US Opposition to the International Criminal Court - Global Policy Forum - International Justice: "The United States government has consistently opposed an international court that could hold US military and political leaders to a uniform global standard of justice. The Clinton administration participated actively in negotiations towards the International Criminal Court treaty, seeking Security Council screening of cases. If adopted, this would have enabled the US to veto any dockets it opposed. When other countries refused to agree to such an unequal standard of justice, the US campaigned to weaken and undermine the court. The Bush administration, coming into office in 2001 as the Court neared implementation, adopted an extremely active opposition. Washington began to negotiate bilateral agreements with other countries, insuring immunity of US nationals from prosecution by the Court. As leverage, Washington threatened termination of economic aid, withdrawal of military assistance, and other painful measures. These exclusionary steps clearly endanger the fledgling Court and may seriously weaken its credibility and effectiveness. "

Why the Qaeda Threat Is Growing - 9/11 - Global Policy Forum: "there's a widely held belief among the Europeans that while police and intelligence cooperation across the Atlantic (and across the Mediterranean, with Arab security services) has been highly effective in eliminating al-Qaeda cells, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has been not only ineffective, but actually counterproductive in the fight against terrorism. European Commission chief Romano Prodi argues that the use of military force as a prime weapon in the fight against terrorism is not working: 'Terrorism is now more powerful than ever before,' he says. And most European leaders believe the al-Qaeda phenomenon will not be defeated until the anti-U.S. grievances in the Arab world on which it feeds have been addressed. "

We Aren't the World -Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "The Pew Global Attitudes Project's latest poll of eight countries shows that resentment toward the U.S. has strengthened since the start of the Iraq war one year ago. President Bush is less popular than Osama Bin Laden in Jordan, Pakistan, and Morocco. The survey showed high approval ratings in all three countries for suicide bombings against the Israelis and Americans in Iraq. "

Foreign Affairs - Book Review - The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership - Zbigniew Brzezinski: "The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership. "

Post-9/11 Collision of Privacy and Security- 9/11 - Global Policy Forum: "We often don't know until it's too late. Americans, loving technology as they do, have responded to their elevated fear with machines that reduce privacy in the hope of creating safety through omniscience. Not all of this technology is new - but the 9/11-inspired acceleration of its development and availability is new.
Fingerprint, face, and iris recognition scanners are being rushed into service. Citizens are being encouraged to report on their neighbors. Researchers at MIT are working on brain scans that potentially might be able to 'see' when you're lying. Defense contractors have manufactured machines that 'see' through thick concrete walls. Entrepreneurs are developing electronic chips you can implant in your children - just as you can do with pets - so you'll always 'see' where they are."

Trade has expanded rapidly in recent decades, with the value of manufacturing exports worldwide more than tripling in 1980-2000. In the 1990s, exports grew on average by 7% a year, although there was a decline of 4% in 2001.

News & Previews from the World Future Society: "The decline of Russia's population is accelerating, warns American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt. Reason: a collapse in national birthrates, coupled with a surge in death rates."..Since the 1992 dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia's population has dropped from 148.7 million to 144.5 million in mid-2003--a 2.8% decline despite an influx of more than 5.5 million migrants during that period. The United Nations projects a drop of more than 21 million people in the next 20 years.

Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Is the end nigh?: "Rees is not convincing in his 50:50 estimate that this will be humanity's last century. The risks seem high, however, that it might be humanity's worst - one in which the numbers of those living in misery and dying from avoidable causes exceed all precedents. Devastating famines, mega-droughts, wars and plagues, both natural and not, are all possible, even likely. But they are not inevitable; enlightened statecraft, open societies, international solidarity, overhauled medicine, respect for human rights and the wise and accountable use of technology could help us not only avoid the worst of our future but also build on its best prospects. "

Amazon.co.uk: Books: Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century?: "Sir Martin Rees tries to warn us that with ever-faster technological progress, the odds of a truly catastrophic mishap - either by accident or design - are going to be significant over the next century. He outlines 'familiar' dangers such as nuclear weapons, genetically engineered viruses, environmental hazards and includes more futuristic ideas about nanotechnology running amok and artificial hyperintelligences taking over."

Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the 21st Century? - smh.com.au: "Once superpowers alone were capable of destroying the world. No more: 'New sciences will soon empower small groups, even individuals, with similar leverage over society.'
Rees's book skates close to science fiction and sometimes his fears for the future seem wildly far-fetched. But Our Final Century is a warning to society: until we learn how to channel our powers productively, the world - maybe the entire universe - will be an unsafe place."

Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the 21st Century? - smh.com.au: "Highlighting how fast technology can overtake society, Rees cites a 1937 study organised by the US National Academy of Sciences which aimed to predict technological change in the second half of the 20th century: 'It came up with some wise assessments about agriculture, about synthetic gasoline, and synthetic rubber. But what is more remarkable is the things it missed. No nuclear energy, no antibiotics (though this was eight years after Alexander Fleming had discovered penicillin), no jet aircraft, no rocketry nor any use of space, no computers; certainly no transistors.'
In other words we do not know what technological changes will arrive in the next few decades."

Reflections on Stephen Wolfram's 'A New Kind of Science': "I do appreciate Wolfram's strong argument, however, that nature is not as complex as it often appears to be. Some of the key features of the paradigm of biological systems, which differ from much of our contemporary designed technology, are that it is massively parallel, and that apparently complex behavior can result from the intermingling of a vast number of simpler systems. One example that comes to mind is Marvin Minsky's theory of intelligence as a 'Society of Mind' in which intelligence may result from a hierarchy of simpler intelligences with simple agents not unlike cellular automata at the base. "

[Page 2] Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science | Online: "It could have been, after all, that in the natural world we would mostly see forms like squares and circles that we consider simple. But in fact one of the most striking features of the natural world is that ".across a vast range of physical, biological and other systems we are continually confronted with what seems to be immense complexity. And indeed throughout most of history it has been taken almost for granted that such complexity--being so vastly greater than in the works of humans--could only be the work of a supernatural being. But my discovery that many very simple programs produce great complexity immediately suggests a rather different explanation.

[Page 1] Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science | Online: "Three centuries ago science was transformed by the dramatic new idea that rules based on mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural world. My purpose in this book is to initiate another such transformation, and to introduce a new kind of science that is based on the much more general types of rules that can be embodied in simple computer programs."

Headlines for Tuesday, March 23, 2004: "European Union foreign ministers warned partner countries that their relations with the economically powerful bloc will suffer if they fail to cooperate in the fight against terrorism, reports The Wall Street Journal Europe. The warning marks a major shift for Europeans, who traditionally have been reluctant to use trade and aid as weapons to force compliance from countries outside the EU bloc. "

Exporting the American Dream - Empire? - Global Policy Forum "Hard power was the ability to coerce others by using carrots or sticks as either bribes or threats". But "soft power is the ability to get what we want by attracting others, by getting them to want the things we want. “If I can get what I want because you want it too," he said, "it saves me a lot of carrots and sticks." But hard and soft power have to be used together.

Perpetual Debt: From the British Empire to the American Hegemon -Empire? - Global Policy Forum Peace would inaugurate a new era in American history. After a brief demobilization, the country would return to a permanent war footing, and forge the Cold War State. It would also discard the venerable tradition of postwar debt reduction. The new tradition was relentless upward ratcheting. Apart from very slight declines in 1947-48 and 1956-57 (the last year there was any reduction at all was 1960), the debt began an upward trajectory into the infinite reaches of outer space. By 1970, the national debt had reached $390 billion. In 1980, it was a modest $930 billion. Next was the deluge. Under Reagan and his Republican Senate, the debt rose to $2,700 billion ($2.7 trillion). Under Clinton and the Republican House, it reached $5.7 trillion. Under Bush and the Republican Congress, it has risen to $6.9 trillion (as of January 1, 2004). Assuming Bush's re-election, the continuation of the illimitable "war on terror," and another recession, the national debt could breach the $10 trillion mark by 2008.

Lobbies and pressure groups are everywhere and everywhere they employ productive resources - time and money - in the pursuit of influence over government decisions. There is widespread historical and economic evidence that such rent-seeking activities have had (and continue to have) real impact on policymaking...The historical evidence suggests that strikes, street demonstrations and other time- and resource-consuming activities were successfully used by popular pressure groups to affect government decisions, in between elections, in a number of populist regimes.2 On the other hand, in other countries - or even in the same countries at other times - other equilibria have arisen in which the influence of lobbies representing the interests of the rich have seemed to dominate....More specifically, the political equilibrium turns out to be biased precisely towards those who have a comparative advantage in the political activity, i.e. those who are relatively less efficient in production.

Asia Times: "Some of the Western world's leading financiers and foreign policy strategists attend Bilderberg, in their view, to polish and reinforce a virtual consensus, an illusion that globalization, defined under their terms - what's good for banking and big business is good for everybody else - is inevitable and for the greater good of mankind. If they have a hidden agenda, it is the fact that their fabulous concentration of wealth and power is completely dissociated from the explanation to their guests of how globalization benefits 6.2 billion people. Some of the club's earlier guests went on to become crucial players. Bill Clinton in 1991 and Tony Blair in 1993 were invited and duly 'approved' by the Bilderberg before they took office. "

Asia Times - Asia's most trusted news source: "In the corridors of Brussels, and in the streets of Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Milan, London and Paris, Europe was given a rude awakening. All the evidence now screams that reshaping the Middle East from a base in occupied Iraq is not leading to less terrorism: it is leading to hyperterrorism. "

History Today: The Human Web: a Bird's-Eye View of World History.(Book Review) (book review): "Between 1450 and 1800, the world's separate webs fused, speeding up the transfer of technologies and urbanisation and encouraging the prominence of the sea in defining human communities. As the authors point out, Bolivian miners could put Bavarian ones out of business, while Bengalis smoked Brazilian tobacco. In the nineteenth century, in large part due to technological developments, especially steamships and the telegraph, the pace of intercommunication accelerated, but change brought instability, not least the tension between globalisation and nationalism. This helped determine the history of the last century, although, in addition, population growth accentuated the problems of adjusting to the pressures of big city life. The McNeills argue that, while technology and other forces hastened integration within the web in the twentieth century, politics at times brought disintegration. Thus the First World War and the response to the Depression of the 1930s hit globalisation in the shape of international migration, trade and capital flows, although they revived powerfully after 1945 in the Western world. The conclusions are sobering in that both authors emphasise instability and the likelihood of catastrophes. William McNeill asks how long all the complex flows sustaining us will endure, and, in this, he refers to flows not just of food and energy, but also of meanings, hopes and aspirations."

New Scientist: "There is growing concern over the rate at which species of plants and animals are disappearing around the world. But until now the evidence for such extinctions has mainly come from studies of birds. 'The doubters could always turn around and say that there's something peculiar about birds that makes them susceptible to the impact of man on the environment,' says Jeremy Greenwood of the British Trust for Ornithology in Norfolk, and one of the research team."

Matters of Scale: Planet Golf Amount of water it would take, per day, to support 4.7 billion people at the UN daily minimum 2.5 billion gallons. Amount of water used, per day, to irrigate the world’s golf courses 2.5 billion gallons.

Presentation The Millennium Project is a UN effort to fill the implementation gap and achieve results on the ground. On a recent visit to Senegal, Botswana, Ghana and Ethiopia, Sachs said he found amble plans to address poverty, but no funds to implement the plans, and poverty is rampant. He called it a lack of trying, not on the part of professionals on the ground, but by donors such as the US government which will spend $US 450 billion on military spending but $US 13 billion on development assistance. This is $US 57 billion less than the US committed to achieving the MDG’s. Sachs said things must change. The donor community must stop telling the poor to live with poverty and work to get the poor what they need such as medicines or soil nutrients.

Challenge The GRAIN technological challenge - the sixth innovation cycle of the Industrial Revolution - comes at a point where human civilisation may already have passed the maximal level of complexity possible under current biological and psychological constraints...Psychohistorical studies show that cultural collapse occurs when the level of complexity attained by that culture exceeds the capacity of its group and psychoclass structures to contain primordial anxieties within the collusionally-defensive construct upon which that culture was built...On the Kardashev or K-scale of galactic civilisations, human civilisation is still at the lowest level or K0 - the pre-planetary - hopefully approaching the level of K1 - the planetary...

We remain 'stone-agers in the fast lane' Despite a remarkable proliferation of human numbers and a succession of seemingly 'wondrous' technological triumphs, we remain 'stone-agers in the fast lane', constrained by the emotional residue of pre- and perinatal trauma, archaic reproductive and childrearing strategies, sexual dimorphism, culture-enhanced gender differentiation, continual sexual arousal and neoteny-induced dependence - traits that conserve and continually reinforce the human propensity for violence, competitive aggression, dominance and submission. - the very traits that gave the species an evolutionary edge to begin with, but are now proving maladaptive in the creation and management of complex societies.

GRAIN technologies - Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Nanotechnology In this paper we will explore some of the social, political and above all, psychological challenges presented by the imminent wave of so-called GRAIN technologies - Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Nanotechnology - from the perspective of psychohistory. Modern psychohistory can be defined simply as the science of historical motivation and has been evolving as an autonomous discipline since the early 20th century. It is an interdisciplinary field, combining insights from individual and group psychoanalysis, small and large group process, transcultural history and complex dynamic systems theory.

World History Connected | Vol. 1 No. 1| Book Review: " Thankfully, as world historians we no longer rely on the nineteenth century view that social evolution should ineluctably move all societies toward the 'perfection'of Western European civilization. That said, how do we explain the century-long delay in industrialization in countries under Western domination? If one of the justifications for 19th century imperialism was to spread Western technology to the rest of the world and to promote 'progress,' what happened? Why did traditional economies fail to become industrial economies based on European technology and instead became 'modern undeveloped ones'(p. 4)? Headrick, who focuses primarily on India and Africa, notes that while tropical economies grew, they did not develop. This 'reversed the age-old pattern of world trade in which the Western peoples craved the goods of the East, but had little but bullion to offer in exchange' (p. 7). Instead, from the middle of the nineteenth century tropical countries were forced into the role of supplying cash crops and raw materials to Western markets and importing Western manufactured goods."

World History Connected | Vol. 1 No. 1| William H. McNeill: An Emerging Consensus about World History?: " Throughout, communication and local responses to novelties of every kind affected and often distressed human lives everywhere. But we human beings have always had to cope with change, and by doing so became the ecologically dominant species we are. We may even be said to have specialized in changeable behavior so as to get whatever it is that we want. And, as specialists in change, we can perhaps even hope to survive the enormous and obvious perils ahead--political, ecological, and social.
13
In the meanwhile, courses in world history constructed around these notions about what mattered most in times past can help to prepare our children to live more wisely (and modestly?) in the world they will inherit, and perhaps can actively interest them by showing how humankind's amazing adventure in times past arose from common everyday experiences and innumerable successful responses to disappointed expectations. "

World History Connected | Vol. 1 No. 1| William H. McNeill: An Emerging Consensus about World History?: "In the Modern Era, the pace of change only increased. In Europe, natural science began to change minds and affect practical technologies even before tapping fossil fuels on a wholesale scale (first coal, then oil and gas) launched a spectacular expansion of industrial production and a no less spectacular acceleration of transport and communication beginning in the 18th century. An unparalleled population surge among disease-experienced populations of Eurasia (and crippling die-offs elsewhere) accompanied this resort to fossil fuels in what was at first only a small part of Europe. Between them, these twin increases in human power and numbers still dominate our world."

World History Connected | Vol. 1 No. 1| William H. McNeill: An Emerging Consensus about World History?: "The rise of cities and civilizations resulted; and since strangers chronically mingled together in cities, the effect was to intensify social frictions and accelerate the pace of change. Thereafter transport and communication sporadically extended their range and carrying capacity, eventually locking local civilizations into a single global network. That network in turn became tighter and tighter down to our own time when such novelties as TV, internet, and e-mail are actively at work altering human consciousness and affecting human behaviors everywhere in ways we can only surmise."

World History Connected | Vol. 1 No. 1| William H. McNeill: An Emerging Consensus about World History?: "Changeable behavior, therefore, became chronic; and whenever something new really worked, it tended to spread far and wide among neighbors and neighbors' neighbors thanks to face to face encounters. To begin with, these occurred mainly on festival occasions when small local groups came together for dance and song and to arrange exogamous marriages. But strangers also met whenever isolated wanderers showed up. Most often such wanderers were restless young men who found difficulty achieving adult status at home because of land shortages or other reasons, but sometimes they had new skills or ideas to impart to strangers they encountered. Later on, organized raid and trade extended and intensified contacts among strangers, and in more and more parts of the earth this sufficed to set an autocatalytic process of historical change in motion."

World History Connected | Vol. 1 No. 1| William H. McNeill: An Emerging Consensus about World History?: "If this is true, we can hope to understand our unique history within the world as a whole by concentrating on the web of communication that sustains every social group, but also seeps across all linguistic and cultural boundaries of the entire globe. Intensified communication through voice and gesture presumably set in among hunting and foraging bands of emergent Homo sapiens and accelerated when fully articulate language allowed our ancestors to create a world of agreed-upon meanings to guide their everyday behavior, thereby inaugurating what David Christian calls 'collective learning.' For whenever experience fell short of expectation, people were provoked to adjust their ideas, alter behaviors accordingly, and every so often they did get better results."

Amazon.com: Books: The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History: "More ecological than humanistic, the McNeill outlook sees conflict and cooperation as twin outcomes of the struggle for survival that drives developments in technology, political organization, social habits and even religious beliefs. "

Amazon.com: Books: The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History: "The motor of history this time is the growing 'web' of interactions-weaving together hunter-gatherer bands, then civilizations and finally the whole world-by which people, goods, diseases and ideas spread. As it binds ever more people ever more tightly, the web both brings them into conflict and lets them share and build on each other's achievements; thus Columbus's extension of the web to the Americas led to conquest but also to the exchange of New World potatoes and maize for Old World horses and smallpox. "

Foreign Affairs - Book Review - The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History - John Robert McNeill and William Hardy McNeill: "The first human webs of our distant ancestors were formed through the rise of speech, migration, and primitive agricultural groupings. Metropolitan webs became integrated into the 'old world web' connecting Eurasia and North America, and in the last century, local and regional webs have merged into an increasingly dense cosmopolitan web. Driven by the search for efficiency and advantage, humans have engineered increasingly complex social organizations creating the wealth and power -- but also the inequality and societal antagonisms -- on display today. "

OECD Observer: Building the knowledge society: "These are important times for education in all the member countries of the OECD. The neverending search for competitive advantage in the global knowledge economy has led all public policy-makers to focus on education as a key factor in strengthening competitiveness, employment and social cohesion.
This is an inevitable consequence of the increasing complexity of all our economies. Indeed, the pace of technological change worldwide is now so fast that, to a large extent, we must plan for the unknown. The only certainty is that education needs to drive these changes. If it does not, then we are all in trouble and we will fail our citizens."

Sensor Web @ GeoICT: "This concept of Sensor Web is truly exciting, powerful and revolutionary. Figure 1 illustrates a conceptual framework of the Sensor Web. In short, Sensor Web weaves an electronic skin of the Earth, offering full-dimensional, full-scale, and full-phase sensing and monitoring at all levels, global, regional and local. Sensor Web is a revolutionary concept towards achieving a collaborative, coherent, consistent, and consolidated sensor data collection, fusion and distribution. Such sensors include, for example: flood gauges, air pollution monitors, stress gauges on bridges, mobile heart monitors, Webcams, and satellite-borne earth imaging devices. Web is considered a 'central computer' that connects to enormous computing resources. Sensor Web can then be thought as a 'global sensor' that connects to all sensors or sensor databases."

BW Online | August 25, 2003 | Tech Wave 2: The Sensor Revolution: "Sensor networks promise a mammoth extension of the Internet. To date, the Web has been a showcase for the human brain. It specializes in the words, numbers, music, and images that mankind produces. With sensors, the network stretches to the far vaster field of global activity. This means such networks can cover every single thing that moves, grows, makes noise, or heats up. Potentially, much of the world will be bugged. Moreover, those bugs will be doing most of the work. 'Most of the data traffic won't be between human beings this time around but between these silicon cockroaches,'"

BW Online | August 25, 2003 | Tech Wave 2: The Sensor Revolution: "Already, companies from British supermarket Tesco PLC to Shell Oil Co. have deployed first-generation systems to monitor inventories and check the status of pumps at gas stations. That's just the beginning. Within five years, these sensor computers could be shrunk to the size of a grain of sand and deployed over much of the globe, resulting in thousands of new networks. Look for them to be scattered across farms and battlefields to monitor minute chemical and temperature changes and slapped onto trucks and shipping boxes to trace inventory automatically."

Asia Times - Asia's most trusted news source: "Social paranoia inevitably will be on the rise - and the main victims are bound to be millions of European Muslims. Racist political parties like Jean Marie le Pen's National Front in France and Umberto Bossi's Northern League in Italy will pump up the volume of their extremely vicious anti-Islamic xenophobia. For scores of moderate European politicians, it will be increasingly difficult to maintain their support for a solution to the Palestinian tragedy - as the Sharon government in Israel spins the line that both Israel and Europe are 'victims of terrorism'. "

Headlines for Tuesday, March 16, 2004: "Agence France Presse notes that Amoako further said agricultural subsidies for farmers in the developed world cost African cotton producers an estimated $300 million in revenue from 1999 to 2001. Amoako notes that African countries would find it difficult to meet a set of UN goals to reduce poverty, hunger and disease by 2015 if the continent's exports continued to be subjected to unfair international trade practices. In 2002 the United States, a major cotton exporter, provided $3.9 billion in subsidies to its cotton farmers, three times the amount of aid it provided to African countries. Africa's share of overall world exports fell from 6.3 percent in 1980 to two percent in 2000, according to report issued last month by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNTAD)."

Headlines for Tuesday, March 16, 2004: "'The unpredictability of aid is widespread in Africa as donors too frequently make unilateral changes in aid agreements without consulting the recipient countries,' Amoako told foreign ministers at the opening of the fourth ordinary session of the African Union Executive Council. Noting that donors were imposing excessive conditionality on aid and insisting on extensive reporting requirements, Amoako said the situation led to high transaction costs for recipient countries. 'Unpredictability results in serious disruptions of important national programs and creates uncertainty about how to plan for the future,' he said."

A Lesson in 'Disappearing the Dead' - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "Of course, the idea of shaping public opinion is hardly new. For example, a 1975 study by the Congressional Research Service, a division of the Library of Congress, in analyzing possible United States takeovers of Persian Gulf oil fields, wrote: 'The administration, Congress, or both - assisted by the mass media - could take steps to sway public opinion one way or another if they believed it advisable.' "

The Logic of Empire: The US Threat to the World -Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "We can resist the US neither by military nor economic means, but we can resist it diplomatically. The only safe and sensible response to American power is a policy of non-cooperation. Britain and the rest of Europe should impede, at the diplomatic level, all US attempts to act unilaterally. We should launch independent efforts to resolve the Iraq crisis and the conflict between Israel and Palestine. And we should cross our fingers and hope that a combination of economic mismanagement, gangster capitalism and excessive military spending will reduce America's power to the extent that it ceases to use the rest of the world as its doormat. Only when the US can accept its role as a nation whose interests must be balanced with those of all other nations can we resume a friendship that was once, if briefly, founded upon the principles of justice. "

American Empire for Dummies - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "Gandhi once said that 'Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but you must do it.' And the reason I must do it is captured by yet another adage, cited by various religious leaders: 'We do these things not to change the world, but so that the world will not change us.' Sam Smith, a journalist in Washington, whom some of you are familiar with, in his new book makes the point that 'Those who think history has left us helpless should recall the abolitionist of 1830, the feminist of 1870, the labor organizer of 1890, and the gay or lesbian writer of 1910. They, like us, did not get to choose their time in history but they, like us, did get to choose what they did with it.' He then asks: Knowing what we know now about how certain things turned out, but also knowing how long it took, would we have been abolitionists in 1830, or feminists in 1870, and so on? We don't know what surprises history has in store for us when we give history a little shove, just as history can give each of us a little shove personally. "

Running Out of Oil - and Time - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "We can no longer sit back and hope that an alternative to oil will come along in time. Such complacency all but ensures that, when the peak does arrive, our response will be defensive, costly and hugely disruptive. Instead, we must begin now, with every tool at our disposal, to find ways to get 'beyond petroleum' if we are to have any hope of controlling the shift from oil to whatever comes next. "

Running Out of Oil - and Time - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "As production falls off this cliff, prices won't simply increase; they will fly. If our oil dependence hasn't lessened drastically by then, the global economy is likely to slip into a recession so severe that the Great Depression will look like a dress rehearsal. Oil will cease to be viable as a fuel ? hardly an encouraging scenario in a world where oil currently provides 40% of all energy and nearly 90% of all transportation fuel. Political reaction would be desperate. Industrial economies, hungry for energy, would begin making it from any source available ? most likely coal ? regardless of the ecological consequences. Worse, competition for remaining oil supplies would intensify, potentially leading to a new kind of political conflict: the energy war. "

Conservatives Use Oil to Keep Heat on Mideast - and Time - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "Former CIA Director James Woolsey, a staunch neo-conservative who is pushing for military intervention in the Middle East, warned the conference of the 'potential use of oil as a weapon to affect our security and our behaviour'. 'As India and China come online with their increased demands, the growth of the middle class and more vehicles, we are likely to see very substantial increases in demand for oil, and much of the supply will come from areas of the world that are volatile, where terrorist interference or a coup are all possible,' Woolsey said. "

Conservatives Use Oil to Keep Heat on Mideast - and Time - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "Conservative oil analysts also argue that oil is likely to be used as a weapon if radical groups take power. And that if more oil money starts flowing into Arab countries, those economies -- under different rulers -- could pose a military threat to Israel. Israelis, on the other hand, are concerned that Arab leaders could use oil as a weapon to leverage their influence across the world, especially in Washington. "

Oil Companies in Iraq: A Century of Rivalry and War - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council: "All producer companies want to gain control of such lucrative profits, by fair means or foul. Company rivalry typically leads beyond ordinary market-based competition. As many studies show, companies and their sponsor governments do not shrink from backing dictatorial governments, using bribery and corruption, promoting civil violence and even resorting to war, to meet their commercial goals and best their competitors"

Oil Companies in Iraq: A Century of Rivalry and War - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council : "Just as governments like the US and the UK need oil companies to secure fuel for their global war-making capacity, so the oil companies need their governments?D military power to secure control over global oilfields and transportation routes. It is no accident, then, that the world?Ds largest oil companies are located in the world?Ds most powerful countries. "

EarthTrends: The Environmental Information Portal Transportation systems define the quality of life for millions of city-dwellers worldwide. Unfortunately, the negative impacts of urban transport, including hazardous levels of air pollution, congestion, noise, sprawl, and threats to public safety, restrict the potential for greater economic growth and happiness. The rise of megacities, with populations over ten million, has only amplified these problems. Growth rates of private vehicle ownership in the developing world continue to soar, despite the fact that automobiles are major consumers of non-renewable energy and major contributors to carbon emissions.

Oil Companies in Iraq: A Century of Rivalry and War - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council Among the world’s fifteen largest corporations listed in the 2002 “Global Fortune 500,” five were oil companies. After US-based Exxon came the UK giants Shell and British Petroleum (BP), the mammoth French firm Total, and the huge US-based Chevron. Compared to the large automakers, with their anemic profits, the oil companies stand out among the world’s biggest corporations for their high profitability. In 2001 (and again in 2003), Exxon earned the world’s highest profits. In 2003, its earnings reached a record $22 billion, more than General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler and Toyota taken together.

Oil Companies in Iraq: A Century of Rivalry and War - Global Policy Forum - UN Security Council Today, a wave of mergers has given the successor companies a new and unprecedented scale, reducing the major firms to just five. In 2003, annual revenues of the leader, ExxonMobil, were an astonishing $247 billion. By way of comparison, Exxon’s revenue is vastly greater than such well-known international companies as Walt Disney ($25 billion) and Coca Cola ($19 billion) and it is larger than the revenues of 185 national governments, including Brazil, Canada, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands. Only the world’s six richest countries – the US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and the UK – had revenues above this level.

Global system The overall challenge to economic globalization is to make the global system deliver economic growth more consistently and more equitably, as the best way to further reduce global poverty and inequality. The specific challenges to globalization are both region- and subject-specific.

Global povertyIncreasingly, global poverty is being concentrated in Africa. At the same time, poverty rates have not declined much in Latin America in recent decades. Taking account of other social indicators, as reflected in the Human Development Index, presents a more encouraging picture of the changing fortunes of the poorest, but the HIVAIDS epidemic is taking a sad toll on longevity in Africa.

Inequality Inequality among national average incomes appears to have been increasing for at least 400 years, since before the rapid increases in economic integration that took place in the nineteenth century. 35 However, this long-term rise in inequality among national average incomes seems to have slowed during the past 20 years.

Sub-Saharan Africa Thus there is considerable evidence that on average conditions have been improving in the developing countries. That is to say: the world is not going to hell in a handbasket. But that is emphatically not to say that everyone in the developing countries is doing better. In particular, conditions in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, where per capita growth has been negative in nearly half the countries in the last quarter century, have been deteriorating, and Latin America has not done well in the last decade.

GlobalizationGlobalization is much more than an economic phenomenon. The technological and political changes that drive the process of economic globalization have massive noneconomic consequences.12 In the words of Anthony Giddens, a leading sociologist: “I would have no hesitation … in saying that globalisation, as we are experiencing it, is in many respects not only new, but also revolutionary. … Globalisation is political, technological and cultural, as well as economic.”

World trade The international financial order that was established at the end of World War II sought to restore the volume of world trade, and by 1973, world trade as a percentage of world GDP was back to its 1913 level – and it has continued to grow almost every year since.

Migration Whether or not migration and labor flows are greater now than they were a century ago, we are becoming more globalized in this regard too, for migration rates have been rising and in a potentially important way, for more migration than in the past is from less to more developed countries.

Globalization All this is at an abstract level. In terms of people’s daily lives, globalization means that the residents of one country are more likely now than they were fifty years ago: to consume the products of another country; to invest in another country; to earn income from other countries; to talk on the telephone to people in other countries; to visit other countries; to know that they are being affected by economic developments in other countries; and to know about developments in other countries.

Aiding small countries It is widely believed that aid donors have a preference for aiding small countries because aid purchases influence, and every country has a vote in the United Nations. It has long been known that smaller countries do indeed tend to be aided relatively generously.

Typical situation We can illustrate the typical situation with some approximate numbers that we happen to have collected recently in relation to Vietnam, a country that, with aid at about 5 per cent of GDP, is a fairly representative aid recipient. In 2002, 25 official bilateral donors, 19 official multilateral donors, and about 350 international NGOs were operating in Vietnam.

Donor proliferationCalculating a measure of donor proliferation virtually identical to the one we employ here, Knack and Rahman (2003; see also World Bank 2003: 205–7) show that, on a global scale, proliferation has taken place almost continuously since 1975. In other words, the number of aid donors has continued to increase faster than the amount of aid actually disbursed.

Sources and channels of aidFrom an institutional perspective, we now live in a very different aid world. It is a long time since the US was the dominant source of development aid. Sources and channels of aid have proliferated enormously. First, a large number of United Nations and related multilateral organisations have emerged, many of them with their own aid programmes, and each under some obligation to operate in a wide range of poor countries. Second, more and more OECD countries have developed independent bilateral aid programmes. Having such a programme has virtually become a badge of a “developed” status.

Foreign Affairs - Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order - G. John Ikenberry: "To be sure, the neoconservatives in Washington have trumpeted their own imperial vision: an era of global rule organized around the bold unilateral exercise of military power, gradual disentanglement from the constraints of multilateralism, and an aggressive effort to spread freedom and democracy. But this vision is founded on illusions of U.S. power. It fails to appreciate the role of cooperation and rules in the exercise and preservation of such power. Its pursuit would strip the United States of its legitimacy as the preeminent global power and severely compromise the authority that flows from such legitimacy. Ultimately, the neoconservatives are silent on the full range of global challenges and opportunities that face the United States. And as Ferguson notes, the American public has no desire to run colonies or manage a global empire. Thus, there are limits on American imperial pretensions even in a unipolar era."

Foreign Affairs - Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order - G. John Ikenberry: "Todd argues that the corruption of U.S. democracy is giving rise to a poorly supervised ruling class that will be less restrained in its use of military force against other democracies, those in Europe included. For Todd, all of this points to the disintegration of the American empire."

Foreign Affairs - Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order - G. John Ikenberry: "In his distinguished scholarly work on the history of social power, Mann, a sociologist, has argued that four types of power drive the rise and fall of states, nations, empires, regions, and civilizations: military, political, economic, and ideological. Applying these categories to the United States, Mann concludes that it is, in a jumble of metaphors, 'a military giant, a back-seat economic driver, a political schizophrenic, and an ideological phantom.'"

Foreign Affairs - Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order - G. John Ikenberry: "zealous policymakers often invoke the fear of terrorism to justify unilateral exercises of power that, in turn, undermine the rules and institutions they are meant to protect. "

Foreign Affairs - Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order - G. John Ikenberry: "Washington has vacillated between appealing to law and undermining it. Barber's thesis is that by invoking a right to unilateral action, preventive war, and regime change, the United States has undermined the very framework of cooperation and law that is necessary to fight terrorist anarchy. A foreign policy oriented around the use of military force against rogue states, Barber argues, reflects a misunderstanding of the consequences of global interdependence and the character of democracy. Washington cannot run a global order driven by military action and the fear of terrorism. Simply put, American empire is not sustainable."

Foreign Affairs - Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order - G. John Ikenberry: "The United States thus shapes and dominates the international order while guaranteeing a flow of benefits to other governments that earns their acquiescence. "

Foreign Affairs - Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order - G. John Ikenberry: "Johnson also offers little beyond passing mention about the societies presumed to be under Washington's thumb. Domination and exploitation are, of course, not always self-evident. Military pacts and security partnerships are clearly part of the structure of U.S. global power, and they often reinforce fragile and corrupt governments in order to project U.S. influence. "

Foreign Affairs - Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order - G. John Ikenberry: "In this rendering, the American military empire is a novel form of domination. Johnson describes it as an 'international protection racket: mutual defense treaties, military advisory groups, and military forces stationed in foreign countries to 'defend' against often poorly defined, overblown, or nonexistent threats.' These arrangements create 'satellites' -- ostensibly independent countries whose foreign relations revolve around the imperial state. Johnson argues that this variety of empire was pioneered during the Cold War by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the United States in East Asia. Great empires of the past -- the Romans and the Han Dynasty Chinese -- ruled their domains with permanent military encampments that garrisoned conquered territory. The American empire is innovative because it is not based on the acquisition of territory; it is an empire of bases."

Foreign Affairs - Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order - G. John Ikenberry: "The term 'empire' refers to the political control by a dominant country of the domestic and foreign policies of weaker countries. The European colonial empires of the late nineteenth century were the most direct, formal kind. The Soviet 'sphere of influence' in Eastern Europe entailed an equally coercive but less direct form of control. The British Empire included both direct colonial rule and 'informal empire.' If empire is defined loosely, as a hierarchical system of political relationships in which the most powerful state exercises decisive influence, then the United States today indeed qualifies."

Foreign Affairs - Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order - G. John Ikenberry: "Scholars often characterize international relations as the interaction of sovereign states in an anarchic world. In the classic Westphalian world order, states hold a monopoly on the use of force in their own territory while order at the international level is maintained through the diffusion of power among states. Today's unipolar world turns the Westphalian image on its head. The United States possesses a near-monopoly on the use of force internationally; on the domestic level, meanwhile, the institutions and behaviors of states are increasingly open to global -- that is, American -- scrutiny. "

March 2, 2004: The Sixth Great Extinction: "At the advent of agriculture some 11,000 years ago, the world was home to 6 million people. Since then our ranks have grown a thousandfold. Yet the increase in our numbers has come at the expense of many other species.
The greatest threat to the world's living creatures is the degradation and destruction of habitat, affecting 9 out of 10 threatened species. Humans have transformed nearly half of the planet's ice-free land areas, with serious effects on the rest of nature. We have made agricultural fields out of prairies and forests. We have dammed rivers and drained wetlands. We have paved over soil to build cities and roads. "

State of the World Trends and Facts: Boosting Water Productivity: "Fresh water is a life support. Yet over the past half-century the scale and pace of human influences on freshwater systems has accelerated rapidly, along with population and consumption growth. Worldwide water demands roughly tripled. Agriculture now accounts for about 70 percent of world water use, industry for about 22 percent, and towns and municipalities for 8 percent.
The impacts of rising water consumption are increasingly visible. Water tables are falling in many countries from the overpumping of groundwater. Major rivers like the Amu Dar?Dya, Colorado, Ganges, Indus, Rio Grande, and Yellow now run dry for portions of the year. Worldwide, freshwater wetlands have diminished in area by about half. Today, at least 20 percent of Earth?Ds 10,000 freshwater fish species are at risk of extinction or are already extinct."

Outsourcing In conclusion, state-level differences once again illustrate the need to distinguish between outsourcing of non-core tasks from US companies and US job losses due to offshore outsourcing. What table 4 and figure 1 show is the constant creative destruction of jobs in America, with some states gaining jobs, as others are losing them. Architecture and engineering jobs lost in Michigan through outsourcing may well have ended up in Colorado.23 In other words, a US job lost to outsourcing somewhere may be another US job gained elsewhere, rather than inevitably moved offshore to a foreign country.

Foreign PolicyNo other immigrant group in U.S. history has asserted or could assert a historical claim to U.S. territory. Mexicans and Mexican Americans can and do make that claim. Almost all of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah was part of Mexico until Mexico lost them as a result of the Texan War of Independence in 1835-1836 and the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. Mexico is the only country that the United States has invaded, occupied its capital—placing the Marines in the “halls of Montezuma”—and then annexed half its territory. Mexicans do not forget these events. Quite understandably, they feel that they have special rights in these territories. “Unlike other immigrants,” Boston College political scientist Peter Skerry notes, “Mexicans arrive here from a neighboring nation that has suffered military defeat at the hands of the United States; and they settle predominantly in a region that was once part of their homeland…. Mexican Americans enjoy a sense of being on their own turf that is not shared by other immigrants.”

Foreign Policy: "In the 1990s, Mexicans composed more than half of the new Latin American immigrants to the United States and, by 2000, Hispanics totaled about one half of all migrants entering the continental United States. Hispanics composed 12 percent of the total U.S. population in 2000. This group increased by almost 10 percent from 2000 to 2002 and has now become larger than blacks. It is estimated Hispanics may constitute up to 25 percent of the U.S. population by 2050. These changes are driven not just by immigration but also by fertility. "

Foreign Policy: The United States' national identity, like that of other nation-states, is challenged by the forces of globalization as well as the needs that globalization produces among people for smaller and more meaningful “blood and belief” identities. "

Foreign Policy The unprecedented inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos form their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and reject the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream. The reconquista of the United States has begun.

Neural power After all, we spend great sums for disciplines aimed at understanding and harnessing nuclear power. Why not consider developing a discipline aimed at understanding and harnessing "neural power?" In the long run, the power of the human intellect is really much the more important of the two.