$1 = 7.8275 Now

Rand slightly softer at midday

THE rand was softer by midday on Friday in what dealers said was a
continuation of the recent trend and seemed unrelated to President Thabo Mbeki’s
State of the Nation address at Parliament.
The rand hit a 16-month worst
level of R7,86 against the dollar yesterday.

More.

Eat Meat At The Expense of Many

“Meat feeds few at the expense of many...”

10kg of vegetable protein produce 1 kg of meat.
900 l of water are needed to produce 1 kg of wheat.
100 000 l water are needed to produce 1 kg meat.

Furthermore, there is a quote from “Diet for a Small Planet” where the author, Frances Moore Lappe, asks the reader to visualise sitting down to eat a large steak. "Then imagine the room filled with 45 to 50 people with empty bowls in from of them. For the ’feed cost’ of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a full cup of cooked cereal grains.”

“...food experts point out that the world hunger problem is artificial. Even now, we are already producing more than enough food for everyone on the planet - but we are allocating it wastefully.”

Meanwhile in financial news:

52,000.00 KRW = 400.148 ZAR

Kunstler: Right Now

Right Now
I got a letter last week from a reader complaining bitterly that the stock market hasn't crashed and blaming me for predicting that it would. He didn't say, but I hope he hadn't been out there on a shorting spree. In case any of you haven't noticed, 2007 is not over yet.

The markets have been on an extraordinary spring run. The Dow finished 23 out of the best 26 days on the upside -- some of them pretty way on the upside. This is the biggest US stock market up-streak since a 19 for 21 streak in July of 1929, prior to the October crash. Bill Fleckenstein points out a similar run on the Tokyo exchange -- 32 upside trading days out of 38 -- just prior to its 1989 tanking.

While this kind of behavior seems ominous, I'm not claiming it necessarily has predictive value. One can say that the financial markets per se are running in an impressive state of structural distortion and imbalance and that systems way out of balance do not stay that way forever. But I risk more opprobrium by stating the obvious.

I think the persistence of this gross imbalance can be accounted for in large part by the current global energy situation. The world is at peak energy, peak oil especially, and the world runs on oil. Peak is peak. The most. There are about 84 million barrels of oil a day flowing around the industrial economies of the world. It is running a lot of activity.

Now, I happen to think that oil production probably peaked about a year ago, but we are still so close to it that the net available energy remains immense. Even if 2007 averages out to 83.5 million barrels a day instead of 84 million, it will still seem like a lot. Markets may be dumber than we think. All they see is a vast amount of cheap energy for manufacturing plastic salad shooters, for powering tourist jet charters to Cancun, for running WalMart, Walt Disney World, and Taco Bell. All that energy is here right now.

Among the many tragic elements in the human condition is this tendency toward short-term thinking, the inability to imagine how our arrangements will work in a time that is not right now.
Interestingly, the main effect of post-peak oil on markets and economies is that it will produce shocking instabilities in complex systems dependent not just on the energy itself, but on the expectation for continuity of the energy. Financial markets are especially sensitive because they operate on sheer expectations. The Dow Jones doesn't manufacture salad shooters, or haul tourists to the Mexican beaches, or build suburban houses. It just relays a dumb signal that says "we expect more" and investors respond. The trouble will start when the signal changes to "we don't expect more." That moment will be when the recognition of peak oil galvanizes the public's attention. It will manifest as a simple societal binary switching mechanism. When that happens, the markets will exhibit the dumb herd behavior that they are famous for.

Of course, I have argued previously that the stupendous run-ups of market indexes themselves represent a kind of instability (those distortions and imbalances), as do also the supernatural flows of "liquidity" -- notional money extended to investors for harvesting future notional profits -- and I would stick to that observation. After all, if the world is "high" on oil -- and I would argue that it is zonked out of its mind -- then it would naturally spring way up off the diving board before swan-diving into the empty pool below.

Me, I'm keeping my eye on things like the production figures coming out of Mexico, the North Sea, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They're all sliding down. Mexico is especially interesting because it is our Number 3 source of oil imports and its production is crashing so hard that a couple of years from now it may not be able to send us a single drop of oil. What do you think of that? Maybe the Walton family will buy Iowa so they can keep WalMart running on ethanol.

Meanwhile, US oil refineries are running above 90 percent production capacity to keep up with the gasoline demand for Happy Motoring. The stress on these complex operations is unprecedented. It gives them no slack time for routine repairs. The results are liable to interesting, too, between the Fourth of July and Labor Day.

From www.kunstler.com

Schizm

Take a careful look at this picture. It shows a soldier using a lever to pry open a crack. Not sure what the sign in the background says, but I'd guess it's Iran.

I was one of the few writers/bloggers/commentators, who decried the war in Iraq before it even started. I didn't support it from beginning, to middle, to now.

So let me be one of the first to say, I don't support the war in Iran. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: but there isn't a war in Iran.

We'll see. Russia has already pulled out its technicians. The drum beat has already started. I guess it's hard to understand or believe or imagine the inevitability of it if you don't understand the Vonnegut Imperative. That the future will be one where only some countries have petroleum.

I think only a handful of people know this. Meanwhile in South Africa oil has recently risen by the highest margin ever, and is set to rise again, by 30 cents.

When I mentioned this to my father, he mentioned the exchange rate. Ah, but it's not R7.70 to the $, it's R7.07. It's actually strengthened a little.

I've given my father books and articles to read, but he prefers not to read them. It's a common reaction. Because once we know where we stand, we realise there really is very little we can do, except expect things to get a lot worse in our lifetimes. Not a nice thought.

But perhaps, I hope, we can look forward to a world, at the very least, with more bicycles in it.

For more information on the War On Iran, click on the title of this Post.

Or follow this link: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20070405.htm