Sometimes a quotation is really all you need. This one is from the superintendent of police, in the tribal warfare area of central India.

“See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss: remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”
Gandhi, but with guns: Part One – Arundhati Roy

The problem, of course, is that multi-national raw material corporations want access to the minerals in the tribal jungles. You know, like the movie Avatar?

You can read part 2 here.

Google has a nice tool I just discovered, global population totals, the graphs run from 1960 to 2010, and you can select different countries, and compare them.

I was curious about just how much various countries had grown, now I know, and it’s quite intuitively designed and constructed as a tool.

For more precise information you can always use the CIA World Factbook site, which gives you easy access to CIA public information on each country listed. I always feel odd using this resource, the concept of ‘open’ and ‘CIA’ do not fit well together in my brain, but it’s still a very decently done resource.

I haven’t been tracking the financial stuff too much lately because… well honestly because it’s getting boring, we’re in the waiting period now before the next major bubble disruption occurs, which will be government debt/currency inflation.

But I’ve found some good articles lately anyway.

The financial system is fundamentally unsound because it depends critically on large connected financial institutions who have scaled up in a way that magnifies any localized financial problem into a systemic problem.
Edward Harrison, Why I’m Now Less Optimistic About Credit Crisis (SeekingAlpha.com)

This is a good read, well linked to other sources, one of the more interesting ones being The recession is over but the depression has just begun. I’d say that’s fairly self-explanatory. I liked this guy enough to add him to my links just on the basis of those two articles.

Then moving over to the old standby, PrudentBear.com, there was a slightly odd article, basically about how capitalism has to be controlled, regulated, and in some sectors, largely dismantled (finance for example). Weird stuff.
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Check out this nice overview, I think pretty accurate except for Jeff Rubin’s constant reasoning failure: ie, oil rises > 150, economies collapse, so I’m not sure where he gets the idea that the world will ever pay super high prices for oil, like > $200, that doesn’t follow at all from his analysis, unless you are promoting a long oil position I guess.

Lots of points here I’d guess most rabid denialists simply have never thought about, like bringing jobs back home, and so on.

With the required denials, a leak from the International Energy Administration (IEA) confirms that not only is that agency fully aware of peak oil, it is being pressured by the USA to deny it is here to avoid full spread panic.

• Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower
• Comments on Guardian article: “Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower”

Among some of the more choice quotes:

“The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year,” said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. “The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today’s number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.

“Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources,” he added.

A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was “imperative not to anger the Americans” but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. “We have [already] entered the ‘peak oil’ zone. I think that the situation is really bad,” he added.

And there you have it.

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