nature loss to damage economies

BBCNews | The abundance of mammals, birds, reptiles and other creatures is falling rapidly

The Earth's ongoing nature losses may soon begin to hit national economies, a major UN report has warned.

The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) says that some ecosystems may soon reach "tipping points" where they rapidly become less useful to humanity.

Such tipping points could include rapid dieback of forest, algal takeover of watercourses and mass coral reef death.

Last month, scientists confirmed that governments would not meet their target of curbing biodiversity loss by 2010.
Continue reading the main story

Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity

"The news is not good," said Ahmed Djoglaf, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

"We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history - extinction rates may be up to 1,000 times higher than the historical background rate."

The global abundance of vertebrates - the group that includes mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians and fish - fell by about one-third between 1970 and 2006, the UN says.

FBI - O

The Scientist | You may soon be visited by an FBI agent, or a scientist acting on behalf of one. Here's why.

They tried to fit in at this year’s iGEM synthetic biology competition. They really tried. Piers Millet from the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs sported a white hoodie with an iGEM insignia that was slightly too tight. Beside him, Lindsay Hartmann, a Weapons of Mass Destruction analyst with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wore nails painted black—the look of a rebellious college kid. The bracelet with charms of a badge, handcuffs, and gun, however, gave her away.

Around them, student competitors whooshed by before the next round of presentations inside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Stata Center. Some headed for the cookies and juice trays. Some gossiped about the 11-year-old who made a liquid handling robot out of Lego bricks. A duo of artists working with a team from Cambridge shuttled around a suitcase of fake, neon-spotted feces—replicas, they said, of a digestive diagnostics tool from an imagined future.

In the midst of the giddy confusion, the agents handed out brochures for a newly invigorated FBI initiative. Its goal: Collaborate with the science community to secure biology from those who would use it to harm people, by engineering a synthetic epidemic, for instance. Only, for the campaign to succeed, the FBI will have to bridge an enormous rift between the science community and law enforcement.

“I’m here to deliver a message,” Millet told students during a presentation. “Securing synthetic biology is not my job, it’s your job. Our job is to give you guys the tools to do that.” The tools were printed on the back of every brochure—56 direct phone lines to the regional offices of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, an FBI division devoted to handling WMD threats. The agents asked students and biologists alike to call if they spotted anything “suspicious” in their labs.

Titled the Biological Sciences Outreach Program, the campaign to start a dialogue with biologists about potential biosecurity risks from their science has begun with the synthetic biology community and is spreading from there. It’s being praised by biosecurity experts for its foresight. What scientists think, however, is a different story.

is bp's blowout the three mile island of offshore drilling?

Treehugger | I'm a big fan of scenario thinking. Although no one can predict "the future," several plausible scenarios can be constructed, informing decisions made difficult by many unknowns. A good decision works in all the scenarios, a very weak decision only in one, and so on. The Big Picture blog has a wonderful article, called Oil Slickonomics, in which three up-to-date prospective scenarios for the BP blowout are succinctly described as: The Bad; The Worse; and,The Ugliest. The writing is powerful good at the end of The Ugliest, in which economics are discussed. Check it out - a short outtake follows.

Deepwater and all offshore drilling in the US has been set back for a generation, just as Three Mile Island set back nuclear power development for decades. No politician can win an election now with a permissive view on drilling. Sarah Palin's "Drill, baby, drill" now condemns her to political marginalization. Off shore drilling has lurched to the top of the political agenda in this November's election cycle.

I'll go out on a a limb here: if by elections this fall we are into The Ugliest, any oil money will be absolutely toxic to politicians who have accepted it. All bets would be off as to who'd ever again invest in deep water drilling platforms. Hence the TMI metaphor used in my headline (credit for the idea goes to The Big Picture). If on the other hand the responders pull off "The Bad" BP will be a corporate hero and their stock will rebound. Government Agencies will have regained the reputation they lost from the Katrina fiasco, Ms Palin will have her chops back, and so on. Higher stakes can not be imagined. Fist tap Dale.

how we wrecked the ocean

In this bracing talk, coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson lays out the shocking state of the ocean today: overfished, overheated, polluted, with indicators that things will get much worse. Astonishing photos and stats make the case.

oil spill may endanger human lives

Physorg | In this image provided by the U.S. Navy Members of Elastec/American Marine Inc., a marine science engineering company, prepare to deploy a lighting agent on oil contained in a boom May 5. The "in situ burn" was conducted by contracted fishing vessels working in partnership with the U.S. Coast Guard, BP PLC, and other federal agencies to aid in preventing the spread of oil following the April 20 explosion on Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit Deepwater Horizon. (AP Photo/US Navy - Jeffery Tilghman Williams)

(AP) -- With a huge and unpredictable oil slick drifting in the Gulf of Mexico, state and federal authorities are preparing to deal with a variety of hazards to human health if and when the full brunt of the toxic mess washes ashore.

The list of potential threats runs from temporary, minor nuisances such as runny noses and headaches to long-term risks such as cancer if contaminated seafood ends up in the marketplace. While waiting to see how bad things will get, public health agencies are monitoring air quality, drinking water supplies and seafood processing plants and advising people to take precautions.

"We don't know how long this spill will last or how much oil we'll be dealing with, so there's a lot of unknowns," said Dr. Jimmy Guidry, Louisiana's state health director. "But we're going to make things as safe as humanly possible."

Oil has been spewing into the Gulf at a rate of at least 200,000 gallons a day since an offshore drilling rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 people. Little if any has reached land thus far, but shifts in wind speed and direction could propel the slick toward populated areas.

In a possible hint of things to come, a foul stench drifted over parts of southwestern Louisiana last week. The oil probably was the culprit, said Alan Levine, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, whose office heard about dozens of complaints - even from state legislators in New Orleans, some 130 miles from the leaky undersea well.

"Their eyes were burning, they felt nauseated, they were smelling it," Levine said.

Farther up the coast at Shell Beach, marina operator and commercial fisherman Robert Campo said the smell gave him a headache as he collected oysters 20 miles offshore. "It was rotten," he said.

debt is violence..,

This Is Sparta, The Whole Scene - The best home videos are here

Eurozine | What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call "the economy". What's more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence – but also, the systematic threat of violence – maintained by the contemporary state.

Let me start with the institution of slavery, whose role, I think, is key. In most times and places, slavery is seen as a consequence of war. Sometimes most slaves actually are war captives, sometimes they are not, but almost invariably, war is seen as the foundation and justification of the institution. If you surrender in war, what you surrender is your life; your conqueror has the right to kill you, and often will. If he chooses not to, you literally owe your life to him; a debt conceived as absolute, infinite, irredeemable. He can in principle extract anything he wants, and all debts – obligations – you may owe to others (your friends, family, former political allegiances), or that others owe you, are seen as being absolutely negated. Your debt to your owner is all that now exists.

This sort of logic has at least two very interesting consequences, though they might be said to pull in rather contrary directions. First of all, as we all know, it is another typical – perhaps defining – feature of slavery that slaves can be bought or sold. In this case, absolute debt becomes (in another context, that of the market) no longer absolute. In fact, it can be precisely quantified. There is good reason to believe that it was just this operation that made it possible to create something like our contemporary form of money to begin with, since what anthropologists used to refer to as "primitive money", the kind that one finds in stateless societies (Solomon Island feather money, Iroquois wampum), was mostly used to arrange marriages, resolve blood feuds, and fiddle with other sorts of relations between people, rather than to buy and sell commodities. For instance, if slavery is debt, then debt can lead to slavery. A Babylonian peasant might have paid a handy sum in silver to his wife's parents to officialise the marriage, but he in no sense owned her. He certainly couldn't buy or sell the mother of his children. But all that would change if he took out a loan. Were he to default, his creditors could first remove his sheep and furniture, then his house, fields and orchards, and finally take his wife, children, and even himself as debt peons until the matter was settled (which, as his resources vanished, of course became increasingly difficult to do). Debt was the hinge that made it possible to imagine money in anything like the modern sense, and therefore, also, to produce what we like to call the market: an arena where anything can be bought and sold, because all objects are (like slaves) disembedded from their former social relations and exist only in relation to money.

But at the same time the logic of debt as conquest can, as I mentioned, pull another way. Kings, throughout history, tend to be profoundly ambivalent towards allowing the logic of debt to get completely out of hand. This is not because they are hostile to markets. On the contrary, they normally encourage them, for the simple reason that governments find it inconvenient to levy everything they need (silks, chariot wheels, flamingo tongues, lapis lazuli) directly from their subject population; it's much easier to encourage markets and then buy them. Early markets often followed armies or royal entourages, or formed near palaces or at the fringes of military posts. This actually helps explain the rather puzzling behaviour on the part of royal courts: after all, since kings usually controlled the gold and silver mines, what exactly was the point of stamping bits of the stuff with your face on it, dumping it on the civilian population, and then demanding they give it back to you again as taxes? It only makes sense if levying taxes was really a way to force everyone to acquire coins, so as to facilitate the rise of markets, since markets were convenient to have around. However, for our present purposes, the critical question is: how were these taxes justified? Why did subjects owe them, what debt were they discharging when they were paid? Here we return again to right of conquest. (Actually, in the ancient world, free citizens – whether in Mesopotamia, Greece, or Rome – often did not have to pay direct taxes for this very reason, but obviously I'm simplifying here.) If kings claimed to hold the power of life and death over their subjects by right of conquest, then their subjects' debts were, also, ultimately infinite; and also, at least in that context, their relations to one another, what they owed to one another, was unimportant. All that really existed was their relation to the king. This in turn explains why kings and emperors invariably tried to regulate the powers that masters had over slaves, and creditors over debtors. At the very least they would always insist, if they had the power, that those prisoners who had already had their lives spared could no longer be killed by their masters. In fact, only rulers could have arbitrary power over life and death. One's ultimate debt was to the state; it was the only one that was truly unlimited, that could make absolute, cosmic, claims.

The reason I stress this is because this logic is still with us. When we speak of a "society" (French society, Jamaican society) we are really speaking of people organised by a single nation state. That is the tacit model, anyway. "Societies" are really states, the logic of states is that of conquest, the logic of conquest is ultimately identical to that of slavery. True, in the hands of state apologists, this becomes transformed into a notion of a more benevolent "social debt". Here there is a little story told, a kind of myth. We are all born with an infinite debt to the society that raised, nurtured, fed and clothed us, to those long dead who invented our language and traditions, to all those who made it possible for us to exist. In ancient times we thought we owed this to the gods (it was repaid in sacrifice, or, sacrifice was really just the payment of interest – ultimately, it was repaid by death). Later the debt was adopted by the state, itself a divine institution, with taxes substituted for sacrifice, and military service for one's debt of life. Money is simply the concrete form of this social debt, the way that it is managed. Keynesians like this sort of logic. So do various strains of socialist, social democrats, even crypto-fascists like Auguste Comte (the first, as far as I am aware, to actually coin the phrase "social debt"). But the logic also runs through much of our common sense: consider for instance, the phrase, "to pay one's debt to society", or, "I felt I owed something to my country", or, "I wanted to give something back." Always, in such cases, mutual rights and obligations, mutual commitments – the kind of relations that genuinely free people could make with one another – tend to be subsumed into a conception of "society" where we are all equal only as absolute debtors before the (now invisible) figure of the king, who stands in for your mother, and by extension, humanity.

What I am suggesting, then, is that while the claims of the impersonal market and the claims of "society" are often juxtaposed – and certainly have had a tendency to jockey back and forth in all sorts of practical ways – they are both ultimately founded on a very similar logic of violence. Neither is this a mere matter of historical origins that can be brushed away as inconsequential: neither states nor markets can exist without the constant threat of force. Fist tap Dale.

greek debt woes ripple outward...,

Video - rioting in Athens.

NYTimes | In Spain Saturday, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. underscored the importance of the issue after meeting with Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. “We agreed on the importance of a resolute European action to strengthen the European economy and to build confidence in the markets,” Mr. Biden said. “And I conveyed the support of the United States of America toward those efforts.”

Beyond Europe, the crisis has sent waves of fear through global stock exchanges.

A decade ago, it took more than a year for the chain reaction that began with the devaluation of the Thai currency to spread beyond Asia to Russia, which defaulted on its debt, and eventually caused the near-collapse of a giant American hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management.

This crisis, by contrast, seemed to ricochet from country to country in seconds, as traders simultaneously abandoned everything from Portuguese bonds to American blue chips. On Wall Street on Thursday afternoon, televised images of rioting in Athens to protest austerity measures only amplified the anxiety as the stock market briefly plunged nearly 1,000 points.

“Up until last week there was this confidence that nothing could upset the apple cart as long as the economy and jobs growth was positive,” said William H. Gross, managing director of Pimco, the bond manager. “Now, fear is back in play.”

While the immediate causes for worry are Greece’s ballooning budget deficit and the risk that other fragile countries like Spain and Portugal might default, the turmoil also exposed deeper fears that government borrowing in bigger nations like Britain, Germany and even the United States is unsustainable.

“Greece may just be an early warning signal,” said Byron Wien, a prominent Wall Street strategist who is vice chairman of Blackstone Advisory Partners. “The U.S. is a long way from being where Greece is, but the developed world has been living beyond its means and is now being called to account.”

gibberish...,

Video - Biden telling wheelchair bound man to "stand up".

WaPo | Biden urges 'resolute European action' to halt financial crisis. With the European debt crisis putting the fragile global economic recovery at risk, Vice President Biden met Saturday with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and tried to walk a delicate line of encouraging a more forceful and unified response without appearing like a heavy-handed intruder into the continent's affairs.

"We agreed on the importance of resolute European action to strengthen the European economy and to build confidence in the markets, and I conveyed the support of the United States of America for those efforts," Biden said on the steps of Madrid's Moncloa Palaceafter a 40-minute meeting. About half the meeting was spent discussing economic matters, particularly the crisis that began with debt problems in Greece and now threatens Spain and other nations.

It was the most public step to date in a concerted effort by the Obama administration to nudge European leaders to respond more aggressively to the crisis -- an effort that has picked up steam in the past 10 days. It has come mostly in the form of private conversations between senior leaders, as the Americans have attempted the tricky task of pressing the Europeans to deal boldly with the burgeoning crisis without seeming pushy themselves.

Their effort could backfire if European leaders tune the Americans out or if their citizens come to blame the United States for unpopular decisions made in responding to the crisis. That could make it even harder for Europe's leaders to contain the crisis.

The meeting with Zapatero, who is also president of the European Union, comes at a crucial time. Finance ministers of E.U. member nations are meeting in Brussels this weekend to craft a plan to restore confidence that the debt of European nations is safe.

An announcement is planned Sunday of an emergency fund to stabilize the value of the euro, although the size and structure of that fund remained unclear Saturday.

"We will defend the euro, whatever it takes," European Commission President José Manuel Barroso of Portugal told reporters in Brussels on Saturday, according to Bloomberg News.

it's not about greece anymore

NYTimes | The Greek “rescue” package announced last weekend is dramatic, unprecedented and far from enough to stabilize the euro zone.

The Greek government and the European Union leadership, prodded by the International Monetary Fund, are finally becoming realistic about the dire economic situation in Greece. They have abandoned previous rounds of optimistic forecasts and have now admitted to a profoundly worse situation. This new program calls for “fiscal adjustments” — cuts to the fiscal deficit, mostly through spending cuts — totaling 11 percent of gross domestic product in 2010, 4.3 percent in 2011, and 2 percent in 2012 and 2013. The total debt-to-G.D.P. ratio peaks at 149 percent in 2012-13 before starting a gentle glide path back down to sanity.

This new program is honest enough to show why it is unlikely to succeed.

Daniel Gros, an eminent economist on euro zone issues who is based in Brussels, has argued that for each 1 percent of G.D.P. decline in Greek government spending, total demand in the country falls by 2.5 percent of G.D.P. If the government reduces spending by 15 percent of G.D.P. — the initial shock to demand could be well over 30 percent of G.D.P.

Obviously this simple rule does not work with such large numbers, but it illustrates that Greece is likely to experience a very sharp recession — and there is substantial uncertainty around how bad the economy will get. The program announced last weekend assumes the Greek G.D.P. falls by 4 percent this year, then by another 2.6 percent in 2011, before recovering to positive growth in 2012 and beyond.

Such figures seem extremely optimistic, particularly in the face of the civil unrest now sweeping Greece and the deep hostility expressed toward the country in some northern European policy circles.

The pattern of growth is critical because, under this program, Greece needs to grow out of its debt problem soon. Greece’s debt-to-G.D.P. ratio will be a debilitating 145 percent at the end of 2011.

Now consider putting more realistic growth figures into the I.M.F. forecast for Greece’s economy — e.g., with G.D.P. declining 12 percent in 2011, then the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio may reach 155 percent. At these levels, with a 5 percent real interest rate and no growth, the country needs a primary surplus at 8 percent of G.D.P. to keep the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio stable. It will be nowhere near that level. The I.M.F. program has Greece running a primary budget deficit of around 1 percent of G.D.P. in that year, and that assumes a path for Greek growth that can be regarded only as an “upside scenario.”

The politics of these implied budget surpluses remains brutal. Since most Greek debt is held abroad, roughly 80 percent of the budget savings the Greek government makes go straight to Germans, the French and other foreign debt holders (mostly banks). If growth turns out poorly, will the Greeks be prepared for ever-tougher austerity to pay the Germans? Even if everything goes well, Greek citizens seem unlikely to welcome this version of their “new normal.”

bbc "IF" drama documentary on peak oil

Video - BBC IF docudrama about Peak Oil.

The demand for energy has risen relentlessly over the last 150 years in line with industrial development and population growth.

And as economies of developing countries like China and India continue to grow, it is predicted demand will rise by a further 50% by 2030.

President Bush has already warned the United States that it is too reliant on oil, often from "unstable" countries, and that it must find alternatives.

Geologists are searching in Arctic Alaska, around the Falkland Islands and under the oceans for the last remaining sizeable reserves of oil.

But what will happen if the fuel crisis is not resolved?

Blending drama and documentary, the IF series returns with a film investigating a scenario many experts fear will come true.

When the cheap oil we depend on starts to run out, we may not be able to take anything for granted any more.

why peak oil will never lead to $500/bbl crude oil

Video - Peak Oil Crash Course.

Chris Martenson | Executive Summary

• Although there’s more than 100 years’ supply of crude oil left in the ground, the resources that are “cheap and easy” to extract have for the most part already been discovered.
• By 2012 the decline of production output from conventional sources coupled with much higher extraction cost of unconventional sources will lead to peak cheap oil, a phenomenon that will put extreme upward pressure on oil prices.
• To a limited extent, a strong case exists for speculation on a moderate increase in petroleum prices.
• Those who anticipate extraordinarily high prices (upwards of $300/bbl) have failed to consider what George Soros calls reflexivity. The global economy simply cannot afford such prices, and the rules will be changed before they are reached.
• The future is likely to bring price controls, government intervention in the petroleum supply chain, and nationalization of oil resources.
• The oil industry will face many unanticipated challenges during this period, capping the price appreciation potential of both commodity and equity plays in the oil industry.
• Wise investors will focus on the initial price run-up expected to occur before large-scale government intervention ensues.

Background
If you’re an investor and you haven’t yet learned about Peak Oil, you need to drop what you’re doing and go find out all about it. The implications of Peak Oil are far wider reaching than the energy sector. Peak Oil is a macroeconomic story that will dramatically affect virtually all investments in the coming decade. This article is intended for those already familiar with the Peak Oil prognosis, and focuses on why I think a lot of investors are making faulty predictions about what Peak Oil will mean for future oil prices. If you’re not already up to speed on the background material, here are some resources to start with:

• The very best basic introduction to the concepts of Peak Oil that I know of is this free video from Dr. Chris Martenson’s Crash Course.
• From there, read Eric Janszen’s excellent articles on the subject, paying particular attention to the distinction Janszen draws between Peak Oil and Peak Cheap Oil. Some of Janszen’s articles are free while others require a subscription to his web site. Start with this free article to get a taste of Janszen’s perspective.

I find it very interesting that Peak Oil has recently begun to get a lot more mainstream attention. Previously, despite overwhelming evidence, Peak Oil was considered a “fringe idea” and not taken particularly seriously by the mainstream investment community. Suddenly the tide seems to have changed.

the moral life of babies

NYTimes | Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

This incident occurred in one of several psychology studies that I have been involved with at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University in collaboration with my colleague (and wife), Karen Wynn, who runs the lab, and a graduate student, Kiley Hamlin, who is the lead author of the studies. We are one of a handful of research teams around the world exploring the moral life of babies.

Like many scientists and humanists, I have long been fascinated by the capacities and inclinations of babies and children. The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature. In graduate school, I studied early language development and later moved on to fairly traditional topics in cognitive development, like how we come to understand the minds of other people — what they know, want and experience.

But the current work I’m involved in, on baby morality, might seem like a perverse and misguided next step. Why would anyone even entertain the thought of babies as moral beings? From Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget to Lawrence Kohlberg, psychologists have long argued that we begin life as amoral animals. One important task of society, particularly of parents, is to turn babies into civilized beings — social creatures who can experience empathy, guilt and shame; who can override selfish impulses in the name of higher principles; and who will respond with outrage to unfairness and injustice. Many parents and educators would endorse a view of infants and toddlers close to that of a recent Onion headline: “New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths.” If children enter the world already equipped with moral notions, why is it that we have to work so hard to humanize them?

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be. Fist tap Nana.

who are we?

Video - Biocentricity

HuffPo | Science has failed to recognize those properties of life that make it fundamental to our existence. This view of the world in which life and consciousness are bottom-line in understanding the larger universe -- biocentrism -- revolves around the way our consciousness relates to a physical process. It's a vast mystery that I've pursued my entire life with a lot of help along the way, standing on the shoulders of some of the most lauded minds of the modern age. I've also come to conclusions that would shock my predecessors, placing biology above the other sciences in an attempt to find the theory of everything that has evaded other disciplines.

We're taught since childhood that the universe can be fundamentally divided into two entities -- ourselves, and that which is outside of us. This seems logical. "Self" is commonly defined by what we can control. We can move our fingers but I can't wiggle your toes. The dichotomy is based largely on manipulation, even if basic biology tells us we've no more control over most of the trillions of cells in our body than over a rock or a tree.

Consider everything that you see around you right now -- this page, for example, or your hands and fingers. Language and custom say that it all lies outside us in the external world. Yet we can't see anything through the vault of bone that surrounds our brain. Everything you see and experience -- your body, the trees and sky -- are part of an active process occurring in your mind. You are this process, not just that tiny part you control with motor neurons.

You're not an object -- you are your consciousness. You're a unified being, not just your wriggling arm or foot, but part of a larger equation that includes all the colors, sensations and objects you perceive. If you divorce one side of the equation from the other you cease to exist. Indeed, experiments confirm that particles only exist with real properties if they're observed. Until the mind sets the scaffolding of things in place, they can't be thought of as having any real existence -- neither duration nor position in space. As the great physicist John Wheeler said, "No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." That's why in real experiments, not just the properties of matter -- but space and time themselves -- depend on the observer. Your consciousness isn't just part of the equation − the equation is you.

random matrix theory

NewScientist | SUPPOSE we had a theory that could explain everything. Not just atoms and quarks but aspects of our everyday lives too. Sound impossible? Perhaps not.

It's all part of the recent explosion of work in an area of physics known as random matrix theory. Originally developed more than 50 years ago to describe the energy levels of atomic nuclei, the theory is turning up in everything from inflation rates to the behaviour of solids. So much so that many researchers believe that it points to some kind of deep pattern in nature that we don't yet understand. "It really does feel like the ideas of random matrix theory are somehow buried deep in the heart of nature," says electrical engineer Raj Nadakuditi of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

All of this, oddly enough, emerged from an effort to turn physicists' ignorance into an advantage. In 1956, when we knew very little about the internal workings of large, complex atomic nuclei, such as uranium, the Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner suggested simply guessing.

Quantum theory tells us that atomic nuclei have many discrete energy levels, like unevenly spaced rungs on a ladder. To calculate the spacing between each of the rungs, you would need to know the myriad possible ways the nucleus can hop from one to another, and the probabilities for those events to happen. Wigner didn't know, so instead he picked numbers at random for the probabilities and arranged them in a square array called a matrix.

The matrix was a neat way to express the many connections between the different rungs. It also allowed Wigner to exploit the powerful mathematics of matrices in order to make predictions about the energy levels.

Bizarrely, he found this simple approach enabled him to work out the likelihood that any one level would have others nearby, in the absence of any real knowledge. Wigner's results, worked out in a few lines of algebra, were far more useful than anyone could have expected, and experiments over the next few years showed a remarkably close fit to his predictions. Why they work, though, remains a mystery even today.

What is most remarkable, though, is how Wigner's idea has been used since then. It can be applied to a host of problems involving many interlinked variables whose connections can be represented as a random matrix.

The first discovery of a link between Wigner's idea and something completely unrelated to nuclear physics came about after a chance meeting in the early 1970s between British physicist Freeman Dyson and American mathematician Hugh Montgomery.

Montgomery had been exploring one of the most famous functions in mathematics, the Riemann zeta function, which holds the key to finding prime numbers. These are numbers, like 2, 3, 5 and 7, that are only divisible by themselves and 1. They hold a special place in mathematics because every integer greater than 1 can be built from them. Fist tap Dale.

tipping point: near-term systemic implications of a peak in global oil production

David Korowicz - Complexity, Economy, Civilisation & Collapse from Feasta on Vimeo.

FEASTA The credit crisis exemplifies society's difficulties in the timely management of risks outside our experience or immediate concerns, even when such risks are well signposted. We have passed or are close to passing the peak of global oil production. Our civilisation is structurally unstable to an energy withdrawal. There is a high probability that our integrated and globalised civilisation is on the cusp of a fast and near-term collapse.

As individuals, and as a social species we put up huge psychological defences to protect the status quo. We've heard this doom prophesied for decades, all is still well! What about technology? Rising energy prices will bring more oil! We need a Green New Deal! We still have time! We're busy with a financial crisis! This is depressing! If this were important, everybody would be talking about it! Yet the evidence for such a scenario is as close to cast iron as any upon which policy is built: Oil production must peak; there is a growing probability that it has or will soon peak; energy flows and a functioning economy are by necessity highly correlated; our basic local needs have become dependent upon a hyper-complex, integrated, tightly-coupled global fabric of exchange; our primary infrastructure is dependent upon the operation of this fabric and global economies of scale; credit is the integral part of the fabric of our monetary, economic and trade systems; a credit market must collapse in a contracting economy, and so on.

We are living within dynamic processes. It matters little what technologies are in the pipeline, the potential of wind power in some choice location, or that the European Commission has a target; if a severe economic and structural collapse occurs before their enactment, then they may never be enacted.

Our primary question is what happens if there is a net decrease in energy flow through our civilisation? For it is absolutely dependent upon increasing flows of concentrated energy to evolve and grow, and to form and maintain its complex structures. The rules governing energy and its transformation, the laws of thermodynamics, are the inviolate framework through which all things happen- the evolution of the universe, the direction of time, life on earth, human development, the evolution of civilisation, and economic processes. This point is not rhetorical, access to increasing flows of concentrated energy, which can be transformed into work and dispersed energy, is the foundation upon which our civilisation stands. Yet we are at a point where these flows are, with high probability, about to begin decreasing. We should intuit that an energy withdrawal should have major systemic implications, for without energy flows nothing happens.

The key to understanding the implications of peak oil is to see it not just directly through its effect on transport, petrochemicals, or food say, but its systemic effects. A globalising, integrated and co-dependant economy has evolved with particular dynamics and embedded structures that have made our basic welfare dependent upon delocalised 'local' economies. It has locked us into hyper- complex economic and social processes that are increasing our vulnerability, but which we are unable to alter without risking a collapse in those same welfare supporting structures. And without increasing energy flows, those embedded structures, which include our expectations, institutions and infrastructure that evolved and adapted in the expectation of further economic growth cannot be maintained.

obama biggest recipient of bp cash

Video - Webster Tarpley: US oil, mine disasters caused by lax Bush/Cheney/Obama regulation

Politico While the BP oil geyser pumps millions of gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama and members of Congress may have to answer for the millions in campaign contributions they’ve taken from the oil and gas giant over the years.

BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Donations come from a mix of employees and the company’s political action committees — $2.89 million flowed to campaigns from BP-related PACs and about $638,000 came from individuals.

On top of that, the oil giant has spent millions each year on lobbying — including $15.9 million last year alone — as it has tried to influence energy policy.

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

An Obama spokesman rejected the notion that the president took big oil money.
“President Obama didn’t accept a dime from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists during his presidential campaign,” spokesman Ben LaBolt said. “He raised $750 million from nearly four million Americans. And since he became president, he rolled back tax breaks and giveaways for the oil and gas industry, spearheaded a G20 agreement to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, and made the largest investment in American history in clean energy incentives.”

In Congress, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who last week cautioned that the incident should “not be used inappropriately” to halt Obama’s push for expansion of offshore drilling, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of BP’s largesse. Her comments created some blowback, with critics complaining that she is too blasé about the impact of the disaster, even though she was among the first lawmakers to call for a federal investigation into the spill.

As the top congressional recipient in the last cycle and one of the top BP cash recipients of the past two decades, Landrieu banked almost $17,000 from the oil giant in 2008 alone and has lined her war chest with more than $28,000 in BP cash overall.

“Campaign contributions, from energy companies or from environmental groups, have absolutely no impact on Sen. Landrieu’s policy agenda or her response to this unprecedented disaster in the Gulf,” said Landrieu spokesman Aaron Saunders. “The senator is proud of the broad coalition she’s built since her first day in the Senate to address the energy and environmental challenges in Louisiana and in the nation. This disaster only makes the effort to promote and save Louisiana’s coast all that more important.”

u.s. exempted bp's gulf of mexico drilling from environmental impact study

WaPo | The Interior Department exempted BP's calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely.

The decision by the department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP's lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 -- and BP's lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions -- show that neither federal regulators nor the company anticipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf.

Rethinking the rules

Now, environmentalists and some key senators are calling for a reassessment of safety requirements for offshore drilling.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who has supported offshore oil drilling in the past, said, "I suspect you're going to see an entirely different regime once people have a chance to sit back and take a look at how do we anticipate and clean up these potential environmental consequences" from drilling.

BP spokesman Toby Odone said the company's appeal for NEPA waivers in the past "was based on the spill and incident-response history in the Gulf of Mexico." Once the various investigations of the new spill have been completed, he added, "the causes of this incident can be applied to determine any changes in the regulatory regime that are required to protect the environment."

"I'm of the opinion that boosterism breeds complacency and complacency breeds disaster," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) on Tuesday. "That, in my opinion, is what happened."

Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said it is important to learn the cause of the accident before pursuing a major policy change. "While the conversation has shifted, the energy reality has not," Gerard said. "The American economy still relies on oil and gas."

recollections from rig survivors

Mark Levin full audio interview with Trans-Ocean Horizon survivor.

PeakOilPetroleumandPreciousMetals | Minutes before the Deepwater Horizon exploded in fire, workers on the deck heard a thump, then a hissing sound. Gas alarms sounded and the rig shook.

Seawater and mud containing gas from the well spewed up through the crown of the derrick and rained down on the drilling floor; fumes reportedly moved into the "safe zones" where the electric generators are located. The generators raced out of control as they sucked gas into the air intakes.

When the electric power surged, light bulbs exploded, computers and other electric systems were destroyed, leaving the rig in darkness except for the light from fires and explosions that ripped apart walls, according to accounts derived from interviews with attorneys representing survivors, missing rig workers and their families, as well as experts in the field of offshore drilling operations.

Before the blowout, the rig's crew had been replacing heavy and valuable drilling mud with lighter salt sea­water in the top section of the pipe, known as the riser -- the purpose being to extract the mud so they could remove the riser, several sources said. While doing so, they had to secure the wellhead to keep oil and gas from blowing out.

But blow out it did.

Kevin Eugene, a steward on the rig, said he was in his bunk watching TV at about 10 p.m. when a "big old loud boom" and an alarm went off "almost simultaneously.

The lights went out. The platform began shaking.

I thought the place was falling in the ocean, that the whole rig was collapsing," said the father of four from Slidell, La.

Ceiling tiles, dust and debris rained down from overhead. Clad only in his pajama pants and undershirt, he scrambled down a hallway toward an exit to a stairwell that would lead to a lifeboat up on deck. He heard more explosions, but can't remember how many.

When he got onto the deck, he felt a blast of heat and saw flames about 200 yards away.

I mean it was the hugest, biggest fire I've ever seen," Eugene said. "It was just a big ol' ball of fire up there on the derrick. The whole derrick was on fire. The fire was shooting from out the well over there that the derrick was connected to and you could hear the gas gushing out."

The deck was covered with oily mud.

farmers in the fields of stars

Video - 2001 a Space Odyssey sync'd to Echoes.

3001 | Call them the Firstborn. Though they were not remotely human, they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the depths of space, they felt awe, and wonder - and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they began to seek for fellowship among the stars.

In their explorations, they encountered life in may forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night.

And because in all the Galaxy, they'd found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of the stars; they sowed and sometimes they reaped.

And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

The great dinosaurs hd long since passed away, their morning promise annihilated by a random hammer-blow from space, when the survey ship entered the Solar System after a voyage that had already lasted a thousand years. It swept past the frozen outer planets, paused briefly above the deserts of dying Mars, and presently looked down on Earth. Spread out beneath them, the explorers saw a world swarming with life. For years they studied, collected, catalogued. When they had learned all that they could, they began to modify. They tinkered with the destiny of many species, on land and in the seas. But which of their experiments would bear fruit, they could not know for at least a million years.

They were patient, but they were not yet immortal. There was so much to do in this universe of a hundred billion suns, and other worlds were calling. So they set out once more into the abyss, knowing that they would never come this way again. Nor was there any need; the servants they had left behind would do the rest

On Earth, the glaciers came and went, while above them the changeless Moon still carried its secret from the stars. With a yet slower rhythm than the polar ice, the tides of civilization ebbed and flowed across the Galaxy. Strange and beautiful and terrible empires rose and fell, and passed on their knowledge to their successors.

And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and gemstone. In these, they roamed the Galaxy. They no longer built spaceships, They were spaceships.

But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. in their ceaseless experimenting, thy had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into dust.

Now they were the Lords of the Galaxy, and could rove at will among the stars, or sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. Thought they were freed at last from the tyranny of matter, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. And their marvelous instruments still continued to function, watching over the experiments started so many ages ago.

But no longer were they always obedient to the mandates of their creators; like all material things, they were not immune to the corruptions of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant Entropy. And sometimes, they discovered and sought goals of their own.

some people have god, I have hubble...,

Video - Hubble Astronomy Domine.

Guardian | for those of us without faith, I propose the Hubble Deep Field Image as an excellent alternative way to get some perspective. In 1995, the Hubble telescope was pointed for 10 days at a patch of sky which appears completely blank to the naked eye from the Earth. It's a tiny piece – much smaller than the area of sky you'd cover with your little fingernail if you held your arm outstretched. And in that apparently blank area of sky the Hubble Deep Field Image discerned with amazing clarity more than 10,000 galaxies. Each galaxy is made up, on average, of about 100bn stars. Every star could, like our sun, be orbited by planets. That is the size of the universe we live in.

This may not be a thought that makes you feel calm. Although many people find that this sense of scale helps make their own problems seem less enormous, it doesn't work for everyone. For some the sense of how incredibly small we actually are seems to instil terror instead. But perhaps even terrifying perspective is important. In 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission, a photograph known as Earthrise was taken. It shows the Earth, from the moon, rising across the lunar landscape. This photograph has been called "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken". The sense it gave of the Earth as small, beautiful and fragile – the understanding that, whatever our differences, we're all together on one small planet – has been credited with kick-starting the environmental movement of the 1970s.

The Apollo space missions may have come partly out of the paranoia of the cold war, but the legacy they've left has been one that can move us out of tribalism. Hubble's contribution to scientific understanding has been impressive, including information about the speed at which the universe is expanding, investigating black holes and improving our estimates of its age. But the benefits of appreciating the size and scale of our universe aren't limited to science.

If I were in charge of such things, I'd mandate that before every climate change conference, before peace talks and trade negotiations, leaders and policians should spend some minutes contemplating the Hubble Deep Field. This is the size of the universe we may as a species, if we're industrious, resourceful and fortunate, get to explore. This can be our goal: surely one worth pursuing. With so many pressing problems on Earth, how can we afford not to try to focus on the things that unite us? Human beings used to cast their eyes heavenwards in search of divine inspiration, but it turns out that the stars themselves can be inspirational enough.

sex and death

Video - The Outer Limits The Second Soul.

Sexual processes, he merger of attracted beings, probably originated as did the early symbioses. In both sexual and symbiotic fusions, hunger was a likely primordial factor urging the desperate to merge. Cells that join in sex, however, by definition represent genes and cytoplasm from gendered individuals who are members of the same species.

In our book, The Origins of Sex, Dorion Sagan and I argued that meiotic sex began long after bacterial sex as abortive cannibalism in certain protists. To understand the convoluted history of sex, we declared, one needs to know protoctist biology.

We explained how both sexual and symbiotic mergers bring distant genes together within the recombined organism. Sex differs from symbiosis in that the cyclical fusion and later separation tend to be far more predictable, far less creative and casual than those in temporary symbiosis. In sex, offspring greatly resemble their parents, and gender differences are ritualized and predictable.

The bodies formed by symbiogenetic fusion, such as modulated bean roots, green hydras, cud-chewing cows, luminous fish, and red algae, differ profoundly from each of the parent partners that fuse. Symbiogenesis is far more splenid than sex as a generator of evolutionary novelty. When the parents are extremely closely related to one another, for example, nonphotosynthetic red algae who live on (or rather "off") their relatives, other photosynthetic red algae, sex and symbiosis re barely even operationally distinguishable. But when the symbiotic parents of the mergers are distantly related - for example, bean plants and rhizobia bacteria or cows and their entodiniomorphid rumen ciliates - the products of these mergers are stunningly different from either parent.

Programmed death is a nonnegotiable consequence of the sexual mode of life. The great cycle in which males and females make sperm and ova with one set of chromosomes, only to have them come together again to make an offspring with two sets of chromosomes is linked intimately with the imperative of individual plants and animals to die. All organisms, including bacteria and many protoctists, can of course be killed. Starvation, dessication, and poisons are great killers. But death by destruction lacks a natural built in timetable. Evolution of the protoctist ancestors to plant and animal bodies required sacrifice and loss; multicellularity and complexification ushered n the aging and death of individual bodies. Death, the literal disintegration of the husk of the body was the grim price exacted for meiotic sexuality. Complex development in protoctists and their animal and plant descendants led to the evolution of death as a kind of sexually transmitted disease. More than one billion years ago, when protoctists evolved by integration of bacterial symbionts into permanent and stable communities that became protoctist individuals, the kind of scheduled death that disturbs us today first appeared.

Excerpted from Animal Sex - Symbiotic Planet Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

sacred sexuality in ancient egypt

Gurdjieff Journal | Out of the cosmic soup, an egg produced by ancetral gods and four primordial couples is called into being by Thoth, the keeper of Science. This egg blasts forth in the first cosmic Big Bang and the Sun is born. Atum-Ra. A divine entity. A demiurge—one who creates material out of chaos. Atum-Ra, surrounded by the feminine element Hathor, becomes excited, masturbates, and either spits or breathes out his two children, Shu and Tefnut, the Two Lions of the solar horizon. Shu and Tefnut, being brother/sister and husband/wife produce two more children, Nut (Heaven) and Geb (Earth). Nut and Geb's union annoys their grandfather Atum-Ra since he can't continue circulating and energizing the world he is creating. He commands their father Shu to separate his "overly amorous" children, creating space between heaven and earth and thus infuriating Geb, who in his fury twists and turns in great gyrations and the mountains and volcanoes are created. Before the separation, Nut (sister/wife) has conceived five more children—Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, Seth, Horus—but Atum-Ra curses them and they are born against his will.

Creation, a Sexual Act
Thus begins the ancient Egyptian creation myth that is minutely detailed in this beautifully illustrated text, Sacred Sexuality in Ancient Egypt. The Ancient Sages, in the eternal wish to regulate man's most powerful urge, the sexual instinct, decided to make Creation a sexual act. The culture, as reflected in the book, is permeated with laws, ritual, literature and art that reflect this divine model. The authors state that their ambition is "a general glimpse behind the shutter of the private life of the ancient dwellers along the Nile."

Now that Thoth had brought Atum-Ra into being, the gods could no longer live outside of space and time and were thus subject to the same cycles as their mortal underlings. The nine emanations of Atum-Ra—Shu, Tefnut, Geb and the five children, Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, Seth and Horus—complete the Ennead, the divine Supreme Court who rule the Universe. Couples are formed—Osiris and Iris, who rule the world peacefully, and Seth and Nephthys. Seth, the Lord of Materiality, however, is less than majestic in his manifestation. A turbulent, frustrated deity, Seth embodies upheaval and sexual chaos. His sister/wife Nephthys is no comfort as she unfortunately is more attracted to Isis and Osiris than to her brother/husband. From her union with Osiris she produces a child, the dark dog Anubis. To complicate matters further, Isis and Osiris, having no child of their own, decide to appoint Horus (he's their little brother, too), as their heir. This infuriates the jealous Seth (uncle/brother), who kills Osiris and cuts him up in little pieces and tosses his body into the Nile.

Isis, a magician as well as a wife, gathers up the pieces (except for the phallus which was swallowed by a fish) and, with the help of Anubis, reconstitutes Osiris; in many illustrations she is depicted as a bird who flutters her wings and brings Osiris back from the dead. Osiris then returns to the center of the earth to once again recharge his energies. He is depicted as a god of nature, literally "germinating" small grains of wheat popping up on his mummified body, and, with a fully erect penis, recharging life force to the earth.

release the kraken!!!

Video - Release the kraken.

Kunstler | Senator Levin pretty much had Goldman Sach's Lloyd Blankfein dead in a casket with that now-notorious email from GS's head of sales and trading, Tom Montag, describing one of their billion-dollar investment "products" as "one shitty deal." Levin seemed to delight in crossing the boundary into the realm of the unspeakable, knowing that even the so-called "family" newspapers and cable TV networks would have to report it. And just to make sure nobody missed the point, the senator repeated that phrase at least twenty times before the day was over. It was like the climactic scene in that old Hammer Films classic, The Horror of Dracula, where Professor Van Helsing moves from coffin to coffin pounding stakes through the hearts of Drac and all his fellow bloodsuckers.

It's hardly the climax of our story, though. Ours has barely started. It seems to me lately that the crack-up we've entered is liable to play out more gruesomely for our privileged elites than the orgy of bloodletting that attended the French Revolution. That historical moment was a sharp transition between old, settled social relations and the new political realities of imminent industrialization and a rising middle class. The elites in charge of things to that moment, an ossified aristocracy, responded to rising discontent with utter feckless stupidity. To make matters worse, a great many of them were hunkered down in the fantasy-land Royal Palace of Versailles, enjoying what was for practical purposes a non-stop mega house party. They must have thought they were safe twelve miles outside Paris.

The French Revolution actually got off to a better start than it is remembered for. A progressive opposition put together a new legislature, the National Assembly. They undertook the writing of a constitution. But it all fell apart rather quickly since the dim-witted King and his cohorts didn't really get into that old changing times spirit and their lack of cooperation -- not to mention their decadence -- provoked the more violent factions of the common people to form that kraken of politics, the mob. What a goddamned mess it turned into -- a revolving cast of mob masters, each worse than the last, whipping up the crowds to ever more horrible enormities of human vivisection -- a political process that had gone hopelessly out of control. Despite the agile precedent of their friend, the new USA, quickly resolving its own rebellion into a functioning government of law, France opted for a bloody clusterfuck -- which went on for eight more years.

trickledown economics...,

Video - unregulated drilling practices at the heart of gulf oil spill.


Video - Gulf oil spill's effects in Indianapolis.

HuffPo | GULFPORT, Miss. — Scientists say the Gulf oil spill could get into the what's called the Loop Current within a day, eventually carrying oil south along the Florida coast and into the Florida Keys.

Nick Shay, a physical oceanographer at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, said Monday once the oil enters the Loop Current, it likely will end up in the Keys and continue east into the Gulf Stream.

Shay says the oil could affect Florida's beaches, coral reefs, fisheries and ecosystem within a week.

He described the Loop Current as similar to a "conveyor belt," sweeping around the Gulf, through the Keys and right up the East Coast.

Shay says he cannot think of any scenario where the oil doesn't eventually reach the Florida Keys.

flooding reaches heart of nashville...,

Video - Party in the face of death.

WaPo | Muddy water poured over the banks of Nashville's swollen Cumberland River on Monday, flooding neighborhoods and parts of the historic heart of Music City after a destructive line of weekend storms killed 28 people in Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky.

The flash floods caught the city off guard, and thousands of residents and tourists were forced to flee. Authorities used motorboats and personal watercraft to rescue residents who had been trapped in their homes. The rapidly rising waters led to the deaths of 17 people in Tennessee, including 10 in Nashville, and officials feared that the death toll could increase.

Country music's landmark, the Grand Ole Opry House, was flooded with several feet of water, and at least 10 feet of water flooded the nearby Gaylord Opryland Hotel complex, indefinitely shutting down one of the nation's largest hotel and convention centers. The historic Ryman Auditorium -- the former home of the Grand Ole Opry -- and the recording studios of Music Row were not in immediate danger.

Downtown was nearly deserted after authorities evacuated the area. Floodwater spilled into some streets near the riverfront, and restaurants and bars were closed. Water filled the basement of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center where pianos were stored and seeped into a mechanical room in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

"It's shocking to see it this way, but it was an incredible storm," Mayor Karl Dean said as he surveyed the flooding on Monday.

Gov. Phil Bredesen declared 52 of Tennessee's 95 counties as disaster areas after finishing an aerial tour.

if only arizona were the real problem

NYTimes | It’s harder and harder to cling to the conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is merely an element in the G.O.P., not the party’s controlling force — the tail that’s wagging the snarling dog. It’s also hard to maintain that the Tea Party’s nuttier elements are merely a fringe of a fringe. The first national Tea Party convention, in Nashville in February, chose as its kickoff speaker the former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a notorious nativist who surely was enlisted precisely because he runs around saying things like he has “no idea where Obama was born.” The Times/CBS poll of the Tea Party movement found that only 41 percent of its supporters believe that the president was born in the United States.

The angry right and its apologists also keep insisting that race has nothing to do with their political passions. Thus Sarah Palin explained that it’s Obama and the “lamestream media” that are responsible for “perpetuating this myth that racial profiling is a part” of Arizona’s law. So how does that profiling work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a Republican Congressman from California and another supporter of the law, rode to the rescue by suggesting “they will look at the kind of dress you wear.” Wise Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!

In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it’s politically incorrect to entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in what drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in America, it turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a “racist.” Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist.” When Obama put up a routine YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last week — which he defined as “young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women” — the Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race card. Presumably the best defense is a good offense when you’re a party boasting an all-white membership in both the House and the Senate and represented by governors who omit slavery from their proclamations of Confederate History Month.

In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.’s one visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message when appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that African-Americans “really don’t have a reason” to vote Republican, citing his party’s pursuit of a race-baiting “Southern strategy” since the Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was attacked by conservatives who denied there had ever been such a strategy. That bit of historical revisionism would require erasing, for starters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped to propel Bush 41 into the White House in 1988.

The rage of 2010 is far more incendiary than anything that went down in 1988, and it will soon leap from illegal immigration to other issues in other states. Boycott the Diamondbacks and Phoenix’s convention hotels if you want to punish Arizona, but don’t for a second believe that it will stop the fire next time.