10 False Flags that Changed the World

At it’s simplest, the term false flag means pretending to be the enemy.

The name comes from ships and armies that, in previous centuries, deceived their foes by displaying another country’s flag.

These days, false flag activities are much more sophisticated…and debauched. These aren’t your granddaddy’s covert operations.

Fake Terror, Deception, and Disgrace

The most commonly known false flag operations consist of an intelligence agency staging a terror attack such that an uninvolved entity gets blamed for the carnage.

Another type of false flag operation might consist of directing purposefully belligerent and trigger-happy clandestine demonstrators to mingle with peace activists in order to disrupt and discredit a passive protest event.

Yet another type of false flag activity consists of infiltrating the opposition, then making easily disproved claims which will embarrass and undermine the credibility of the organization.

An Ignorant Public Enables False Flags

When the Constitutional Convention closed in 1787, a lady asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

...

Joe Cru Baugh post

10) Nero, Christians, and the Great Fire of Rome
09) Remeber the Maine, to hell with Spain
08) The Manchurian Incident
07) Secrets of the Reichstag Fire
06) Fake invasion at Gleiwitz
05) The myth of Pearl Harbor
04) Israeli Terrorist Cell uncovered in Egypt
03) Operation Northwoods
02) Phantoms in the Gulf of Tonkin
01) What did you think?

A Model of a Trust-based Recommendation System on a Social Network

Frank E. Walter, Stefano Battiston, Frank Schweitzer

(Submitted on 28 Nov 2006)

In this paper, we present a model of a trust-based recommendation system on a social network. The idea of the model is that agents use their social network to reach information and their trust relationships to filter it. We investigate how the dynamics of trust among agents affect the performance of the system by comparing it to a frequency-based recommendation system. Furthermore, we identify the impact of network density, preference heterogeneity among agents, and knowledge sparseness to be crucial factors for the performance of the system. The system self-organises in a state with performance near to the optimum; the performance on the global level is an emergent property of the system, achieved without explicit coordination from the local interactions of agents.

download paper
arXiv post

Feigenbaum number

4.669201609102990671853203820466201617258185577475768632745651 343004134330211314737138689744023948013817165984855189815134 408627142027932522312442988890890859944935463236713411532481 714219947455644365823793202009561058330575458617652222070385 410646749494284981453391726200568755665952339875603825637225

Think they made a movie about it: Pi

Forgiveness

One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee's house, and sat at table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was sitting at table in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner." And Jesus answering said to him, "Simon, I have something to say to you." And he answered, "What is it, Teacher?" "A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he forgave them both. Now which of them will love him more?" Simon answered, "The one, I suppose, to whom he forgave more. And he said to him, "You have judged rightly." Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I entered your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little."
LUKE 7:36-47.


The story we have read, like the parable of the Prodigal Son, is peculiar to the Gospel of Luke. In this story, as in the parable, someone who is considered to be a great sinner, by others as well as by herself, is contrasted with people who are considered to be genuinely righteous. In both cases Jesus is on the side of the sinner, and therefore He is criticized, indirectly in the parable by the righteous elder son, and directly in our story by the righteous Pharisee.

We should not diminish the significance of this attitude of Jesus by asserting that, after all, the sinners were not as sinful, nor the righteous as righteous as they were judged to be by themselves and by others. Nothing like this is indicated in the story or in the parable. The sinners, one a whore and the other the companion of whores, are not excused by ethical arguments which would remove the seriousness of the moral demand. They are not excused by sociological explanations which would remove their personal responsibility; nor by an analysis of their unconscious motives which would remove the significance of their conscious decisions; nor by man's universal predicament which would remove their personal guilt. They are called sinners, simply and without restriction. This does not mean that Jesus and the New Testament writers are unaware of the psychological and sociological factors which determine human existence. They are keenly aware of the universal and inescapable dominion of sin over this world, of the demonic splits in the souls of people, which produce insanity and bodily destruction; of the economic and spiritual misery of the masses. But their awareness of these factors, which have become so decisive for our description of man's predicament, does not prevent them from calling the sinners sinners. Understanding does not replace judging. We understand more and better than many generations before us. But our immensely increased insight into the conditions of human existence should not undercut our courage to call wrong wrong. In story and parable the sinners are seriously called sinners.

And in the same way the righteous ones are seriously called righteous. We would miss the spirit of our story if we tried to show that the righteous ones are not truly righteous. The elder son in the parable did what he was supposed to do. He does not feel that he has done anything wrong nor does his father tell him so. His righteousness is not questioned--nor is the righteousness of Simon, the Pharisee. His lack of love toward Jesus is not reproached as a lack of righteousness, but it is derived from the fact that little is forgiven to him.

Such righteousness is not easy to attain. Much self-control, hard discipline, and continuous self-observation are needed. Therefore, we should not despise the righteous ones. In the traditional Christian view, the Pharisees have become representatives of everything evil, but in their time they were the pious and morally zealous ones. Their conflict with Jesus was not simply a conflict between right and wrong; it was, above all, the conflict between an old and sacred tradition and a new reality which was breaking into it and depriving it of ultimate significance. It was not only a moral conflict--it was also a tragic one, foreshadowing the tragic conflict between Christianity and Judaism in all succeeding generations, including our own. The Pharisees--and this we should not forget--were the guardians of the law of God in their time.

The Pharisees can be compared with other groups of righteous ones. We can compare them, for example, with a group that has played a tremendous role in the history of this country--the Puritans. The name itself, like the name Pharisee, indicates separation from the impurities of the world. The Puritans would certainly have judged the attitude of Jesus to the whore as Simon the Pharisee did. And we should not condemn them for this judgment nor distort their picture in our loose talk about them. Like the Pharisees, they were the guardians of the law of God in their time.

And what about our time? It has been said, and not without justification, that the Protestant churches have become middle-class churches because of the way in which their members interpret Christianity, practically as well as theoretically. Such criticism points to their active adherence to their churches, to their well-established morality, to their charitable works. They are righteous--they would have been called so by Jesus. And certainly they would have joined Simon the Pharisee and the Puritans in criticizing the attitude of Jesus towards the woman in our story. And again I say, we should not condemn them for this. They take their religious and moral obligations seriously. They, like the Pharisees and the Puritans, are guardians of the law of God in our time.

The sinners are seriously called sinners and the righteous ones are seriously called righteous. Only if this is clearly seen can the depth and the revolutionary power of Jesus' attitude be understood. He takes the side of the sinner against the righteous although He does not doubt the validity of the law, the guardians of which the righteous are. Here we approach a mystery which is the mystery of the Christian message itself, in its paradoxical depth and in its shaking and liberating power. And we can hope only to catch a glimpse of it in attempting to interpret our story.

Simon the Pharisee is shocked by the attitude of Jesus to the whore. He receives the answer that the sinners have greater love than the righteous ones because more is forgiven them. It is not the love of the woman that brings her forgiveness, but it is the forgiveness she has received that creates her love. By her love she shows that much has been forgiven her, while the lack of love in the Pharisee shows that little has been forgiven him.

Jesus does not forgive the woman, but He declares that she is forgiven. Her state of mind, her ecstasy of love, show that something has happened to her. And nothing greater can happen to a human being than that he is forgiven. For forgiveness means reconciliation in spite of estrangement; it means reunion in spite of hostility; it means acceptance of those who are unacceptable, and it means reception of those who are rejected.

Forgiveness is unconditional or it is not forgiveness at all. Forgiveness has the character of "in spite of," but the righteous ones give it the character of "because." The sinners, however, cannot do this. They cannot transform the divine "in spite of" into a human "because." They cannot show facts, because of which they must be forgiven. God's forgiveness is unconditional. There is no condition whatsoever in man which would make him worthy of forgiveness. If forgiveness were conditional, conditioned by man, no one could be accepted and no one could accept himself. We know that this is our situation, but we loathe to face it. It is too great as a gift and too humiliating as a judgment. We want to contribute something, and if we have learned that we cannot contribute anything positive, then we try at least to contribute something negative: the pain of self-accusation and self-rejection. And then we read our story and the parable of the Prodigal Son as if they said: These sinners were forgiven because they humiliated themselves and confessed that they were unacceptable; because they suffered about their sinful predicament they were made worthy of forgiveness. But this reading of the story is a misreading, and a dangerous one. If that were the way to our reconciliation with God, we should have to produce within ourselves the feeling of unworthiness, the pain of self-rejection, the anxiety and despair of guilt. There are many Christians who try this in order to show God and themselves that they deserve acceptance. They perform an emotional work of self-punishment after they have realized that their other good works do not help them. But emotional works do not help either. God's forgiveness is independent of anything we do, even of self-accusation and self-humiliation. If this were not so, how could we ever be certain that our self-rejection is serious enough to deserve forgiveness? Forgiveness creates repentance--this is declared in our story and this is the experience of those who have been forgiven.

The woman in Simon's house comes to Jesus because she was forgiven. We do not know exactly what drove her to Jesus. And if we knew, we should certainly find that it was a mixture of motives--spiritual desire as well as natural attraction, the power of the prophet as well as the impression of the human personality. Our story does not psychoanalyze the woman, but neither does it deny human motives which could be psychoanalyzed. Human motives are always ambiguous. The divine forgiveness cuts into these ambiguities, but it does not demand that they become unambiguous before forgiveness can be given. If this were demanded, then forgiveness would never occur. The description of the woman's behavior shows clearly the ambiguities of her motives. Nevertheless, she is accepted.

There is no condition for forgiveness. But forgiveness could not come to us if we were not asking for it and receiving it. Forgiveness is an answer, the divine answer, to the question implied in our existence. An answer is answer only for him who has asked, who is aware of the question. This awareness cannot be fabricated. It may be in a hidden place in our souls, covered by many strata of righteousness. It may reach our consciousness in certain moments. Or, day by day, it may fill our conscious life as well as its unconscious depths and drive us to the question to which forgiveness is the answer.

In the minds of many people the word "forgiveness" has connotations which completely contradict the way Jesus deals with the woman in our story. Many of us think of solemn acts of pardon, of release from punishment, in other words, of another act of righteousness by the righteous ones. But genuine forgiveness is participation, reunion overcoming the powers of estrangement. And only because this is so, does forgiveness make love possible. We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love. We cannot love where we feel rejected, even if the rejection is done in righteousness. We are hostile towards that to which we belong and by which we feel judged, even if the judgment is not expressed in words.

As long as we feel rejected by Him, we cannot love God. He appears to us as an oppressive power, as He who gives laws according to His pleasure, who judges according to His commandments, who condemns according to His wrath. But if we have received and accepted the message that He is reconciled, everything changes. Like a fiery stream His healing power enters into us; we can affirm Him and with Him our own being and the others from whom we were estranged, and life as a whole. Then we realize that His love is the law of our own being, and that it is the law of reuniting love. And we understand that what we have experienced as oppression and judgment and wrath is in reality the working of love, which tries to destroy within us everything which is against love. To love this love is to love God. Theologians have questioned whether man is able to have love towards God; they have replaced love by obedience. But they are refuted by our story. They teach a theology for the righteous ones but not a theology for the sinners. He who is forgiven knows what it means to love God.

And he who loves God is also able to accept life and to love it. This is not the same as to love God. For many pious people in all generations the love of God is the other side of the hatred for life. And there is much hostility towards life in all of us, even in those who have completely surrendered to life. Our hostility towards life is manifested in cynicism and disgust, in bitterness and continuous accusations against life. We feel rejected by life, not so much because of its objective darkness and threats and horrors, but because of our estrangement from its power and meaning. He who is reunited with God, the creative Ground of life, the power of life in everything that lives, is reunited with life. He feels accepted by it and he can love it. He understands that the greater love is, the greater the estrangement which is conquered by it. In metaphorical language I should like to say to those who feel deeply their hostility towards life: Life accepts you; life loves you as a separated part of itself; life wants to reunite you with itself, even when it seems to destroy you.

There is a section of life which is nearer to us than any other and often the most estranged from us: other human beings. We all know about the regions of the human soul in which things look quite different from the way they look on its benevolent surface. In these regions we can find hidden hostilities against those with whom we are in love. We can find envy and torturing doubt about whether we are really accepted by them. And this hostility and anxiety about being rejected by those who are nearest to us can hide itself under the various forms of love: friendship, sensual love, conjugal and family love. But if we have experienced ultimate acceptance this anxiety is conquered, though not removed. We can love without being sure of the answering love of the other one. For we know that he himself is longing for our acceptance as we are longing for his, and that in the light of ultimate acceptance we are united.

He who is accepted ultimately can also accept himself. Being forgiven and being able to accept oneself are one and the same thing. No one can accept himself who does not feel that he is accepted by the power of acceptance which is greater than he, greater than his friends and counselors and psychological helpers. They may point to the power of acceptance, and it is the function of the minister to do so. But he and the others also need the power of acceptance which is greater than they. The woman in our story could never have overcome her disgust at her own being without finding this power working through Jesus, who told her with authority, "You are forgiven." Thus, she experienced, at least in one ecstatic moment of her life, the power which reunited her with herself and gave her the possibility of loving even her own destiny.

This happened to her in one great moment. And in this she is no exception. Decisive spiritual experiences have the character of a break-through. In the midst of our futile attempts to make ourselves worthy, in our despair about the inescapable failure of these attempts, we are suddenly grasped by the certainty that we are forgiven, and the fire of love begins to burn. That is the greatest experience anyone can have. It may not happen often, but when it does happen, it decides and transforms everything.

And now let us look once more at those whom we have described as the righteous ones. They are really righteous, but since little is forgiven them, they love little. And this is their unrighteousness. It does not lie on the moral level, just as the unrighteousness of Job did not lie on the moral level where his friends sought for it in vain. It lies on the level of the encounter with ultimate reality, with the God who vindicates Job's righteousness against the attacks of his friends, with the God who defends Himself against the attacks of Job and his ultimate unrighteousness. The righteousness of the righteous ones is hard and self-assured. They, too, want forgiveness, but they believe that they do not need much of it. And so their righteous actions are warmed by very little love. They could not have helped the woman in our story, and they cannot help us, even if we admire them. Why do children turn from their righteous parents and husbands from their righteous wives, and vice versa? Why do Christians turn away from their righteous pastors? Why do people turn away from righteous neighborhoods? Why do many turn away from righteous Christianity and from the Jesus it paints and the God it proclaims? Why do they turn to those who are not considered to be the righteous ones? Often, certainly, it is because they want to escape judgment. But more often it is because they seek a love which is rooted in forgiveness, and this the righteous ones cannot give. Many of those to whom they turn cannot give it either. Jesus gave it to the woman who was utterly unacceptable. The Church would be more the Church of Christ than it is now if it did the same, if it joined Jesus and not Simon in its encounter with those who are rightly judged unacceptable. Each of us who strives for righteousness would be more Christian if more were forgiven him, if he loved more and if he could better resist the temptation to present himself as acceptable to God by his own righteousness.

~ Paul Tillich, The New Being, Chapter 1

Multi-Agent Approach to the Self-Organization of Networks

Is it possible to link a set of nodes without using preexisting positional information or any kind of long-range attraction of the nodes? Can the process of generating positional information, i.e. the detection of ``unknown'' nodes and the estabishment of chemical gradients, \emph{and} the process of network formation, i.e. the establishment of links between nodes, occur in parallel, on a comparable time scale, as a process of co-evolution?
The paper discusses a model where the generation of relevant information for establishing the links between nodes results from the interaction of many \emph{agents}, i.e. subunits of the system that are capable of performing some activities. Their collective interaction is based on (indirect) communication, which also includes memory effects and the dissemination of information in the system. The relevant ("pragmatic") information that leads to the establishment of the links then emerges from an evolutionary interplay of selection and reamplification.

Frank Schweitzer paper
arXiv post

Fear

I must not fear. Fear is the mindkiller. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear's path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

The question is, how to be rid of fear?

First of all, anything that is overcome has to be conquered again and again. No problem can be finally overcome, conquered; it can be understood but not conquered. They are two completely different processes and the conquering process leads to further confusion, further fear. To resist, to dominate, to do battle with a problem or to build a defence against it is only to create further conflict, whereas if we can understand fear, go into it fully step by step, explore the whole content of it, then fear will never return in any form.

As I said, fear is not an abstraction; it exists only in relationship. What do we mean by fear? Ultimately we are afraid, are we not, of not being, of not becoming. Now, when there is fear of not being, of not advancing, or fear of the unknown, of death, can that fear be overcome by determination, by a conclusion, by any choice? Obviously not. Mere suppression, sublimation, or substitution, creates further resistance, does it not? Therefore fear can never by overcome through any form of discipline, through any form of resistance. That fact must be clearly seen, felt and experienced: fear cannot be overcome through any form of defence or resistance nor can there be freedom from fear through the search for an answer or through mere intellectual or verbal explanation.

Now what are we afraid of?

Are we afraid of a fact or of an idea about the fact? Are we afraid of the thing as it is, or are we afraid of what we think it is? Take death, for example. Are we afraid of the fact of death or of the idea of death? The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another. Am I afraid of the word 'death' or of the fact itself? Because I am afraid of the word, of the idea, I never understand the fact, I never look at the fact, I am never in direct relation with the fact. It is only when I am in complete communion with the fact that there is no fear. If I am not in communion with the fact, then there is fear, and there is no communion with the fact so long as I have an idea, an opinion, a theory, about the fact, so I have to be very clear whether I am afraid of the word, the idea or of the fact. If I am face to face with the fact, there is nothing to understand about it: the fact is there, and I can deal with it. If I am afraid of the word, then I must understand the word, go into the whole process of what the word, the term, implies.

For example, one is afraid of loneliness, afraid of the ache, the pain of loneliness. Surely that fear exists because one has never really looked at loneliness, one has never been in complete communion with it. The moment one is completely open to the fact of loneliness one can understand what it is, but one has an idea, an opinion about it, based on previous knowledge; it is this idea, opinion, this previous knowledge about the fact, that creates fear. Fear is obviously the outcome of naming, of terming, of projecting a symbol to represent the fact; that is fear is not independent of the word, of the term.

I have a reaction, say, to loneliness; that is I say I am afraid of being nothing. Am I afraid of the fact itself or is that fear awakened because I have previous knowledge of the fact, knowledge being the word, the symbol, the image? How can there be fear of a fact? When I am face to face with a fact, in direct communion with it, I can look at it, observe it; therefore there is no fear of the fact. What causes fear is my apprehension about the fact, what the fact might be or do.

It is my opinion, my idea, my experience, my knowledge about the fact, that creates fear. So long as there is verbalization of the fact, giving the fact a name and therefore identifying or condemning it, so long as thought is judging the fact as an observer, there must be fear. Thought is the product of the past, it can only exist through verbalization, through symbols, through images; so long as thought is regarding or translating the fact, there must be fear.

Thus it is the mind that creates fear, the mind being the process of thinking. Thinking is verbalization. You cannot think without words, without symbols, images; these images, which are the prejudices, the previous knowledge, the apprehensions of the mind, are projected upon the fact, and out of that there arises fear. There is freedom from fear only when the mind is capable of looking at the fact without translating it, without giving it a name, a label. This is quite difficult, because the fealings, the reactions, the anxieties that we have, are promptly identified by the mind and given a word. The feeling of jealousy is identified by that word. Is it possible not to identify a feeling, to look at that feeling without naming it? It is the naming of the feeling that gives it continuity, that gives it strength.

The moment you give a name to that which you call fear, you strengthen it; but if you can look at that feeling without terming it, you will see that it withers away. Therefore if one would be completely feree of fear it is essential to understand this whole process of terming, of projecting symbols, images, giving names to facts. There can be freedom from fear only when there is self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, which is the ending of fear.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Gapminder

Another Google tool to analyze various indicators like economic growth, population, income per capital, military budgets, number of girls going to school etc. per countries and regions.You may see the results in maps or charts which can be chosen on the left up side. Also select the indicators from right side.

A very user-friendly tool...

Learn Like A Human

By Jeff Hawkins
Why Can't A Computer Be More Like A Brain?

Turing's behavioral framing of the problem has led researchers away from the most promising avenue of study: the human brain. It is clear to many people that the brain must work in ways that are very different from digital computers. To build intelligent machines, then, why not understand how the brain works, and then ask how we can replicate it?

My colleagues and I have been pursuing that approach for several years. We've focused on the brain's neocortex, and we have made significant progress in understanding how it works.

neocortex brain grid illustration

...

Because of the neocortex's uniform structure, neuro-scientists have long suspected that all its parts work on a common algortihm-that is, that the brain hears, sees, understands language, and even plays chess with a single, flexible tool. Much experimental evidence supports the idea that the neocortex is such a general-purpose learning machine. What it learns and what it can do are determined by the size of the neocortical sheet, what senses the sheet is connected to, and what experiences it is trained on. HTM is a theory of the neocortical algorithm. If we are right, it represents a new way of solving computational problems that so far have eluded us.

Although the entire neocortex is fairly uniform, it is divided into dozens of areas that do different things. Some areas, for instance, are responsible for language, others for music, and still others for vision. They are connected by bundles of nerve fibers. If you make a map of the connections, you find that they trace a hierarchical design. The senses feed input directly to some regions, which feed information to other regions, which in turn send information to other regions. Information also flows down the hierarchy, but because the up and down pathways are distinct, the hierarchical arrangement remains clear and is well documented.

As a general rule, neurons at low levels of the hierarchy represent simple structure in the input, and neurons at higher levels represent more complex structure in the input. For example, input from the ears travels through a succession of regions, each representing progressively more complex aspects of sound. By the time the information reaches a language center, we find cells that respond to words and phrases independent of speaker or pitch.

...

Good stuff. If you are interested, here is the whole article

Bio-Ethanol

Q: What is there to say about a fuel that requires more energy in than energy out?

A: I had a manager once with a sign above his door that read "It depends".

So it goes with bioethanol. It's pretty easy to condemn subsidised, US-grown corn ethanol. Other feedstocks however may make ethanol a helpful addition to the fuel supply. The ultimate criticism of ethanol is there isn't enough land in the world to grow the needed quantities.

There is also a swiftian aspect to ethanol. Rather than actually eating babies, modern societies will take the food from their mouths. Black children in Africa will compete for energy with black SUV's in North America.

Spengler forum chatter

GAIN report - E36129

Page 2 of 3
USDA Foreign Agricultural Service

The CAP Reform of 2003 introduced the so-called Carbon Credit, which grants a payment of €45/ha to growers of energy crops, including crops grown for the production of biodiesel and bioethanol. The Carbon Credit is available for all agricultural crops except hemp, as long as they have a contract for approved energy uses. EU farmers cannot get Carbon Credit for energy crops on set-aside land.

The European Commission has proposed to extend the energy crop premium Carbon Credits to all New Member States (NMS) starting 2007. Currently 8 of the 10 NMS are excluded from this aid, since they apply the Single Area Payment Scheme (SAPS). This aid for energy crops came into effect for the first time in 2004, when it was eligible in the EU15, Slovenia and Malta. The areas for which the direct payment for energy crops was
claimed in the first two years was well below the maximum guaranteed area (MGA) of 1.5million hectares.

The total area in 2004 was around 300,000 ha (about 20 percent) and the total area in 2005 around 570,000 ha (38 percent). Preliminary data for 2006 shows that the strong growth continues and suggests the area could be 1.2-1.3 million ha.

...

sofar The Biopact

The mother of all secrets

A momentous event occured on September 24, 2000. The threat to the United States was greater than all the world's terrorists put together. Our corporate mass media didn't inform the American public. Neither did Presidents Clinton or Bush. They were afraid to tell the truth. So they didn't.

That's why the first priority of Bush administration officials after the Al Queda attack of 9-11 was to connect that attack to Iraq in the public mind. They needed a fig leaf for the naked aggression that was already a given in their minds and plans. The big secret was what Saddam Hussein had done on September 24, 2000. He had announced Iraq would no longer accept U.S. dollars for oil but only euros. And then he converted all of Iraq's $10 billion Reserve Fund into euros. The new currency of united Europe, the euro, could not be allowed to threaten the dollar's monopoly of world oil payments.

If other oil producers followed his lead, the dollar would tank. All those petrodollars would no longer be needed to buy oil and the supply of dollars would outstrip demand. The standard of living in the U.S. would plummet. This was the trigger that led to the US capture of Iraq and its huge oil reserves.

Saddam had to go. Other oil producers had to be convinced not to convert their oil payments to euros, or else. War to save the petrodollar was inevitable. But you can't tell the world you are starting a war so a corporation called the Federal Reserve can keep on printing money. So, first the cry was WMD. Then Saddam is brutal. Finally, it was democracy .

But the critics of the Iraq war are wrong. Invading with too few troops against the Joint Chiefs of Staff's advice wasn't a mistake. Allowing chaos and looting (except at the Iraqi Oil Ministry) wasn't a lapse in oversight. Disbanding the Iraqi Army and putting hundreds of thousands of angry, unpaid young men on the streets wasn't poor judgement. All were more likely part of a plan known only at the highest levels of the administration. This plan required reasons for permanent U.S. control of Iraqi oil, priced in dollars and sold for dollars. Post-invasion chaos and turmoil were absolutely necessary to provide public reasons for the U.S. military to remain in Iraq after our invasion toppled Saddam.

...

Saddam's sin wasn't the gassing of the Kurds. Rumsfeld and Cheney didn't mind that. Saddam wasn't wrong in building WMD's. Rumsfeld and Cheney actually helped him year's ago. Saddam made the fatal error of refusing to take corporate IOU's called Federal Reserve notes because he, like the rest of the world, knew this paper keeps on losing value, year after year after year.

Look in your wallet. Guess what you are holding.

Spengler forum post, Terry Stone

The Petro-Dolar and Petro-Euro conflict

...

Going back to the pre-ear period, until November 2000, no OPEC country dared breaking the petro-dollar system. Driven by the spirit of defying the United States and the long term oil supply agreements with France and Germany, on Sept. 24, 2000, Saddam Hussein’s government announced that it would no longer accept dollars for oil being sold under the UN Oil for Food program. All oil sales were to be paid for in euro. Taking into consideration that Iraq, has the world's second largest proven reserves - some 112 billion barrels, and at least another 100bn of unproven reserves, according to the US Department of Energy. US buys up Iraqi oil to stave off crisis we can see the magnitude of the serious threat looming over the Petro-Dollar system. Hence we can understand why the U S invaded Iraq.

Similarly Iran announced switching the oil sales from Petro-dollar to Petro-Euro. Starting from 20.3.2006

...

Vega.soi.city BaghdadmeNews post

Learned Hand

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

Billings Learned Hand quote

The Big Business of Blocking Entry

...

It is likely that many viewers interpret the alleged growing corporate advocacy of actions to limit carbon admissions as prima facia evidence of the basic validity of Gore's alarmism. Would business be willing to acquiesce to harmful regulation if corporate leaders were not persuaded that a real emergency exists?

Ms. Easton, and most viewers, likely fail to perceive that businesses are illustrating Nobel Prize winning economist George Stigler's 1971 theory of government regulation.* Incumbent businesses seek legislation impeding the entry of competitors into their product markets.

Suppose, for example, petroleum refining is the main activity of an American corporation. This corporation cannot obtain legislation to outlaw the expansion of the petroleum refining industry, especially in the face of rising gasoline prices grieving the American public.

However, if citing a new refinery, or expanding a competitor's existing one, involves an increase in the emission of carbon dioxide, which it almost certainly would, then a cap on carbon emissions will covertly serve the same purpose. In a March 6 article in TCS Daily, Arnold Kling explains that "cap and trade" legislation is being proposed as a method of limiting carbon dioxide emissions - a method that would exempt some or all of the existing levels of emissions from present-day refineries by capping them. Permits licensing some or all emissions at the enactment date's levels would be given to established firms which could then sell them to other firms. What that legislation would do, in addition to providing a valuable permit windfall, is make it more costly for competitors to expand their refining capacity or to enter the refining industry at all.

...

TSC Daily article

The Logic of Collective Action

The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups is a book by Mancur Olson, Jr. first published in 1965. It develops a theory of political science and economics of concentrated benefits verses diffuse costs.

The book challenged accepted wisdom in Olson’s day that
1) if everyone in a group has interests in common, then they will act collectively to achieve them
2) in a democracy, the greatest concern is that the majority will tyrannize and exploit the minority.

The book argues that individuals in any group attempting collective action will have incentives to "free ride" on the efforts of others if the group is working to provide public goods. Individuals will not “free ride” in groups which provide benefits only to active participants. Public goods are goods which are non-excludable (i.e. one person cannot reasonably prevent another from consuming the good) and non-rival (one person’s consumption of the good does not affect another’s, nor vice-versa). Hence, without selective incentives to motivate participation, collective action is unlikely to occur even when large groups of people with common interests exist.

The book also noted that large groups will face relatively high costs when attempting to organize for collective action while small groups will face relatively low costs. Furthermore, individuals in large groups will gain relatively less per capita of successful collective action; individuals in small groups will gain relatively more per capita through successful collective action. Hence, in the absence of collective incentives, the incentive for group action diminishes as group size increases, so that large groups are less able to act in their common interest than small ones.

The book concludes that, not only will collective action by large groups be difficult to achieve even when they have interests in common, but situations can occur where the minority (bound together by concentrated selective incentives) dominate the majority.

Futher reading:

Philip G. Cerny, "Globalization and the Changing Logic of Collective Action", International Organization, Vol. 49, no. 4 (Autumn 1995)

Brooke Lichtenstein, "Review of The Logic of Collective Action", PSC 129, Febuary 24, 2005

Bibliovault.org, "Table of Contents", Harvard University press

Warming climate creates mountains of mushrooms

It is perhaps the most striking example of how global warming is turning up the heat on the world's wildlife. Across the UK, wild mushrooms are reproducing twice a year instead of the usual once, the first time climate change has been reported to affect the life cycle of any organism in this way.

Many fungus species spend their lives in the soil as a fibrous mat called a mycelium. Once a year they reproduce, forming the fruiting bodies that are the familiar caps and stools that speckle forest floors. In the UK, this used to happen around September, during the onset of the British autumn. Now all that has changed.

Within just 50 years, many fungi have doubled the length of their breeding season from 33 days on average to 74, according to a survey of 315 species conducted by Alan Gange at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, and colleagues. Species now appear above ground in July, mainly as a result of warmer temperatures, and the scarcity of frosts means they keep breeding into December.

Positive effect

More significantly, many have also switched to reproducing twice a year, fruiting once in the British spring and again in the autumn, something unheard of before temperatures began to climb in the mid-1970s. "The most astonishing thing from our analysis is that 30% of the species we looked at now fruit in May as well," says Gange.

19:00 05 April 2007
NewScientist.com
Andy Coghlan

China limits synfuel

Bloomberg News
Published: July 14, 2006

HONG KONG China, the world's biggest energy consumer after the United States, on Friday announced restrictions on projects that turn coal into liquid fuels and chemicals to avoid overcapacity and the waste of resources.

China will not approve coal-to-fuel, or synfuel, projects that have an annual production capacity of less than three million metric tons, the National Development and Reform Commission, the top Chinese economic planning agency, said in a statement on its Web site.

Record oil costs are spurring China to build plants that can turn some of its coal reserves, the world's third-largest, into auto fuels and raw materials for making plastics. Sasol of South Africa, the biggest producer of motor fuel from coal, said last month that China had the potential for at least 12 coal-to-fuel plants.

...

IHt article

Crude: Barrels of fun to crack you up

...

However, crude prices and the prices of its products do not move in absolute lockstep. A 5% rise in crude over some period of time may produce a 3%, a 4% or a 6%, 7% or 8% rise in the products. If the products' prices are moving higher at a greater percentage rate than the crude, it means that it is becoming comparatively more profitable to be a refiner than a producer of oil, since what you are receiving as a price for your finished product, the petroleum finished products, is rising faster than what you are paying for the raw material you need to make that product, crude oil.

A complex mathematical formula called the "crack spread" ("crack" being the industry jargon verb defining the process in which crude oil is refined into products) illustrates this ever-dynamic price relationship between crude and its products. As it rises, crude's products are becoming comparatively dearer than crude itself. No matter what the media are reporting about the world's various far-flung crises, if the crack spread is rising, the products, especially gasoline, are leading crude oil up, not the other way around.

So what's the crack spread doing during the current Iran/UK crisis? Just like It Happens Every Spring, it's rising, but this year it's rising earlier, faster and higher than previously. From being under 10 for most of the previous six months, it has surged to almost 25 recently. It pulled back a bit early last week, but by Friday, March 30, it was on the move again, closing at 18.37, up 12% on the day.

Every time the price of crude rises and the Western popular media accuse OPEC nations of price gouging, their defense is that it's not them, it's the Western oil companies. The rising crack spread essentially proves their point. There's no real shortage of crude oil; actually, the world is awash in it. Spare refining capacity, that's another story.

Fox News is dealing with consumer concern over rising US energy prices by working overtime to make sure that their newsreaders speak the name "Al Gore", the Oscar winner for An Inconvenient Truth and former US vice-president and Democratic party candidate for president in 2000, as the audio accompanying video of US gas stations displaying $3 a gallon or more prices for gasoline on their signboards. Much like the conditioned-reflex therapy attempted on Alex in A Clockwork Orange, in which he was administered a nausea-inducing and respiration-suppressing drug while watching violent films, thus making him associate the two, the intention here is apparently to make viewers think of, and associate Gore with, the current financial unpleasantness of filling their cars with fuel.

...

If environmental Luddites are preventing creation of new US refinery capacity, surely that can't be true in the 95 other countries where refineries are currently sited, not to mention the 100 or so other countries where they are not. Many of these countries are in the Third World; they are desperately poor, and local environmental movements, if they exist at all, are at most nascent. Surely, if the oil companies knocked on their door asking to build a new refinery or expand a currently sited one, they would not say no.

But, like Sherlock Holmes' dog that didn't bark, the story here is the knocks on the doors that don't come, the world refinery capacity that isn't being built.

According to the Energy Information Administration of the US Department of Energy, total world refinery capacity has only increased 1.5% from 2000 to 2005, from 81.53 to 82.8 million barrels a day (mb/d).

...

Atimes article

Mars' global warming

Dust blamed for warming on Mars

Scientists have been puzzling over the cause of dramatic global warming on Mars, which has made parts of the south polar ice cap disappear in recent years.

* 18:00 04 April 2007
* David L Chandler

Mars could be undergoing major global warming

Mars is undergoing global warming that could profoundly change the planet's climate in a few thousand years, new data suggests.

* 10:05 07 December 2001
* Jeff Hecht

* NewScientist.com news service

If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuels

by George Monbiot, Guardian, 27 March 2007

From the article:

It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless. In theory, fuels made from plants can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cars and trucks. Plants absorb carbon as they grow - it is released again when the fuel is burned. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil plants to living ones, governments on both sides of the Atlantic claim to be "decarbonising" our transport networks.

In the budget last week, Gordon Brown announced that he would extend the tax rebate for biofuels until 2010. From next year all suppliers in the UK will have to ensure that 2.5% of the fuel they sell is made from plants - if not, they must pay a penalty of 15p a litre. The obligation rises to 5% in 2010. By 2050, the government hopes that 33% of our fuel will come from crops. Last month George Bush announced that he would quintuple the US target for biofuels: by 2017 they should be supplying 24% of the nation's transport fuel.
So what's wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster. In 2004 I warned, on these pages, that biofuels would set up a competition for food between cars and people. The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are richer than those who are in danger of starvation. It would also lead to the destruction of rainforests and other important habitats. I received more abuse than I've had for any other column - except for when I attacked the 9/11 conspiracists. I was told my claims were ridiculous, laughable, impossible. Well in one respect I was wrong. I thought these effects wouldn't materialise for many years. They are happening already.

Since the beginning of last year, the price of maize has doubled. The price of wheat has also reached a 10-year high, while global stockpiles of both grains have reached 25-year lows. Already there have been food riots in Mexico and reports that the poor are feeling the strain all over the world. The US department of agriculture warns that "if we have a drought or a very poor harvest, we could see the sort of volatility we saw in the 1970s, and if it does not happen this year, we are also forecasting lower stockpiles next year". According to the UN food and agriculture organisation, the main reason is the demand for ethanol: the alcohol used for motor fuel, which can be made from maize and wheat.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2043462,00.html

Algae-Based Fuels Set to Bloom?

Oil from microorganisms could help ease the nation's energy woes.

Algae makes oil naturally. Raw algae can be processed to make biocrude, the renewable equivalent of petroleum, and refined to make gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and chemical feedstocks for plastics and drugs. Indeed, it can be processed at existing oil refineries to make just about anything that can be made from crude oil. This is the approach being taken by startups Solix Biofuels, based in Fort Collins, CO, and LiveFuels, based in Menlo Park, CA.

Alternatively, strains of algae that produce more carbohydrates and less oil can be processed and fermented to make ethanol, with leftover proteins used for animal feed. This is one of the potential uses of algae produced by startup GreenFuel Technologies Corporation, based in Cambridge, MA.

The theoretical potential is clear. Algae can be grown in open ponds or sealed in clear tubes, and it can produce far more oil per acre than soybeans, a source of oil for biodiesel. Algae can also clean up waste by processing nitrogen from wastewater and carbon dioxide from power plants. What's more, it can be grown on marginal lands useless for ordinary crops, and it can use water from salt aquifers that is not useful for drinking or agriculture. "Algae have the potential to produce a huge amount of oil," says Kathe Andrews-Cramer, the technical lead researcher for biofuels and bioenergy programs at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, NM. "We could replace certainly all of our diesel fuel with algal-derived oils, and possibly replace a lot more than that."

To be sure, the use of algae for liquid fuels has been studied extensively in the past, including through a program at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) that ran for nearly a decade. At the time, the results were not encouraging. The NREL program was terminated in 1996, largely because at the time crude-oil prices were far too low for algae to compete.

Source: Algae-Based Fuels Set To Bloom - Oil From Microorganisms Could Help Ease The Nation's Energy Woes., Kevin Bullis, Technology Review, 07/02/05

Claus Hoffmann: Eine Kontroll-Architektur fur autonome emotionale Roboter-Agenten

Abstract:
Methoden der künstlichen Intelligenz gewinnen zunehmend an praktischer Bedeutung. Manch einer betrachtet inzwischen die Buchstaben KI nicht nur als Abkürzung für künstliche Intelligenz sondern auch für künftige Informatik. So gelten Agententechnologien, Wissensverarbeitung und personalisierte Benutzerschnittstellen als zukünftige Megatrends. Agententechnologien können dazu verwendet werden, Assistenzsysteme zu realisieren. Assistenzsysteme sind intelligente Systeme, die unter der Kontrolle von Menschen flexibel und robust Teilaufgaben eines Problems lösen können. Menschen übernehmen dabei die Leitungsfunktion. Agenten führen die ihnen erteilten Aufträge möglichst autonom aus. Wenn dabei Probleme auftauchen, die sie selbst nicht lösen können, sind sie dazu in der Lage dies frühzeitig festzustellen und ggf. ihre menschlichen Benutzer um Unterstützung zu bitten. Realisierungen von Agenten können sowohl SW-Agenten als auch Roboter-Agenten sein. Hier befassen wir uns mit der Konstruktion von Roboter-Agenten, nehmen aber an, dass die gefundenen Lösungen auch für das Engineering von SW-Agenten interessant sein können. In der Robotik-Forschung existieren zwar bereits erste Ansätze, jedoch für einige Kern-Probleme konnten bisher noch keine überzeugenden Lösungen gefunden werden. Drei wesentliche, noch offene Punkte sind:

* In komplexen dynamischen Umgebungen ist es schwierig die interne Sicht eines Roboter-Agenten mit der äußeren Realität konsistent zu halten.
* Es gibt noch kein überzeugendes Konzept für das Zusammenspiel zwischen Reaktivität und Deliberativität.
* Die Kommunikation mit Menschen in der Qualität, wie sie für eine effektive Zusammenarbeit benötigt wird, ist noch weitgehend ungelöst.

In der Psychologie, Kognitionswissenschaft und Emotionsforschung finden sich Vorschläge, die Vorbild für die Lösung dieser Probleme sein können. Bei Menschen sind Motivationen, kognitive Funktionen und darauf basierende Emotionen eine wesentliche Grundlage der Handlungssteuerung und Kommunikation. Sie bilden beispielsweise die Grundlage um:

* Mit anderen autonomen Agenten effektiv zu kommunizieren
* Sich unter eventuell hohem Zeitdruck ein lageabhängiges Bild der aktuellen Situation zu verschaffen
* Handlungsziele zu setzen
* Handlungen auszuarbeiten
* Diese Ausarbeitung lagespezifisch zu modulieren

Unser Ziel ist der Entwurf einer entsprechenden Kontroll-Architektur für Roboter-Agenten. Die Architektur soll die Grundlage sein für eine angemessene Interpretation der aktuellen Situation, einer lageabhängige Integration von Reaktivität und Deliberativität sowie zu effektivem kommunikativen Verhalten mit Menschen. Grundlage dafür sind maschinenbezogene Motivationen und daraus entstehende Emotionen. Das System besitzt natürlich keine Emotionen im menschlichen Sinne sondern emergente Zustände, die von menschlichen Benutzern als Emotionen interpretiert werden können.

The Tropical Pacific: The Sleeping Dragon Wakes, R.T. Pierrehumbert

The past ten thousand years has seen two special phenomena: The Earth climate has been unusually stable and human civilizations emerged. Could it be that the latter was only possible because of the former? (There is evidence that the emergence of hominids in Africa a few million years ago was also triggered by climate effects with a resulting reduction of forested land area.)

One important factor in stabilizing the climate fluctuations seems to be the "great oceanic conveyor belt" that kept pumping the equivalent of one Peta Watt (= 1015 Watt, the power of about a million nuclear power plants) of warm water to the North Atlantic. It could be show that every time a rapid climate change took place it was connected with a switching of the North Atlantic conveyor belt, technically known as "Thermo-Haline Circulation (THC)" (See also the article by J. Marotzke (9.1) and ComDig 1999.beta 2.10, 1999.beta6.2). This switching seems to be so sensitively dependent on detailed parameter configurations that current (coarse) general atmospheric circulation models could not reproduce this empirical feature. It appears to be one of the situations where the "butterfly effect" of chaos theory can play a role in the unpredictability of climate changes.

The situation is very different in the Pacific ocean where large scale circulations are mainly driven by wind patterns and therefore do not affect deep layers of the ocean. But the formation of convecting air is also "tippy" in the sense that small changes in initial conditions can either switch the convection system on or off. One of the parameters that have an impact on the wind patterns in the Pacific is the retreat of the ice around the Antarctic. Pierrehumbert even points out scenarios under which one of the most robust wind patterns the tropical easterly trade winds of the Pacific -familiar to many seafaring generations- could be turned off. He concludes: " If one is tugging on the dragon's tail with little notion of how much agitation is required to wake him, one must be pre-pared for the unexpected."

* The Tropical Pacific: The Sleeping Dragon Wakes, Pierrehumbert, R. T. , PNAS, Vol. 97, 1355–1358, 15 Feb 2000

Plants' Battle Against Disease Is 'Trench Warfare At Molecular Level'

Abstract: The search for information on the web is faced with several problems, which arise on the one hand from the vast number of available sources, and on the other hand from their heterogeneity. A promising approach is the use of multi-agent systems of information agents, which cooperatively solve advanced information-retrireview problems. This requires capabilities to address complex tasks, such as search and assessment of sources, query planning, information merging and fusion, dealing with incomplete information, and handling of inconsistency. In this paper, our interest is in the role which some methods from the field of declarative logic programming can play in the realization of reasoning capabilities for information agents. In particular, we are interested in how they can be used and further developed for the specific needs of this application domain. We review some existing systems and current projects, which address information-integration problems. We then focus on declarative knowledge-representation methods, and review and evaluate approaches from logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning for information agents. We discuss advantages and drawbacks, and point out possible extensions and open issues.

* Using Methods of Declarative Logic Programming for Intelligent Information Agents, T. Eiter, M. Fink, G. Sabbatini, H. Tompits, paper ID: cs.MA/0108008, arXiv 14-Aug-2001.
* Contributed by Carlos Gershenson

About political responsibility

The difficilties to which German idealism was exposed gave rise to the third wave of modernity-of the wave that bears us today. This last epoch was inaugurated by Nietzsche. Nietsche retained what appeared to him to be the insight due to the historical consiousness of the 19the century. But he rejected the view that the histrical process is rational as well as the premise that a harmony between the genuine individual and the modren state is possible. He may be said to have returned, on the level of the historical consiounses, from Hegel's reconciliation to Rousseau's antinomy. He taught then that all human life and human thoughts ultimatly rest on the horizon-forming creations which are not suscepitble of rational legitimization. The creators are great induviduals. The solitary creator who gives a new lamp unto himself and who subjects himself to all its rigors takes place of Rousseau's solitary dreamer. For Nature has ceased to appear as lawful and merciful. The fundamental experience of existence is therefor the experience, not the bliss, but the suffering, of emptiness, of an abyss.

Nietzsche's creative call to creativity was adressed to induviduals who should revolutionize their own lives, not the society or his nation. But he expected or hoped that his call, at once stern and imploring, questioning and desirous to be questioned, would tempt the best men of the generations afther him to become true selves and thus to form a new nobility which would be able to rule the planet. He opposed the possibility of a planterary aristocartie to the alleged necessity of a universal classless and stateless society. Being certain of the tameness of modern western man, he preached the sacred right of "merciless extinction" or large masses of men with as little restraint as his great anatgonist has done. He used much of his unsurpassable and inexhaustable power of passionate and fascinating speech for making his readers loathe, not only socialsim and communism, but conservatism, nationalism and democracyy as well.

Afther having taken upon himself this great political responsibility, he could not show his readers a way toward political responsability. He left them no choice except that between irresponsible indifference to politics and irresponsible political options. He thus prepared a regime which, as long as it lasted, made discredited democracy look again like a golden age. He tried to articulate his understanding both of the modern situation and of human life as such by his doctrine of will to power. The difficulty inherent in the philisophy of the will to power led afther Nietzsche to the explicit renunciation of the very notion eternity. Modern thought reaches its culmination, its highest seld-consiouness, in the most radical historicism, i.e., in explicity condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity. For obilivion of eternity, or in other words, enstrangement from mans deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues, is the price which modern man had to pay, from the beginning, for attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to become the master and owner of nature, to conquer chance.

L. Strauss
What is Political Philosophy?