The United Nations’ food agency issued an alert on Tuesday warning that a severe drought was threatening the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock.

China has been essentially self-sufficient in grain for decades, for national security reasons. Any move by China to import large quantities of food in response to the drought could drive international prices even higher than the record levels recently reached.

My biggest concern is that such droughts could trigger another world food crisis.  Of course, you can’t evaluate how likely that scenario is, because there’s no mention of the food crisis of ’07 and ’08.  People in the U.S. are more or less completely oblivious that for most of the developing the world, economic catastrophe started before the ’08 financial crisis.  The ’07-’08 food crisis is one of the biggest unreported stories of our times.  That’s not going to change anytime soon with our current media.

No other state has produced more guns seized by police in the brutal Mexican drug wars than Texas. In the Lone Star State, no other city has more guns linked to Mexican crime scenes than Houston. And in the Texas oil town, no single independent dealer stands out more for selling guns traced from south of the border than Bill Carter.

Carter, 76, has operated four Carter’s Country stores in the Houston metropolitan area over the past half-century. In the past two years, more than 115 guns from his stores have been seized by the police and military in Mexico.

As an unprecedented number of American guns flows to the murderous drug cartels across the border, the identities of U.S. dealers that sell guns seized at Mexican crime scenes remain confidential under a law passed by Congress in 2003.

A year-long investigation by The Washington Post has cracked that secrecy and uncovered the names of the top 12 U.S. dealers of guns traced to Mexico in the past two years.

Eight of the top 12 dealers are in Texas, three are in Arizona, and one is in California. In Texas, two of the four Houston area Carter’s Country stores are on the list, along with four gun retailers in the Rio Grande Valley at the southern tip of the state. There are 3,800 gun retailers in Texas, 300 in Houston alone.

“One of the reasons that Houston is the number one source, you can go to a different gun store for a month and never hit the same gun store,” said J. Dewey Webb, special agent in charge of the Houston field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “You can buy [a 9mm handgun] down along the border, but if you come to Houston, you can probably buy it cheaper because there’s more dealers, there’s more competition.”

Drug cartels have aggressively turned to the United States because Mexico severely restricts gun ownership. Following gunrunning paths that have been in place for 50 years, firearms cross the border and end up in the hands of criminals as well as ordinary citizens seeking protection.

“This is not a new phenomenon,” Webb said.

What is different now, authorities say, is the number of high-powered rifles heading south – AR-15s, AK-47s, armor-piercing .50-caliber weapons – and the savagery of the violence.

Federal authorities say more than 60,000 U.S. guns of all types have been recovered in Mexico in the past four years, helping fuel the violence that has contributed to 30,000 deaths. Mexican President Felipe Calderon came to Washington in May and urged Congress and President Obama to stop the flow of guns south.

U.S. law enforcement has ramped up its focus on gun trafficking along the southwestern border. Arrests of individual gunrunners have surged. But investigators rarely bring regulatory actions or criminal cases against U.S. gun dealers, in part because of laws backed by the gun lobby that make it difficult to prove cases.

First, a big problem here is there’s a politically powerful vested interest that profits from arming the drug cartels. The U.S., generally, is very good about controlling the flow of our military arms, but it seems the security state is turning a blind eye to this problem. Second, as crime has continued to decrease in the U.S. despite the recession, the increase in violence in Mexico may be the actual consequence of the lapsing of the assault weapons ban.  I’ll also just note that border states have particularly lenient gun ownership laws, which no doubt helps fuel the ant trade.  I wonder when this problem will create enough political pressure to change current gun policy.

Update:

Conservatives at Red State, of course, have a genuinely insane idea related to this: invade Mexico.

“There is,” Willett explains, “a profound difference between an activist judge and an engaged judge.” The former creates rights not specified or implied by the Constitution. The latter defends rights the Framers actually placed there and prevents the elected branches from usurping the judiciary’s duty to declare what the Constitution means. Let us hope the Supreme Court justices are engaged when considering the insurance mandate.

Now if only we could get Democratic politicians to start talking like that.

In November 2009, six years after the government of Libya first agreed to disarm its nuclear weapons program, Libyan nuclear workers wheeled the last of their country’s highly enriched uranium out in front of the Tajoura nuclear facility, just east of Tripoli. U.S. and Russian officials overseeing Libya’s disarmament began preparations to ship this final batch of weapons-grade nuclear material to Russia, where it would be treated and destroyed.

The plan was to load the uranium onto a massive Russian cargo plane, one of the few in the world specially equipped to fly nuclear materials. On November 20, the day before the plane was to leave for a nuclear facility in Russia, Libyan officials unexpectedly halted the shipment. Without explanation, they declared that the uranium would not be permitted to leave Libya. They left the seven five-ton casks out in the open and under light guard, vulnerable to theft by the al-Qaeda factions that still operate in the region or by any rogue government that learned of their presence.

For one month and one day, U.S. and Russian diplomats negotiated with Libya for the uranium to be released and flown out of the country. At the same time, engineers from both countries worked to secure the nuclear material from theft or leakage, two serious dangers that became more likely the longer the casks sat exposed. On December 21, Libya finally allowed a Russian plane to remove the casks, ending Libya’s nuclear weapons program and with it the low-grade game of nuclear blackmail they had been playing.

The month-long crisis, never revealed by the Obama administration or reported in the press, is recorded in U.S. State Department documents obtained by The Atlantic. Those documents tell the story of frantic diplomatic maneuvering as U.S. and Russian officials pushed Libyan leaders to honor their disarmament pledge. A person with access to the cables provided them to The Atlantic in order to publicize the dangers of loose nuclear materials under the control of unpredictable regimes in unstable countries.

The fact that Republicans seem to be willing to risk loose nukes due to lack of U.S. oversight and cooperation with Russia is astounding. It also shows how casual their disregard to U.S. national security interests is when their political interests differ from national ones.

CNN’s twenty-four-hour coverage of the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake, which took an estimated 300,000 lives, doubled the network’s viewership. This coverage undoubtedly played a role in the America public’s response to the tragedy—one out of two Americans donated money to aid organizations. But little reporting has been done since then that asks how exactly that money is being spent, holds aid organizations accountable to their promises, or investigates the American government’s development and economic policies in the country. These policies, argues sociologist Alex Dupuy, have kept Haiti frozen in a destructive cycle of aid-dependence and exploitation for decades, stripping Haiti of its self-determination. “For the level of tragedy, no one’s really being very honest,” said Michael Fairbanks, a development expert, of the American and international community’s rhetoric about Haiti since the earthquake. “[Haitians] are constantly put into the position of adolescence and being infantilized so they can prey on the charity from the rest of the hemisphere.”

The longer American news outlets ignore these critical and complex issues, the easier it will become to view their occasional jaunts to Haiti with cynicism: it’s an convenient place to get B-roll of tragedy and disaster. Their coverage increases viewership, but without a moral component of responsibility towards Haitians themselves over the long-term, such coverage is basically exploitative. And over time, superficial reporting on Haiti’s problems—which plays a role in soliciting charitable donations from Americans-will arguably make the media culpable in the very system of aid-dependence and misguided development policies that help keep Haiti poor.

Today’s top students are motivated less by enthusiasm for Democrats and much more by revulsion from Republicans. It’s not the students who have changed so much. It’s the Republicans.

It’s worth reading full.  Kevin Drum has a simpler explanation:

Older voters might be willing to accept Republican incoherence simply because it’s in their interest to do so and they don’t really care if the arguments make sense, but younger voters don’t have that same motivation. Republican magical thinking doesn’t really benefit them, so they’re just repelled by it.

It’s not just that Republican magical thinking doesn’t directly benefit young people in any tangible way.  The bigger problem is that, values aside, this magical thinking is so easy to knock down.  At universities where a bunch of bright young people are getting into late-night bull sessions by night and reading academic literature by day, these arguments have no chance of gaining traction.  They fall down under any empirical attack.  I don’t think politicians need to go around saying the most intellectually daring arguments out there, but they should have some substance behind them.  Republicans increasingly rely on glass house arguments.  Ambitious kids who think they know much more than they do are going to throw rocks.  It would take someone with a lot fortitude to constantly want to play that sort of defense with your peer group.

Increasingly in my life, I simply end conversations when they veer into Republican fantasyland.  I’m not going to argue about whether the Bush tax cuts added to the deficit or not.  Either you base arguments on widely accepted factual premises or you don’t.

• Cooks Source is Voldemort.
• Cooks Source voted for David Hasselhoff on Dancing with the Stars.
• Cooks Source was the second gunman on the grassy knoll
• Cooks Source is my abusive ex boyfriend.

 

Basically the currently elderly, people living in rural areas, and people whose income depends on the military-industrial complex would all be protected from a drive that focuses specifically on domestic discretionary. Not coincidentally, these are many of the people inclined to vote Republican.

Besides the fact that Republicans are much better at demonizing Democratic constituencies (“Greedy teachers,” etc.), Republicans have been able to attach moral opprobrium for when Democratic constituencies effectively use the political system to enhance their welfare.  Think of how Republicans talk about teacher’s unions.  The fact is that everyone tries to use the government for pecuniary gain, and I don’t see how what moral distinction one can make between a grain farmer in Iowa supported by farm subsidies, and a teacher using collective action and labor laws to protect their pay and benefits.  Both are contributing something useful to society and using government to ensure they get the best possible compensation for their work.

Wired has a whole article about them.

More here.