The Daily Kos has the story Exxon CEO Joins Lawsuit to Stop Fracking Near His Home.

Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson may be the world’s biggest fracker (Exxon is the biggest natural gas producer in the U.S.) but he isn’t stupid. He’ll frack my backyard and tell me it’s good for me and he’ll frack your place too, but don’t let any frackers near his home. He knows damn well that fracking lowers property values, but he wouldn’t admit it until the frackers came to his place. He just joined a lawsuit to stop the fracking because it would lower the value of his property.

Well, if you read the story on which The Daily Kos article is commenting, the path from the lawsuit to fracking is not quite as direct as the comment would imply.  However, “it is close enough for government work” as we used to say in the Army.

The step between the lawsuit and the fracking is really a pretty thin veil, in my opinion as well as the opinion of the article.

I don’t know who is being quoted here, but this shows you the indirection used.

Tillerson has joined a lawsuit that cites fracking’s consequences in order to block the construction of a 160-foot water tower next to his and his wife’s Texas home.

The Wall Street Journal reports the tower would supply water to a nearby fracking site, and the plaintiffs argue the project would cause too much noise and traffic from hauling the water from the tower to the drilling site.

If noise and traffic is a legitimate cause for legal action, you would think that poisoning wells and causing earthquakes would be legitimate causes for action, too.  Poisoned wells and earthquakes are the more typical reasons for objecting to fracking.

Motherboard has the article The Math That Predicted the Revolutions Sweeping the Globe Right Now.

Just over a year ago, complex systems theorists at the New England Complex Systems Institute warned us that if food prices continued to climb, so too would the likelihood that there would be riots across the globe. Sure enough, we’re seeing them now. The paper’s author, Yaneer Bar-Yam, charted the rise in the FAO food price index—a measure the UN uses to map the cost of food over time—and found that whenever it rose above 210, riots broke out worldwide. It happened in 2008 after the economic collapse, and again in 2011, when a Tunisian street vendor who could no longer feed his family set himself on fire in protest.

To judge this article, it helps to know the definition of the Food Price Index.

The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) Food Price Index is a measure of the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities. It is not a measure of the height of food prices, but it is a measure of how quickly the prices change.

I have been wondering what it takes to drive people to start the kind of uprising that can overthrow a government.  This article provides an answer that I had not thought about.  I doubt the Republicans know what fire they are playing with when they cut back on food stamps in this country.  Should we tell them, or should we let them dig themselves a hole they will never get out of?  If it weren’t for the suffering of the people who cannot afford to buy food for their families, the answer to the previous question would be more obvious.