Ukraine. They will not be enthusiastic about it. They will do little and do it slowly.

Likewise our economic sanctions campaign against Russia (including the attack on the ruble) is now blowing back on the Eurozone’s export economy. Russia has survived much worse than Western sanctions in recent history. Russia will survive by turning east to Asia. This is already happening and is well publicized. 

What it means for Europe sooner than later is the loss of their access to imported oil and gas from Russia. Meanwhile, the North Sea fields and the Dutch Groningen gas field are dying. Good luck staying warm, Europe.

The blowback of Europe’s foolish partnership with the US campaign to punish Russia can only discredit the ruling parties and boost new right-wing parties such as France’s National Front and Britain’s UK Independence Party, both deeply nationalistic, anti Euro Union, and anti endless immigration.

The Islamic State was another legacy of blowback from American foreign adventurism. It was spawned out of the remnants of Al Qaeda in poor, broken Iraq and its conquests in 2014 ranged clear across northern Syria to several major cities in Iraq (Faluja, Tikrit, Mosul) right up to the suburbs of Baghdad. They made a lot of money off of captured oil wells and ransoming western hostages, and they shocked Western decency with their YouTube decapitations of hostages that the US and UK refused to ransom. 

The US’s response now is to bomb their installations and bivouacs. That can only drive them, literally, underground. IS will thrive on Western punishment. It has vast potential to recruit the population of idle, under-employed young men all across North Africa and the Middle East, and beyond to Europe and the band of Islamic society that stretches below Russia across mid-Asia. The catch is, if and when they come to actually rule most of these territories, they will be running economies reduced to Dark Age levels.

As I write, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has just entered the hospital. At 91, he is closer to the end of his story than the middle. 

Meanwhile, the tanking of crude oil prices has critically impaired an Arabian economy that depends on oil sales for more than 80 percent of its operating revenue. Much of that revenue goes to a national welfare system that pays just about everybody to not work. There will be a lot less money to go around now and a lot of grievance over it. 

The population of the Arabian Peninsula is so far beyond critical overshoot that the situation can only get ugly, especially since a large part of that excessive population consists of testosterone-jacked young men under 30 with nothing to occupy their hours but chitchat over tea and religious mummery. 

Consider also that when King Abdullah goes, there is liable to be a deeply destabilizing fight for the throne among the hordes of princes and competing clans — despite whomever Abdullah has named as his successor. You may be sure the Islamic State will be standing by to add fuel to those fires. That, in and of itself, could bring on a fast end of the oil age. 

Bear in mind, too, that the eastern side of Saudi Arabia, where most of the oil infrastructure is, contains a majority Shi’ite population. In a conflict between Sunni IS and Iran-backed Arabian Shia, a lot of stuff could just get blown up. At the least, itr could badly interrupt 30 percent of the world’s oil supply.

China is obviously struggling to prevent a financial freefall brought on by 20-plus years of extravagant debt creation and a lot mal-investment in the service of a very late entry into the techno-industrial frolic. It can’t be denied that they made a good show of it in a very short time, but they got in at the blow-off stage. 

Now conditions are changing unfavorably. The global economy that made China the world’s workshop is unwinding in a vortex of currency war, trade friction, territorial dispute, ethnic ill-will, and the disturbances that attend the great background problem of peak cheap oil.

The Chinese will work sedulously to try for a soft landing in the great economic contraction that looms. Chinese banking being non-transparent, overly subject to blundering central control, and deeply corrupt, may not bode well for that project. 

However, China has many cushions to fall back on short-term in the form of foreign money reserves and stockpiles of raw materials. But sooner or later they have to reckon with their dependence on continued oil imports. 

That is clearly the basis of China’s current flirtation with Russia — but with Russia arguably past its own oil production peak, that’s not a long-term strategy. China has cranked up the world’s mightiest production line of photovoltaic hardware, but solar won’t replace oil the way things currently run, and whatever they rig up may not last more than one generation if there’s no supporting platform of an oil economy for the manufacture of solar replacement parts.
 
Japan’s suicidal experiment with hyper-turbo ZIRP and QE is not accomplishing much except exacerbating global currency carry trades and driving down the nation’s standard of living. It may succeed in destroying the Yen and what remains of its economy in 2015. Fukushima remains unresolved and Japan’s energy future looks plain dismal. They have no energy resources of their own whatsoever. 

Any serious mischief in the Middle East oil fields will finish them off. The nation has been on the fast track to become the first post-industrial neo-medieval society. They could be fortunate to land back there and set up their shop while there are still residual riches in the world to work with. 

They might also go cuckoo and start a war with China for control over the oil fields of the South China sea. It is hard to see any other outcome from such a conflict other than China kicking Japan’s ass.

Geopolitical forecast particulars for 2015

• Russia toughs out sanctions imposed by the USA; European partners drop their sanctions as self-evidently counter-productive. Russia threatens to post-pone debt repayments to Western banks. The ruble stabilizes.

• Russia endures Islamic terrorist attacks and responds very harshly, embarrassing the wimpy West.

• Baghdad Falls to Islamic State forces. Years of American endeavor are lost just like that. The IS attempts to use Iraqi oil reserves to fund its operations. It has a hard time keeping the infrastructure in repair. The USA refrains from bombing Iraqi oil installations, a decision viewed as weakness by IS.

• The Islamic State makes inroads across North Africa. Libya, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco are all susceptible.

• Formerly marginal political parties win big across Europe, forcing nations to rethink wide-open immigration policies. Neo-liberalism sinks into deep Weimar-style discredit. Open ethnic warfare breaks out in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden.

• European economies continue to sink for the simple reason that the growth era of techno-industrialism is over, along with affordable oil, and no amount of debt production will bring it back. All the machinations of the EU and the ECB are dedicated to overcoming this implacable reality, and thus will only lead to deeper and more intractable problems.

• Beginning with the late January elections, which Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza party wins, Greece plays hardball with the EU for debt restructuring that amounts really to forgiveness of utterly unpayable €322 billion ($398 billion). If the EU calls Greece’s bluff and kicks them out, a European banking meltdown is almost certain. If Greece stays, then other hopelessly indebted nations of the EU declare they want the same deal. Pretty much a rock and hard place. Impossible to call except to say the situation promises mucho turmoil in 2015. ¡Hay problema!

• Ebola contagion persists and rips across sub-Saharan Africa. Other nations are forced to pass severe travel restrictions to-and-from Africa.

• Nigeria descends into bloody political turmoil as its oil industry falls apart in response to low prices. UN intervention accomplishes nothing. In wartime conditions, Ebola gains a foothold in Lagos, one of the world’s most overpopulated slum cities.

• Pakistan and Afghanistan both continue to melt down into ungovernability. India is forced to take over administration of Pakistan and remove nukes. America continues to pretend that its mission in Afghanistan has some purpose, but it only remains a black hole of military expenditure and becomes a rancorous issue in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election.

The USA Homefront 2015
For one who has been a close observer of the US socio-political-economic scene since the Kennedy era, the nation has gotten itself into a pretty sorry state. 

The pervasive racketeering that poisons American life from the money-in-politics farce, to the shameless, chiseling medical-pharma cabal, to the SNAP-card and disability rights empire of grift, to the college loan swindle, to the disgusting security state apparatus, to the corporate tyranny of local life and economies, to the delusional techno-narcissism of the media, to the despotic and puerile gender preoccupations of academia — all of it adds up to a society that cares as little for the present as it does for the future. 

And that’s aside from the pathetic digital device addiction of the generation coming up, and the sheer sordid behavior of the tattooed, drug-saturated, pornified masses of adults now forever foreclosed from a purposeful existence or a decent standard of living.

Even physically America is a sorry-ass spectacle: between our decrepitating cities, abandoned Main Streets, gruesome strip-mall highways, repellent and monotonous suburbs, dreary industrial ruins, profaned countryside, and desecrated coastline, there is little left to actually love about This land is Your Land. We’ve made so many collective bad choices about how we live that one can’t help feeling we are simply a wicked people who deserve to be punished.

Whole classes already are, of course. What used to be a working class with aspirations has devolved to the forlorn savagery averred to above. Our thought-leaders are devoid of thought. Our hopes and dreams are absurd sci-fi fantasies prompting us toward robot-assisted suicide. Our political stratagems of recent years accomplish nothing except making more trouble for ourselves while inciting the enmity of people elsewhere.

Barack Obama’s signal failure — aside from letting the banks get away with murder and omitting to counter the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — has been his total evasion of measures that would prepare the nation for the vast changes in social and economic imperative that will attend the transition out of the techno-industrial era when he is out of office. 

These include supporting local small scale agriculture (rather than giant corporate agri-biz); promoting and supporting the reconstruction of local economic networks (Main Street business); eliminating multitudinous federal regulations that prevent individuals and small enterprises from operating; closing the hundreds of superfluous US military bases around the world; giving federal support to rebuild the US passenger rail system; promoting walkable communities — especially the re-activation of existing small towns and cities — instead of mindless obeisance to the suburban “home-building” industry (and its step-child in the commercial highway strip development racket) — and truly reforming medical care without the connivance of the insurance racketeers.

Obama and his party can be faulted for fostering the myth that every young person needs a college degree — leading a whole generation into debt penury for no good purpose, while depriving society of a long list of vocational roles and livelihoods based on providing genuine service or value. 

We will be a nation of unemployed gender studies graduates instead of plumbers, electricians, organic farmers, arborists, carpenters, machinists, nurses and paramedics, small business owners, et cetera.

This enormous bundles of myths and misplaced expectations for yesterday’s tomorrow prevents the collective national imagination from summoning a revised American Dream based on repairing the massive destruction of recent decades.

The political mood has not been murkier in my longish lifetime. Both major parties edge toward extinction as the Whigs did in the mid-1850s. 

The citizenry not sunk in drugs and depravity — that is, people who still read the news in some form and would like to care about their country — deserve a new faction or party that can at least express their discontent with the current situation. They will surely not get this in the generally supposed coming contest between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. 

I hope they will be so insulted by this dynastic grab that more than one new party will form and make a big stank about it. The Tea Party was a good start in that spirit, but it tripped on its internal contradictions and its association with Dixieland-style religious fundamentalist idiocy and cracker war-mongering.

All that redounds on the current state of the Republican Party, a gang of venal ignoramuses pimping for lost causes. 

Despite having won the 2014 midterms, and capturing both houses of congress and governorships, they seem increasingly out-of-touch with the realities of economic contraction, peak oil, and climate irregularities. The old magic of stirring up the animals on social issues of abortion, bedroom activities, and allegiance to Jesus fail to move the old base, which is becoming economically quite desperate. 

That base also becomes conscious of how they have been hornswoggled into voting against their own interests for years in the sense that author Thomas Frank so aptly described in What’s the Matter With Kansas.

Race relations turned very sour in 2014 with more highly publicized killings of young black men in ambiguous circumstances. The chief martyr of the year, Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo., was a poor candidate for sainthood, and did not help advance the credibility of claims that police brutality rather than the misbehavior of young men is behind a lot of strife abroad in the land. 

One gets the feeling that black race hustlers are in the driver’s seat recklessly pushing African Americans toward open warfare with everybody else. 

My view of the situation is not popular with Progressives, viz: that black separatism and its offshoots in “diversity” politics and multi-culturalism tragically promote an antagonistic, alienated, oppositional black politics at the expense of a common culture for blacks and whites with common values and common standards of behavior. 

 It has gotten so bad that reasonable people can sadly conclude that the long civil rights project has ended in failure. 

We are treading on dangerous ground here, with foolishly outmoded ideas about what to expect from each other, and of course all this begs the questions: What now? What next?

Domestic Forecast Particulars for 2015 

• Markets tanking in Q3 destroy the illusion of “recovery.” It becomes obvious that the story was a lie and the public mood grows much more surly.

• 2014 proves to be the year of peak shale oil. After the shakeout of 2015 due to low oil prices, production never returns to previous levels. The fairy tales of “energy independence” and “Saudi America” fall apart, deeply demoralizing a gulled public and adding yet another layer of discredit to the people in charge of things.

• Different kinds of political revolt break out around the country among varied groups, left, right, and center. Some of it revolves around life-and-death struggles for the souls of the floundering major parties. Some of it is organized violence against the government and especially against the US security state apparatus, including overly militarized local police forces.

• Low-grade racial warfare erupts across the US. Flash mobs, knock-out games, lootings, and hammer attack type outrages generate counter-attacks. By summertime the conflict heats up. Firefights become routine and casualties mount. President Obama proves to be tragically ineffectual in restoring peace.

• Anti-immigration sentiment in Europe spreads to the US as falling oil prices produce political disorder in Mexico prompting tens of thousands to try to flee north.

• Bank of America is the first of the Too Big To Fails to enter the event horizon of failure. Obama can’t get congress to go along with a bailout. By Thanksgiving, there is turmoil among the banks as they scramble to cover losses. A public furor over using taxpayer money to cover derivatives losses leads to an unprecedented concerted action by states to attempt “nullification” campaigns.

• Citibank applies for a bail-in of account holders. Dithering, frightened federal authorities are too slow to respond, permitting a run on deposits.

• Hillary is loudly booed and hectored at campaign stops as “a tool of Wall Street.” Her coffers overflow with TBTF bank contributions. She bows out of the presidential contest as the public mood toward her sours. But not before she generates a lot of resentful opposition and alienates many Democratic Party voters who are also furious over the eight-years of Obama’s “hope” and “change” hand-jive. Elizabeth Warren is dragooned to replace her — dubbed the “Un-Hillary” — rescuing the party from a near-death experience. She openly feuds with party bosses, who plot against her, and undermine her campaign.

• Senator Rand Paul agitates to abolish the Federal Reserve. His senate colleagues are shamed into considering legislative reform of the Fed’s mandate. Debate on the issue is the only thing the Republican dominated congress and senate accomplish in 2015. Paul decides to challenge Jeb Bush for the 2016 nomination. This blows the Republican party apart.

• At Christmas 2015, the DJA sits at 13,500, the S & P is at 1200. Gold is at 1750, silver at 42.

Good luck everybody. Gird your loins and fasten your seat belts.

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Residents ban traffic cameras

SUBHEAD: One Missouri county has voted to ban traffic enforcement cameras that hand out tickets.

By Joshua Krause on 29 December 2014 for the Daily Sheeple -
(http://www.thedailysheeple.com/missouri-residents-vote-to-ban-speed-cameras_122014)


Image above: Dayton to stop using traffic enforcement cameras. Speed cameras aimed at U.S. Route 127 in New Miami, Ohio, Feb. 25, 2014. From (http://wdtn.com/2015/01/05/dayton-to-stop-using-traffic-enforcement-cameras/).

It should come as no surprise to most drivers, that speed cameras are not being installed on your roadways to make your life easier (and they are your roadways. Your taxes paid for them). As much as the government would like you to think that they have your best interest at heart, these devices do not make our roads safer.

If anything they may make intersections even more dangerous, and they really don't serve any purpose beyond generating revenue for the city and the police department.

One Missouri county has had enough, and decided to hold a referendum to ban the use of red light cameras. The measure passed with 73 percent of voters in support of the ban. However, some elected officials aren't happy with the new bill, and have decided to bypass the will of their voters.

St. Peters, O’Fallon, Lake St. Louis, and a councilman from O’Fallon are filing a lawsuit in attempt to block a ban on red light cameras in St. Charles County.

Voters approved the ban November 4, with 73 percent of those who went to polls supporting the measure. However, those suing maintain the county has overstepped its legal bounds.

“Seventy-three percent of the voters pass a ban on red light cameras so what these cities are doing are suing 73 percent of the voters in St. Charles County, within their own cities. They’re suing their own residents,” said St. Charles County Councilman Joe Brazil. 

Normally I'm quite wary of Democracy, and its ability to give privileges to the majority at the expense of the minority. But in this case, the voters weren't attempting to stomp on the rights of the minority. They were attempting to protect their money from a thieving political class, and that class is obviously doing their best to stop them.

Fortunately, they probably won't succeed since the councilman who are challenging this ballot probably don't have any legal authority to do so.

“The federal government has jurisdictions over the states, states have jurisdictions over the counties, the counties have jurisdictions over their municipalities, so it’s fairly clear that they have the right to impose laws on those municipalities, especially if those laws are voted into law by the voters,” said Roger Dalsky.

The attorney representing the cities filing the lawsuit said the county’s legal authority is very clear.

“The state can dictate what cities are authorized to do or prohibit the cities from doing things. There’s nothing in the Missouri Constitution that provides the county to do the same thing,” said attorney John Young. 

It just goes to show you how dangerous our elected officials have become at all levels of government.

They try to tell us that we live in a democracy when it benefits them, but when we vote to cut their funding, they act like they have special powers that were never granted to them.

While the state constitution should keep their money grubbing mitts away from Missouri's drivers, there is still a possibility that they could overturn the ban. After all, The United States Constitution has been violated by the political class numerous times without any consequences. Political documents mean nothing to politicians if there aren't enough people willing to protect their rights.

Hopefully the residents and courts of Missouri can stop the overreach of these councilman, because if they can't, it's going to set a very dangerous precedent for elected officials in the future.ey can't, it's going to set a very dangerous precedent for elected officials in the future.

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Unnecessary Arrests

SUBHEAD: The sun is still out and everything is fine after arrests drop by two-thirds in NYC.

By Jon Queally on 4 January 2015 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/01/01/sun-still-out-and-everything-after-arrests-drop-two-thirds-nyc)


Image above: Some police officers turn their backs as Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks during the funeral of NYPD Officer Wenjian Liu on Jan. 4, 2015 in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (From (http://abc7chicago.com/news/mayor-eulogizes-nypd-officer-as-cops-outside-turn-backs-again/461296/).

If angered NYPD can so dramatically reduce arrests and citations, many are suggesting it could offer an ironic path to better policing nationwide.

Earlier this week, responding to initial news reports that the New York Police Department had drastically reduced the number of arrests and citations following the murder of two of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos on December 20, New York-based journalist and radio host Allison Kilkenny took to Twitter and noted, "Arrests plummeted 66% but I just looked outside and nothing is on fire and the sun is still out and everything. Weird."

What has been largely reported as a "virtual work stoppage" by NYPD officers as a result of a perceived lack of support coming from the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio, the internal turmoil between City Hall and the police stemmed from the interplay between ongoing street protests in the city that followed the non-indictment of Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the choking death of Eric Garner and public comments made by the mayor in support of those protests.

When the man who killed officers Liu and Ramos appeared cite revenge for Garner's death as part of his motivation, many officers—including union heads and leaders of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association—quickly put the blame on de Blasio for creating what they called an "anti-police" atmosphere.

Though the public debate over the relationship between City Hall and the NYPD has seemingly started to cool, many people are now looking at the "work stoppage" itself—which reportedly resulted in drastic reductions in arrests, citations, and even parking tickets—as rather positive evidence that a city with less arrests may be something to celebrate, not criticize.

Writing for Rolling Stone on Wednesday, journalist Matt Taibbi described the situation in the city as "surreal," but noted positively that, "In an alternate universe, the New York Police might have just solved the national community-policing controversy."

In his article, Taibbi explores that if the police protest was done for "enlightened reasons"—as opposed to what he described as "the last salvo of an ongoing and increasingly vicious culture-war mess that is showing no signs of abating"—there would be something wonderful about living in a city that called on officers to prioritize building-up community members instead of finding ways to put officers "in the position of having to make up for budget shortfalls" by issuing unnecessary fines and citations to people who can barely afford to make ends meet in the first place.

"If I were a police officer, I'd hate to be taking money from people all day long," Taibbi writes. "Christ, that's worse than being a dentist. So under normal circumstances, this slowdown wouldn't just make sense, it would be heroic.  Unfortunately, this protest is not about police refusing to shake people down for money on principle."

But as Matt Ford asks in a new piece for The Atlantic, the stoppage—whatever its motivation—still raises this key question: "If the NYPD can safely cut arrests by two-thirds, why haven't they done it before?"

The "human implications" of that question, he continues, are not insignificant, especially for those most impacted by aggressive forms of policing. He writes:

Fewer arrests for minor crimes logically means fewer people behind bars for minor crimes. Poorer would-be defendants benefit the most; three-quarters of those sitting in New York jails are only there because they can't afford bail. Fewer New Yorkers will also be sent to Rikers Island, where endemic brutality against inmates has led to resignations, arrests, and an imminent federal civil-rights intervention over the past six months. A brush with the American criminal-justice system can be toxic for someone's socioeconomic and physical health.

The NYPD might benefit from fewer unnecessary arrests, too. Tensions between the mayor and the police unions originally intensified after a grand jury failed to indict a NYPD officer for the chokehold death of Eric Garner during an arrest earlier this year.

Garner's arrest wasn't for murder or arson or bank robbery, but on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes—hardly the most serious of crimes. Maybe the NYPD's new "absolutely necessary" standard for arrests would have produced a less tragic outcome for Garner then. Maybe it will for future Eric Garners too.

Concluding his assessment, Taibbi describes what he thinks are the two issues that are central to what's happening in New York City and their relevance to a much broader conversation about race, policing, and other public policy questions for the nation as a whole. He writes:

One is an ongoing bitter argument about race and blame that won't be resolved in this country anytime soon, if ever. Dig a millimeter under the surface of the Garner case, Ferguson, the Liu-Ramos murders, and you'll find vicious race-soaked debates about who's to blame for urban poverty, black crime, police violence, immigration, overloaded prisons and a dozen other nightmare issues.

But the other thing is a highly specific debate over a very resolvable controversy not about police as people, but about how police are deployed. Most people, and police most of all, agree that the best use of police officers is police work.

They shouldn't be collecting backdoor taxes because politicians are too cowardly to raise them, and they shouldn't be pre-emptively busting people in poor neighborhoods because voters don't have the patience to figure out some other way to deal with our dying cities.

However, what Taibbi ultimately laments is that because the work stoppage, in his opinion, represents a self-interested gesture by the NYPD it will likely have little, if any, long-term impact.
Instead of shining a light on the broader issues he mentioned, Taibbi says, it will unfortunately be "just more fodder for our ongoing hate-a-thon" that plays out on cable news and elsewhere.

Sardonically, Taibbi signed off, "Happy New Year, America."

See also:
These are the articles that got me fired as a TGI columnist back in 2008.
Island Breath: The Nature of Police Patrolling 6/7/2008
Island Breath: The Kauai Police Department  Mission 5/18/2008
These are the articles that led to the ones above.
Island Breath: Kauai police need bikes not riot gear 4/5/08
Island Breath: Lingle Plan for Police State 09/22/07

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Remembering Uncle Louis

SUBHEAD: Louis Almodova passed on New Year's Eve. He was Salt Pond's Ambassador of Aloha.


Image above: Portrait of Louis Almodova Jr in Old Hanapepe Town in 2011 by Evelyn Ritter. From PDF file below.

Note: A PDF file (10.4 meg) of a tribute publication honoring Uncle Louis is available at:
(http://www.islandbreath.org/2015Year/01/150104unclelouis.pdf)

The tribute contents are from previous stories about Uncle Louis in Island Breath:
The Caretaker of Salt Pond
Uncle Louis remembers the Eleele School Song
Kauai Rhumba Kings
Two Tales from Uncle Louis Almodova
The Legend of the Menehune Fish Pond
The Legend of Spouting Horn
Hanapepe Valley Mochi Pounding
Da Mayor of Salt Pond
Salt Pond Pavilion named for Uncle Louis

---

Goodbye Uncle Louis

By Darin Moriki on 4 January 2015 for The Garden Island - 
(http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/goodbye-uncle-louis/article_94bd64c8-93ca-11e4-89e7-57dec33cdb70.html)


Image above: A recent photo of Uncle Louis playing the ukelele at the Salt Pond Beach Park pavilion named in his honor, From original article.

If you’ve spent some time at Salt Pond Park or stopped by the weekly Hanapepe Art Night over the years, chances are you’ve probably seen Louis Almodova Jr. talk story with locals and tourists alike. If you’re lucky, you may have heard the Hanapepe resident play one of his favorite songs on his ukulele or even sing it out loud.


Almodova, a longtime Westside and South Shore resident and World War II veteran who was known by many as the “Mayor of Salt Pond,” died Wednesday at Hale Kupuna Heritage Home in Omao after a brief illness. He was 97.

“He loved talking to tourists,” said his daughter Sandi MacDonald.

“He just loved the tourists,” added another daughter, Geraldine Yamamoto. “To me, that’s what kept him alive.”

“You’d see him talking to them every day,” interjected his youngest daughter, Pat Ashley. “He would always be at Salt Pond welcoming people there whether he knew you or not. He would always walk up to them and say, ‘Welcome to Salt Pond. Where are you folks from? How can I help you?’”

And that is the way some family members and residents say they will always remember him.

“When I heard of Uncle Louis’ passing, it really saddened me,” County Department of Parks and Recreation Director Lenny Rapozo wrote in an email. “He truly embodied the aloha spirit and his love for the island really showed, especially to those who visited Salt Pond.”

Even as his health declined over the last two months, family members said Almodova would often show that welcoming spirit at any opportunity he had.

“About two weeks before he died, I was bringing him home from Straub Clinic on Oahu and he was sitting in the first row on the plane,” Ashley recalled with a laugh. “As everyone started boarding, he would see the tourists and say, ‘Aloha,’ but they didn’t respond. They were probably wondering, ‘Whoa. What’s this man doing?’ I had to laugh to myself but I let him do it because that’s what he loved to do.”

Born on Oct. 24, 1917, to a family of 11 children, Almodova began working for the McBryde Sugar Company at 13 years old. Almodova eventually rose through the ranks and became a plantation foreman for McBryde Sugar Company, where he met his wife Alice, whom he married in 1944. He briefly played the tenor guitar in a seven-man band called “The Rhumba Kings” in his early 20s. He was drafted by the U.S. Army in 1940 and served for five years on Kauai.

After retiring from McBryde Sugar Company, Almodova worked as a tour bus driver until he decided to retire for good in his early 70s.

But even during his golden years, family members say Almodova remained active by ballroom dancing with his wife and playing senior baseball — a pastime that he took to heart.

When he was 80, Almodova competed in the Senior Softball World Series as a pitcher and first baseman, helping lead his team to the World Championship in Kansas City, Kansas.

Ashley recalled that her dad was a traditionalist when it came to baseball — he insisted that players wear knee breeches, rather than full-length pants, and lectured people when their caps were turned backward.

“My dad played baseball until he was 85 and he always wore the stockings instead of the long pants,” Ashley said. “He would say, ‘They’re wearing pajamas. They’re not dressed like ball players,’ so if you look at the Waimea High School baseball team, the boys all dress with stockings, but that was because of my dad. He wanted them to dress like ball players.”

But perhaps what he is most remembered for is his love for Salt Pond Park and all the people who visited there.

It is, after all, the reason why he was recognized by then-Mayor Tony Kunimura as the “Mayor of Salt Pond” and why county officials in 2011 named the main pavilion at the Hanapepe beach park after him.

Yamamoto said Almodova would send out about 400 Christmas cards each year to some of the people he met over the years, including visitors from Switzerland, the Bahamas, Japan and Canada, to name a few.

“I remember the days when Dad would handwrite them, but then cards became expensive,” Ashley said.

Kauai County Council Vice Chair Ross Kagawa, who grew up in Waimea, said Almodova would regularly stop by his grandmother’s store, Sue’s Snack Shop, in Eleele Shopping Center while he was growing up on the Westside.

“He was amazing,” Kagawa said. “He was an ambassador on the Westside. There’s not a lot of signs about what’s out there on the Westside, so Louie would always be at Salt Pond and talk to all the tourists and tell them about what they can do or whatever. We kind of had a free tourism specialist for many years.”

Kumu Hula Leina‘ala Pavao Jardin of Halau Ka Lei Mokihana O Leinaala said she remembers first meeting Almodova during frequent trips with her grandmother to see his mother.

“He always made us feel extremely welcome and made sure we ate plenty of his mom’s famous panadeja,” Jardin wrote in an email.

Jardin said she last saw Almodova at her halau’s kachi kachi dance fundraiser, where he “sat with me and talked story.”

“Uncle Louie will be missed, but I hope that his passing brings a reminder to all of us to live with unconditional aloha for our family, friends, kamaaina and malihini,” Jardin wrote. “May his legacy of aloha and hospitality live on through the many lives that he touched.”

Almodova also served as a father figure for many kids growing up on the Westside, and had words of advice to share along with a few jokes.

“I think what Dad told me was, ‘Go to school. Don’t worry about boys — boys will always be there. Go to school first,’” Ashley said. “I think he still says that to kids today.”

Rapozo, who first met Almodova when he returned home to Kauai after college, said the Hanapepe resident was “the last person I know of who knew my Hawaiian grandfather.”

“It was a pleasure to sit and talk to him about my papa, and it was a connection to my childhood,” Rapozo wrote in an email. “Although I will miss Uncle Louis, I am happy that he is now with his beloved wife who he truly loved and missed.”

Councilwoman JoAnn Yukimura said she met Almodova when she made her first run for public office in the late 1970s, and valued his words of encouragement.

“He was an icon and a much beloved figure by both residents and visitors,” Yukimura said. “He just took care of people and made people laugh — he gave encouraging words and told funny jokes. He was very beloved in the community and we’re all going to miss him very much.”

Gale Sagucio, owner of JJ Ohana, said she remembers when Almodova used to sit outside her store during Hanapepe Art Nights on Friday and talk to tourists from all over the world as they walked along Hanapepe Road.

“He was so special to everybody, I think,” Sagucio said. “On Friday nights, he used to come out and play his ukulele and talk to the visitors, so he made them feel welcome with his aloha spirit.”
Dickie Chang said he has known Almodova since he started his “Walaau” television show in the mid-1990s, and recalled how generous and humble he was to everyone, even politicians.

“He allowed politicians, including me, to put their signs in front of his house just because I think he wanted to be helpful to everybody,” Chang recalled. “I don’t think it had anything to do with issues — I think he just wanted to be kind to everybody. He just never said no.”

One of Chang’s most enduring memory of Almodova occurred on the day he died. As Chang drove past Almodova’s home on New Year’s Eve, he recalled seeing a big American flag posted outside of the house — an act his family said he would regularly do.

“He was definitely an ambassador of aloha,” Chang said. “He must have met thousands of people every year who used to come and see him, and if he wasn’t at Salt Pond, a lot of people used to drive to his house. I used to drive to his house just to talk story with him — the door was always open and he was humble to everybody.”

Almodova is preceded in death by his wife, Alice Almodova, who died in 2003 after 59 years of marriage.

He is survived by son Don Almodova of Eleele and daughters Geraldine Yamamoto of Hanapepe, Sandi MacDonald of Cuenca, Ecuador, and Pat Ashley of Honolulu. He is also survived by nine grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren.

Visitation with family will be held from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. on Saturday at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Kalaheo with Mass to follow.

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We are all Seeds

SUBHEAD: Seeds and soil vs the tyranny of corporatism. A message of hope in the Year of the Soil.

By Jon Queally on 1 January 2015 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/01/01/seeds-and-soil-vs-tyranny-corporate-power-2015-message-hope)


Image above: Image plants growing in healthy soil. From (http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/recommended-reading-for-the-un-international-year-of-soils-2015).

It has been declared 'the International Year of the Soil,' but the year ahead, according to Dr. Vandana Shiva, will also see key developments in the global fight to overthrow corporate power with true democracy

Last year, the United Nation's Food and Agricultural Organization officially declared that 2015 would be celebrated as the International Year of the Soil citing the threat to one of the key ingredients to the planet's food and farming systems posed by "expanding cities, deforestation, unsustainable land use, pollution, overgrazing and climate change."

Though many recognize the FAO declaration as a largely symbolic gesture, many advocates of organic food and sustainable agricultural are planning to seize the designation as a way to push forth their message that the health of the planet's soil should not be relegated as a metaphorical issue, but rather one that should be at the very heart of serious conversations and policy changes humanity must begin in order to transform its economic systems, its democracies, the way it generates power, and the way it feeds itself.

Summarizing the issues at stake and the fight ahead, one of the world's most prominent advocates for democracy and organic agriculture, Dr. Vandana Shiva, an Indian activist and founder of the seed-saving organization Navdanya, has posted an impassioned New Years message to those battling on behalf of food sovereignty, economic egalitarianism, agroecology, climate action, and social justice.

In the video posted to the website of Seed Freedom, Shiva applauded all those who have stood up for the the rights of people and Mother Earth against the greed and disregard perpetrated by corporate power and the neoliberal economic model which is ravaging economies, human rights, and the planet's ability to sustain life.

Looking back on 2014, Shiva celebrated that it was a year in which the phrase 'We Are All Seeds' rang out in resonance aross the world and described how "for a while we might lie underground, but at the right moment we germinate and burst forth with our full potential."

At the dawn of 2015, however,  she welcomed global activists to look forward to this coming 'Year of the Soil' and called it a year that will commemorate "earthiness... groundedness... [and] rootedness" of individuals and organizations that make up the global movement for climate, economic, and social justice.

The year ahead, she said, will be a year in which the seeds—"of hope and love" and "of abundance and creativity"—that activists and well-meaning citizens from around the world have sown and will sow, shall be political and cultural seeds that "will multiply and show the way forward."

"In the Year of the Soil," Shiva continues, "let us celebrate the connections between Mother Earth and ourselves. We are, afterall, made of the earth. We are made of soil."

She said, "In the seed and the soil we find the answers to every one of the crises we face. The crisis of violence and war; the crisis of hunger and disease; the crisis of the destruction of democracy. We will not allow corporations to allow everyone to believe that they are persons. Corporations are legal constructions—that's where their place is.

People, through democratic processes,  give permission to what sort of business activity is sustainable, what business activity is equitable, what business activity respects, with dignity, the life of this planet, the life of all beings, and the lives of all human beings."

Shiva cited recent lawsuits filed by corporations against places like Vermont and Maui, Hawaii for citizen-led efforts to ban GMO crops or label GMO ingredients as examples of an illusionary charade in which business interests masquerade as people.

The movement she is speaking to, she said, will instead "create a reality in which reality rules—the reality of the living ecological processes of the planet." She offered that such a reality would be shaped by the ordinary lives of citizens by democratic rule, not fabricated by corporate pr campaigns and disinformation.

The challenge of fighting for true democracy, according to Shiva, "is going to be the single biggest challenge throughout 2015."

Within that challenge and amid the context of the 'Year of Soil' ahead, Shiva finally reminded her listeners that it is organic farming and ecological agriculture (frequently called agroecology) which offers the "answer to the havoc that's being created by fossil fuels." Quoting from her book, Soil Not Oil, Shiva argued that "in the soil lies the answer to the problems oil has created" across the planet.

"The joint crises of climate change and biodiversity erosion can both be addressed by planting gardens everywhere—full of biodiversity; full of the celebration of life, well-being, and abundance.

Gardens of hope everywhere. Farms that give real food. We will continue to create the other world that we are sowing—seed by seed, inch-by-inch of soil, person by person, community by community—until all of this planet is embraced in one circle of a resurgent life and resurgent love. We will not give up."


Video above: "We Are All Seeds" - A New Year message from Dr. Vandana Shiva. From original article and (http://youtu.be/fX5jsq74fAo).


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Why We Farm

SUBHEAD: The drama of discovering a goose is laying her first egg, that quickly becomes a clutch of twelve.

By Brian Miller on 25 December 2014 for Winged Elm Farm -
(http://www.wingedelmfarm.com/blog/2014/12/25/merry-christmas-why-we-farm/)


Image above: A brown goose tending her eggs. From (http://www.jrcompton.com/photos/The_Birds/J/Apr-07.html).

A night deep in January, I’m lying on my side in six inches of snow, the temperature at 3 degrees. I have a heat gun in my hand and have been trying for 30 minutes to thaw out the well pump.

The little electric pump sits on top of the well shaft and pulls the water up and pushes it on to the house. The pipe has frozen at the juncture before it reenters the ground. The epiphany comes when the ice audibly breaks and the water flows. I lie back in the snow and think,

What a lucky man.

Riding through the woods on the tractor on an early spring morning, redbuds and dogwoods in bloom. Delicate wood sorrel and rustic little brown jugs scattered across the lane. I have eight hours of work with the chainsaw ahead of me.

Lunch taken in the shade of the tractor. Both Lefty and Tip grovel at my feet, doggy grins displayed, hoping to be favored with yesterday’s pizza. I finish the day dragging felled trees to a central brush pile, then head home. Back through the woods, the evening light, as peaceful as the morning’s, signals a slowing down.

Next morning, I head back out. Enjoy the sheer pleasure of turning out the cattle onto a pasture of rich spring grass. Another day, this time spent repairing the fencing the trees have dragged down. Lunch, again under the tractor, of leftover chicken, cooked to what my friend Jack refers to as “mahogany brown.”

What we call burnt, and delicious whatever the nomenclature. I finish the new fencing. The cattle are content and well secured. Again, the fields, the lane through the woods, and I’m home.

A Better Spring: The delight in hearing that first peep under ruffled feathers. The goose telegraphs the event 24 hours prior by spreading out over the nest like a hovering angel. Hearing or feeling, she knows the time is near.

Catching glimpses, I count six goslings. With long-sleeved shirts to protect from bites, Cindy gingerly pulls the goslings from underneath. We place them in the brooder.

Or, the drama of discovering a goose is laying her first egg, that quickly becomes a clutch of twelve. The snake-like hiss of the goose on her nest.

The gander aggressively signals your immigrant status in his world. Noting the calendar day that begins the 30-day march to goslings. The real sense of sadness as the hatch day passes and inexplicably nothing arrives. A note of betrayal in the goose’s voice as we shovel up her eggs and consign them to the burn barrel.

The gander—we call him Uncle—takes up a guarding position outside the cage. Regardless of parentage, he is the chosen sentinel. He will stay by the goslings’ side for the next three months. He has developed a style of fighting that would be quite effective against children, and is against dogs.

Flapping his wings, he levitates off the ground. Hissing, stationary, he signals his determination to protect and serve.

Midnight skies, a flock of wild turkeys heard but not seen on the opposing ridge, the uncontrollable spread of wild mint, the loveliness of peach trees in bloom, the muscle ache from setting 30 fence posts. The giddy delight in admiring our equipment shed, the morning sun throwing a splash of color through the Victorian stained glass window in the tack room.

Collecting persimmons from a wild tree to make beer, not knowing or caring what it will taste like. Breathing in the smell of hay drying in the field, gentling a rooster before butchering, approaching cautiously as I move an irascible bull.

Buzzards in a tree dreamed up by Tim Burton, staring at me sweating in the garden in eager expectation.

The barn at 3 in the morning as Daisy calves.

And still we get the question?

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The Peak Oil Crisis

SUBHEAD: Perhaps 2014 will someday be recognized as the all-time high for global oil production .

By Tom Whipple on 31 December 2014 for Falls Church News -
(http://fcnp.com/2014/12/31/the-peak-oil-crisis-2/)


Image above: Uncle Sam shooting up oil. From (http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/the-cost-of-blunting-peak-oil/).

I know that it is getting harder all the time to believe that there really is a “peak oil crisis” lurking out there waiting to engulf our civilization and create all sorts of havoc.  Nearly every day now oil and gasoline prices are falling. We are forever told that America is on the verge of independence from foreign energy sources; that the world has decades of whatever we are burning left to burn; and climate change is something for the great-great-grandchildren to worry about. In the last five months, oil prices have fallen 40 dollars a barrel so that we Americans now have about $800 million dollars more each day to spend on something other than oil products. To top it all off, those folks whose governments don’t like us very much — Russia, Iran, Venezuela for example — are really hurting as they slide into deeper economic troubles.

Leaving aside for the moment the possibility that some exotic and as yet not fully understood source of energy will emerge in the near future, saving us from climate change, reviving the global economy, and allowing us to fly further into space, the evidence is very strong that we are still on the verge of a crisis. In fact we probably are already in it and just don’t recognize it for what it is. It is a lot easier to blame troubles on high taxes or government regulation than to admit that shortages of natural resources are driving up prices and/or cutting growth.

It is now generally accepted by those actually studying the issue that production of “conventional oil,” which is what the early “peakists” were talking about 10 or 15 years ago, really did stop growing back in about 2005-2008. Since then official “oil” production numbers have continued to climb slowly, but included in the “official” numbers as put out by the US and international agencies is not all your grandfather’s oil. Instead the compilers of our oil statistics have learned to lump all sorts of liquid hydrocarbons of varying utility together and tell us that oil in the form of “all liquids” continues to grow. Now these hydrocarbons such as natural gas liquids, biofuels, tar sands, and shale oil have uses, but they either cost considerably more to produce than conventional oil, or do not have the same energy content as conventional oil. In at least one case, “refinery gains” which are sort of like whipping up a pint of cream into gallons of whipped cream, have no additional energy in their expanded state at all. They simply fill more barrels and let us pretend we have more energy to use than we actually do.

While the financial press continues to chatter endlessly about the technological breakthroughs that have brought us millions of barrels of new shale oil, sadly they have the basics of the story wrong. It is the high prices that “oil” has been selling for in the last ten years, not the decades-old fracking technology that has allowed very expensive shale oil to be produced that is new. Even with the recent $40 per barrel price decline, oil is still selling for four times what it was going for 12 or 13 years ago. It is the surge in prices to circa $100 a barrel has allowed very expensive oil such as that from fracked shale wells, the Canadian tar sands, and deep offshore oil wells to be produced; now with oil selling for closer to $70 a barrel the question is how long oil that is no longer economic to produce will keep being extracted. The other question is just how much of our oil supply is in danger of being mothballed until prices climb again as they surely will.

The reason for the current fall in prices is still in debate. The “oil” supply has continued to creep up in recent years, but starting last June the demand for $100+ oil was no longer there. While demand in the “rich” OECD countries has been down since the 2008 oil price spike, this year it seems to be the slowing Chinese economy and its reduced demand for raw materials that has been behind the sinking demand. Many of the developing economies have been growing and using more oil each year due to growing trade with the Chinese.

Someday conventional wisdom will conclude that oil at circa $100+ a barrel was simply too much to sustain high rates of economic growth and so the growth fell taking oil demand along with it. As nearly every action has a reactive feedback, we now are likely to see some sort of economic revival in those countries that have had to import a large share of their energy during the time of higher prices. Conversely the many states that have benefited from having large quantities of excess oil to export will not be doing so well for a while.

Where we are going from here is of course the question of the day. It currently looks as if oil prices will continue to fall a bit more. The Saudis say they expect $60 a barrel will be the equilibrium place. If this happens in the next few months, then we clearly will see a reduction in the drilling for high-cost to produce oil. In the case of fracked shale oil, which requires constant drilling just to  keep production even, this means we could see a reduction in output next year despite the protestations of many shale oil drillers that this will not happen.

Should US shale oil production actually fall next year, then global “all liquids” production could fall too.  

A few astute analysts are already mulling whether just perhaps 2014 will someday be recognized as the all-time high for global oil production or in other words “peak oil.” 

It is still years too early to pronounce that an all-time peak in what we now call “all liquids” has occurred, but it is an interesting thought.  The situation may just be worse than it seems.

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