Nov 13th 2009
From The World in 2010 print edition
By John Parker
Conflicts over natural resources will grow
In the world’s earliest written legal code, dating from 1790BC, Hammurabi, the king of Babylon, laid down rules governing the maintenance of irrigation systems and the amount of water people could take from them. Two generations later, his grandson abandoned this rules-based approach and used the river Tigris as a weapon against rebels in Babylon.
The world is charting a similar course, away from rules governing scarce resources towards conflict over them.
Phi Beta Iota: “Too Big to Fail” is industrial era idiocy. REALITY tells us that the more complex a system gets, the more it DEMANDS self-healing from the bottom-up. Feedback loops at all levels, each with their integrity intact. What all of the headlines above have in common is precisely the opposite: degraded feedback loops lacking integrity.
What is very interesting about this is that Mack is the only guy on Wall Street the Chinese leadership really trusts. There is no real difference between Goldman Sachs, Citi-Bank (the original Black Eagle Trust holder) and Morgan, although Mack does seem considerably more classy, and perhaps more able to get a grip on reality going into the future.
The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. …
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. …
Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.
New Documentary Challenges Gore's ‘Inconvenient Truth' on Global Warming
In 2007, a British High Court judge ruled that Al Gore's global warming film contained nine significant errors and should no longer be screened in schools unless accompanied by guidance notes to balance Gore's “one-sided” views. … Buoyed by the ruling, two Irish journalists — Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney — released a documentary in which they gather evidence outlining the damage of global warming hysteria. In “Not Evil Just Wrong,” they challenge the claims made in Gore's film and conclude that the film is not worth screening in schools because it is shown there as “an article of science, not faith.” … The film's “apocalyptic vision” was not an impartial analysis of climate change, High Court Judge Michael Burton said, adding that the film is “substantially founded up scientific research and fact” but that the errors were made in “the context of alarmism and exaggeration.”
An e-mail hack that exposed thousands of private e-mails and documents about global warming from a University of East Anglia climate change research center indicates a shifting paradigm for e-mail as a means of “private” communication, and a continuation of political “hacktivism” to further political agendas, experts say.
10-year-old refuses to say Pledge of Allegiance until everyone has equal rights
Lylah M. AlphonseNovember 23, 2009
A 10-year-old Arkansas boy is refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance at school until our country does a better job of living up to its ideals.
“I looked at the end and it said ‘with liberty and justice for all.' And there really isn't liberty and justice for all,” Will Phillips told CNN recently. “Gays and lesbians can't marry. There's still a lot of racism and sexism in the world.”