A new fetish

From times to times, the media find a new subject that is characterised as a totally new thing, sometimes as dangerous as a menace to the mankind. The last one was the warming of the Earth, but it is been substituted by the ultimate danger, at least of this week, the food crisis.
Let´s think, is there a food crisis? Depends on what you call a crisis. The Oxford Dictionary says: crisis is a time of great difficulty or danger or when an important decision must be made. So... well, I think, no, we are not in a food crisis.
Despite some prices pumping worries into the economists minds, and some governors, they are all but a glimpse of scarcity. The world has never produced more food than today. Malthus would not say I said because he would be to ashamed about the way its previsions have been destroyed by the time. On the contrary of his expectations, the harvests are showing a faster pace of grow than the population.
Perhaps this stupid foreign is nuts, the reader can be thinking: how then are the prices of staple food increasing instead plunging? Because we are in the edge of the greater cultural crisis the mankind has passed by. The globalisation produce a lot of good stuff, but a stress a lot behaviours in the touching new peoples. One of the biggest is the way as the alimentary standards are changing quickly.
More than any scarcity, is the changing of the pattern of consumption that is driving to a dearer lunch. When every people used to have different staple, the prices were easily controlled by the governments, with the most curbing imports to please local farmers. This has prevented the World to create a real global market to the most part of the crops and yet is responsible to the unbalance of the prices.
Of course everybody can say that to the poor it is a food crisis, but it is not. It is just the new surge of the permanent inequality that cyclically hits them with lack of food relieved by humanitarians programs that help more the rich´s consciences than change the structural causes.

Delusive opinions

More and more analysts foreseen that oil prices will shrink just because consumers from the USA will use it less, dragging down the revenues of the companies and, consequently, making them cut speculative deals. The experts add that, even the energy usage rates do not plunge, the present charges drive to new sources´ development. I hope so, but I am not optimist about this based in three reasons.
First, once it is reached a energy usage level, it is not likely to reduce it unless by means of severe economic depression. Ok, the USA is in a recession, everybody knows, but nobody is saying it will be that bad, yet, and most economists say the World will pass throughout the year growing just a little bit slower than has done in the quinquennium.
Second, it is a myth to say the OECD members are turning more energy efficient annually. They are just importing more goods, hence using energy abroad.
Third, expecting the oil can be replaced by a new source in a short time is a wishful thinking. In most of the booming economy countries, petroleum is already a alternative source by coal and it will not be left behind as a supplier without a good and reliable substitute, which existing technology does not offer in the needed scale.
Then the consumption of oil is bound to increase rather reduce, pointing the prices up.

You can always count on... II

...the hypocrites.
The former New York Governor has made a career fighting prostitution rings. Apparently the rings have struck back.
Many are comparing Spitzer with Bill Clinton. It makes some sense: both are politicians , democrats, and were caught in sex scandals. But, well, Clinton has not paid for it. He has not expend money nor let the political job. Home run for the "come back kid".
In the opposite direction, Spitzer has paid, as the news are saying, $80,000 dollars in hooker´s bills (strike one), has resigned from his mandate (strike two), and has Biblically known Misses Dupre, a.k.a. Kristen, (it was definitively not a strike, considering the pictures I have seen on the news I even would love pass the same experience if I could afford- he can easily say in your face Bill).
So, as we saw, the results were all but alike, and the hypocrite that climbed fighting prostitution is facing ruin for using it. Poetic justice.
Just a commentary: when all parts are in a consensual agreement prostitution should not even been considered a crime, despite it the ex-prosecutor have battled it as a crusade, so he could not appear as a usual costumer VIP.

You can always count on... I

...the authoritarians.
They will never fails who wants free media coverage.
If the demonstrators in New Delhi had have completed their march, nobody outside such downtown would even know about it. Now every single person that watches news broadcasting has seen people been beaten and arrested.
I am sure that the people around the world is actually bound to say "Free Tibet". Or at least the citizens which enjoys democracy are more likely than yesterday to blame China . Thanks to the repression of a bunch of red wore by the India´s authorities to take the graces of Chinese Comunist Party.