A Dying Russia Likely to Lash Out in Death Throes

“Russia will be experiencing a population decline not seen since the plague of the Middle Ages,” said Jackson. “This is a cause for concern because an extreme misalignment of geopolitical aspirations and demographic fundamentals can lead countries to behave unpredictably.”

Will Russia meekly accept the fate of its demographic decline, or will this trend feed extremism and provoke aggression?

“Russia has window of opportunity that is closing soon,” said Joe Purser, director of the JFCOM Futures Group. “It may face a situation in 20 or 30 years when it will be unable to see to its own security.” _ISN

If Russia's ethnic Slavs are aging without replacement, who will work to pay for the pensions of those who cannot work?

...in January 2010 the Kremlin may be paying nearly 40% more for old-age pensions than it is paying now because of Russia’s runaway consumer price inflation, which runs well above 20% on the tiny basket of staple products that ordinary Russians need to survive.

Where will the Kremlin get the money?

It has already wasted more than half of its FOREX reserves on a futile effort to artificially inflate the value of the ruble and the stock market. It is planning to spend a huge chunk of its budgetary reserves to cover existing expenses in 2009, when it will be entering a full-blown recession and incurring massive debt. It’s planning a gigantic increase in military spending, and now it will face the crushing burden of monumental new, permanent, pension expenses — or the prospect of senior citizens starving and freezing as their existing pensions are whittled down to nothing by the plague of inflation. _LR

The Russian economy -- like the ruble -- is in freefall. Russian doctors earn $1.25 an hour. If the doctor is willing to work overtime, she may earn as much as $2.00 an hour!

"At the state hospital, I earn $200 a month, $400 with overtime," Bogdashov says. _npr

Russian men typically die in their 50s. Drug and alcohol abuse have become a staple of Russian life, beginning in the early teenage years.

"You see 12-, 13-year-olds sitting in the benches, just drinking beer like soda. So young. That's a problem," Kelleher says.

It's even more of a problem in villages outside the city where life has stood still. Abandoned by anyone with ambition, the shabby wooden houses lean to one side, seemingly as drunk as many of the remaining residents. _npr

Putin ignores the internal tragedy of Russia, since it is the outward projection of Russian power that concerns him. Putin will need to move against the Ukraine soon, to solidify his ability to project force into central Europe and the Mediterranean. What will Obama do in response? He will bend over as far as Vlad requires.

Under the Obama administration, American foreign policy's initial focus is on fighting the Afghan war. So the question regarding the Russian resurgence is not what the Americans will give the Russians, but how much and how publicly. This will give the United States greater leverage in dealing with what it has identified as its prime concern, but at the cost of both creating a greater challenge in the future and undermining the strength of the Transatlantic alliance structure. _Source_via_LR

Russia will build a wide fence of disaster around itself in an attempt to create a safety buffer. Given the demographic collapse of ethnic Slavs and the demographic rise in the Islamic ethnic groups of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, such a policy is likely to bring on the downfall of the Russian state even more rapidly.

Chechen warlords and other powerful Muslim fighting groups within and near Russia are biding their time. They will take payoffs from Putin and fight small wars like the one against Georgia for the booty. But eventually they plan to walk the streets of Moscow as owners.

A "New" Form of Economics Perpetrated Upon a Complacent American Population and an Unsuspecting World

“America doesn’t have reserves and it doesn’t have anything except, so far, the ability to borrow,” [Jim] Rogers said. “That’s not going to be good for the world economy. It’s just adding more debt, more consumption to a problem that’s caused by debt and consumption.” _Bloomberg

Children in high places are determining the future of the world's economy. Mind-child Barak Obama has joined with mind-child Tim Geithner and the mind-children of the US Senate and US House of Representatives to cancel the private sector in favour of a neo-fascist form of top-down feudalism.The exact form of this brave new reich will be spelled out to the populace as soon as the mind-children in charge decide what it will be.

...Democrats will take the stimulus increases and make them part of a new, higher baseline for future spending growth. Anyone who proposes to cut from that amount will be denounced as "heartless" and Draconian.

The Republican staff of the House Budget Committee has calculated what happens to future spending if Congress continues to fund 19 of the most politically untouchable programs at their new stimulus levels. The list of 19 includes Pell Grants, Head Start money for poor kids, nutrition programs for seniors, Medicaid, special education, food stamps and cancer research at the National Institutes of Health, among others. Across a 10-year period through 2019, these 19 programs alone would increase federal outlays and tax entitlements by $1.59 trillion.

The nearby chart shows how the bill will increase the 2009 budget deficit, which is already the largest in modern history. Perhaps you recall the deficit wails from the Reagan years, but the peak deficit was only 6% of GDP in 1983. In the Clinton years we were told taxes had to rise to reduce a deficit of merely 3.9% of GDP. CBO estimates the 2009 deficit will reach 8.3% of the economy, not including the stimulus or bank bailout cash. Toss in those, and analysts at the Strategas Group estimate the deficit could hit nearly $2 trillion, or 13.5% of the U.S. economy. _WSJ

The Obama plan: Borrow more money than the world's economy can support, and consolidate power through any mechanism imaginable. The American people haven't a clue what this power grab is leading up to. The rest of the world is even less prepared.

But it is good news for all the dictators of the world who couldn't wait to see the collapse of Pax Americana. The world is departing the era of any pretense to the rule of law, and returning to the historical stand-by era of the rule of strong and ruthless men.

If the strongest and most ruthless men hail from Russia or China, the world will assume a certain form. If the strongest and most ruthless men hail from Pakistan, Caracas, or Lagos, the world will assume a quite different form.

The rules are changing. Wait and see, or take steps to prepare. Your choice.

Irrational Exhuberance? Perhaps a Little

The current economic contretemps is a forceful reminder against blind extrapolation of present trends. Those who remember other recent discontinuities such as the 9/11 attacks and the dot.com crisis -- among others -- should remember not to fall too quickly for "gee whiz!" futuristic monomania.

Eventually, after we sweep up the messes made by Pelosi, Obama, Putin, and others, humans may be back on track for some type of singularity, or choice-expanding discontinuity.

Don't expect mind uploading or human-level machine intelligence for a number of decades. When mind uploading becomes possible, don't be surprised if the destination architecture has nothing in common with what we currently think of as computers.

Expect to be surprised, in both good and bad ways. Prepare for both. That way you can move as quickly over the bad as possible, to savour the good.

H/T Open Culture

Recession Clouds Reaching as Far as Dubai

BEIJING -- The worldwide economic slump is slashing demand for exports from Asia, aggravating China's downturn and threatening to push some countries into full-blown recession.After nearly a decade of eye-popping growth, China's economy slowed dramatically in the last quarter of 2008, recording gross domestic product growth of just 6.8 per cent at an annual rate, down from 9 per cent the previous quarter. _GlobeandMail

Whether a nation's economy is based upon exports, like China or Russia, or based upon financial services like Dubai, the current global credit crisis and de-leveraging is causing significant dislocations. Consider Dubai, a nation once thought to have a bullet-proof economy:

No one knows how bad things have become, though it is clear that tens of thousands have left, real estate prices have crashed and scores of Dubai’s major construction projects have been suspended or canceled. But with the government unwilling to provide data, rumors are bound to flourish, damaging confidence and further undermining the economy.

...Some things are clear: real estate prices, which rose dramatically during Dubai’s six-year boom, have dropped 30 percent or more over the past two or three months in some parts of the city. Last week, Moody’s Investor’s Service announced that it might downgrade its ratings on six of Dubai’s most prominent state-owned companies, citing a deterioration in the economic outlook. So many used luxury cars are for sale , they are sometimes sold for 40 percent less than the asking price two months ago, car dealers say. Dubai’s roads, usually thick with traffic at this time of year, are now mostly clear.

...For many foreigners, Dubai had seemed at first to be a refuge, relatively insulated from the panic that began hitting the rest of the world last autumn. The Persian Gulf is cushioned by vast oil and gas wealth, and some who lost jobs in New York and London began applying here.

But Dubai, unlike Abu Dhabi or nearby Qatar and Saudi Arabia, does not have its own oil, and had built its reputation on real estate, finance and tourism. Now, many expatriates here talk about Dubai as though it were a con game all along. Lurid rumors spread quickly: the Palm Jumeira, an artificial island that is one of this city’s trademark developments, is said to be sinking, and when you turn the faucets in the hotels built atop it, only cockroaches come out. _NYT

Most unfortunate. The Arab world truly needed an interface to the larger world such as Dubai. A place where Arabs and Muslims could pretend to be free of the irrational tribal strictures of Islam, at least for a while. The dream was to create an Arab "halfway house" that would ease the transition of the Arab world from the middle ages to modern times. It looks as if medieval Saudi Arabia will have the last laugh. At least until Iran drops the big one on Riyadh.

After that, one may have to wait quite a while before anyone laughs again in that part of the world.

How Did Humans Come to Be Smarter than Apes?

Humans display significant differences in behaviour and mental aptitude from their closest relatives -- the great apes. How did those differences come about? Could a similar branching off take place in the near future, with the arrival of a new species that can make monkeys out of men?

Changing a single base, or DNA letter, is likely to have a limited effect because such mutations alter only a single gene. But large duplications containing 20,000 bases or more, such as the ones mapped in the new study, may contain more than one gene or parts of genes and regulatory regions.

Doubling, tripling or quadrupling the number of copies of a piece of DNA in the genome can potentially increase activity of genes contained in the chunks by a corresponding amount. A duplication might contain some parts of a gene, but not all of it, which could change the gene’s function. And duplications might contain control panels for genes, Gerstein says. Copying those control panels, in full or in part, and inserting them somewhere else in the genome could change the activity of genes adjacent to the insertion point.

Duplications don’t appear to happen randomly, the researchers found. Most duplications occurred next to more ancient duplications, creating hot spots in the genome susceptible to copying and rearranging....

About 20 percent of the duplications identified in the study are found only in humans. Most of the replicated chunks contain genes with unknown function, so the next step of the project is to figure out how the duplications happen and how the genes inside them contribute to making humans human. _ScienceNews

Genomic "hotspots" are analogous to the volcanic "hotspots" responsible for creating the Hawaiian Islands, and other island chains. The question is whether these genomic hotspots are still active, percolating the foundations for an even newer species that is to man as men are to apes? In any event, understanding the power of gene duplications will help to understand more of the powerful forces underlying evolution.

Such speculation is highly politically incorrect, since if the mind is not careful it may stray to the heretical topics of IQ and EF differences between population groups, and differences in measured IQ on different continents and parts of continents of the world. Such differences may suggest nascent speciation attempts that were ongoing thousands of years in the past.

Unfortunately, such self-censorship of the sciences in the western world is leading to the acceptance of the most absurd theories (imminent anthropogenic climate catastrophe) and an out of hand rejection of the study of promising avenues of research (reasons for differences in group intelligence and aptitudes). Refusing to study these things only assures that we will remain stuck in the present rut of ignorance.

Evolved, Not Designed: Magnificent Brain

The human brain is a hodge-podge Swiss Army Knife of cognitive skills, driven by emotions, instincts, and physiologic drives. Almost all of our explanations for why we do what we do, are wrong. Is it any wonder that human-level machine intelligence is already "several decades overdue"?

Romance is like addiction in the brain. Not really surprising. In terms of procreation and providing for helpless infants and toddlers, it has proved a rather useful addiction indeed.

Sleep is needed to form memories. The researchers demonstrated that sleep is needed for the brain to develop through the "critical developmental windows." As far as how much sleep an adult human really needs for normal functioning, I suspect that it all depends upon the particular human's genome, his actual job demands and life demands. I suspect that most adults could do quite well on half the sleep they actually get, once we understand what sleep does and how to help it to get done.

External choices are given higher priority than internal choices. This makes sense for individuals with under-developed or damaged frontal lobes. For others with a strong sense of self efficacy and skepticism toward outside authority, the findings might be completely different. Psychological neoteny involves a perpetual adolescent incompetence, being stuck at the stage before the pre-frontal lobes are fully developed. Present society is full of such people, which makes academic lobotomy and "media lobotomy" much easier to perform.

Brain training helps memory and real world performance in the elderly. Imagine that! When you force the brain to work, it performs better. I experience a similar "thought acceleration" when flying a plane, compared to driving a car. Likewise when performing anesthesia on a difficult neurosurgical case requiring extreme precision, the mind seems to perform at almost super human levels. Subsequent real life seems to take place extremely slowly in comparison.

Duplication in genes leads humans to branch from other primates. This article requires a blog posting of its own, its implications are so rich.

It is only reasonable that humans do not understand their own brains. Opportunists may discover particular "hacks" that allow them to take advantage of those around them. Hucksters, magicians, advertising geniuses, politicians, media tycoons -- the successful ones understand how to fool the human mind. Some of the people, all of the time. Even all of the people some of the time. But all of the people, all of the time? They are working on it.

Doctors Pelosi et Obama Promise to Cure

A new government-financed bubble will soon be upon us and, like a runaway train, it cannot be stopped. _TheAge

It is one of history's great jokes that the US, with its traditions of "limited government", should be now be led by unlimited government proponents such as Obama and Pelosi, just when a century-long string of government excesses should come to a bubble-bursting climax.

Far from restoring the economy to health, the pork-barrel Pelosi plan will likely force the US economy into the catastrophe of acute stagflation and decline, with grave long-term repercussions at home and abroad.

....With the stakes this high, Pelosi should have restrained her urge to flex political muscle.

Most economists agree that America has enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, based primarily on excessive US dollar liquidity and unmanageable levels of debt. Thus, any healthy correction would necessarily involve serious deleveraging and a severe recession. After a lot of pain, the economy would rebuild with healthier fundamentals. Infrastructure improvement would aid, but not cause, the eventual recovery.

Recession is the natural cure for the politically inspired profligacy that America has enjoyed for almost 40 years. Unfortunately, the side effects of this medicine, namely the rapid reallocation of labor resources and deflationary damage to debtors, are still unpalatable to pandering politicians.
_Browne

Obama's apocalyptic threats -- of the irreversible devastation that would occur should he not get his way -- do not suggest leadership in the grand tradition of Churchill during the blitz. Instead, the push toward unlimited government powers and ever-building, unlimited government spending suggest more the Bernie Madoff scam artist of pyramid scheme fame.

This week President Obama claimed that failure to pass his economic stimulus bill will have catastrophic consequences for the U.S economy. The reality is the catastrophe will be far greater with his plan than without it. If the trends of January and early February of 2009 continue, the rug will be completely pulled out from beneath the U.S. economy, and the full cost of the President's "economic depressant package" will be apparent to all. _SeekingAlpha

It is difficult to believe that Pelosi et Obama actually understand the potential for economic devastation that lies within the current international financial stress point. Their actions suggest that they are viewing the crisis as an opportunity to consolidate power by rewarding powerful friends and by undermining the private sector of the economy -- which is viewed with mistrust and loathing by the unlimited government faction currently in control.

Obama and Pelosi do not understand the current problem. No wonder their "solution" is so perfectly crafted to make the problem considerably worse.

I fear that the trillions of government finance spent to save the world from "deflation" will, in the end, require perpetual needs for trillions more. There will be no kick-starting asset bubbles or a return of private-sector credit excess. Instead, it will be a case of throwing repeated doses of government-directed finance/purchasing power at the system. Temporary but fleeting economic boosts will then require only stronger doses of artificial stimulus.

We've commenced a new cycle dominated by government electronic printing presses in all their various forms. The inflationary consequences will be a different variety than we've grown accustomed to from previous reflations. But the bottom line is - and there's ample history to support this view - that once the "printing presses" get humming along it's going to be darn difficult to slow them down. _Noland

Neurosciences Institute 5, Carnegie Mellon 0

At the invitation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, we incorporated a brain of the kind that we were just talking about into a Segway transporter. And we played a match of soccer against Carnegie Mellon University, which worked with an AI-based Segway. We won five games out of five. That’s because our device learned to pick up a ball and kick it back to a human colleague. It learned the colors of its teammates. It did not just execute algorithms. _Edelman

When you are making brains for robots, you need to follow the right pattern for what the robot is intended to do. If the robot is supposed to perform a human function, or play a human game, its brain should preferably be patterned after that of a human, to some extent. From an interview with Gerald Edelman of Scripps Research Institute and the Neurosciences Institute:

By proposing the possibility of artificial consciousness, are you comparing the human brain to a computer?
No. The world is unpredictable, and thus it is not an unambiguous algorithm on which computing is based. Your brain has to be creative about how it integrates the signals coming into it. And computers don’t do that. The human brain is capable of symbolic reference, not just syntax. Not just the ordering of things as you have in a computer, but also the meaning of things, if you will....

What exactly is a brain-based device?
It looks like maybe a robot, R2-D2 almost. But it isn’t a robot, because it’s not run by an artificial intelligence [AI] program of logic. It’s run by an artificial brain modeled on the vertebrate or mammalian brain. Where it differs from a real brain, aside from being simulated in a computer, is in the number of neurons. Compared with, let’s say, 30 billion neurons and a million billion connections in the human cortex alone, the most complex brain-based devices presently have less than a million neurons and maybe up to 10 million or so synapses, the space across which nerve impulses pass from one neuron to another.

Our brain-based device learned to pick up a ball and kick it back to a human colleague. It did not just execute algorithms....

Why is this kind of machine better than a robot controlled by traditional artificial intelligence software?
An artificial intelligence program is algorithmic: You write a series of instructions that are based on conditionals, and you anticipate what the problems might be. AI robot soccer players make mistakes because you can’t possibly anticipate every possible scenario on a field. Instead of writing algorithms, we have our BBDs play sample games and learn, just the way you train your dog to do tricks.

Artificial Intelligence enthusiasts almost always underestimate the importance of machine architecture when they fantasise about "human level machine intelligence." Machine intelligence acolytes often seem to feel that consciousness and cognition can be captured in an algorithm, and installed in a wide range of machine architectures. Unfortunately for that effort, intelligence is not algorithmic. Humans, as "intelligent beings", devise algorithms in order to help machines and humans accomplish goals more efficiently. But the algorithms are artificial constructs usually designed for specific tasks.

The same type of mistake is frequently made by "uploading enthusiasts," who think that human consciousness will sooner or later be uploaded into a more durable matrix than the "meat brain" it currently resides in. Needless to say, the problem they think they are discussing is not what they believe.

For an example of what Al Fin thinks is the most realistic "uploading" concept so far, read John Scalzi's "Old Man's War," a work of science fiction.

Interestingly, some British roboticists are beginning to devise parallel methods of machine learning and evolution, loosely modeled on biological evolution. And a company in Japan is offering to construct a "baby you" robot that looks like the picture of you that you send in with your order and $2215. Perhaps if the British and Japanese roboticists were to get together, we may soon be able to buy youthful robots that looked like us, that could grow to imitate us and learn to take one's place at dreary official functions?

Are you thinking about "Pod People", or "Kiln People", or other fictional scenarios you may have read or seen? Don't be too quick to dismiss the idea. Life is more fun when we inject just a bit of poetry, fantasy, and magic.

Special Bonus: A Wired article looking at another "brain architecture computing" project centered at IBM Almaden, that includes researchers from Stanford, Cornell, Columbia, and UCal Merced.

A World Where Even Forests Learn to Talk

Forests? Talking? What could forests possibly find useful to talk about? What about ..... fire? Imagine a forest of trees, wirelessly networked to communicate information such as temperature, humidity, winds, and more?

enough energy is available to power wireless mesh networks within forests that can transmit data about local temperature and humidity conditions. These networks could be used for agricultural monitoring or early detection of forest fires. Voltree Power is planning to test their so-called Early Wildfire Alert Network (EWAN) beginning in the spring. _DesignNews_via_Bioenergy

Networked forests (and fields) could monitor for fires, pests, poachers, and a large number of other things.

Starting this spring, Voltree will test its device in a 10-acre area provided by the U.S. Forest Service in Boise, ID. Future applications, Love says, could include agricultural monitoring as well as radiation detection along the U.S. borders, to prevent the smuggling of radioactive goods. _TechnologyReview

Interesting. These talking forests and fields will detect smugglers, terrorists, the health of crops and trees, forest fires, and more. All made possible by the ability to turn lovely trees into "battrees."

And that is only the sensor side of the equation. What about actuators? What if trees could fight their own fires, or change the flow of the fire to make it easier for human firefighters to control? What if forests could alert animals of danger and somehow guide them to safety? Or trap poachers, terrorists, and other "undesirables"?

You can read more about the technology behind networked forests here and here. Here is the full text of a PLOS research article by MIT scientists describing the underlying phenomenon.

The voltages involved are in the milli-volt range, suitable only for a trickle charge to a small rechargeable battery. But as electronic devices are made smaller and less power-hungry -- yet more capable -- the possiblities for distributed computing and networking using very small levels of current are growing more impressive.

Russia's Problems Further Highlighted

Out of Russia's 140 million people, between 20 million and 25 million are Muslims.

If population trends continue at the current rate, Muslims could outnumber ethnic Russians in 30 years, al-Jazeera reports. More Russians are dying each year than being born, due in large measure to the popularity of abortion (Russian women had almost 13 abortions for every 10 live births in 2003), alcohol, and suicide.

Meanwhile, Russia's Muslim population has grown by 40 percent since 1989, the result of a high birth rate and continued immigration from the North Caucasus and Central Asia. There are now 25 million Muslims in Russia, and they are projected to become one-fifth of the country’s overall population by 2020. _ForeignPolicy

...with the rise of Islam, coupled with the negative growth in Russia's ethnic Slav population, dramatic change is under way.

If the trend continues, the Muslim population could outnumber ethnic Russians within 30 years. _Al Jazeera

If Russians are not procreating, but a minority 20% of the population is procreating, what will be the most popular name for newborns in the country? Muhammed? Well, at least for the boys. And where will an increasingly large portion of military conscripts originate? From the faster breeding minority, of course.

France is another country with a rapidly rising proportion of Muslims among its youth and military population. How are Muslims in the French military working out?

Over the last five years, France has been detecting, or at least fearing, loyalty problems among the fifteen percent of its soldiers who are Moslem. The military insists that these second and third generation French soldiers of, for the most part, Arab descent, are loyal. _StrategyPage

Russia's military has seen much better days. And just as high energy prices promised to allow a rapid rejuvenation of Russia's aging arsenal, commodity prices collapsed. With Russia's shrinking population, and rapidly changing demographics, how likely is it that Russia can hold its vast land empire together as one country for much longer?

The recent warship manoeuvres in the Mediterranean and Latin America were just "symbolic" gestures, carried out by the former maritime giant that was able to deploy only a small number of ships while the rest of the fleet was tied up at home without enough money to keep them in business, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said.

In February last year, a naval force led by the carrier Admiral Kuznetsov completed a two-month deployment, including a period in the Mediterranean - one of the longest of its kind since the Cold War, the IISS said in its annual Military Balance. A second naval deployment took place in October en route to an exercise with the Venezuelan Navy, and a Russian warship has joined the anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden.

Oksana Antonenko, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the institute, however, told a press conference at the launch of the Military Balance: "In military terms it was all very modest. This is not a major military comeback, it was just a symbolic deployment."

She cast doubt on Russia's ability to project force, and despite the "victory" of Russian troops in Georgia last August, their performance had highlighted their limited capabilities. She predicted that next year Moscow's defence budget would suffer from an even greater deficit. "It's hard to envisage a substantial increase in defence spending," she said. _Source

Russians are beginning to speak out against Muslim immigration, fearing that they will become a minority within their own country. Violence by Russians against Muslim immigrants is growing more common, lessening national cohesion. A similar phenomenon of decohesion is occurring within the ranks of the Russian army.

Below is a short interview with investor Jim Rogers, discussing the future of Russia and its economy:

The astounding thing, is that at the same time as the overall Russian population is shrinking by 400,000 people a year, the Muslim proportion is procreating at over twice the indigenous Russian rate. What does that tell you?

Russia faces huge challenges demographically, economically, technologically, and militarily. Russia has bullied its neighbors for far too long for any of them to feel particularly friendly toward the ailing bear. As Russia's Slavic population shrinks and becomes unable to defend Russia's huge landmass, these resentful neighbors will press inward more and more forcefully, upon the bear's rich den.

What will it take for Russia to survive? And if Russia falls, will its nuclear forces unleash a final flurry of belligerent outrage upon the world? Just hope it doesn't happen. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst....

Government Workers: The New Privileged Class

America, in case you hadn't noticed, is dividing into two nations. The 22.5-million-strong public sector (that includes retirees) is growing ever larger, and enjoying ever greater wages and benefits often guaranteed by state constitutions. In private-sector America your job, assuming you still have one, hangs on the fate of the economy. _Forbes

America dividing into two nations? The private sector has grown subservient to a better-paid, and far more securely pensioned public sector of unionised government workers. Government workers' unions are one of the biggest lobbies at all levels of government, and have the power to swing election results. If you work in the private sector, you are in thrall to the mighty government employee, and his all powerful union.

They can pretty much spend as much as they need to in order to get what they want. They have literally billions of dollars annually in dues they collect from their members working in government. This is taxpayers money.

This is the genuine “two Americas,” those of us in the private sector who have to be wealthy in order to retire with any sort of financial security, and public sector workers, who earn as much or more than private sector employees during the years they work, then retire early with an income for life that dwarfs what they might have eventually gotten under social security. Not only is this unjust, but it has become totally unsustainable from a financial standpoint. _Ecoworld

Public employee's have very generous pensions. These huge pensions -- which all of our taxes pay for -- are being mismanaged and run into the ground by "socially responsible" fund managers who have used other people's money to invest in "global warming" and "social justice." As these idiot-run funds crash to the ground, one might ask "who will pay for these 'gilt-edged pensions'?" The answer? YOU!!! WILL!!! PAY!!!

We have watched with trepidation as the stock market declines and along with it the value of our retirement accounts. Yet with our personal accounts, it’s our own problem. When it comes to public pensions, it’s the taxpayer’s problem. Underfunded pensions could cut two ways, leading to much higher taxes and/or cuts in government spending. _NG

It is almost impossible to lay off unionised government employees. And "spending cuts" in the age of Obama are an oxymoron. Our debt -- which stretches out into the indefinite future -- can only grow by the trillions, as the new dominant class makes itself at home in the house of privilege.

Indeed, government workers have led a charmed life over the past decade. In California, state and local public employee job growth increased between 1999 and 2007 at roughly twice the rate of the private sector, according to calculations from the Beacon Economics consulting firm. Whereas the number of private sector jobs increased about 8 percent, the number of state government jobs was up 16 percent and the number of local government jobs was up 14 percent.

As for wages, state government and private sector pay increased about 34 percent during that period, while local government salaries went up 40 percent. But make no mistake: When the value of benefits is added in, public sector workers are well ahead, often enjoying pension benefits and retirement health benefits unmatched in the private sector.

Now that Obama is NIC (narcissist in chief), what is true for California will be true for the entire nation. Government work is privileged work -- sinecured, generous, with lifelong benefits. Meanwhile, the private sector is being sucked dry by the government vampire.

What parts of the private sector will profit? The parts that are well-connected to the Obama wrecking crew. The private interests that supported the campaigns of the new ruling class, the new aristocracy, the new nobility, the new royalty.

Will being King prove elevating enough for Barak? Probably not. But we will have to wait and see how long this huge, unsustainable charade can continue.

When Will the Muslim "Youth Bulge" Pass So The World Will Be More Peaceful?

Asia Times

As Spengler points out at ATimes, Muslims are not contributing very much to the modern world except religious violence and intolerance. This violence grows naturally out of the "youth bulge," the demographic spike of sexually repressed young people living in an extreme shame vs. honour culture, which can be best tracked by the "median age" statistic. Young males of limited intelligence are particularly prone to violence, and as you can see from the above graph, Islamic countries are currently swimming in young males (and females), with an average IQ of 85.

Successful cultures produce people whose contributions resonate through the world - scientists, poets, musicians, entrepreneurs, or philosophers. Just one great individual can transform a nation, by setting an example for ambitious youth. Thanks to the composer Jan Sibelius, Finland with just 5 million people became a force in the world of classical music. But woe unto cultures whence comes no contribution to the rest of humanity. Where are the Muslim scientists, novelists, entrepreneurs, athletes and musicians?

...Most Muslims want to better their lives, as Obama said, but their lives are getting worse rather than better, and nothing they know can make things better. In theory, there might be a future state of the world in which the Islamic world could live in peace and prosperity, but today's Muslims cannot get there from here. _ATimes

It is interesting to compare median age with total fertility rate. If the country's vital statistics are reliable, then the median age statistic should be fairly reliable. The total fertility rate, on the other hand, is an estimate of expected fertility which is subject to a bit of manipulation and guesswork. What does one make of Iran, for example, with a relatively low median age (25.8) AND a relatively low TFR (2.1) for the third world? It is one thing for a country such as Japan with a median age of 44 and a fertility rate of 1.28 to be declared "demographically decreasing." A significant number of women aged 44 are already infertile. I consider the same declaration to be extremely premature for Iran or any other Muslim country. Japan is approaching the "point of no return", after which it will be extremely difficult to avoid a population implosion (without massive immigration), regardless of the wishes of the government or the people. Iran's fertility, on the other hand, could change at the drop of a mullah (or the entire gang of mad mullahs).

The chart from the Spengler article is attributed to UN projections. Unfortunately, if one is familiar with other UN projections, eg the IPCC climate projections, it is extremely difficult to put much reliance upon UN numbers.

Too many people make the assumption that the fertility curves (and affluent modernity) of the third world will magically begin to track the affluence and demographic implosion of the western world. There is very little reason to believe such a thing, except the failure to think outside of one's own culture. In many cultures, a new affluence is a good excuse to grow large families.

In the west, several concomitant trends came together in the 1960s to trigger the subsequent decline in births. The rise of widespread affluence, the abandonment of religion, the technology of contraception, the legalisation of widespread abortion, the explosion of females in higher education and the professions, the ascendancy of radical feminism and with its angry disapproval of stay-at-home moms, the widespread postponing of marriage, a legal "war against fathers" that made men second-class citizens in the divorce court which discouraged men from marrying at all, and a culture of psychological neotenisation creating an abundance of "never-grow-up" Peter Pans and Cinderellas. In what cultures of the world is the same confluence of factors likely to occur as quickly as in the west and Japan?

Muslim countries -- whether rich or poor -- are generally religious and conservative. The method of child-raising creates insular minds, and cultures that look inward in a monotonous manner. Creativity is almost non-existent, technology and the sciences are moribund. High IQ youth have to escape to the west for education and escape from the stifling atmosphere back home. Fortunate is that youth who can truly escape physically, mentally, and spiritually. He is the exception. The cruel culture of shame vs. honour instilled in the child's mind too often reveals itself decades later in the grown man.

There is only one way to be sure the Muslim youth bulge violence is well behind us. More on that later.

Killer Robots Change Face of Future War

We are entering the age of military robots, where killer robots become ever more lethal as they inch toward autonomy.

Attack drones and bomb-handling robots are already common in battle zones.

Robots not only have no compassion or mercy, they insulate living soldiers from horrors that humans might be moved to avoid.

"The United States is ahead in military robots, but in technology there is no such thing as a permanent advantage," Singer said. "You have Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran working on military robots."

There is a "disturbing" cross between robotics and terrorism, according to Singer, who told of a website that lets visitors detonate improvised explosive devices from home computers.

"You don't have to convince robots they are going to get 72 virgins when they die to get them to blow themselves up," Singer said. _France24

The US has a head start in the use of robots by land, sea, air, and space -- but Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran, and soon North Korea will have their own killer bots. Perhaps even equipped with nuclear warheads. To each of those tyrannous regimes, North America and Europe represent obstacles to the goal of conquering the world. Better to use robots to clear out the populations, so that your own people can move in and settle the land.

So why hasn't the US done this with Mexico, to make room for southward expansion in the face of the coming Ice Age? The US has not thought in terms of expansion for many decades. But the US is changing, and new imperatives may arise in the face of a changing global economy and demographics. The next violent cross-border incursion by Mexican military forces may trigger something big -- something robotic? Who knows?

Big, destructive robots may not be the biggest threat. Tiny, nano-robots, that can be targeted like the hunter-killers of Dune -- but are too small to be seen -- are soon to arrive on the scene. Carrying a tiny dose of highly lethal toxin or microbe, such nano-assassins would be virtually unstoppable. I can think of several other ways -- easy ways -- that invisible nano-machines could kill. Better not to say more.

Nanotech plus biotech plus infotech will make for potent changes in military strategy and tactics. But robotech will be quite enough, for now. Although now I must go, in the name of the baroque bloggers association, let me say, I'll be Bach!

The Settlement of the South Pacific

Dienekes Anthropology Blog looks at the evidence behind different theories dealing with the populating of the South Pacific by Austronesians. Anthropologists can use genetic evidence along with linguistic evidence to study the migrations of groups over long periods of time. The current consensus is that this vast migration began in Taiwan, and spread southward, then eastward, and branched to all points of the compass, eventually settling the Philippines, Indonesia, parts of New Guinea, and most of the South Pacific including New Zealand, Hawaii, and Easter Island (almost to South America).

Where else might these intrepid sea migrants have gone? Could they have formed settlements along the Chilean coast? If so, the evidence has not turned up yet.

One thing is clear, the old myth that the South Pacific islands were settled from South America is all but destroyed. Thor Heyerdahl's idea was adventurous enough and excited many romantic hearts, but doesn't seem to have proven out in the end.

The idea of the "lost civilisation" is persistent throughout the volumes of human myths and tales. When humans brave so much and travel so far to establish a home, it is likely that many promising starts ended up badly. There is a basis in fact for the "lost civilisation." Probably a much vaster basis than we can imagine.

Truly Tough People Temper in the Fire

The reaction of the intellectual elite to Sarah Palin was far more provincial than Palin herself ever has been, and those who reacted so viscerally against her evinced little or no appreciation for an essential premise of democracy: that practical wisdom matters at least as much as formal education, and that leadership can emerge from utterly unexpected places. The presumption that the only road to power passes through the Ivy League and its tributaries is neither democratic nor sensible, and is, moreover, a sharp and wrongheaded break from the American tradition of citizen governance. _Commentary

America's effete elite got exactly who they wanted in the White House. Someone who talks and thinks like themselves. Someone as equally untouched and untempered by real life, but with the proper degrees, friends, and attitude toward centralised control from "the top".

Meanwhile, America's schools and culture continues growing a large crop of perpetual adolescent incompetents, who take their cues from the effete elite via the entertainment and news media. The zombies of Obamby-land. Quite useful one day every two years, and particularly useful one day every four years. Otherwise, brain-dead zombies to be "managed."

If you learned the hard lessons of self-reliance, personal competencies, and working within the rules of society, you may not know how to talk the talk and walk the walk of the effete elite. If so, too bad for you if you want to break into national politics.

The reaction to Palin revealed a deep and intense cultural paranoia on the Left: an inclination to see retrograde reaction around every corner, and to respond to it with vile anger. A confident, happy, and politically effective woman who was also a social conservative was evidently too much to bear. The response of liberal feminists was in this respect particularly telling, and especially unpleasant.

“Her greatest hypocrisy is her pretense that she is a woman,” wrote Wendy Doniger, a professor at the University of Chicago. “Having someone who looks like you and behaves like them,” said Gloria Steinem, “who looks like a friend but behaves like an adversary, is worse than having no one.”

...In the end, Palin had a modest impact on the race. About 60 percent of those interviewed in the exit polls said McCain’s choice of Palin had been a factor in their vote. Of these, 56 percent voted for McCain while only 43 percent voted for Obama. In other words, she appears to have helped McCain more than she hurt him, but not by much, which is as it should be; we were voting for a President, after all. In the face of unprecedented attack, Palin succeeded where almost no vice-presidential candidate ever has before in winning sustained support for the ticket. _Commentary

Palin had real problems as a candidate. The news and entertainment media locked onto those weaknesses, and magnified them out of all reason and proportion. With Obama, they took exactly the opposite tack, and ignored any hint of weakness or deficiency.

They got what they wanted. And they continue to cover-up and obfuscate the huge problems of their Messiah. Zombies walk the land, oblivious. But real people, tough people, are tempered in the fire of real life. They keep living, keep growing, and keep getting tougher, because they face life full-on.

A society that grows top-heavy with a scummy faux elite, such as current American society, will eventually undergo significant changes. These changes will leave the unprepared, largely incompetent elite at a loss. The generations of zombies, psychological neotenates, are already lost -- beyond everything except technological revolutions that can remake their minds into those of real people. It's possible.

His Work Cut Out For Him

Seeking Alpha

Unfortunately, nothing he has done so far will help. In fact, if Obama's grand plans for health care nationalisation, energy starvation, military demoralisation, and amnesty for illegal aliens etc. are actually carried out, economic matters are likely to get far worse before getting better.

There is a good reason why leftism brings misery wherever it is put into practise. Obama has no experience in the real world, and refuses to learn from the experiences of others. His mind is full of misty, disconnected notions and whims, tied together by the limitless ambition of the total narcissist.

Interesting times to be alive. If you can get around all the corruption and stupidity in high places, some interesting opportunities are beginning to develop. Stay tuned.

Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst

We would all like to believe that the future of humanity on this planet is destined to be happy, prosperous, and long-lived. And, according to Ed Ring in "Humanity's Prosperous Destiny," that is exactly what we should expect.

Humanity is destined within a tantalizingly few decades to achieve a level of prosperity that can scarcely be imagined today. The ongoing conflicts of nations, continued destruction of the environment, heartbreaking poverty, ruthless injustice - these all constitute a dark fog of tribulations that can appear inpenetrable. But this fog that can seem so thick and toxic is actually disappearing with breathtaking speed. _More at Ecoworld

Very commendable in its optimism. I recommend reading the entire piece. It is well reasoned and documented.

While we are waiting for prosperity, the singularity, the next level, etc., we may want to make ourselves better able to deal with some of the intervening crises that may crop up. Living through the era of Putin, Obama, and Pelosi -- and reaching the age of prosperity on the other side -- will not be easy.

How will we get our basic services if society is falling down around us? Fortunately, Ed Ring provides us with information about some sophisticated tools that may come in handy, should any of us want to build "alternative communities" with minimal vital links to mainstream utility services. He starts with "energy from waste" and "making your own clean water from wastewater."

By showing how small, semi self-sufficient communities might provide their own power and wastewater services economically, Ed begins to show us how more functional self-assembling groups of people can sever most of their ties to the much larger, more dysfunctional population. There is much more at EcoWorld, on many topics dealing with improving one's world.

For the more "nitty-gritty" of dealing with the proximate hard times that may be coming, I recommend The Survival Blog(TSB). The archives of TSB are full of helpful tips and personal anecdotes that can save you a world of trouble. If the feces ever makes contact with the rapidly rotating metal blades, you will want to be able to separate yourselves from the masses of helpless pychologically neotenous whiners who populate much of the western world. Start preparing now to learn how that can be done. Here is another good information source.

The combined credit and commodities collapse of this past summer and fall were only the first in a series of economic problems coming down the pipe. It was natural that the voters of the US would choose a new face in the hope that newer ideas might be better ideas. Natural, but very stupid. Of course, a President McCain would have been at least 70% as bad as a President Obama will be, in terms of bad decision making. That 30% difference might have been most important, however.

That points out a huge part of the problem with humans -- they tend to rely on their leaders and bureaucratic structures in a most delusional manner. The self-reliance of the old pioneers is in short supply. That is obvious by how easily political scam artists get away with corruption and cheating. The media is in on the scam, of course, but with all the "new media" tools humans have, there is no reason they should still be so dependent on "old media" scam artists.

More Problems for Russia

After Putin's triumphal march on Davos, the Russian military's triumph over Georgia, energy triumph over Europe, and the recent expansion of Russia's air and sea power to larger parts of the globe, one might believe that Russia is entering a new phase of world dominance. Not so fast . . . .

The latest U.N. Development Program report on Russia's demographics, based on the birthrates of the last decade, suggests the country's numbers of young males of military age are set to halve after 2020. Russia's current economic woes, its unemployment doubling in six months and its exchange rate tumbling against the euro and the dollar reinforce the impression that the Kremlin's current ambitions are way beyond its capabilities.

...One key symbol of the financial crisis is the dizzying rise in interest rates. Since October 2008 the interest on a three-month ruble loan has more than tripled, from 9.1 percent to 28.3 percent. Another key statistic for the Russian economy is energy production, and in January oil output fell to 9.7 million barrels a day, a 1 percent decline on the year. Less oil, fetching a far lower price on world markets, is an ominous trend. At the same time, gas output fell by more than 10 percent in January because of the price row with Ukraine.... _Walker'sWorld

To Vladimir Putin, all of these problems are seen as mere distractions from his ambitious goals to extend Russian power to the antipodes and beyond. Putin wants to accomplish the ambitions of Stalin -- Russian hegemony over the globe.

Putin appears not to be aware of Russia's excessive dependence on energy exports. The huge problem of a shrinking indigenous Russian Slav population does not seem to have registered on the former KGB clerk. The rapid and massive expansion of muslim populations inside Russia and the Russian military itself must be outside of Vlad's consciousness. The powerful rise of China, and China's ravenous need for land and resources (such as the Russian far east) must not have occurred to the Prime Minister. Taking Putin's statements and actions literally, one would have to suppose that Vlad sees the world through magical eyes.

This is a pivot point for much of the world. Some of the world's leaders are taking semi-appropriate action to meet the challenges. Most are not. The aftermath may be most wretched.

Making Zombies

Human history is full of examples of ambitious people who discovered the "back door password" into human minds. Using this key, turning human beings into zombie followers was not so difficult.

Throughout history, it seems as though individuals had the ability to sway others to follow them no matter where they [led]. In the las[t] century, both Hitler and Mussolini had the ability to bend millions of people to their fascist will.

...Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group.

"It makes us feel as though we're part of a larger entity, so we see the group's welfare as being as important as our own," he says.

...Psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause....

...our brains are geared to mimic our peers.

"We are set up for 'auto-copy'," says Haidt.

Neurological evidence seems to back this idea. Vasily Klucharev, at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, found that the brain releases more of the reward chemical dopamine when we fall in line with the group consensus. _Source

Populist leaders who have learned the secret can seemingly come out of nowhere to control an entire population. While it appears that they have turned thinking humans into complete zombies, the true situation is more complex. The potential for zombification always existed, waiting for the proper key to fit the lock.

Far more interesting to me are the "skeptics", the "resisters". Independent thinking persons who generate their own goals and stoke their own energies to create their own lives, are the starting material for the next level. Zombies and would-be zombies are flimsy, too subject to the changing winds and tides. To create a next-level human, one must start with the best materials.

It is instructive to observe the history of the American colonies, as they evolved over time. Stubborn and strong minded persons tended to flock together and created one environment, while more pliable and group-minded persons flocked to create a different environment. As settlements of even the strongest-minded individuals evolved, natural flocking tendencies began to predominate, and the more independent persons migrated out to more open territory that required a tougher-minded sort.

There is little question but that the relative strength of independence vs. conformity lies at least partially in genetic factors. Environment no doubt plays a strong part in strengthening innate tendencies toward either group-think or independence. Executive function combined with IQ and other personality and character traits, all are both largely heritable and strongly influenced by environment. Why should zombie-potential be any different?

And perhaps we do not need to go back in history at all, to see successful examples of zombification?

Challenges to Russia Piling Up Quickly Like Snow

Finland's Ministry of Defense recently made available a 2008 study of contemporary Russian challenges (PDF). As might be expected, Russia's demographic problems are highlighted:

Russia is about to face big demographic challenges. Russia’s population is diminishing by approximately 400 000 persons per year; yet, the population in 15 Russian regions increased in 2005. Each of them, such as Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetya in the North Caucasus has sizeable Muslim populations. The life expectancy among Muslim males is far greater than that of ethnic Russians.

Paul Goble, an expert of Islam and the Muslim populationin Russia, estimates that the majority of Russian military recruits will be Muslims in 2015. In 2020 twenty per cent of the citizens will be Muslims, provided that the current demographic trends continue. If no changes occur, within three decades the majority of the citizens of the Russian Federation will be Muslims. Russian Muslims are a very heterogeneous group, ranging from Volga Tatars and multiethnic groupings in the North Caucasus to the new immigrants from the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. _Finish PDF report excerpted in Tundra Tabloids _ via _ Islam in Europe

Russia's muslims breed faster than the Slavic population, just as western Europe's muslims breed faster than the indigenous Europeans. Since muslims tend to settle in cities, where welfare payments are easier to obtain, it is the cities of Russia and Europe which will be impacted by muslim pluralities and majorities first. The Finnish ministry report predicts that by 2020, 20% of persons living in Russia will be muslim. But of course, that number will be much higher in Moscow and other cities.

Within the Russian military, new conscripts will be overwhelmingly muslim, and you will have a Slavic officer corps lording it over a disaffected muslim conscript army. Good luck with that, Vlad.

Even without the falling ruble, Russia’s impoverished population, working for an average wage of $4/hour, already faced double-digit consumer price inflation. Russia’s feeble economy is unable to produce a wide range of basic consumer products, and therefore must import them — and the falling ruble means a whole new level of inflation piled on top of the existing one. _LaRussophobe

With such problems inside Russia mushrooming, who can blame Putin for wanting to travel abroad to hobnob with the rich and famous, and harangue them on how they should be running their economies and their lives?

The Problem With Pot is Who Smokes it When

Using brain scans, researchers found abnormalities in areas of the brain that interconnect brain regions involved in memory, attention, decision-making, language and executive functioning skills. _LS

Image Source

When an adult smokes pot occasionally for relaxation and social bonding, his body and brain are well capable of dealing with the drug effects. But for the still-developing brains of adolescents and young adults, the impact of pot smoking is a bit more complicated. The brain contains abundant cannabinoid receptors, with effects that are still being discovered.

The findings are of particular concern because adolescence is a crucial period for brain development and maturation, the researchers note.

"Studies of normal brain development reveal critical areas of the brain that develop during late adolescence, and our study shows that heavy cannabis use is associated with damage in those brain regions," said study leader Manzar Ashtari of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The findings are considered preliminary, however, and more research is needed to confirm the work. The results, announced today, were detailed in the Journal of Psychiatric Research last month. _LiveScience

It is quite likely that any developmental effects of cannabinoids on adolescent brains depends upon the specific genetics of the individual in question. Some high school and college students might tolerate cannabinoids well, while other students might find particular career or life pathways aborted or forestalled by early and excessive use of pot. Even in mature adults, marijuana smoking has short and medium term effects that make certain types of reasoning (mathematical and abstract thought) more difficult.

The greatest danger of psychoactive drug use is during the formative periods of brain development. From embryonic development through adolescence and into adulthood, the young brain should be protected from substances that might alter brain development, whenever possible. We are familiar with fetal alcohol syndrome, of coke babies, and of babies born addicted to heroin. But the effects of recreational drugs on the brain development of middle school, high school, and college users has not been well studied.

We do not completely understand the Obama zombie effect, which culminated in the election of a US President completely unqualified to do anything other than vote "present." We have seen how "academic lobotomy" and "psychological neoteny" contributed to the zombification process, but is it not also likely that interference with normal brain development by psychoactive drug use also played a part? Certainly a brain unable to think for itself is more likely to be influenced by media propaganda and zombie peer pressure. The next question to ask: "Is there life after Obama-Zombification?" More on that later.

You Know You May be Demented if You Believe in Climate Catastrophe and Ocean Acidification

Admit it: any conscientious person who really believed in human-caused climate catastrophe would have shot himself in the head long ago. They could easily lighten the planet's burden and save many hundreds of tons of CO2 by the simple act of rapid intra-cranial lead infusion.

So, if you really want to save the planet, stop wasting time and energy by writing pointless articles based on flimsy evidence. Charity starts at home, but saving the environment starts in the governments of India, China and the USA. There are also a number of other ways to make a difference

1. Breath[e] less. An average person's respiration generates some 900g of carbon dioxide a day, so by breathing less, or avoiding getting steamed up over global warming issues you could make a real difference immediate.
2. Shoot yourself. My thanks to Jonathan Porrit for pointing out that doing something about population could help stop climate change, even if he can’t do the demographic maths too well. Of course the quickest way to make a difference would be to shoot yourself. Ending your life 40 years ahead of schedule would save over 400 tons of carbon dioxide, and this could be easily increased by bumping off a few other people too.
_Cientifica

You really have to be more than a bit deranged or demented to believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and ocean acidification in the first place. It's really tough to dig yourself out of a deep mental hole when you've been so thoroughly academically lobotomised and psychologically neotenised. Simply putting yourselves out of your own misery might be best.

Science is not about belief, or even about factual, declarative knowledge. Science is about questioning, doubting, testing -- building structures of testable hypotheses for the sheer pleasure of tearing them down again using ever more elegant logical hypotheses and means for testing them.

We are learning that there is no scientific basis for forecasting climate. We are learning that even James Hansen's supervisors at NASA see Hansen as dishonest and an embarrassment to NASA. We are learning that northern glaciers in Alaska, Norway, and Greenland are growing once again, and that arctic sea ice is already beginning to recover from its recent low in summer 2007. We have learned that ocean acidification from CO2 is an absurdity. We can easily see that alarmist temperature predictions from Hansen and the IPCC are diverging from actual temperature trends.

In the huge, dimly lit camp of the Obama-zombies, we see large numbers of true believers in human caused eco-devastation. The zombies constantly dwell on warming catastrophe and ocean acidification. It is easy to for them believe such things -- particularly when the rest of the milling mob believes them too. Not so easy to think for one's self, particularly when all the forces of one's upbringing, education, media and political culture...are telling you to let others do your thinking.

The science is not settled, and the debate is not over. Only the demented and the deranged hold to the static view of science promoted by Gore and Hansen. Future reality holds some harsh surprises for the zombie horde.

Singularity University: Vaulting Into the Beyond

Looking over the array of geopolitical disasters and catastrophic lack of visionary leadership in the world, it would seem that you cannot get to the singularity from here. You will need to either "tunnel" below, or vault above the dysfunctional world of nation-states, religious fiefdoms, and tribal clash. The best work of the best scientists and technologists will only be bent to the will of the worst megalomaniacs and power hungry con-men. What to do?

Peter Diamandis (X-Prize) and Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near) decided to jump-start the singularity by opening the Singularity University on the NASA Ames campus, near Stanford University, in the generative Silicon Valley.

The school hopes to attract students from a cross section of emerging disciplines - including nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology - to tackle huge issues facing humanity. Pandemics and global health care concerns would be typical in scope and import.

"We are reaching out across the globe to gather the smartest and most passionate future leaders and arm them with the tools and network they need to wrestle with the grand challenges of our day," said Diamandis, who is perhaps best known for his current work as chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, a group that gives $10 million awards to teams working on breakthroughs in fields such as space travel and genomics. "There is no existing program that will offer the breadth and intensity that SU will offer."

...Kurzweil and Diamandis began talking about creating the school last year, which led to a semi-secret meeting on the grounds of NASA Ames on Sept. 20.

Nobel Prize-winning scientists joined up with NASA engineers and executives from companies like Google Inc. to brainstorm ideas for the new university.

In the end, Google provided some money and NASA provided the physical space to house the school.

Google co-founder Larry Page played a key role in focusing the school's mission, encouraging its founders to "address the grand challenges of humanity," according to Kurzweil.

Unlike a traditional university, Singularity will consist of a single, nine-week course of study every summer, during which 120 students from a cross-section of disciplines will mix together to tackle weighty issues. Tuition will be $25,000. Candidates will be chosen mostly from graduate and post-graduate programs around the world. _SFGate_via_BrianWang

Will the Singularity University provide the right mix of rigour, non-conventional insight and inspiration, and directional foresight to produce graduates who are more like the school's founders (Kurzweil and Diamandis) and less like the Ivy League Whizzards of Wall Street and Washington DC -- whose blindly greedy and grasping hands would seemingly steal the future from us in their quest for ever more power and loot? Or will graduates of S.U. become yet more cogs in the machine that empowers the kleptocracies firmly ensconced in the world's capitals?

Believe me when I say that no one in power wants anything even close to "a singularity" to occur, much less "The Singularity." Discontinuities from wildly disruptive technologies will be the end of current power structures. Such disruption would bypass many current problems and create new sets of problems that today's conformists and tenured, bureaucratic minds could never understand -- much less solve.

The Singularity University sounds a good deal more serious about solving problems than most of the "gee-whiz! futurism" that has floated around the various futurist and trans-humanist organisations of the western world for decades. It is likely that some good things will come of it.

But -- "The Singularity?" Probably not. But SU may well spawn some of the seeds that lead to accelerating disruption.

More at Brian Wang's NextBigFuture and at Business Week.

New Surprises From Non-Coding RNA

There is a lot more to genetics than the old dogma: DNA makes RNA makes protein. One of the complications to the old way of genetics thinking is non-coding RNA (see here and here). A team of scientists from Harvard, MIT, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has discovered yet another type of non-coding RNA -- with potentially huge ramifications.

A research team at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has uncovered a vast new class of previously unrecognized mammalian genes that do not encode proteins, but instead function as long RNA molecules. Their findings, presented in the February 1st advance online issue of the journal Nature, demonstrate that this novel class of "large intervening non-coding RNAs" or "lincRNAs" plays critical roles in both health and disease, including cancer, immune signaling and stem cell biology...

...the newly discovered lincRNAs are thousands of bases long. Because only about ten examples of functional lincRNAs were known previously, they seemed more like genomic oddities than critical components. The new Nature study shows that there are actually thousands of such genes and that they have been conserved across mammalian evolution.

...By correlating the expression patterns of lincRNAs in various cell types with the expression patterns of known critical protein-coding genes in those same cells, the scientists observed that lincRNAs likely play critical roles in helping to regulate a variety of different cellular processes, including cell proliferation, immune surveillance, maintenance of embryonic stem cell pluripotency, neuronal and muscle development, and gametogenesis. Further experimental evidence from several of the identified lincRNAs verified these observations. _MNT

The researchers commented that the genes that encode lincRNAs are "hiding in plain site", and expect to find a lot more of them. The discovery of important new components of gene expression comes as an invigorating "slap in the face" to genetics researchers already overwhelmed by the mass of data being generated in the field. Such discoveries amount to "new territory to conquer," with potential for scientific breakthroughs and Nobel Prizes.

Autologous Stem Cells Hold Most Promise in MS

Medical scientists are learning how to use autologous stem cells -- a person's own stem cells -- to treat serious illnesses such as multiple sclerosis (MS). A recent study at Northwestern University demonstrates an ingenious approach to the use of autologous stem cells:

In clinical trials, a team of scientists led by Richard Burt of Northwestern University in Chicago essentially rebuilt the immune system of 21 adults – 11 women and 10 men – who had failed to respond to standard drug treatments.

First they removed defective white blood cells that, rather than protecting the body, attacks the fatty sheath, called myelin, that protects the nervous system.

The immune systems were then replenished with so-called haemopoeitic stem cells – extracted from the patient's bone marrow – capable of giving rise to any form of mature blood cell.

....After an average follow-up period of three years, 17 of the 21 patients improved by at least one point on a standard disability scale, and none had a final score lower than before the stem cell transplant. _Cosmos

The ability to not only stabilise, but to actually reverse symptoms of advanced MS using autologous cells, is encouraging. Autologous cell therapies are preferred over cell transplants from donors or ESCs, due to the virtual absence of immune system rejection. That is why the new methods of inducing pluripotent stem cells from adult cells such as skin cells, will almost certainly be the preferred method of future medical rejuvenative and regenerative cell and (grown) organ replacement therapies.

Lancet article

Science Is Not About Facts, But About Reasoning

Researchers at Ohio State University appear astounded to discover that teaching students "science facts" does not appear to help students with scientific reasoning.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A study of college freshmen in the United States and in China found that Chinese students know more science facts than their American counterparts -- but both groups are nearly identical when it comes to their ability to do scientific reasoning.

Neither group is especially skilled at reasoning, however, and the study suggests that educators must go beyond teaching science facts if they hope to boost students' reasoning ability.

Researchers tested nearly 6,000 students majoring in science and engineering at seven universities -- four in the United States and three in China. Chinese students greatly outperformed American students on factual knowledge of physics -- averaging 90 percent on one test, versus the American students' 50 percent, for example.

But in a test of science reasoning, both groups averaged around 75 percent -- not a very high score, especially for students hoping to major in science or engineering.

The research appears in the January 30, 2009 issue of the journal Science.

Lei Bao, associate professor of physics at Ohio State University and lead author of the study, said that the finding defies conventional wisdom, which holds that teaching science facts will improve students' reasoning ability. _PO

Reasoning without facts is fanciful, and facts without reasoning are dead. Education seems to flit from one approach to the other, without understanding that children need exposure to both -- without political indoctrination (eg "climate catastrophe"), and respecting the critical developmental periods of the brain.

Educational methods pass through fads, lacking a deep understanding of the nature of human learning. One current fad is the use of computers in place of books or dialogue. There may be problems with this fad.

"By using more visual media, students will process information better," she said. "However, most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination — those do not get developed by real-time media such as television or video games. Technology is not a panacea in education, because of the skills that are being lost.

"Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades." _PO

Many teachers want students to use the computer during school time, and to have parents make the children read at home. Parents may have difficulty separating the children from their video games, cell phones, texting, messaging, MTV, videos, etc. long enough to get them to read, however. With both parents working, there may be little actual "home time" at all.

Reading, thinking, and thoughtful, informed dialogue help to teach children reasoning. Computer games can teach multi-tasking and eye-hand coordination. But the deeper reasoning that higher level modern life requires seems to fall between the cracks.

It was once thought that the $100 "laptop for every child" was the answer to educating the entire world's children. In India, they even have the $10 laptop for every child. Indian officials have high hopes for the device, naturally.

Learning to reason with objective facts -- forming hypotheses, then finding ingenious and elegant ways to test them -- is at the heart of scientific reasoning, which is what science is about.

Modern education seems to be about something entirely different. Call it a cross between indoctrination (academic lobotomy), expensive baby-sitting, and peer group socialisation into psychological neoteny. Not the best way to prepare new generations of problem solvers. More like the programming of brain-dead consumers and lifelong helpless adolescents.

Governments Die, Countries Live On .....

As this chart shows, the lessons of the rise of the American economy in the 20th century have finally been learned by the rest of the world. If the top corporate tax rate of 40%, which includes a 5% state tax on top of the 35% federal rate, remains much longer, American companies will find themselves on the short end of the stick thanks to their competitive disadvantage.

That means more people will lose their jobs. That means less wealth for all. _Heritage

Never mistake the government for the country. They are two distinctly different things. And while governments can easily die, countries are a bit tougher. The graph on the left shows the declining global trend for taxing corporations. Corporations naturally go to the countries that tax them the least, all other things being equal. If a government taxes corporations more than it is worth to the corporation to locate there, the corporation will go elsewhere and take its jobs with it.

California, New York, Massachussetts, and several other states are getting caught up in the "tax 'em high" fever emanating out of Obama et Pelosi's DC. But as you can see, the global trend has been in the other direction. Corporations are leaving California etc. and new startups are hesitating to locate there. The same phenomena is beginning to show on the global scale.

The US government is heading down the road of fiscal and budgetary suicide with a lethal combination of new, non-productive spending plus punitive taxation on productive entities and employers. Add to that devastating new regulations and taxes on energy and industry plus a growing stranglehold by trial lawyers and labour unions over business, and one can see how easily the US can go from being a good place for corporations to locate to being a losing proposition.

Corrupt high roller state governments such as California, New York, Illinois, Massachussetts, and Michigan are living well beyond their incomes -- and running to the new Obama / Pelosi reich for multi-billion dollar welfare for the states. Although the federal government is in no condition to be handing out goodies to corrupt state cronies, that is exactly what is happening with the O / P "stimulus bill." And they are just getting started.

Anyone who took the trouble to watch the 30 minute IOUSA film clip should have at least a vague idea of the coming budget disruption. You need to know how a responsible government would deal with such a problem in order to understand how badly our current government is focquing up. Rapidly failing state governments are a microcosm of the larger problem at the federal level.

The federal government can print money, it can sell notes, bonds, influence interest rates etc. as long as it has some degree of fiscal credibility. When it loses that credibility it will be stressed to the breaking point. Looking into the future, there is no sign that either the governing or the governed have an understanding of the problem, nor the will to deal with it. Demographic implosion plus government fiscal suicide plus cultural and educational decadency. Not a pretty combination, although quite common in western Europe also. In fact, most European nations have a bit of a head start. A few countries may even be starting to wake up.

What happens to the country after the government falls? What do you think happens?