Is chess non-violent war?

Does the player who doesn’t make the last mistake usually win?

After the game

the king and pawn go into the same box

Italian proverb

The more captured opposing pieces the less risk

and vice versa

Do some football running backs fake left and go right

to mislead the defense to commit in the wrong direction?

All warfare is based on deception

…when able to attack we must seem unable

when using our forces we must seem inactive

when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far…

when far away, we must make him believe we are near

Sun Tzu

On Oil Production, Consumption and Light Sweet and Heavy Sour Crude

Before we started using it, there was about 76 cubic miles of oil on Earth,
or a sphere with a diameter of 5.26 miles, about as tall as the tallest mountain on Earth,
of which since 1859, we have consumed about half.

If Earth’s diameter is about 7,960 miles and the diameter of all the oil is about 5.26 miles,
and about half of it is gone, is less than ½ of 1% of Earth is made of oil?

In 2000, the difference between non-OPEC light sweet and sour crude oil production of 66 mb/d
was 41% light sweet and 59% sour.

mb/d = million barrels per day

From 2000 to 2004, non-OPEC light sweet production fell 3.26 mb/d, from 27.06 mb/d to 23.8 mb/d.

34% to 67%, light sweet to sour.
3. Oil producing nations export petroleum products only after domestic needs are met.

A ‘2000’ nation producing 5 mb/d, consuming 1.0 mb/d of light sweet can export 1.05 mb/d of light sweet. (41% light sweet production)

If a ‘2004’ nation’s total oil production increased 6% to 5.3 mb/d, like non-OPEC production above,
and total light sweet production dropped to 34% while domestic consumption rose to 1.1 mb/d,
then light sweet exports fell about 33.3%, to 0.7 mb/d.

If between 2000 and 2004, non-OPEC lost 3.26 mb/d as OPEC added 1 mb/d of light sweet,
did total global light sweet production fall to about 2.26 mb/d?
If total oil production rises or stays the same
while light sweet production falls while consumption rises in oil producing nations
and China and India…?

Monte Carlo

… a "Monte Carlo" simulation, commonly used in financial planning

estimates the odds of reaching retirement financial goals.

 

Though these tools typically run through hundreds or thousands of potential market scenarios,

they often assign minuscule odds to extreme market events.

 

Yet these extreme events seem to be happening more often.

 

If causes, actions or winners have effects, reactions or losers

and A is caused, allowed, accelerated, held back or prevented

is it better to pre-think what could happen to B, C and D

than not?

 

The questions about Monte Carlo tools

reflect broader concerns about mathematical models

for gauging portfolio risks

 

These models were supposed to help quantify and manage the risks

of...complex instruments

 

If achievement takes less time with a rational plan

can you get farther faster than those without

and vice versa?

 

But given the events of the past couple of years

it appears that the models often gave big institutions

as well as small investors, a false sense of security

 

Critics emphasize that the problem isn't Monte Carlo itself

but the assumptions that go into it

 

If some financial estimates and hypothetical illustrations

assume perpetual levels of varying data

can probability be manipulated?

 

Is the present you the only who

who’s going to care for the future you?

 

 

Since no standard approach exists

one user might plug in a range of assumptions on interest rates

inflation or volatility that is different from another user

 

Some industry participants and academics

are pushing for Monte Carlo tools to more clearly illustrate

the scarier scenarios

 

Eleanor Laise

The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2009

 

If there are at least 15,000 professional American Economists

and less than 1% foresaw the financial crisis

and many mathematical based financial prognostications

were relatively useless

which if left in place

could negatively affecting the future

should some try to fix what’s probably broken?

If 2008 was the first year the billions of people in China, India, Russia and the Middle East consumed more oil than the millions in the US, what should happen when demand exceeds supply?

The world consumes two barrels of oil for every barrel discovered.

 

…is this something you should be worried about?

 

Advertisement

 





Via The Oil Drum

If borrowing to pay for tax cuts helps an economy in the short run, do unpaid for tax cuts retard growth in the long run?

The Laffer Curve, anyone know what this says?

 

It says that at this point on the revenue curve

you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point…

 

Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980, anyone?

 

Something-d-o-o economics, voodoo economics.

 

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

 

Should higher interest rates and inflation

correlated to tax cuts and increased borrowing

eventually reduce tax revenue

following short term economic growth?

What does spending more than you make look like?

 Chart Via Business Insider

Does history rhyme?

If some lose their whole fortunes, they will drag many more down with them.

 

If those revenues are destroyed,

our whole system of credit will come down with a crash.

 

…The national budget must be balanced.

 

The public debt must be reduced.

 

The arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled.

 

Payments to foreign governments must be reduced

if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt.

 

People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.

 

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Roman Constitutionalist

Are rising financial markets in the best interests of the financial news industry?

 

Sales of new homes rose in February

for the first time in seven months

…another sign that the housing market is thawing

 

New-Home Sales Rise 4.7%

The Wall Street Journal

March 26, 2009

Why would a mainstream news story entitled

New-Home Sales Rise 4.7%

not mention year over year sales were down 41%

or that January 2009 new home sales fell 10%

to the lowest level since reporting began in 1963

48.2% below January 2008 estimates?

 

Who controls the past controls the future

 

Who controls the present controls the past

 

George Orwell

If $100 loses 50% and then rises 5%

how should most feel about having $52.50 instead of $100

after enduring conjured platitudes?

 

If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed

 

 If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed

 

Mark Twain

If capitalism is dependent on creative destruction, what is it without destruction?

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter
popularized and used the term to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation

 

…innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies

that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power

 

Creative Destruction

Wikipedia

 

If most economists still believe in the concepts that discounted the possibilities of the financial crisis, should economic policy rely on the same prognosticators who helped enable the worst financial distress since the Great Depression for economic tactics and forecasting?

 

The process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within,  incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one ...

 

[The process] must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction, it cannot be understood on the hypothesis that there is a perennial lull

 

Joseph Schumpeter

The Process of Creative Destruction, 1942

 

If the natural cycle of laissez faire capitalism revolves between risk and aversion, what should happen if government intervention perverts the process

to forestall short term economic pain?

 

What should the electorate expect

from leadership dependent on the status quo?

 

Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act

 

George Orwell

Don’t make bets you can’t afford to lose when confronting an opponent with unlimited resources who can arbitrarily change the rules.

I don't care if I follow your rules, if you can cheat, so can I.

 

 I won't let you beat me unfairly, I'll beat you unfairly first.

 

Ender Wiggin

Fictional Military Strategist

Geo-Politics and business is Zugzwang

Zugzwang…describes a situation where one player is put at a disadvantage because he has to make a move – the player would prefer to pass and make no move. The fact that the player must make a move means that his position will be significantly weaker than the hypothetical one in which it is his opponent's turn to move.

A player whose turn it is to move who has no move that does not worsen their position is said to be in zugzwang.

In a chess endgame, being in zugzwang usually means going from a drawn position to a loss or a won position to a draw, but it can be from a win to a loss, or a substantial loss of material which probably affects the outcome of the game.

Zugzwang
Wikipedia

I have studied the enemy all my life
 
I have read the memoirs of his generals and his leaders

I have even read his philosophers…

I have studied in detail the account of every damned one of his battles

I know exactly how he will react under any given set of circumstances
and he hasn’t the slightest idea of what I’m going to do

So when the time comes, I’m going to whip the hell out of him

George S Patton

On Resource War

Calling All Future-Eaters

The human species during its brief time on Earth has exhibited a remarkable capacity to kill itself off.

 The Cro-Magnons dispatched the gentler Neanderthals.

The conquistadors, with the help of smallpox, decimated the native populations in the Americas.

Modern industrial warfare in the 20th century took at least 100 million lives, most of them civilians.

...Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the "future-eaters."

In the past when civilizations went belly up through greed, mismanagement and the exhaustion of natural resources, human beings migrated somewhere else to pillage anew. But this time the game is over. There is nowhere else to go.

The industrialized nations spent the last century seizing half the planet and dominating most of the other half. We giddily exhausted our natural capital, especially fossil fuel, to engage in an orgy of consumption and waste that poisoned the Earth and attacked the ecosystem on which human life depends. It was quite a party if you were a member of the industrialized elite. But it was pretty stupid.

Collapse this time around will be global. We will disintegrate together. And there is no way out. The 10,000-year experiment of settled life is about to come to a crashing halt. And humankind, which thought it was given dominion over the Earth and all living things, will be taught a painful lesson in the necessity of balance, restraint and humility.
There is no human monument or city ruin that is more than 5,000 years old.

 Civilization, Ronald Wright notes in "A Short History of Progress," "occupies a mere 0.2 percent of the two and a half million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone."

..."Whether human beings would still be a force on the planet, or even survive, is a moot point," ...Clive Hamilton in his book "Requiem for a Species...writes. "One thing is certain: there will be far fewer of us."

We have fallen prey to the illusion that we can modify and control our environment, that human ingenuity ensures the inevitability of human progress and that our secular god of science will save us. The "intoxicating belief that we can conquer all has come up against a greater force, the Earth itself," Hamilton writes. 

...We face a terrible political truth. ...Decisions about the fate of the planet and human civilization are in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls...

...lobbyists make the laws. Their public relations firms craft the propaganda and trivia pumped out through systems of mass communication. Their money determines elections. Their greed turns workers into global serfs and our planet into a wasteland. ...They cannot be reformed or trusted.

...We will either defy the corporate elite...or see ourselves consumed.

Time is not on our side.

...The future, if we remain passive, will be wrested from us by events.

Chris Hedges
Common Dreams

How could US Senator Charles E. Schumer explain why he voted to charge each and every US child about $1,600 each to give New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg what could be about $295 million in Tax Cuts over two years?

If about 1,699,000 US households make more than $250,000, and their portion of the tax cuts is about $120 billion...?

If US congressman Darrell Issa is worth about $303 million and makes about 5% of his net worth per year, could he charge every US child $12,000 to vote himself about $1,387,836 in Tax Cuts over two years?

Could US Senator John Kerry charge every US child $12,000 to vote himself about $500,036 in Tax Cuts over two years?

If Britney Spears makes about $64 million per year, could she bring in another $5,876,704 from President Obama's Tax Deal over the next two years?

If Michael Bloomberg makes 5% per year on $20 billion, and pays half his taxes on long term capitol gaines and half on dividend interest, could he bring in an extra $295 million over two years with Obama's Tax Deal?

If Rush Limbaugh makes about $78 million per year, could Obama's Tax Deal give him about $15,324,704 more over the next two years?

If there are about 75 million kids in the United States of America, will congress and the president charge them $12,000 a piece to bail out the financial mismanagement of their parents?

Can any American legislator who votes for a $900 billion deficit increase run as a "fiscal conservative" in 2012?

How could some American legislators opposed to raising the debt ceiling, vote to increase the nation's deficit by $900 billion over 2 years?

Pork in the Tax Deal that will cost every American child $12,000

"The bill also now extends dozens of other expiring provisions, usually for a year or two. Among them: help for elementary and secondary school teacher expenses, those who employ people who work on or near Indian reservations, domestic film and television producers, economically depressed areas of Washington, D.C., and areas devastated by 2005's Hurricane Katrina.

"This is a great day for American workers," added Denise Bode, the chief executive officer of the American Wind Energy Association, after learning that the bill would extend a key investment tax credit for a year.

Many of the small breaks are for education and energy interests, which have strong constituencies on Capitol Hill. Seven breaks are education-related, while 11 deal with energy interests, affecting biodiesel and renewable diesel, refined coal, marginal oil and gas wells, and electronic transmission, as well as ethanol and alternative energy sources.

Next year, the same interests could return seeking another extension, said Williams of the Tax Policy Center — and that's what's troublesome about the system.

"In theory, extending these provisions for a year implies they'll look carefully at them next year," he said, "but they rarely do.""

David Lightman

Why should Americans believe the folks who missed it last time, for a strategy that is going to borrow about $12,000 per American child?

"...We should keep in mind President Obama's governing assumption about the economy,
which is that we are in a recovery that is just not proceeding as fast as we need it to.

...If his assumption is correct, a stimulus -- any stimulus,
even one he acknowledges is inadequate or based on the wrong kind of measure
-- that gets us through the next few months
 until the economy "turns around" and "gets moving again"
is a victory.

The problem comes about if it turns out
Obama's governing assumption about the economy is not correct.

In that case,
what he has just agreed to is a massive transfer of private sector debt to the public sector,
and a prolonged period that will see many millions of hitherto middle class Americans
in great economic distress while the federal government does nothing
-- beyond sending out unemployment checks...

The people advising Obama on economic affairs
did not think the financial crisis two years ago would be as bad as it was,
and did not foresee unemployment and underemployment rising to the levels we see today.

This does not guarantee they are wrong about a recovery that just hasn't moved fast enough.

Nor does the historical fact that recessions following asset price crashes
tend to take much longer to turn around than cyclical recessions
like those of twenty and thirty years ago.

The evidence, though, suggests that Obama's hopeful talk
about what the tax cut compromise means
contains a very large component of wishful thinking
-- not just about the politics, but also about the economy."

JB

"...Fed Chairman. Mr. Bernanke...delivered two massive distortions:"

"This past Sunday on the CBS program "60 Minutes", ...Fed Chairman. Mr. Bernanke...delivered two massive distortions:
 
Lie #1 - The Fed isn't printing money. Bernanke stated: "The amount of currency in circulation is not changing...the money supply is not changing in any significant way. What we're doing is lowering interest rates by buying Treasury securities." Given that it is the Treasury Department's Bureau of Engraving and Printing, not the Fed, that actually prints paper money, his statement is technically correct while substantively false. However, Bernanke is buying bank assets with Fed credit. With such an arrangement, printing becomes unnecessary.
 
...His stated purpose is to boost bond prices and lower yields in order to stimulate borrowing and aggregate demand. So pushing up bond prices is an act of inflation. Bernanke similarly contradicts himself by saying that he isn't creating inflation, while at the same time claiming that his easing campaign is designed to boost asset prices to combat the phantom of deflation.
 
...the Fed is causing money supply to increase significantly. The compounded annual growth rate of M2 is over 7% in the last quarter. Apparently in the eyes of the Chairman, a 7% annualized increase in the broad money supply isn't considered significant.
 
Lie #2- Bernanke is "100 % confident" that, when necessary, the Fed can control inflation and reverse its accommodative monetary policy. He stated, "We've been very, very clear that we will not allow inflation to rise above 2 percent. We could raise interest rates in 15 minutes if we have to. So, there really is no problem with raising rates, tightening monetary policy, slowing the economy, reducing inflation, at the appropriate time."
 
...In claiming he is 100% confident in his ability to control inflation, Mr. Bernanke ignores the record that during his tenure he has misdiagnosed the economy.
 
...Bernanke was completely unaware that the Fed actions had created an economy that had become completely addicted to artificially-produced low interest rates and inflation.
 
Shortly after the collapse of the real estate market and the ensuing truncated deflationary-depression, Bernanke took interest rates to near zero percent.
 
...the U.S. economy has become more addicted to free money than at any other time in our history.
 
Commodity prices are soaring once again and the real estate market, banking sector, and the overall economy cling precariously on the arm of government induced bailouts and low interest rates.
 
...our government has massively increased its level of debt
 
Bernanke was accurate in saying that the economy is not expanding at a sustainable pace.
 
Of course, his prescription was the same as it always is; print more money in the misguided belief that inflation will lead to growth.
 
As such, he indicated that it's possible that the Fed may actually expand bond purchases beyond the $600 billion announced last month. (Remember that the $600 billion comes after the $1.7 trillion that has already been printed, which failed to produce anything much beyond a weaker dollar)."
 
Mike Pento

If the Fed is printing enough to cover what the Treasury borrows, should unemployment benefits be extended, and if there's no such thing as a free lunch, who ends up with the bill?

…the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course,
fully and in its own right.

The second generation receives it clear
of the debts and incumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on.

For if the first could charge it with a debt,
then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation.

Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid
during the course of its own existence.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789

"With millions of Americans still looking for work, now is not the time to cut key safety net programs like Unemployment Insurance. The Emergency Unemployment Compensation program is set to expire at the end of November. If that happens, 2 million people will lose benefits in December and 6 million by the end of next year."

Hilda Solia
Derpatment of Labor
Via Tyler

Why is China restricting rare earth metals?

"Rare Earth in BlackBerry to Prius Underscores Alarm Over Supply

Rare-earth elements help give BlackBerrys their buzz, Toyota Priuses their battery power, and computer hard drives their spin.

The rare earths, a group of 17 metals including neodymium, lanthanum, cerium and europium, also have industrial and national-security uses, such as in petroleum refining, fiber- optics transmission, and military radar and missile-guidance systems.

The range of uses explains why U.S. lawmakers, officials in Japan and Germany and manufacturers of components that need these materials say they are alarmed by steps taken by China, which provides 97 percent of the world’s supply, to reduce exports by about three-quarters.

Components made with rare earths are so ubiquitous that they aren’t easily replaced, according to Jack Lifton, founder of Technology Metals Research LLC in Detroit, which advises investors in specialty metals. “Without anyone noticing, the rare-earth magnets have become overwhelmingly essential,” he said yesterday.

Rare-earth magnets account for 80 percent of the market for “permanent” magnets that retain their charge, up from zero in 1980, he said. They are in electric motors, small earphones and mobile phones. When a BlackBerry vibrates, a high-powered magnet made with neodymium is at work converting electrical power into mechanical energy.

“They are pervasive in our technology, especially in miniaturization of electronics,” Lifton said.

Automakers relying on neodymium-iron-boron magnets, used in power-steering equipment, “are concerned about long-term access to under-the-hood magnets because they import them from China and Japan,” Lifton said in a phone interview.

...While the elements aren’t as rare in nature as the name implies, they are difficult to find in profitable concentrations, expensive for Western producers to extract and often laced with radioactive elements. China has come to dominate the market because it has been able to produce the elements more cheaply and with fewer environmental restrictions than its competitors.

Japan, the largest importer of Chinese rare-earth materials, has said China halted shipments to Japanese users last month after a collision in disputed waters between a Chinese trawler and the Japanese Coast Guard led to the fishing- boat captain’s detention. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku said Oct. 20 that the import situation “hadn’t changed” weeks after the captain’s release.

Chinese Delays

China said this week that it hasn’t suspended shipments to the U.S. and Europe, as reported on Oct. 20 by the New York Times. Chinese customs officials are delaying shipments by various means, such as imposing extra inspections, according to industry participants who spoke on condition of anonymity because of concern about Chinese reaction.

China’s 72 percent reduction in export quotas for the second half of this year, which it announced in July, and the customs delays since then are driving up prices.

...Prices have climbed sevenfold in the last six months for cerium oxide, which is used for polishing semiconductors, and other elements have more than doubled...

China accounts for about 36 percent of global rare-earth reserves, the largest share, and the U.S. is second, with 13 percent, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

...Makers of catalysts for the oil-refining industry are among the major users of rare earths in the U.S....lanthanum, used to break down heavy crude into light crude...

Lanthanum also is used for nickel-metal hydride batteries that power hybrid cars...

...Commercial and military airplanes also use samarium-cobalt magnets for power generation...

...Neodymium-based magnets also are used in wind turbines..."

Gopal Ratnam

World Trade War 2010

"China to Halt Some Exports to U.S.

China, which has been blocking shipments of crucial minerals to Japan for the last month, has now quietly halted shipments of those materials to the United States and Europe, three industry officials said on Tuesday.

The Chinese action, involving rare earth minerals that are crucial to manufacturing many advanced products, seems certain to further intensify already rising trade and currency tensions with the West.

...“The embargo is expanding” beyond Japan, said one of the three rare earth industry officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Chinese authorities.

They said Chinese customs officials imposed the broader restrictions on Monday morning, hours after a top Chinese official summoned international news media Sunday night to denounce United States trade actions.

China mines 95 percent of the world’s rare earth elements, which have broad commercial and military applications, and are vital to the manufacture of products as diverse as cellphones, large wind turbines and guided missiles. Any curtailment of Chinese supplies of rare earths is likely to be greeted with alarm in Western capitals, particularly because Western companies are believed to keep much smaller stockpiles of rare earths than Japanese companies.

China experts said on Tuesday that Beijing’s assertive stance on rare earths might also signal the ascendance of economic nationalists, noting that the Central Committee of the Communist Party convened over the weekend.

...Industry executives said there had been no signal from Beijing of how long rare earth shipments intended for the West would be held by Chinese customs officials.

...Word of the blocked shipments emerged from industry executives on Tuesday after an official China newspaper reported earlier in the day that Beijing planned next year to further reduce its annual export quota for rare earths.

The signals of a tougher Chinese trade stance come after American trade officials announced on Friday that they would investigate whether China was violating World Trade Organization rules by subsidizing its clean energy exports and limiting clean energy imports. The inquiry includes whether China’s steady reductions in rare earth export quotas since 2005, along with steep export taxes on rare earths, are illegal attempts to force multinational companies to produce more of their high-technology goods in China.

Despite a widely confirmed suspension of rare earth shipments from China to Japan, now nearly a month old, Beijing has continued to deny that any embargo exists.

Industry executives and analysts have interpreted that official denial as a way to wield an undeclared trade weapon without creating a policy trail that could make it easier for other countries to bring a case against China at the World Trade Organization.

So far, China seems to be taking a similar approach in expanding the embargo to the West.

Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said on Tuesday that the Chinese government was putting new restrictions on the mining, processing and export of rare earths to protect the environment. But he said that China was not violating any W.T.O. rules in doing so and that it was not imposing an embargo or trying to use rare earths as a bargaining chip.

“With stricter export mechanism gradually in place, outbound shipments to other countries might understandably begin to feel the effect,” Mr. Wang said in an e-mail. “But I don’t see any link between China’s reasonable rare earth export control policy and the irrational U.S. decision of protectionist nature to investigate China’s clean energy industries.”

...The Chinese government office that oversees rare earth policy...has emerged as a bastion of economic nationalism.

...China reduced in July its export quota for rare earths for the second half of the year by 72 percent. Exporters had only six weeks’ of quotas left when China imposed its unannounced embargo on shipments to Japan.

China is preparing further reductions of up to 30 percent in its 2011 quotas compared with quotas issued in 2010..."

Keith Bradsher
New York Times

Russian Wheat Export Ban = Riots in Mozambique?

The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change…
…so, in a month's time,
a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen,
or maybe one that wasn't going to happen does.

Ian Stewart
The Mathematics of Chaos

"U.N. Raises Concerns as Global Food Prices Jump
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

With memories still fresh of food riots set off by spiking prices just two years ago, agricultural experts on Friday cast a wary eye on the steep rise in the cost of wheat prompted by a Russian export ban and the questions looming over harvests in other parts of the world because of drought or flooding.

Food prices rose 5 percent globally during August, according to the United Nations, spurred mostly by the higher cost of wheat, and the first signs of unrest erupted as 10 people died in Mozambique during clashes ignited partly by a 30 percent leap in the cost of bread.

If too many Gazelles relative to water and grass lead to fewer Gazelles,
do fewer Gazelles  =  fewer Cheetahs?

...It is an issue not limited to Russia alone. Harvest forecasts in Germany and Canada are clouded by wet weather and flooding, while crops in Argentina will suffer from drought, as could Australia’s, according to agricultural experts. The bump in prices because of the uncertainty about future supplies means the poor in some areas of the world will face higher bread prices in the coming months.

If water was money and grass was credit
and Cheetahs and Gazelles were people,
who would be who?

Food prices are still some 30 percent below the 2008 levels, Mr. Abbassian said, when a tripling in the price of rice among other staples led to food riots in about a dozen countries and helped topple at least one government.

Did shortages of arable land and food
coincide with many Rwandan Hutus eliminating many Tutsis?

...In June, Russia was predicting a loss of just a few million metric tons due to hot weather, but by August it announced it would lose about one-fifth of its crop. Wheat prices more than doubled in that period.

...In early August, Russia announced an export ban that it would review at the end of the year, but Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin announced Thursday that the ban on grain exports would extend into 2011. The price of wheat jumped again, and that has had a spillover effect into other grains like corn and soybeans. The forecast for the global rice harvest has also dropped, although it is still expected to be higher than in 2009 and should be a record...

Only seven meals separate civilization from potential anarchy.

Josette Sheeran
UN World Food Program

 

...After two days of rioting set off by price increases for bread and utilities like electricity and water, the streets in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, were largely calm on Friday.

...Price increases have been much sharper in Mozambique than in most of the world because the government kept prices artificially low before elections last year...

What could happen if there’s enough food but some can’t afford it,
or governments can’t provide it?

As with any commodity, questions of wheat shortages spur speculation and hoarding, and experts suggest both are at play...

 

But the world also has to come to grips with changing weather patterns due to climate change, argued Prof. Per Pinstrup-Anderson, an expert in international agriculture at Cornell University.

You're captives of a civilizational system
that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world
 in order to live.

Daniel Quinn
Postulated correlations between  population growth
and natural resource consumption

“We are going to have much bigger fluctuations in weather and therefore the food supply than we had in the past, so we are going to have to learn how to cope with fluctuating food prices,” Professor Pinstrup-Anderson said."

New York Times

How many need and/or want how much of what,
where is half way, who’s got what’s left, who gets cut off when,
who will compete with who for what’s left,
and how is who most likely to win?