do we really want the unvarnished truth?

Video - Colonel Jessup breaks it down.

NYTimes | Why are people praising Chinese autocracy these days? Perhaps they fear that the open society is opening too wide.

The trend toward reappraisal of China comes after hard years for democracy enthusiasts: Iraq and Afghanistan; Hamas’s election; the disappointment of many of Europe’s colored revolutions; persistent repression in Iran and Myanmar; an economic crisis that free societies were unable to prevent and unravel; growing sclerosis in the U.S. political system; and China’s extraordinary success, despite what Westerners have often regarded as a political system incompatible with success.

The question the reappraisers seem to be asking is whether their belief in bottom-up, spontaneously ordering, self-regulating societies blinded them to other truths (as their enthusiasm for China risks blinding them to the cruelty and violence of autocracy). They are asking: Can openness go too far? Can public opinion be measured too frequently? Can free speech sow disorder? Is the crowd really smarter than the experts? Can transparency hamper governance?

Or, to put it in the terms of an influential 1997 essay, is the bazaar always better than the cathedral?

In that essay, Eric S. Raymond, a software programmer, heralded the rise of the Linux operating system and the bottom-up, open-source, we-the-people world that it reflected. He wrote that old-style software was “built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation.” Open-source pointed to a new way: “a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches,” as he put it, “out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.”

Mr. Raymond’s immediate subject was software, but his essay spoke for the age. It was a moment when democracy seemed on the march worldwide, when “the end of history” had been declared by Francis Fukuyama, when new tools called Web logs, or blogs, promised to empower the little guy. In that moment, as went the open-source technology, so went the world.

But today, in this moment of autocrat envy, as goes the world, so goes the technology.

Unfettered openness has been a near theology not merely for boosters of democracy; it is also the defining ethos of the Internet. But here, too, are signs of pushback and a new questioning among technophiles about the limits of openness. Fist tap Nana.

urban aerial reconnaissance

Fist tap Arnach.

Video - UAV CyberQuad VTOL demonstration.

smaller missiles...,

WaPo | The CIA is using new, smaller missiles and advanced surveillance techniques to minimize civilian casualties in its targeted killings of suspected insurgents in Pakistan's tribal areas, according to current and former officials in the United States and Pakistan.

The technological improvements have resulted in more accurate operations that have provoked relatively little public outrage, the officials said. Pakistan's government has tolerated the airstrikes, which have killed hundreds of suspected insurgents since early 2009, but that support has always been fragile and could quickly evaporate, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.

The CIA declines to publicly discuss its clandestine operations in Pakistan, and a spokesman would not comment on the kinds of weapons the agency is using. But two counterterrorism officials said in interviews that evolving technology and tactics have kept the number of civilian deaths extremely low. The officials, along with other U.S. and Pakistani officials interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the drone campaign is both classified and controversial.

Last month, a small CIA missile, probably no bigger than a violin case and weighing about 35 pounds, tore through the second floor of a house in Miram Shah, a town in the tribal province of South Waziristan. The projectile exploded, killing a top al-Qaeda official and about nine other suspected terrorists.

The mud-brick house collapsed and the roof of a neighboring house was damaged, but no one else in the town of 5,000 was hurt, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed after-action reports.

Urban strikes
The agency, using 100-pound Hellfire missiles fired from remotely controlled Predator aircraft, once targeted militants largely in rural settings, but lighter weapons and miniature spy drones have made killings in urban areas more feasible, officials said.

no secrets in the sky

NYTimes | THE highly classified C.I.A. program to kill militants in the tribal regions of Pakistan with missiles fired from drones is the world’s worst-kept secret.

The United States has long tried to maintain plausible deniability that it is behind drone warfare in Pakistan, a country that pollsters consistently find is one of the most anti-American in the world. For reasons of its own, the Pakistani government has also sought to hide the fact that it secretly agreed to allow the United States to fly some drones out of a base in Pakistan and attack militants on its territory.

But there are good reasons for the United States, which conducted 53 such strikes in 2009 alone, and Pakistan to finally acknowledge the existence of the drone program.

First, there is the matter of Pakistani civilian casualties caused by the drones. In a poll last summer, only 9 percent of Pakistanis approved of the drone strikes. A key reason for this unpopularity is the widespread perception that the strikes overwhelmingly kill civilians.

A survey we have made of reliable press accounts indicates that since January 2009, the reported strikes have killed at least 520 people, of whom around 410 were described as militants, suggesting that the civilian death rate is about 20 percent.

It’s possible, however, that the number is even lower. An American counterterrorism official told The Times in December that the civilian fatality rate is only 5 percent, saying that “just over 20” civilians and more than 400 militants were killed in 2009. Should the American government’s claims about the small number of civilian deaths be verified, some of the Pakistani hostility toward the United States might dissipate. This would be much easier if the now-classified videotapes of drone strikes were made available to independent researchers.

Acknowledging the drone program would also help advance our efforts — and improve our profile — in the region by providing an excellent example of the deepening United States-Pakistan strategic partnership. Since January 2009, up to 85 reported drone strikes have killed militants who are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Pakistanis. A good deal of the intelligence that enables these strikes comes from the Pakistanis themselves.

Last, Pakistanis once considered any military offensive against the Taliban as fighting America’s war. But because of the cumulative weight of the Taliban’s atrocities against politicians, soldiers, police and civilians, Pakistanis now believe that battling the militants is in the country’s own interest. As a result, over the past year, the public’s support for the Pakistani Army’s efforts in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan has surged. If Pakistan came clean about its involvement with the drones, public backing for the program might similarly increase.

Of course, by acknowledging the drone strikes, the Obama administration would also have to admit that civilians are sometimes killed in these attacks. When Afghan civilians are killed by American forces, their families are often compensated by the United States. Surely, the families of Pakistani civilians killed in American drone strikes deserve the same.

stephan hawking - don't talk to aliens

Video - Discovery Alien Planet

Telegraph | THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history.

One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another shows glowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter.

Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

beyond the farthest reach of the sun's power

Video - Abundant Life in and around Hydrothermal Vents

In the eyes of many Christians, the darwinian revolution left nature purposeless, at least on paper. Darwinians, faced with a personal Creator as the only conceivable source of purpose, hastened to agree. But physical purpose is more subtle than that. From the thermodynamic vantag point, purpose has a physical aspect. It is no more uniform than memory, which manifests itself in bodies, genetically, and brains, neuronally - and even in machines - magnetically. And like memory, purpose - with its orientation toward the future - has a thermodynamic genesis.

Life is thermodynamic. A continuous whirlpool downstream of Niagara Falls has a name; "Whirlpool". We give names to things like species and hurricanes, that keep their identities - at least for a time. The formation of stable identities aids the thermodynamic process of gradient reduction. The highly heritable members of a species, like other cyclical and complex thermodynamic agents, provide stable vehicles of degradation. The cycling selves of life survive in order to reduce the energetic and material gradients that keep them going, they covet and tap into these gradients to survive long enough to reproduce. As natural selection filters out the many to preserve the remaining few, those few ever more efficiently use environmental energy to "purposefully" reduce their gradients. The key point is that living and nonliving "selves" come into being to reduce gradients naturally. The reproducing self of biology is a higher order cycle whose antecedents can be inferred from the cycles of the nonliving world. Nucleotide replication and cell reproduction do not emerge from nowhere. They are born in an energetic universe from thermodynamic tendencies inherent in nature.

the driving force II

Video - Excerpt from Chronos.

Acceleration of change sweeps us away. One week recently, I passed a yellowed, run-down, student-infested house on the main street of town while bicycling to the campus as usual. A week afterward the view past the house across to the neighboring schoolyard was splendid. For the first time in living memory, it was unobstructed.

Mountains framed the distant backdrop. The house was gone. No sign that any house hade ever been there remained, except newly raked soil in the footprint of a simple ground plan. Such dramtic changes in our immediate surroundings are commonplace. Burger King, Toys "R" Us, Wendys, McDonalds, and bank branches sprout in our cities and towns. Mom-andpop shops, wheat fields, and old oaks disappear like coins dropped into the sand. Native Americans thrive if they form gambling liasons, graduate students receive stipends when they change from studying the habits of beavers inside their lodges to the search for genes in the human genome.

1. Why do the forces of change always seem to prevail over the quiet and uneventful habits of the past?
2. Why does the evolution of life seem to accelerate as we move into the present and out toward the future?
3. Is evolution just random change?
   
4. Does the evolutionary process itself, the origin and diversification of life from common ancestors, seem to be directed?

When we ask evolutionary biologists and other scientists if the evolution of life is going in some direction, they adamantly deny it. But our everyday experience suggests that our social environment grows more complex. Our natural green and watery environment seems to shrink to be locally augmented with metallic solids. Neon lights, traffic signals, and other aspects of urbanization replace woodlands and open streams at an ever-increasing rate of change. People crowd out foxes and antelope, pigeons and sparrows replace orioles and woodpeckers. Digital tools supplant simple mechanical devices at alarming speeds. Evolution of life does seem to have a direction. Life's peculiarities and human technologies do seem to expand at an accelerating rate of change as we come from the past toward the present. Darwin's Dilemma Acquiring Genomes Lynn Margulis.

nature abhors a gradient

"Streaming Gradient" by Jen Stark from Jen Stark on Vimeo.

A gradient is defined as a difference across a distance.

Evolution is a science of connections, and connection does not stop with ties of humans to apes, apes to other animals, or animals to microbes. Life and nonlife are also connected in very fundamental ways. The organization of life is material and energetic.

Life exists in the very real thermodynamic difference between 5800 Kelvin of incoming solar radiation and 2.7 Kelvin of outer space. It is this gradient upon which life's complexity feeds. This thermodynamic idea connects life to nonlife.

Life is one of a class of systems that organize in response to a gradient.

it's not the size that matters, it's how you use it

Life After Growth - Economics for Everyone from enmedia productions on Vimeo.

the imminent crash of the oil supply

ICH | This graph was prepared for a DOE meeting in spring, 2009. Take a good look at what it says, assuming it to be correct:

1. Conventional oil will be almost all gone in 20 years, and there is nothing known to replace it.

2.. Production of petroleum from existing conventional sources has been dropping at a rate slightly over 4% per year for at least a year and will continue to do so for the indefinite future.

3. The graph implies that we are past the peak of production and that there are750 billion barrels of conventional oil left (the areas under the "conventional" portion of the graph, extrapolated to the right as an exponent ional). Assuming that the remaining reserves were 900 billion or more at the halfway point, then we are at least 150 billion barrels, or 5 years, past the midpoint.

4. Total petroleum production from all presently known sources, conventional and unconventional, will remain "flat" at approximately 83 mbpd for the next two years and then will proceed to drop for the foreseeable future, at first slowly but by 4% per year after 2015.

5. Demand will begin to outstrip supply in 2012, and will already be 10 million barrels per day above supply in only five years. The United States Joint Forces Command concurs with these specific findings. http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf , at 31. 10 million bpd is equivalent to half the United States' entire consumption. To make up the difference, the world would have to find another Saudi Arabia and get it into full production in five years, an impossibility. See The Oil Drum, http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5154

5. The production from presently existing conventional sources will plummet from its present 81 mbpd to 30 mbpd by 2030, a 63% drop in a 20-year period.

6. Meeting demand requires discovering, developing, and bringing to full production 60mbpd (105-45) of "unidentified projects" in the 18-year period of 2012-2030 and approximately 25 mbpd of such projects by 2020, on the basis of a very conservative estimate of only 1% annual growth in demand. The independent Oxford Institute of Energy Studies has estimated a possible development of 6.5mbpd of such projects, including the Canadian tar sands, implying a deficit of 18-19 mbpd as compared to demand, and an approximate 14 mbpd drop in total liquid fuels production relative to 2012, a 16% drop in 8 years.

7. The curve is virtually identical to one produced by geologists Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere and published in "The End of Cheap Oil," in Scientific American, March, 1998, twelve years ago. They projected that production of petroleum from conventional sources would drop from 74 mbpd in 2003 (as compared to 84 mbpd in 2008 in the DOE graph) and drop to 39 mbpd by 2030 (as compared to 39 mbpd by 2030 in the DOE graph!).http://www.jala.com/energy1.php . Campbell and Laherrere predicted a 2003 "peak," and the above graph implies a 'peak" (not necessarily the actual peak, but the midpointr of production of 2005 or before.

So here we are, if the graph is right, on the edge of a precipice, with no prior warning from either the industry, which knows what it possesses, or the collective governments, which ostensibly protect the public interest. As Colin Campbell, a research geologist who has worked for many large oil companies and studied oil depletion extensively says, "The warning signals have been flying for a long time. They have been plain to see, but the world turned a blind eye, and failed to read the message. The world was completely transformed by oil for the duration of the twentieth century, but if the graph is right, within 20 years it will be virtually gone but our dependence upon it will not. Instead, we have;

• zero time to plan how to replace cars in our lives
• zero time to plan how to manufacture and install millions of furnaces to replace home oil furnaces, and zero time toproduce the infrastructure necessary to carry out that task
• zero time to retool suburbia so it can function without gasoline
• zero time to plan for replacement of the largest military establishment in history, almost completely dependent upon oil
• zero time to plan to support nine billion peolple without the "green revolution," a creation of the age of oil
• zero time to plan to replace oil as an essential fuel in electricity production
• zero time to plan for preserving millions of miles of roads without asphalt.
• zero time to plan for the replacement of oil in its essential role in EVERY industry.
• zero time to plan for replacement of oil in its exclusive role of transporting people, agricultural produce, manufactured goods. In a world without oil that appears only twenty years away, there will be no oil-burning ships transporting US grain to other countries, there will be no oil-burning airlines linking the world's major cities, there will be no oil-burning ships transporting Chinese manufactured goods to the billions now dependent on them.
• zero time to plan for the survival of the billions of new people expected by 2050 in the aftermath of ":peak everything."
• zero capital, because of failing banks ansd public and private debt, to address these issues.

strong biology

Be careful never to use either "cooperation" or "competition" to describe biological or other evolutionary phenomena.

These words may be appropriate for the basketball court, computer industry, or financial institutions, but they paint with too broad a brush. Far too often they miss the complex interactions of live beings, organisms who cohabit. Competition implies an agreement, a set of actions that follow rules, but in the game of real life, the "rules" - based on chemistry and environmental conditions - change with the players. To compete, people - for example on opposite teams - must basically cooperate in some way. "Competition" is a term with limited scientific meaning, usually without reference to units by which it can be measured. How does the green worm or the lichen fungus assess its competitive status? By the addition of points in its score or by dollars, or Swiss francs? No. Then what are the units of competition? If you ask what are the units of biomass we can tell you in grams or ounces. If you ask how light or biotic potential is to be measured, we answer in lux or foot-candles or numbers of offspring per generation. But if you ask "what are the units of competition" we reply that yours is not a scientific notion.

Vogue terms like "competition" "cooperation" "mutualism" "mutual benefit" "energy cost" and "competitive advantage" have been borrowed from human enterprises and forced on science from politics, business, and social thought. The entire panoply of neodarwinist terminology reflects a profound philosophical error, a 20th century example of a phenomenon aptly named by Alfred North Whitehead; the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The terminology of most modern evolutionists is not only fallacious but dangerously so., because it leads people to think they know about the evolution of life when in fact they are baffled, ignorant, and confused. The "selfish-gene" provides a fine example. What is Richard Dawkins's selfish gene? A gene is never a self to begin with. A gene alone is only a piece of DNA long enough to have a function. The gene by itself can be flushed down the sink; even if preserved in a freezer or a salt solution the isolated gene has no activity whatsoever. There is no life in a gene.

There is no self. A gene never fits the minimal criterion of self, of a living system. The time has come in serious biology to abandon words like competition, cooperation, and selfish genes and replace them with meaningful terms such as metabolic modes (chemoautotrophy, photosynthesis), ecological relations (epibiont, pollinator), and measurable quantities (light, heat, mechanical force). So many current evolutionary metaphors are superficial dichotomizations that come from false clarities of language. They do not beget but preclude scientific understanding.

Would not society be better served, then, if we adopted symbiotic metaphors instead of competitive ones? No. Society will be better served by more accurate scientific understanding, and this is not to be gained by substituting one pole of oversimplified metaphors for another. But of course organisms do vie in various ways with each other for space and food. Such vying however, (or competition) among members of the same species does not in itself lead to new species; a source of genetic novelty-usually symbiogenesis-is needed. excerpted from Darwinism not NeoDarwinism Acquiring Genomes Lynn Margulis.

exemplar...,

Video - Lynn Margulis discusses her love of science.

colleague disputes case against anthrax suspect

NYTimes | A former Army microbiologist who worked for years with Bruce E. Ivins, whom the F.B.I. has blamed for the anthrax letter attacks that killed five people in 2001, told a National Academy of Sciences panel on Thursday that he believed it was impossible that the deadly spores had been produced undetected in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory, as the F.B.I. asserts.

Asked by reporters after his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had carried out the attacks, the microbiologist, Henry S. Heine, replied, “Absolutely not.” At the Army’s biodefense laboratory in Maryland, where Dr. Ivins and Dr. Heine worked, he said, “among the senior scientists, no one believes it.”

Dr. Heine told the 16-member panel, which is reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the investigation, that producing the quantity of spores in the letters would have taken at least a year of intensive work using the equipment at the army lab. Such an effort would not have escaped colleagues’ notice, he added later, and lab technicians who worked closely with Dr. Ivins have told him they saw no such work.

He told the panel that biological containment measures where Dr. Ivins worked were inadequate to prevent the spores from floating out of the laboratory into animal cages and offices. “You’d have had dead animals or dead people,” he said.

The public remarks from Dr. Heine, two months after the Justice Department officially closed the case, represent a major public challenge to its conclusion in one of the largest, most politically delicate and scientifically complex cases in F.B.I. history.

Asked why he was speaking out now, Dr. Heine noted that Army officials had prohibited comment on the case, silencing him until he left the government laboratory in late February. He now works for Ordway Research Institute in Albany.

Dr. Heine said he did not dispute that there was a genetic link between the spores in the letters and the anthrax in Dr. Ivins’s flask — a link that led the F.B.I. to conclude that Dr. Ivins had grown the spores from a sample taken from the flask. But samples from the flask were widely shared, Dr. Heine said. Accusing Dr. Ivins of the attacks, he said, was like tracing a murder to the clerk at the sporting goods shop who sold the bullets.

“Whoever did this is still running around out there,” Dr. Heine said. “I truly believe that.”

SDO

Video - First images from the new solar observatory.

BBC News | NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has provided an astonishing new vista on our turbulent star.

The first public release of images from the satellite record huge explosions and great looping prominences of gas.

The observatory's super-fine resolution is expected to help scientists get a better understanding of what drives solar activity.

Launched in February on an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, SDO is expected to operate for at least five years.

Researchers hope in this time to go a long way towards their eventual goal of being able to forecast the effects of the Sun's behaviour on Earth.
“ It's like looking at the details of our star through a microscope ”
Richard Harrison, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

Solar activity has a profound influence on our planet. Huge eruptions of charged particles and the emission of intense radiation can disrupt satellite, communication and power systems, and pose a serious health risk to astronauts.

Scientists working on SDO say they are thrilled with the quality of the data received so far.

"When we see these fantastic images, even hard-core solar physicists like myself are struck with awe, literally," said Lika Guhathakurta, the SDO programme scientist at Nasa Headquarters.

SDO is equipped with three instruments to investigate the physics at work inside, on the surface and in the atmosphere of the Sun.

The probe views the entire solar disc with a resolution 10 times better than the average high-definition television camera. This allows it to pick out features on the surface and in the atmosphere that are as small as 350km across.

The pictures are also acquired at a rapid rate, every few seconds.

In addition, the different wavelengths in which the instruments operate mean scientists can study the Sun's atmosphere layer by layer.

A key quest will be to probe the inner workings of the solar dynamo, the deep network of plasma currents that generates the Sun's tangled and sometimes explosive magnetic field.

It is the dynamo that ultimately lies behind all forms of solar activity, from the solar flares that explode in the Sun's atmosphere to the relatively cool patches, or sunspots, that pock the solar disc and wander across its surface for days or even weeks.

"The SDO images are stunning and the level of detail they reveal will undoubtedly lead to a new branch of research into how the fine-scale solar magnetic fields form and evolve, leading to a much, much better understanding of how solar activity develops," said co-investigator Richard Harrison from the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).

"It's like looking at the details of our star through a microscope," he told BBC News.

what links the banking crisis and the volcano?

Video - ashy Icelandic volcano.

Guardian | Man proposes; nature disposes. We are seldom more vulnerable than when we feel insulated. The miracle of modern flight protected us from gravity, atmosphere, culture, geography. It made everywhere feel local, interchangeable. Nature interjects, and we encounter – tragically for many – the reality of thousands of miles of separation. We discover that we have not escaped from the physical world after all.

Complex, connected societies are more resilient than simple ones – up to a point. During the east African droughts of the early 1990s, I saw at first hand what anthropologists and economists have long predicted: those people who had the fewest trading partners were hit hardest. Connectivity provided people with insurance: the wider the geographical area they could draw food from, the less they were hurt by a regional famine.

But beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a hazard. The longer and more complex the lines of communication and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the greater the potential for disruption. This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impoverished mortgage defaulters in the United States – the butterfly's wing over the Atlantic – almost broke the global economy. If the Eyjafjallajökull volcano – by no means a monster – keeps retching it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect.

We have several such vulnerabilities. The most catastrophic would be an unexpected coronal mass ejection – a solar storm – which causes a surge of direct current down our electricity grids, taking out the transformers. It could happen in seconds; the damage and collapse would take years to reverse, if we ever recovered. We would soon become aware of our dependence on electricity: an asset which, like oxygen, we notice only when it fails.

As New Scientist magazine points out, an event like this would knacker most of the systems which keep us alive. It would take out water treatment plants and pumping stations. It would paralyse oil pumping and delivery, which would quickly bring down food supplies. It would clobber hospitals, financial systems and just about every kind of business – even the manufacturers of candles and paraffin lamps. Emergency generators would function only until the oil ran out. Burnt-out transformers cannot be repaired; they must be replaced. Over the past year I've sent freedom of information requests to electricity transmitters and distributors, asking them what contingency plans they have made, and whether they have stockpiled transformers to replace any destroyed by a solar storm. I haven't got to the end of it yet, but the early results suggest that they haven't.

There's a similar lack of planning for the possibility that global supplies of oil might soon peak then go into decline. My FoI requests to the British government reveal that it has made no contingency plans, on the grounds that it doesn't believe it will happen. The issue remains the preserve of beardy lentil-eaters such as, er, the US joint forces command. Its latest report on possible future conflicts maintains that "a severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity".

It suggests that "by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10m barrels per day". A shortage of refining and production capacity is not the same thing as peak oil, but the report warns that a chronic constraint looms behind the immediate crisis: even under "the most optimistic scenario … petroleum production will be hard pressed to meet the expected future demand". A global oil shortage would soon expose the weaknesses of our complex economic systems. As the cultural anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown, their dependence on high energy use is one of the factors that makes complex societies vulnerable to collapse.

man-up moment in the senate...,

Video - Sen. Blanche Lincoln driving derivatives transparency.

NYTimes | This was Wednesday at the Senate Agriculture Committee, which was considering the regulation of derivatives. These are extremely complicated financial instruments, and they are under the control of the agriculture committee because, really, when you get right down to it, everything is a crop.

“Members of this committee check their partisan politics at the door,” boasted the chairwoman, Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat of Arkansas. Then, in between compliments, the members approved Lincoln’s bill on derivatives in a series of party-line votes.

Except for Charles Grassley, a Republican of Iowa, who sided with Lincoln. Truly, this was a day for the record books. Somebody finally got a Republican to vote for something.

And perhaps a sign of things to come. As President Obama prepared to make his big financial reform speech near Wall Street on Thursday, the G.O.P. seemed increasingly eager to find a way to work this one out.

“We probably generally agree on 90 percent,” said the agriculture committee’s ranking minority member, Saxby (“I golf, therefore I am”) Chambliss. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, took credit for forcing bipartisan negotiations with his innovative threat-of-a-filibuster tactic. Chris Dodd, the chairman of the banking committee who has been negotiating with the Republicans for months, said it was like a rooster taking credit for the sunrise.

The Republican leadership originally seemed to believe that financial reform could be a replay of health care reform, with a political payoff for total obstruction. They’re discovering that the only real similarity is that both are almost impossible to explain. People love their doctors, but they tend to hate their bankers. Nobody is going to scare voters by predicting that if the Democratic bill passes, they may not be able to keep seeing the same hedge fund manager.

It’s a sign of the shift that Blanche Lincoln has gone to the front of the populist pack. She was one of the weakest reeds on the Democratic side of the health care reform debate. Before that, she was obsessed with trying to cut the estate tax. Before that — well, let’s be frank. We have no idea what she was up to.

Given her record, people had expected a weak, boring package from her committee. But Lincoln came up with rules that were tougher than anyone had expected, requiring derivatives to be traded on public exchanges so investors could compare prices. The banks hate this idea, possibly because it will drive down their profits.

For sure because it will drive down their profits.

chess, not checkers (continued)......,

Video - Bill Black on Goldman Sachs derivatives fraud.

WaPo | Even before the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman last week, accusing it of creating a complex financial product designed to fail and selling it to unknowing investors, the firm had become a frequent target of investigators. In courts and in Congress, Goldman has been accused of a range of misdeeds, including manipulating oil prices and using taxpayer money for handsome bonuses.

The company has maintained that it did nothing improper in any of those cases. In the Massachusetts settlement, it admitted to no wrongdoing, and a spokesman said Goldman was never a leading issuer or underwriter of residential mortgage-backed securities. Yet, to many Goldman critics, the SEC lawsuit underscores their worst image of the firm as a cold bank that places its profit before anything else -- client interests, customer needs and its obligation to society as a leading American corporation.

Although Goldman quickly agreed to settle the Massachusetts case, it is gearing up for a court battle with the SEC. The case, analysts said, challenges the heart of Goldman's motto -- "Our clients' interests always come first" -- and could set off a new wave of lawsuits against the firm.

"Anyone who's ever done any investment through Goldman who's lost a significant amount of money all the sudden starts to say, 'Gee, I wonder if there was something else out there that they were doing, which they didn't tell me about, which would have made me not want to invest?' " said Richard L. Scheff, chairman of the law firm Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads. "If I'm a person who's lost money, why would I think it's limited to this? You're talking about someone's duty to their clients. That's the principle at issue here."

we live in a kleptocracy

Video - Michael Hudson explained the kleptocracy some time ago.

Alternet | Kleptocracy -- now, there’s a word I was taught to associate with corrupt and exploitative governments that steal ruthlessly and relentlessly from the people. It’s a word, in fact, that’s usually applied to flawed or failed governments in Africa, Latin America, or the nether regions of Asia. Such governments are typically led by autocratic strong men who shower themselves and their cronies with all the fruits of extracted wealth, whether stolen from the people or squeezed from their country’s natural resources. It’s not a word you’re likely to see associated with a mature republic like the United States led by disinterested public servants and regulated by more-or-less transparent principles and processes.

In fact, when Americans today wish to critique or condemn their government, the typical epithets used are “socialism” or “fascism.” When my conservative friends are upset, they send me emails with links to material about “ObamaCare” and the like. These generally warn of a future socialist takeover of the private realm by an intrusive, power-hungry government. When my progressive friends are upset, they send me emails with links pointing to an incipient fascist takeover of our public and private realms, led by that same intrusive, power-hungry government (and, I admit it, I’m hardly innocent when it comes to such “what if” scenarios).

What if, however, instead of looking at where our government might be headed, we took a closer look at where we are -- at the power-brokers who run or influence our government, at those who are profiting and prospering from it? These are, after all, the “winners” in our American world in terms of the power they wield and the wealth they acquire. And shouldn’t we be looking as well at those Americans who are losing -- their jobs, their money, their homes, their healthcare, their access to a better way of life -- and asking why?

If we were to take an honest look at America’s blasted landscape of “losers” and the far shinier, spiffier world of “winners,” we’d have to admit that it wasn’t signs of onrushing socialism or fascism that stood out, but of staggeringly self-aggrandizing greed and theft right in the here and now. We’d notice our public coffers being emptied to benefit major corporations and financial institutions working in close alliance with, and passing on remarkable sums of money to, the representatives of “the people.” We’d see, in a word, kleptocracy on a scale to dazzle. We would suddenly see an almost magical disappearing act being performed, largely without comment, right before our eyes.

u.s. military warns of massive shortages by 2015

Guardian | The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.

The energy crisis outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command, comes as the price of petrol in Britain reaches record levels and the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel.

"By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day," says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.

It adds: "While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India."

The US military says its views cannot be taken as US government policy but admits they are meant to provide the Joint Forces with "an intellectual foundation upon which we will construct the concept to guide out future force developments."

The warning is the latest in a series from around the world that has turned peak oil – the moment when demand exceeds supply – from a distant threat to a more immediate risk.

The Wicks Review on UK energy policy published last summer effectively dismissed fears but Lord Hunt, the British energy minister, met concerned industrialists two weeks ago in a sign that it is rapidly changing its mind on the seriousness of the issue.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency remains confident that there is no short-term risk of oil shortages but privately some senior officials have admitted there is considerable disagreement internally about this upbeat stance.

Future fuel supplies are of acute importance to the US army because it is believed to be the biggest single user of petrol in the world. BP chief executive, Tony Hayward, said recently that there was little chance of crude from the carbon-heavy Canadian tar sands being banned in America because the US military like to have local supplies rather than rely on the politically unstable Middle East.

But there are signs that the US Department of Energy might also be changing its stance on peak oil. In a recent interview with French newspaper, Le Monde, Glen Sweetnam, main oil adviser to the Obama administration, admitted that "a chance exists that we may experience a decline" of world liquid fuels production between 2011 and 2015 if the investment was not forthcoming.

it's impossible to "get by" in the u.s....,

Video - Talib Kweli Get By.

ZeroHedge | While the market cheers on the fantastic job “growth” of March 2010, the more astute of us are concerned with a growing tide of personal bankruptcies. March 2010 saw 158,000 bankruptcy filings. David Rosenberg of Gluskin-Sheff notes that this is an astounding 6,900 filings per day.

This latest filing is up 19% from March 2009’s number which occurred at the absolute nadir of the economic decline, when everyone thought the world was ending. It’s also up 35% from last month’s (February 2010) number.

Given the significance of this, I thought today we’d spend some time delving into numbers for the “median” American’s experience in the US today. Regrettably, much of the data is not up to date so we’ve got to go by 2008 numbers.

In 2008, the median US household income was $50,300. Assuming that the person filing is the “head of household” and has two children (dependents), this means a 1040 tax bill of $4,100, which leaves about $45K in income after taxes (we’re not bothering with state taxes). I realize this is a simplistic calculation, but it’s a decent proxy for income in the US in 2008.

Now, $45K in income spread out over 26 pay periods (every two weeks), means a bi-weekly paycheck of $1,730 and monthly income of $3,460. This is the money “Joe America” and his family to live off of in 2008.

Now, in 2008, the median home value was roughly $225K. Assuming our “median” household put down 20% on their home (unlikely, but it used to be considered the norm), this means a $180K mortgage. Using a 5.5% fixed rate 30-year mortgage, this means Joe America’s 2008 monthly mortgage payments were roughly $1,022.

So, right off the bat, Joe’s monthly income is cut to $2,438.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, the average 2008 monthly food bill for a family of four ranged from $512-$986 depending on how “liberal” you are with your purchases. For simplicity’s sake we’ll take the mid-point of this range ($750) as a monthly food bill.

This brings Joe’s monthly income to $1,688.

Now, Joe needs light, energy, heat, and air conditioning to run his home. According to the Energy Information Administration, the average US household used about 920 kilowatt-hours per month in 2008. At a national average price of 11 cents per kilowatt-hour this comes to a monthly electrical bill of $101.20. Fist tap Dale.