G-Thang Baybee...,

"We’re not going there just for the oil because we’re not that evil. It’s just a stupid argument," says Thomas P.M. Barnett, a New York Times best-selling author and military expert who is a forecaster of future global conflicts. "We’re going so to create better governments, improve the people, create jobs, create stability."

In essence, the US has grand plans to set in motion "the great African renaissance," says Barnett, who traveled to Ethiopia and Kenya this past summer, visiting several newly established US military outposts.

The White House, however, is not saying much about their plans for AFRICOM to those who should be in the know, says a prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Don Zaluchi: I also don't believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn't do that kind of business. Somebody comes to them and says, "I have powders; if you put up three, four thousand dollar investment, we can make fifty thousand distributing." So they can't resist. I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable.
[slams his hand on the table and shouts]

Don Zaluchi: I don't want it near schools! I don't want it sold to children! That's an infamia. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people, the coloreds. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.

Baraka Jes Grew....,

Black Superdelegates Switch From Clinton to Obama

The former first lady just days ago was assailing Obama as untested, using as evidence the fact that Obama had never had a negative TV ad run against him. This week she remedied that complaint, launching an ad criticizing Obama for not agreeing to debate her in Wisconsin. The DLC is so busted now.

Baraka is single-handedly forcing the revision of all pre-existing political calculus. Please recall my earlier statements to the effect that I support his candidacy strictly on the grounds that he would do just such a thing. Two commenters this morning at Cobb, have really summed up the terror of the situation for both ends of the political spectrum.

1. Darkstar brings it in the comment;

This is something it Blacks from the Right are delighting in because of the row about the Black Right being punks and never showing up when invited, now the shoe is on the other foot. But the Black Right is, mostly, deliberately missing the point.

The Black Right claims they want the Black masses to hold politicians accountable and Smiley is doing just that.

It's like when the Black Right says Jackson, Sr, Sharpton, the NAACP, etc "controls the minds" of the Black community but publicly ignores when the same Black community slams Jackson, Sr, Sharpton, the NAACP, etc.

Just look at the split in support for Clinton and Obama. The Black Right likes to point it out but won't go that extra step and ask, "Does OR DID the so-called Black leader EVER lead or determine how Black America thinks or acts?"

No, the Black Right won't do that because then the answer would force people to look behind THEIR curtain.

We all know so-called Black leaders don't determine what Black America does or thinks. But too many people from the left and right need to "perpetrate the fraud" for selfish reasons.

2. While A. Charles drops science with this comment;

If we're saying that you can be where he is just by virtue of being a black candidate, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Carol Mosely Braun should have gotten there before him, I would think.

If you're adding up all the votes he gets just because he's black, and for no other reason, and even assuming that all of the black folks are voting for him just because he's black and not because he's the best candidate, there's not much reason to think that anybody who isn't black is gonna be voting for him. Which means that we can see him winning South Carolina, D.C. and Maryland. That makes him about as marginal as Bill Clinton tried to make him in comparing him to Jesse Jackson, and substantially less of a front-runner than Mike Huckabee is on the other side of the party line.

Neither of those what-ifs is in fact the case, though. No black candidate has done what this one has done, and this one has come out ahead in primaries where being black can't explain the result: Iowa, Maine, Colorado, Nebraska, Idaho, etc.

Put it this way: if John Edwards could be a legitimate presidential candidate in 2004, why couldn't somebody who's just like him, just better in every tangible way that's relevant to a politician, be ahead in this race just on the basis of those virtues?

That analysis is why I reject the comparison of whites who vote for whites just because of their race to the black people who are voting for Obama. There is a difference between voting just because of race and being pleased and proud to have, for the first time ever, the chance to confirm with your vote that the best candidate is one of your race. I wouldn't vote for Alan Keyes for president, and I wouldn't be happy to have Barack Obama be head coach of the Chicago Bears. But I am pleased, after having to believe for quite some time that I'd never see black men in either of those jobs, to see that the best available candidates are black men.

I take infinite pleasure in seeing all the handkerchief heads outed in one brilliant fell swoop.

Anti-Democratic Global Corporatism

Ten years ago, the late Sir James Goldsmith discussed the toxic social effects of global corporatism with Charlie Rose. Enduring nasty "debate" from a Clinton hanger-on, Dr. Laura D'Andrea Tyson for about 10 minutes toward the middle of the program - Goldsmith resumes civil discourse with Charlie Rose after Tyson finishes. Very, very interesting insight into the subversion of the global financial system, the U.S. economy, and the health of our population.

Goldsmith was also the founder of the most successful of the U.K. Referendum Parties - a most capital notion for reinjecting democratic praxis into the otherwise utterly undemocratic governance scheme that we currently endure.

Cilia and Visual Consciousness

Consciousness may involve quantum computation in the brain.

Cilia in the retina (and possibly elsewhere in the brain) may be involved in quantum optical processes relevant to consciousness.

Dr. Stuart Hameroff "Cilia, vision and consciousness" Syntonic Optometry, May 2007

Patterns

Oliver Sacks writing at length in the NYTimes blog;

As a child, I was fascinated by patterns, starting with the patterns in our house — the square colored floor tiles we had on the porch, the tessellation of small pentagonal and hexagonal ones in the kitchen; the herringbone pattern on the curtains in my room, and the pattern on my father’s check suit. When I was taken to the synagogue for services, I was more interested in the mosaics of tiny tiles on the floor than in the religious liturgy. And I was fascinated by a pair of antique Chinese cabinets we had in our drawing room, for embossed on their lacquered surfaces were patterns of wonderful intricacy, patterns on different scales, patterns nested within patterns, all surrounded by clusters of tendrils and leaves.

These geometric and scrolling motifs seemed somehow familiar to me, though it did not dawn on my until years later that this was because I had seen them not only in my environment but in my own head, that these patterns resonated with my own inner experience of the intricate tilings and swirls of migraine.

Much later still, when I first saw photographs of the Alhambra, with its intricate geometric mosaics, I started to wonder whether what I had taken to be a personal experience and resonance might in fact be part of a larger whole, whether certain basic forms of geometric art, going back for tens of thousands of years, might also reflect the external expression of universal experiences. Migraine-like patterns, so to speak, are seen not only in Islamic art, but in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry — in virtually every culture. There seems to have been, throughout human history, a need to externalize, to make art from, these internal experiences, from the decorative motifs of prehistoric cave paintings to the psychedelic art of the 1960s. Do the arabesques in our own minds, built into our own brain organization, provide us with our first intimations of geometry, of formal beauty?

Whether or not this is the case, there is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception — that this is how seeing begins. Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems — one may see it equally in the formation of snow crystals, in the roilings and eddies of turbulent water, in certain oscillating chemical reactions. Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time, very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning, but a universal of nature itself.

This article is related to these precursor articles Za'irajah, Ars Generalis Ultima, and Undulipodium- I hadn't forgotten, I just got distracted by work and current events for few days....,

America's Most Miserable City

No. 1 - Detroit, Mich. (Not counting the highest foreclosure rate in the nation.)
Rank
Commute times 80
Income tax rates 87
Superfund sites 135
Unemployment 149
Violent crimes 150
Weather 95

Misery Measure 696

Motown is the worst in the country when it comes to violent crime, with an annual rate of 1,251 crimes for every 100,000 residents. Unemployment in the area is below the double-digit rates it hit in the early 1990s, but at 8.5% over the past three years, it is still the second-highest in the country among the 150 largest metro areas.

Ranks are based on the 150 largest metro areas.

Sources: Bert Sperling; Moody's Economy.com; U.S. Census Bureau

Imagine living in a city with the country's highest rate for violent crime and the second-highest unemployment rate. As an added kicker you need more Superfund dollars allocated to your city to clean up contaminated toxic waste sites than just about any other metro.

Unfortunately, this nightmare is a reality for the residents of Detroit. The Motor City grabs the top spot on Forbes' inaugural list of America's Most Miserable Cities.

Baraka SOBU?

So, I'm checking my email this morning, and much to my surprise is this item of no small controversy cc'd to me from one of the Kwaku nets comprised mainly of my elders it's from Roland Martin's Essence Newsletter;

Sen. Barack Obama took a lot of heat last year from participants in Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Union annual confab, which was held in Virginia. To be fair, he was a little busy that day...announcing HE WAS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT!

Some of the folks there were besides themselves, and frankly, were childish about it, even saying that he should have put off his presidential announcement to be there.

Now, almost a year later, he is faced with a similar dilemma.

Tavis has announced that he will hold his State of the Black Union annual talkfest on Feb. 23 in New Orleans, La. This is a huge event attended by thousands each year; broadcast on C-SPAN; and attracts some of the nation's top black activists, politicians and intellectuals.

During his commentary Thursday on the Tom Joyner Morning Show, the most listened to black radio show, Tavis said he's invited the three top candidates, Republican frontrunner, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He said only one has accepted, and he will wait until tomorrow for the other two to decide.

He didn't say which one decided to attend, but on Friday, Clinton announced that she was attending.

In his commentary, Smiley said he was going to snap on those who don't attend on Tuesday's show, demanding that they own up to black issues and zero in on social justice issues as outlined in the book he edited, "The Covenant with Black America."

Martin says Obama ought to skip Smiley's State of the Black Union.

Clinton has no choice but to attend.

McCain doesn't matter.

Question of the Day: Do you think Sen. Barack Obama should attend Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Union event in New Orleans on Feb. 23?

Georgia and the Coming Resource Wars

It's official: the era of resource wars is upon us. In a major London address, British Defense Secretary John Reid warned that global climate change and dwindling natural resources are combining to increase the likelihood of violent conflict over land, water and energy. Climate change, he indicated, “will make scarce resources, clean water, viable agricultural land even scarcer”—and this will “make the emergence of violent conflict more rather than less likely.”

Although not unprecedented, Reid’s prediction of an upsurge in resource conflict is significant both because of his senior rank and the vehemence of his remarks. “The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur,” he declared. “We should see this as a warning sign.”

Resource conflicts of this type are most likely to arise in the developing world, Reid indicated, but the more advanced and affluent countries are not likely to be spared the damaging and destabilizing effects of global climate change. With sea levels rising, water and energy becoming increasingly scarce and prime agricultural lands turning into deserts, internecine warfare over access to vital resources will become a global phenomenon.

Comes now P6 with this fascinating little glimpse from the twilight zone in which the ongoing southeastern drought has Georgia revisting a nearly 200 year old border dispute with Tennessee;

"It's never too late to right a wrong," said Georgia state Sen. David Shafer (R), whose bill would create a boundary-line commission that aims to resolve the dispute.

Good. Now about those reparations for slavery.

But on the serious tip - there is about to be a heat-up under the law about sovereign control of territory - given the implications for big business, unbridled growth, and the continuing viability of the obviously unsustainable sprawl that is Atlanta;

Nearly two centuries after a flawed survey placed Georgia's northern border just short of the Tennessee River, some legislators are thirsting to set the record straight.

A historic drought has added urgency to Georgia's generations-old claim that its territory should extend about a mile farther north and reach into the Tennessee -- a river with about 15 times the flow of the one Atlanta depends on for water.

"It's never too late to right a wrong," said Georgia state Sen. David Shafer (R), whose bill would create a boundary-line commission that aims to resolve the dispute.

The reaction of Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (D): "This is a joke, right?"

No joke gov. Georgia desperately needs that water, and it's coming at you to get it by any means necessary. Really though, it's not like you expect the Federal government to intervene constructively here, do you? Civil and infrastructural engineers have already pegged the cost of getting Atlanta's water storage capacity up to snuff at $300 Billion dollars. It'd be a helluva lot cheaper to simply sue and steal the desperately needed water from Tennessee based on a 200 year old dispute over territorial precision.

Technosexual Tragedy...,

Since I'm on a crooks and liars tear this afternoon, I GOT to put in my two cents here with Scottie Maurice Pippen and Bigfoot;





I would absolutely love to see Tonya Reiman get ahold of these two - but given the stanktabulous nature of her primary funding source, THAT'S NOT GONNA HAPPEN.



fist tap to UCBM for originally cracking me up with Kwame's real deal....,

Khartoum?

We all remember the disturbing scene in Francis Ford Coppola's “The Godfather” where Tom Hagen goes to Hollywood to convince a recalcitrant movie producer to use Johnny Fontaine in his next film. The “Big shot” producer is finally persuaded to hire the young actor after he wakes up in bed next to the severed head of his prize thoroughbred. Did Bush make a similar “offer they could not refuse” to the various leaders of the Gulf States when he met with them earlier this month. Why would he choose to visit the Middle East just as his second term as president is winding down and there is no chance of success?

Unbelievable.....,

USAF Pushing Energy Alternatives

Here's where you know, if you read the signs and between the lines, how serious the situation has become. This also happens to be a VERY GOOD THING that we should each push our respective district congress critters to support aggressively and vociferously. Every branch of the U.S. armed services needs to get on this stick with the quickness because they have both the market moving scale to make it matter, and, they have the hierarchical social cohesion and reach into the social mass sufficient to drive such initiatives into the larger public domain.

Air Force pushing energy alternatives

A top ranking official said Friday the Air Force is striving to be a "market initiator" in developing energy alternatives and weaning the nation away from foreign oil dependence.

William C. Anderson, Air Force assistant secretary for installations, environment and logistics, wrapped up a two-day visit to Robins Air Force Base after briefing base leaders on the Air Force's energy strategy and receiving updates from the Advanced Power Technology Office at Robins. Anderson said the strategy is simple: Reduce demand, find new, domestically sourced, clean energy and change the Air Force culture for every airman.

"From the day an airman walks into basic training to the most senior ranks of the Air Force, we want to ensure they make energy considerations in every thing they do," Anderson said during an afternoon press conference. He said the Air Force mission remains to fly, fight, win and maintain sovereign options for the nation. "But we believe we can do that in a way that reduces demand on energy," he said, "and in a way that reduces the environmental impact."

The Power of Community - How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

In 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba experienced an 'energy famine.' Transportation and agriculture virtually came to a stop due to lack of diesel fuel and fertilizer shortages. This film explores what changes were put in place. The makers of the film 'The End Of Suburbia' went to Cuba to explore it as a test case for what the conditions after Peak Oil would look like. This is that story.

Cubans improved their health, sense of community, food and health of their land. A greater percentage of Cubans own their own home than Americans. More farmers own their own land. Free markets indeed....,

Can the world afford a middle class?

By Moisés Naím February 8, 2008 LATimes

More countries are pulling themselves out of poverty, placing greater demand on food supplies and natural resources.

The middle class in poor countries is the fastest-growing segment of the world's population. While the total population of the planet will increase by about a billion people in the next 12 years, the ranks of the middle class will swell by as many as 1.8 billion -- 600 million just in China. The impact of a fast-growing middle class will be felt in the price of other resources. After all, members of the middle class are also buying more clothes, refrigerators, toys, medicines and eventually will buy more cars and homes. China and India, with nearly 40% of the world's population -- most of it still very poor -- already consume more than half of the global supply of coal, iron ore and steel. Thanks to their growing prosperity and that of other countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey and Vietnam, the demand for these products is booming.

Moreover, a 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.

And we know what happened to oil prices. Oil reached its all-time high of $100 a barrel not because of supply constraints but because of unprecedented growth in consumption in poor countries. China alone accounts for one-third of the growth in the world's oil consumption in recent years.

South Africa in the Premature Long Emergency

The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century is a book by James Howard Kunstler (Grove/Atlantic, 2005) exploring the consequences of a world oil production peak, coinciding with the forces of climate change, resurgent diseases, water scarcity, global economic instability and warfare to cause chaos for future generations.

The book's principal theme explores the effects of a peak in oil production, predicted by many geologists, on American society as well as the rest of the world. In both this book and in his other writings, Kunstler argues that the economic upheavals caused by peak oil will force Americans to live in more localized, self-sufficient communities.

Letter from a farmer to Kunstler; It began with a few potholes in the roads, the odd interruption to the water supply in the suburbs, a couple of days with strike action preventing the delivery of municipal services – no garbage collection, protest action disrupting the mining industry and picketing & toy toying at shopping malls…It continued over the next couple of years, largely with disregard for the disruptions, a little irritation to daily commercial and home life by the lack of service provision in food, gas, water and power.

In recent months, at the receivables end of the supply chain, there was a little aggravation at the delays, the lack of service, the shortage of a few consumer luxuries in the retail shops…, ‘but hey, what the hell, this is a great country, we cannot fault the lifestyle, the weather…’. For a couple of months, perhaps a year back or so, there seemed little or no reason to change our way of life, our lifestyles…a little further down the road and the disruptions become more frequent, we learn to cope, learn to accept the rising cost of living, gas supply shortages in the Winter of 2007, the intermittent water disruptions, the odd power outage and the potholes. Potholes may well be the singular measure of the calamity we are in or about to face.

As we head into February, it will be interesting to see the economic figures; theoretically the revenue generation for the period should be down by at least 25% or something similar to the power outage percentages. Notwithstanding that the stock market took a bend downwards and followed the USA crash and the antics of the Societé General rogue trader. (Well done on the foresight, James). The South African property market is following suit, as well.

And just as we were wondering how the effect, implications and opinions of an emergency would pan out into daily life, what the tell tail signs would be… it happened, all of this is the short space of about 2-3 weeks, the realization dawns that it has begun, the country is experiencing and living through the beginning of the Long Emergency, rather unexpectedly and certainly too prematurely.

I proffer that the events in South Africa, tragic as they are, as they play themselves out, will give a good indication of the events that the USA and other countries will realize in the years to come as The Long Emergency’ comes to pass.

The Inner Life of the The Cell

Dirt Cookies

It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.

The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cité Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.

"When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day," Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth. Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies give her stomach pains. "When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too," she said. Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher prices for oil, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.

The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports, and food prices are up 40 percent in places.

INSIGHTS: Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008;

We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.

The world is facing the most severe food price inflation in history as grain and soybean prices climb to all-time highs. Wheat trading on the Chicago Board of Trade on December 17th breached the $10 per bushel level for the first time ever. In mid-January, corn was trading over $5 per bushel, close to its historic high. And on January 11th, soybeans traded at $13.42 per bushel, the highest price ever recorded. All these prices are double those of a year or two ago.
Lester R. Brown in his office. (Photo courtesy Earth Policy Institute)

As a result, prices of food products made directly from these commodities such as bread, pasta, and tortillas, and those made indirectly, such as pork, poultry, beef, milk, and eggs, are everywhere on the rise. In Mexico, corn meal prices are up 60 percent. In Pakistan, flour prices have doubled. China is facing rampant food price inflation, some of the worst in decades.

This is what happens when the bubble making machine breaks;

the next great bubble will be a $20 trillion "alternative energy" bubble. In fact, Wall Street's already hustling biofuels, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric as the new alternative energies destined to replace oil, gas and coal in this next new economy. Timing? The new "alternative energies" bubble will last about 8 years, from a 2005 launch till a peak around 2013, when it will "creatively destruct," when all possible "fake wealth" is squeezed out, when investors wise up to the scam, when that new bubble pops.

Why The Price of "Peak Oil" is Famine

Peak Oil is morphing into Peak Food;

Vulnerable regions of the world face the risk of famine over the next three years as rising energy costs spill over into a food crunch, according to US investment bank Goldman Sachs.

"We've never been at a point in commodities where we are today," said Jeff Currie, the bank's commodity chief and closely watched oil guru.

Global oil output has been stagnant for four years, failing to keep up with rampant demand from Asia and the Mid-East. China's imports rose 14pc last year. Biofuels from grain, oil seed and sugar are plugging the gap, but drawing away food supplies at a time when the world is adding more than 70m mouths to feed a year.

"Markets are as tight as a drum and now the US has hit the stimulus button," said Mr Currie in his 2008 outlook. "We have never seen this before when commodity prices were already at record highs. Over the next 18 to 36 months we are probably going into crisis mode across the commodity complex.

"The key is going to be agriculture. China is terrified of the current situation. It has real physical shortages," he said, referencing China still having memories of starvation in the 1960s seared in its collective mind.

While the US housing crash poses some threat to the price of metals and energy, the effect has largely occurred already. The slide in crude prices over the past month may have been caused by funds liquidating derivatives contracts to cover other demands rather than by recession fears. Goldman Sachs forecasts that oil will be priced at $105 a barrel by the end of 2008.
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The current "supercycle" is a break with history because energy and food have "converged" in price and can increasingly be switched from one use to another.

Corn can be used for ethanol in cars and power plants, for plastics, as well as in baking tortillas. Natural gas can be made into fertiliser for food output. "Peak Oil" is morphing into "Peak Food".

quoth Submariner;

meaningful change will occur as a response to a combination of imminent external threat and a mass domestic outcry.

To which I respond;

When all prior assumptions are rendered moot and a dizzying number of variables are in play - meaningful change can mean a lot of different things.

Transformation or Extinction?

Turner Classic Movies is showing my all-time favorite;



Cliff Notes for the impatient and those without cable teevee.