Libya, what price of freedom?

Given even the academics are heading back to University, it’s time for the old Wrinkle to dust off the cobwebs and ease back into a blog or two.

Starting overseas, the current big news is obviously Libya. Just to add a few comments on this one, for those unaware Libya is effectively a country split in two by 600 kilometres of desert with over 90% of the population living close to the coast.

In the West you have the capital, Tripoli, two thirds of the population and one third of the oil reserves, and in the East you have one third of the population and two thirds of the oil, plus a new regime in charge. The oil in both sections is what they call in the US, "Sweet Texas Crude", or of extremely high quality and hence, value.

However to put things into perspective the Saudi’s have four million barrels of spare oil capacity per day, in various quality configurations and have offered to make up any shortfall resulting from the activities in Libya. This spare capacity is more than double Libya’s 2 million odd barrels of output per day.

While Libya also has the 9^th largest oil reserves in the world, this isn’t going anywhere and sooner or later production will flow again. Accordingly any market blips in relation to the current unrest are likely to be short term.

What isn’t short term however is the human toll, and what price freedom. The turning point in the East appears to be when one brave soul filled his car with cooking oil and drove it into the gates of the security compound in Benghazi, setting off a raging fire.

Recently there seems to have been a cluster of tragedies both overseas and very close to home. Being a Kiwi myself, the Wrinkle would like to offer his thoughts and condolences to all those affected by the sad events in Christchurch.

In a way it’s also doubly sad that such tragic events are needed to shock us out of the closed view of our little customised worlds as we go about our daily activities. Nature is a true equaliser and sometimes these clarion calls serve to remind us of the everyday privilege we call "life".

Outside of the recent natural disasters the Wrinkle also came across some statistics that aren’t new, but which really surprised me recently. Able Australia is warning that the prevalence of deaf blindness will increase as Australia's population ages. Access Economics data produced for Deafblind Awareness Week predicts 1.1 million Australians will have the combined disability by 2050 (Source: ABC news, Friday June 18).

Able Australia estimates that there are currently 288,000 Australians with varying degrees of combined deaf blindness. Outside of the use of Cochlear implants, the only effective way for people with this combined disability to communicate is via touch sign language. Interpreters in this mode of communication typically cost $200 per hour.

All of us have heard of Ann Frank, but the Wrinkle for one certainly wasn’t aware of how many people actually suffer from this disability.

So many of us take our health for granted until something goes wrong, it’s in these times (and always for that matter) we should be grateful for what we have and are.