The big difference between today and thirty years ago – nobody needed passwords then. Just a drivers licence. Now they want our retina and finger prints. Next they will be after our memories and skills. Imprints of our personalities will become available online. Individuality will be lost in a miasma of traded iconography and ideas that betray no reason.

Or we will retain our individuality despite this assault of psychic interception. There is the Internet. And there is the Mobile Internet. People wonder why Facebook is full of these silly questions “What is your favourite colour” and then all your ads go blue.

Marketing could have intimacy as its goal but then it is not marketing. It is futile manipulation and as any manipulator will learn about humanity, they will not play ball. They change their minds and momentum often, and you will go on looking for holy grails.

Check this countdown timer for when the atmosphere has 1,000,000,000,000 tonnes of carbon in it – which is approximately past the threshold when the atmosphere will go above 2 degrees average and the real climatic instability proceeds with potentially disasterous consequences predicted.

Cont/-

For example droughts/flooding ratios would become more extreme than they are. The world will continue to change and evolve until it goes over a certain point where the food chain starts to collapse and then that’s it for a few million years before life crawls back out of the rocks.

Most climate change deniers will be long dead before things get really nasty. It is the lack of responsibility for the people of the future that seems to be contrary to purposes of nations, of our species and of our world.

There will come a point where economic growth will become impossible, so why not take the reigns of it now and make energy non-carbon producing and sustainable? Why is this so hard? Because the oil companies will not own it and they are funding governments through the tax dollar?

If there is any danger that future generations will suffer, then we must understand the science. Listening to one entrapeneur (the guy that started the weather channel) talk about his complete disbelief in climate change is spooky. But when you realise that he is being paid to say what he is saying, his conviction is nothing less than hollow. His evidence is irrelevant – merely things her heard someone say was good enough science to him. He is no qualified sceptic.

And to counter this (apparently) right-wing claim that climate change is merely a scam: prove it. It is your responsibility to prove that your pollution is harmless before it destroys everything. Got it?

There is plenty of evidence that pollution causes death. There is plenty of evidence that the atmosphere is being unnaturally loaded with our pollutants and we have no right under God or Nature to so abuse our environment just so some balance sheet looks nice.

There is plenty to say that we destroyed careful balances nature had established since the last great extinction of 80% of all live on earth. It is possible that a natural catastrophie will get us first before climate change makes modern life impossible.

Modern man has only been around for a fraction of the planet’s natural history. Let’s not let go of that which nature has taken so long to organise before giving us the minds with which to briefly appreciate it, turn it into art and then systematically destroy it. Our representations of nature will be all we have to remember it by.

America has changed culture more than most modern civilizations. This mutability or adaptability is a threat to the older established rigid moral compass of a world that did not have so many variables and survived as a reason of taking great care with physical rules.

Rules about eating and sex characterize religions and form the basis of culture where restriction adds the value of temptation, where the forbidden gives the terribly rich and powerful access to the asinine. In a sense, the decline of civilisation, its very decadence, is not what defines it. It is not the act of the soldier priest that starts the long walk that eventually ends up with coddled children and little bits of shiny plastic. The old model was of a shepherd herding sheep, a leader with vision with followers endowed with perception or enough good sense to follow. In this contrived clash of civilisations (even it was contrived by Osama Bin Laden and his wealth, or a Bush conspiracy) we see the most decadent fighting against the most devout. Both American decadence and deep Islamic devotion are extra-ordinary behaviours based on a lifetime of thinking a certain way. Neither are wrong, indeed, if either are right it is not the reason the other is not. Social coherence is not sourced in the will. For the first part of life we seek the dictates of a leadership, we either wait for permission or we take the reigns. Early life knows no middle ground. Later on we start to realise the value of waiting dissipates and action is required and urge on our younger brothers and sisters to feel responsibility in their lives.

It is the same problem in the self aware culture of the Americas as in the forceful rigour of Afghani life. The young will not listen. But for the clash of civilisations to resolve, the young need to listen because their beliefs are formed around what they fail to understand. American culture has so many levels of pretense it appeals to many personae whereas restrictive cultures can only appeal to a limited range of minds, meaning that they only produce a limited range of mind sets.

Variety in the challenges to the mind set have produced a new approach to finding the “most successful” path. Multiple expertise assists survival in the bleakest of circumstance, but for a culture to master every terrain and climate requires more facets of specialisation. Afghanistan has become a country ruled by war and a distrust for invaders, whom, one after the other, have managed to find an army more suited to the internal conditions of a land that is not typical of every land.

The fear of invasion of America has been a driving force since World War II. The European invasion and colonisation empires collapsed as the colonies develop independent wealth. Trade ensues and is seen as the healthy signs of a cooperating world.

Into the hands of children do they place weapons. Trade supports the flow of weapons in as much as drugs and food. Trade has no conscience. What it carries from one set of hands to another is judged by neither and the mutual risk of rejection by the other is reduced by the use of currency.

On the battlefield, there is no such medium. The exchange is guaranteed to cause disease to both sides. The product of war is reduction in demand and it causes wealth by concentrating ownership. It is the exercise of power, trading the lives of those we old man can influence to fight for their sisters, their wives and children. To fight and kill the other males from over the valley and dale. To exercise their internal need to be dominated we force their energies into each other?

The application of nature to applied technology extends capabilities in ways only imagined previously in rather wild fiction.

This is an excellent presentation of ideas that not only have important space research and military applications, but we may have to get used to the idea of search and rescue squads of mechanical dogs – now that is an interesting idea.

With mechanically shaped algorithms inherent in design, and the role of AI being more independent, the subconscious tendency of robotics to cope with their wobbling walk, their calculations are now involved in self image, we could be at the edge of something we may not notice. This seems more significant than it seems at first glance, but that is nonetheless worth your careful consideration.

Look inside an ant or a bee hive. What do you see? There are two things that immediately come to mind – first it appears the creatures are all the same, but if you watch it becomes apparent that pockets of mass specialisation occur within the mass of worker female eunuchs, functional components of what we call a “society” appear. We half believe the metaphor of being a cog in a survival machine, while lamenting the boring mundane role we play, we live.

The economic decline is a pause. What went wrong with the machine? Why did it break? Now let’s construct another excuse for our normal accepted behaviour. The banks and AIG that paid executive bonuses with tax payer money were breaking the natural laws of mutual suffering. They caused the problem in their own books in competition with each other, fully aware in the same way that when we say “society” we submit to the constraints on our lives.

We can not just kick back and enjoy the recession, but we have to think of new ways to function – new patterns of ants form as old ones finish their task and a new mutual shape and function is agreed upon with chemical communication or dance. I have not heard ants sing, so I expect their forms of communication evolved in their own fashion. It is conceivable their communication is a little more sophisticated than we are prepared to credit.

California is coming apart at the seams economically. The blame can be laid in all sorts of places, but it is logical that in times of an shared tidal suck of liquidity the most indebted would have the most difficulty as all their income goes to the most wealthy. The onset of economic malaise (the reduction in asset value, generally) is avoided by governments meticulously at the cost of the social order. We are “regrouped” from the lifetime of preparation as an expert on a specialisation that is no longer required.

If we try and move our economic progress so fast that everyone has to retrain – are we not starting to press at a natural limitation? Are we not better to do that which we love for as long as we want, and progress to be modulated to the rhythm of our lives?

Apparently not. We instead try to cram more into our fragile selves, full of aspiration as the bank approves a lifetime of debt so you can protect your family in a wooden box, and when you are successful and the birds leave the nest, progress defines us by interruptions and upheavals.

War is unnecessary. If Governments learned to flip a coin and live with the consequences (if political hegemony was merely a game of luck) then the world would be a little more equal and progress would slow down. If we increase the frequency of progress, then we increase the demand to retrain everybody. Is that a good thing? Increased challenge is evolutionary, up to a point. Retraining every five years is hard. Every six months is itself counter productive. Returning to Plato, we could simply choose to preserve certain arts and not negate their value, because someone is so good at doing it. The print media industry logically could be completely replaced by mobile phones. But I would be happier if both existed side by side for most of the rest of my lifetime. I accept they won’t but the values of the print media must not be lost in a sonic miasma of advertising. Information is.

There is thus a natural tendency, or a social fabric that we knot ourselves into increasingly duping ourselves into believing it is of value when a vast wave comes in and nothing but the skin we were born with is available as a resource to protect yourself. Then you have to retrain and adjust. If we controlled the effect of those collapses but also allowed progress to exist the social fabric would have to be more elastic.

The very idea that progress itself be modulated may infact therefore be what is actually happening. Secret government research is the stuff of fanciful television, but it is also logical that as well as financial reserves, a nation devises a reserve of military and intellectual development. That an academic class structure exists.

The politicians of the world face the constant problem of over population and consequential climate change. To pretend that the answer is not selective annihilation while sitting on nuclear bombs is irrational. What other function do they serve, exactly? “They keep the peace.” Really, what peace?

Look again at that ant’s nest. Their apparent strong social fabric adjusts to change, but it does not deal with progress. Human culture can. Trade was interesting enough to distract us from war and for years America was winning that game. The challenge will be to see in the recovery a return to human value as opposed to the needs of a market fiction.

Army chief warns of prospect of failure in Afghanistan.

When the chief of the army starts a claim for more pay with dire warnings of losing a war in Afghanistan it takes away some edge from the argument he is making. Losing in Afghanistan is a worse result than underpaid soldiers, certainly.

He says that Vice-President Joe Biden’s plan to spend more on covert missions than direct military engagement would never work. How killing lots of people with firefights in their own towns is going to win support also seems far-fetched. One can imagine:

“Why are you here?”
“We have come to protect your village from the Taleban.”
“Then why did you kill my brother?”
“He is Taleban.”
“Is he? So what, what did he do to you?”
“He ran away.”

The war with the Taleban is being fought because Osama Bin Laden was not handed over, and since then it has morphed into a war against the Taleban for being what they are. And that seems a just war as they are such bastards.

They tore down Buddhist statues. They make women wear clothes that completely conceal their identity. They enforce Sharia Law. They do not allow liberalism, they are authoritarian, they promote the opium harvest. How many of these would they be doing anyway if they had handed over Osama Bin Laden? All of them. If Bush had not gone to war with the Taleban back in 2002 (this war is now longer than WW2 but thankfully less destructive so far), the Taleban would still be in power in Afghanistan and opium would still be flooding Europe.

That Al Qaeda is in Pakistan and Iraq as well as Afghanistan – the sworn enemy of both the West and Iran, it certainly makes sense for America, Russia and Iran to join forces and consider offering the Taleban an offer of peace if they reform the opium trade and agree to elections. It would seem in the mutual interests of all those nations to break the back of the Taleban before they acquire means, however the assumption is that it is “not possible to negotiate with terrorists”. Apart from the Buddhah statues, the Taleban are not specifically terrorists. They harboured a man who directed an act of war against America and The West and then refused to cooperate with international justice.

If America had joined the ICC and charged the Taleban with criminal involvement with the Opium trade long before 9/11 as it was known and provable by the CIA, would that have been a more effective course of action?

Who knows. We can not do anything except what we can do now. And losing in Afghanistan is not dissimilar to losing in Vietnam. Except that Vietnam was an ideological battle, whereas this is a battle for justice, albeit one where the scales are terribly overbalanced in favour of nobody.

There are no winners in this war. It is entirely negative. Kill them or wait for the next attack is the driving logic. Inventing ways to kill them and drumming up support because of what the West does to itself in full view of its critics, letting financial bubbles explode.

But at least the West has them. The Western idea is that making mistakes is essential to explore all aspects of life, that a liberal science exploration and separation of church and state has led to progress. But military progress is not necessarily what will “win a war”. For a start, there is a “just cause” to remove the Taleban, but only after 9/11 was it a legal cause.

GW Bush went to war without gaining enough support and then really blew it by training his big guns on Iraq prematurely. If he had waited for Afghanistan to be won (who know, it could have taken 20 years) before marching into and turning Iraq into a quagmire it was not beforehand, he would not have toppled the American economy into the red to such a degree.

In other words if the fight in Afghanistan is not a) purposeful or b) legitimate – then is fighting the correct strategy?

One tends to agree with Biden about taking out the leaders of an essentially criminal gang with drones, and stopping Al Qaeda from taking hold in Pakistan these are both important goals to fully achieve. How is that a cause that can be “lost”? Is the NATO police action that has lasted 8 years so far in fact a military occupation with a specific goal?

Perhaps it should have been that all along. It feels like the intelligence community had too much wrong on this one, and that the military incursion into Afghanistan was not well planned. But who knows? Intelligence is not shared with the world, for good reasons.

A Tsunami struck Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga on Thursday morning after a major earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale, 18km deep, 190km from Samoa and Tongan islands, close enough that warning systems had but 6 minutes to alert people sleeping in beach hut Fali to run for the hills. Many survived by sheer dint of how fast they could escape the beach. 170 people were lost to the sea.

Civil Defense in New Zealand has been criticized for their slow reaction not advising people quickly or loudly enough perhaps that disaster was on its way, even though in the final analysis, they were right to err on the side of calm. Northern beaches were given a strong swell and a boats may have suffered damage, but the consequences in New Zealand were extremely mild and the focus on it soon faded as the realisation crept into that day that whole villages in Samoa (Auckland is the largest city for Samoan residence) had been wiped out. A news report of a mother losing all three of her children right before her eyes to the tides fury became the headlines. By evening the sense of unreality was still dreadful. A feeling of incredible sadness infuses this side of the world for the loss of life from paradise.

On the other side of the same fault line, 10,000 kms distant, earthquake ravaged Sumatra faced a far more deadly series of shocks. Maybe 1100 have died, being buried by collapsing buildings, only to suffer another huge earthquake.

The official death toll stands at 715, although one U.N. estimate said more than 1,100 may have perished. Officials said that thousands were still not yet accounted for.

Speculation that these events were related were dismissed as unlikely.