The US debt emergency is coming, and it is a man made Tsunami – after the erasure of an accumulation of massive fictional wealth – the complex debt structures borrowed with leverage against assumptions that have resulted in systemic deficiencies and bailouts – and may result in the collapse of one set of rules in favour of a new set.

The huge injection of funds into the US economy devalued the US Dollar, resulting in other currencies revaluing. If more and more dollars get printed the Euro may become the more stable international base currency.

Meantime we stare at the disaster unfolding after implementing short term solutions but taking too long to pass long term solutions. That aspect of human nature figures into our financial systems. There is a delay between action and payment allowed, a period of settlement when money is in transit. As though it did not exist.

The fact is that money is a self equalising sea that makes accumulation/wealth expensive, in theory. In fact poverty is made far more expensive by deceptive margin. The way in which human effort is rewarded compared with investment performance appears the basic problem.

Ruling humanity by a points system is absurd. As populations have risen, the money supply has been held back, the conservative “cure” for inflation. Economists must address symptoms or causes as a priority. President Obama ensured that the US would not drown in poverty (symptom) while figuring out what regulation would prevent any repeat of the derivative madness (cause).

Like a gambler perhaps there is a belief that another last burst of derivative action will right the problem. Regulation will stop that. An equitable financial system that serves commonly held goals and eliminates inequality through design rather than force may be a superior solution than regulating or extending instruments that base their logic on flawed theory.

The laws of supply and demand operate as clumsy filters. With online ecommerce – a standard could be reached so all markets are fully equal, so that poverty is not responded to with high interest rate traps, so that credit card companies that charge criminal rates (anything over 10% per annum is effectively slavery) are taxed harshly.

See also: Moneywatch

The “economic crisis” and the “war in Afghanistan” are both threats to the US economy. What is the “US Economy” to the new world that has discovered greed is not exclusively an American sin?

Any society that is not driven by a common economic goal is going to flounder, economically. And one that pursues capitalism or communism too successfully will suffer after success. In this TED talk, Geoff Mulgan talks about the need for capitalism to adopt caring in the new world.

Where capitalism benefits risk takers, communism fosters creativity.

If a society does not take risks with creativity continuously, then relevant winners are not found. Hence the success of capitalism. Democracy serves us by proving change. It is not the cheapest way to determine when it is time for change, but it is indicative of common will.

Whether it is optimal is another question and one best left unexplored. When the Government starts to plan change of government, inevitably human nature steps in and someone gets addicted to dominating everyone else.

But the service of democracy is to favour the other side of the equation. Concentrate on improving the health and education of the people comprising the country, and then make them cycle downhill as fast as they can with more skill. Then prepare for the next hill.

Democracy has a problem. It reacts to history, rather than what is needed. The making of history is the way it is because we turn it into a duality (which is why fair systems, e.g. proportional representation, is so unpopular with the politicians). A duality means winning half the time. If there were five major parties, proposing not just red and blue, but green, white and yellow as well – there comes a point where the “popular mandate” becomes meaningless.

We worship the wrong god. Democracy is not what makes politics work, it is what makes despotism fail.

The “will of the people” is a popular choice, and is usually not the correct choice. It is therefore little more than fiction. Lots of people flock to see terrible movies. It does not improve the inherent value of the art.

Popularism as political muscle is dangerous. The best leaders are not self aggrandizing super humans. Their political views are well formed and with them they can see the (totally right/utterly wrong) approach and from debate, the Government could work out which rhetoric fits the circumstances and overrule the other. Why crossing the floor is such a crime in FPP (first past the post) non-proportional electorates is that a government is defined as a continuous right to control power. Is that the best way?

Probably a non-partisan senate, where candidates are promoted to office (i.e. sponsored) by parties, but need not remain loyal to the party on every vote.

A more elastic form of party politics could mean that governments evolve with the best people from both sides but decisions are weighed for their actual effect rather than each side trying to beat the other with rhetoric.

A more representative and responsive democracy needs to evolve. The constant polling and referendums of the broad population does not produce better answers, just commonly held opinions.

We are smart enough to cause all these problems, we are smart enough to solve them and create more complex ones.

Recent near misses by asteroids, when you think clearly about them, clearly present two dangers:

1. the object is large enough and slow enough to be influenced by gravity and survive the atmosphere

or

2. the object is moving so fast, the opportunity to change its path using gravity is very short lived.

Fortunately the ones in the second category are usually too small to survive the atmosphere.

Cat 2: very fast, tree house size, VERY close (14,000 kms, about the diameter of the Earth, so you could say it missed us by one day, though it would not be accurate). 3rd closest non-impacting asteriod on record.. More about this event.

2009 VA mag=12.2 Nov 06 21:00, dist=0.000136 A.U. Nov 06 21:36, speed=4392.12 arcseconds/min Nov 06 21:00, diam=5-11 m

Cat 2: fast, truck size, about 1/2 distance to moon

2009 WJ6 mag=15.3 Nov 20 09:00, dist=0.001187 A.U. Nov 20 09:36, speed=1284.9 arcseconds/min Nov 20 11:00, diam=8-19 m

Cat 1: slow, city block size, over 6 million miles away

2000 XK44 mag=13.4 Nov 05 03:00, dist=0.07395 A.U. Nov 04 09:36, speed=8.45 arcseconds/min Nov 04 18:00, diam=637-1425 m

Intellectual Ventures – a group of scientists who are coming up with viable scientific ideas that can help quell the effects of arctic ice loss due to global warming but imitation of volcanic spewing of sulphur dixoide into the stratosphere at about 60 degrees north, should cool the atmosphere.

Scientists love to isolate a problem and think outside the box.

Polluting in a controlled way introduces new chemistry into the delicate balance. It is like smoking menthol cigarettes, you are adding to the cause but suffer the effects less as the menthol sooths your lungs. In this case it reduces the length of the teeth as we ask the atmosphere to bite us.

It means that industry now has an excuse to pollute the air even more, adding to the real problem which is not arctic ice melt so much as destruction of the atmophere’s chemical composition. Is that really such a good idea?

The Intellectual Ventures invention that maintains the ice caps, saves both the polar bear and New York City.

The Green movement seek a reduction in emissions which is also helpful.

By addressing the symptoms of the problem, we will never really solve it. By allowing for greater industrial pollution, we open the door to more imbalances. What if the calculations are wrong and an ice age is triggered? How do you test for it?

Intellectual Ventures is a large and impressive group of inventors and I applaud their wonderfully different ideas, their hurricane buffers that also cool the air by encouraging natural processes treat hurricanes as inflammation of the atmosphere and work like a steroid drug may, cooling everything down a couple of notches as the injury makes everything swell. If we invent to allow pollution to continue as a viable possibility then we need also to invent ways of transporting people, warming our homes and powering our consumption industry, deal with nuclear waste and keep the rain forests viable.

Where is the no emissions standard car for the world? Where is free electricity? Can scientists invent with a political imperative: “do no harm”? Or for general good, or do we need a sense of common destruction to do much to quell the grand hunger of our ambition?

A need to view the end of civilization expressed by the film 2012 fulfills the same basic need. We want fireworks, a big bang to go out on, the idea that Armageddon fury may rain down on our generation seems to lie behind the criminal destruction of nature.

A “its going to go, anyway” is pervasive in the subconscious direction of a human race that has doubled in size in the first forty years of my lifetime. The second 3 billion new humans were born in forty years. The first 3 billion living humans took millions of years to achieve. The third 3 billion will be achieved about 35 years later. Although the rate of growth is declining, the effect is still a problem.

All it takes is a different economic model. Japan’s has “suffered deflation” for years. It also has slowed population growth. But it’s economics are stagnant.

We only really need invent an economic model that works for human contraction, instead of growth. Uncontrolled human population growth is doomed as a survival strategy.

This blog presents a view of nuclear proliferation I have never seen before. Is it correct? I suppose I had better find out. LiveMint suggests that Russia gave China nuclear capability and that was transferred by China gifting it to Pakistan, which in turn criminally proliferated to Libya, North Korea and Iran.

On one hand, the simple fact that nuclear proliferation is a far too dangerous set of circumstances to experiment with, on the other, the surprise nature of the two most destructive known earthbound explosive forces: volcanoes and nuclear weapons – both are subject to extraordinarily chaotic principles that inevitably ensure outcomes. The same principles apply to financial bubbles. The building blocks of dishonesty lie in the first times compromises are made.

How can a country develop nuclear arsenal without compromising their integrity with others? Owning nuclear weapons is a crime of extortion against the rest of humanity in exchange for self destruction.

How do we find the value of the nuclear deterrent? We define the result as undesirable. What organisation with terror as its mantra can resist, reason the CIA.

Eventually, if the “terrorist” organisations are not neutralised they may try to hijack the nuclear process, or worse, develop its own.

Complete outlawing of nuclear weapons is the only solution. How can it be achieved? Or is there something about the threat of nuclear weapons that operates with enough mutual fear that it is simply impossible?

Wishful thinking.

People face life every day. On very few of those days the plain shadow of death falls, and when it does it seems sudden, unexpected, incomplete.

Life is a book that ends in the wrong place. It could be on a train, after a steamy love scene or during a part of the life that the author correctly thought should be skipped entirely. A void from which the main character never re-emerges.

Death is not talked about, except when there are rules. Families suffer death and then it becomes the only thing talked about. Then the thing that must not be talked about. Eventually reflection is possible.

This cultural tendency to shun death, and keep it away from the subject of living seems a good strategy. Do not upset Grandma with that kind of talk, that sort of imperative. The fact that it usually approaches like anything, without an instruction guide, makes us all the more mystified by the obvious change it brings.

The psychological effects of death in the family should not be discounted. The gross effect of war, the intrusion of American forces into a culture that does not respect its intrusion, but associates the arrival of these badly dressed warriors with the death of many of their own family members.

The only time war is justified is to undo an invasion. There is no such thing as improving a culture by killing certain members of it. Enmity causes power to be invested in fighting adversaries.

War is a disease and the cure – it requires plenty of human intelligence. Is death the end game in Afghanistan? Will the bodies of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda leaders be the only product that America can win from this adventure of revenge?

Or will they further invest themselves in “reforming” a culture they do not own or even understand very well?

Barack Obama seeks to move the goal posts by postponing the Copenhagen agreement. Observing there is not enough time to make meaningful changes (which it is implied, would need to have been started during the reign of King George to now be appearing before the Senate). It seems American Health Care was the priority.

New Zealand, having been an economic little engine that could, expanded its economic base by allowing much foreign investment. New Zealand has increased its greenhouse gas emissions by some 22% during the Kyoto era – the highest in the world. It illustrates the real problem we face, attempting to mitigate human expansionism.

That Kiwi colloquial “she’ll be right, mate…” dissolves into that other one, “Yeah, right.”

Part of the NZ problem is importing capital inevitably leads to more or everything. Kyoto sought to LIMIT the output from human activity. If you increase the number of the industrially capable by allowing immigration of people and capital, greenhouse gas emissions rise, demonstrably.

Reduction targets as a goal seem ignore a fundamental problem. We are overheating the world by increasing our activity levels year on year. It is politically unsound to rail against productivity growth.

As New Zealand’s population has increased, its per capita increase in greenhouse gases is particularly of concern as it driven by primary production – the making of animal foods – in an economy that is the very model of new right thinking unleashed. Someone had to do it, unprotect everything, tax everything. NZ’s eradicated farming subsidies twenty years ago; subsidies still protect American and French farmers – the danger seems that removing them will introduce new efficiency and expansion into the food production chain on a far larger scale and make matters exponentially worse.

If we limit activity, but increase population, the result is inevitable: poverty.

The solution is that economic growth be shackled by the requirement for clean and efficient energy, and economic planning to reward population reduction. Plus, if we change technology, we can grow with less concern.

The new watchword must be “100% clean energy”. All the scare stories about global warming are not changing our behaviour; the solution seems to be to utilize our behaviour.

The problem remains. Human greed. If we were not wired that way, we would not have evolved. We did, now we must attend to the heart and lung health of the world. We are a miracle, let us be inventive enough to advance without polluting.

In this video, which is about Israel’s border guards being able to shoot those who attempt to approach the wall dividing them from Palestinians we see the march of technological progress against sheer numbers. The removal of border guards to relative safety and the use of remote cameras and controlled weapons is an obvious advantage.

These weapons systems are sold by the US and paid for from US aid monies provided by the Americans to Israel. Thus it is proxy war, and a US driven market of death.

It will expand as it obviously is beneficial for the dominant side, they lose nobody, whereas the “other” loses everyone.

The counter argument is that such mollycoddling is not making real soldiers out of the forces, indeed the combination of the apparent distance (i.e. like a video game) and the guilt (causing death to another human being) could produce mental disorders in these vets of the technocracy – probably disabling them from indulging in virtual games in the future. Not as bad as losing a leg, certainly. And the mental effects on the solider are the not the issue. It is a stupid argument to pursue, disingenuous at best.

A more feasible reason to understand the rise of the role of technology in battle is to question the very need for it. We need technology, I am assured of that part. It is the use of death as a form of control, that I question.

The most instructive aspect of this video are the divided comments, pro Israel and anti – both are irrational. A good life is not one led under the fear of death, random or certain. A good life is not one won as a result of killing other humans.

The human race paused in the 1980s when Prof Helen Cauldicott made the world aware that there was no winnable nuclear war scenario, only the destruction of all of us. It is the same thing with all forms of war. There is nothing to gain, there is everything to lose.

But if we start to believe that routine random execution of the unwanted is the only way ahead, we must question who we are to make that decision.

The same goes for the other side. Hurling bombs over the wall is not going to provide political progress for your children. It ruins the chance at clear dialog. There is nothing harder – to talk to someone who slayed children.

What gets me is that both sides historically commit and accumulate more injustice with acts of war. Mutual tolerance is the easy way to do it. Segregation and bulldozing residences, shooting at people or the random blowing up of innocents, these measures provide no progress. Military action always brings chaos.

Imagined political change is not sufficient reason to justify violence.

In 40 years nobody has tried peace as a solution.

Sharing the wealth with education and respectively putting up with the strange rituals of the other as something private as more successful pluralities emerge.