schizo321

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/..._wolfowitz.html

"I do not seperate people, as do the narrow minded, into Greeks and barbarians." Alexander the Great

* cough *

The UK's pound sterling was the primary reserve currency of much of the world in the 18th and 19th centuries. But perpetual current account and fiscal deficits financed by cheap credit and unsustainable monetary and fiscal policies and the relative decline of Britain from being the world's pre-eminent military and economic power led to the pound losing this status. Hmmmmm.

I can see he`s Bush.

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=...story+of+oil%22 I felt I had to share this video where Robert Newman describes the way oil influenced history in the last century and it`s importance today. Informative and funny.

John Lowes, a detainee at Guantanamo bay in Cuba has admitted to practicing witchcraft confessing that "he had covenanted with the devil, suckled familiars for five years, and had bewitched cattle. He had also caused a ship to sink off Harwich, on a calm sea, with the loss of fourteen lives”. Guantanamo has drawn criticism though it`s alledged use of torture to extract information. Sleep deprivation, the use of so-called truth drugs, beatings, locking in confined and cold cells, and being forced to maintain uncomfortable postures. One Boston agent reported that she observed two incidents that she described as, "personally very upsetting to me," of two detainees chained in a fetal position between 18 to 24 hours that had urinated and defecated on themselves. The detainee in questions confession was extracted after sleep deprivation for three days whilst being repeatedly forced to jog up and down his cell with the occassional rest breaks. But in my opinion how can you criticise the methods, it`s the results that are important here in this War on Heresy, sorry Terror. He`s confessed to summoning imps, Satan`s familiars, feeding them his own blood with a teat under his tongue and using them to sink ships. When you`ve got cast iron testimony like that extracted under torture, who needs proof?

Collateral damage.

From "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph A. Tainter "The hypothetical society discussed a few paragraphs above responds to stress by increasing complexity. In so doing it increases investment in agricultural and other resource production, in hierarchy, in information processing in education and specialized training, in defence, and so forth. The cost-benefit curve for these investment increases at first favourably, for the easiest, most general, most accessible, however, continued stresses require further investments in complexity. The least costly solutions having been used, evolution now proceeds in a more expensive direction. The hierarchy expands in size, complexity, and specialization; resource production focuses increasingly on sources of supply that are more difficult to acquire and process; agricultural labor intensifies; information processing and training requirements become less generalized; and most likely, an increased military apparatus is seen as the solution to these problems. What benefits derive from these adjustments? Barring the acquisition of new energy sources, most often through conquest, such increased costs are usually undertaken merely to maintain the status quo. Stress that is met by increased complexity might come from such sources as agricultural deterioration, population growth, external danger, internal unrest, and threats to foreign sources of important commodities. When complexity increases to counter such stress, it achieves success when the factors that threaten stability no longer do so. So if agricultural production drops below about 2000 calories per person per day, increased complexity, and attendant agricultural development, may restore it to that level. Where stability is threatened by internal or external sources, increased complexity will achieve success when the prior state of orderliness has been restored, or the frontiers defended. Where the supply of a commodity is threatened, increased complexity and military adventures may ultimately secure an even greater supply of the commodity, but just as often they may not. Thus a growing sociocultural system ultimately reaches a point such as B1, C1 on the curve in Fig. 19, whereafter investment in further complexity yields increased returns, but at a declining marginal rate. When this point is reached, a complex society enters the phase where it becomes increasingly vulnerable to collapse." Was first published in 1988.