Putin Blames Capitalists for Crisis

At Davos Forum, Russia and China Blame Capitalists for Economic Crisis - NYTimes.com

In the official opening address of the World Economic Forum, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia spoke of a financial “perfect storm” that has decimated the old system, rendering it obsolete.

“A year ago, American delegates speaking from this rostrum emphasized the U.S. economy’s fundamental stability and its cloudless prospects,” he said, speaking through a translator. “Today, investment banks, the pride of Wall Street, have virtually ceased to exist.”

But the damage goes beyond Wall Street, he said. “The entire economic growth system, where one regional center prints money without respite and consumes material wealth, while another regional center manufactures inexpensive goods and saves money printed by other governments, has suffered a major setback.”

Vegetable Garden at the White House

Obamas Hire Chef From Chicago - NYTimes.com

Mr. Kass’s appointment should please chefs like Alice Waters, who have lobbied the Obamas to set an example for the rest of the country by emphasizing food that is healthy, local and sustainable. It further suggests that a vegetable garden on the White House grounds, another of Ms. Waters’s dreams, could be on the horizon.

Git on, Gitmo

Obama Issues Directive to Shut Down Guantánamo - NYTimes.com

President Obama signed executive orders Thursday effectively ending the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program, directing the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp within a year

Where art thou, Polonius?

From today's NY Times:

Even more than their American counterparts, borrowers in Britain turned
to local banks to fuel a real estate boom that was as much a national
pastime as a rational decision about what to buy. Household debt as a
percentage of disposable income hit 177 percent in 2007, compared with
141 percent in the United States.

Obama increases government transparency

Day One and the government is opening up its windows to the people. This from the Wall Street Journal

In an attempt to deliver on pledges of a transparent government, Mr.
Obama said he would change the way the federal government interprets
the Freedom of Information Act. He said he was directing agencies that
vet requests for information to err on the side of making information
public -- not to look for reasons to legally withhold it -- an
alteration to the traditional standard of evaluation.

I feel like I imagined that Eastern Europeans felt when their autocrats fell. Feels pretty good!

The Military Industrial Perrenial Polyculture Complex

The RAND corporation has a paper out in engineering perrennial polycultures - interesting perspective: http://www.endgame.org.uk/pdfs/polyculture.pdf

Said another way, had the first inhabitants of the prairies found that there were enough
edible grasses there for their needs, they would not have needed to become annual tillers and
sowers. They could have survived simply by reaping what they needed from the prairie year
after year. Indeed, when human populations were smaller, many societies did subsist on what
wild ecosystems provided. Prairie ecosystems—with their perennial polycultures and mixed
intercropping—required no maintenance, yet provided food for a variety of animals, continuous
ground cover and deep root systems to prevent erosion, legumes to provide natural
fertilizers, and natural disease and pest control measures. Thus, if we could engineer more
bountiful prairies, we could dispense with much of the machinery, energy, fertilizers, irrigation,
herbicides, and pesticides that are mainstays of modern agriculture. That, in turn, would
have secondary benefits in environmental remediation, biodiversity, energy use, and—as I will
argue below—in combating global problems such as poverty, hunger, and even disparities in
education.

Speculation is merely one aspect of what happened...

I have been wondering how much of the rise in oil prices was due to speculation, or recursive market effects. I guess 60 minutes discussed this subject last night - although I missed it, Barry Ritholtz has written a nice response. Here is an excerpt from his great post on the rise and fall of oil:

There’s a lot more, but the bottom line is this: Higher energy prices
were caused many many factors over the past 8 years. Certainly,
speculation played a part at the end of the run — but it always does.
Oil fell more precipitously than it rose, but don’t all markets do
that? Didn’t the S&P just plummet nearly 50% in a year, after a 5
year run?

Are antibiotics bad for you? Hope not...

Crops absorb livestock antibiotics, science shows — Environmental Health News

For half a century, meat producers have fed antibiotics to farm animals to increase their growth and stave off infections. Now scientists have discovered that those drugs are sprouting up in unexpected places.

Vegetables such as corn, potatoes and lettuce absorb antibiotics when grown in soil fertilized with livestock manure, according to tests conducted at the University of Minnesota.