Shaving Near A C Section

Finally the truth

Even as one of the principal architects of the Iraq war washes His hands of the whole bloody mess, there is still only a vague understanding of the real reason behind the invasion, But evidence of the intense interest of the international Continues to build oil companies. Only last week, ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson said in London: "We look forward to the day when we can partner with Iraq to develop that resource potential." Despite their interest and influence, however, the decision to attack was not taken in the boardroom. Iraq was indeed all about oil, but in a sense that transcends the interests of individual corporations, however large.
The elephant in the drawing room was the fact that global oil production is likely to peak within about a decade. Aggregate oil production in the developed world has been falling since 1997, and all major forecasters expect world output excluding Opec to peak by the middle of the next decade. From then on everything depends on the cartel, but unfortunately there is growing evidence that Opec's members have been exaggerating the size of their reserves for decades.

Oil consultancy PFC Energy briefed Dick Cheney in 2005 that on a more realistic assessment of Opec's reserves, its production could peak by 2015. A report by the US Department of Energy, also in 2005, concluded that without a crash programme of mitigation 20 years before the event, the economic and social impacts of the oil peak would be "unprecedented". The evidence suggests these fears were already weighing heavily with Cheney, Bush and Blair.

In a world of looming shortage, Iraq represented a unique opportunity. With 115bn barrels, it had the world's third biggest reserves, and after years of war and sanctions they were the most underexploited. In the late 1990s, production averaged about 2m barrels, but with the necessary investment its reserves could support three times that. In a report to the security council, UN inspectors warned in January 2000 that sanctions had caused irreversible damage to Iraq's reservoirs. But sanctions could not be lifted with Saddam still in place.

Cheney knew, fretting about global oil depletion in a speech in London the following year, where he noted that "the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies". Blair too had reason to be anxious: British North Sea output had peaked in 1999, while the petrol protests of 2000 had made the importance of maintaining the fuel supply excruciatingly obvious.

Britain's and the US's fears were secretly formalised during the planning for Iraq. It is widely accepted that Blair's commitment to support the attack dates back to his summit with Bush in Texas in April 2002. What is less well known is that at the same summit, Blair proposed and Bush agreed to set up the US-UK Energy Dialogue, a permanent liaison dedicated to "energy security and diversity". Its existence was only later exposed through a freedom of information inquiry.

Both governments refuse to release minutes of Dialogue meetings, but one paper dated February 2003 notes that to meet projected demand, oil production in the Middle East would have to double by 2030 to more than 50m barrels a day. So on the eve of the invasion, UK and US officials were discussing how to raise production from the region - and we are invited to believe this is coincidence. The bitterest irony is, of course, that the invasion has created conditions that guarantee oil production will remain hobbled for years to come, bringing the global oil peak that much closer. So if that was plan A, what on earth is plan B?

· David Strahan is the author of The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man

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Europe Piagnoni

Curiosiamo nel web e troviamo un
giornalista della Bbc (della Bbc!) da
mesi in ostaggio degli islamisti, imprigionato
da una cintura esplosiva. Clicchiamo
e c’è la voce del caporale Shalit,
humiliated and offended by a year in prison
who blasphemes the name of your
gracious and merciful God. The
fragile and a bit 'fatuous Salman Rushdie is still under
fatwa, and we have pointed out when he became a baronet of

queen. Robert Redeker
semi-clandestine lives. Gaza is in the hands of a bunch of murderers
called
Hamas, supported actively by qaidisti
al Zawahiri. Hamas said it was
by realists of our boots that needed
cuddle, especially after
their electoral victory, because they would become good
,
had to think about the complexity of the problem, the
real, welfare, and
desperation of a people, we had to finance them,
treat, and in the meantime
hundreds of dead killed by tribal methods
unprecedented, with religious ferocity, as
was for Fatah al Islam in Lebanon, a
bell'eccidio
among Muslims until the rendering of six English soldiers.
But we take care of our
good conscience, do not recognize the
state of international war, we are ridiculously
divided in Afghanistan
only hear the complaining that the West does not fight
(Italy in the first line in
complaining) , to cover the noise of
battle against the Taliban, who now will recover
their hospitals by Gino Strada. The West-
€
humanitarian who is kidnapped, take off, blackmail, which philosophizes
on the faults of Israel's unilateral withdrawal
, who does not notice
burning of synagogues, Christian
hunted and martyred, by which time '
other side every time you need to look reality in the face
, and tolerate the shame of the Islamist war
deployed,
not only deserves criticism or
loving compassion for the destiny that chose
: deserves the contempt

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The best news of the year, the cost of PV down more and more go to jail

The production costs of photovoltaic cells are collapsing, and so in the coming years, the solar become a 'mainstream option' for the production of electricity. It supports the Worldwatch Institute in Washington in a document drawn up together with the Prometheus Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and released a couple of weeks ago. Interestingly, even as the climate issue on the agenda of world leaders - fighting the abnormal warming of the atmosphere means ridure gas emissions, "greenhouse" such as carbon dioxide, emitted in combustion processes and especially when we burn fossil fuels, thus producing more energy alternatives to oil (and renewable). The sun's energy is one of the ideal alternative. And though a bit 'costs, a bit 'the political will, ensure that by the time the solar panel option remains minor. At least the first
alibi, however, the cost begins to fail. In fact, production costs have already dropped a lot compared to twenty or thirty years ago, and now we see a collapse. Only since 2000 the PV industry has grown six times, and grew by 41% in 2006 alone. It is true that solar electricity networks still represents less than 1% of the world, but in 2006 increased by 50%, notes the Worldwatch. (As an aside it should be noted that the production of solar energy comes in the networks because it will be on a tiny scale for a consumer located in remote places: the panel next to the house of a village in the Amazon carries the electricity to where they will never get the cable distribution network, but does not enter into calculations. For "isolated users," let's call them, solar energy is not alternative but the only possible). But back to the production recorded in networks: driving the boom are Germany and Japan, and Spain will enter the group this year (thanks to its new solar power plant) and the United States followed closely.
So far, notes Worldwatch, growth was limited by a shortage of industrial production of purified polysilicon, which is necessary for photovoltaic cells (the same semiconductor material at the base of the electronics industry, but in 2006 for the first time more than half of the polysilicon product in the world has been used to make photovoltaic cells). This will change over the next two years, when they come into production over a dozen producers of polysilicon in Europe, China, Japan and the USA. The increased availability, together with new advances in technology will lower costs by 40% over the next three years, according to estimates Prometheus Institute. Here, as in many other areas, pushing costs down, in particular, is China with its thirst for energy, the wide availability of labor and its strong industrial base. The biggest news of 2006 was the growth in production capacity in China, which overtook the United States (home of the first modern solar cell, produced by Bell Labs in the 50s): China now has the third largest producer of solar cells, after Germany and Japan. Producing the first Chinese company, Suntech Power, was the eighth largest producer in 2005 and fourth in 2006 (and its president has become one of the richest Chinese).
Meanwhile, the shortage of raw materials (polysilicon) has led manufacturers to use it more efficiently, thereby speeding up the emergence of technologies that do not rely on purified polysilicon and are even cheaper, so-called thin cells made amorphous silicon and other cheaper materials. All this, concludes the Worldwatch Institute, indicates that the PV is becoming a viable and competitive option for generating electricity without emitting carbon dioxide. I'll have even the Italian planners will take note, since we are in the bottom places ...

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remains a mystery how the country that wants the champion of freedom in the world has changed in society over the prison planet. In the early 70s the United States had a percentage of prisoners than the entire population, comparable to that of Western Europe, but today there is practiced the largest ever recorded in internment a parliamentary democracy. In 2004 about one hundred thousand people there were seven hundred and sixty prisoners, against the forty-Japan, eighty of France, Italy ninety-four. In the U.S., that is, there are sixteen times more prisoners than in Japan and eight times more than in Italy. Only the post-Cold War Russia has comparable numbers: seven hundred and thirty prisoners every hundred thousand inhabitants. If you add to them who is on parole for good behavior or, in the U.S. monitored the total exceeded 4.3 million people in 1990 and seven million in 2004. That is, at any time in the United States more than three hundred adults are caught in the net of justice.
not surprising that the subject arouses the curiosity of journalists and researchers. Almost always prevails a sociological look like in the book by a disciple of Pierre Bourdieu, Loïc Wacquant (Punishing the poor). This contrasts with the perspective of Elizabeth the Great who, while reviewing all aspects of American carcerizzazione, look at the phenomenon from an angle less traveled and asks what are the mechanisms for investigation, litigation and legal proceedings that have sent so many people behind the bars. The title of his book The third strike. The prison in America (with a note of Adriano Sofri; Sellerio, pp. 168, € 15) points out that provision, approved by an overwhelming majority for the first referendum in California and then in other states, so that the third sentence, even for minor offenses, automatically results in life sentence: three strikes and you are out. At the third "hit" they close the cell and 'throw away the key. "
Elizabeth Large reports horrific cases: for example, a man sentenced to life imprisonment (with the proviso that can not get out on parole after serving fifty years before) for stealing nine videotapes worth from one hundred and fifty dollars, just because he had previous theft and transportation of marijuana, or another recidivist punished with life imprisonment for stealing a piece of meat valued at $ 5 and 62 cents (4.19 euro) plus that was used to feed the handicapped brother and mother Both hungry because the board of the latter was lost in the mail.
What has been lost on the street is the idea that punishment should be proportionate to the seriousness of the offense. In this regard, the book uses a legal term often evocative: it speaks of bagatellari crimes, follies of life imprisonment. It is distraught that the very notion of judicial punishment and is not even the hypocrisy of bourgeois penalty as a means of orthopedic, through the redemption that punish that Michel Foucault has dissected in a masterly way. If they could, the judges would like their U.S. colleagues of the colonial powers of yesteryear, will ship held in Cayenne or Siberia.
Elisabetta Grande follows the meanders court the accumulation of small devices that combined crowd the prisons. Two examples. One is based on the idea that the truth of the case should be decided by battle between defense and prosecution during the trial. But good lawyers because they charge by the three hundred thousand dollars for each hour of work, deprived the defendants can receive only a defense motion that is performed by inexperienced lawyers or in decline, overwhelmed by a huge amount of work and paid a poverty: "In Georgia, in 2002, three lawyers from the same family are represented in court for 776 poor people accused in an average cost of $ 49.86 (€ 37.21) ... Also in Georgia, a lawyer appointed to defend the court found 94 defendants in the same day. " The weakness of the defense motion makes it easier for prosecutors to condemn the poor, and then fill out the list of winners of their convictions, necessary to launch his political career. For the same reason, defenders tend to abuse the office of plea bargaining, plea bargain before trial, with admission of guilt in case of innocence: a better reduction of sentences that the lottery process. Hence the increase in the number of repeat offenders, and then of those who fall into the nightmare of the third strike. The number of prisoners becomes an independent variable that has nothing to do with the number and seriousness of the crimes actually committed, but rather is related to the rate of anxiety "Securitarian" that the media and politicians are able to instill in the public opinion.
The "great internment" American (to borrow another key term in Foucault) as follows by a perverse mix between the media system and representative democracy, and the specificity of the racist connotation of all U.S. detention.
The fact and law and order is first of all white law to bring order among blacks that although only 12.5 percent (one out of eight) of the population but account for almost half (one in two) of American prisoners, so that the detention is an almost inevitable rite of passage for a young black man raised in an urban ghetto. The effects on American society are outlandish and inconceivable: for example, this rate of imprisonment has reintroduced polygamy in urban ghettos, because black women have to share the few males out of the bars.
What an excellent book by Elizabeth Large can not do is predict the long-term incarceration as a huge produce the fabric of American society. Of course it is a strange society in which the correction (as they call themselves the companies involved) is one of the leading sectors of the economy: the judicial system employs 2.3 million people in 2001 and fight crime has cost the U.S. one hundred sixty-seven billion dollars, three times and a half times more than nineteen years earlier. Elisabetta Grande notes worried that other countries (especially those of the Commonwealth) are following the U.S. on the same street. I do not know if postmodern theorists had in mind also that involution concentration camp.
PS. Publishers and editors should Adriano Sofri to defend himself, even when it exposes the thesis, it shall then make a surplus of hatred that does a disservice to his intelligence. Here in the initial note rightly argues that the law ex-Cirielli shows that Italy is being Americanized. But why to say it must do before a shot sull'antiamericanismo any discourse on prisons and then joined the U.S. anti-Semitism? Maybe that analyze the rise of Silvio Berlusconi is a symptom of anti-Italian? Here too we observe a perverse effect: the legal persecution suffered by Sofri and supported by the right, has paradoxically led to a hatred towards the left, perhaps it should take longer to brake.