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It's WorldChanging's third birthday - hopefully they will be around for a long time into the future.

They include a list of highlights - to which I'd add The Post Oil Megacity, The Green Revolution (On Earth Day) and Postcards from the Global Food System.

It's quite odd, actually, to think that it's only been three years since we put up our first post (about Jim Moore's essay, The Second Superpower). That seems an age ago.

Looking back, though, it's amazing how well the stories we wrote that first month have anticipated the work we've done in the three years since, with pieces on Corruption and Transparency International, the Thai Bio-Solar House, the Earth Simulator, Organic Photovoltaics, Open Source and the Developing World. the Public Library of Science, Open Source Biology, Car-Free Cities, Creative Commons and Copyleft, Biomimicry, "Soft Paths" for Water, Solar Power in the Developing World, Knowing Nature Through Technology, Reducing Poverty and Greening Mega-Cities, The Ethics of Nanotechnology, Sustainable Business, MySociety, WiFi in the Himalayas and Ecological Economics.

It's also amazing to see how quickly many ideas we once thought fringe have moved so quickly into the mainstream. Sustainability, social change, collaborative innovation and emerging technologies are all popular concerns now. The Worldchanging community has had at least some small part in helping create that change.

Words can't express how annoyed I am with Blogger and Firefox, having just had a largish rant almost completed....

Here's a brief retry which will be longer on links than commentary than originally intended.

Jamais from Open The Future has a column at Futurismic up called "The Geoengineering Option", which follows on from his pieces at WorldChanging on "Terraforming Earth" (thankfully he's emphasising that geoengineering/terraforming is a last-ditch option).

Here's the good scenario: we have maybe a decade, fifteen years on the outside, before we need start seeing a significant and sustained global reduction of greenhouse gases if we are to avoid absolutely catastrophic environmental results. You know the litany by now: unstoppable sea level rise, famine from loss of agricultural land, countless deaths around the world from the heat and opportunistic diseases, extinctions galore, and on and on. Ten years is enough time to implement significant improvements in our transportation and energy technologies, our consumption patterns, and the design of our communities. We know the pieces that we need to put into place, it's just a question of getting them assembled in time.

Here's the not-so-good scenario: you know that decade we thought we had? It's more like a year or two. Good luck.

Nearly every plan for dealing with disastrous climate change depends on there being enough time to boost energy efficiency, redesign urban systems, change to cleaner transportation, and so forth, all to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before it's too late. If we don't make it, we likely hit a climate transition point where the global climate system finds a new stable state -- a "tipping point," if you will, into a climate this planet hasn't seen in a million years or more. The answer is simple, if daunting: we need to make sure that we start reducing anthrogenic carbon emissions before we get to that tipping point.

Newsweek has an article on the "big, big problems" facing big oil (poor little petals - how will they get by ?). The problems - rising costs, falling reserves and resource nationalism. Unmentioned is the underlying cause - peak oil.

Under the 11-year leadership of Lord John Browne, BP cultivated a reputation as a different kind of oil company, kinder and gentler on everything from the environment to the issue of women in its work force. Browne has often topped lists of "most-admired CEOs." But in recent months BP has suffered a deadly refinery explosion in Texas City, an oil spill in Alaska, and accusations that the company's trading arm manipulated energy markets. Key investors have asked whether there is a systemic problem at the company. U.S. congressmen have lambasted BP executives over safety standards. The U.S. Justice Department and other agencies are investigating; BP has appointed an ex-judge to review claims of whistle-blowers, some of whom allege a cover-up, which the company flatly denies. As Lord Browne told NEWSWEEK this summer, "We're moving from a situation of business as usual to a situation of business as unusual."

That transition doesn't end with BP. While the world's third largest oil company (after ExxonMobil and Shell) is undoubtedly in the hottest water, John Browne is by no means the only oil chief worried about the future. From the outside, the oil industry may look like a bunch of fat cats enjoying record prices, profits and CEO salaries. But what many executives dwell on are costs—which are rising as fast or faster than profits—and past experience, which tells them not to enjoy high prices because they are likely not to last.

Most see the recent price dip below $60 a barrel as only the first sign of a slide that will take prices below $40, even $30, as new supplies come on line. Indeed, the oil industry was so focused on containing costs for so many years before the recent runup in prices, many analysts say it was only a matter of time before a giant like BP found itself accused of cutting corners on safety and maintenance.

Implausible as it may seem for oil CEOs to plead hard times, the truth is that Big Oil is not much richer in absolute terms than it was before the price spike. For the past six years, returns have been flat—according to Goldman Sachs, the average integrated Western oil company will earn a 19 percent return on capital employed, up only about 2 percent since 2000. In the supremely capital-intensive oil industry, return on capital is a key measure, because it reflects not just how much profit a company made, but the cost of making it.

The bottom line: value creation at oil companies is stagnating. Companies are making more than ever before, but they're also spending unprecedented amounts to generate those profits. The problem is a perfect storm of factors: two decades of underinvestment, rising oil nationalism, the maturing of old reserves and more and more risky exploration projects. All of which has conspired to limit Western majors' access to easy oil, and to send costs spiraling out of control.

Newsweek is also asking if the oil boom is over - reading this you'd think there is a wall of oil about to hit the markets (its written by an Eni executive), but it smells more like pre-election propaganda to me. My prediction (widely shared) - the price will be heading north again after the election. The funniest part is the claim that rising Chinese demand is a myth (China oil imports - up 15% in 8 months).

Understanding the oil market is difficult. Making reasonable forecasts is almost impossible. That's why most analysts were surprised by the dip in prices from the Aug. 8 historic high of $79 per barrel to below $60 in recent days. Suddenly the alarmists who foresaw an imminent era of oil scarcity are silent, OPEC is again discussing supply cuts, oil share prices are down. And new conspiracy theories are flowing, like the one about the Republicans' pushing down gas prices before the U.S. midterm elections.

What's going on? Over the last few years the public has been bombarded by pessimistic warnings about a world inexorably running out of oil, in the midst of growing instability in oil states from Iran to Nigeria, and rising demand—particularly from China, India and other emerging economies. As this bleak scenario gained acceptance, it became easy to assume that the price of oil would defy the laws of gravity and break the barrier of $100 per barrel.

In fact, the current oil crisis has nothing to do with a catastrophic shrinking of global oil resources, while the specter of rising Asian demand is largely a myth—China has huge potential to reduce its oil consumption. Supply is tight because two decades of low prices discouraged the exploration and development of new fields in the world's most oil-rich areas. That has cut spare production capacity—the critical cushion needed to cope with crises—to just 2 to 3 percent of global consumption. This makes the price of oil a hostage to political and climatic events. There has been no objective rise in oil-state instability, only in the market's vulnerability to speculation—gloomy or not.

Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University has a column in, of all places, the Lebanon Daily Star, looking at the futility of neoconservative strategy in the middle east.

It always comes back to oil. The continuing misguided interventions in the Middle East by the United States and the United Kingdom have their roots deep in the Arabian sand. Ever since Winston Churchill led the conversion of Britain's navy from coal to oil at the start of the last century, the Western powers have meddled incessantly in the affairs of Middle Eastern countries to keep the oil flowing, toppling governments and taking sides in wars in the supposed "great game" of energy resources. But the game is almost over, because the old approaches are obviously failing.

Just when one is lulled into thinking that something other than oil is at the root of current US and UK action in Iraq, reality pulls us back. Indeed, President George W. Bush recently invited journalists to imagine the world 50 years from now. He did not have in mind the future of science and technology, or a global population of 9 billion, or the challenges of climate change and biodiversity. Instead, he wanted to know whether Islamic radicals would control the world's oil.

Whatever we are worrying about in 50 years, this will surely be near the bottom of the list. Even if it were closer to the top, overthrowing Saddam Hussein to ensure oil supplies in 50 years ranks as the least plausible of strategies. Yet we know from a range of evidence that this is what was on Bush's mind when his government shifted its focus from the search for Osama bin Laden to fighting a war in Iraq.

Saddam's overthrow was the longstanding pet idea of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, which was already arguing in the 1990s that Saddam was likely to achieve a stranglehold over "a significant proportion of the world's oil supplies." Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated those fears in the run-up to the Iraq war, claiming that Saddam was building a massive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction to "take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies."

Cheney's facts were wrong, but so was his logic. Dictators like Saddam make their living by selling their oil, not by holding it in the ground. Perhaps, though, Saddam was too eager to sell oil concessions to French, Russian, and Italian companies rather than British and US companies.

In any event, the war in Iraq will not protect the world's energy supplies in 50 years. If anything, the war will threaten those supplies by stoking the very radicalism it claims to be fighting. Genuine energy security will come not by invading and occupying the Middle East, or by attempting to impose pliant governments in the region, but by recognizing certain deeper truths about global energy.

First, energy strategy must satisfy three objectives: low cost, diverse supply, and drastically reduced carbon dioxide emissions. This will require massive investments in new technologies and resources, not a "fight to the finish" over Middle East oil.

It is ironic that an administration fixated on the risks of Middle East oil has chosen to spend hundreds of billions - potentially trillions - of dollars to pursue unsuccessful military approaches to problems that can and should be solved at vastly lower cost, through research and development, regulation, and market incentives. The biggest energy crisis of all, it seems, involves the misdirected energy of a US foreign policy built on war rather than scientific discovery and technological progress.

Japan seems to be in some danger of missing out on the chance to exploit Iran's giant Azadegan field.

apanese and Iranian developers failed to reach an agreement on tapping Iran's giant Azadegan oil field by the Tehran-set deadline on Saturday but the talks will continue until Monday, a news agency run by the Iranian Oil Ministry reported.

The talks have met difficulty over the amounts of additional investment to be made on the project while the Japanese government does not reportedly hope to see it launched before seeing the outcome of issues related to Iran's nuclear programs, the report said.

The Azadegan oil field is one of the world's largest, with estimated crude oil reserves amounting to 26 billion barrels.

Iran's developer, the National Petroleum and Gas Co., had warned that if the Japanese side failed to begin work by the deadline, the $US2 billion contract would be canceled, the report said.

Japanese government-linked Inpex Corp, which signed the contract with the National Iranian Oil Co in February 2004, has yet to start developing the oil field in southwestern Iran, citing a delay in Iranian demining work.

Renewable Energy Access has a post on Chinese harnessing of the seaside equivalent of a ground heat pump - the ocean.

China's first heating and cooling system to use seawater pumps is under construction in the northeast coastal city of Dalian and will begin operation this winter, according to China News Agency.

The second and third phases will supply neighboring residential areas as well, expanding the coverage to two million square meters.

The system harnesses the energy released by seawater temperature differences to provide buildings with air conditioning and heating, bringing huge potential energy savings and environmental benefits.

The project, located in Dalian's Xinghai Bay Commercial District, is an initiative of the Iceburg Group, a local large equipment manufacturer. The first phase of the project will equip the district's conference center and swimming pools with comfort heating over an area of 300,000 square meters. The second and third phases will supply neighboring residential areas as well, expanding the coverage to two million square meters.

By using seawater-derived heating and cooling, China may be able to avoid large investments in power generation and electricity grids. The systems could also bring significant environmental benefits to the nation, which generates more than half of its electricity from heavily polluting coal-fired power plants.

REA also reports that renewable energy is reaching a positive tipping point.

History will judge 2006 as the start of a major paradigm shift for the world's energy infrastructure, according to a leading environmental thinker.

Flavin said the tipping point toward renewable energy is forming now. The growing momentum will soon force the political realm and the business sector to change one another, drastically transforming the energy economy.

Speaking on RenewableEnergyAccess.com's Inside Renewable Energy podcast, Worldwatch Institute President Christopher Flavin said, "While much more needs to be done, I think we will look back and say, 'this was the moment.'"

Flavin said the tipping point toward renewable energy is forming now. The growing momentum will soon force the political realm and the business sector to change one another, drastically transforming the energy economy.

The UK Daily Telegraph reports that the Saudis are build a 550-mile fence to shut off the country from Iraq. Presumably another part of the masterplan that was Operation Iraqi Liberation.

Security in Iraq has collapsed so dramatically that Saudi Arabia has ordered the construction of a 550-mile high-tech fence to seal off its troubled northern neighbour.

The huge project to build the barrier, which will be equipped with ultraviolet night-vision cameras, buried sensor cables and thousands of miles of barbed wire, will snake across the vast and remote desert frontier between the countries.

The fence will be built despite the hundreds of millions of pounds that the Saudi kingdom has spent in the past two years to beef up patrols on its border with Iraq, with officials saying the crisis in Iraq is now so dangerous it must be physically shut out.

"Surveillance has already been stepped up over the past 18 months," said Nawaf Obaid, the director of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project, an institute that advises the government on security affairs.

"But the feeling in Saudi is that Iraq is way out of control with no possibility of stability. The urgency now is to get that border sealed: physically sealed."

The fence is a fresh sign that key allies of the United States in the Middle East are resigned to worsening violence and the possible break-up of Iraq, where American intelligence agencies said this week that the continuing conflict fuelled global terrorism. The National Intelligence Estimate, a report compiled by 16 spy agencies, concluded that the Iraq war had become a cause célèbre for Islamic extremists and was cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.

Past Peak reports that this year's "Project Censored" list of under-reported news stories is out. I was once again impressed by Dick Cheney's capacity for making money in any circumstance, with one of the stories being the sale by Halliburton of nuclear power technology to Iran. Next they get to support the invasion, and finally they get lots of no bid "reconstruction" contracts. the man is the master of militant mercantilism.

Project Censored has published its list of the 25 most important news stories that went largely uncovered for the year. Here they are:

1. Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
2. Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
3. Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
4. Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
5. High-Tech Genocide in Congo
6. Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
7. US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
8. Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
9. The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
10. Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
11. Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
12. Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
13. New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
14. Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US
15. Chemical Industry is EPA's Primary Research Partner
16. Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court
17. Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda
18. Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story
19. Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
20. Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem
21. Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
22. Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
23. US Oil Industry Targets Kyoto in Europe
24. Cheney's Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year
25. US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region

No matter how much of a news junkie you are, many, if not most, of these stories will be news to you. Which is exactly the point. They're important stories, but media self-censorship keeps us from hearing about them.

From the "those who forget history are condemned to repeat it" files - the New York Times has a great article on an earlier War On Terror centered on the middle east that started 2 millenia ago.

The period of Pompey's war on the pirates, his triumvirate with Caesar and Crassus and Caesar's eventual establishment of the first fascist dictatorship is a very interesting one - worth reading up on some Roman history for those who have never done so.

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty.

One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”

Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”

What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.

But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.

“Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what amounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone,” the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. “There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.”

Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury — 144 million sesterces — to pay for his “war on terror,” which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprecedented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated.

Nevertheless, at a tumultuous mass meeting in the center of Rome, Pompey’s opponents were cowed into submission, the Lex Gabinia passed (illegally), and he was given his power. In the end, once he put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompey’s genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, they could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.

But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.

Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.

In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar — the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompey’s special command during the Senate debate — was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul.

Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces began to assume direction of the state.

It also brought a flood of money into an electoral system that had been designed for a simpler, non-imperial era. Caesar, like Pompey, with all the resources of Gaul at his disposal, became immensely wealthy, and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. Henceforth, the result of elections was determined largely by which candidate had the most money to bribe the electorate. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.

Mother Jones has an interview with Jimmy Carter on the rise of religious fundamentalism in the US.

MotherJones: In your book, you talk about the intersection in recent years of religious and political fundamentalism. What is the origin of this merger?

Jimmy Carter:, I think it was in 1979, when future fundamentalists took control of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is a very important religious and political factor in this country. After that, the Southern Baptist Convention had almost diametrically opposite basic principles than it had previously followed, and there's been an evolution within the Convention toward a more and more rigid and strict creed that embodies the fundamentalist principles that I mention in the book.

Now, I don't think there's any doubt that the elementary principle of fundamentalism has existed for ages, and it obviously permeates other religions as well, such as Islam and Hinduism and others. But this trend continued and, parallel to it, there was in effect a merger of the fundamentalist Christian leaders and the more conservative elements of the Republican Party. And for the last 25 years or so, that merger has become more pronounced and more evident.

MJ.com: Which of the two strains of fundamentalism do you see as leading the other?

JC: I wouldn’t say leading, but both are influencing each other. In the past, there have been two parallel premises for the separation of church and state. One obviously is what Thomas Jefferson declared, stating that he was speaking on behalf of the other founding fathers, when he said we should build a wall between the church and state. And in the Christian faith, we all remember that Christ said, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's.” This also indicates that there should be a clear separation.

But those premises have been publicly disavowed or challenged by Pat Robertson on the religious side, and even by the former chief justice of the Supreme Court [William Rehnquist]. But nowadays, with the allocation of billions of dollars through what President Bush calls a faith-based initiative, taxpayers' money is distributed to churches and other religious institutions that will comply with the basic principles of the present political administration. And there's no doubt that in public conventions and in individual church speeches and sermons, there's been a prevalent inclination to endorse candidates, primarily Republican candidates.

MJ.com: At this point, 25 years in, do you expect this to remain a permanent situation?

JC: In the last few months at least, I would guess, there has been a reconsideration by many American citizens that that trend was not advisable for our country. This is indicated, at least to some degree, by public-opinion polls. And obviously the popularity in polls of some Republican leaders has deteriorated as well. So there's been a re-thinking in many ways. I think part of it has been caused by some of the practical political decisions that were ill advised and were supported by the religious fundamentalists.

All of us Christians worship the Prince of Peace, but the fundamentalists I referred to earlier publicly supported what I consider the unjust and unnecessary invasion of Iraq. That was one indication of a very radical departure. The reception of public funds to go into the religious activities of a church is almost unprecedented, at least within the Baptist faith, which I share. Other aspects are the almost complete refusal of the fundamentalist Christian leaders to condemn even the torture of prisoners and the intrusion on Americans' privacy and rights as protected under the U.S. Constitution. On those kinds of issues, formerly characterized by a separate opinion on public events between the religious community and the political community, the difference has been eliminated.

...

MJ.com: You mentioned the Iraq war, and you were an early critic. Given the situation as it stands now, are you at all hopeful about the prospects for a stable democracy emerging?

JC: Well, I'm hopeful. I pray that there will be a successful democratic system established in Iraq that can keep the country together and avoid further violence. I think what we should do is get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, and this can be done in a number of ways. I think one of the best ways would be for us to surreptitiously ask the new leaders of Iraq to publicly request that the U.S. troops withdraw. Then, instead of taking the initiative and saying we have failed in Iraq, we could say that we are honoring the new democracy established in Iraq. That's one scenario that could lead to a withdrawal of U.S. troops within a year. But my own belief is that no one in the top levels in Washington now intends to ever pull all the American troops from Iraq. I think there was a strong motivation to go into Iraq to establish a permanent military presence there of some kind. And I don't believe there's anyone in the top levels in Washington who's willing to relinquish the privileged position we have in the acquisition and marketing of Iraqi oil, to open it up to France or Russia or China.

So I think there's still a strong feeling in Washington to retain a strong permanent military and economic presence in Iraq. My belief is that a lot of the violence that continues in Iraq right now between different religious groups is caused in part by the continued presence of American troops. I believe that if American troops withdrew, almost immediately the level of violence would decrease.

Its amazing how lucid an aging Carter is compared to the bumbling idiot who is in charge of the latest round of malaise in America.

Speaking of ex-Democratic presidents, Crooked Timber asks how the brownshirt contingent so keen on the elimination of habeas corpus and torturing anyone the president doesn't like might feel about the same powers being available to President Clinton (and they consider the prospect of this being Bill or Hillary - maybe revenge on the vast right wing conspiracy could be more savage than anyone ever imagined - and while torture is abhorrent the idea of a vicious harpy like Ann Coulter having a conversation with a baseball bat does have a certain unpleasant appeal...).

The passage by the US Congress of a bill that among other things abolishes habeas corpus for terrorism suspects, allows interrogation methods that would normally be classed as torture, and allows the President to declare legal residents of the United States to be enemy combatants has produced a predictably partisan divide. All but two Senate Republicans voted for the Bill (Lincoln Chafee opposed and Olympia Snowe did not vote), and most pro-Republican bloggers seem to have backed it with marginal qualifications.

Those of us who fear and distrust the Bush Administration naturally find it easy to see what harm could be done with powers like this. The Administration’s supporters, on the other hand, seem confident that only the likes of David Hicks and Jose Padilla have anything to fear.

So, for those who support the bill, it might be useful to consider the standard thought experiment recommended to all who support dictatorial powers for a leader on their own side. Think about what the other side might do with these powers.

For concreteness, suppose Hillary Clinton is elected in 2008 with a Democratic majority in Congress, and appoints someone like Janet Reno as her Attorney-General, and that some rightwing extremist takes a potshot at her. Suppose that the unsuccessful terrorist turns out to have drifted widely through the organisations that Clinton famously called the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, ranging from organisations with a track record of association with terrorism, like Operation Rescue and the militia movement, to those of the mainstream right, not engaged in violence, but prone to the violent rhetoric of people like Ann Coulter.

The bill, as it stands, would give the Clinton Administration essentially unlimited powers over non-citizens legally resident in the US (or anywhere else in the world) and over US citizens found, by the Clinton Administration, to have provided material support for those involved in the attack. Given unlimited powers of search and seizure, and unfettered use of “aggressive interrogations”, it would be easy to find evidence of some criminal offence even in cases of people who had no connection whatsoever with the original case. The Bush Administration has set plenty of precedents for the kinds of shifting jurisdiction that can keep people locked up for years without ever facing trial.

Moreover, but in the wake of a domestic terror attack, it would be just about impossible to resist a demand for additional powers, drawing on precedents established by Bush. Ambiguous provisions of the existing law could be clarified in ways that negated most of the protections currently given to US citizens.

And, although I may be corrected on this, there doesn’t appear to be any notion of prohibiting retrospectivity or of a statute of limitations. There would be nothing to stop the Clinton Administration revisiting cases of the 1990s, and applying the newly broadened definitions of enemy combatant to anyone who, for example, made threats against the government or government officials over those cases.

Of course, Hillary is just one possibility for the next president (and not one I'd particularly favour). "Avant News - predictor of future headlines - considers another, possibly more likely scenario - the next president will be a write in candidate currently working as a technician for Diebold.

In a dramatic development that has come as a surprise to pundits and the public alike, a youthful technician with Diebold, Inc. has emerged as the unlikely winner of the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. The president-elect, 19 year old Billy Pustule of Green, Ohio, reached via SMS at the garage apartment by his mother's house in which he currently resides, said he was "real psyched about being the president" and "had big plans for the inauguration party".
A D V E R T I S I N G

Veteran political observers including Seymour Shackleton of the Miami-Dade Political Coroner have expressed what amounts to sheer disbelief at the unanticipated outcome.

"To my knowledge, this is the first presidential election in American history won by an entirely unknown write-in candidate," Mr. Shackleton said. "No one seems to have even heard of Billy Pustule. A Google of his name turns up only five listings, all of them Amazon.com reader comments on anthologies of 19th century erotic cartoons. How the president-elect managed to build a sufficiently large grass-roots groundswell to clinch the election while operating in complete anonymity is, frankly, beyond me."

President-elect Pustule said he "has always been kind of interested in politics because of my job", a service technician and junior programmer at Diebold, Inc., the primary manufacturer of electronic voting machines in the United States. Tamper-proof Diebold electronic voting machines have figured prominently in recent U.S. elections, particularly those elections in which outsider candidates sharing a political affiliation with Diebold executives have won by bafflingly wide margins.

According to the official electronic tally, compiled and certified by Diebold voting engineers, President-elect Pustule won an impressive 59.6% of the popular vote nationwide, the strongest showing ever received by a write-in candidate since the dissolution of the Constitution in 2007. He was followed by 38% for Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, and 28.6% for Republican candidate Bill Frist. The fact that the totals exceed 100% has been attributed by a Diebold spokesman to "a special kind of rounding".

Billmon (not as retired as he made out) has one of his customary paired quotes up comparing Bush and FDR.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Inaugural Address
March 4, 1933

"The only thing we have is fear."
George W. Bush
Radio Address
September 30, 2006

Billmon also has a look at the latest Republican pervert to be unmasked - who exactly is the base for these guys nowadays - when did they become the party of child molesters, torturers and gay S&M prostitutes posing as journalists ?

Six-term Republican Rep. Mark Foley of Florida . . . chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, said he would resign immediately after ABC News reported he sent messages to current and former congressional pages with repeated references to sexual organs and acts . . . Foley was the author of the key sexual predator provisions of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which Bush signed in July.

So the congressional point man on sexual predation is -- or rather was -- a sexual predator. Why am I not surprised?

As it happens, the Showtime channel has a new show about a Miami forensic examiner (his speciality is analyzing blood spatters) who moonlights as a serial killer. I read a review just this morning in the New York Times.

Purely a coincidence, no doubt. But Jung believed, and I tend to agree, that coincidences often reveal deeper psychological truths -- about that which is observed and not just the observer.

I think there's a long post, if not a book, to be written about this particular truth, which is the Jeckyll-and-Hyde split between appearances and reality in 21st century America -- the America where prostitutes pose as journalists (or vice versa), "Christian" activists lobby for legalized torture, generals swagger like Rambo in front of the cameras but cringe before their civilian masters in private, libertarian law professors write secret memos justifying the creation of a police state, sworn enemies of big government gorge themselves on pork, vomit, then gorge some more, and U.S. Senators with the racial values of a klavern leader masquerade as "compassionate conservatives."

And then, of course, there's our president, who preaches democracy and freedom by day and rewrites the Geneva Conventions by night.

Past Peak points to a story about the unfolding impact of global warming on the arctic.

hey never used to need air conditioners up in the Arctic.

But earlier this year, officials in the Canadian Inuit territory of Nunavik authorized the installation of air conditioners in official buildings for the first time. Artificial cooling was necessary, they decided, because summertime temperatures in some southern Arctic villages have climbed into the 80s in recent years.

Inuit families in the region never used to need to shop in grocery stores, either. But the Arctic seas that always stayed frozen well into the summer have started breaking open much earlier, cutting off hunters from the seasonal caribou herds on which their families depend for sustenance.

And experienced Inuit hunters, as comfortable reading ice conditions as professional golfers are reading greens, had seldom fallen through the ice and drowned. But this year in Alaska, more than a dozen vanished into the sea.

"These are men used to running their trap lines, people who know the area well, yet they are literally falling through, they are just gone," said Patricia Cochran, executive director of the Alaska Native Science Commission in Anchorage and chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. "The ice conditions are just so drastically different from all of their hunting lifetimes."

It took a while, but global warming, the relentless greenhouse gas phenomenon that most scientists believe has altered climates across much of the rest of the world, appears to have finally breached the northern polar redoubt. And the effects on aboriginal societies trying to hold fast to traditional ways have been jarring.

The people of this far northern Canadian hamlet of 250 used to hunt eider ducks every summer, using the meat and eggs for food and the soft feathers for clothing. But this past summer was the third in a row that the Inuit couldn't reach the nesting grounds because the ice around them was too thin.

The seals have changed, as well.

"Now when we are trying to take the fur off the seals, it's very hard to do," said David Kalluk, 65, a village elder and veteran hunter. "It's like it's burned onto them. Maybe this is because the sea is warmer."

Wayne Davidson, the resident meteorologist in Resolute Bay for 20 years, says monthly temperatures throughout the year are 5 to 11 degrees higher than recent historical averages. For example, Davidson said, the average daily temperature last March was minus 13.4 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with an average of minus 24.2 degrees from 1947 to 1991.

"Science for us in the Arctic is experience," Davidson said. "Resolute used to be a horrible place to live as far as weather is concerned, absolutely brutal. Now it's much milder." [...]

"The basic question of global warming is no longer a subject of dispute in the scientific literature," said Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at the University of California, San Diego, who reviewed 928 scientific papers about climate change published between 1993 and 2003 and found none challenging evidence of human contributions to global warming.

"The discussion has moved on to how quickly will things change in the future, the rate of ice melting and differing climate models," Oreskes said. "There's almost nobody left anymore who doesn't accept that global warming is real."

It certainly feels real enough to the people of Resolute Bay. From their perch on the edge of the Barrow Strait, they watched this summer as the waters of their rocky bay melted and filled with drifting icebergs — a view as depressing as it was picturesque, because in years past the water remained frozen solid enough to traverse aboard sleds and snowmobiles to their traditional hunting grounds.

"The heat of the sun is different now," said Kalluk, the village elder, trying to make sense of the changes. "I think there is global warming, because snow that has never melted before is starting to melt now."

The Economist has a look at the rapidly expanding solar power industry - no link to global warming or peak oil , but at least they are paying a small amount of attention to the future.

MOST of the power generated by mankind originates from the sun. It was sunlight that nurtured the early life that became today's oil, gas and coal. It is the solar heating of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans that fuels wave power, wind farms and hydroelectric schemes. But using the sun's energy directly to generate power is rare. Solar cells account for less than 1% of the world's electricity production.

Recent technological improvements, however, may boost this figure. The root of the problem is that most commercial solar cells are made from silicon, and silicon is expensive. Cells can be made from other, cheaper materials, but these are not as efficient as those made from silicon.

The disparity is stark. Commercial silicon cells have efficiencies of 15% to 20%. In the laboratory, some have been made with an efficiency of 30%. The figure for non-traditional cells is far lower. A typical cell based on electrically conductive plastic has an efficiency of just 3% or 4%. What is needed is a way to boost the efficiency of cells made from cheap materials, and three new ways of doing so were unveiled this week in San Francisco, at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society.

... The technique used by Dr Lee and Dr Heeger boosts the efficiency of plastic cells to 5.6%. That is still poor compared with silicon, but it is a big improvement on what was previously possible. Dr Lee concedes that there is still a long way to go, but says that even an efficiency of 7% would bring plastic cells into competition with their silicon cousins, given how cheap they are to manufacture.

A second approach, taken by Michael Grätzel of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is to copy nature. Plants absorb solar energy during photosynthesis. They use it to split water into hydrogen ions, electrons and oxygen. The electrons released by this reaction are taken up by carrier molecules and then passed along a chain of such molecules before being used to power the chemical reactions that ultimately make sugar.

Dye-sensitised solar cells seek to mimic this assembly line. The dye acts like chlorophyll, the pigment that makes plants green and that is responsible for absorbing sunlight and liberating electrons. The electrons are passed via a semiconductor to an electrode, through which they leave the cell. By using a dye called phthalocyanine, which absorbs not only visible light but also infra-red wavelengths, Dr Grätzel has been able to raise the efficiency of the process to 11%. That, he says, should be enough to make dye-sensitised cells competitive with silicon.

The third technique, being developed by Prashant Kamat of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and his colleagues, uses that fashionable scientific tool, the carbon nanotube.

The Energy Blog has a post on developments in solid state lighting - other recent posts that caught my eye include some on ocean power developments in South Africa and San Francisco, and new battery technology from Firefly and NanoeXa.

Group IV Semiconductor, Inc., Ottawa, CA, has announced a three-year, $9.1 million initiative aimed at developing solid state lighting products made of silicon that use 90 per cent less energy than a traditional incandescent light bulb and last up to 50 times longer.The goal of Group IV's silicon-based technology is to dramatically reduce the cost of solid-state lighting—overcoming the critical price barrier and enabling widespread adoption.

While compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) have caught on lately with their promise of energy savings, they’re still only about 20 to 25 percent efficient. Lamps that use solid-state lighting (SSL) technology, by comparison, can achieve efficiency levels as high as 80 percent.

The global lighting market is worth about $12-billion, Group IV estimates. The company says about 20 per cent of the world's electricity demand is for lighting through light bulbs.

Deconsumption points to an article about Indonesia threatening to cut back LNG exports to demand. If this eventuates, I suspect it will be good news for at least one of Inpex, Woodside or Oil Search.

Indonesia has notified Japanese companies that it intends to halve exports of liquefied natural gas to Japan by as early as 2010, sources said Thursday...With the soaring price of crude oil, and growing concerns over environmental problems, countries including China, South Korea and the United States have started importing LNG. This increase in demand from other nations, and subsequent reduction in LNG imports from Indonesia, is likely to have a significant impact on Japan's energy strategy, observers note."

(Hmmm...you think?)

"Japan hopes to compensate for the reduced amount with imports from other locations such as the Sakhalin-2 project plant in Russia. However, with the Russian government recently cancelling a permit for an oil and gas development project by an international joint venture, the prospects for domestic gas and electric company procurement have become increasingly gloomy.

....Japanese companies are currently negotiating with the Indonesian government on the assumption that imports will be cut by half in the renewed contracts. But with the Indonesian government suggesting it may call for further dramatic reductions, negotiations could become even more complicated, the sources said.

Jeff Vail has been meditating on complex credit derivatives and the prospect of financial collapse.

Bear with me for a second here. This isn't an easy topic. That's because no one understands Credit-Default Swaps (CDSs), or other complex credit-derivatives, but it is important that we try to understand the implications of their exponential increase. Sure, some people claim to understand: hedge fund managers, investment bankers, etc. They understand the derivatives marketplace just like neuroscientists understand consciousness—they know the component parts, they can use them as tools barely under their control, but when it comes to understanding exactly how the greater dynamic emerges from the component parts they are in the dark.

No one really understands the credit-derivative market, but everyone is impacted by it. Credit-derivatives represent the creation of money out of thin air, like some act of financial wizardry. Take a Credit-Default Swap, for example. Here’s how it works: Corp. A needs to raise funds to expand operations, so they issue a $10 million bond. Pension Fund B buys that bond, but is concerned with the risk of Corp. A going bankrupt and defaulting on the bond. So Hedge Fund C offers what is, in effect an insurance policy—Pension Fund B pays Hedge Fund C $200,000, and in exchange if Corp. A defaults on the bond, Hedge Fund C covers the $10 million for Bank B. Here’s the magic: because this insurance policy creates the market for this otherwise too-risky bond from Corp. A in the first place, and because the par-value of the credit-default swap (the insurance policy) that the Hedge fund issues does nothing more than eat up the difference between the risk-premium on this bond, this $200,000 that the hedge fund makes is essentially fabricated out of thin air. Don’t forget to sprinkle in a liberal portion of fractional-reserve-banking fairy dust and viola: now you understand the credit-derivatives market as well as anyone else in the world.

Clear as mud? Try this on for size: there were $25 Trillion dollars in credit derivatives issued so far in 2006. That’s about half the size of the world economy. Oh, and it’s unreported, unregulated, and largely non-transparent. But wait, it gets better

Peter at Karavans has a review of a book called "The Flip", which includes the great quote "If you watch television, Madison Avenue has your mind colonized". I like the way a lot of tinfoil writers refer to TV as the "mind control device) - or, more subtly, "the glass hammer". Hopefully YouTube and Google Video will slowly replace it with something more balanced. Though I guess its entirely possible we'll just end up with MySpace instead...

(Karavans also recently hosted a Carnival of the Green).

A few months ago, I plugged David Korten's latest book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, which deals with one of my favorite topics, namely extricating oneself from the great "rat race" as much as possible. This resulted in a good conversation about the book. But while the book serves as a fine overview of how we came to be in the present mess, the final three chapters on what to do about it were on the weak side. They didn't leave the reader with a clear set of ideas on what to do after they had finished reading it.

Now a new book is out which performs this task admirably although there is no connection between the two. It's called The Flip: Turn Your World Around and is co-written by Jared Rosen and David Rippe. I would say that the book title refers to a mental or gestalt flip we can all do instantly to change how we view situations and circumstances.

I am about half-way through this book and like very much the way it's organized. The eleven chapters focus on the key areas of life such as our values, health, finances, media exposure, diets, religion, and work life, etc. The first half of every chapter explains how to look at these areas differently--in a healthier and more balanced manner-- and then the second half provides short interviews with people who did "the Flip" and serve as living proof that it can be done. Each chapter is short and easy to digest but offers a fresh perspective.

I find that often all that's required to make a change in one's life is to first simply realize that there are other ways of being and doing. This book is a good starting point for doing the flip.

Let me share a personal example with you. Back in 1982 one of my philosophy profs was talking about the detrimental effect watching television has on your life. He summed his position up with the immortal words, "If you watch television, Madison Avenue has your mind colonized." I thought about it for a few days and then cancelled my cable subscription and left the set connected only to the VCR (now replaced by a DVD player which is used to watch two movies per week from Netflix.) I have never regretted the decision to rid myself of the lobotomy box.

An example of TV being referred to as a mind control device can be found in this rambling essay on the likelihood of an attack on Iran and the impact on oil prices (amazingly enough he thinks they will go up).

The United States is an unusual country in that it does not have a government in the normal sense of the word. This is because many politicians who ostensibly represent the people are primarily answerable to, and therefore controlled by, the big business interests who ultimately determine their fate. These interests are collectively known as the Military-Industrial complex and this power grid is the effective government of the United States. The Defense, Oil and Pharmaceutical lobbies in particular have immense power in Washington. This state of affairs explains why the food supply in the United States is adulterated with genetically modified crops and harmful additives such as Aspartame, and other substances that promote obesity.

When the Cold War ended in the early 90's, the people had a reasonable right to expect a "peace dividend" - reduced defense expenditure, because the United States no longer had any enemies of significance. The defense industry didn't like this at all, they were getting a big slice of the pie, and it is reasonable to suppose that they would bring whatever leverage they could to bear to ensure that their cut did not decrease, and if they could get it increased, so much the better. It is therefore obvious that the events of 11th September 2001 were like a Las Vegas jackpot to them. Barely had the victims been buried than big increases in the Defense budget were announced. Big defense budgets require an enemy to justify them, and if there is no enemy, well, you just have to invent one, hence the "War on Terror". Clearly, it is not enough to have an enemy in name only, you need, in addition, to get them stirred up and energized, and hence readily identifiable to the masses back home as an enemy. This is achieved by perpetrating atrocities and outrages against them, and making sure that these are publicized sufficiently to get the populations of the target countries or racial or religious groups sufficiently incensed to take to the streets and want revenge, the goal being to foment as much polarization as possible. This is the underlying reason for the interrogation and torture of prisoners, and for the recent pulverizing of Lebanon by Axis forces emanating from Israel. The elites within the Axis powers, who, to whatever extent they are religious, are either Christians or Zionists, view Arabs and Muslims in the same way that a gardener regards ants or termites - at best as an irrelevance to be tolerated, perhaps utilized as a source of slave labor, and at worst as a pest to be exterminated. When you understand this point you can readily appreciate why the Axis powers would be quite happy to foment an inter-Arab war, Shiites versus Sunnis, for example, and then stand back and watch with satisfaction as they wipe each other out - as long as they don't damage the oilfields. Not that they have much more respect for citizens in their own countries, who they broadly class into two groups. One is civilians who are farmed for their labor and tax revenue; the working classes of course, but also the broad swath of the middle class, the stewards of the system, who like to think that they are in control of their own lives, but are in reality just operatives for the elites. The other group is military personnel who are the unwitting henchmen that do their dirty work in far flung lands, putting their lives on the line to serve their master's geopolitical ambitions.

Dr Josef Goebbels, the godfather of propaganda, who was head of propaganda in Nazi Germany in the 30‘s, would have thought he had woken up in heaven, had he found himself suddenly transposed to being in charge of the Axis propaganda machine in our times. The greatest mind control machine in the history of the human race, the television set, is to be found in virtually every home in the developed world, sometimes several of them, and the people weren't forced to accept them, they went out and bought them of their own accord. The seductive allure of the screen is much more attractive to most than the effort involved in reading. Nowadays the television is the main source of information for the vast majority of the population - if you can gain control of its throughput you can control the minds of the masses. In the United States, almost all Newspaper and Television stations are controlled from above by the process of syndication, which means there is in effect no such thing as an independent local press.

I'm not sure Josef Goebbels should really be called the godfather of propaganda - he was more of a skilled practitioner (though the best propaganda wouldn't be seen as such - it would be generally be believed by most "normal" people to be true). The actual father of propaganda was a man named Edward Bernays, who was a nephew of Sigmund Freud.

Bernays defined the profession of "counsel on public relations" as a "practicing social scientist" whose "competence is like that of the industrial engineer, the management engineer, or the investment counselor in their respective fields." To assist clients, PR counselors used "understanding of the behavioral sciences and applying them—sociology, social psychology, anthropology, history, etc." In Propaganda, his most important book, Bernays argued that the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in society:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ... We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Bernays' celebration of propaganda helped define public relations, but it did not win the industry many friends. In a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter described Bernays and Ivy Lee as "professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism and self-interest." And history showed the flaw in Bernays' identification of the "manipulation of the masses" as a natural and necessary feature of a democratic society. The fascist rise to power in Germany demonstrated that propaganda could be used to subvert democracy as easily as it could be used to "resolve conflict."

In his autobiography, titled Biography of an Idea, Bernays recalls a dinner at his home in 1933 where:

Karl von Weigand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, an old hand at interpreting Europe and just returned from Germany, was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Weigand his propaganda library, the best Weigand had ever seen. Goebbels, said Weigand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. ... Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign.

Bernays and his work were the subject of a TV series by Adam ("Power of Nightmares") Curtis called The Century of the Self.

The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.

It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.