As in the 2008 presidential election—remember the chants of “Drill, baby, drill!”—rising oil and gasoline prices have become an issue in 2012.
But election-year politics aside, the forces driving up prices at the pump are very different today than they were four years ago. In 2008, it was primarily the surge in oil consumption in emerging markets, disruptions, and a belief that the world was running short of oil (the so-called peak oil crisis).
In 2012, the reason is mainly geopolitics. Last November, the United Nations declared that Iran was clearly developing nuclear-weapons capabilities. The West is responding with sanctions aimed at reducing Iran’s ability to export oil, on which it depends for more than half of its government revenues, to get it to halt its nuclear-weapons program. Tehran has answered by conducting large naval exercises and threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes some 35% of the world’s oil exports.
Global oil prices and U.S. gasoline prices have both risen about 20% since mid-December. And all this is occurring in a world oil market that is already tight, tighter than it was last year, with no more than 2.5 million barrels of spare capacity. At least half a million barrels a day are currently out of the market because of disruptions in South Sudan and Yemen and civil war in Syria.
A market this tight would already be susceptible to upward price pressures. But the market is operating on expectations that supplies will become even tighter as new U.S. and European sanctions against Iran take effect and the risk of military conflict increases. Put simply, the oil market is reading the front page.
Given these circumstances, there’s not much Washington can do in the short term to reduce prices at the pump. Indeed, the picture would look much worse were it not for the nearly 20% increase in U.S. oil output since 2008. More efficient permitting could get more U.S. oil fields up and running faster, but even then there are lead times. Moreover, new oil flows from Canada, North Dakota and elsewhere are hobbled by an outdated pipeline system.
The market is clearly responding to what it sees as dangers ahead. Still, charges of speculation and price manipulation are already being resurrected from 2008. This is nothing new. As early as 1923, Sen. Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, chairing highly charged Senate hearings on gasoline prices, warned that if companies were permitted “to manipulate oil prices . . . the people of this country must be prepared, before long, to pay” the unheard-of-level of at least “a dollar a gallon.” As it turned out, within a few years gasoline was as low as 10 cents a gallon.
Read MORE.
###
Yahoo Movies “Yahoo Movies is your guide to everything about movies online, from upcoming releases, to movies in theaters and movies on DVD. Find trailers and clips, movie news, cast and credits, celebrity photos, movie showtimes and tickets, box office reports and much more.”
Basking sharks are pregnant for more than two years, while other sharks, such as the bonnet head shark, are pregnant for only a few months. The longest gestation period of any mammal is the elephant, at 22 months. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
###
With the success of its CG-adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, Universal is siccing its animation subsidiary Illumination Entertainment on yet another classic Seuss title, The Cat in the Hat.
Universal’s live-action Cat in the Hat feature, which was considered a bomb despite grossing over $100 million, is only nine years old, but with The Lorax defeating John Carter — AKA “the year’s first blockbuster” — the feeling among the involved parties is that Dr. Seuss books “connect better in animation.”
Rob Lieber will write, Illumination Entertainment’s Chris Meledandri will produce, and Dr. Seuss’s wife Audrey Geisel will executive produce. No word yet on a release date.
###
Unless you’re a frequent reader of parenting blogs, you might not know there’s a major divide in the world of children’s playgrounds.
On the one side, you have the safety advocates who want lower structures, softer ground, and less opportunities for falling off or over, well, anything. On the other, those who worry that a safe playground is a boring playground that will do little to stimulate a child’s imagination.
The debate can seem quite technical – should playgrounds have foam floors, or wood chips? What would be better for the 5-year-olds who tumble off the monkey bars? Should there even be monkey bars, or is that just asking for trouble? One mom was even banned from McDonald’s after she was caught swabbing their play places in search of bacteria.
The debate has a very 21st century feel to it but it’s actually nothing new – these types of questions have been asked for at least a century. Below, a look at the history of playgrounds:
MORE.
###
Foxwoods pays Connecticut 25 percent of the ‘‘hold’’ from its slots, which was $46 million over all in January.
Nearly everything about the Foxwoods Resort Casino is improbable, beginning with its scale. It is the largest casino in the Western Hemisphere — a gigantic, labyrinthine wonderland set down in a cedar forest and swamp in an otherwise sleepy corner of southeastern Connecticut. Forty thousand patrons pack into Foxwoods on weekend days. The place has 6,300 slot machines. Ten thousand employees. If you include everything — hotel space, bars and restaurants, theaters and ballrooms, spa, bowling alley — Foxwoods measures about 6.7 million square feet, more than the Pentagon.
The owner of this enterprise is the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. Once powerful and even feared, the Pequots were nearly extinguished in one day — in fact, in just one hour — when English colonists and their Indian allies attacked and torched the main Pequot village near Mystic in the spring of 1637. The survivors were sold into slavery or given over to neighboring tribes. The colonists even barred the use of the Pequot name, “in order to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth,” as the leader of the raiding party later wrote.
MORE.
###
###
Stairs Still Hazardous for Youngsters
Every six minutes, a young child in the US ends up in the emergency room due to a stair-related injury. Between 1999 and 2008, an estimated 93,000 kids under the age of five were treated for stair-related injuries. Though the majority of the injuries were fairly mild and did not require hospitalization, about 10 percent of the children hurt on staircases suffered a broken bone. Over the course of the study period, the number of stair-related injuries steadily declined, but researchers say more can be done to help protect children, like installing gates at the tops and bottoms of staircases and thinner railings that are more easily gripped by small hands. More …
###
Male fruit flies who are deprived of sex may turn to alcohol as a source of pleasure. That’s the upshot of a study published Thursday afternoon in the magazine Science.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, set out to explore the way the brain’s reward system may be affected by a social interaction (sex) and how that relationship might affect the seeking of pleasure by other means (alcohol).
In this undated image provided by the University of California San Francisco, a male fruit fly drinks alcohol-laced food from from a tube. In the Friday, March 16, 2012 issue of the journal Science, researchers say sexually deprived male fruit flies are driven to excessive alcohol consumption, drinking far more than comparable, sexually satisfied male flies. (G. Ophir – AP) They knew that alcohol consumption is a rewarding experience for fruit flies. They also knew that social interactions are highly rewarding.
So they placed 24 male fruit flies (technically Drosophila melanogaster) in containers containing female fruit flies, some of them virgins, some of them already mated. Virgin female fruit flies are receptive to male sexual advances — but as the couple completes the act, the male injects, along with sperm, a substance that temporarily makes the females unreceptive to males, the study explains.
MORE.
###
The mental_floss Guide to the NCAA Tournament: The Midwest
###
###
Google is relaxing its normal extreme secrecy over its flagship Search technology to reveal how it is about to get much more artificially intelligent. The Wall Street Journal’s Amir Efrati tells us that Google is gearing up for one of the biggest overhauls of its search engine in the company’s history. In the near future, when you Google things, you’ll not only get a list of links but also answers to questions you didn’t even ask. Sound cool? That totally depends on how well Google pulls off the challenge of making artificially intelligent software.It’s not news that Google is improving Search — it’s always making little tweaks to the algorithm. It is, however, a pretty big deal that they’re giving their cash cow a complete makeover. Good old fashioned Googling isn’t disappearing, however. Efrati’s sources says that the changes “could directly impact the search results for 10 percent to 20 percent of all search queries, or tens of billions per month.” Thought that leaves a lot of search results untouched, it’s enough to send SEO wizards reeling over how to update their websites in order to keep good Google rankings. As such, SEO-dependent sites like About.com and The Huffington Post will likely see a major dip in traffic. But for you and me, this new strategy could make life a little bit easier.
Read MORE.
###
A Michigan State University anthropologist who spent more than a year infiltrating the black market for human kidneys has published the first in-depth study describing the often horrific experiences of poor people who were victims of organ trafficking. Monir Moniruzzaman interviewed 33 kidney sellers in his native Bangladesh and found they typically didn’t get the money they were promised and were plagued with serious health problems that prevented them from working, shame and depression.
The study, which appears in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Moniruzzaman’s decade-long research in the field describe a growing worldwide market for body parts that include kidneys, parts of livers and even corneas.
Moniruzzaman said the people selling their organs are exploited by unethical brokers and recipients who are often Bangladeshi-born foreign nationals living in places such as the United States, Europe and the Middle East. Because organ-selling is illegal, the brokers forge documents indicating the recipient and seller are related and claim the act is a family donation.
Doctors, hospital officials and drug companies turn a blind eye to the illicit act because they profit along with the broker and, of course, the recipient, said Moniruzzaman, who questioned many of the people involved. Most of the 33 Bangladeshi sellers in his study had a kidney removed across the border in India. Generally, the poor seller and the wealthy recipient met at a medical facility and the transplant was performed at that time, he said.
MORE.
###
More and more personal and household devices are connecting to the internet, from your television to your car navigation systems to your light switches. CIA Director David Petraeus cannot wait to spy on you through them.
Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” Petraeus enthused, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”
All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if you’re a “person of interest” to the spy community. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your conversation. With the rise of the “smart home,” you’d be sending tagged, geolocated data that a spy agency can intercept in real time when you use the lighting app on your phone to adjust your living room’s ambiance.
MORE.
###
Late last week Israel launched a targeted air strike, killing Zohair al-Qaisi, militant leader of the Popular Resistance Committee, claiming the group was planning a terrorist strike in Israel. Over the next few days, militant groups in Gaza launched hundreds of rockets into southern Israel in retaliation, and Israel responded with new rounds of air strikes. Israel also deployed an anti-missile system known as Iron Dome, claiming to have shot down more than 40 rockets. Egypt stepped in to help broker a cease-fire that began yesterday, and held for about a day, but both sides have since launched limited attacks. In all, eight people in Israel have been wounded in the fighting, and at least 27 Palestinians have been killed. [36 photos]
MORE.
###
###
Penjing
Penjing is the ancient art of growing miniature trees in tiny containers. Originally developed in China, penjing was the precursor to bonsai, which was adopted by the Japanese. The trees are kept small and proportionate through careful pruning, feeding, and spare watering. Branches are trained in the desired shape by the application of wire coils. Weathered trees in harsh climates serve as natural models for the often gnarled, bent, and overhanging miniature trees. How old is penjing? More…
###
The Giant, Underestimated Earthquake Threat to North America
Brian Atwate/USGS
On a foggy spring morning just before sunrise, 27 miles northwest of Cape Mendocino, California, a pimple of rock roughly a dozen miles below the ocean floor finally reaches its breaking point. Two slabs of the Earth’s crust begin to slip and shudder and snap apart.
The first jolt of stress coming out of the rocks sends a shock wave hurtling into Northern California and southern Oregon like a thunderbolt. For a few stunned drivers on the back roads in the predawn gloom, the pulse of energy that tears through the ground looks dimly like a 20-mile wrinkle moving through a carpet of pastures and into thick stands of redwoods.
Telephone poles whip back and forth as if caught in a hurricane. Power lines rip loose in a shower of blue and yellow sparks, falling to the ground where they writhe like snakes, snapping and biting. Lights go out and the telephone system goes down.
Cornices fall, brick walls crack, plate glass shatters. Pavement buckles, cars and trucks veer into ditches and into each other. A bridge across the Eel River is jerked off its foundations, taking a busload of farm workers with it. With computers crashing and cell towers dropping offline, all of Humboldt and Del Norte Counties in California are instantly cut off from the outside worl
MORE.
###
For Richer Not For Poorer: The Inequality Crisis of Marriage – Nancy Cook – Business – The Atlantic
A Corvette. A home in the Hamptons. A Hermes handbag. Oh, and marriage. Because marriage, too, is fast becoming a luxury good.615 rings marriage DM7 shutterstock.jpgDM7/ShutterstockAmericans are falling out of love with marital bliss. Look at the data. As of 2010, only 51 percent of Americans 18 or older were married, compared with 72 percent in 1960. Exacerbated by a weak job market, the drop is starker still among the young. Today, just a fifth of Americans ages 18 to 29 have a spouse, down from roughly three-fifths in 1960. The number of marriages performed in the United States fell by 5 percent from 2009 to 2010, according to the Pew Research Center. That was partly the result of a sagging economy, but it also represents an acceleration of longer-term trends seen in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere in the developed world.Americans aren’t starry-eyed anymore about marriage as an aspiration. Roughly four of every 10 Americans told the Pew center in 2010 that they thought matrimony was becoming obsolete. It’s certainly no longer a necessary station on the route to adulthood. Millions of educated young Americans now buy homes and sock away money for retirement, all without a wedding ring or even a significant other. Nor does child-rearing need the imprimatur of marriage: More than half the women under age 30 who give birth in the United States are single.
MORE.
###
When I was only a few months old, a fortune-teller warned my mother of my financial recklessness. Recorded on a cassette tape that my mother used to listen to when I was a child, he predicted, among other things, that I would one day buy a house that I would have to resell at a loss.
“So don’t buy a big house,” my mother would say, laughing.
The fortune-teller was wrong. It wasn’t a house, but a condo. And I couldn’t sell it at a loss. I lost it to a foreclosure.
This isn’t a total shock. Yes, it’s sad, frustrating, and depressing. But in a twisted way, it makes sense. Because in the five years since signing that stack of home loan papers and paying the minimum mortgage payment every month, my husband and I never felt like we were supposed be homeowners.
Matt and I bought our first home together, a condo in Oakland, California at the height of the real estate bubble in May 2007. My parents had given us the down payment as a wedding present, with the hope that after a few years of living in a starter condo, we could build enough equity to buy a single-family house to raise their grandchildren.
Within months, the bubble burst, and over the next few years, we watched our property’s value eat away not only our down payment, but also half its purchase worth.
MORE
###
Zorro’s wife?
###
Caligula Becomes Emperor of Rome (This Date in 37 CE)
When Caligula became the Roman emperor in 37 CE, replacing the hated Tiberius, the public welcomed his reign, and for a time it was uneventful. Seven months later, he fell severely ill, and when he recovered, he was a changed man. Suddenly, his reign was marked by financially ruinous extravagance, unmatched cruelty, and rampant executions, even of his former supporters. He was assassinated within a few years. What may have caused the mental instability Caligula displayed after his illness? More…
###
There are some things money can’t buy—but these days, not many. Almost everything is up for sale. For example:
• A prison-cell upgrade: $90 a night. In Santa Ana, California, and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay for a clean, quiet jail cell, without any non-paying prisoners to disturb them.
• Access to the carpool lane while driving solo: $8. Minneapolis, San Diego, Houston, Seattle, and other cities have sought to ease traffic congestion by letting solo drivers pay to drive in carpool lanes, at rates that vary according to traffic.
• The services of an Indian surrogate mother: $8,000. Western couples seeking surrogates increasingly outsource the job to India, and the price is less than one-third the going rate in the United States.
• The right to shoot an endangered black rhino: $250,000. South Africa has begun letting some ranchers sell hunters the right to kill a limited number of rhinos, to give the ranchers an incentive to raise and protect the endangered species.
MORE.
###
In 590 BC, to protect her besieged city of Bethulia, the alluring Jewish widow Judith drank with and seduced the attacking Assyrian general Holofernes. When he fell into a drunken, sated heap, she decapitated him with his own sword and displayed his head as trophy, rallying her fellow citizens to rout the Babylonians.
So the Bible tells us, and so the Viennese Expressionist Gustav Klimt depicted in a famous 1901 painting, “Judith,” that reflects, in tune with the psychological and artistic sensibility of his era, the braided ecstasy and aggression of women’s sexuality. Klimt depicts her “as a symbol of the devastating power of the female erotic urge.” Judith, “barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture,” writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight.
Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who’s spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails? What’s he doing lecturing us on art history?
MORE.
###
Aged just 16 when she died, and buried lying on a special high status funerary bed, she was laid to rest with a small solid gold, garnet encrusted, Christian cross upon her chest.
Her exact identity is as yet a complete mystery. However, it’s likely that she was a member of one of the newly Christianized Anglo-Saxon royal families of the period.
She was buried fully clothed, her bronze and iron chatelaine (belt hook) and purse, still attached to her leather belt.
A clue to the circumstances of her death is the presence of three other individuals buried in separate graves alongside her (two women aged around 20 and one other slightly older individual of indeterminate sex, but conceivably female). It’s likely that they died at the same time – probably from some sort of epidemic. Significantly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions that England was devastated by the plague in 664 AD (around the very time that the archaeological evidence also suggests they died).
The archaeological investigation – carried out by Cambridge University Archaeological Unit – has also revealed that they were interred adjacent to a high status settlement consisting of a 12 metre long timber hall and at least half a dozen other buildings with substantial semi-subterranean storage cellars.
MORE.
###
###
George Clooney, his father Nick, congressman Jim Moran (D-VA), and NAACP President Ben Jealous were among several people arrested this morningat a protest outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington.
The Associated Press reports that they were escorted to the back of a US Secret Service van.
Clooney has long been a vocal adversary of the government in Khartoum, which he accuses of perpetrating humanitarian crimes against its own people.
Earlier this week, Clooney spoke at a Congressional hearing, where he testified that “a campaign of murder” was taking place in Sudan, and warned of “a real humanitarian disaster” if something wasn’t done within the next few months.
###
Originally posted 2012-03-16 11:02:11. Republished by Blog Post Promoter