Great Filter - Fin d'siecle Oil?

For some time now, I've used the terms "evolutionary bottleneck" or "evolutionary blind alley" - but my hat's off this week to Robin Hanson and his coinage "Great Filter" referenced in the Technology Review article apparently upsetting to that pair of angry UFO-logists in the comments;

the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or millennia to come. Let us ponder these possibilities in turn.

I'm going to begin using this term and targetting certain events as possible or probable Great Filters in the path of complex industrial civilization. Matt Simmons talked about one such filter at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston this week. OTC: $100 trillion needed to rebuild energy infrastructure;

The oil and gas industry will need to invest $50-100 trillion to rebuild its ageing infrastructure within the next 7 years and stave off a serious drop in oil and gas production, Matt Simmons, chairman of Simmons & Co. International, told OGJ May 5 at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston.

In a worst-case scenario, Simmons said, oil and gas output could fall by 10-20% by 2013 if industry does not replace its rusting, corroded assets. Spare capacity also has run out because formerly cheap prices for oil and gas precluded upgrading and construction of new facilities .

The average age of offshore rigs is 25 years, and oil companies have ignored the problem for the past few decades because of the low energy prices, which meant that maintenance has been expensive.

However, the upward trend in prices can help pay for the rebuilding of the energy system, Simmons stated.

"There is no blueprint in place, and this is a global problem. The longer the blueprint is postponed, the more acute the crisis will get," he said.

Simmons is an archetypal figure in the sphere of Peak Oil realists. If he says it, you can pretty much take it to the bank. This begs the question; where are the presidential candidates? on a topic of such obvious moment. It also goes straight back to the struggles of the Rockefeller heirs with corporatist governance and the challenge of trying to put ExxonMobil back on track.

Retrogenes and Retrobeasties

Olivia Judson is a popular writer with a background in evolutionary biology. In this week's NYTimes blog where she's featured, she writes the following;

The genomes of most organisms are littered with entities known as retroelements. These are a type of genetic parasite — stretches of DNA that (usually) do nothing useful for the cell, and exist simply to make more copies of themselves. (There are many different kinds of genetic parasite: as much as half of the DNA in the human genome is thought to have originated from them.) The way that retroelements proliferate is complicated, and depends on the element in question, for there are many sorts; but one thing they all have in common is that they, too, depend on the activity of reverse transcriptase.[...]

whether a newly created retrogene will appear and immediately vanish — or whether it will confer some kind of advantage on the organism and thus spread through the population — depends on where in the genome it gets inserted. If it arrives in the “wrong” place, it may not be able to be switched on; or worse, it may destroy the workings of an existing gene and harm the organism in some way. Hence, only a fraction of the retrogenes that are created will succeed in becoming established.

Which brings me to the X-odus. In mammals and in fruit flies, the genetic difference between males and females is that females have two X chromosomes whereas males have an X and a Y. Studies of successful retrogenes in a number of species, including fruit flies, humans, mice and opossums, have all shown the same, striking pattern. The parents of retrogenes are disproportionately likely to be found on the X chromosome. But the retrogenes themselves are typically located elsewhere. In other words, there’s a weird kind of genetic migration going on: successful retrogenes are fugitives from the X.

This is both fascinating to me and very timely in light of new data popularized this week concerning the genome of the duckbilled platypus;

The sex of the platypus is determined by a set of ten chromosomes, an oddity that sets it apart from all other mammals and from birds. These chromosomes link during meiosis to form a chain that ensures every sperm gets a set of all Xs or all Ys. Despite the similar designations, none of the platypus X chromosomes resembles the human, dog or mouse X. “The sex chromosomes are absolutely, completely different from all other mammals. We had not expected that,” says Jennifer Graves of the Australian National University in Canberra, who studies sex differentiation and is an author on the paper. Instead, the platypus Xs better match the avian Z sex chromosome. Another chromosome matches the mouse X, Graves and her colleagues report in Genome Research (F. Veyrunes et al. Genome Res . doi:10.1101/gr.7101908; 2008). This is evidence that placental mammalian sex chromosomes and the sex-determining gene Sry — found on the Y chromosome — evolved after the monotremes diverged from mammals, much later than previously thought. “Our sex chromosomes are a plain old ordinary autosome in the platypus,” Graves says.

Both articles make for some fascinating storytelling, and they complement one another by introducing and amplifying a new insight from the nascent field of genomic mechanics into the popular sphere. Most people don't pay enough attention to this to discern where the science ends and the storytelling begins. As a result, constant vigilance is required to ensure that storytellers with an agenda are never permitted to hijack any aspect of this research for their own political ends while the science endeavoring to understand the phenomenon remains very much an early stage work in progress.

Eugenics or Profit?

Bayer Documents: AIDS Tainted Blood Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs An examination of internal Bayer company documents by The New York Times reveals that the company was engaged in unsavory, probably criminal marketing practices. The documents reveal that Bayer continued to sell contaminated blood plasma causing thousands of hemophiliac patients to be infected with AIDS. The company continued to sell the contaminated blood in Asia for over a year when it had already introduced a safer, heated blood plasma version in the US and Europe in February 1984.

The documents examined by the Times provide evidence of unrestrained corrupt practices by a pharmaceutical industry giant. According to The Times, records suggest that the reason for continuing to sell an AIDS infected blood product, was to get rid of inventory and "the company hoped to preserve the profit margin from 'several large fixed-price contracts.'"

This previously uninvestigated case demonstrates how this industry's lies and crimes are shielded by officials at the Food and Drug Administration. The Times reports that in 1985 FDA's Dr. Harry Meyer willingly helped Bayer cover up "one of the worst drug-related medical disasters in history." Meyer suggested that the issue should be "quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community and the public." This culture of accommodation continues to prevail at the FDA.

The case also demonstrates Bayer's racial elitism. Its lethal marketing policies disregard human lives. The mother of a 22 year old hemophiliac who was killed by Bayer's tainted product in Hong Kong put it this way: "they did not care about the lives in Asia. It was racial discrimination."

The Times reports that three other American pharmaceutical companies were involved in selling tainted blood plasma after a safer version existed: Armour Pharmaceutical, Baxter International and Alpha Therapeutic.

American taxpayers have awarded unprecedented, generous financial subsidies to this industry--no other has extended patent rights as does this industry. In return they have been deceived, believing that drug company officials care about alleviating suffering and improving people's health, and that the FDA protects them from tainted products. In fact, this industry has repeatedly shown that profits matter more than human lives even less valued are the lives in underdeveloped countries.

Useless Eaters?

The methods used for mass extermination in the Nazi death camps originated and were perfected in earlier use against people with physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities. Developed from the article by Dr. Mark Mostert, this website describes the historical context of attitudes toward people with disabilities in Germany and how this context produced mass murder of people with disabilities prior to and during the early years of World War II.

The connection between eugenics and social darwinism is exactly the opposite of what is usually imagined. Eugenics is a method by which those who fear they will lose the struggle for existence try to change the outcome.

Natural Born Killers?

From Michael P. Ghiglieri's THE DARK SIDE OF MAN: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence

[p. 71] One trait chimps, bonobos, and humans share is the retention of males. Unlike nearly every other social species of mammal, these societies generally retain their males. Meanwhile, females marry into new groups. Anthropologist Carol Ember clarified this pattern by surveying 179 hunter-gatherer societies. She found that only 16 percent of these societies retained their young women more than their young men. Chimp and bonobo social groups also keep their males but transfer their females. Gorillas do the same, although only a few males stay with their fathers. In contrast, orangutans (and almost all other primates) disperse all their males and none of their females. This pattern is significant because this one evolutionary event in the common ancestor of chimps, bonobos, and humans—the retention of males—set the stage for cooperative ape warriors.

[pp. 175-177] It should be noted that male chimps waged war on a neighboring community only when it, the “enemy,” was a lot smaller and weaker than their own community, containing half or fewer adult males. It is no overstatement to say that chimps are Machiavellian—or, to put it another way, politically devious and violent. Men are chimpanzee-like!

These studies of wild chimps tell us that solidarity in aggression among a community’s male kin is their standard strategy to reproduce and that this strategy has been around for a long time. How do we know? Despite their fierce and violent competition, male chimps are only 123 percent the weight of females, evidence that winning against other males no longer hinges on the more primitive orangutan or gorilla strategy of being a huge and formidable individual. Instead, winning depends on group size of male kin who cooperate as an army. Were this a recent evolutionary development, male chimps would be both big and cooperative.

Although chimps teach us what the law of the jungle really means, they also teach us what being social is all about. Sociability is for individual advantage. Within the chimps’ fusion-fission society, each ape’s decisions as to whether to socialize and with whom are based solely on how to best enhance his or her own reproductive success. Thus chimpanzee social structure—violent and otherwise—owes its form ultimately to each individual’s reproductive strategies and, by extension, to each one’s individual decisions. Warfare is simply the social version of combat.

Chimp social structure would be unique were it not for humans acting similarly. This is no coincidence. By most taxonomic criteria, chimps and humans are sibling species. Overall, chimp society is not only extremely sexist—with all adult males dominant over females—but also xenophobic to the extent of killing all alien males, many infants, and some old females who enter their territory. To some readers, my use of the word war may seem too strong to describe what male kin groups do. But systematic, protracted, deliberate, and cooperative brutal killings of every male in a neighboring community, plus genocidal and frequent cannibalistic murder of many of their offspring, followed by usurpation of the males’ mates and annexation of part or all of the losers’ territory, matches or exceeds the worst that humans do when they wage war.

Wild chimps reveal the natural contexts of territoriality, war, male cooperation, solidarity and sharing, nepotism, sexism, xenophobia, infanticide, murder, cannibalism, polygyny, and mating competition between kin groups of males—behaviors that have evolved through sexual selection. Also significant is the fact that none of these apes learned these violent behaviors by watching TV or by being victims of socioeconomic handicaps—poor schools, broken homes, bad fathers, illegal drugs, easy weapons, or any other sociological condition. Nor were these apes spurred to war by any political, religious, or economic ideology or by the rhetoric of an insane demagogue. They also were not seeking an “identity” or buckling under peer pressure. Instead, they were obeying instincts, coded in the male psyche, dictating that they must win against other males.

Nuclear physicist Freeman Dyson warns, “If we are to avoid destruction, we must first of all understand the human and historical context out of which destruction arises. We must understand what it is in human nature that makes war so damnably attractive.”

The great apes, especially chimpanzees, are the best living mirrors of primeval humankind It is up to us to look into that mirror (before we have destroyed all their tropical forests and killed them all) and identify what it is in the human male psyche that makes violence so “damnably attractive.” Now that we have seen the Machiavellian nature of martial chimpanzees, it is time to revisit Homo sapiens.

Are Human Warriors Natural-Born Killers?

IN ALL WARS ever fought by men, some men have killed, while others have avoided doing so. This inconsistency has spurred many idealists to deny that men are instinctive warriors. Instead, they insist, killing must be pounded into each of us against the grain. According to journalist Alessandra Stanley, “Yes, boys have a primitive urge to fight, an easily tapped aggression. But killing is not instinctive; it is an acquired taste, something that grownups must pass on.” Historian Gwynne Dyer likewise claims, ‘Aggression is certainly part of our genetic makeup, and necessarily so, but the normal human being’s quota of aggression will not even cause him to kill acquaintances, let alone wage war against strangers from a different country.”

Both are wrong. People’s “quotas of aggression” are all too often high enough to kill both acquaintances and strangers. During the Vietnam War, for example, Ho Chi Minh’s forces killed fifty-eight thousand Americans. But during the same time span, Americans murdered far more Americans at home—and most of those murdered were acquaintances (or even more intimate). According to political scientists Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevilla, “An ineluctable fact is that human intercourse all too naturally produces circumstances in which reasonable people regard kill or be killed as the best option available.”

This reality is so obvious to biologists that, despite his personal aversion to believing that men are innate killers, German ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt found himself listing the universal traits of men the world over that are vital to war: loyalty to group members; readiness to react aggressively to outside threats; motivation to fight, dominate, and act territorially; universal fear of strangers; and intolerance of those who deviate from group norms.

Essential Orage

Of the three lines of evolution perceptible to man (and hence attributed by him to nature), the highest, because the most inclusive, is spiritual evolution defined as the self-perception of self. But between, first, this verbal definition and the realization of its meaning; and secondly, the realization of its meaning and its actualization in being—there may be aeons of difference. From merely understanding that the highest value is self-objectivity (the ability, that is to say, to see everything thought of as self exactly as if it were not self) it does not follow that we have it, any more that it follows that if we understand that gold is of more value than silver, we necessarily possess gold. The attainment of the state of self-objectivity is something totally different from its understanding just as acquiring gold is something totally different from the appreciation of its value.

What I am therefore disposed to say of the problems already referred to is that their understanding and appreciation need to be supplemented by something entirely different before they can be solved; and that, in fact, the modern mind, even when desirous of objectivity, is incapable of solving such problems for the simple reason that the modern mind is not, in actuality, self-objective.

I beg myself as well as my readers not to mistake understanding for attainment; and not to imagine, on the strength of their realization of certain truths, that they possess them, or still less, that they can use them. Our being, in which alone truth is possessed, is still a long way behind our understanding. Is then, Progress a "myth"? I do not know. Is it, on the other hand, a fact in Nature? Again, I do not know. Nor do I find it necessary to settle the question one way or the other for my peace of mind. To understand what the question implies, to be satisfied that one can not answer it now, but to hope to be able one day to answer it, that, I think, is enough. . .

Killer Apes

From Michael P. Ghiglieri's THE DARK SIDE OF MAN: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence

[pp. 172-173] One big reason for those chimps’ community to fission into smaller parties is ecology. Sixty percent of a chimp’s diet consists of ripe fruit. Yet fruit is often so hard to find that wild chimps are drastically underweight compared to captive ones. Nor do enough huge fruit trees exist for all fifty or so chimps of a community to travel together and still get enough to eat. In any tree, the least dominant chimps, females in particular, lose in competition over what little fruit exists. Here again, however, males place solidarity ahead of calories. Despite the importance of a square meal, when approaching big fruit trees, males at Gombe and Kibale—but not females—have been observed pant-hooting loudly and drumming tree buttresses with their feet in a wild tattoo resounding through the rain forest for up to a mile. This bedlam attracts other chimps, who share the food of the calling males. This cooperative “food calling” pays off in three selfish ways for the males who called: by facilitating mutual grooming to rid them of parasites, by adding more male companions for safer territorial patrols, and by being able to mate with a female arrival. It also pays off in inclusive fitness by helping all relatives within earshot to achieve better nutrition. All of this, incidentally, is gained at a low cost because males usually call at trees big enough to feed all comers. By contrast, a female would gain nothing by food calling, because males habitually usurp the best feeding spots. And, to add insult to injury, she would be cheated by arriving males, who would not groom her after she groomed them.

Chimps typically travel in groups of two to six adults, but scarcity of food often forces them to go it alone. That they travel together anyway whenever they can leads us to ask the biggest question in social behavior: why do they bother to be social at the cost of not getting enough to eat?

Pieces of this puzzle fell into place in the early 1970s. The process began after Jane Goodall stopped her eight-year program of giving Gombe chimps six hundred bananas a day to habituate them to human observers and to keep them nearby. Her study community split into two factions. The biggest, the Kasakela community of thirty-five apes, stayed in the north. The Kahama faction of fewer than fifteen chimps went south. Within a year or two, the Kasakela males forayed south to the Kahama Valley in sortie after sortie, during which they killed at least five of the seven Kahama. males (the last two vanished due to causes unknown). They likely also killed two of the old females. These gang killings were at least as brutal as the one described at the beginning of this section. Males stomped on, twisted, bit, yanked, dragged, gouged, pounded, dismembered, and threw boulders at their outnumbered opponents with such fierce and deliberately lethal aggression that Goodall admitted, “If they had had firearms and had been taught to use them, I suspect they would have used them to kill.”

China vs. U.S. The Battle for Oil (1-7)

Sky-rocketing growth and shortage of sufficient resources to supply its burgeoning American-style middle-class is forcing China to set its sights outside its borders in a frantic search for oil. Under the dominant production and consumption model - there's no question where this will lead. Middle-class lifestyle in these developing countries, even if more frugal than what is common in rich nations, is more energy-intensive. In 2006, China added as much electricity as France's total supply. Yet millions in China lack reliable access to electricity; in India, more than 400 million don't have power. The demand in India will grow fivefold in the next 25 years. So much demand, not enough supply....,

Assessing Memetic Weapons Capability of Neoconservatism

Use of radio as a form of memetic warfare has long been known and exploited (Voice of America, Radio Free Europe). The early innovations of memetic warfare are evident in spam, now reaching 80% of internet traffic -- possible to justify future implementation of severely restrictive counter-measures. In contrast to the threat of viruses, spam has a cognitive component. The focus on sexually explicit imagery, together with performance improving drugs and devices, is clearly associated with evocation of lust as a memetic weapon. It is no coincidence that a high percentage of such spam originates in the USA -- where even the highest ranked hotels offer "adult movies". Only the naive would fail to recognize the offensive function of such memetic weapons against other cultures, such as Islam.

Whilst such spam may be understood as a memetic analogue to biological warfare, there is a case for anticipating the development and deployment of memetic analogues to tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. There is also a case for recognizing the probable nature and targets of such weaponry and the appropriate modes of defence.

From Anthony Judge's Seven Deadly Sins of Fundamentalism

The Gospel of Consumption

and the better future we left behind....,

"Do we live to work or work to live? The question of how important work is in our lives is central to Hunnicutt's study of Kellogg's daring social experiment, which began in 1930 and lasted until 1985.... [I]t could serve as a wake up call for a nation in big trouble if the jobless future comes to pass." —Publishers Weekly

This was welcome news to workers at a time when the country was rapidly descending into the Great Depression. But as Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book Kellogg's Six-Hour Day, Brown and Kellogg wanted to do more than save jobs. They hoped to show that the free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources. Instead, workers would be liberated by increasingly higher wages and shorter hours for the final freedom promised by the Declaration of Independence "the pursuit of happiness."[...]

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation's Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called "need saturation". Davis noted that the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months operation each year and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year's supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, It may be that the worlds needs ultimately will be produced by three days work a week.[...]

Yet we could work and spend a lot less and still live quite comfortably. By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day-or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level. We were already the richest country on the planet in 1948 and most of the world has not yet caught up to where we were then.

Kellog's vision, despite its popularity with his employees, had little support among his fellow business leaders. But Dahlberg's book had a major influence on Senator (and future Supreme Court justice) Hugo Black who, in 1933, introduced legislation requiring a thirty-hour workweek. Although Roosevelt at first appeared to support Black's bill, he soon sided with the majority of businessmen who opposed it. Instead, Roosevelt went on to launch a series of policy initiatives that led to the forty-hour standard that we more or less observe today.[...]

But we cannot do it as individuals. The mavericks at Kellogg held out against company and social pressure for years, but in the end the marketplace didn't offer them a choice to work less and consume less. The reason is simple: that choice is at odds with the foundations of the marketplace itself-at least as it is currently constructed. The men and women who masterminded the creation of the consumerist society understood that theirs was a political undertaking, and it will take a powerful political movement to change course today.

Kellogg's six-hour day was the pinnacle of a hundred-year process that cut working time virtually in half. Kellogg Management, propelled by a vision of Liberation Capitalism, insisted that six hours would revolutionize society by shifting the balance of time from work to leisure--from economic concerns to the challenge of freedom.

Kellogg's employees, like centuries of workers, believed that work was a means to an end. An overwhelming number of employees were willing to "share their work" and found the extra time an opportunity to invest in the family, community, church, and individual freedom. When World War II ended, Kellogg's managers abandoned the six-hour shift and began with the rest of the nation to define progress as more work for more people. Losing sight of the original dream of more time to live outside necessity, management argued that work should remain the center of life, providing identity, meaning, and purpose to an otherwise meaningless existence.

Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied

Charles Kettering: General Director of Research Laboratories at General Motors.
[From Nation's Business, 17, no. 1 (January 1929), 30-31, 79.]

A few weeks back I was sitting with a group of executives. All were admiring a new model.

"It is absolutely the best automobile that can be made," enthused one. I objected to that statement.

"Let's take this automobile which, you say, is the 'best that can be made' and put it into a glass showcase," I said. "Let's put it in there-seal it so no person can possibly touch it. Just before we seal it in the case, let us mark the price in big letters inside the case."

"Let us do that and come back here a year from today. After looking at it and appraising it, we will mark a price on the outside of the glass. It will be a price something less than what we think the car is worth today. Probably $200 less. Then, let's come back once every year for ten years, look through the glass, and mark a new price. At the end of ten years we won't be able to put down enough ciphers to indicate what we think of the car. That is, of course, eliminating its value as junk.

"In those ten years, no one could possibly have touched the car. There could be no lessened value through handling. The paint would be just as good as new; the crank case just as good; the real axle just as good; and the motor just as good as ever.

What then, has happened to the car?

"People's minds will have been changed; improvements will come in other cars; new styles will have come. What you have here today, a car that you call 'the best that can be made,' will then be useless. So it isn't the best that can be made. It may be the best you can have made and, if that is what you meant, I have no quarrel with what you said. . . ."

Change, to a research engineer, is improvement. People, though don't seem to think of it in that manner. When a change is suggested they hold back and say, "What we have is all right--it does the work." Doing the work is important but doing it better is more important. The human family in industry is always looking for a park bench where it can sit down and rest. But the only park benches I know of are right in front of an undertaker's establishment.

The younger generation--and by that I mean the generation that is always coming--knows what it wants and it will get what it wants. This is what makes for change. It brings about improvements in old things and developments in new things.

We, as manufacturers, must offer those improvements after they have been found to be capable improvements. The public buys and disposes of what it has. The fact that it is able to dispose of what it has enables us, as producers, to put a lower price tag on the new model. The law of economy in mass production enters here. We are permitted to turn out cars in volume because there is a market for them...

If everyone were satisfied, no one would buy the new thing because no one would want it. The ore wouldn't be mined; timber wouldn't be cut. Almost immediately hard times would be upon us.

You must accept this reasonable dissatisfaction with what you have and buy the new thing, or accept hard times. You can have your choice.

Of course, it wasn't always this way. Coupled with the corporate aim of production and sales without end, psychology and the tools of mass media combined to give rise to the collective id monster threatening to devour us all - dopamine hegemony.

The World's First Billion-Dollar Home

While visiting New York in 2005, Nita Ambani was in the spa at the Mandarin Oriental New York, overlooking Central Park. The contemporary Asian interiors struck her just so, and prompted her to inquire about the designer.

Nita Ambani was no ordinary tourist. She is married to Mukesh Ambani, head of Mumbai, India-based petrochemical giant Reliance Industries, and the fifth richest man in the world. ( Lakshmi Mittal, ranked fourth, is an Indian citizen, but a resident of the U.K.)

Forbes estimated Ambani's net worth at $43 billion in March. Reliance Industries was founded by Mukesh's father, Dhirubhai Ambani, in 1966, and is India's most valuable firm by market capitalization. The couple, who have three children, currently live in a 22-story Mumbai tower that the family has spent years remodeling to meet its needs.

Like many families with the means to do so, the Ambanis wanted to build a custom home. They consulted with architecture firms Perkins + Will and Hirsch Bedner Associates, the designers behind the Mandarin Oriental, based in Dallas and Los Angeles, respectively. Plans were then drawn up for what will be the world's largest and most expensive home: a 27-story skyscraper in downtown Mumbai with a cost nearing $2 billion, says Thomas Johnson, director of marketing at Hirsch Bedner Associates. The architects and designers are creating as they go, altering floor plans, design elements and concepts as the building is constructed.

The ghetto-fabulous full-monty in pictures, words, and video is at Forbes.com.

Modok Crossed the Line Last Week

I doubt that anybody noticed, because it wasn't the context in which his comments were presented hereabouts, but in addition to his forward looking remarks about overpopulation, CIA Director Michael Hayden also said Wednesday that Iranian policy, at the highest government level, is to help kill Americans in Iraq, the boldest pronouncement of Iranian involvement by a U.S. official to date.

Hayden made the statement in response to a student question while delivering the Landon Lecture at Kansas State University.

"It is my opinion, it is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to highest level of that government, to facilitate the killing of Americans in Iraq," Hayden said. "Just make sure there's clarity on that."

My friend Rembom dropped a stellar Pepe Escobar joint in the comments y'day providing a fairly detailed current state assessment of the heat-up towards Iran;

It's like old times in the Persian Gulf. As of this week, a second aircraft carrier battle task force is being sent in -- not long after Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen highlighted planning for "potential military courses of action" against Iran[...]On the dispatching of that second aircraft carrier, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates offered the following comment: "I don't see it as an escalation. I think it could be seen, though, as a reminder."

uh huh..., by the benchmarks established by the Bush administration, this is an overwhelming justification for war. Indeed, in the carefully constructed reality of the GWOT, Modok's accusation essentially compels war: what nation would accept the killing of its own people without striking back?

The Militarist

Despite neoconservatism's close association in the public imagination with the Bush administration, and despite McCain's image as a moderate, a look at the record makes clear that McCain, not Bush, is the real neocon in the Republican Party.

McCain was the neocons' candidate in 2000, McCain adhered to a truer version of the faith during the early years of hubris that followed September 11, and as president McCain would likely pursue policies that will make what we've seen from Bush look like a pale imitation of the real thing. McCain, after all, is the candidate of perpetual war in Iraq. The candidate who, despite his protestations in a March speech that he "hates war," not only stridently backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq but has spent years calling on the United States to depose every dictator in the world. He's the candidate of ratcheting-up action against North Korea and Iran, of new efforts to undermine the United Nations, and of new cold wars with Russia and China. Rather than hating war, he sees it as integral to the greatness of the nation, and military service as the highest calling imaginable. It is, in short, not Bush but McCain, who among practical politicians holds truest to the vision of a foreign policy dominated by militaristic unilateralism. American Prospect current issue by way of P6

Our Mr. Sun

The Half-Life For Air Travel

Falls Church News Press; At $3.71 a gallon, jet fuel is now the single largest expense an airline faces.

In 2000, the airlines fuel bill was $14 billion. It is now pushing $60 billion and climbing. Southwest, the most profitable carrier, recently announced that this year’s fuel bill will be $500 million more than last year and equal to 2007 profits. During the first quarter of 2008 American airlines lost $328 million; Delta lost $274 million; United lost $537 million; Continental $80 million; Northwest $191 million; and US Airways $236 million. Only Southwest Airlines, which did a better job of hedging its fuel than the others, made a profit.

It is clear we are going to see major changes in air travel shortly. While the demise of inexpensive discretionary air travel has ramifications for many industries, in the first instance tourism is likely to be hit the hardest.

Ignoring for the minute the likely effects of $4 or $5 gasoline in California this summer, Las Vegas reports that nearly half of its tourists arrive by air. To make matters worse, resort operators have recently spent billions upgrading their facilities to the $300 a night places that are less likely to attract drive up customers. The same pattern can be repeated at air-dependent tourist attractions all over the world.

There is still a remarkable amount of denial in the airline business. In any case, the day of the ubiquitous kerosene-powered jet transport which revolutionized travel for many of us in the second half of the 20th century is likely to be shorter than most realize.

US Navy research lab under microscope in Indonesia

Fascinating;

Apparently stung by the latest whirlwind of allegations, some of which stretch back several years, the US embassy has issued a statement entitled "The Truth About Namru-2."

"There's been rumours over the last 10 years that we had to respond to," US embassy deputy chief of mission John A. Heffern told AFP.

"It's just crazy," he said of the allegations of spying and secret experiments, adding that Namru-2 was "totally unclassified, totally transparent."

"If the Indonesian ministry of health wants the raw data, it's totally open to them," he said.

"Hopefully we will resume our negotiations. This doesn't help."

Sticking points in the negotiations have included the US's insistence that all American staff at the laboratory be given diplomatic immunity.

Complicating matters is a separate dispute between Washington and Jakarta over bird flu samples.

Jakarta is insisting on "the recognition of sovereign rights of states over their biological resources," and fears the flu samples will be used by foreign companies to make vaccines, which will be too expensive for Indonesians.

US officials have slammed the position, with US Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recently stressing the importance of international cooperation to tackle the bird flu threat.

"The United States has very important relationships here in Indonesia, that involve joint work in laboratories in various levels of research, and we have pledged to continue that," Leavitt said after meeting Yudhoyono last month.

Indonesia has the highest number of human bird flu victims, with 108 people known to have died in the sprawling archipelago from the disease.

The World Health Organisation, which has designated Namru-2 as a Collaborating Centre on disease research, has warned that Indonesia is putting its own population in danger by failing to share its samples.

submitted to your attention without further comment, almost. There was after all that little pandemic thingy from a couple weeks ago, nah.......,

CIA Chief Sees Unrest Rising With Population

The Director Central Intelligence spoke at KU last week. The full transcript of his speech is here, the WAPO summed it up thus;

Swelling populations and a global tide of immigration will present new security challenges for the United States by straining resources and stoking extremism and civil unrest in distant corners of the globe, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in a speech yesterday.

The population surge could undermine the stability of some of the world's most fragile states, especially in Africa, while in the West, governments will be forced to grapple with ever larger immigrant communities and deepening divisions over ethnicity and race, Hayden said.

The CIA director also predicted a widening gulf between Europe and North America on how to deal with security threats, including terrorism. While U.S. and European officials agree on the urgency of the terrorism threat, there is a fundamental difference -- a "transatlantic divide" -- over the solution, he said.

We live in excessively interesting times....,

The Cognitive Age

quoth Ed;

I noticed you have not discussed the artificial intelligence angle. Who needs to employ a real business analyst when you have computers making up optimized probable scenarios and determining the best path and a fall back plan?

This type of AI is emerging and this will eliminate the need for many White collar workers. What is going to happen is a mass of micro-firms while a lot of middle class people will be left behind.

I agree with this to a very great extent Ed, though I'm less inclined to believe that AI will be the driver as much as the obsolescence of large hierarchical organizations. As you well know, no large hierarchical command and control system can express anything even remotely approaching the cognitive efficiency of small, flexible, and highly incented teams. Not only that, but in a large enterprise, one or two bad apples can exert spoiling effects that extend across the entire enterprise. Given the effects of incumbency and non-merit based promotion decisions, it's an inevitability that the large organization will suffer from scrub parasitization. What is true of the large enterprise is still more true of nations.

David Brooks column y'day in the NYTimes kinda, sorta, faintly - and in a waters testing way - went there (though he clearly played himself with the gratuitous partisan hackery);

The chief force reshaping manufacturing is technological change (hastened by competition with other companies in Canada, Germany or down the street). Thanks to innovation, manufacturing productivity has doubled over two decades. Employers now require fewer but more highly skilled workers. Technological change affects China just as it does the America. William Overholt of the RAND Corporation has noted that between 1994 and 2004 the Chinese shed 25 million manufacturing jobs, 10 times more than the U.S.

The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

I'll take it a step further Ed. Not only have we entered the cognitive age (arguably, humans have always competed on a cognitive threshing floor) but the way in which small, flexible teams are organized and operate determines whether or not they can realize and benefit from the emergent ne telepathic levels of coordination and complementarity that are possible for optimized teams.

Finally, this emergent phenomenon of micro-firms will pose nearly as significant a governance challenge as the material, biological, and computational technologies with which such firms will be engaged. It's almost like we've entered the era of Goldilocks optimization, not too big, not too small, but just right. There's a lot of opportunity for folks who've prepared themselves to get on with it.

The chips will go down

For want of a nail the kingdom was lost. In our civilisation, the nails are the computer chips used in every electronic device, every level of infrastructure and throughout communications, transportation, manufacturing, and so on.

Computer chips are so fragile that most fail or degrade within four years. Chip fabrication plants cost more than $10 billion because the water, chemicals and silicon to make them require such purity that particles 500 times smaller than a human hair can cause defects. Microchips require metals that are depleting faster than fossil fuels, have the longest supply chain of any product, and are vulnerable to single points of failure - which brings us back to Africa and 98% of the strategic minerals on which we depend.....,

Global Systems Administration for Liberal Democracy?

Yesterday's "discussion" about the utility of warsocialist enterprise quickly crystallized into a focus on Africa and engendered a post at Cobb. In typical fashion, a prodigious amount of handwaving signifying nothing remotely approaching discoursive closure ensued. However, in the course of all this kerfluffle - a comment by Cobb's designated subject matter expert stuck out like a sore thumb;

But I don't know how much of this informs Frazer's attention to Zimbabwe. I'm sure Zimbabwe is something of a low priority for the current Administration in terms of dedicated resources, though it's a great subject for talking about the spread of democracy, etc.--from a more realpolitik standpoint, we don't have any major interests at stake in Zimbabwe, unlike in the resource-rich areas of the continent or in areas where there is a strong Islamist presence.

demanding follow-up, both, in the context of Cobb's claims concerning the morally proper global systems administrator for liberal democracy role which he insists (though never persuasively demonstrates) is at the heart of militarism in American foreign policy - and - which he exhorts us all to believe as the primary motivation undergirding warsocialist enterprise, former president Dwight D. Eisenhower's claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Of particular concern to me, and pivotal in a certain regard to the Cobbian thesis, is the gross factual error asserted by Cobb's subject matter expert concerning the lack of American interests at stake in Zimbabwe. Nothing could be further from the truth. The U.S. in general and the military and high technology sectors in particular have crucial interests at stake in Zimbabwe.

Since 1961, the U.S. has relied on foreign sources for 100% of its chromium needs. Major concentrations of chromium are in Africa, with the largest known reserves in the Republic of South Africa and the purest grades are in Zimbabwe. These two countries together account for 98% of the world's reserves. The only other significant sources of chromium are the Soviet Union, Turkey and Albania.

The extent to which other minerals can be substituted for chromium is quite limited. There is no material which can adequately replace chrome in the steel industry and no substitutes exist for its aerospace industry and no substitutes exist for its aerospace applications.8 In a crisis some consumers of chromium could continue to function by reducing their useage of the mineral. However, most critical industries, particularly defense, could not continue to operate without normal supplies.

So Cobb, as long as our strategic interests in the region are being met, we should consider our liberal democratic systems administration mission as having been accomplished? THIS explains so much of our foreign policy vis-a-vis the warsocialist enterprise.

Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable

This article originally appeared in New Scientist;

Western industrial civilisation has become bigger and more complex than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal and oil, but these are limited. There are increasing signs of diminishing returns: the energy required to get each new joule of oil is mounting and although global food production is still increasing, constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental degradation and evolving pests and diseases - the yield boosts per unit of investment in innovation are shrinking. "Since problems are inevitable," Joseph Tainter warns, "this process is in part ineluctable."

Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter reached from studying history. Social organisations become steadily more complex as they are required to deal both with environmental problems and with challenges from neighbouring societies that are also becoming more complex, Bar-Yam says. This eventually leads to a fundamental shift in the way the society is organised.

"To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at this point.

This shift to decentralised networks has led to a widespread belief that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical systems. "I don't foresee a collapse in society because of increased complexity," says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond. "Our strength is in our highly distributed decision making." This, he says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those like the old Soviet Union, in which decision making was centralised.

Increasing connectedness

Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the 2006 book The Upside of Down. "Initially, increasing connectedness and diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get food from another village that didn't."

As connections increase, though, networked systems become increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can propagate: the more closely those two villages come to depend on each other, the more both will suffer if either has a problem. "Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways," says Bar-Yam. "This is not widely understood."

The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to transmit shocks rather than absorb them. "The intricate networks that tightly connect us together - and move people, materials, information, money and energy - amplify and transmit any shock," says Homer-Dixon. "A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak has almost instant destabilising effects, from one side of the world to the other."

I can't imagine a stronger practical incentive for mutualism. Unfortunately, the corporatist unilateralism dominating our mainstream political belief and discourse doesn't really allow for much in the way of alternative points of view - still less alternative modes of organization and operation.

Rockefellers and ExxonMobil

Big oil companies are used to operating within explicit laws to maximize profits. Many have been actively and aggressively opposed to taking voluntary steps to address public concerns about energy and the environment. There is at present no legislation in the U.S. requiring these companies to alter their course, and with de facto control of the White House, big oil has had a field day unprecedented since the era of the robber barons.

ExxonMobil is the most profitable of the major integrated energy companies. The Irving, Texas, company has been highly notable for its climate change and global warming denial. In addition, while other Big Oil companies have lent credence to the idea that global oil reserves are dwindling, ExxonMobil executives claim the world has ample hydrocarbon reserves, and supplies are constricted due to a lack of access to those reserves.

Comes now some descendants of John D. Rockefeller - the archetypal robber baron himself - with a different perspective from ExxonMobil management. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, which was later declared a trust and broken up early in the 20th century. ExxonMobil, the world's largest company by market capitalization, was built on some of Standard Oil's assets.

Members of the Rockefeller family (Peter O'Neill and Neeva Rockefeller Goodwin pictured) are pressuring Exxon Mobil to focus more on renewable energy.

The family of John D. Rockefeller, who's Standard Oil Trust ultimately spawned Exxon Mobil, say they have spent years behind the scenes prodding the company to change its approach.

Family representatives say their stake in Exxon represents a significant holding, but the company's top shareholders are mutual funds and other institutional investors.

Exxon Mobil says the company has met with members of the Rockefeller family several times and "respects the rights of all shareholders to make their views known."

"They are fighting the last war and they're not seeing they're facing a new war," said Peter O'Neill, who heads the Rockefeller Family committee dealing with Exxon Mobil and is the great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller. The family members, who say they are the oil giant's longest continuous shareholders, say Exxon is too focused on short-term gains from sky-high oil prices. They also argue splitting the roles of chairman and CEO will help the company be more flexible in the future.

Mutual funds and other institutional investors, not individuals, are the company's top shareholders. Which points out a key dilemma confronting even this immensely wealthy and influential family in its effort to provoke change. As I've previously indicated, the most dangerous political and economic influence in contemporary life is the convergent power of corporatism manifested through a warsocialist state. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the limitations of Exxon's largest private shareholders to influence the management and operations of the world's largest oil company because the real majority owners (80% ownership) of ExxonMobil stock are mutual funds and institutional investors. So, absent laws and other controls, the management of ExxonMobil is pretty much at liberty to flaut the wishes of the Rockefellers - and - aided and abetted by a big oil mandate still occupying the White House......, see how this works?

Sleepwalking Toward the Oil Precipice

Remember a few week ago, Vice President Dick Cheney paid a visit to the Saudi's? The question du jour was how much longer will Saudi Arabia support the US$?

If the Arab oil kingdoms decide to ditch their dollar pegs to control inflation and diversify their overseas assets to earn higher returns in other currencies or in gold and commodities, the net result could be the loss of the US dollar’s reserve currency status.

Preserving the dwindling value of the petrodollar wasn't the only question on deck, there was also a request that the Saudi's boost supply and finally, there was the issue of Iranian "containment".

Well, a few weeks later, and V.P. Cheney has gotten his answer. Yesterday Dave Cohen presented a detailed and sobering discussion of what we can realistically expect from the Saudi's and from OPEC in general. Bottomline - U.S. expectations when compared and contrasted with the political and material realities on the ground - are increasingly at odds with one another. The money shot from his article;

Unless we take some drastic actions, it will be All OPEC, All the Time after 2010 when you will turn on the radio or switch on the TV to listen to the inevitable stories about whether gasoline will finally hit $5 or $6/gallon. But in 2008, our public discourse on the oil situation is still a joke. We need to stop blathering about the boosting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, opening up ANWR, taking OPEC to court, cutting federal taxes on gasoline, raising taxes on Big Oil, punishing speculators, counting on imaginary cellulosic ethanol, waiting for mass production of plug-in hybrids, and all the other nonsense we are bombarded with every day.

We are sleepwalking toward the oil precipice. OPEC will not meet the fantastic expectations placed upon it by the "experts." I can only hope that Americans grasp this reality soon, because all we're doing right now is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

OPEC (read Saudi Arabia) is not going to bail us out any longer. It's reached the end of what it's willing to do on our behalf. Now it's up to us - and in case you haven't noticed - not a single one of the three candidates for POTUS has even begun to seriously and explicitly engage the energy issues in any substantive or meaningful way - so when I say "us" that means a la Hurricane Katrina "us" to make sure we're personally ready for what's beyond that signpost up ahead.

While you were distracted.....,

by the media spectacle du jour - efforts to initiate a shooting war with Iran continued in earnest.

Justin Raimondo gives political backstory undergirding the likely next phase of escalation.

In a world where "benevolent global hegemony" is the goal of U.S. foreign policy, there is no right to self-defense; that, along with national sovereignty, has been abolished. Defiance is met with an implacable campaign for regime-change in the offending nation. By all indications, Iran is the next victim to be made an example of, sometime in mid-summer, or so the rumor goes.

We know where the presidential candidates stand on this issue. Hillary looks forward to the "obliteration" of Iran and takes up Charles Krauthammer's demand that we extend our nuclear shield over Tel Aviv just as we would do the same for, say, Toledo. Indeed, there are not a few who would argue that we would be fully justified in sacrificing the latter in order to save the former, and not all of them are to be found among Rev. Hagee's deluded flock. In any case, we know what the McCain-Hagee position is without even having to ask.

We also know where Obama stands on all or most of this: he advocates a policy of engagement with the Iranians, just as he has endorsed talking with South American caudillo Hugo Chavez, and for the same very sound reasons: because it's talk or fight. He clearly realizes waging perpetual war is hardly in our interests, even if we had the financial and military capacity to carry out such a crazed policy. Yet, if he's speaking out about this, at this crucial moment – when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is practically declaring war on the Iranians – then I just can't hear him: he must not be speaking very loudly, or perhaps this gets lost amid all the soaring rhetoric about Change and Hope and A Better Tomorrow.

Nah Justin, it's a lot more prosaic than that. While the domestic economy crumbles and the foreign resource war grows, Baraka is caught up in a good old fashioned American coonshow pitting bad negros against responsible negros in a futile, staged struggle to placate implacable anti-negro sentiment. Good old-fashioned American comedy gold and a tried and true mechanism of domestic governance. ABC and Fox News, talk radio, and all the other proponents of Obamamandian anti-Americanism have succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings, or maybe not...., maybe in fact the calculus of distracting and managing the enfeebled memory, attention, and emotions of the herd has become so exacting, that there's really no guesswork involved any longer?

Albert Hofmann - RIP

From Erowid;
Albert Hofmann
Jan 11, 1906 - Apr 29, 2008
Summary - Albert Hofmann was born in Baden, Switzerland in 1906. He graduated from the University of Zürich with a degree in chemistry in 1929 and went to work for Sandoz Pharmaceutical in Basel, Switzerland. With the laboratory goal of working towards isolation of the active principles of known medicinal plants, Hofmann worked with Mediterranean squill (Scilla maritima) for several years, before moving on to the study of Claviceps purpurea (ergot) and ergot alkaloids.

Over the next few years, he worked his way through the lysergic acid derivatives, eventually synthesizing LSD-25 for the first time in 1938. After minimal testing, LSD-25 was set aside as he continued with other derivatives. Four years later, on April 16, 1943, he re-synthesized LSD-25 because he felt he might have missed something the first time around. That day, he became the first human to experience the effects of LSD after accidentally ingesting a minute amount. Three days later, on April 19, 1943, he decided to verify his results by intentionally ingesting 250 ug of LSD. This day has become known as "Bicycle Day" as Hofmann experienced an incredible bicycle ride on his way home from the lab.

In addition to his discovery of LSD, he was also the first to synthesize psilocybin (the active constituent of 'magic mushrooms') in 1958. Albert Hofmann, known as the 'father of LSD', continued to work at Sandoz until 1971 when he retired as Director of Research for the Department of Natural Products. He continued to write, lecture, and play a leading role as an elder in the psychedelic community until his quick and relatively painless death from a heart attack at the age of 102.

Peak oil at Bush press conference

U.S. President George W. Bush addressed peak oil in a roundabout way at a press conference yesterday that was largely devoted to gas prices and the economy. Several quotes clearly indicate that he understands the current state of world oil.

The answers? Explore more, drill more, buy new cars that can use electricity, grow more biofuels, add more refineries, and hope for cellulosic ethanol.

Meanwhile, a long-time Bush supporter groans but resolutely engages in wishful thinking and continued reality evasion.

Mutualism

Modern day capitalism is manifestly not a free market, but a system created and sustained by massive central government interventions in the economy. As such, not only would it not thrive in the absence of government intervention, it would collapse without it. In the 20th century, the symbiotic relationship of corporation and government is even more obvious—though it goes strangely unnoticed by many people. Examples include the military industrial complex, the widespread subsidizing of transportation and communication, the for-profit corporate benefits of government pharmaceutical and other research, tax breaks and incentives for favored industries, the myriad direct and indirect subsidies of suburban sprawl, agricultural subsidies, etc. Here's a book in progress that examines the reality of our system of production.

Organization Theory Outline: Expanded Version

In the absence of such overwhelming intervention, what would the economies of industrialized nations look like?

Mission Accomplished?

The seizure of Iraq is widely perceived to be have been a blunder. From the strategic standpoint of the US elites it was no such thing. The oil reserves contained within Iraq are gigantic, and thus its acquisition was a major economic and security leap forward for the United States. In this piece, a compelling case is made for U.S. Global hegemony. Please go read the entire article, it's lengthy but well worthwhile.

According to their logic the US elites have good reason to feel pleased with themselves following the successful takeover of Iraq, even if the general public in the United States is unable at this stage to grasp what a "glorious achievement" it is. Iraq is known to have over 100 billion barrels of oil reserves. In addition to this the country is still relatively unexplored and there are an estimated 200 to 300 billion barrels more waiting to be discovered. Given that this is largely light crude, the most valuable type of oil, it doesn't take much effort of the imagination to figure that US forces have seized control of one of the world's greatest treasures, whose value dwarfs the cost of the invasion. The invasion of Iraq would therefore be a strong contender for an entry in the Guinness World Records as the greatest act of piracy in the history of the world. It makes the exploits of Blackbeard and Captain Jack Sparrow look decidedly tame. With this being election year in the US, various politicians try to curry favor with the voters by talking about "bringing the troops home". So let's be clear about this - the troops are not coming home until the infrastructure has been built to fully exploit Iraq oil resources, and to this end to partition off the local population who might otherwise interfere with production. In fact, a background level of violence is actually desirable at this time, in order to provide the excuse to keep the troops there. We should also not overlook the reality that the US elections are pure spin anyway, a charade. The United States is not a democracy and has not been for a long time. Its political system is a duopoly of power, with the same plutocratic forces controlling both the Democrat and Republican parties, the election being a 4-yearly circus to fool the masses into thinking that they live in a democracy. In one sense democracy is an absurd concept anyway - how can you allow ignorant, uneducated people the same vote as intelligent, discriminating people? The answer is that that you can - and then you program them to do what you want them to anyway via their favorite entertainment and media inputs. If you spend an hour of your time going down to the polling station to vote, you have just wasted an hour of your life, except that it can be amusing to watch the other fools wasting their time lining up - thinking that they are going to make a difference.

Complete control of the Mid-East, which the United States and the major oil companies are now close to having achieved, of course confers massive power over the rest of world, in particular over rising economic powers such as China and India and the immense leverage that this will in time afford can be used to steer these countries in whatever direction is desired. The US is believed to be involved in a strategic race against time to corner the bulk of the world's remaining oil reserves, the control of which can then be used to dissuade countries like China from resorting to the wholesale dumping of dollars or US Treasuries, along the lines of "Try it and we'll cut off your oil supply", which one would expect to be couched in more diplomatic language. Because of its gargantuan levels of debt the US is acutely vulnerable now, but with time it plans to tip the scales back in its favor partly by sales of its recently acquired plunder. Anyone who has watched those David Attenborough nature programs about seal colonies on beaches will know that the US is like the "beach master", the huge bull elephant seal, taking possession of all of the females on the beach and jealously guarding them, while China and Russia are the other strong contenders, who don't quite have the strength or size to try to assert dominance and as a result can only make gains when the beach master suffers some drastic reversal of fortune. The irony is that China now has the power to stop the US in its tracks, by dumping its vast dollar and Treasury holdings, which would send the US economy straight over a cliff, but it is unlikely it will do this because it can't stomach the consequences to itself or its people of doing so.

It's a dazzling assessment of the geostrategic current state. Fundamentally, it's about the consolidation of power rather than an increase in the wealth of the nation, much less the world. Furthermore, it is very consistent with the logic and history of TEP intrigues. You be the judge...,