We Are Marching to Utopia . . . We Will Soon Be There!

...optimists and idealists -- with their ignorance about the truths of human nature and human society, and their naive hopes about what can be changed -- have wrought havoc for centuries....instead of utopian efforts to reform human society or human nature, we [should] focus on the only reform that we can truly master -- the improvement of ourselves through the cultivation of our better instincts. _OUP Review of "Uses of Pessimism"

Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. _Captain Malcolm Reynolds

There is something deep in human nature which has resisted change -- despite the best efforts of crusaders, utopians, religionists, and wishful thinkers -- for many [tens of?] thousands of years. After countless failures to reform the human spirit, most utopians are unfazed. If they can only grab enough power and control over how resources are distributed, they are sure that they can bring perfection to the land, under their own benevolent leadership. "The land will heal, the sea levels will begin to subside, and every man will say to every other man, you are my brother." And so on.

Philosopher Roger Scruton -- author of The Uses of Pessimism -- takes a somewhat more reluctant view:

The belief that humanity makes moral progress depends upon a wilful ignorance of history. It also depends upon a wilful ignorance of oneself – a refusal to recognise the extent to which selfishness and calculation reside in the heart even of our most generous emotions, awaiting their chance. Those who invest their hopes in the moral improvement of humankind are therefore in a precarious position: at any moment the veil of illusion might be swept away, revealing the bare truth of the human condition. Either they defend themselves against this possibility with artful intellectual ploys, or they give way, in the moment of truth, to a paroxysm of disappointment and misanthropy. Both of these do violence to our nature. The first condemns us to the life of unreason; the second to the life of contempt.

...In order to see human beings as they are, therefore, and to school oneself in the art of loving them, it is necessary to apply a dose of pessimism to all one’s plans and aspirations. _GloomMerchant

In another piece, Scruton presents a paradoxical recommendation for how to teach children to think for themselves, logically and clearly:

...children are drawn to magic...they spontaneously animate their world with spirits and spells...they find relief and excitement in stories in which the heroes can summon supernatural forces to their aid and vanquish untold enemies – these facts reflect layers of deep settlement in the human psyche. But they also remind us that, in the life of the child, belief and imagination are not to be clearly distinguished, and that both serve other functions than the pursuit of truth.

...humanists should wake up to this point, and be careful when they seek to deprive their children of enchantment, or to replace their spontaneous fantasies with the cold hard facts of empirical science. It could well be that religion is a better discipline than pop science, when it comes to shaping the rational intellect, and that [we can offer our] children more in the way of a solid foundation, by anchoring their imagination in sacred stories and religious doctrines, than they are likely to be offered by those “Darwinian fairy tales’” as David Stove has called them, which have gained such currency in the wake of Dawkins and Hitchens.

In response to a child’s metaphysical curiosity grown-ups can say that everything has a scientific explanation. But they will know that this is a lie. The proposition that everything has a scientific explanation does not have a scientific explanation – it describes an amazing fact about our universe, a point where reasoning falls silent. There are many such points, as anyone who has children knows: why is there anything? Why should I be good? What existed before the Big Bang? What is consciousness? You can wrestle with these questions through philosophy, but science won’t answer them.

Children have an inkling of this. They also recognise that behind these questions lies a huge void – an emptiness which must be filled with love and reassurance, if their existence is not to seem like an accident. _Art_of_Certainty

Utopians try so hard to purge their children's minds of falsehood and "error", to create the perfect children of rational thought, capable of seeing through all the corrupt fables of the past. Except...children will be who they will be. You cannot make boys into girls or girls into boys without destroying who they are. And you cannot make humans into angels without ruining the essence of what they are. And still the utopians continue to try -- until they finally throw their hands up in complete exasperation at and condemnation of the utter evil of those who do not think along the same lines as themselves, the utopians.

The disgusted dismissal of homo rapiens and all his works that we find spelled out by John Gray in Straw Dogs is not a form of pessimism. It is an attempt to dismiss humanity entirely, as a kind of plague on the face of the earth. That kind of misanthropic nihilism is of no use to us. It removes the ground from all our values, and puts nothing in their place. _GloomMerchant

At that point, they often begin to plot and fantasize the great dieoff, to cleanse the otherwise pristine Earth of the incorrigible human demons who infest the lands and oceans. Fortunately, utopians are as incompetent in planning the great dieoff as they are in most other aspects of their lives.

The point is not to resist all change or improvement of humans. But any lasting change for the better is likely to happen from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Nothing illustrates the different approaches to a better world than the contrast between the French and American revolutions of the late 19th century.

The primary difference in causes that led to the American Revolution and the French Revolution was based in the world view of the innate goodness or innate evil of man. _Hyperhistory

Not all utopians believe in the innate goodness of men -- sometimes they only believe in the innate perfectibility of men. But utopias born of such ideas all come to a bitter end.

Every child has to learn to think for himself, from the beginning. But he must have a beginning from which to start.

The need for foundations is quite clearly an adaptation, and these foundations must provide the promise of protection and love, if they are to fit the new organism for its brief time in the world. If that is so, you are not going to eliminate the need for faith: the best you can do is to withhold all objects of faith, so that a child goes hungry into the life to which he or she is destined. More often than not, a humanist education will leave a child exposed to massive and mind-clogging superstitions of the Harry Potter and Star Wars kind. But these superstitions contain far less in the way of insight than is contained in the first chapter of Genesis.

Religious stories are also the result of natural selection – though selection at another level: they have come down to us because they have fulfilled a moral need. They have survived refutation because they contain, beneath their superficial falsehood, the moral truths that people need, when they must order their lives by good examples. _The Art of Certainty

This is true not only of religious stories, but of all the mythology and lasting moral fables from antiquity. Children must have some kind of foundation that transcends deductive logic, because that is how minds begin. Then, later, when they choose to either reshape or reaffirm their beliefs, they will have a sense of having decided for themselves, and feel stronger for it.

Yes, humans can make choices that make them better. Improved nutrition of mother and child can make humans stronger, smarter, taller, and sometimes capable of clearer thought. But a power structure that attempts to legislate morality, to engineer the moral and ideological purity of the human souls of its citizens -- that power structure is morally bankrupt, and deserves to die quickly. If it is allowed to continue, its leaders will eventually decide that the recalcitrant citizens do not deserve the benefit of the leaders' great wisdom. Then, beware.

This question has been acquiring an ever greater urgency over the past century -- even longer. It is now coming to a head in the demographic and economic crises of many of the world's most advanced nations. A culture that has rested on its own laurels, that has comforted itself with mental images of its own progressive improvement, is soon to be reawakened to a coarse and unruly history.

Previously published at Al Fin blog.

10 Foot Diameter Virtu-Sphere Virtual Reality in Las Vegas

PopSci
The first public VirtuSphere was installed in Las Vegas at the Excalibur Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in May 2010. If the venture proves profitable, expect similar VR spheres to pop up in arcades, amusement parks, shopping malls, and tourist traps across North America. High throughput virtual reality may well lead to continent-wide leagues of virtual reality sports. The VirtuSphere is in the lead now, but inventors are sure to come up with virtual competitors soon.

The 10-foot sphere is made of the same plastic as Legos, and its curvature helps to cushion players if they fall. The ball spins on a platform fitted with 45 caster-mounted wheels. Beneath, an optical sensor tracks motion the same way a computer mouse does, watching for relative movement across x and y axes. To make the experience truly immersive, the player is fitted with a head-mounted display with two internal LCD screens. A laptop wirelessly collects the data from the sensor and the gyroscopes, magnetometers and accelerometers on the headset to create the image the player sees.
As new spheres pop up in malls and arcades, users will be able to jump into movie trailers or globe-trot using Google Earth. _PopSci

Obama is Death to the American Economy

Obama's Economic Policies Stifle Growth

The chairman of the Business Roundtable, an association of top corporate executives that has been President Obama's closest ally in the business community, accused the president and Democratic lawmakers Tuesday of creating an "increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation."

Ivan G. Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon Communications, said that Democrats in Washington are pursuing tax increases, policy changes and regulatory actions that together threaten to dampen economic growth and "harm our ability . . . to grow private-sector jobs in the U.S." _WaPo

Obama's anti growth and anti-private sector bias was evident two years ago. But it's nice that a few people are beginning to notice.

The Next Big Economic Crisis is the Default of State Bonds

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are sucking up Stimulus Funds and destroying the mortgage system of the US

Americans are losing hope in the Messiah of hope and change

President Obama is an incompetent, inexperienced, clown of a child-in-man's-clothing. Only an idiot could have ever expected him to put the country on a sound economic footing.

Fresh Water from the Sea: Cheap, Clean, Abundant

The surface of Earth is 70% seawater. There would be a lot more seacoast available for human settlement if only more freshwater for drinking and plant cultivation were available. Desalination is the sensible answer, but desalination requires a lot of energy. New approaches to cheaper desalination promise to open up a lot more of the oceans and seacoasts to human settlement.

Brian Wang provides a look at a new desalination technology from Saltwork Technologies that promises to reduce the energy costs of desalination by up to 80%.

Canadian scientists from Saltworks Technologies have recently discovered a new technology for water desalination. The process reduces the electrical energy consumption needed by the process by 70%. Saltworks Technologies reported that they can produce 1 cubic meter of fresh water using just 1kWh compared to 3.7kWh per cubic meter achievable using reverse osmosis.
But how does the actual technology really work? Simple: solar heat or waste heat is used to evaporate water and concentrate salt water. As a fact, solar energy is converted into osmotic energy and the resulted osmotic energy is used to desalinate water. The concentrated salt water is exposed to two separate solutions of regular salt water via two different ‘bridges’, one which is porous to chloride ion and the other which is porous to sodium ions.

Sodium and chloride ion are able to migrated across the bridges into the salt water solution. The two elements have the role to equalize the difference in ion concentration between the two solutions. In this way the two solutions get charged positively with the sodium ions and negatively with the chloride ion. To continue the process, the resulted solutions are exposed across two similar bridges to the water to be desalinated.
Sodium ions are attracted into the chloride solution and chloride ions into the sodium solution (different changes attract themselves) resulting desalination. The 1kWh energy used in the process for 1 cubic meter of water, comes mainly from pumping fluids around the pipework. To reduce costs, plastic pipes can be used instead of steel pipes as the system in not working under high pressure. _GreenOptimist_via_BrianWang

More approaches to cheaper desalination from NextBigFuture:

Dais Analytic

Dais Analytic’s “new generation of desalination technology” concentrates on desalination by molecular diffusion. This low-cost, pressure desalination process uses commercialized nanotechnology, and employs a solid polymer membrane to reject dissolved solids by size, polarity and diffusion concentration, leaving fewer than 100 PPM TDS. The Dais “MD” membrane does not foul or need regeneration, nor does it scale or support marine growth, making it a viable option where environmental concerns are uppermost. It can be used in applications with capacities of up to 10,000m3/d.

NanoH20

NanoH20 has developed a membrane that attracts water molecules and repels other types of molecules, thus speeding up the desalination process. A membrane that uses nanotechnology to separate pure water from seawater at a lower energy cost than existing reverse osmosis membranes. NanoH2O’s next generation reverse osmosis membranes are thin-film composite membranes that contain nano-structured material. Their enhanced permeability should enable dramatic improvements to be made in the process economics of seawater reverse osmosis. NanoH2O claims that their thin-film nanocomposite membranes will allow 10-15% to be shaved off the cost of producing potable grade water. The company aims to have its first commercial product available within 18-24 months. Research into the application of the technology in brackish water and fresh water scenarios is planned to follow from 2009, making the product suitable for a variety of desalination and water reuse applications.

Clathrate Desalination (Mouchel and Water Science)

A joint venture between Mouchel and Water Science has come up with a new approach to separating fresh water from seawater based on trapping water molecules in carbon dioxide molecules as clathrates. Carbon dioxide forms a clathrate with water spontaneously at more than 30 bar pressure and less than 80 degrees Celcius temperature. The new multipass solution developed by the team for separating and cleaning the clathrate crystals holds the key to the concept’s main attraction – ultra-low energy use. The breakthrough system is predicted to reduce energy consumption to below 1.3 kWh/m3, with the thermodynamics of salt solutions providing the simple explanation behind the baseline economics. The goal is to apply the technology in large-scale industrial desalination plants, remote desalination facilities using renewable energy, and in the oil & gas sector, for the treatment of waste well water.

Light of Future Night

This LED light bulb is packed full of rechargeable batteries, so that if the power goes down, you will still have 2 hours of light. Or just unscrew the bulb and use it as a flashlight. Source_Engadget

Light Up the Night With Your Heavy Breathing!

These unique algae-powered glow-lamps are charged by sunlight in the day, then fueled by your own CO2 at night. So do something that will cause you to breathe fast and heavy. Your algae will thank you for it.

Inspired by recent research into harnessing energy directly from plants, Netherlands-based designer Mike Thompson has come up with a concept for an algae powered lamp that runs on only sunlight, water and your breath.

Called the Latro (latin for thief), Thompson's concept design consists of a conical jar with a spout and a cross between a handle and a built-in straw at the top. Water is added through the spout, CO2 is added by breathing through the handle, sunlight enters from all sides and everything is in place to harvest energy from the algae. _Gizmag

Humans have used microbes to produce food and drink for several thousand years. Microbial fuels are destined to replace petroleum within 50 years. Why not also use microbes to produce electricity, and light? It is a microbial world.

Rise of Lunar Self-Replicating Robots

Japan is planning a $2.2 billion robot colonising mission to the moon. Giant robots will be delivered to the lunar surface, where they will set about building an unmanned lunar base.

As forward thinking as the Japanese robot mission to Luna may seem, it would be more sustainable if the robots were capable of self-replicating. The hobby replicator enterprise is rapidly evolving and expanding, with some desktop replicators able to build as many as half of all their replacement parts.

It is not so important that each machine be able to replicate itself. Instead, think of colonies of complementary machines, capable of making some of their own replacement parts along with replacement parts for other types of machines. Maintenance and controller machines would be given top time and resource priority, under the discipline of a type of "machine economics."

Speaking of space travel, private space launch company SpaceX plans its debut launch for its Falcon 9 rocket tomorrow, June 4.

The one major hurdle left before the fledgling rocket can attempt to launch is final approval of its flight termination system (FTS), an explosive charge that would destroy the rocket if it flew off course. Both SpaceX and the U.S. air force, which monitors the launch area, must be confident that the system works before Falcon 9 can lift off.

"We are now looking good for final approval of the FTS by this Friday, June 4th, just in time for our first launch attempt," SpaceX officials said in a Tuesday statement.

This test version of Falcon 9 will carry a mockup of SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which is designed to carry cargo, and eventually humans, to the International Space Station. This SPACE.com graphic shows how SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Dragon stack up to other rockets. _Space

Best wishes for a successful launch!

Surviving: A Compulsion to Prepare for the Worst

"People are waking up to the fact that they cannot always rely on outside sources for their personal safety and survival," Tom Martin, CEO of the American Preppers Network, tells Asylum.

"A 'sh** hit the fan' scenario happens to just about everyone sometime in their life," he says. "Preparing and having a 'prepper' mindset will lessen the impact of whatever disaster it may be that you might experience in your life."

...there is a posse of self-sufficient men and women out there who make it their goal to be prepared when disaster strikes. They call themselves "preppers."

From natural catastrophes to economic meltdowns to nuclear blowouts, the preppers' collective goal is quite simple: to carry on as usual, even when catastrophe strikes.

Over recent years, a huge community of preppers has developed. Perform a simple Google search and you'll turn up plenty of prepper-related stuff, including the Web television portalPrepper TV, survival blogs, podcasts (such as DoctorPrepper and PrepperPodcast), andforums that cover everything from a woman's perspective to recycling to how to handle dead bodies.

There's even a rash of YouTube videos offering tutorials on such topics as how to construct your own nuclear bomb shelter, what firearms you should own, and how to earthquake-proof your stored food.
_Asylum

h/t SurvivalBlog

The idea is to have the tools, supplies, and skills to make it to the other side of whatever crisis is likely to pop up.  If you last longer than everyone else in your part of town, and you are running out of supplies, it will be okay to scavenge a bit in your local neighborhood.  But be careful of other scavengers who may be of the "shoot first and ask questions later" variety.

Ironically, while it is largely leftists who frequent the dieoff.org sites and who pine for the killing off of 90% of the human population of the planet, it is more likely to be the more independent and apolitical persons who will be in the best position to see the far side of catastrophe.  Most leftists -- typically incompetent pseudo-intellectuals -- will not have what it takes to make it.

750,000 Concrete Mushroom Bunkers from Commie Paranoia Days

Concrete Mushrooms Preview - Albania's 750,000 inherited bunkers. from Concrete Mushrooms on Vimeo.
Back in the commie paranoia days of Albania's Enver Hoxha, the fear of invasion from imperialist capitalist outsiders was topmost in the mind of leadership. To better defend Albania from the hordes of capitalists who were massing at the gates, Hoxha built hundreds of thousands of concrete mushroom bunkers. Many years later, now, and the invasion never came. So what does the dirt-poor country of Albania do with almost a million concrete mushroom bunkers?

Some people are creating hotels and resorts from the lumps of concrete. Others turn the monstrosities into wineries or restaurants. Let your imagination run wild. The mushrooms are there. You may as well think of a use for them.

H/T and photo credit: ImpactLab

Imagine the Possibilities

H/T Recyclart Das Park

This simple sewer pipe-to-dwelling conversion suggests many possibilities. Sewer pipe is strong, water-proof, and meant to be buried underground. With the proper end-caps, sealants, insulation, and entry-ways, an underground survival shelter or bunker made of large diameter sewer pipe could be made relatively sustainable for long periods of time -- given a certain ingenuity and resourcefulness.

H/T ImpactLab

Pitcher-Style Home Water Purification System

H/T ImpactLab
The Homedics water purification utilises both filtration and light-wave germicidal action to kill 99.9999% of bacteria, 99.99% of viruses and 99.95% of microbial cysts in your drinking water (and costs $99.99 as well). It is like a Brita activated charcoal filter plus germicidal ultraviolet, so it removes more of the potentially harmful products that sometimes find their way into a drinking water supply.
Homedics website

UVC light, with wavelengths between 100 and 280 nm, is commonly referred to as “germicidal light” due to its effectiveness in destroying microorganisms. UVC light acts as a natural outdoor air purification system by deactivating the DNA of microorganisms and destroying their ability to multiply.

UVC light has been used to effectively disinfect and sanitize in water treatment plants, hospitals and laboratories, and food and drug facilities for years. In addition, this technology has been used in a number of consumer products.

Utilizing the germ-killing benefits of UVC light, HoMedics, the leader in health and wellness products, developed Restore®, a complete water purification system in an easy to use pitcher. Restore combines UV Clean technology to remove bacteria, viruses and microbial cysts with a filtration system to reduce heavy metals, chlorine (taste and odor), and some industrial and agricultural pollutants.

Restore includes an internal filtration system with an activated carbon and ion exchange resin. Once water has passed through the filter, the water is purified by the built-in UV lamp by activating a 60-second germ-killing cycle. _Homedics PDF

Police Searching for Missing, Productive, Obedient Woman

Police Still Searching For Missing Productive, Obedient Woman
Worth watching just for the Sasquatch ads.

War of the Sexes: Not Politically Correct

In the paper, Nyborg looks at many other studies to try to determine whether sex differences in IQ exist and, if so, which sex does better on which subtests and by how much. He comes to the conclusion that women do slightly better in verbal tests, men better on spatial, and in sum, men have an IQ advantage over women of between 3 and 8 points, his best number being around 7 points. Men also have a wider dispersion of IQs than women....The result, as the graph shows, is that at an IQ of 145, which could reasonably be deemed an elite level, men outnumber women by a factor of 8. _Mangans

Mangans
Dennis Mangan looks at a 5 year old study comparing gender differences in intelligence. The study was by Helmuth Nyborg at a Danish university, U. of Aarhus. Nyborg received no end of grief from pseudo-intellectuals, and was even reprimanded by his own university for daring to cross the line of political correctness. But lines of political correctness must be crossed if humans are to get at the truth -- and learn to live with the truth while doing whatever they feel is necessary to change the underlying reality.

Experts have long disagreed about the existence of a sex difference in overall intelligence. Some (e.g. Lynn, 1994, 1997, 1999; Lynn, Irwing, & Cammock, 2002) find that males outscore females by about 3.8 IQ points, but most find no sex difference (e.g. Brody, 1992; Halpern & LaMay, 2000; Jensen, 1998).

This disagreement is confusing for theoretical reasons. First, males dominate all higher ranks of education, research, occupation, and political power structures that call for capacity to deal with complexity, which is just another way of defining general  intelligence g. Second, males have, on average, larger brains than females, and brain size correlates positively with intelligence. Yet, the empirical evidence for a male g advantage is equivocal.

The present study addresses these paradoxes by testing four hypotheses: (1) Ambiguous definitions and methods explain the current disagreement among the experts, (2) The proper analytic approach will identify a male lead in general intelligence g, (3) The larger male brain
partly explains the average male g lead, and, (4) Classical Distribution Theory illustrates how a small male mean SD g score advantage and a wider male SD dispersion score translate into an exponentially increased male–female ratio at the high end of the g distribution. This unequal ratio of high g males to females explains in part why males (always, according to Goldberg, 1977) dominate the intellectually most demanding top occupational and political strata.

...The study made it understandable how an exponentially growing male/female ratio at the high end of the g distribution—with the exact numerical ratio being a function of the size of the average sex difference in mean g and of the dispersion of g—provides part of an explanation of the male dominance in high society.

The present results derive from a more careful sampling of the two independent sub-samples than any before, but the small Ns call for caution in interpretation, even if it is harder to obtain a statistically significant difference in a small than in a large sample.

The general conclusion: Proper methodology identifies a male advantage in g that increases exponentially at higher levels, relates to brain size, and explains, at least in part, the universal male dominance in society. _PDF_Nyborg_PDF

Later research using fMRI and other brain scanning methods have looked at specific differences in connections between brain centers (white matter) and differences in specific brain centers themselves (grey matter), finding much greater significance in those subtle differences than in gross brain size and weight differentials.

That is to be expected, since it is the actual performance of the brains, rather than the size of the hat, that is at issue.

Males dominate the top levels of most professions for many reasons. A significant part of the reason is hormonal -- testosterone providing a certain assertiveness that often lends toward hard work and achievement. At the upper levels of cognitive performance, males are undeniably dominant. Part of that difference is also likely due to testosterone's effects on the developing brain -- primarily in adolescence, but also in early life.

Modern political correctness is counter-productive and self defeating for society as a whole, since it leads to wholesale waste of many of the finest male brains on the planet -- and for too many other reasons to mention here.

In the final reckoning, there will be no final reckoning. But there will certainly be repercussions that Susan Faludi never dreamed of. ;-)

48% of African American Women have Genital Herpes

More from LA Times

CDC MMWR reporting findings

It is shocking to think that half the African American women one may see walking down the street are infected with HSV 2, genital herpes. HSV 2 infection makes one more susceptible to HIV infection. And these days, STDs do not necessarily travel alone. Syphilis, gonorrhea, and other STDs are much more common among American blacks as well.

Given the 70% illegitimacy rate of childbirth among African Americans, it is clear that family and monogamy are not highly prized. Other symptoms of social pathology such as high poverty rates, high crime rates, high rates of drug and alcohol abuse, and high rates of domestic violence, combine with behavioural diseases such as STDs to add to the misery index of the community.

It is not an American phenomenon, since one sees the same things in Haiti, Jamaica, South Africa, and almost everywhere that persons of African descent live in appreciable numbers and proportions.

More attention needs to be given to these social pathologies which tend to concentrate among persons of African heritage -- that is if we wish to do something to lessen the morbidity, mortality, and misery.

1001 Uses for Vinegar, and Other Cheap Everyday Things

In a prolonged recession, it sometimes becomes necessary to learn to do more with less. That's why it is good to know several uses for common, cheap, household items such as vinegar, bleach, rubbing alcohol, baking soda, and vaseline.

Here are 1001 uses for white distilled vinegar. Some of them might get you out of embarrassing situations, or help you get over an ailment when no doctor can be found.

12 extraordinary uses for bleach. Mostly having to do with sanitation, of course. Here's an extra: 5 drops of liquid bleach in 1/2 gallon water can keep stored water potable long term.

13 ways to use rubbing alcohol.

75 extraordinary uses for baking soda -- not all of them for cooking! It can even help clean your stuck drains!

60 uses for table salt. A mixture of salt and baking soda in your Neti Pot can help tremendously in cold and allergy seasons.

30 uses for Vaseline petroleum jelly. The one about getting bubble gum out of your child's hair was a new one for me.

Becoming an expert in the use of cheap, common household products could make you the hero of the hour -- more than once. I won't tell you that such knowledge will save your life someday, but in some circumstances it might.

They call it being resourceful, or being broadly competent, or just being prepared. The best time to learn these simple things is childhood, of course. But who had parent willing to teach them these things? Not many.

Try being your own parent now.

3 Meals from Anarchy

Things can fall apart for many reasons, and at astoundingly rapid speeds. Whether you are 3 meals from anarchy or 9, the distance between you and deadly threat is alarmingly small. Natural disaster, epidemic disease, power failure, terror attack, or outright warfare -- potential triggers are more numerous than you can imagine.

You won't be able to leave the city by freeway -- they will all be jammed by wrecked, abandoned, and burning vehicles. Better have several alternate routes and fallback plans. Is your bugout kit packed and ready? Does your bugout vehicle have a full tank of fuel and is it well maintained? Do you have a bugout destination?

I recommend the links and the postings at PreparednessPro.com. A good site for daily browsing is SurvivalBlog. Unfortunately, membership in the Society for Creative Apocalyptology is currently closed, but several online forums of a similar nature are available.

You have a much better chance of surviving a short, medium, and long-term catastrophe if you are a member of a cooperating group of survival-oriented individuals and families with complementary skills.

First published at Al Fin

Bugout Tanker: Naked Girl Sold Separately

When you think about the ideal bugout vehicle, it is not likely that you think of a modified tanker trailer. And yet, consider the advantages: easily transportable, rugged construction, weather-proof, potentially floatable, and even capable of burying underground with proper anti-corrosion precautions and ventilation equipment. It would also make a fine sauna on warm summer days.

I am required to tell you that the naked girl seen in the sketch does not come with the converted tanker. You will have to make other arrangements when furnishing your bugout apartment. The long, cold winter nights should be more happily endured with a well furnished survival apartment.

The bugout vehicle above is not nearly so convenient as the tanker apartment on top. For one thing, you must push the vehicle yourself. And as you can see, there is no naked girl inside, nor is there very much room for one should you take the trouble to obtain her. Nevertheless, even a small hand-pushed bugout vehicle is better than no shelter at all. This one comes with a mini-kitchen and make-shift washroom, at least.

Impact Lab, via Design Boom

A Potpourri of Ways to Escape a Doomed City

If you watched the "After Armageddon" videos in the previous post, you should have some awareness of how difficult it might be to get out of town at the exact same time as several million other would-be escapees. The HovPod featured in the video below was the recipient of the Al Fin 2009 Small Vehicle Survival Award.

The HovPod is a great all-terrain escape vehicle, but you can see from the topmost video that adding flight -- even low level ground effect flight -- to your escape vehicle's capabilities may make the difference between reaching the high ground and being stuck in a bad place.

The Terrafugia Transition is featured in the video below. It is a roadable aircraft capable of flying above the gridlocked freeways below. Finding a good landing spot may be problematic under some conditions, but a wise escape artist plans ahead.

The ICON A5 amphibious trailerable plane may be your best bet if you live near a lake, river, bay, or protected harbour. With the A5 you can take off from water and land on solid surface, or vice versa. Check it out below:

A personal helicopter may be your best bet if you live in the middle of a large city, and do not have access to a waterway or runway for your private airplane. The Helicycle demonstrated in the video below, is one example of a personal helicopter. Consider adding flotation for more versatility.

At War in the Forest: Ballad of the Bark Beetle

Bark beetles have killed nearly 80 million ponderosa, piñon and lodgepole pines in Arizona and New Mexico and tens of millions more across the West over the past decade. Years of punishing drought left the trees unable to protect themselves against the attacks, which carve ugly scars into forests, weaken the surrounding ecosystem and heighten wildfire danger.

Forest managers can apply insecticide to individual trees or small stands, but forestwide treatments are impractical and would be wildly expensive and potentially risky to other plants and wildlife.

Enter Reagan McGuire, a research assistant who wondered what would happen if the beetles were blasted with noise, creating an acoustic stress that might change their behavior. He sold Hofstetter on the idea, and the experiment was hatched at NAU's School of Forestry lab.

They collected tree trunks infested with bark beetles and sandwiched slices of the trees between clear plastic plates, creating what looked like the old ant farms once sold in the back pages of magazines.

Working in the lab, McGuire piped in the music through tiny speakers, the sort you might find in a singing greeting card. He watched the reaction of the beetles using a microscope. The rock music didn't seem to annoy the bugs, nor did Rush [Limbaugh] in reverse.

McGuire and Hofstetter decided to try something different. They recorded the sounds of the beetles and played them back, manipulating them to test the response.

Suddenly, every little thing they did seemed to provoke the beetles.

"We could use a particular aggression call that would make the beetles move away from the sound as if they were avoiding another beetle," Hofstetter said.

When they made the beetle sounds louder and stronger than a typical male mating call, he said, the female beetle rejected the male and moved toward the electronic sound.


Even more surprising was what the beetles did to each other. The researchers manipulated the sounds and, at a certain point, the male stopped mating and tore the female apart, McGuire said.

"This is not normal behavior in the natural world," he said. _AzCentral

Al Fin botanists and entomologists respond to McGuire: No shite Shirlock! If it were normal behaviour in the natural world, there would be no bark beetles at all by now. It is your job to make it common behaviour in the pine forest. Otherwise, give back all those grants!

Biomass companies had better grab up as many dead pines as they can, while they last. If the bark beetles are driven to distraction by the manipulation of their own sounds, pine forests may have a few years to recover -- until the next deadly pest comes along.

First published at Al Fin, The Next Level

Skipper BO Steers Course Onto the Rocks, Blames Others

Worst unemployment picture since WWII

Obama Doesn't Know What He's Doing

Long-term unemployment skyrockets

Middle class collapsing

Dependency on government a growing addiction for Americans

This is the Obama - Pelosi age, the age of the oxymoron "social justice." Destroying the country to save it is the path that radical revolutionaries often take -- from Mugabe to Castro to Chavez to Kim to Pol Pot to Stalin to Hitler and so on.

Captain Obama at the wheel, the USS America headed onto the rocks, and in the ballroom Pelosi is gathered with Greenpeace, the trial lawyers, labour union bosses, the IPCC, Al Gore and the carbon traders, and a host of lobbyists, singing "Happy Days are Here Again!"

Pay no attention to those deep grinding noises coming from below. Those are just some noises left over from the previous administration. Captain BO has increased speed to full ahead, so we will soon be out of the rough spots.

Stun Gun Cannon Will Keep Neighbors at Bay

If you are the type of person who doesn't like intrusive neighbors, you may be interested in the new sonic cannon device from Israel. If you are tired of neighbors using your landscaped lawn and gardens as a shortcut -- or as a place for their dog Rover to relieve himself -- consider the stun cannon, and a few other non-lethal devices that may serve to keep outsiders on the proper side of the line.

Using a patented process involving Pulse Detonation Technology (PDT), the system feeds the gas-air mixture into one or more so-called impulse chambers or cannon barrels, where the burning fuel detonates and intensifies in force as it travels through the chamber, exiting in a rapid-fire succession of high-velocity shock bursts.

A small battery-powered control system - about twice the size of a pack of cigarettes - measures fuel pressure, temperature and flow rates while monitoring the continuous intake of the air-gas mixture.

According to company data, the system generates 60 to 100 bursts per minute, each traveling at about 2,000 meters per second and lasting up to 300 milliseconds.

The resulting shocks create a double deterrent to rioters and potential intruders, developers here say, by the extreme air pressure and sonic boom effect generated once the mixture propagates and expands through the air. One standard 12-kilogram LPG gas canister (retail cost: about $25) can produce up to 5,000 shock bursts. _DefenseNews

This powerful stun cannon can now take its place alongside the infrasonic disruptor, the microwave skin burn, and a large variety of lasers, electric-stun, and impact-stun weapons meant to discourage unwelcome guests.

We are talking about riot control, repelling pirates, and perhaps border control. As the ability to stun-at-a-distance gets better and less permanently damaging, remotely operated non-lethal antipersonnel emplacements will likely be installed along difficult stretches of border.

For Israelis, the issue is clear. Good fences make good neighbors. For the rest of us, the ability to control the dangerous and unruly mob has never been more necessary.

Wake Up Little Stupid Head!

You are being played like a chump in many ways. Here are just 2:

foreign outsourcing of component manufacturing has led to consistent overstatement of U.S. GDP and productivity. The connection goes a long way to explain why we keep losing jobs even as GDP is apparently expanding.

As our economy becomes less competitive due to higher taxes, burdensome and uncertain regulations, and capital flight, more manufacturing and services will be outsourced to foreign firms. However, the flaw in GDP calculation allows the output of those foreign workers to be included in our domestic tally. Since we count the output but not the worker responsible for it, government statisticians attribute the gains to rising labor productivity. To them, it looks like companies are producing more goods with fewer workers.

The reality is that we are producing less with fewer workers. The added “productivity” comes from higher unemployment and larger trade deficits. This is a toxic formula that will have lethal economic consequences. _PeterSchiff

And # 2, look at the taxes!

I keep reading about surveys that show that retail sales are up. But as noted above, no one pays extra sales taxes, or decides they need to pay more income taxes. The surest way to measure retail sales is sales taxes. Want to know how incomes are doing? Look at income tax receipts. Let's look at sales taxes first.

First off, I can find no single source of recent sales tax information. It is all one-off, but it is consistent. Sales taxes in my home state of Texas are down 12.8% year-over-year, and we're in the fifth straight month of decreases of 11% or more. Projections are for sales taxes to continue to decline into 2010.

There is a very revealing study by the Pew Center on state taxes, called "Beyond California". Everyone knows how badly off California is. The Pew Center looks at how the rest of the states are doing, and focuses on 10 states that also have severe problems. Sales tax receipts are down 14% in Arizona, and state income taxes are down 32%.

On average, revenues are down almost 12%. Oregon has seen their revenues collapse a stunning 19%. New York is down 17%, with a deficit of 32%. Illinois has a projected deficit of 47% of its budget, second only to California with 49%. You can see how your state fares here.

The Liscio Report notes that all states had negative year-over-year sales tax collections in October, and the weighted average decrease was 10.2%, down from a negative 7.2% in September. _SeekingAlpha

One more thing: do you really believe those unemployment numbers they try to feed you?

As I noted last week, the number of unemployed actually soared by 558,000, to 15.7 million, as measured by the household survey, not the 190,000 you read about in the mainstream media. Unemployment is sadly continuing to rise by significant amounts.

In August, I did an interview with CNBC from Leen's Fishing Lodge in Maine. The unemployment numbers had just come out. I did a back-of-the-napkin estimate that we would need about 15 million new jobs over the next five years just to get back to where we were when the recession started. _SA

President Obama thinks he can speak the country out of the recession with his teleprompter and 1960s era speechwriters.

He thinks that by paying off his supporters in the big unions, big Wall Street firms, big trial lawyer partnerships, and big overseas illegal campaign contributor scams, that somehow everything will magically get better.

How, Mr. Obama? By taxing small and medium business into oblivion? By destroying the coal industry, hamstringing the oil industry, and paralyzing the nuclear industry? By giving the auto industry to your union chums to destroy, and regulating the energy industry out of existence? By creating a monster of a government health care bureaucracy that drives the economy into the mud even more quickly than all previous entitlements put together?

Hey little stupid head! Wake up and decide if you are going to put up with this green rookie incompetent clown president you stumbled into electing. Because despite what you may have been told, the world really did need a prosperous, strong US -- for a lot of reasons.

Another Century of Crude Oil?

The following is excerpted from the October 2009 Scientific American article by Leonardo Maugeri, "Another Century of Oil?"

On fourteen dry, flat square miles of California’s Central Valley, more than 8,000 horsehead pumps—as old-fashioned oilmen call them—slowly rise and fall as they suck oil from underground. Glittering pipelines crossing the whole area suggest that the place is not merely a relic of the past. But even to an expert’s eyes, Kern River Oil Field betrays no hint of the technological miracles that have enabled it to survive decades of dire predictions.

When Kern River Oil Field was discovered in 1899, analysts thought that only 10 percent of its unusually viscous crude could be recovered. In 1942, after more than four decades of modest production, the field was estimated to still hold 54 million barrels of recoverable oil, a fraction of the 278 million barrels already recovered. “In the next 44 years, it produced not 54 [million barrels] but 736 million barrels, and it had another 970 million barrels remaining,” energy guru Morris Adelman noted in 1995. But even this estimate proved wrong. In November 2007 U.S. oil giant Chevron, by then the field’s operator, announced that cumulative production had reached two billion barrels. Today Kern River still puts out nearly 80,000 barrels per day, and the state of California estimates its remaining reserves to be about 627 million barrels.

Chevron began to markedly increase production in the 1960s by injecting steam into the ground, a novel technology at the time. Later, a new breed of exploration and drilling tools—along with steady steam injection—turned the field into a kind of oil cornucopia.

Kern River is not an isolated case. According to common wisdom, a field’s production should follow a bell-shaped trajectory known as the Hubbert curve (after the late Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert) and peak when half of the known oil has been extracted. Instead most of the world’s oil fields have revived over time. In a way, technology is the real cornucopia.

Many analysts now prophesy that global oil production will peak in the next few years and then decline, following the Hubbert curve. But I believe that those projections will prove wrong, just as similar “peak oil” predictions [see “The End of Cheap Oil,” by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère; Scientific American, March 1998] have been mistaken in the past. New exploration methods have revealed more of the earth’s secrets. And leaps in extraction technology have led to tapping oil in once inaccessible areas and in places where drilling used to be uneconomic. Advanced exploration and extraction methods can keep oil production growing for decades to come and could allow oil supplies to last at least another century.

Although oil and other fossil fuels pose risks for the climate and the environment, for now alternative energy sources cannot compete with their versatility, cost, and ease of transport and storage. As research into alternatives goes on, we will need to be sure that we use the oil we have responsibly.

All That You Can’t Leave Behind
At a time when the world increasingly fears an approaching peak and subsequent decline in oil production, it may be surprising to learn that most of the planet’s known resources are left unexploited in the ground and that even more still wait to be discovered.

On the face of it, oil should last only a few more decades. In 2008, just before the economic meltdown slashed consumption, the world burned about 30 billion barrels of oil a year. Assuming that in the near future consumption resumed at 2008 levels and then stayed constant, our planet’s proven reserves of oil—currently estimated at between 1.1 trillion and 1.3 trillion barrels—would have about 40 years to go.

But proven reserves are only estimates and not fixed numbers. They are defined as the amount of known oil that can be recovered economically with current technology, so the definition changes as technology develops and as the price of crude varies. In particular, if supply tightens or demand increases, resale prices go up, and oil that was once too expensive to extract becomes part of the proven reserves. That is why most oil fields have produced much more than the initial estimates of their reserves assumed and even more than the initial estimates of their total content. Today only 35 percent of the oil in the average oil field is recovered, meaning that about two thirds of the oil in known fields remains underground. That resource is rarely mentioned in the debate on the future of oil.

Even a mature oil country such as the U.S., whose oil production has been declining since the 1970s (if not as fast as the Hubbert curve predicted), still holds huge volumes of unexploited oil under its surface. Although the country’s proven oil reserves are now only 29 billion barrels, the National Petroleum Council (NPC) estimates that 1,124 billion barrels are still left underground, of which 374 billion barrels would be recoverable with current technology.

On a global scale, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the earth’s remaining conventional oil (petroleum) deposits to be around seven trillion to eight trillion barrels. But with today’s technology, know-how and prices, only part of that oil can be recovered economically and is thus classified as a proven reserve.

And there is more.

Only one third of the sedimentary basins of our planet—the geologic formations that may contain oil—has been thoroughly explored with modern technologies. Moreover, the USGS data do not include unconventional oils, such as ultraheavy oils, tar sands, oil shales and bituminous schist, which together are at least as abundant as conventional oil.

Thus, a country or a company may increase its reserves of black gold even without tapping new areas and frontiers, if it is capable of recovering more oil from known fields. Still, doing so is not always easy.

A Rocky Start
Contrary to common belief, oil is not held in great underground lakes or caves. If you could “see” an oil reservoir, you would notice only a rocky structure seeming to have no room for oil. But beyond the reach of the human eye, a world of often invisible pores and microfractures entraps minuscule droplets of oil, together with water and natural gas.

Nature created these formations over millions of years. It started when huge deposits of vegetation and dead microorganisms piled up at the bottom of ancient seas, decomposed and became buried under successive layers of rock. High temperatures and pressures then slowly transformed the organic sediments into today’s oil and gas. These fossil fuels soak the porous underground rock almost like water soaks pumice.

When such a reservoir is drilled, it behaves a bit like an uncorked bottle of champagne. The oil is freed from its ancient rocky prison, and the reservoir’s internal pressure pushes it to the surface (along with stones, mud and other debris). The process goes on until the pressure peters out, usually after several years. This initial, or primary, stage of recovery can usually yield between 10 and 15 percent of the oil in place. From then on, recovery must be assisted.

About one third of the oil left in a reservoir after the initial “champagne” release is called immobile oil—drops trapped by strong capillary forces within isolated pores in the rock. No technique exists yet to extract this part of the oil. The remaining two thirds, though mobile, will not necessarily flow into the wells on its own. In fact, usually about half of the mobile oil stays stuck inside the reservoir because of geologic barriers or low permeability, which happens when the pores are too narrow. The situation is even worse when the oil is not a light liquid but a heavy, viscous, molasseslike substance.

To help some of the remaining oil seep through the pores in the rock and come out of the wells, operators usually inject natural gas and water into the reservoir, in what is called secondary recovery. Injecting gas restores the lost pressure and forces oil that is sufficiently fluid to seep through the rock’s pores. Meanwhile, because oil is lighter than water, injection of water raises the oil toward the well, just like pouring water in a glass filled with olive oil would send the oil upward.

In the past decade or so, the distinction between primary and secondary recovery has blurred as companies have begun to apply advanced technology from the outset. One of the most important developments so far has been the horizontal well, an L-shaped structure able to deliver dramatically more oil than the traditional vertical drilling that has been used since the inception of the oil industry. The L shape enables horizontal wells to change direction and penetrate sections of a reservoir that would otherwise be unreachable. The method, first adopted commercially in the 1980s, is particularly suitable in reservoirs where oil and natural gas occupy thin, horizontal layers.

Exploration tools have also improved over the years. Advanced 3-D imaging of the underground, for instance, which is based on how seismic waves bounce off the boundaries between layers of different rock composition, now offers more detailed understanding of the structure of existing fields, which helps in choosing where to drill to optimize recovery.

Imaging technologies now enable geologists to “see” what lies underneath layers of salt that sit unevenly distributed below the seabed and are sometimes thicker than 5,000 meters. Similar to frozen waters, salt formations used to represent a formidable obstacle because they blurred the seismic waves used to reconstruct an accurate image of the underground.

Such imaging breakthroughs, combined with more advanced offshore technologies, have made new parts of the oceans accessible to oil developers. At the time when the North Sea oil fields were developed in the 1970s, it seemed as if offshore technology had reached its most daunting milestone, tapping fields that lay below 100 to 200 meters of water and 1,000 meters under the seabed. But in the past few years the industry has succeeded in striking oil at depths below 3,000 meters of water and 6,000 meters of rock and salt. There have been at least three major ultradeep offshore discoveries: Thunder Horse and Jack in the Gulf of Mexico and Tupi off the coast of Brazil.

Scraping the Barrel
As wells have gone farther and deeper than ever before, technologies have also evolved to get more oil out of the rock after the first lines of recovery have run their course. Primary and secondary recovery stages together can bring the recovery rate to between 20 and 40 percent. To go beyond that, in what experts call tertiary recovery, it is usually necessary to make the remaining oil less viscous, which can be accomplished using heat, gases, chemicals and even microbes. Steam injection, among the oldest heat-based methods, was decisive in the revival of the Kern River Oil Field back in the early 1960s. The injected steam heats the overlying formation and enables oil to move. To this day, Kern River’s steam-injection project is among the largest of its kind in the world. A variant of steam-assisted recovery has been applied to tar sand deposits in Alberta that are too deep to be surface-mined.

Another heat-based process that has been tested in the field is burning a part of the reservoir’s hydrocarbons by igniting it with a heater while pumping air into a well to feed the combustion. The fire generates heat and carbon dioxide (CO2), both of which make oil less viscous; much of the CO2 also remains underground and helps to push the oil out. At the same time, the fire itself breaks the larger and heavier molecules of oil, once again making it mobile. The airflow can be controlled to limit oil that gets burned and to prevent the release of pollution into the surrounding environment.

A more common method is the high-pressure injection of gases such as CO2 or nitrogen into the reservoir. These gases can restore or maintain a reservoir’s pressure and can also mix with oil, reducing both its viscosity and the forces that can keep the oil trapped. In the U.S., CO2 extracted from volcanoes or from waste gases from power stations has been applied to oil recovery since the 1970s. The process is in use in about 100 ongoing projects, with dedicated pipeline networks totaling more than 2,500 kilometers.

The know-how accumulated in CO2 injection has opened the way for the capture and storage of CO2 from power plants—procedures that could help slash emissions of this greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and instead keep it underground for hundreds of years. The first commercial carbon capture and storage project has been active at the Sleipner field, off the coast of Norway, since 1996, and is storing one million metric tons of CO2 a year. This amount is small, considering that human activity alone is estimated to eject into the atmosphere greenhouse gases equivalent to around 50 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. But the plant’s success serves as a proof of concept.

Continue reading here

Peak oil has never been an intelligent religion, but it is growing less and less bright every day.   If peak oilers knew one tenth as much about what is going to happen with oil supplies and prices as they pretend, they would be stinking rich from crafty investing.  

Between the Peak Oil Religion and the Climate Catastrophe Religion, a huge proportion of the world's nutcases can be grouped.  Add the Fundamentalist Muslim Religion and you have largely covered the world's majour delusions and problem children.  Throw in the Obama Zombies and that just about does it.   While still delusionary, the rest of the religions are not a significant threat to the future of abundance and sustainability.

Reinventing the Wheel Again, Once More

Tires and wheels that can change configuration to suit the purpose at hand, might come in handy. Modern tires that can assume only one shape are of limited use in an all-purpose, amphibious vehicle.The wheels / tires shown above are capable of changing from conventional round tires, to a stepped snow tire shape, to a water-wheel configuration. That should prove useful, should you wish to cross the river without a bridge.The system above is known as the intelligent wheel system. Its 3 configurations can serve well on the highway, on snow - mud - or sand, and in the water.

Freedom of Movement for the Fourth of July

The Aeroyacht 110has been dubbed “the world’s most innovative super catamaran” by its designers and, while that’s a pretty big claim, it’s certainly an audacious concept. Capable of speeds of over 32 knots but able to cruise effortlessly at 20, boasting a superbly-appointed 32ft wide salon with 360º sea views and with its own fold-up amphibious plane as a tender, the Aeroyacht 110 looks to be the ne plus ultra of luxury sailing.

Designed from scratch by Gregor Tarjan, founder of Aeroyacht International, together with naval architect Pete Melvin, of the world-renowned Morrelli & Melvin multihull architects, the Aeroyacht 110 was designed from the outside-in. Tarjan started with the concept for a “pure sailing machine” and, once its streamlined shape was established, only then worked out how many people it could and should accommodate.Source

The amphibious tender ICON A5 adds a completely new dimension of freedom to the maritime ensemble. All that is lacking is a small submarine. Perhaps the Aeroyacht people can correct that oversight by the time the super cat hits the market.

First Send Them Back to the Stone Age, Then Make Their Home Into a Parking Lot

And you can do it all without messy invasions or nuclear weapons! First send that pesky enemy back to the stone age with EMP weapons -- you don't even need to use nukes! This will create havoc with military command and control, and largely break civilian morale within a few days.Then you can destroy transportation arteries and vital infrastructures such as powerplants, fuel refineries, pipelines and military installations from a distance -- using kinetic weapons fired by electromagnetic cannon!

This one-two punch can be assembled with off-the-shelf components taking very little time and expense.

A smart world conqueror might put off invasion plans until nano-weaponry becomes more advanced. Nothing clears a space so well as nano-invaders capable of stripping a land cleaner than locust. Stealthy in, quick working, then dissolving into the landscape. Entire nations could be turned over, ready for radical makeover practically overnight!

The social democracies of Europe, North America, Japan, and Oceania have allowed humans to take a vacation from history for the past half century or more. This pax cannot possibly last much longer, particularly in the wake of the ongoing Obama devastation of the world economy.

Soon, the world populations will be thrust back into the hands of the warlords, the conquerors, the absolute destroyers of lands and peoples. Again. History coming to life, just when you thought it was obsolete.

Modern weapons research is a bit uneven. Most projects, perhaps, will not survive due to poor conceptualisation and a lack of robustness on the field of battle. But enough of the tools of "the new warfare" will succeed, to change the face of the planet a million times more than the hyped up global warming scare of Gore and Obama.

Buckle up.