Iceland Was Right, Terror Futures, West Nile Spraying

corbettreport

The Revenge of Geography

Natural gas - Special Report

EconomistMagazine

The End Of Civilization

jakevanek

Peak Oil Oppositional Disorder: Neurosis or Psychosis?

ClubOrlov/

The latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has grown to include 297 disorders, but it seems that there is always room for one more.

Richard Heinberg recently published an article that addresses various recent claims that Peak Oil is no longer a concern. His term for the phenomenon is “peak denial.” It sounds good, and dovetails nicely with Richard's overall theme of “peak everything.” It's a thoughtful piece that does a thorough job of exposing the surreal nature of the optimists' projections, and I have no issues with his argument. I do, however, have an issue with his terminology. First, since denial does not happen to be a nonrenewable resource with a characterizable depletion profile, its peak, should we detect one, is not particularly meaningful, because it could just as easily peak again tomorrow and then again next century. Second, I suspect that “denial” is no longer the right word to describe the social phenomenon we are currently observing. I think that Ugo Bardi pointed us in the right direction: in his article reacting to George Monbiot's assertion that "We were wrong about peak oil, there is enough to fry us all," Ugo characterized Monbiot's approach to Peak Oil using another word: “delusion.”

If you feel that the distinction between denial and delusion is just a minor, innocuous terminological difference—a gratuitous splitting of hairs on my part—then pardon me while I whip out my Sigmund Freud: in The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis [1924] he wrote the following: “Neurosis does not disavow the reality, it ignores it; psychosis disavows it and tries to replace it.” [p. 185] What psychosis replaces reality with is delusion.

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Theoretical physicist Peter Higgs lives to see his boson

By Robert Evans

GENEVA — Peter Higgs was no good in the lab, but he never doubted that one day his theory of a powerful subatomic particle that bears his name would be proven right in practice. His surprise was that he lived to see that day.

Speaking at Geneva's CERN research center on Wednesday after experimental physicists announced the discovery of a new particle, a boson much as Higgs imagined half a century ago, he confessed to Reuters he felt "rather dazed but very pleased."

As a schoolboy in Bristol in the southwest of England, the now 83-year-old Higgs admitted to being "incompetent" at science in the laboratory. He went on, however, to specialize in the theoretical realm, applying mathematics to exploring the outer reaches of our understanding of the universe that makes us.

One paper he dispatched from Edinburgh University in 1964, as he was formulating a theory of an elusive particle to explain how an ordered universe emerged from Big Bang, was rejected by an academic physics journal edited at CERN.

But he gave no sign of bearing a grudge when he spent the day at the institution watching its experimental experts vindicate him.

"For me personally it is just the confirmation of something I did 48 years ago, and it is very satisfying to be proved right in some way," Higgs said in the interview. "I haven't been dreaming about it for 48 years because I had other things to do with my life. At the beginning, I had no expectation that I would still be alive when it happened."

That experimental proof had been delivered in his own lifetime was, he said, "incredible," and he suggested the moment would have greatly surprised his early science teachers: "I certainly did some lab work as a schoolboy in Bristol. I was incompetent," he said, a boyish grin flitting across his round face.

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Higgs boson: La particula de Dios

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Don Tapscott on The Theory of Wikinomics: Rethinking Civilization for an Age of Networked Intelligence

By AspenInstitute

What Will the Top Ten Companies Be in 2050?

ForaTv

Ian Bremmer on Apple, China and the G-Zero World

TimeMagazine

Agenda 21's Globalist Death Plan for Humanity

TheAlexJonesChannel

Amnistía Internacional - Informe 2012

AmnestyInternational

Elon Musk and the Giving Pledge

By EconomistMagazine

Revealed – the network that runs the world

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)

By Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie 

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.  More >>

"La doctrina del shock"/ Naomi Klein

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Wasteful military spending?

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Notes from the Field

ClubOrlov

[Guest post by Mark. As I keep saying, being poor takes practice.]

You hear a lot of talk about relocalization and deindustrialization. The pastoral life, the good old days. How romantic! Reality pays you a visit when your pick-axe hits a rock, a chunk hits your face, and you taste your own blood.

Unaware of it at the time, I was a child of privilege, one of five born to a Chairman of Earth and Space Sciences at a State University in New York. We were all expected to be high achievers. I fulfilled the expectation and put in 32 years as an engineer helping the über-wealthy zip around the skies in personal rocket ships from one golf game to another while chalking it off as business expenses, when all I ever really wanted to do was sit out in the woods and cook some food on a stick over a fire.

In 1994 I acquired a 160 acre tract of land in southeast Kansas, for a price only slightly above chicken feed, as a weekender place to go sit by that fire and decompress from the rat-race. 18 years ago the future didn't look quite so ominous. Reel forward to the present and this full-time back-to-the-land experiment is starting to look like a pretty good idea. Some stark realities become self evident however when you are actually 'living the life'. Talking about it is easy. Doing it is something altogether different. Here is where I wish to convey a few 'notes from the field':

1. You realize after a while it is mostly hard, dirty, repetitive and boring. Mud, blood, shit, sweat, discomfort, disappointment, death. There are rewards, but you have to have a passion for it to endure. People who have grown up ranching already know these things of course, but they don't have to adapt. They know the life.

2. If you create an artificial abundance of anything, Mother Nature will do her best to return things to the status quo. Plant a large garden and you will have more venison than you can eat. Goats are not native to this region, coyotes are. Eagles, hawks, owls, raccoons, possums, foxes and bobcats are also native here. Chickens are not. They will all eat your chickens, given a chance.

3. If you want to eat meat, you have to kill something. It's brutal and unpleasant. Blood is blood, you best get used to it. Warm guts smell bad. They smell different, depending on what you just killed, but they all smell bad. The first time you shove an arm elbow deep in warm guts and blood to tear loose some connective tissue, you are hard pressed to not lose your lunch. It begins to get a bit easier when you have a chilled carcass with the hide peeled off, and the pieces you hack off start to look like something you would buy in a grocery store, but the lifeless eyes continue to stare.  

4. Intellectual deprivation. This was unexpected. It doesn't become apparent right away because you're so damned glad to be away from the crush of humanity and the demolition derby approach to getting around. Land is inexpensive in certain regions for a reason. Living elsewhere is much easier (so far). In this case, the regional economy has been in decline for 70 years. The population has declined nearly 80% from its peak, and the brain drain is close to 100%. Most anybody with ambition left long ago, and most youth leave, never to return. It is not hard now to understand why, historically, tribes of 1 to 5 haven't fared well. You need some minimum critical mass of human interaction to be able to survive psychologically, and some degree of specialization and division of labor just to cover all the bases. For those of you considering it, the 'survivalist bunker' approach to dealing with the future would be ill advised. Social interaction is not just something nice, it is an imperative.

Not to be too glum, on the upside there is sunshine, fresh air, fresh meat, eggs, milk, cheese, honey, fruits, nuts, vegetables, abundant wildlife and beautiful scenery. You don't need to 'go to the gym' to stay in shape either.

To peer into the future and see nothing beyond an endless re-run of this hard living is enough to put fear and dread in most hearts. I find it increasingly difficult to believe that dispossessed cubicle dwellers will be able to adapt physically or mentally.

In this setting it is not hard to envision the emergence of a tradition where you take each seventh day off from the grunt work and get together with your friends and neighbors just to celebrate the fact you are still breathing. No deities or voodoo required. Then just for fun, throw a big feast every solstice and equinox and invite everybody. Wait... haven't we been there before?

People tend to think of a 'land of milk and honey' as something idyllic and easy. This land of milk and honey is accessible, tangible and real, but it comes with strings attached.

The World is Laughing on Fidel [Video]

comentario dejado en el sitio kaxtrizta VideosCubaHoy: esto no lo van a pasar pero no importa porque es para ustedes. chico, yo se que esto lo cuelgan en youtube porque se los mandan, pero por alla por el hipotalamo no les da verguenza mostrar al mundo a un anciano decrepito, senil, autosuficiente y megalomano [lo de criminal, asesino, dictador,... es otro asunto], hablando estupideces. the world is watching it and it's laughing. son el alma reir del mundo.

Madonna’s Superbowl Halftime Show: A Celebration of the Grand Priestess of the Music Industry

Vigilant Citizen

When I learned that Madonna – aka the Grand Priestess of the music industry – would be performing at the Superbowl halftime show, I thought: “This should be interesting”. And it was. While most were amazed by a woman in her fifties dancing around with LMFAO and others were annoyed at her lipsynching, I was amazed by something else: the flurry of symbolism flashed to billions of worldwide viewers. While most saw Madonna’s performance as an entertaining interlude to the most important football game of the year, those with symbol-literacy will probably agree: Madonna’s halftime show was a big celebration of the Illuminati industry and of its Grand Priestess, Madonna.
A week before the Superbowl, Madonna described on Anderson Cooper the spiritual importance she attributed to her Half-Time show:

“The Superbowl is kind of like the Holy of Holies in America. I’ll come at halfway of the “church experience” and I’m gonna have to deliver a sermon. It’ll have to be very impactful.”

It is rather appropriate that this Kaballah-intiate referred to the Superbowl as the “Holy of Holies” as it was the name of the most sacred place in Solomon’s Temple. No one was ever permitted the Holy of Holies but the High Priest and only on the Day of Atonement – to offer the blood of sacrifice and incense before the mercy seat. Madonna’s analogy was therefore rather telling of the mindset behind her performance. Let’s look at the main parts of her show.
Vogue or Entrance of the Priestess
Madonna entrance is an elaborate procession fit for a High Priestess or even a goddess.

Pushed by hundreds of Roman soldiers and welcomed by hundreds of women, Madonna’s glorious entrance is a reflection of her status in the entertainment world. 

Her first performance is highly influenced by ancient Egypt-Sumeria-Babylon and Madonna’s costume recalls an ancient Babylonian goddess.

The decor of Madonna’s first performance combines elements from ancient Egypt, Sumeria and Babylon. Madonna herself is dressed in a way that highly resembles an Ancient Sumerian/Babylonian goddess, Inanna-Ishtar. 

Ishtar with her foot on a roaring lion and wearing a distinctive headdress thatresembles the one worn by Madonna. Ishtar is often depicted with wings, a feature that is recalled on Madonna’s “carriage”. 

Ishtar was a powerful and assertive goddess whose areas of control and influence included warfare, love, sexuality, prosperity, fertility and prostitution. She sought the same existence as men, enjoying the glory of battle and seeking sexual experiences. Madonna’s as Ishtar is therefore quite interesting as one can argue that the pop singer has embodied, throughout her career, the same assertive yet highly sexual qualities of Ishtar, even achieving a state of power in the music industry that is usually reserved to men. On an esoteric level, Ishtar is associated with the planet Venus, known as the Morning Star or the Evening Star – a name also attributed to Lucifer in occult schools.
So in this mythologically-charged setting Madonna performed Vogue. During the performance, we saw dancers on the covers of Vogue, a magazine that is at the forefront of Illuminati symbolism in fashion (as seen in the series of articles Symbolic Pics of the Month).
Vogue ends with a symbol that is consistent with the Egyptian-Babylonian theme of the performance. It is also highest importance in occult Secret Societies such as Freemasons, the Rosicrucians and the Illuminati: the Winged Sun-Disk.

The song ends with the displaying of the symbol of the Winged Sun-Disk. 

Egyptian mystics used the winged sun for ritualistic magic and invocations:

“‘Emblematic of the element of air, this consists of a circle or solar-type disk enclosed by a pair of wings. In ritual magic it is suspended over the alter in an easterly direction and used when invoking the protection and co-operation of the sylphs.”
-Hope, Murry, Practical Egyptian Magic

The winged sun is still being used today by groups like the Freemasons, the Theosophists and the Rosicrucians.

“The Winged Globe is pre-eminently a Rosicrucian symbol, although the Illuminati may lay claim to it, and it may be admitted that it is of Egyptian origin. The Winged Globe is the symbol of the perfected soul making its flight back to the source of its creation in the Elysian fields beyond.”
-Swinburne, Clymer, The Rosicrucians Their Teachings

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Mysterious Sounds Reported Around the World

Discovery News/

People around the world have reported hearing strange sounds from the skies over the past month. Sometimes they describe it as a hum or low rumble; other times it’s a whine, thump, or even a melody. Often the sounds have been recorded and posted online, fueling rumors and conspiracy theories.

One blogger wrote, "either the world is ending, aliens are landing or everyone is getting hoaxed. Or, possibly, there’s an actual scientific explanation for the mass amount of YouTube videos capturing bizarre sounds that are being heard around the globe. Are we witnessing the beginning of a full-scale alien invasion?"

So, what are people hearing (and recording)?

Natural Explanations

The explanations are almost as varied as the sounds themselves. There's not a single blanket explanation for all the mysterious sounds, though many have been identified. For example there's the recent "midnight roar" reported in Malaysia:

According to a Borneo Post report, the "Sky Roar" had been heard over Kota Samarahan from around 2am or 3am till dawn on both days. Terrified residents, the report added, described the noises as a "loud hushing" or "snoring" sound. The sounds were also recorded that night, and were later uploaded on YouTube. The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation has a very simple explanation – it was created by an oil palm factory testing their boiler pressure on Jan 11 and Jan 12.

In other cases the strange sound is still being researched; last week the Canadian government was asked to investigate a low-frequency hum that has intermittently plagued citizens in Windsor, Ontario for months. (If the conspiracy theorists are right, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper may soon get an unofficial visit from Men in Black-type agents warning him not to investigate.)  Read More >>