The Environmental Protection Agency has a Criminal Enforcement Division. Naturally, that Division has a most wanted list. Many of the suspects flee the country, but sometimes even that doesn't work. Earlier this year they caught Bhavesh Kamdar, who had been on the lam in Rajkot, India. Fortunately, an Interpol notice paid off and the police there apprehended him. His original crime? Defrauding New York of several million dollars as an environmental consultant.
Deepak Chopra gets pissed off at Sean Hannity (emphasis added):
Getting reflective, intelligent dialogue out of Hannity would require more spiritual power than even Deepak Chopra can muster.
This sucks. It isn't like we released some deadly poison into the sea and we could have known this would happen. This required changes in salinity, a species of algae, and a deadly neurotoxin. It is impossible to predict the third order effects of human uses of the environment. So, we are stuck reacting to environmental damage. We are stuck undoing the investments we made in whatever is causing the environmental damage. At best, we can proactively manage the risks we know. But there are always the unknown unknowns.
Reuters reports, "Surging shoppers kill New York Wal-Mart employee":
It will be interesting to see how the consumption patterns shift this holiday season. Which retailers will win and which will news? Wal Mart should do well. A couple of days ago, Jim Cramer suggested that Jones Apparel (JNY) might be undervalued when it was trading under $4 despite having $2.40 a share in cash. The stock shot up to around $5, which is still cheap relative to the $19 it was trading at a year ago, and relative to the 55 cents a year it has been paying in dividends. Jones sells mostly womens' clothes and shoes (Jones New York, Anne Klein, Nine West, Gloria Vanderbilt) through department stores and their own retail stores. Their holiday sales will be interesting, some volume lost to the lower end retailers and some volume gained from refugees from the high-end. If they can retain volume, and keep paying those dividends the stock is a steal.
"England could run out of home-produced honey by Christmas." 2 billion bees, about 1/3 of the bees in England, have been killed off by the varroa mite. Beekeepers are marching in London, demanding that the government spend more money on research. A New Zealand company claims to have bred in resistance to this mite into bees. This could be worth billions of dollars. One estimate says: "the annual value of honeybee pollination to crop production is US$ 14.6 billion in the USA, US$ 1.14 billion in Canada , about US$ 3 billion in the EC, and US$ 2.3 billion in New Zealand."
In other insect news, locusts are attacking Australia. A low density swarm about six kilometres long and 170 metres wide has been reported. See video from the BBC.
Tom Friedman's latest book, on energy technology, is "Hot, Flat and Crowded." His description of his plan:
As usual, Friedman likes to make up facts to go with his argument. The Manhattan Project was enormous, employing well over 100,000 people. Here are some details:
From 52 to 48 is cute but wrong. 53-46 is more like it.
A talk by Christine M. Korsgaard, “Interacting with Animals: A Kantian Account” (as summarized by a student):
Peter Singer . . . has argued that . . . there is no disutility cause by painlessly killing a non-human animal. Nothing is lost. The utility that would have been created by the animal’s future pleasure can be added by breeding another animal to take its place. For Singer, this is not the case with humans because due to our ability, and tendency, to plan, etc., more is lost when one of our lives ends. When we die something (morally relevant) is taken from the world that cannot be replaced.
Which swing states won it for Obama? Here you can see Iowa took him to 269 and Colorado took him to outright victory. Obama could have lost Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Indiana, and North Carolina and still have won the election. This image is from the Iowa State Statistical Working Group:
