Topic: WE'RE STUFFED!!!

[Nichi]

The Breathing Earth simulation
Welcome to Breathing Earth. This real-time simulation displays the CO2 emissions of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates.

[Michael]

The great game rolls on.

Is the Tea Party destroying any vestige of hope for the Republicans in November's elections by pushing them so far to the right that they lose the middle ground? Or will they shift the middle ground to the right with them, and set the stage for global violent struggle for increasingly scarce resources?

Greece, Spain and Portugal have had their credit ratings downgraded. There doesn't seem any way out of this one, especially for Greece. How can the EU continue to keep these countries within its community? And how can they kick them out?

We are perhaps witnessing the second wave of the GFC beginning.

Israel is in a right pickle. They hate the Palestinians so much, which is racism pure and simple, that there appears no way out. They have three options:
1. Separate state, which the US is pushing for but lets be realistic - there is no way Israel will allow it.
2. Single Apartheid state where Palestinians are treated as second class citizens who can't vote, live in ghettos, use different roads and buildings, and are subject to a different law to Jews. This is what is happening by default, and of course it can't last. The end result of this option is a state that Israeli Jews won't want to live in because it will be run by Palestinians as the majority once the Apartheid collapses, which it will.
3. Ethnic cleansing of all non-Jews from Israel. This will be tried, and pushed for by the extreme right, but realistically it won't work in such modern times - it would be ultimately damaging for Israeli international standing and Middle-Eastern peace.

Peak oil happened in 2008 we are now informed. That was the price hike which was in reality caused by market recognition that demand had out-stripped supply. The prices only dropped due to the growing recession in the US and then the GFC. It may well have caused the GFC due to so many marginal mortgage holders in the US living on the outskirts of cities, where cheap petrol was critical to their survival. When they couldn't afford to commute for work and all other functions, they had to default on their mortgages.

This means we are about to head into a new world where the high price of world will transform the world we know. It will also cause wars of resource security, which is why China's Navy is growing at an alarming rate.

[Michael]

Germany finally came to the party to help bail out Greece. Spain is officially out of recession, despite having a huge debt.

I don't think Germany had an option really, but they are definitely not happy about it - and nor should they be.

Meanwhile the Greeks are throwing a tantrum - they don't like it up 'em.

Basically this is unsustainable, and against the founding rules of the EU. The two essential rules, that debt level defaulters would be fined, and no one would be bailed out, have long since been forgotten.

Seems the EU is facing the old problem that has crippled many a person and many an institution - responsibility without power.

It will fail, but when? I think they just might get through this one, but how long before the next?

[Michael]

I may have been too hopeful.

This is not looking good.
$3.9 trillion in debt, won't evaporate overnight.

Can the European Central Bank save the day? Or is the party really over now?

[Michael]

OK, we see the lie of the land now.

The EU has guaranteed bail-out funds of 1 trillion dollars. Slips off the tongue so easily doesn't it - I wonder if the people who decided on this today had orgasms when they said the word?

People in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are still happy to blow themselves up for some vague idea.

Millions across the globe haven't enough food to live more than one day at a time.

People of this forum are preoccupied with their relationships.

Kali is rolling in blood.

The sea keeps crashing below the cliff I write this on.

[Nichi]

Am I jaded to speculate that this discovery, dating from 2006, played a part in Obama's escalation over there? Or to speculate that the US's "joy" is not philanthropic?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100614/ap_on_bi_ge/us_afghanistan_mineral_treasures

[Michael]

Am I jaded to speculate that this discovery, dating from 2006, played a part in Obama's escalation over there? Or to speculate that the US's "joy" is not philanthropic?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100614/ap_on_bi_ge/us_afghanistan_mineral_treasures

I'm sure it's a factor, in the play of all parties except the Taliban.
Not sure how the US would directly benefit, except ask for some money back which would be unlikely.
But add that to the oil pipeline issue and Afghanistan plays a critical strategic role in geo-eco-politics of that whole area. So that is why Pakistan remains an effective force behind the Taliban, and why India is jumping up and down over the stupidity of the US in funding Pakistan.

I see it more as a hope by the US that this area remains in friendly hands, instead of being used against the economic benefit of the US. That is the kind of thing governments, with the power to act, would normally do - especially looking forward into an uncertain future.

But ... it's not going well in Afghanistan. The big push was a gambol, but frankly, I gather it has failed - no one has admitted that yet, but from what I pick up, it won't be long before the US just has to pull out and leave it to Pakistan and Iran to fight it out. India knows this and is very worried.

[Michael]

Well, I don't consider myself up with all the issues around this, but nonetheless I'd wager that the US Administration saw this idiotic indiscretion by Stanley McChrystal as a god-send.

They have been in deep anxiety over Afghanistan all year, and longer. It has appeared that only McChrystal believed things were going well, and I suppose that was his job. But frankly it's a disaster - not just for Afghanistan but for the Democrats.

What I don't understand is why David Petraeus hasn't been given the job much sooner. He is the proven expert in counter-insurgency. Possibly the only one in the whole US military hierarchy. The US military is not set up for counter-insurgency, and has recently identified itself as counter-terrorism.

Unfortunately, even counter-insurgency is insufficient in Afghanistan's case. What is needed is nation-building, and the US has never wanted to get into that game. Probably in the past, for good reason, but alas now those skills are needed, they are noticeably absent.

The task in Afghanistan is mind-boggling, and I can't see the US and it's coalition succeeding. The forces against it are just too complex and steep. The only chance is to hold on long enough till those forces mutate sufficiently such that international terrorism is minimised as a consequence of leaving it all to themselves to sort out - because that's what will happen eventually.

Petraeus will have to rebuild the entire Afghan government - with a forceful hand - and bring that rabid mob in Pakistan into line (ie their military), who are actually who this war is against. That just for a start. I think it's impossible.

[Michael]

William Dalrymple has an interesting take on the Afghanistan war.

He says that in the West this is seen as a war between Nato forces and the Taliban. But in Afghanistan, it is seen as a war between the South and the North, which has been going on since the 1970s.

The South are Pashtun - their rural conservative religious affiliation is with the Taliban, and the Taliban are Pashtun. When the US invaded Afghanistan, they deposed the Pashtun from power, and replaced them with the Northern Alliance. Thus installing the North in power, who are Tajik, Usbek and Hazara.

Thus internally the current conflict is seen as a rebellion of the Pashtun to reclaim power from the Northerners.

There is now a move by Pakistan. Essentially this is a geo-strategic move against India. India has been pouring money into Afghanistan and gaining an influential foothold, much to the horror of Pakistan. To offset this, Pakistan has been having top level talks with Karzai. Their offer is to 'deliver' the Taliban as a friendly co-exister and co-sharer of power in Afghanistan. A few provinces, a few ministries etc.

Their 'friendly' Taliban are the Haqqani wing of the Taliban, which make up a sizable proportion of the Taliban fighting in Afghanistan. The Pakistan ISI believes it can control the Haqqani.  India naturally is frothing at the mouth at these developments.

Dalrymple has a neat resolution to this, which is dreaming of course. He says, let Pakistan have Afghanistan, in exchange of India having Kashmir. They could do a deal. Fat chance I reckon.

He also is sceptical that Pakistan has any real control over the Haqqani Taliban, and that the Taliban would ever be content with sharing power. Personally I'd say without Nato, Karzai is a dead duck. He doesn't seem to understand this.

[Builder]

Ok, another hottest year on the record...

Met Office report: global warming evidence is 'unmistakable'

A new climate change report from the Met Office and its US equivalent has provided the "greatest evidence we have ever had" that the world is warming.

The report brings together the latest temperature readings from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean

Usually scientists rely on the temperature over land, taken from weather stations around the world for the last 150 years, to show global warming.

But climate change sceptics questioned the evidence, especially in the wake of recent scandals like "climategate".

Now for the first time, a report has brought together all the different ways of measuring changes in the climate. The ten indicators of climate change include measurements of sea level rise taken from ships, the temperature of the upper atmosphere taken from weather balloons and field surveys of melting glaciers.

New technology also means it is possible to measure the temperature of the oceans, which absorb 90 per cent of the world's heat.

The State of the Climate report shows “unequivocally that the world is warming and has been for more than three decades”.

And despite the cold winter in Europe and north east America, this year is set to be the hottest on record.

The annual report was compiled by the Met Office and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Both the NOAA and Nasa have stated that the first six months of this year were the hottest on record, while the Met Office believes it is the second hottest start to the year after 1998.

Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said “variability” in different regions, such as the cold winter in Britain, does not mean the rest of the world is not warming.

And he said 'greenhouse gases are the glaringly obvious explanation' for 0.56C (1F) warming over the last 50 years.

“Despite the fact people say global warming has stopped, the new data, added onto existing data, gives us the greatest evidence we have ever had,” he said.

Sceptics claimed that emails stolen from the University of East Anglia show scientists were willing to manipulate the land surface temperatures to show global warming.

The scientists were cleared by an independent inquiry but the ‘climategate scandal’ as it became known cast a shadow over the case for man made global warming.

Dr Stott said the sceptics can no longer question the land surface temperature as other records also show global warming.

He pointed out that each indicator takes independent evidence from at least 3 different institutions in order to ensure the information is correct. Despite variations from year to year, each decade has been warmer than the last since the 1980s.

"Despite the variability caused by short term changes, the analysis conducted for this report illustrates why we are so confident the world is warming,” he said. “When we look at air temperature and other indicators of climate, we see highs and lows in the data from year to year because of natural variability. Understanding climate change requires looking at the longer-term record. When we follow decade-to-decade trends using different data sets and independent analyses from around the world, we see clear and unmistakable signs of a warming world.”

Reports/links:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2010/pr20100728.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate/

Ok... this phenomenon has been apparently discussed here for years now. Some have believed, some have been scpetic. Let's say it is warming and disaster is impending...NOW WHAT?

Is anybody learning or drawing some conclusions or introducing at least microscopic changes...at personal level?

Rethorical question.

[Builder]

Tibetan nomads struggle as grasslands disappear from the roof of the world

Jonathan Watts in Madou
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 September 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/02/tibetan-plateau-climate-change

Scientists say desertification of the mountain grasslands of the Tibetan plateau is accelerating climate change

Like generations of Tibetan nomads before him, Phuntsok Dorje makes a living raising yaks and other livestock on the vast alpine grasslands that provide a thatch on the roof of the world.

But in recent years the vegetation around his home, the Tibetan plateau, has been destroyed by rising temperatures, excess livestock and plagues of insects and rodents.

The high-altitude meadows are rarely mentioned in discussions of global warming, but the changes to this ground have a profound impact on Tibetan politics and the world's ecological security.

For Phuntsok Dorje, the issue is more down to earth. He is used to dramatically shifting cloudscapes above his head, but it is the changes below his feet that make him uneasy.

"The grass used to be up to here," Phuntsok says, indicating a point on his leg a little below the knee. "Twenty years ago, we had to scythe it down. But now, well, you can see for yourself. It's so short it looks like moss."

The green prairie that used to surround his tent has become a brown desert. All that is left of the grasslands here are yellowing blotches on a stony surface riddled with rodent holes.

It is the same across much of this plateau, which encompasses an area a third of the size of the US.

Desertification

Scientists say the desertification of the mountain grasslands is accelerating climate change. Without its thatch the roof of the world is less able to absorb moisture and more likely to radiate heat.

Partly because of this the Tibetan mountains have warmed two to three times faster than the global average; the permafrost and glaciers of the "Third Pole" are melting.

To make matters worse, the towering Kunlun, Himalayan and Karakorum ranges that surround the plateau act as a chimney for water vapour – which has a stronger greenhouse gas effect than carbon dioxide – to be convected high into the stratosphere. Mixed with pollution, dust and black carbon (soot) from India and elsewhere, this spreads a brown cloud across swaths of the Eurasian landmass. When permafrost melts it can also release methane, another powerful greenhouse gas. Xiao Ziniu, the director general of the Beijing climate centre, says Tibet's climate is the most sensitive in Asia and influences the globe.

Grassland degradation is evident along the twisting mountain road from Yushu to Xining, which passes through the Three Rivers national park, the source of the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang rivers. Along some stretches the landscape is so barren it looks more like the Gobi desert than an alpine meadow.

Phuntsok Dorje (name has been changed) is among the last of the nomads scratching a living in one of the worst affected areas. "There used to be five families on this plain. Now we are the only one left and there is not enough grass even for us," he says. "It's getting drier and drier and there are more and more rats every year."

Until about 10 years ago the nearest town, Maduo, used to be the richest in Qinghai province thanks to herding, fishing and mining, but residents say their economy has dried up along with the nearby wetlands.

"This all used to be a lake. There wasn't a road here then. Even a Jeep couldn't have made it through," said a Tibetan guide, Dalang Jiri, as we drove through the area. By one estimate, 70% of the former rangeland is now desert.

"Maduo is now very poor. There is no way to make a living," said a Tibetan teacher who gave only one name, Angang. "The mines have closed and grasslands are destroyed. People just depend on the money they get from the government. They just sit on the kang [a raised, heated, floor] and wait for the next payment."

Many of the local people are former herders moved off the land under a controversial "ecological migration" scheme launched in 2003. The government in Beijing is in the advanced stages of relocating between 50% and 80% of the 2.25 million nomads on the Tibetan plateau. According to state media, this programme aims to restore the grasslands, prevent overgrazing and improve living standards.

The Tibetan government-in-exile says the scheme does little for the environment and is aimed at clearing the land for mineral extraction and moving potential supporters of the Dalai Lama into urban areas where they can be more easily controlled.

Qinghai is dotted with resettlement centres, many on the way to becoming ghettos. Nomads are paid an annual allowance – of 3,000 yuan (about £300) to 8,000 yuan per household – to give up herding for 10 years and be provided with housing. As in some native American reservations in the US and Canada, they have trouble finding jobs. Many end up either unemployed or recycling rubbish or collecting dung.

Some feel cheated. "If I could go back to herding, I would. But the land has been taken by the state and the livestock has been sold off so we are stuck here. It's hopeless," said Shang Lashi, a resident at a resettlement centre in Yushu. "We were promised jobs. But there is no work. We live on the 3,000 yuan a year allowance, but the officials deduct money from that for the housing, which was supposed to be free."

Their situation was made worse by the earthquake that struck Yushu earlier this year, killing hundreds. People were crushed when their new concrete homes collapsed, a risk they would not have faced in their itinerant life on the grasslands. Many are once again living under canvas – in disaster relief tents and without land or cattle.

In a sign of the sensitivity of the subject, the authorities declined to officially answer the Guardian's questions. Privately, officials said resettlement and other efforts to restore the grassland, including fencing off the worst areas, were worthwhile.

"The situation has improved slightly in the past five years. We are working on seven areas, planting trees and trying to restore the ecosystem around closed gold mines," said one environmental officer. The problem would not be solved in the short term. "This area is particularly fragile. Once the grasslands are destroyed, they rarely come back. It is very difficult to grow grass at high altitude."

The programme's effectiveness is questioned by others, including Wang Yongchen, founder of the Green Earth Volunteers NGO and a regular visitor to the plateau for 10 years. "Overgrazing was considered a possible cause of the grassland degradation, but things haven't improved since the herds were enclosed and the nomads moved. I think climate change and mining have had a bigger impact."

Assessing the programme is complicated by political tensions. In the past year, three prominent Tibetan environmental campaigners have been arrested after exposing corruption and flaws in wildlife conservation on the plateau.

Infestation

Another activist, who declined to give his name, said it was difficult to comment. "The situation is complicated. Some areas of grassland are getting better. Others are worse. There are so many factors involved."

A growing population of pika, gerbils, mice and other rodents is also blamed for degradation of the land because they burrow into the soil and eat grass roots.

Zoologists say this highlights how ecosystems can quickly move out of balance. Rodent numbers have increased dramatically in 10 years because their natural predators – hawks, eagles and leopards – have been hunted close to extinction. Belatedly, the authorities are trying to protect wildlife and attract birds of prey by erecting steel vantage points to replace felled trees.

There is widespread agreement that this climatically important region needs more study.

"People have not paid enough attention to the Tibetan plateau. They call it the Third Pole but actually it is more important than the Arctic or Antarctic because it is closer to human communities. This area needs a great deal more research," said Yang Yong, a Chinese explorer and environmental activist. "The changes to glaciers and grasslands are very fast. The desertification of the grassland is a very evident phenomenon on the plateau. It's a reaction by a sensitive ecosystem that will precede similar reactions elsewhere."

Phuntsok Dorje is unlikely to take part in any study. But he's seen enough to be pessimistic about the future. "The weather is changing. It used to rain a lot in the summer and snow in the winter. There was a strong contrast between the seasons, but not now. It's getting drier year after year. If it carries on like this I have no idea what I will do."

Additional reporting by Cui Zheng

[Builder]

Mozambique used to be one of the success stories of Africa.

Mozambique's food riots – the true face of global warming

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/05/mozambique-food-riots-patel

The violence in Maputo is just the latest manifestation of the crippling shortcomings of the global economy

Raj Patel
The Observer, Sunday 5 September 2010

It has been a summer of record temperatures – Japan had its hottest summer on record, as did South Florida and New York. Meanwhile, Pakistan and Niger are flooded and the eastern US is mopping up after hurricane Earl. None of these individual events can definitively be attributed to global warming. But to see how climate change will play out in the 21st century, you needn't look to the Met Office. Look, instead, to the deaths and burning tyres in Mozambique's "food riots" to see what happens when extreme natural phenomena interact with our unjust economic systems.

The immediate causes of the protests in Mozambique's capital, Maputo, and Chimoio about 500 miles north, are a 30% price increase for bread, compounding a recent double-digit increase for water and energy. When nearly three-quarters of the household budget is spent on food, that's a hike few Mozambicans can afford.

Deeper reasons for Mozambique's price hike can be found a continent away. Wheat prices have soared on global markets over the summer in large part because Russia, the world's third largest exporter, has suffered catastrophic fires in its main production areas. These blazes, in turn, find their origin both in poor firefighting infrastructure and Russia's worst heatwave in over a century. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin extended an export ban in response to a new wave of wildfires in its grain belt, sending further signals to the markets that Russian wheat wouldn't be available outside the country. With Mozambique importing over 60% of the wheat its people needs, the country has been held hostage by international markets.

This may sound familiar. In 2008, the prices of oil, wheat, corn and rice peaked on international markets – corn prices almost tripled between 2005-2008. In the process, dozens of food-importing countries experienced food riots.

Behind the 2008 protests were, first, natural events that looked like an excerpt from the meteorological section of the Book of Revelation – drought in Australia, crop disease in central Asia, floods in south-east Asia. These were compounded by the social systems through which their effects were felt. Oil prices were sky-high, which meant higher transport costs and fossil fuel-based fertiliser prices. Biofuel policy, particularly in the US, shifted land and crops from food into ethanol production, diverting food from stomachs to fuel tanks. Longer term trends in population growth and meat consumption in developing countries also added to the stress. Financial speculators piled into food commodities, driving prices yet further beyond the reach of the poor. Finally, some retailers used the opportunity to raise prices still further, and while commodity prices have fallen back to pre-crisis levels, most of us have yet to see the savings.

Is this 2008 all over again? The weather has gone wild, meat prices have hit a 20-year high, groceries are being looted and heads of state are urging calm. The view from commodities desks, however, is that we're not in quite as dire straits as two years ago. Fuel is relatively cheap and grain stores well stocked. We're on track for the third-highest wheat crop ever, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO). While all this is true, it misses the point: for most hungry people, 2008 isn't over. The events of 2007-2008 tipped more than 100 million into hunger and the global recession has meant that they have stayed there. In 2006, the number of  undernourished people was 854 million. In 2009, it was 1.02 billion – the highest level since records began. The hardest hit by these price rises, in the US and around the world, were female-headed households.

Not only are the hungry still around, but food riots have continued. In India, double-digit food price inflation was met by violent street protests at the end of 2009. The price rises were, again, the result of both extreme and unpredictable monsoons in 2009 and an increasingly faulty social safety net to prevent hunger. There have been frequent public protests about the price of wheat in Egypt this year, and Serbia and Pakistan have seen protests too.

Although commodity prices fell after 2008, the food system's architecture has remained largely the same over the past two decades. Bill Clinton has offered several mea culpas for the international trade and development policies that spawned the food crisis. Earlier this year, he blamed himself for Haiti's vulnerability to price fluctuations. "I did that," he said in testimony to the US Senate. "I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else." More generally, Clinton suggested in 2008 that "food is not a commodity like others… it is crazy for us to think we can develop a lot of these countries [by] treating food like it was a colour television set."

Yet global commodity speculators continue to treat food as if it were the same as television sets, with little end in sight to what the World Development Movement has called "gambling on hunger in financial markets". The recent US Wall Street Reform Act contained some measures that might curb these speculative activities, but their full scope has yet to be clarified. Europe doesn't have a mechanism to regulate these kinds of speculative trades at all. Agriculture in the global south is still subject to the "Washington consensus" model, driven by markets and with governments taking a back seat to the private sector. And the only reason biofuels aren't more prominent is that the oil they're designed to replace is currently cheap.

Clearly, neither grain speculation, nor forcing countries to rely on international markets for food, nor encouraging the use of agricultural resources for fuel instead of nourishment are natural phenomena. These are political decisions, taken and enforced not only by Bill Clinton, but legions of largely unaccountable international development professionals. The consequences of these decisions are ones with which people in the global south live everyday. Which brings us back to Mozambique.

Recall that Mozambique's street protests coincided not only with a rise in the price of bread, but with electricity and water price hikes too. In an interview with Portugal's Lusa news agency, Alice Mabota of the Mozambican League of Human Rights didn't use the term "food riots". In her words: "The government… can't understand or doesn't want to understand that this is a protest against the higher cost of living." The action on the streets isn't simply a protest about food, but a wider act of rebellion. Half of Mozambique's poor already suffer from acute malnutrition, according to the FAO. The extreme weather behind the grain fires in Russia transformed a political context in which citizens were increasingly angry and frustrated with their own governments.

Yesterday, I reached Diamantino Nhampossa, the co-ordinator of Mozambique's União Nacional de Camponeses (National Peasants Union of Mozambique). "These protests are going to end," he told me. "But they will always come back. This is the gift that the development model we are following has to offer." Like many Mozambicans, he knows full well which way the wind blows.

[Michael]

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/money-trail-links-the-war-on-terrorism-to-the-global-financial-crisis-20100829-13xjr.html

There has been much comment on the links between Osama bin Laden and the GFC (I was tickled to hear that the GFC acronym for the Global Financial Crisis is an Australian invention). Osama has been the driving force behind international Islamic terrorism, and aside from his primary focus on Saudi Arabia, he has had a fierce secondary target of Western Capitalism.

So comes the GFC, and we begin to see the connections between the 'War on Terror' and the teetering bankruptcy of Western Capitalist Nations.

This article above, by Loretta Napoleoni, is about a book on the subject she has written.

I feel she has established a valid thesis, with some bits I was not aware of. However I would have to reserve my view on the causes of the GFC. There are many causes that have nothing to do with terrorism. And those causes are significant.

However, she does draw a cogent argument of how the Twin Towers and American Outrage manipulation fed directly to the GFC.

The part I was not so aware of, and she does not outline completely in this article, is how to finance the post 11/9 War on Terror, interest rates had to be held down. I think everyone now knows of the calamitous consequences of low interest rates that produced the Sub-Prime Mortgage bubble, but most commentators point to the Dot-com and other economic crises for that.

So the War of Terror was another factor in creating the ground for the Sub-Prime blowout. You could argue it is all connected, and that is fair enough, but currently, it appears to me that GW Bush just put the icing on the cake through his government's absolute incompetence ... and the rest is history.

Now Obama is trying to salvage the situation. But again it currently appears to me that he doesn't have the power to turn around the ship of state, the ship of other states, the US and world economic magnates, nor the embedded attitudes that have been fostered by years of dedicated influence by Right-wing manipulators. So he tries to walk both sides, and neither work.

But this book outlines one fact, that the attack on the Twin Towers has had a devastating impact on the power of all Western Democracies and Russia. It has marked the turning point - Asian and South American economies are now rising, and a huge power shift is upon us. But not the attack itself - it is the response that has really done the damage. And it's not over yet.

Nonetheless, this theses sidelines the real underlying cause of the 'demise of the West'. It has been a psychological issue that has caused the problem, and it appears too few commentators are effective in addressing this. Western Civilisation is sick. Islamic Civilisation doesn't have the answer. A new cultural paradigm is required, but I don't see it. The very basis of it's acknowledgement has been destroyed.

We have become severed from an intuitive knowledge of why we exist and how we should exist. We are a species isolated.

[Builder]

Yes, there is a strong argument regarding the effects of 9/11 and the demise of Western domination. One well-informed former American civil servant put it very bluntly to me:

'We, Americans, live on borrowed money. As long as others trust in our ability to manage the debt and produce innovation, we have no problem - the money will keep flowing in. However, after 9/11 our defence budgets have soared and reached unimaginable US $700 billion for FY 2010. Nobody can sustain that. Nobody. And they [people how borrow their money to the US] know it. It's just a matter of time until it will become very painful for us. Besides, we are not winning the war either. Nobody in the US is seriously interested in that.'

Another superstate is over-extending itself while losing economical viability and is about to join a long row of historical examples: Roman Empire, British Empire, Germany, Soviet Union...

Nonetheless, this theses sidelines the real underlying cause of the 'demise of the West'. It has been a psychological issue that has caused the problem, and it appears too few commentators are effective in addressing this. Western Civilisation is sick. Islamic Civilisation doesn't have the answer. A new cultural paradigm is required, but I don't see it. The very basis of it's acknowledgement has been destroyed.

We have become severed from an intuitive knowledge of why we exist and how we should exist. We are a species isolated.

Good point. With the help of globalisation the sickness called 'existential Alzheimer of mankind' has spread extremely well to every corner of the world. If previous collapses of empires and superpowers were disasters in separate states, then modern Western collapse would be a much more global phenomenon.

One can only wonder about the sheer intelligence of spirits who have managed to lock human mind so thoroughly that it is turning against itself thinking at the same time that it is crafting bright future for itself.

[Jahn]

The world economy will be experience many new aspects in the coming years. Inflation at the same time of deflation. Interest rates are kept low, while the surplus of dollars inflates the economy. The Gold price is rushing, a sign of global inflation, while the dollar debt increase.

Marc Faber today:
9.06.2010
All The Monetary Policies In The US Create Mis-Allocation Of Capital And Unintended Consequences
The US Federal Reserve and central banks around the world of continue money printing and the devaluation of their currencies. It is a fallacy to believe that easy money and the purchase of treasuries will boost economic activity in the US. Money will flow into equities at least over the next couple of weeks, and into commodities.

Over the last two years we eased massively in the US and where did the growth take place? In Asia. So when we talk about job creation, do you think that Intel or a small businessman will hire more people in the US because of further monetary printing?

No! they will build factories in Asia and hire poeple in Asia and all the monetary policies in the US create mis-allocation of capital and unintended consequences.

http://marcfaberblog.blogspot.com/