Fading Away.

Conditions: Sullen. With Threats of Rain.


Future Of American Dominance Fading.

Those of you gearing up for another eight years of American military and or economic dominance may want to hold off on the extensions to the bunker. The National Intelligence Council is predicting China, India and Russia will challenge the U.S dominance, and that access to food and water will likely cause conflict.

"The next 20 years of transition to a new system are fraught with risks," says Global Trends 2025, the latest of the reports that the NIC prepares every four years in time for the next presidential term.

Washington will retain its considerable military advantages, but scientific and technological advances; the use of "irregular warfare tactics"; the proliferation of long-range precision weapons; and the growing use of cyber warfare "increasingly will constrict US freedom of action", it adds.

Nevertheless, the report concludes: "The US will remain the single most important actor but will be less dominant."
[...]

The EU is meanwhile predicted to become a "hobbled giant", unable to turn its economic power into diplomatic or military muscle.

A world with more power centres will be less stable than one with one or two superpowers, it says, offering more potential for conflict.

Global warming, along with rising populations and economic growth will put additional strains on natural resources, it warns, fuelling conflict around the globe as countries compete for them.

"Strategic rivalries are most likely to revolve around trade, investments and technological innovation and acquisition, but we cannot rule out a 19th Century-like scenario of arms races, territorial expansion and military rivalries," the report says.

"Types of conflict we have not seen for a while - such as over resources - could re-emerge."

- news.bbc.co.uk/

So there we go, turns out our path ahead is decidedly less certain and more fraught than we thought, and we already thought it was pretty damn less certain and more fraught. Is this some kind of warning that American dominance is a good thing, that having one country dominate all the others leads to a certain calm? It seems to read that way, and yet civilisation needs to change and evolve. Tyrants fall, worlds collide, everything burns. So I don't much care for the NIC and their hand-wringing. Yes things are in flux, but as someone once said, a little revolution now and then is a good thing.

More: www.truthout.org/




Going Out With A Whimper.

One of the more fun assumptions that has been made over the years is that our television signals, source of so much amusement and horror to ourselves, are sweeping out into space, and will one day inevitably show up on the television screens of as yet unknown alien civilizations, millions of light years away. Well, like most things in life, it turns out not even this is true. Apparently, our signals are simply too weak to survive long enough out in the big black, says Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute.

OK, how strong is that signal by the time it reaches our putative alien audience at 55 light-years distance? Not very. The megawatt broadcast washes over ET's world with a power density of about 0.3 million million million million millionths of a watt per square meter, which is not exactly a scorching signal. Actually, only about a third of that transmission power is in the "carrier" - the part of the broadcast that's very narrow in frequency and easily detected. So knock that piddling power density down by another factor of three if you want to know the strength of the easily detectable part of the transmission.
[...]

Could their LOFAR-style antenna find that carrier, thereby indicating that a program was on the air? Well, engineers have computed that at the frequency of VHF television, LOFAR will have an effective collecting area similar to that of the 305-meter diameter Arecibo antenna in Puerto Rico.

That's big. That's brawny. But not brawny enough. In our SETI experiments at Arecibo, we could find a signal if it were about 0.1 million million million millionths of a watt per square meter. That number, you will notice if you count up the words, is a million times bigger than the "I Love Lucy" carrier at 55 light-years. The aliens' LOFAR would be inadequate to detect the broadcast by a factor of a million, a not entirely negligible amount. Simply stated: LOFAR couldn't hear it.

So here's the bottom line: LOFAR would only be able to find TV signals comparable to ours from a distance of much less than one light-year! Turning this around, the mother of all rabbit ears couldn't pick up the Alien Broadcasting Network at the distance of even the nearest star.

Disappointing, but you might argue that the extraterrestrials will have much, much more powerful TV transmitters than we do. In fact, their broadcasts would have to be millions of times more powerful to even produce a blip on LOFAR, which seems a bit silly and likely to set alien roofs on fire.

- www.space.com/

I have to say, this is disappointing. Because as stupid and primitive as we are, we could kill ourselves off very easily, and have nearly done so already. Our signals into space were assumed to be our only true legacy, outlasting us, our culture, even the eventually crumbling concrete and flaking metal our homes and libraries are made out of. You know, just in case it all goes gunnysack. But it turns out we have no backup legacy after all, in case of extreme stupidity. So just think about that the next time you buy a hamburger. If it all ends tomorrow, eventually everything we built or created will dissipate back into nothingness. Bummer.



Film Review: Traitor

It's a tribute to the unbelievably terrible way America has fought it's wars in the last few years that a film like Traitor could even be made. It's essentially a fairly standard idea of a deep-cover operative being planted into a terrorist cell, who then struggles to stop the Big Attack from happening, because of how deep under cover he is. The difference here though, is that the bad guys are portrayed throughout as fighting for a worthy cause. In fact, the film seems to deal with the terrorists as being more misguided than "Evil", and America's final and inevitable victory at the end comes across flat and hollow.

Who'd have thunk we'd ever have a film where the terrorists are portrayed as thoughtful and even righteous, and the F.B.I are thuggish and slow? The title, apart from an obvious reference to Don Cheadle's character eventually betraying his terrorist friends in serve of his country, could also serve as a question over a Hollywood film treating this subject manner in this way.

We've seen this in so many episodes of Miami Vice, where Crockett and Tubbs are so undercover that they're closer to their criminal friends than their cop bosses, and so when the time comes to set everyone up for the big mass arrest, conflicting emotions arise. The problem with Traitor is that Cheadle doesn't have a partner to express his tangled loyalties to, so we really have to just infer it from his furrowed brow. So while the pain of betraying fellow terrorists can be inferred, it's not really as obvious as it could of been. Which for a Hollywood film is still something of a surprise. Three civilian casualties out of Five.


- Peace out.