Bits and pieces

I ran across Kurt Cobb's interesting "Is just-in-time nearly out of time?" blogpost; it paints a compelling picture of the dangers of living in a just-in-time world where businesses have minimal inventories... and a minimal ability to react in a time of crisis. And he extends the concern to how individual Americans would cope in a time of crisis:

There is an interesting resonance here between the "just-in-time" delivery of manufacturing inputs and retail stock and the modern tendency to keep essentially no food in one's home. It's a joke on TV shows and movies about bachelors and young moderns, but a great many people really do have nothing in their fridges but a six-pack of beer and a jar of mustard and nothing in their cupboard but half a bag of cookies and a couple of Cup-O-Noodles. They depend on take-out food, restaurants, their more provident friends' larders, and heaven help them, vending machines.

If the restaurants are not open because no food has been delivered, if the pizza take-out isn't delivering because there is no gasoline (and no pizza), and the vending machines have all been stripped bare by other hungry people, then these "grasshoppers" only resource is their friends. Desperation is just around the corner.

WHILE THE BUSH TEAM PLAYS POLITICS with the disruption of the terrorist plot to bring down airliners with liquid explosives, the TSA ignores advice from internal experts, one of whom predicted just such an approach a year ago:

"Next time the terrorists might put explosives in toothpaste tubes, and you can count on TSA screeners squishing out all the toothpaste from passengers' bags."

Well, we can expect that sports drinks and hair gel will now be permanently banned. This was what the British terrorists planned to use to disguise the explosives.

Read more here. Also, listen to Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, speak on Fresh Air about his new book, Without Precedent: the Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission.

A RETIRED CIA ANALYST SHARES his thinking on whether the U.S. is headed toward war with Iran. And Michael Ventura of The Austin Chronicle ponders the conflict in Lebanon as well as Israel's long term security.

AND FROM THE WORLD OF BIOLOGY, a parasite that can affect an individual's personality (and the culture of an entire country!) and a bacteria that infects insects and can even change their sex to improve its own odds of survival.


ANOTHER STORY ON THE DANGERS of genetic engineering of agricultural crops, this time from Hawaii where experiments were run to produce drugs and vaccines from altered strains of corn and sugar cane. A federal court ruled that the USDA provided insufficient oversight to prevent contamination of native plants, saying their "utter disregard for this simple investigation requirement, especially given the extraordinary number of endangered and threatened plants and animals in Hawaii, constitutes an unequivocal violation of a clear congressional mandate."

AND FINALLY A GREAT QUOTE from an American patriot:

'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them.... Yet panics, in some case, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered.... They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world.

-- COMMON SENSE, The American Crisis, No. I, Thomas Paine, 1776