Prepare for Change

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/10/california_central_valley_agriculture_drought_and_climate_change_photos.html "Frankly, there’s not much hope. How do we accommodate this new reality? Farming is never going to go back, regardless of how much rain we get next year, to the way it was in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s a long-term era of scarcity. California is much bigger than it was when these reservoirs were built, 40 or 50 years ago. There’s more water going to cities and the environment now. That boom era of California farming, I think everyone recognizes, is just a thing of the past." the price of food will go up while availability goes down.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29618889 "Last year a commercial scale advanced biofuels plant was opened in Crescentino near Turin , with the aim of producing 75 million litres of bioethanol every year from straw and arundo donax, an energy crop grown on marginal land. The Italians recently announced plans to open three further plants in the south of the country. Novozymes, one of the companies involved in the Crescentino initiative welcomed the government's decision to make it legally binding on fuel suppliers to include advanced biofuels in their petrol and diesel." This makes so much more sense than using food to make fuel, like corn ethanol.  I hope this comes to the US soon.

http://www.businessinsider.com/popular-resentment-could-lead-to-end-of-isis-2014-10 " Growing inequality and a general lack of concern for civilians living under ISIS's rule could eventually spell the end of the group, Elizabeth Palmer and Khaled Wassef report for CBS News. In Raqqa, Syria, ISIS's de facto capital, civilians chaffing under the jihadist's strict rule are becoming disenchanted with the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Residents are poor and disenfranchised — while fighters for the group are living lavishly. " From the book The False Messiahs, by Jack Gratus, it's easy to see that ISIS is nothing new in history. Someone like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, comes along, gathers a religious following, builds a movement, and then the whole thing collapses. I suspect, based on how ISIS is utilizing short-term strategies that will alienate most people, it will not last very long either. A short example from the book i...