FNFM  

I haven't done a Friday Night Fear Mongering post for quite some time (though I do fondly remember the response to last year's "Tick Tick Tick" effort), so while I should be trying to post something a bit more meaningful before I head down the coast for the weekend, instead here's some tinfoil and gloom for you to ponder.

Steve at Deconsumption is always a great provider of this sort of stuff - one recent post looked at a rumour of ammo shortages in the US (spread by the not entirely reliable "Urban Survival"), with speculation that the military is soaking it all up as it gets ready for action in Iran. If you think (as I do) that this seems an unlikely explanation (assuming the basic story is true), its still a lot closer to potential reality than the first commenter's impressively paranoid alternative theory - "It makes me think of a purely provisional suspicion, that the Armed Services are buying up ammo to keep civilians from being able to buy any, in anticipation of being able to crush any rebellion the government hopes to provoke in the government's own good time, when the government is good and ready."

Steve also has a post on end times messiahs.

National Geographic has a story about the increasing intensity of solar storms, with predictions of problems for electrical grids (which should make Duncan's followers quiver with anticipation) as well as a hook for adherents of the "end of the world in 2012" theory.

The next 11-year solar storm cycle should be significantly stronger than the current one, which may mean big problems for power grids and GPS systems and other satellite-enabled technology, scientists announced today.

The stronger solar storms could start as early as this year or as late as 2008 and should peak around 2012.

Rigzone reports that the 2006 hurricane season is predicted to rival the 2005 disaster.

The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season produced record numbers of named tropical storms (27), hurricanes (15), and Category-5 hurricanes (three), with Hurricane Emily likely to be upgraded as the fourth, according to Weather 2000. "These off-the-charts Tropical frequencies have set an anticlimactic benchmark, but also underscore the latest active multi-decadal cycle which the Atlantic Basin is in the midst of, and warrants awareness, caution and preparation," the New York-based forecasting service said.

Looking at the 2006 Atlantic season, Weather 2000 said its research, along with atmospheric and oceanographic parameters, are pointing towards a lot of activity. The company said it would not be surprised to see 15-22 named storms, eight-13 hurricanes and four-seven intense hurricanes.

Jeff Vail has a post which includes a notes that there is some talk that the Al Qaida attack on the Abqaiq complex did more damage than has been reported.

New suggestions that the recent al-Qa'ida attack on the Abqaiq gas oil separation facility wasn't exactly a failure, as has been widely reported. A member at peakoil.com says that, after visiting the facility today, the two explosions definitely happened inside the security perimeter, and in fact right next to critical points in the facility's infrastructure, actually causing some damage to the facility's oil processing capability. Not that a cover-up is surprising.

Jeff also has a post on "Smoke & Monetary Policy" which looks at debt, inflation and monetary collapse.

For an outstanding example of the broad and pervasive manipulation of economic parameters by the government, take a look at this fascinating interview with economist John Williams. Williams shows how, for at least the past 25 years, the government has systematically manipulated the most fundamental of economic parameters such as the Consumer Price Index (a measure of inflation), the unemployment rate, the growth rate of Gross Domestic Product, and more. This isn't just a case of minor fudging of the numbers--Williams provides a compelling argument, for example, that current US unemployment is currently over 12% (compared to the reported 4.6% in Jan. 2006), that the CPI is actually around 7% (compared to the reported 4% WITH energy prices included), and that the US economy actually shrank 1.9% in the last quarter (compared to the official, and already alarming "rise" of of 1.1%). Take a look at Williams "Shadow Government Statistics" site for more.

Jeff's thinking about where to put your money in the event of a steady meltdown of some currencies and an unpleasant end to the debt bubble seems to be in line with mine - forget gold and be careful about real estate given its high price - energy is the best store of value.

It increasingly seems like a financial collapse is only a matter of time. MAYBE there is a way that it could be averted, but not within the structural limitations of our system. From that standpoint, it seems obvious that we need to scrap "the system" and start over. Of course, that's a completely unrealistic solution on a large scale--but it is certainly attainable on a localized scale. One of the tricks will be how to transition assets that are currently "within the system" to "outside the system" without a great loss in value--especially the ability to withstand symptoms of a systemic collapse such as hyperinflation, housing busts, etc. Personally, I'm not a big fan of gold, because it's much-lauded "inherent value" is really just a function of the desire AND ability of society to possess it as a luxury item--if the financial circumstances force more of a "survival mode," then the demand for luxury items will actually drop. It's hard to say exactly how much of gold's present value is its "inherent value" in a sociological sense--that is, the portion of its value that will remain--and how much of it is just a result of increased demand for luxuries. Productive land or energy commodities seem like a better bet to me... with the latter being an especially good hedge against hyperinflation, and even better than gold as a hedge if Peak Oil ends up being a cause of that hyperinflation to begin with.

SW notes that more than half of americans are apparently intellectually challenged, with a poll showing that most of them don't believe the theory of evolution. He also has a good snippet from James Woolcott on the challenges Dubya will face when he is eventually ejected from the White House, much to the relief of the disguntled populace (hopefully his poll numbers will have reached an all-time record low soon, as befits the worst president the US has ever had).

Once he leaves office, it's difficult to think of any country Bush will be able to set foot on the tarmac (apart from Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait) where a posse won't be waiting to haul him in for crimes against humanity. As president, his security apparatus can depopulate the streets of London or the Irish countryside to keep protesters unseen and unheard; as ex-president, his imperial desires will be less indulged, his protective bubble considerably shrunken.

Fox News and conservative talk radio are flapping their rubber gums with pseudo indignation over the high-school class in Parsippany that's conducting a war crimes trial of Bush, but it's entirely plausible that someday a similar proceeding may be held at the Hague, or in the foyer of Hell. High school isn't a bad place to start.

Past Peak has a pair of posts worth reading - one on the ever expanding gaze of Big Brother (and the slowness of his payment processing minions in the Department of Homeland Security) and one on the decreasing amount of data available to normal people - in this case the right to know what is in their food.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted. [...]

In case you had any lingering doubts about whether massive, automated surveillance of Americans — the kind of data-mining that was supposedly banned when Congress defunded the Total Information Awareness program — is still going on, this story is a reality check.

Mobjectivist has a sobering post on the cliff Norway's oil production seems to be falling off.



Clashes are continuing in the Niger Delta between the military and MEND rebels. It seems this is could be just a turf war over who gets to siphon off oil from Shell's oilfields.

Karavans has some interesting posts on "where has all the optimism gone" and the "Best Place to Live in the Event of Collapse".

Robert Fisk's recent interview on Lateline on the topic of the steady escalation of violience in Iraq seemed a bit wishy-washy (and prompted some tinfoil analysis at RI with the imaginative title of "Iraq's Hutu Radio").

In a March 2 interview with Australian Television, Robert Fisk asked a similar, rhetorical question:

The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al Qaeda, it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. I'd like to know what the Americans are doing to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems to me not very much. We don't hear of any suicide bombers being stopped before they blow themselves up. We don't hear of anybody stopping a mosque getting blown up. We're not hearing of death squads all being arrested. Something is going very, very wrong in Baghdad. Something is going wrong with the Administration.

In the same broadcast, professional coincidentalist Daniel Pipes was as forthcoming as modesty permitted: "should there be a civil war, it is not necessarily all that bad for our interests. By no means am I endorsing it, by no means do I want one. I'm looking at it in a cool way and saying there are advantages to it."

Paul McGeogh's report in the Herald today went a bit closer to providing the likely explanation (one familiar to long time readers) - the implementation of the Salvador option.

Despite constant official denials and empty promises to disband militias that operate inside - or alongside - units of the Shiite-controlled security forces, Baghdad had one of its worst days on Wednesday. Fifty people were abducted in a daylight raid on a security agency, and the city was reeling from the discovery the night before of 18 men in an abandoned minibus. Almost 50 others died violently across the country in the same 24-hour period.

In a sinister attempt to cleanse public records of the handiwork of what senior US officials now openly refer to as "death squads", staff at Baghdad's central morgue say they have been ordered to catalogue violent death only by bombings or insurgency clashes - not as execution-style shootings.

The orders are said to have been imposed by senior officials of one of the biggest Shiite religious parties, the Iranian-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. They follow the flight from Iraq last week by the morgue director after he publicly revealed the extent of the gangster-like killings.

In a statement released in Baghdad, a United Nations human rights official appeared to confirm the new regime at the morgue, claiming "the acting director is under pressure by the Interior Ministry not to reveal such information and to minimise the number of casualties".

Many of the raids are carried out by masked men wearing the uniforms of the US-trained security forces, controlled by the Interior Ministry, and driving what appear to be new government-owned vehicles.

The minibus was found by US forces patrolling in Amariyah, a predominantly Sunni quarter in the west of the capital.

Gunmen who raided a security firm controlled by a relative of the Sunni Vice-President, Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, were dressed in government-issue police uniforms, but there were contradictory official responses to the attack, in which 50 guards disappeared. Three senior Interior Ministry officials told reporters no such raid had been authorised. But two others claimed it was an officially sanctioned operation by police commandos acting on a client's complaint.

My earlier conspiracy theory of the Iranian's being behind the destruction of the Samarra shrine was one possible scenario, but I suspect this one is more likely - and it was well flagged in advance, though perhaps the tinfoil community don't pay as much attention to the mainstream press as they should. I have a vague recollection of once reading an article by (I think) Alex Jones of all people, who was (for some reason now lost on me) covering a Noam Chomsky speaking tour of Australia, where he noted that the best way to get real news was to read the financial press (presumably he wasn't talking about the Wall Street Journal op ed page) as it had to stick closer to reality than propaganda in order to keep its readership informed of what is actually going on (as they make decisions which need to based on fairly accurate information unlike the average consumer of the products of News Corp, for example).

Anyway - its all very ugly stuff, and I'm sure there will be a price to pay in the long run (and I'm not just talking about Bush leading an old age similar to that of General Pinochet - we'll all be paying it).

On a more positive note, Dave Roberts has posts on decentralized energy generation (and my favourite topic of smart grids) and a new review on global warming denier and aspiring soft porn writer Michael Crichton.

She took a sip of red wine, then set the glass down on the bedside table. Unceremoniously, she pulled her top over her head and dropped her skirt. She was wearing nothing beneath.

Still in her high heels, she walked toward him. ... She was so passionate she seemed almost angry, and her beauty, the physical perfection of her dark body, intimidated him, but not for long.

--State of Fear by Michael Crichton

It may be hard to fathom that someone capable of writing the above passage is also capable of discovering the hidden truth about global warming that has eluded the world's leading scientists.

Singapore has announced it is joining the Kyoto protocol.

The Energy Blog has a bunch of good posts for those who are interested in developments in solar energy - a summary on Concentrating PV Solar, a post on Concentrix's concentrating photovoltaic technology, and one on a solar overview on CNET.

And to close, Bruce's latest (long) Viridian Note is out, with the pope emperor continuing his musings on the subject of blobjects and spimes, and introduces a new one - "blogjects" ("objects which emit data about their use" - I wonder if that includes us compulsive blog posters or if it only applies to spimes emitting regular updates). WorldChanging also has some comments on this note.

When I try to describe an Internet of Things, I find that the most refreshing and interesting and promising aspects are not based in older words, but in the present-day realities of computing. It's the new stuff that has emerged from massive human interaction with the technology. Classic computer science never talked about this much, because they just didn't imagine it.

In the past, they just didn't get certain things. For instance:

1. the digital devices people carry around with them, such as laptops, media players, camera phones, PDAs.
2. wireless and wired local and global networks that serve people in various locations as they and their objects and possessions move about the world.
3. the global Internet and its socially-generated knowledge and Web-based, on-demand social applications.

This is a new technosocial substrate. It's not about intelligence, yet it can change our relationship with physical objects in the three-dimensional physical world. Not because it's inside some box trying to be smart, but because it's right out in the world with us, in our hands and pockets and laps, linking and tracking and ranking and sorting.

Doing this work, in, I think, six important ways:

1. with interactive chips, objects can be labelled with unique identity == electronic barcoding or arphids, a tag that you can mark, sort, rank and shuffle.
2. with local and precise positioning systems == geolocative systems, sorting out where you are and where things are.
3. with powerful search engines == auto-googling objects, more sorting and shuffling.
4. with cradle to cradle recycling == sustainability, transparent production, sorting and shuffling the garbage.
Then there are two other new factors in the mix.
5. 3d virtual models of objects == virtual design == cad-cam, having things present as virtual objects in the network before they become physical objects.
6. rapid prototyping of objects == fabjects, blobjects, the ability to digitally manufacture real-world objects directly or almost directly from the digital plans.

If objects had these six qualities, then people would interact with objects in an unprecedented way, a way so strange and different that we'd think about it better if this class of object had its own name. I call an object like this a "spime," because an object like this is trackable in space and time.

Why do we need a new word for a concept like that? Because the old words distract our attention.

"Spimes are manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes begin and end as data. They're virtual objects first and actual objects second."

Why would we want to do such a weird thing? Mostly so that we can engage with objects better during their lifecycle, from the moment of invention to their decay. That's the technical reason, the design reason: but the real reason would be because of how that would feel.