Gas war, Old grass, Autistic glance

csmonitor
Seems fairly obvious:
1) China will soon have 40 million surplus unmarried males
2) China is voracious for materials and energy
3) Around CE 2012±7 peak oil, and price goes to the 'BinLaden level' of $200
Its obvious theres going to be a war around 2020
expect SanDiego,LosAngelse to be nuked
Australia will make a few foolish gestures towards USA, then be promptly occupied by China
The real fighting will be over gas, not oil. Gas makes Ammonia.
Australia has contracted its gas cheaply to China (thanks, little Johnny)
so when Aus reneges, China will have an instant excuse for invasion.
One uncertainty is the immanent effect of GlobalWarming. By 2020 will USA or Aus agriculture be damaged?

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Grunts not so quick on the draw in the far West...
16 November 2005, 23:21 Makka Time..
Nine US servicemen have been killed over the past two days Iraq, including five marines killed in a gun battle in the country's far west.

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W going potty...
americablog
..This man is running our country. And he won't speak to anyone - ANYONE - other than Condi Rice, his mom, and Karen Hughes? That leaves out the entire Dept of Defense - kind of important during war time - the CIA, every other agency and the entire White House staff.
...Not just worst president ever. But quickly becoming scariest president ever.

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..it is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have espoused during the last 230 years.
Jimmy Carter .."Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis,"

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Greenhouse gasses are likely to rise in coming years after a fall linked to the collapse of smokestack industries in the former Soviet Union, UN data..
GG Emissions down 5.9% 2003->1990 in 40 rich nations including former Communist..
That beat a goal of 5.2% by 2008-12 in the UN's Kyoto Protocol..
..It projected that emissions could rise by 10.6% above 1990 by 2010 most cuts were from the early 1990s when ..Soviet Union and eastern Europe shut down.
Biggest falls
..Lithuania had made the deepest cuts at 66.2% below 1990->2003 Latvia on 58.5% and Estonia on 50.8%.
Spain was furthest above target with a 41.7% rise 1990->2003, Monaco at 37.8%, Portugal 36.7%, Greece 25.8 and Ireland 25.6%.
The United States was 13.3% over 1990 levels.
Among developing .. biggest rise was in Paraguay with a 114% gain in 1994-> 1990 and the biggest fall in Cuba, of 40%.

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Harriet 175years
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17 Nov 2005. Fossilised dinosaur droppings found in central India show that..titanosaurs ate grass..
Few..had ever thought that dinosaurs grazed, because there was no evidence that grasses existed that long ago.
..Vandana Prasad.. Lucknow..65-million-year-old coprolites ..
They found the expected plant matter - cycads and conifers .. Cretaceous
..Stromberg spotted silica structures called phytoliths.
.."It's indisputable that these are from grasses....from very different species of grass.
"..the first unambiguous evidence that grasses had originated by the late Cretaceous period and also that they had considerably diversified,"..
That suggests that grasses had been around for a long time..
..phytoliths look like..rice.

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laweekly Lewis article in LA weekly pushing Nuclear power:
and noted these:
"which for every megawatt of power blasts a ton of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the skies"
-this is meaningless, an ignorance of physics terminology which is the first item mentioned in techno-journalism 101
"It is widely accepted that one nuclear power plant spares the atmosphere the emissions of 93 million cars"
- this is tendentious to the point of deception - nuclear electricity doesnt replace oil
the Uranium cycle may be OK if everyone acts correctly. ...Nobody would turn off all safety systems, would they?
Heres a story from the front end of the cycle. At a uranium mine in Australia [in a World Heritage Park!], radioactive waste water was accidentally connected to drinking water pipes. Employees chugged it down for days.

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flying spaghetti monster
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andromeda
spitzer
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Polio virus stocks made using monkey cells..nearly universally contaminated with SV40. ..in 1959, most ..eliminated SV40 .. with an anti-SV40 antiserum. One eastern European .. (EEVM) .. instead heated ..producers switched to ..SV40-resistant African green monkeys instead of rhesus..
..tested stored samples ...all stocks were negative..except an EEVM virus stock produced in 1966 and used through 1978 was positive ..

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Resveratrol is a natural polyphenol .. grapes, berries and peanuts, 40 micromoles/litre cut levels of the Alzheimer's-associated] amyloid-beta peptides by more than half.

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Nature
People can have physical brain abnormalities similar to those found in autistic individuals without having the disorder themselves.
Eric Peterson U Colorado.. scanned the brains of 40 parents of autistic children and compared the results with functional magnetic imaging (MRI) scans from 40 controls. The data look much like those obtained for comparisons between autistic and non-autistic brains..
Some areas of the brain region known as the prefrontal cortex were smaller than normal in the parents of autistic children
..tendency to avoid making eye contact Brendon Macewicz U North Carolina.. nine families with an autistic child and unaffected brother a digital camera and told them to take pictures of friends and family. Macewicz then mixed up the shots with images of strangers and tracked the childrens' eye movements while asking them to say whether the people they saw in the pictures were familiar or not.
Most people rely heavily on looking at the eyes when asked to complete this task. But autistic children are known to avoid the eyes and focus on other areas of the face. To Macewicz's surprise, the non-autistic siblings did almost exactly the same.
..then ran MRI scans on the brothers, focussing on the part of the brain known as the amygdala..typically smaller in autistic..The children showed a similar decrease in amygdala size to their autistic siblings.. 5-10%.
[- this is another in the long series of "lamppost" brain scan articles - whatever todays best brain scanners resolution, medicos excitedly announce they have discovered the brain structure for [fill in your favourite disorder]
- fact is that brains are wildly variable and labile, and current scanners have around a few seconds and a few millimetres resolution, which is absurd in considering function.
Anyway eye contact is way overrated, I only use it in job interviews, or seduction. Like a lot of real world people Islanders, aborigines.. I know that more than a glance is a threat]

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Mangrove murder, Sleeping bag, Soykino, Harere, German cheesebox

Mangroves, Fishponds, and the Quest for Sustainability
"As I write on this late June afternoon, my heart grieves amid news that a young couple, dearly loved former research colleagues living in the north of Panay Island in the Philippines where I work, had been shot over a fishpond dispute. The owner, it seems, did not want them to use a shortcut on his property that led to the pond the couple was renting from him. Bullets shattered the jaw, collarbone, and colon of the husband, a marine biologist who miraculously survived, but they proved fatal to his wife, an aquaculture nutritionist and university instructor."

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energybulletin
Is it possible to use fossil fuels without the negative effects?
Holmgren: Well, the example we give within permaculture is that right from the beginning there has been a strong emphasis on earthworks, using bulldozers to create dams, house sites, appropriately constructed roads and earthworks to direct the flow of water. The idea is that properly designed and constructed earthworks are one of the ancient ways in which people manipulated catchments to increase their total productivity, like the rice terraces of southeast Asia and many other structures that required the work of generations of people working with mostly human labor, sometimes animal power. We now have, as the result of technology and fossil fuels, the capacity to move earth very cheaply. Those earth structures, if they're well designed, can be maintained by future generations with little human labor. So that represents a very good investment of the capital capacity we have now.
...............
in Australia the glass of milk we drink is about twenty percent oil. In Europe, it's about fifty to sixty percent oil. In Israel, it's about ninety percent oil! In Saudi Arabia they've gone further than that—they have to desalinate sea water, too. What that shows is if there's enough energy you can do anything, in a way. You might get some very perverted systems, but it's still possible.

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survivingpeakoil
How to Plan for Peak Oil on a Limited Budget
Chris Lisle
your Sleeping Bag
There’s only one item I recommend you buy, and that’s a good sleeping bag. A good sleeping bag is worth its weight in gold. You need a good sleeping bag for many reasons. In a true survival situation, most people die because of hypothermia, not because of lack of water or food. A person can die of hypothermia in temperatures well above freezing. Just getting cold and wet at 60 degrees can make someone go hypothermic. In any survival situation, maintaining body temperature is critical to surviving. Further, getting sleep is essential to a good attitude and essential for making good decisions. Cave men would have killed for a good sleeping bag.

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infoshop
Canadian Chemical Producers Association released a statement pointing out that by far the most valuable use of natural gas was to make other materials such as vinyl and plastics. The Association contends that using natural gas to make materials is far more valuable to our civilization than burning it to keep warm or to make electricity that can be produced by other fuels. Until recently there was so much gas around nobody really looked very hard at what it should be used for. Anything that made economic sense was fair game.
It’s now starting to look as if natural gas may become scarce even before oil does.

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Our Village
Dmitry Orlov
As I mentioned, the collapse of the Soviet economy was barely detectable in Soykino. Reasoning by analogy, if some of the more pessimistic (or, as more and more of us think, realistic) predictions come true, and the developed portions of the United States become completely dysfunctional, much more so than they are presently, a village such as Soykino, if one existed, would remain similarly unaffected. And if you owned a house there, you could live there, and be unaffected as well.
Upon arriving, you would no doubt have to explain to the other residents what happened: "You see, the economy collapsed, and now there is nothing more for me to do out there." And they would say: "No! Really? That's a pretty big thing, isn't it?" And you would say: "Huge! Could you please pass the pickled mushrooms?"

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Middlebury Institute, which “hopes to foster a national movement in the United States” that will “place secession on the national political agenda; develop secessionist and separatist movements here and abroad; . . . create a body of scholarship to examine and promote the ideas of separatism; and work carefully and thoughtfully for the ultimate task, the peaceful dissolution of the American Empire.” The authors, Kirkpatrick Sale and Thomas Naylor, note that “the national government has shown itself to be clumsy, unresponsive, and unaccountable in so many ways

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When the historians come to write the history of the 21st Century, they may well record that the African nation of Zimbabwe was the first to succumb to peak oil.
...
A few years ago, the government turned much of the oil import business over to the private sector while retaining price caps on retail gasoline. Obviously, when the cost of oil got higher than the permissible sales price, gas stations went dry. This has resulted in a black market where gasoline is selling for ten times the controlled price.

While Zimbabwe 's multiple economic problems make it an atypical case, it is the first country to run almost completely out of oil. This, in turn, gives us a look at what will happen as the consequences of expensive and scarce oil spreads around the globe.

By last week, nearly all buses and commuter taxis in the capitol, Harare , had stopped running, forcing tens of thousands to walk to work. While there are still a lot of private cars on the road, they are being fueled with $36 a gallon black market gasoline. Municipal services have stopped. There are no trash collections, no ambulances, or operating public works vehicles. Only one fire truck has any fuel left. The police immediately commandeer any fuel they come across. Clean water and electricity are available sporadically. Hospitals are out of supplies and the staff is fleeing. What was once one of the cleanest, most modern cities in Africa is nearly finished.

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Katrina
, or how ConIntern will treat you...
Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

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the East German technology, known as "electroflux gradient" technology, identifies the magnetic fields of unlike metals. These fields are electronically targeted and, in turn, trigger detonations. Only certain machinery, like Humvees and tanks trigger the explosions, while people, horses, and donkeys that near the devices result in no detonations. The circuitry and explosives are contained in what is called a "German cheesebox." The box is able to focus the blast to defeat armor. A military intelligence official said these units are hard to defeat and make armor virtually obsolete.
[I always say: use two IR beams, that gives you speed and length of vehicle, so you can detonate your shaped charge to kill the maximum Australian or USA or English troops. Not sure what the current Australian law on disaffection is, but surely there is a moral duty on every able-bodied citizen, anywhere in the world, to proceed immediately to Iraq and kill Australian troops - they are illegal invaders]

Scuttling HMNZS Wellington, Island Bay, Wellington, New Zealand. 13 November 2005

Scuttling HMNZS Wellington, Island Bay, Wellington, New Zealand. 13 November 2005, originally uploaded by Felicity and Phillip.

Cook Straight at peak traffic, explosions follow

St Basil on evolution, Wayne on Chavez & Jordan,tom_lasseter on Iraq, China, Sony rootkit

St. Basil the Great as saying that some people, "fooled by the atheism that they carry inside of them, imagine a universe free of direction and order, as if at the mercy of chance."

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France:
waynemadsen
WMR has emphasized that the arson attacks are well planned, coordinated, and only plaguing the three major NATO countries that opposed the war in Iraq, For that reason, European law enforcement and intelligence agencies should place 24x7 surveillance on Israeli diplomatic and intelligence personnel who may be engaged in "Lavon Affair" and "911" style false flag operations. Such an operation aimed at Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez may have just been uncovered in Trinidad and Tobago.

In what may have been an attempt to stage a set of bombings in the Caribbean oil region and point the finger at Venezuela's significant Arab and Muslim population, a Russian-born Israeli national was recently arrested in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Vatang Agrunov (who uses the aliases Bhatang Agranouve and Dahtang Mik Agarunov), 26, is being questioned by Trinidadian authorities for his connections to four bombings in Port of Spain this year

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Jordan:
informationclearinghouse
Israelis evacuated from Amman hotel hours before bombings : A number of Israelis staying on Wednesday at the Radisson hotel were evacuated before the bombing by Jordanian security forces, apparently due to a specific security alert. They were escorted back to Israel by security personnel.

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Population declining:
Russia is losing 2,000 people a day, and is expected to go on doing so for the next 45 years. In the other European countries of the former Soviet Union, the outlook is, if anything, even worse: in Ukraine the decline is expected to be over 40% and in Belarus nearly 30%.
.. In Asia the big loser will be Japan where the population has just started falling, two years ahead of expectations,
.. Italy: at present there are 58 million Italians, and if they continue to reproduce at their current low rate there will be 20% fewer ..by 2050, even allowing for immigration.

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Egypt election:
csmonitor
With the opposition group expected to at least triple its numbers in parliament, a significant shift in the country's political dynamic is afoot. Today, for the first time in decades, not a single Muslim Brother sits in jail, and candidates are campaigning openly as Muslim Brothers.
..............
Last month's Muslim-Coptic riots in Alexandria, in which three people died and a nun was stabbed, highlighted tensions between the two communities.

"There is no desire to give the Copts representation in parliament and this is among the reasons that the Christian feel oppressed," says Milad Hana, a secular Coptic writer. "There is more and more a sectarian air within the ruling powers in Egypt."
..and I re-read "Mountolive" just last week
[for latest news see: egyptelection

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China Inc : How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World by Ted C. Fishman
..China "Wal-Mart with an army."
Deng Xiaoping : From 1978 onward, he started decollectivizing the economy. I
but absolute poverty, defined as living on $1 a day or less, has fallen from 64% to 17% of the population.
[but see V Smil & methane generator destruction: All of the thousands of methane generators from the CulturalRev days have been trashed. Meanwhile methane generators are the latest thing in Sweden...
Smil also points out that China's economy is becoming less energy intensive, ie more output per Joule.
Probably wont be enough to prevent the Middle Kingdom from coal-cooking the planet...]
[ps: 22Nov05 Aus aid in Inner Mongolia, currently includes Pigshit Methane generator.. what goes around...]

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Iraq, news from a 'peaceful' province:
tom_lasseter
"They say attacks are down. Well, no s---," Hendricks said. "We're not patrolling where the bad guys are."
U.S. patrols on a parallel road, Route Marie, ended in late May.
Pointing to Route Marie on a map on the wall of his barracks, Hendricks traced a 2-mile stretch of the road with his index finger.
"They kicked our a-- off this road," Hendricks said. "They hit us with so many IEDs we had to stop using it."

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mercurynews
Tom Lasseter
Shwail told the officers that Ayatollah Hussein al-Sadr had informed him that the troops must stay in Kadhemiya to protect the Shiite faithful.

"Sayyid Hussein al-Sadr has more influence than (Prime Minister) Ibrahim Jaafari," Shwail said, using an honorific title. "The battalion in Kadhemiya won't be moved from there for the next 100 years."

The officers looked at each other, dismayed. Their men, stretched thin in the insurgent hotspots, are shot and killed regularly.

"But sir, we need more troops," one officer said.

"The problem," Shwail said, "is convincing Sayyid Hussein al-Sadr."

Some Iraqi troops went a step further, saying they were only awaiting word from the marja'iya before turning on American forces

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bowman.typepad a couple of conservative links:
amconmag
James P. Pinkerton:
Shanghai Cooperation Organization, comprising six members: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Since then, the SCO has expanded: India, Pakistan, and Iran now enjoy “observer” status. It remains to be seen, of course, whether this ambitious new Eurasian entity possesses much weight; so far, America and its allies have ignored the SCO’s resolution that we quit Afghanistan.
... ...
Barry Lynn, in his new book, End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation, argues that if present trends continue, the Chinese will soon be able simply to pull the plug on our economy—and so we won’t be able to fight China even if we want to, or have to,
..
chief financial officer of CNOOC, Yang Hua..“What is ‘human rights’?” Yang asked rhetorically. “I’ll tell you what it means. It means having guaranteed access to energy.”

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foreignpolicy
Stephen M. Walt
Rumsfeld and other administration officials blame our problems on Baathist “dead-enders” and radical jihadis, aided and abetted by Syria and Iran. It’s not the Bush administration’s fault we’re losing, we are told; it’s our enemies’ fault. That is no defense at all, of course, because it merely reminds us that the Bush team failed to anticipate what would happen once Saddam was gone and we “owned” Iraq

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csmonitor sysinternals
Sony cripples your Computer:
But when Mr. Russinovich, chief software architect for Winternals Software, did a thorough investigation he was shocked to find the source of the rootkit: a commercially produced music CD from Sony BMG. Not only that, but when he manually tried to erase the program, it disabled his computer's CD drive.