Who would the world elect?
Meaningless, but fun…
Guardian: food security perfect storm “appears to be gathering force”
The Guardian today has a lengthy piece by John Vidal on “the looming food crisis”:
A “perfect storm” of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering force, threatening vast numbers of people with food shortages and price rises. Even as the world’s big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals [in order to grow crops for biofuels instead], the global population is rising by 87 million people a year; developing countries such as China and India are switching to meat-based diets that need more land; and climate change is starting to hit food producers hard. Recent reports in the journals Science and Nature suggest that one-third of ocean fisheries are in collapse, two-thirds will be in collapse by 2025, and all major ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. “Global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record this year. Outside of wartime, they have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer,” says the US Department of Agriculture.
We first posted on this subject on Global Dashboard back in March, and Vidal’s right to be worried. Here’s a link to the one page table we published a few months back showing how the major scarcity trends reinforce one another – and how it’s absolutely the issue of food security we really need to be worrying about.
What’s alarming isn’t just the scale of the challenge, but the extent to which managing it requires a degree of policy coherence both within and between governments that just isn’t there.
Greece aflame
Greece from space (hat-tip: NASA).
Meanwhile, John Robb at 4GW blog Global Guerrillas is saying that
…according to my Greek sources, most of the fires have been set around the country’s biggest electricity plants. So the potential for a cascading cycle of damage, where the fires knock out electricity production which in turn hampers relief is in the offing. If this is true, on the cheap systems disruption on a strategic scale may have made it’s debut in a modern country. The returns on investment on this attack are going to be amazing and it looks like the loss in legitimacy the current government is suffering will decide the upcoming election.
Fourth generation warfare on the Jon Stewart Show. No, really…
Unreal. On Thursday night’s Jon Stewart show in the US, one of the guests was Lt. Col. John Nagl – one of the leading US military experts on counter-insurgency and fourth generation warfare (link here). Following his appearance, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual – of which he’s a co-author – leapt into the top 100 books on Amazon. As John Robb on Global Guerrillas put it:
Wow, the Petraeus information operations media machine is amazing (and this is a great example). Nod of respect to the masterful way in which the Petraeus team has been able to influence the public’s perception of this war — the essence of which was a shift towards marketing the Iraq leadership as both competent and brilliant.
C.f. David Kilcullen doing the rounds of the blogosphere engaging the commentariat directly…
Chertoff for Attorney General
Well, that’s the rumour doing the round on various American blogs today, anyway. Here’s the gossip at US News:
The buzz among top Bushies is that beleaguered Attorney General Alberto Gonzales finally plans to depart and will be replaced by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Why Chertoff? Officials say he’s got fans on Capitol Hill, is untouched by the Justice prosecutor scandal, and has more experience than Gonzales did, having served as a federal judge and assistant attorney general.
That said, Steven Benen is a naysayer on this one:
Color me skeptical. I don’t doubt that if Bush were willing to replace Gonzales, he’d probably pick someone who stood a good chance of being confirmed, but I think it’s probably an overstatement to suggest Chertoff is popular among lawmakers. Indeed, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has already called on Chertoff to resign.
And while it’s certainly true that Chertoff is untainted by Gonzales’ multiple DoJ scandals, he is tainted by his own DHS scandals, including the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, his “gut feeling” fiasco, and some controversial staffing decisions.
Regardless, that’s the rumor. Take it with a grain of salt.