Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Dec. 18, 2007

--Russia delivers its nuclear fuel to plan in Iran; a setback for the US. NYT A1. . . . overall the result is easy to predict: a regulatory pole will emerge in Eurasia, one closer to the geographic center of the world, and there will be a slowdown in the flow of goods, capital, and migration that currently nourishes the United States. The United States will then have to live like other nations, notably by reigning in its huge trade deficit, a constraint that would imply a 15 to 20 percent drop in the standard of living of the population. . . Todd, AFTER THE EMPIRE (2003) 199

--...thousands of New Orleanians forced out by Hurricane Katrina are settling in across the Gulf Coast, breaking their ties with the damaged city... NYT A1--: --Old Line Families Escape Worst of Flood and Plot the Future. Mr. Reiss said he and other business leaders will no longer tolerate living in a dangerous city with bad schools and substandard municipal services. “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way … “ The power elite of NOLA … insist the remade city won’t simply restore the old order. –WSJ, A-12 Sept. 12, 2005

-... American farmers are growing more corn than at any time since the 1940s. And sea life in the Gulf of Mexico is paying the price. The nation’s corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen runs off fields in Corn Belt states, It makes its way to the Mississippi River and eventually pours into the Gulf, where it contributes to a growing “dead zone”—a 7900 square mile patch so depleted of oxygen that fish, crabs and shrimp suffocate. SBT A3 For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one that is also rooted in a field of corn, NOT to think of himself as a corn person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism... You are what you eat, it’s often said, and if that is true, then what we mostly are is corn—more precisely, processed corn. OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA p. 20

--infused with a heightened awareness of life and death-.—ART CRITICISM 101, YOU TOO CAN BE AN ART CRITIC (cliché #2)

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