Global Stock and Credit Crash Alert

The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months as inflation paralyses the major central banks.

"A very nasty period is soon to be upon us - be prepared," said Bob Janjuah, the bank's credit strategist.

A report by the bank's research team warns that the S&P 500 index of Wall Street equities is likely to fall by more than 300 points to around 1050 by September as "all the chickens come home to roost" from the excesses of the global boom, with contagion spreading across Europe and emerging markets.

RBS alert: Quotes from the report

Fund managers react to RBS alert

Support for the euro is in doubt

Such a slide on world bourses would amount to one of the worst bear markets over the last century.

An Inconvenient Truth about any inconvenient truth

I have a backlog of work to attend to, so I plan on being scarce today. However, I wanted to bring this link up from the comments and submit it for your consideration because it nicely illuminates the scholastic and propositional nature of the national political spectacle unfolding all around us.

Technological illustrations of the inconvenience of any inconvenient truth relating to global governance

The simplicity, comprehensibility and communicability of an inconvenient truth is well-illustrated by:

* automobiles: which few are capable of making or repairing, although many (but not all) claim an ability to drive, and an aspiration to do so -- despite their dependence on non-renewable resources and their impact on the environment

* electronic consumer products: despite extremely widespread use of radio, music players, TVs, and computers, who is capable of understanding their operating principles to a degree enabling their design, development or repair, in contrast with the number whose familiarity with their use in practice obscures their inability in those respects? The classic example of "inability to program a VCR" is now matched by "inability to use a computer", let alone to program one.

* space rockets: whilst "reaching for the stars" has been promoted as a comprehensible ideal justifying allocation of resources as a priority to that end, who is capable of comprehending the complex control systems that renders them viable, and of developing the technology in practice? How was this allocation of resources rendered credible to those without that understanding?

In the light of such various degrees of engagement with technology:

* who is likely to to be able to envisage the requisite new "technologies" of governance appropriate to the challenges of the times?
* who might understand how to design and develop them in practice?
* who might comprehend their significance sufficiently to allocate resources to that end?
* who might have the skills to use them?

Again, the convenience of the explanation of any technology depends on it being significantly shorter than that required for its operationalization in practice -- implying that any remedial technique is necessarily both a challenge to implement and to justify funding for its development.

What inconvenient truth does this imply about the democratic global governance desirable for the future?

I believe this line of inquire also has direct applicability to the religiously themed exchange sparked by the questions I posed on Monday

The sheer hypocrisy of this debate on oil

Oil makes hypocrites of us all. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general who last year took office declaring that his main goal was to fight "man-made climate change", has spent most of his weekend in Jeddah attempting to persuade King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to ramp up the kingdom's oil production.

This is just the global edition of Gordon Brown's earlier plea to the Saudis to "do something" about the high price of oil; a remarkable display of diplomatic chutzpah from a man who, as Chancellor, spent a decade telling us that increasing the price of petrol on British forecourts through fiscal means was very much in the best interests of the whole planet.

Meanwhile the US Senate has threatened to launch a prosecution of OPEC for its alleged fixing of the world oil market, to the detriment of the American consumer. The American legislature's hypocrisy in this matter takes a different form to ours: the politicians who are now howling with rage about the shortage of oil supply are in essence the same people who have long blocked the oil industry from developing vast deposits both in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off their own coastline – about 80 per cent of the US continental shelf is out of bounds, on environmental grounds.

I imagine that when King Abdullah told Mr Ban that "national policies in the West" were partly to blame for the current very high price of crude oil, the Americans' refusal to drill for oil in their own most geologically promising territories might have been one of the factors he had in mind.

Ban Ki-moon was not, needless to say, acting solely as an emissary for the United States: he was representing the teeming billions in nations as diverse as China, India and Malaysia. Yet if you look at this seizure in the oil market from the point of view of demand, rather than supply, then these same countries have also contributed directly to the problem they have asked Mr Ban to sort out for them.

All have for years had a policy of subsidising the price paid by their consumers and industry for oil products – and on a vast scale. According to the head of the International Energy Agency, Nobuo Tanaka, such subsidies are currently running at a rate of about one hundred billion dollars a year. In other words, these countries' biggest energy consumers are being shielded from the effects of high oil prices, and therefore are not adjusting their consumption downwards – quite the reverse, in fact.

This morning's commentary in the Independent.

The oil era reaches its desperate endgame

Saudi Arabia appears ready to cave in to demands from Western governments for the kingdom to make special efforts to increase its production of oil. Analysts forecast that the world's largest producer will shortly raise its output by half a million barrels a day. The United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, confirmed this impression at the weekend after emerging from talks with the Saudi monarch, King Abdullah.

What we are seeing in this desperate horse-trading is the endgame of the oil age. Even if we have not yet reached the inevitable moment of "peak oil", when production begins its inexorable decline, it is abundantly clear that the age of cheap fuel is over. The economic leaps forward by China and India represent a step-change in energy demand. The rate of discovery of new oilfields has failed to keep pace with the speed at which nations are joining the global economy. That means the price of oil will remain considerably above the level to which we have historically been accustomed.

That is the central fact that governments ought to be addressing. It is ridiculous for the Saudis to attempt to tell Western governments how they ought to tax fuel sales, just as it is ridiculous for Western governments to tell Saudi Arabia and other oil producers how much they ought to pump out of the ground. The debate ought to be about how best to break our economic dependence on oil.

From yesterday's Independent; The oil era reaches its desperate endgame

Overcoming the Status Drive?

The instinctive drive for status is remarkably efficient. It requires only that there be at least two people involved. Whatever the circumstances, small nuances will be enough to establish a status difference. This assures a constant motivation for action of some sort and with a small amount of discipline the action can be directed towards a productive result. Naturally, in a meritocratic context, those having superior abilities would tend to rise in rank. In hunter-gatherer times when meritocratic performance meant the difference between life and death, feast or famine, this drive served as an admirable adaptive attribute.

However, the social structures that have evolved in modern society suffer from a non-adaptive tendency. The social order seeks to perpetuate itself in part by preventing change and adaptation. This is built into present day America by the automobile centered design of our infrastructure. As fuel becomes more scarce, adaptation to walking, cycling, and public transport is hindered by the design itself, as was intended. In the system of American inclusive fitness, the driver will always seem superior to the walker, cyclist, or transit rider.

Automobiles, oil, roadways, and suburbia represent a great status structure. As fuel runs low, the culture itself will be a formidable barrier to change. Will it be possible to create a structure of conservation, recycling, and environmental virtue to supplant the automotive culture as the automotive culture supplanted the agrarian past?

Can any system that uses less energy have greater status than one that uses more?

Could religious paradigms be synthesized to meet this challenge?

Given the a priori nature of the inclusive fitness mandate, what beliefs, culture, law or other mores could serve to counteract the deep genetic drive?

Beliefs, culture, laws and other mores are secondary rationalizations.

If offered the choice between retaining status through aggressive violence or peaceful downsizing with loss of status, would enough Americans choose to downsize so as to make cooperative scaling possible?

How many Americans would choose aggressive violence in order to avoid the loss of status?

How many Americans are capable of surmounting their fundamental drives and acting in a way that is contrary to the normative logic, language, and values of American culture?

The Peacock/Peahen Spectacle

"I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceases only in death." -- Thomas Hobbes

Six billion or so of you humans are imprisoned in a status-driven social paradigm. You are bound and determined to increase your social status -- i.e., increase the size of your peacock tail. The only way for you to increase the size of your peacock tail is to deplete natural resources. I call this process the Peacock/Peahen Spectacle.

All of the organizations comprising your society -- be they branches of government, universities, corporations, politicians, churches, and philanthropies -- work to support the genetic drive for increased status. The leading members of those social organizations (i.e. highest status individuals) work to increase the status of the organizations and in the process, increase their own personal status. Throughout this process, opinions expressed by dissenting individuals are suppressed. Dissent within the overarching paradigm is not conducive to the achievement of high status.

In addition to being among the most powerful genetic drives, the genetic drive for status is utterly insatiable, in other words, if your neighbor appears to increase his status beyond yours, then you must work harder to increase your status and get ahead of him (buy more-expensive car, bigger house, better job, etc.). This tendency is commonly referred to as "keeping up with the Joneses".

All high status individuals within your social paradigm deliberately lie (many subconsciously though none the less obviously) to further their drive to increased status. Moreover, no high status individual is willing to lose social status by admitting lies, errors, or omissions in the decisions that they've taken pursuant to their status-seeking aims. So, not only do all of the organizations within your society work in concert to promote this paradigm, but, all the current high-status individuals leading these social organizations are genetically-biased against telling the truth because it threatens to cost them their hard-won social status.

When people are frustrated in their endless drive to increase status, they often resort to violence. The only alternative to public violence is the endless conversion of finite natural resources into ever-more-marvelous peacock tails - thus it is that the Peacock/Peahen Spectacle operates within a system of governance via dopamine hegemony.

With fewer natural resources available for conversion into ever-more-fabulous and more widely sought-after peacock tails - the insatiable and infinite genetic drive for increased status must inevitably lead to a new world war over finite natural resources.

Bugs that Eat Waste and Excrete Petrol

Big Don brings it this morning; Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'.

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

This is where it's at. Via these and related cutting edge agricultural methods, the humans either solve the equation and elude the Great Filter, or else...,

Thanet Earth

The biggest greenhouse in Britain unveiled; This week, workers are putting the finishing touches to Britain's largest hydroponic greenhouse an astonishing construction in white steel and glass. By the time the site is complete in 2010, another six massive greenhouses will have been constructed, providing a home to more than 1.3million tomato, pepper and cucumber plants - grown hydroponically, without soil. Kent is often called the Garden of England. When this village of glass is complete, it will be more like England's factory. The site will contain seven greenhouses, each the size of 10 football pitches. At a time when people are increasingly concerned about industrial-scale farming, this latest, monumental step in the steady, insidious creep of factory farming is a controversial one.

Emulate Japan to cope with oil shocks

Again from Asia Times; With the price of oil rocketing to the unprecedented level of US$130 a barrel and more, there is a talk of another oil shock. Unlike past instances, this one is unlikely to subside and may indeed keep intensifying. The only way out is for Western nations, the gluttonous users of petroleum, to cut their consumption and emulate Japan in its consistent drive for energy efficiency and alternate sources.[...] Since supply is unlikely to rise appreciably in the near future, the stress must be laid on curtailing demand. That can only happen in the Western nations. As it is, in the face of soaring prices at gasoline stations, US demand fell by 3% during the first three months of this year.

It's worth noting that a similar decrease occurred in America after the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973-74. That oil shock led to a drive for fuel efficiency in the United States, West Europe and Japan. It also gave a boost to developing renewable sources of energy. But whereas Japan has followed a consistent, long-range policy, and reduced its petroleum usage, America has not. [...] Little wonder that the oil usage in Japan has dropped by 15% over the past dozen years.

Americans rediscover the railroad

BOSTON (Reuters) - As oil prices spike, many Americans are rediscovering the railroad.

Amtrak, America's struggling passenger railroad, saw record numbers in May when ridership rose 12.3 percent from a year earlier, and ticket sales climbed 15.6 percent, according to company data.

Amtrak President Alex Kummant said the numbers point to a sixth straight year of record passengers. He estimated a more than 11 percent rise this year on its 21,000 miles of track, building on last year's 26 million passengers.

He attributes about half that growth to higher gas prices. "It depends on the service but certainly our ridership growth is linked to the fuel prices," he said in an interview. "We are up against capacity limits."

The Bush administration has sought to scrap direct federal funding for Amtrak, a for-profit federal corporation that has bled red ink since its 1971 creation. Its backers contend that passenger rail services in other countries also lose money.

Pentagon blocked Cheney's attack on Iran

From the Asia Times; Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) bases by insisting that the administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former George W Bush administration official.

J Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled in an interview that senior Defense Department (DoD) officials and the Joint Chiefs used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal.

McClatchy newspapers reported last August that Cheney had proposed several weeks earlier "launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran", citing two officials involved in Iran policy.

According to Carpenter, who is now at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy, a strongly pro-Israel think-tank, Pentagon officials argued that no decision should be made about the limited airstrike on Iran without a thorough discussion of the sequence of events that would follow an Iranian retaliation for such an attack. Carpenter said the DoD officials insisted that the Bush administration had to make "a policy decision about how far the administration would go - what would happen after the Iranians would go after our folks".

The question of escalation posed by DoD officials involved not only the potential of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Iraq to attack, Carpenter said, but possible responses by Hezbollah and by Iran itself across the Middle East.

Carpenter suggested that DoD officials were shifting the debate on a limited strike from the Iraq-based rationale, which they were not contesting, to the much bigger issue of the threat of escalation to full-scale war with Iran, knowing that it would be politically easier to thwart the proposal on that basis.

The former State Department official said DoD "knew that it would be difficult to get interagency consensus on that question".

Meet the Intraterrestrials

Olivia Judson is nearly always three days late and three dollars short. This article is no exception.

However, given the agenda-driven, cornucopian interrogatory from my long time literal-fundamentalist, conservative evangelical gadfly Ken;

Do you think plants and dinasaurs decomposed and were compressed and then came the hydrocarbons on this Saturn moon?

Hey back on earth, I was hoping for clarification on the evolution process. The plants and dinasaurs and all this life decomposed and then through heat and compression came hydrocarbons, I got that, is it then hydrocarbon eating animals began to evolve? Here is where this article had me wondering...

her modest little contribution is right on time.

Then there are the “intraterrestrials” — the organisms that live in rocks deep in the earth, the creatures of the “deep subsurface biosphere.” Bacteria have been found in rock samples taken several hundred meters below the sea floor, even when the sea floor itself is 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) below sea level.

We don’t know how many organisms are living in this (to us) alien environment. But based on what’s been found in rock samples so far, the numbers are likely to be gigantic. One recent study found between 1 million and 1 billion bacteria per gram of rock (a gram is 1/28 of an ounce). It may be that a large proportion — perhaps as many as a third — of all bacteria on Earth live in rocks below the floor of the sea. That would be a lot of bacteria.

Until recently, it was assumed that the chemical alteration and decomposition of rocks in the ocean crust was due purely to elemental forces — the circulation of seawater, the grinding of rocks against one another. But increasingly, intraterrestrial bacteria are suspected of making a contribution, too. Shards of volcanic glass from basaltic rocks hundreds of meters beneath the seabed show grooves and etchings that appear to have been made by bacteria.

kaaaay.....?

So Ken, though I've not really troubled myself to explain where I believe oil comes from, instead of making silly assumptions and dubious projections that disclose more about the inner workings of your formatory apparatus than about anything I might think or believe, you might instead simply ask the question in good faith. Hamfisted attempts at sophistry are bound to yield little more than sustained malevolent ridicule from yours truly. Given our lengthy discoursive history, you know me more than well enough to know that by now.

Condoleezza Rice's Neo-colonial Manifesto

In today's Agenceglobal; A striking example of the Bush administration’s divorce from reality may be seen in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s 9,000 word article in the current issue of the U.S. journal Foreign Affairs.

“The democratization of Iraq and the democratization of the Middle East [are] linked,” she writes. “As Iraq emerges from its difficulties, the impact of this transformation is being felt in the rest of the region… Our long-term partnership with Afghanistan and Iraq, to which we must remain deeply committed, our new relationships in Central Asia, and our long-standing partnerships in the Persian Gulf provide a solid geostrategic foundation for the generational work ahead in helping to bring about a better, more democratic, and more prosperous Middle East.”

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry when one reads this manifesto. The Iraqis don’t want to be ‘democratized’ by American military power; the Afghans don’t want a Western model of society forced upon them; the impact of Iraq’s ‘transformation’ -- that is to say its destruction -- has been highly destabilizing for the whole region; some Gulf rulers may misguidedly feel the need for U.S. military protection, but most of their subjects emphatically do not. Arab prosperity, such as it is, owes nothing to the American military presence and everything to oil and to Arab trading skills.[...]

As had long been suspected, it looks as if the Bush administration is seeking to tie its successor to its own failed policies, and make it difficult, if not impossible, for a candidate like Barack Obama, if he is elected President, to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, as he has pledged.

The United States wants Iraq to sign a so-called Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) by 31 July, to replace the United Nations mandate, which expires on 31 December, and which has so far provided the legal cover for the presence of coalition forces in Iraq.

The obvious and far better alternative would be for the United States to seek a new and brief UN mandate -- say of six months -- to allow the next American President to assess the situation next year and make his own decisions.

Although U.S.-Iraqi negotiations are being held in secret, the terms of the proposed SOFA have been widely leaked to the British newspaper, The Independent. They include the long-term U.S. use of 50 bases in Iraq; U.S. freedom to conduct military operations and arrest anyone it wants in pursuit of the ‘war on terror’, without consulting the Baghdad government; immunity from Iraqi law for U.S. troops and contractors; and control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000 feet. This is nothing less than a neo-colonial strait-jacket, which has already mobilized strong political and religious opposition in Iraq.

There’s An Iranian Under Our Bed!

Iran’s President Ahmadinejad’s regime is a threat to all of us. His words contain a chilling echo of some of the world’s most tragic history.

~ Senator Barack Obama

Everywhere one turns these days, we find a politician screaming about Iran and the dire threat it supposedly represents to America. President Bush has been spinning dark tales about this for years, his claims dutifully echoed by most of the presidential candidates (with the musical score provided by Senator McCain). Even Barack Obama, ostensibly the "antiwar" Democratic nominee, has taken to rattling sabers at the behest of his new neocon handlers.

But if we brush away the rhetorical fog, does a tangible threat really exist? Is Iran actually a danger to our way of life? And if so, what does this threat look like?

Let us suppose for a moment that Iranian President Ahmadinejad decided that the time had come to launch a glorious mission to conquer the United States of America. Suppose, furthermore, that he proceeded to order the massive Iranian Army (actually, Ahmadinejad is not the commander of the Iranian military...but let’s put that aside for a moment) to board transport ships of the mighty Iranian Navy (although Iran doesn’t really have a navy, but let’s put that aside for a moment too) and set sail.

In concrete terms, how would this scenario unfold?

If the neocon warnings are accurate, this armada would have to sail out of the Persian Gulf, up the Red Sea, and through the Suez Canal (though why the Egyptians – Sunni rivals of Shiite Iran – would allow a massive Iranian military force to pass through the canal is another mystery).

Picking up speed, the armada would then sail across the Mediterranean Sea and through the Straits of Gibraltar. Once in the open Atlantic (though still without air cover or any logistical supply-chain whatsoever), the Iranian armada would then race across the ocean, presumably making landfall somewhere in New Jersey (where they could no doubt link up with their many secret agents posing as convenience store cashiers up and down the Garden State Parkway).

Once reassembled on the ground – but still without air cover or re-supply – this force would, according to our warmongering politicos, fight its way across the continental United States, thus completing Ahmadinejad’s mad plan of global domination.

This is, without embellishment, the actual threat that Iran poses to the United States.

Steven LaTulippe at LewRockwell.com - is a physician currently practicing in Ohio. He was an officer in the United States Air Force for 13 years.

Irony of Ironies.......,

People with higher IQs are less likely to believe in God, according to racist "psychologist" Richard Lynn.

Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average.

A decline in religious observance over the last century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence, he claimed.

But the conclusions - in a paper for the academic journal Intelligence - have been branded "simplistic" by critics.

Whatever this sea cucumber's sphincter thinks can only be considered in the light of his own unfalsifiable belief in biological "races".

Mulholland Falls

I'm very tempted to put up Eisenhower's departing address here - because there just aren't that many ways to effectively contextualize and convey the domestic enormity of the political and economic genie that's been unleashed by the invasion of Iraq and the GWOT. But I put up the more cryptic Mulholland Falls because to me that movie more fully captures and conveys the complex quilt of "interests" competing in the presidential election for control of the direction of the country.

Because of the peculiar demographic status of the all volunteer and corporate mercenary expeditionary force, the domestic sense and sensibility concerning this very large and very protracted war has been kept to an unprecedented minimum. As a society, we have been anesthetized to the reality of the national commitment.

Comes Submariner in the comments;

This is intriguing and I'll definitely bookmark the link. Of the top, what I know is that McCain's dad and granddad were both admirals. His father in particular was CINCPAC during the Vietnam War and was an advocate for more aggressive maneuvers that would have confronted China directly.

That said, the lesson of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, about the futility of containing a rising Asian power short of nuclear weapons is being painfully relearned. Resorting to wholesale purges of CENTCOM, Air Force Secretary and Chief of Staff in a compressed period tells me that Bush is having serious trouble holding the reins on his war horses.

Followed by Rembom;

"In the end, there is no simple solution. It is probably dangerous, for the republic and the armed forces that defend her, for this situation to exist. But it is also the logical result of 232 years of evolution between the military and the civilian authorities that control them. The question that remains is this: When nobody is willing to sit in judgment of the combat performance of the generals, including the generals, then who is really in control of our armed forces?"

who throws an article containing perspective and corroborating data on the subject not commonly aired or known in the public domain. Seems to me we have all the makings of an extremely interesting political discussion. It gets even more interesting if we ponder what's just around that signpost up ahead. The invasion of Iraq was an all or nothing gambit. There is no simple national retreat available to the U.S. from the operationalized objective of acquiring control of Iraq's oil. That the law of unintended consequences took effect almost immediately after the campaign began in earnest, and that American consensus reality has not accommodated itself to the facts of Peak Oil - means that a very rude awakening is in store. In the words of Nick Nolte before he throws William Petersen over the cliff, "this isn't America, this is L.A.....,"

Fin d'Siecle Governance Issues

The US Senate yesterday introduced a biosafety bill that takes small steps towards resolving some controversial aspects of the system regulating research with agents that could be used for bioterrorism.

The regulations, called the Select Agent Program, have been controversial since they were established in 2002. The new bill, introduced by Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) on behalf of himself and Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), extends funding for the program, which expired last September, for five years. It calls for the federal government to update its agents list and clarify its definition of the smallpox virus to exclude less dangerous viruses, and demands that the government conduct a study on how well the Select Agent Program is functioning. It also mandates biosafety training for researchers working in biosafety level 3 and level 4 labs, and a reporting system for safety breaches -- suggestions made at a Congressional hearing on biosafety held last October. Finally, it gives state governments access to select agent registration information.

Gigi Gronvall of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center noted that some researchers believed that the Select Agent Program should be scrapped entirely -- a sentiment she disagrees with. "I don't hold any illusion that this would stop anyone from stealing [a listed pathogen] and potentially working on it as a weapon," she said, but it was still important "to know who is working on what." During the 2001 anthrax attack, she noted, the government's response was, "'We have no idea who works with anthrax.'" But, she said, "that's the wrong answer."

Senate tweeks bioterror regs - The Scientist NewsBlog.

An ominous warning..,

In today's UK Independent, from the CEO of Gazprom that the rapid rise in oil prices has only just begun. As a side note, I've been listening to NPR's coverage of the fuel-price strikes taking place now in Europe - what is striking to me is that the EU nations effected by rising prices have achieved levels of energy efficiency that the U.S. can only aspire to. What this portends for our leaky bucket is truly draconian;

While Europeans are used to paying a lot for unleaded gasoline, the sudden rise in the more popular and usually cheaper diesel fuel has come as a shock. In Spain this week, truckers blocked roads and stopped making deliveries to protest the soaring fuel costs. Spanish fishermen are also striking, and the French Navy has canceled three summer missions.

The chief executive of the world's largest energy company has issued the most dire warning yet about the soaring the price of oil, predicting that it will hit $250 per barrel "in the foreseeable future".

The forecast from Alexey Miller, the head of the Kremlin-owned gas giant Gazprom, would herald the arrival of £2-per-litre petrol and send shockwaves through the economy. His comments were the most stark to be expressed by an industry executive and come just days after the oil price registered its largest-ever single-day spike, hitting $139.12 per barrel last week amid fears that the world's faltering supply will be unable to keep up with demand.

BBC uncovers lost Iraq billions

So it's been a minute since I saw the documentary on perverse Iraq war profiteering, and that documentary was two years old at the time of the posting. Thankfully, it looks like investigations into what it recounted are underway.

A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.

For the first time, the extent to which some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding has been researched by the BBC's Panorama using US and Iraqi government sources.

A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations.

The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies.

• While George Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely the gagging orders will be lifted.
• To date, no major US contractor faces trial for fraud or mismanagement in Iraq.
• The president's Democrat opponents are keeping up the pressure over war profiteering in Iraq.
• Henry Waxman who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said: "The money that's gone into waste, fraud and abuse under these contracts is just so outrageous, its egregious.
• "It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history."

What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains?

In the July/August Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr asks; Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

At the Tip of Iran's Spear

Good profile of Petraeus' Iranian counterpart, Brig. General Qassem Soleimani in Sunday's WaPo;

Let's try for a moment to put ourselves in the mind of Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. For it is the soft-spoken Soleimani, not Iran's bombastic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who plays a decisive role in his nation's confrontation with the United States.

Soleimani represents the sharp point of the Iranian spear. He is responsible for Iran's covert activities in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and other battlegrounds. He oversees the regime's relations with its militant proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas. His elite, secretive wing of the Revolutionary Guard is identified as a terrorist organization by the Bush administration, but he is also Iran's leading strategist on foreign policy. He reports personally to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his budget (mostly in cash) comes directly from the supreme leader's office.

Bill O'Reilly's been making apocalyptic noises on his radio program for the past two days. One wonders what's in store between now and the November elections.

Brainpower May Lie in Complexity of Synapses

It's been a minute since we last visited the topic of connectomics.

T3 hollar'd at me this morning about neural density. This in turn provoked me to dredge up this post on neuroeconomics from the archives and do a bit of google-ing. My remarks to T3 were rather disparaging of the state of the art. As it turns out however, the dismissive remarks were right on target as this article in the current Technology Review bears out.

The diagram is the fruit of an emerging field called "connectomics," which attempts to physically map the ­tangle of neural circuits that collect, ­process, and archive information in the nervous system. Such maps could ultimately shed light on the early development of the human brain and on diseases that may be linked to faulty wiring, such as autism and schizophrenia. "The brain is ­essentially a computer that wires itself up during development and can rewire itself," says ­Sebastian Seung, a computational neuroscientist at MIT, who is working with Lichtman. "If we have a wiring diagram of the brain, that could help us understand how it works."

But my man Nana has gotten us back on track with an update on one of the core data sets we like to monitor - that which illuminates the structural and functional underpinnings of cognition and everything we consequently hold dear - this one concerning measurable interspecies differences in synaptic density and complexity;

The computing capabilities of the human brain may lie not so much in its neuronal network as in the complex calculations that its synapses perform, Dr. Grant said. Vertebrate synapses have about 1,000 different proteins, assembled into 13 molecular machines, one of which is built from 183 different proteins.

These synapses are not standard throughout the brain, Dr. Grant’s group has found; each region uses different combinations of the 1,000 proteins to fashion its own custom-made synapses.

Each synapse can presumably make sophisticated calculations based on messages reaching it from other neurons. The human brain has about 100 billion neurons, interconnected at 100 trillion synapses.

Lets see how long it takes for Big Don and his confederates to begin foraging around for additional data along this cytoarchitechtonic variable to shore up the preconceived notions they hold so dear. Interestingly, if I had to wager as to a group of homo sapiens with exceptional phenotypical characteristics in this area, I'd wager that Australian aboriginals have the rest of you humans beaten hands down along this measure. Just a hunch on my part....,

Oil Crisis: Obama vs. Mccain

Whoever wins the White House this fall WILL spend more time tackling energy challenges than any other president in history.

The energy policies of Barack Obama and John McCain differ widely and voters can bet on some spirited political debate.

McCain would mandate reductions in greenhouse gasses, then largely rely on the free market to spur conservation. In order to ease the pain of high gas prices he also wants to suspend the federal gas tax.

Obama would tax oil companies and use the money to help low income people. He would also restrict greenhouse gasses, but charge more for companies to pollute and use the money to fund renewable energy research. He also sees a bigger role for government in encouraging conservation.

CNNMoney.com asked the candidates questions which we feel are central to solving the world's energy challenge. Here's what they said:

look at the two candidates' fathers

As we simplistically blather about the candidates' race and age – it's hip vs hip operation, folks – we seem to be ignoring the best guide we have to John McCain and Barack Obama's hearts.

Both men have written strange, searching books about their fathers. It is in their pages that we can find the clearest clues to their potential presidencies. At first glance, these slabs of non-fiction – Dreams From My Father by Obama, and Faith of My Fathers by McCain – are strikingly similar. They both tell the autobiographical story of an insecure young man who flails around for an identity, and finds it by chasing the ghost of his absent father to a dangerous place far beyond the United States. Yet Obama ended up writing a complex story of colonised people – while McCain wrote a simple celebration of the coloniser.

Johann Hari in last Friday's Independant: If you really want to understand what this race is about, look at the two candidates' fathers

The Varying Impact of Gas Prices

Gas prices are high throughout the country, but how hard they hit individual families depends on income levels, which vary widely. Click on the image to go to NYTimes Interactive article - then go check out the companion article Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average.

Green is the new Black

comedy gold.....,

Having it all
Our “Having it All” Issue highlights stories about things like sustainable high fashion, eco-friendly commuting, farming in the city, and environmentally-responsible musicians. You can have it all, it just might look a little different than what you’re used to.

Interactive Experience
in|ur magazine utilizes an interactive Flash format for the online magazine, creating a more tangible online reading experience. Throughout the pages of the current issue readers will encounter clickable advertising and links (both highlighted and hidden).

Intentionally Urban Magazine......,

Around the World on a Tank of Gas

From the current issue of BusinessWeek;

Get ready for a new guessing game to pass those long hours on the road: Who pays the most to fill up the tank?

As Americans head off for the first weekend of the summer driving season, the biggest excitement may come at the start of the trip when they fill up the tank on $4-a-gallon gas. Instead of playing the license plate game, how about guessing which countries have the highest and lowest gas prices? It may be comforting to know that, even at current prices, gas in the U.S. costs less than half what it does in some European countries. But it's much, much more expensive than in, say, Venezuela, where gas costs 12¢ a gallon. In the following slides, we give you 12 of the most, and 12 of the least, expensive places to fill up, with the U.S. in the middle for a reference point. Prices are as of March, 2008.

Peak Oil Debunked in Four Minutes

The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care)

Dan Hurley in the NYTimes; “The left hemisphere does language in the narrow sense, understanding of individual words and sentences,” Dr. Chatterjee said. “But it’s now thought that the appreciation of humor and language that is not literal, puns and jokes, requires the right hemisphere.”

There was nothing very interesting in Katherine P. Rankin’s study of sarcasm — at least, nothing worth your important time. All she did was use an M.R.I. to find the place in the brain where the ability to detect sarcasm resides. But then, you probably already knew it was in the right parahippocampal gyrus.

What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankin’s study, just do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, “Nice weather we’re having.”

Bubble Governance Measures

Here's the real reason I'm not sanguine about imminent collapse.

The Commodity Futures and Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating trading in oil futures to determine whether the surge in prices to record levels is the result of manipulation or fraud. They might want to take a look at wheat, rice and corn futures while they're at it. The whole thing is a hoax cooked up by the investment banks and hedge funds who are trying to dig their way out of the trillion dollar mortgage-backed securities (MBS) mess that they created by turning garbage loans into securities. That scam blew up in their face last August and left them scrounging for handouts from the Federal Reserve. Now the billions of dollars they're getting from the Fed is being diverted into commodities which is destabilizing the world economy; driving gas prices to the moon and triggering food riots across the planet.

For months we've been told that the soaring price of oil has been the result of Peak Oil, fighting in Iraq, attacks on oil facilities in Nigeria, labor problems in Norway, and (the all-time favorite)growth in China. It's all baloney. Just like Goldman Sachs prediction of $200 per barrel oil is baloney. If oil is about to skyrocket then why has G-Sax kept a neutral rating on some of its oil holdings like Exxon Mobile? Could it be that they know that oil is just another mega-inflated equity bubble---like housing, corporate bonds and dot.com stocks-that is about to crash to earth as soon as the big players grab a parachute?

There are three things that are driving up the price of oil: the falling dollar, speculation and buying on margin.

When the regulators are invoked to cool the out of control chain reaction in the reactor core, not only here in the colonies, but simultaneously in the imperial homeland, it doesn't mean that the cavalry is coming to save the day for you and I, oh no. Rather, it means that the quest to extract remaining collateral value from the middle and the bottom has become excessively frenzied to the detriment of too vast a swath of the top. Governance stability is at risk. Things could still very well spiral out of control, however, efforts are being made to bring them back under control which means you may still have enough time to get your own act together and prepare you and yours for the clampdown. It's coming. I just don't think it's coming next week or that TPTB want it to come anytime between now and the election.

Global Governance Strained

From the Christian Science Monitor - Food crisis: A daily quest for bread in Cairo;

Egyptians are living through the worst food crisis in a generation, caught in a storm of stagnant wages, rising global food prices, rampant corruption, and a quickly advancing inflation rate that hit 16.4 percent in May. The price of basic commodities like bread, wheat, rice, and cooking oil has doubled since this time last year – prompting bread riots.

The riots are why Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was a featured speaker among 40 government leaders at the three-day UN food summit that concluded Thursday in Rome. Mr. Mubarak called for an end to subsidies for biofuels because they are creating a "hazardous distortion to the present system of agricultural trade."

While Mubarak pushed for changes abroad, his government struggles to meet the basic needs of Egyptians.

Under a government order, bakers now start work at 4 a.m. to produce enough bread for everyone waiting in the city's bread lines, says Yasser Shalaby, who owns a bakery with his brother Said in another part of Imbaba.

Once at work, they labor under the careful watch of government supervisors. The supervisors ensure they bake through the day, but there are allegations that they participate in theft and smuggling as often as they prevent it.

Bread line violence in other parts of the city has led to brawls in which at least a dozen people have died since January.

Bread shortages have eased since government measures went into effect but inflation and high prices show no signs of ending anytime soon.

Not Quite Yet....,

Of course, I could be mistaken. But having slept on it, this morning I'm disinclined to think that yesterday's market meltdown and oil price spike constituted anything remotely approaching the last straw. I believe that the energy bubble is still in its early phases and that controls will be implemented to ensure that this bubble expands gradually until all possible profit is extracted. If it were to explode prematurely, then TPTB would miss out on their vampiric extraction of remaining collateral value from the middle and the bottom.

Speculative analysts echoed this view;

"In the past two months nothing very dramatic has happened to warrant an increase in the oil price to $135. This is pretty much 100 percent speculation," he told the Reuters Global Energy Summit from Singapore.

"It is very likely and possible that we will go back again to the $100 range as speculators take profits and go out of the market. It could happen by end-August or latest by September."

Blue Gardena....,

This just in from my man rembom. Gardena pushing up hard on the $5.00 Gas Club. Today, at 190th and Western, Gardena, CA. (note the palm tree in the background Ed Dunn, in case you're busy scrutinizing....,)

Nitrogen Fertilizer

My man BD keeps it truthy and keeps the subrealist ouevre on its toes, thank you sir;

Photo of $8.95 20# bag of garden fertilizer attached. I recently bought several bags for TSHTF purposes since the price has not gone up appreciably yet in response to the oil skyrocket. Price was same as a year ago.

$5 did sound waaay high - but organic fertlizer is more expensive than commercial fertilizer. At the end of the day, urine is a better nitrogen fertilizer than chemical nitrogen. A little humanure, compost from your own yard, ashes from your fireplace and barbeque and some regular golden showers, and voila! The form of the fertilizer makes a HUGE difference.

As for the rest, spending to treat wastewater sewage is both wasteful and destructive to the environment. That urban output has a far more valuable and immediate application to victory gardening and doesn't drag gallons of tapwater down the drain to send it gushing out of your apt. or house and into the infrastructural money pit.

The Water Crisis - A Practical Solution

Local food production is the basis of all economies and the missing component in modern cities.

The economic potential of capturing human urine is stunning. Human urine is 18% organic nitrogen and has been used in agriculture for thousands of years. Sweden, Germany, Holland and many other countries have been using and processing human urine for agricultural purposes and to protect the environment from water based sewer systems. Human urine is the only renewable, sustainable and economically feasible source of nitrogen available to humanity and it is free.

What is the economic value of human urine? Here is how it works, the value of comparative petroleum derived fertilizer with the same 18% nitrogen content is approximately $10.00 a gallon and requires a massive polluting industry that is not renewable. The average person produces 2 liters of urine a day or roughly $5.00 worth of organic nitrogen. A city like Miami flushes down the drain 10 to 20 million dollars worth of nitrogen a day and spends another fortune to do it. Integrated Recycling is the future of our economy and could replace taxation in funding community services. The cities will become fertilizer factories and urban and suburban farming and food production could provide a sustainable, local food supply. Schools and churches could be nurseries and local gardening centers, hubs of city and urban agriculture and recycling. This could be a sustainable, local system that is a renewable doable foundation for local economies.

This section on water/sewage is in the midst of other, more general material. For more of the author's thoughts about agriculture see Interview.

The Urban Farmer

In the Independant;

Last April, in a discussion about the global food crisis, Gordon Brown announced: "We need to make great changes in the way we organise food production in the next few years." High on the list of viable changes is the idea of inner-city agriculture. Which is the theory behind Haeg's concept, detailed in his new book Edible Estates: it proposes the replacement of the domestic front lawn in cities with "an edible landscape". Last year, to illustrate this point, Haeg was commissioned by the Tate to create a permanent "edible estate" on a triangle of communal grass in front of a housing estate near Elephant and Castle, bordered on two sides by a main road along which London buses thunder every few minutes.

The aim was to engage and involve the local residents – and together they miraculously transformed a patch of grass previously favoured by dogs and drunks into a luscious agri-plot housing apple and plum trees, a "forest" of tomato plants, aubergines, squashes, Brussels sprouts, runner beans, sweet peas, a "salad wing", herbs, edible flowers and 6ft artichoke plants. It is also quite beautiful: "The design was inspired by the ornate, curvy raised flowerbeds you find in front of Buckingham Palace," explains Haeg. Interestingly, although this space is still accessible by passers-by – unlike the traditional allotment, which Haeg feels is outdated – there has been no theft or vandalism. The London project was mirrored in several locations around the US. [...]

Many are already talking about it. Inspired by the "victory gardens" of the First and Second World Wars, when civilians were urged to "dig for victory" to survive the food shortages. [...]

It's not just about financial and health benefits – Wright has also noticed social benefits. "People who have not spoken for five years are suddenly chatting again, discussing what they've grown. And it brings together people from different cultures too – they lean over the fence and reminisce about the vegetables they grew in their countries as children – okra, bananas, yams, sweet potatoes."

Wright describes one gardener, an elderly widow, who has planted an almond tree as a memorial to her late husband and says he would have loved to see how the space had been transformed. "One guy has even replaced the photo of his family on his mobile phone with a picture of the garden. It's given them so much pride."

The impact of the garden has been enormous, says Wright. People from further and further away are coming along to get involved, learn new skills and socialise. "They see it and it's like a lightbulb and they say, 'We want our own edible estate.' Well, it makes sense, doesn't it?"