Wednesday, April 25, 2012

China: New Eurasian Geopolitics

China’s Land Bridge to Turkey creates new Eurasian Geopolitical Potentials

The prospect of an unparalleled Eurasian economic boom has been further solidified following recent talks between Turkish and Chinese leaders. The first steps are being constructed with a number of little-publicized rail links envisioned to connect China and parts of Western Europe. It is increasingly clear to all nations concerned, especially China and Russia, that their natural tendency to develop these markets faces only one major hurdle: NATO and the US Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance obsession. According to Engdahl, rail infrastructure is a major geopolitical tool for obviating that obstacle.

Voltaire Network | Frankfurt (Germany)
JPEG - 32.5 kb
With the planned connection of the Marmaray project under the Bosphorus to the Edirne-Kars high-speed railway line, a train line from China’s easternmost Lianyungang to Spain and England would be completed.
(Map: Yunus Emre Hatunoğlu)

China and Turkey are in discussions to build a new high-speed railway link across Turkey. If completed it would be the country’s largest railway project ever, even including the pre-World War I Berlin-Baghdad Railway link. The project was perhaps the most important agenda item, far more so than Syria during talks in Beijing between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Chinese leadership in early April.

The proposed rail link would run from Kars on the easternmost border with Armenia, through the Turkish interior on to Istanbul where it would connect to the Marmaray rail tunnel now under construction that runs under the Bosphorus strait. Then it would continue to Edirne near the border to Greece and Bulgaria in the European Union. It will cost an estimated $35 billion. The realization of the Turkish link would complete a Chinese Trans-Eurasian Rail Bridge project that would bring freight from China to Spain and England. [1]

The Kars-Edirne line would reduce travel time across Turkey by two-thirds from 36 hours down to 12. Under an agreement signed between China and Turkey in October 2010, China has agreed to extend loans of $30 billion for the planned rail network. [2] In addition a Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway connecting Azerbaijan’s capital of Baku to Kars is under construction, which greatly increases the strategic importance of the Edirne-Kars line. For China it would put a critical new link in its railway infrastructure across Eurasia to markets in Europe and beyond.

GIF - 73.3 kb
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, on 10 April 2012.

Erdogan’s visit to Beijing was significant for other reasons. It was the first such high level trip of a Turkish Prime Minister to China since 1985. The fact that Erdogan was also granted a high-level meeting with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, the man slated to be next Chinese President, and was granted an extraordinary visit to China’s oil-rich Xinjiang Province also shows the high priority China is placing on its relations with Turkey, a key emerging strategic force in the Middle East.

Xinjiang is a highly sensitive part of China as it hosts some 9 million ethnic Uyghurs who share a Turkic heritage with Turkey as well as nominal adherence to the Turkish Sunni branch of Islam. In July 2009 the US government, acting through the National Endowment for Democracy, the regime-change NGO it finances, backed a major Uyghur uprising in which many Han Chinese shop owners were killed or injured. Washington in turn blamed the riots on Beijing as part of a strategy of escalating pressure on China. [3] During Uyghur riots in Xinjiang in 2009, Erdogan accused Beijing of “genocide” and attacked the Chinese on human rights, a dicey issue for Turkey given their Kurd ethnic problems. Clearly economic priorities from both sides have now changed the political calculus.

Building the world’s greatest market

With the end of the Cold War in 1990 the vast under-developed land space of Eurasia became open again. This space contains some forty percent of total land in the world, much of it prime unspoiled agriculture land; it contains three-fourth of the entire world population, an asset of incalculable worth. It consists of some eighty eight of the world’s countries and three-fourths of known world energy resources as well as every mineral known needed for industrialization. North America as an economic potential, rich as she is, pales by comparison.

The Turkish-China railway discussion is but one part of a vast Chinese strategy to weave a network of inland rail connections across the Eurasian Continent. The aim is to literally create the world’s greatest new economic space and in turn a huge new market for not just China but all Eurasian countries, the Middle East and Western Europe. Direct rail service is faster and cheaper than either ships or trucks, and much cheaper than airplanes. For manufactured Chinese or other Eurasian products the rail land bridge links are creating vast new economic trading activity all along the rail line.

Two factors have made this prospect realizable for the first time since the Second World War. First the collapse of the Soviet Union has opened up the land space of Eurasia in entirely new ways as has the opening of China to Russia and its Eurasian neighbors, overcoming decades of mistrust. This is being met by the eastward expansion of the European Union to the countries of the former Warsaw Pact.

The demand for faster rail transport over the vast Eurasian distances is clear. China’s container port activity and that of its European and North American destinations is reaching a saturation point as volumes of container traffic explode at double-digit rates. Singapore recently displaced Rotterdam as the world’s largest port in volume terms. The growth rate for container port throughput in China in 2006, before outbreak of the world financial crisis was some 25% annually. In 2007 Chinese ports accounted for some 28 per cent of world container port throughput. [4] However there is another aspect to the Chinese and, to an extent, the Russian land bridge strategies. By moving trade flows over land, it is more secure in the face of escalating military tensions between the nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, especially China and Russia, and NATO. Sea transport must flow through highly vulnerable narrow passageways or chokepoints such as the Malaysian Straits of Malacca.

The Turkish Kars-Edirne railway would form an integral part of an entire web of Chinese-initiated rail corridors across the Eurasian landmass. Following the example of how rail infrastructure transformed the economic space of Europe and later of America during the late 19th Century, the Chinese government, which today stands as the world’s most efficient railroad constructor, has quietly been extending its rail links into Central Asia and beyond for several years. They have proceeded in segments, one reason the vast ambition of their grand rail infrastructure has drawn so little attention to date in the West outside the shipping industry.

China builds Second Eurasian Land Bridge

By 2011 China had completed a Second Eurasian Land Bridge running from China’s port of Lianyungang on the East China Sea through to Kazakhstan’s Druzhba and on to Central Asia, West Asia and Europe to various European destinations and finally to Rotterdam Port of Holland on the Atlantic coast.

The Second Eurasian Land Bridge is a new railway connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic that was completed by China to Druzhba in Kazakhstan. This newest Eurasia land bridge extends west in China through six provinces—Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan, Shaanxi, Gansu, and Xinjiang autonomous region, which neighbors respectively with Shandong Province, Shanxi Province, Hubei Province, Sichuan Province, Qinghai Province, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Inner Mongolia. That covers about 360,000 square kilometers, some 37% of the total land space of China. About 400 million people live in the areas, which accounts for 30% of the total population of the country. Outside of China, the land bridge covers over 40 countries and regions in both Asia and Europe, and is particularly important for the countries in Central and West Asia that don’t have sea outlets.

In 2011 China’s Vice Premier Wang Qishan announced plans to build a new high-speed railway link within Kazakhstan, linking the cities of Astana and Almaty, to be ready in 2015. The Astana-Almaty line, with a total length of 1050 kilometers, employing China’s advanced rail-building technology, will allow high-speed trains to run at a speed of 350 kilometers per hour.

DB Schenker Rail Automotive is now transporting auto parts from Leipzig to Shenyang in northeastern China for BMW. Trains loaded with parts and components depart from DB Schenker’s Leipzig trans-shipment terminal in a three-week, 11,000 km journey to BMW’s Shenyang plant in the Liaoning province, where components are used in the assembly of BMW vehicles. Beginning in late November 2011, trains bound for Shenyang departed Leipzig once each day. "With a transit time of 23 days, the direct trains are twice as fast as maritime transport, followed by over-the-road transport to the Chinese hinterland," says Dr. Karl-Friedrich Rausch, member of the management board for DB Mobility Logistics’ Transportation and Logistics division. The route reaches China via Poland, Belarus, and Russia. Containers have to be transferred by crane to different gauges twice—first to Russian broad gauge at the Poland-Belarus border, then back to standard gauge at the Russia-China border in Manzhouli. [5]

In May 2011 a daily direct rail freight service was launched between the Port of Antwerp, Europe’s second-largest port, and Chongqing, the industrial hub in China’s southwest. That greatly speeded rail freight transport across Eurasia to Europe. Compared to the 36 days for maritime transport from east China’s ports to west Europe, the Antwerp-Chongqing Rail Freight service now takes 20 to 25 days, and the aim is to cut that to 15 to 20 days. Westbound cargo includes automotive and technological goods, eastbound shipments are mostly chemicals. The project was a major priority for the Antwerp Port and the Belgian government in cooperation with China and other partners. The service is run by Swiss inter-modal logistics provider Hupac, their Russian partner Russkaya Troyka and Eurasia Good Transport over a distance of more than 10,000km, starting from Port of Antwerp through to Germany and Poland, and further to Ukraine, Russia and Mongolia before reaching Chongqing in China. [6]

The Second Eurasian Land Bridge runs 10,900 kilometers in length, with some 4100 kilometers of that in China. Within China the line runs parallel to one of the ancient routes of the Silk Road. The rail line continues across China into Druzhba where it links with the broader gauge rail lines of Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is the largest inland country in the world. As Chinese rail and highways have expanded west, trade between Kazakhstan and China has been booming. From January to October 2008, goods passing through the Khorgos port between the two nations reached 880,000 tons - over 250% growth compared with the same period a year before. Trade between China and Kazakhstan is expected to grow 3 to 5 fold by 2013. As of 2008, only about 1% of the goods shipped from Asia to Europe were delivered by overland routes, meaning the room for expansion is considerable. [7]

From Kazakhstan the lines go on via Russia and Belarus over Poland to the markets of the European Union.

Another line goes to Tashkent in Uzbekistan, Central Asia’s largest city of some two millions. Another line goes west to Turkmenistan’s capital Asgabat and to the border of Iran. [8] With some additional investment, these links, now tied to the vast expanse and markets of China could open new economic possibilities in much-neglected regions of Central Asia. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) could provide a well-suited vehicle for coordination of a broad Eurasian rail infrastructure coordination to maximize these initial rail links. The members of the SCO, formed in 2001, include China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan with Iran, India, Mongolia and Pakistan as Observer Status countries.

Russia’s Land Bridge

Russia is well positioned to benefit greatly from such an SCO strategy. The First Eurasian Land Bridge runs through Russia along the Trans-Siberian Railway, first completed in 1916 to unify the Russian Empire. The Trans-Siberian remains the longest single rail line in the world at 9,297 kilometers, a tribute to the vision of Russian Sergei Witte in the 1890s. The Trans-Siberian Railway, also called the Northern East-West Corridor, runs from the Russian Far East Port of Vladivostok and links in Europe to the Port of Rotterdam some 13,000 kilometers. At present it is the less attractive for Pacific-to-Atlantic freight because of maintenance problems and maximum speeds of 55 km.

There are attempts to better use the Trans-Siberian Land Bridge. In January 2008 a long distance Eurasian rail freight service, the "Beijing-Hamburg Container Express" was successfully tested by the German railway Deutsche Bahn. It completed the 10,000 km (6,200 miles) journey in 15 days to link the Chinese capital to the German port city, going through Mongolia, the Russian Federation, Belarus and Poland. By ship to the same markets takes double the time or some 30 days. This route, which began commercial service in 2010 incorporates a section of the existing Trans-Siberian Railway, a rail link using a broader gauge than either Chinese or European trains, meaning two offloads and reloads onto other trains at the China-Mongolia border and again at the Belarus-Poland border.

Were the Trans-Siberian railway passage across Russian Eurasian space to be modernized and upgraded to accommodate high-speed freight traffic, it would add a significant new economic dimension to the economic development of Russia’s interior regions. The Trans-Siberian is double-tracked and electrified. The need is minimally to improve some segments to insure a better integration of all the elements to make it a more attractive option for Eurasian freight to the west.

There are strong indications the new Putin presidency will turn more of its attention to Eurasia. Modernization of the First Eurasian Land Bridge would be a logical way to accomplish much of that development by literally creating new markets and new economic activity. With the bond markets of the United States and Europe flooded with toxic waste and state bankruptcy fears, issuance of Russian state bonds for modernization or even a new parallel high-speed rail Land Bridge linking to the certainty of growing freight traffic across Eurasia would have little difficulty finding eager investors.

Russia is currently in discussion with China and Chinese rail constructors who are bidding on construction of a planned $20 billion of new high-speed Russian rail track to be completed before the 2018 Russian hosting of the Soccer World Cup. China’s experience in building some 12,000 km of high speed rail in record time is a major asset for China’s bid. Significantly, Russia plans to raise $10 billion of the cost by issuing new railroad bonds. [9]

A Third Eurasian Land Bridge?
JPEG - 25.1 kb

In 2009 at the Fifth Pan-Pearl River Delta Regional (PPRD) Cooperation and Development Forum, a government-sponsored event, the Yunnan provincial government announced its intention to accelerate construction of needed infrastructure to build a third Eurasian continental land bridge that will link south China to Rotterdam via Turkey over land. This is part of what Erdogan and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao discussed in Beijing this April. The network of inland roads for the land bridge within Yunnan province will be completed by 2015, said Yunnan governor Qin Guangrong. The project starts from coastal ports in Guangdong, with the Port of Shenzhen being the most important. It will ultimately go all the way through Kunming to Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Iran, entering Europe from Turkey. [10]

The route would cut some 6,000-km from the sea journey between the Pearl River Delta and Rotterdam and allow production from China’s eastern manufacturing centers to reach Asia, Africa and Europe. The proposal is for completing a series of missing rail and modern highway links totaling some 1,000 Km, not that inconceivable. In neighboring Myanmar a mere 300 km of railways and highways are lacking in order to link the railways in Yunnan with the highway network of Myanmar and South Asia. It will help China pave the way for building a land channel to the Indian Ocean.

The third Eurasian Land Bridge will cross 20 countries in Asia and Europe and have a total length of about 15,000 kilometers, which is 3,000 to 6,000 kilometers shorter than the sea route entering at the Indian Ocean from the southeast coast via the Malacca Straits. The total annual trade volume of the regions the route passes through was nearly US$300 billion in 2009. Ultimately the plan is for a branch line that would also start in Turkey, cross Syria and Palestine, and end in Egypt, facilitating transportation from China to Africa. Clearly the Pentagon’s AFRICOM and the US-backed Arab Spring unrest directly impacts that extension, though for how long at this point is unclear. [11]

The geopolitical dimension

Not every major international player is pleased about the growing linkages binding the economies of Eurasia with Western Europe and Africa. In his now famous 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, former Presidential adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski noted,

In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geo-strategy involves the purposeful management of geo-strategically dynamic states…To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and to maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 1997, Basic Books, p. 40. See F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Wiesbaden, 2011, edition.engdahl, for details of the role of the German Baghdad rail link in World War I.

The “barbarians” that Brzezinski refers to are China and Russia and all in between. The “imperial geo-strategy” refers to US strategic foreign policy. The “vassals” are countries like Germany, Japan and other NATO allies of the US. That Brzezinski geopolitical notion remains US foreign policy today.

The prospect of an unparalleled Eurasian economic boom lasting into the next Century and beyond is at hand. The first sinews of binding the vast economic space have been put in place or are being constructed with these rail links. It is becoming clear to more people in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Eurasia including China and Russia that their natural tendency to build these markets faces only one major obstacle: NATO and the US Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance obsession. In the period prior to World War I it was the decision in Berlin to build a rail land link to and through the Turkish Ottoman Empire from Berlin to Baghdad that was the catalyst for British strategists to incite the events that plunged Europe into the most destructive war in history to that date. This time hopefully we have a chance to avoid a similar fate with the Eurasian development. More and more the economically stressed economies of the EU are beginning to look east and less to their west across the Atlantic for Europe’s economic future.

[1] Sunday’s Zaman, "Turkey, China mull $35 bln joint high-speed railway project," Istanbul, April 14, 2012.

[2] Ibid.

[3] “Washington is Playing a Deeper Game with China”, by F. William Engdahl, Voltaire Network, 13 July 2009.

[4] UNCTAD, "Port and multimodal transport developments," 2008.

[5] Joseph O’Reilly, "BMW Rides Orient Express to China," Global Logistics, October 2011.

[6] Aubrey Chang, "Antwerp-Chongqing Direct Rail Freight Link Launched," May 12, 2011.

[7] CNTV, "Eurasian land bridge," March 12, 2011.

[8] Shigeru Otsuka, Central Asia’s Rail Network and the Eurasian Land Bridge, (Pdf file), Japan Railway & Transport Review 28, September 2001, pp. 42-49.

[9] CNTV, "Russian rail official: Chinese bidder competitive," November 21, 2011.

[10] Xinhua, "Yunnan accelerates construction of third Eurasia land bridge," 2009.

[11] Li Yingqing and Guo Anfei, "Third land link to Europe envisioned," China Daily, July 2, 2009.

Original Source: Here.

Struggle over the Middle East

WAR OVER GAS
Struggle over the Middle East: Gas Ranks First

Targeting Syria has never been far away from the struggle over gas in the world in general and the Middle East in particular. At a time in which there seemed to be a collapse in the Euro Zone accompanied with an extremely crucial economic crisis which led the U.S to be indebted for $ 14.94 trillion; i.e., 99.6% of the GDP, and at a time in which the global American influence reached a minimum in encountering emerging powers like China, India and Brazil, it has been so clear that searching for the potential of power no longer exists in the nuclear and non-nuclear military arsenal. That potential lies there, where energy harbours. This is the point which clearly manifests the Russian-American struggle.

Voltaire Network | Damascus (Syria)
JPEG - 16.3 kb

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians began to feel that the struggle for armament has exhausted them, especially in the absence of the necessary energy sources needed by any industrial country. The American presence in the oil zones for some decades enabled them to grow and have control over the international political decision without much struggle. Therefore, the Russians turned towards energy sources, be them oil or gas. Since the international apportionment does not bear much competition in oil sectors, Moscow sought to manipulate gas in the areas of gas production, transporting or marketing on a large scale.

The starting point was in 1995 when Putin set the strategy of Gasprom Co. to move within the area in which gas exists starting from Russia through Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Iran (for marketing) and the Middle East. Certainly, the projects of the Nord Stream and South Stream will be a historical order of merit/insignia given to Vladimir Putin for his efforts in bringing Russia back to the International arena and for tightening the grip on the European economy which will depend, for decades, on gas as an alternative for oil or depend on gas as well as oil, yet with prioritizing the first; i.e., gas. At this point, it was a must for Washington to hasten to create its peer project; Nabucco, to compete against the Russian project as to gain an international apportionment on the basis of which the next century will be politically and strategically determined.

Gas is the main source of energy in the twenty-first century whether as an alternative for oil, due to recession in oil reserves, or as a source of clean energy. Therefore, having control over the zones of gas reserves in the world is considered to be, for the old as well as modern powers, the basis of international Conflict in its regional manifestation.

Obviously, Russia well read the map and well learnt the lesson, for the lack of world energy resources that are needed to inject industrial institutions with money and energy, and which were not under the control of the Soviet Union, was the reason behind its collapse. Therefore, Russia learnt that the source of energy of the coming century; i.e., the 21st Century, was GAS.

An initial reading of the gas map reveals that gas locates in the following areas, in terms of quantity and access to consumption areas:

1. Russia: beginning with Vyborg and Beregvya.

2. Annexed to Russia: Turkmenistan.

3. The near and further roundabouts of Russia: Azerbaijan and Iran.

4. Captured from Russia: Georgia.

5. Eastern Mediterranean: Syria and Lebanon.

6. Qatar and Egypt.

Moscow hastened to work on two strategic lines; the first of which is setting up a Russian – Chinese (shanghai) century based on the economic growth of the Shanghai Bloc, on the one hand, and the control of gas resources, on the other hand.

Thus, Moscow set the grounds for two projects; the South Stream and the Nord (North) Stream in an attempt to face an American project that aimed at seizing the gas of the Black Sea and the gas of Azerbaijan; the Nabucco Project.

There is, then, a strategic race between two projects so as to have control over Europe and the gas resources.

• The American Project (Nabucco) which centres in Central Asia and the Black Sea and its surroundings. Its storage places are in Turkey while its path starts in Bulgaria, and moves through Romania, Hungary, Czech, Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. It was due to pass through Greece, but this idea was ducked for the sake of Turkey. • The Russian projects; the Nord and South Streams: a) Nord Stream: It starts in Russia and goes directly to Germany, and from Weinberg to Sasnetz across the Baltic Sea without penetrating Belarus. This helped ease the American pressure there. b) South Stream: It starts in Russia and moves towards the Black Sea and Bulgaria, then it goes into Greece and then goes towards South Italy, Hungary and Austria.

The Nabucco project was supposed to compete the two Russian projects, but due to technical problems the project was delayed until 2017 though it was scheduled in 2014. This resolved the race in favor of Russia, at this stage in particular, and urged for the search of supplementary areas supporting either project:

1) The Iranian gas which the U.S. insists on making supportive of the Nabucco gas pipeline in the sense that it passes parallelistically by Georgia’s gas pipeline (and Azerbaijan if possible) to reach an assembling point in Erzurum, Turkey. 2) Gas of the Eastern Mediterranean: Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

Iran took a decision the result of which was signing a number of agreements in July 2011 to transport gas through Iraq to Syria. These agreements make Syria the centre of assembly and production in conjunction with the reserves of Lebanon. This is a space of strategy and energy that geographically opens for the first time and extends from Iran to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Though it was banned and was not allowed for a length of years, it now shows the degree of struggle over Syria and Lebanon at this phase, and shows the emerging role of France that considers the Eastern Mediterranean as a historical region of influence and everlasting interests. The French role now goes along with the French absence ever since the World War II. In other words, France wants to have a role in the world of (gas) from which it has gained (a health insurance) in Libya and wants to gain (a life insurance) in both Syria and Lebanon.

Now, Turkey feels it is going to be lost amid the struggle for gas as long as the Nabucco project is late. At the time when the Nord and South Streams exclude Turkey, the latter knows quite well that the gas of the Eastern Mediterranean has become at a distance from the influence of Nabucco, and so has Turkey.

History of the Game:

For the Nord and South Stream Projects, Moscow established the company of Gazprom in the early 1990s. Remarkably, Germany who wanted to escape, once and for all, the repercussions of the World War II, prepared itself to be a party to the project and a partner of it, as well, whether in terms of establishment, end of the north pipeline or the storage places of the south Stream in the Germanic roundabouts, especially Austria.

JPEG - 26.9 kb
Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller at a press conference

Gazprom:

Gazprom was founded with the cooperation of Hans-Joachim Gornig; Moscow’s German friend, who was a former vice president of the German Oil and Gas Industrial Company and who supervised the construction of the pipeline network of GDR. The one who headed Gazprom until October 2011 was Vladimir Kotenev who was a former Russian ambassador to Germany.

The Company of Gazprom signed qualitative and easy transactions with German companies, on top of which comes the companies cooperating with the Nord Stream as the giant (E.ON) company for energy, and the giant (BASF) for chemicals where the (E.ON) gets preferences to buy amounts of gas at the expense of Gazprom when gas prices go up. This is considered to be a kind of (political) support of the German energy companies.

Moscow benefited from the liberalization of the European gas markets monopoly to force those markets to disconnect the distribution networks from production facilities. These clashes between Russia and Berlin turn a page of historic hostility to start a new phase of cooperation on the basis of economy as well as repudiation of a heavy weight put on Germany’s shoulders; i.e., the heavy weight of the debt-overburdened Europe that is under the thumb of the U.S. Germany considers that the Germanic Group; Germany, Austria, Czech and Switzerland, has the priority in being the core of Europe, but it should not bear the consequences of the aging of a continent nor the fall of another giant.

Gazprom’s German ventures include its Wingas joint venture with Wintershall, a subsidiary of BASF which is Germany’s largest oil and gas producer and controls 18% of the gas market. Gazprom has given its top German partners unrivaled stakes in its Russian assets. BASF and E.ON each control almost one-quarter of the Yuzhno-Russkoye gas fields that will provide most of the supplies for Nord Stream at a time, which is not a mere coincidence or simulation, when the peer of Gazprom in Germany; called "The Germanic Gazprom", expands to own 40% of the Austrian Centrex Co. specialized in gas storage. The latter has qualitative expansion into Cyprus; an expansion with which Turkey may not be contented.

Turkey dearly misses assuming a tardy role in the Nabucco Gas Company whereby it is supposed to start storing, marketing and transferring about (31) billion m³ of gas which can go up to (40) billion m³ – at a later stage – in a project that makes Ankara more and more subjugated to the Washington and Nato decisions without having the right to insist on joining the European Union that has rejected it several times.

As a matter of fact, the strategic ties through gas become even more strategic in politics where Moscow lobbies effective on the Social Democratic Party of Germany in North-Rhine Westphalia; the major industrial base that is home to the RWE (Neurath power plant) for electricity utilities and E.ON subsidiary.

Such an influence is recognized by the head of energy policies in the Green Party; Hans Joseph Fell, that four German companies related to Russia play a role in formulating the German Energy Policy through a very complicated network that lobbies ministers and manipulates the Public Opinion via the Eastern European Economic Relations Committee that represents German companies and has close business relations in Russia and countries of the Former Soviet Union Bloc.

Therefore, there is an indispensible silence on the part of Germany vis-à-vis the accelerating Russian influence. This silence is based on the necessity to improve the so-called "Energy Security" in Europe.

Remarkably, Germany now considers the policy of (easing and pacifying) suggested by the European Union to cover the Euro crisis would hinder the Russian – German investments for a long time. This reason, together with other reasons – stand behind the German dawdling in saving the euro laden with European debts. However, it should be taken into consideration that Germany and its Germanic bloc can bear those debts alone.

Every time Europeans oppose Germany and its policy regarding Russia, Berlin asserts that the Europe’s Utopian plans are unenforceable and may push Russia to sell its gas in Asia. This will, definitely, eighty-six the energy security in Europe.

This Russian – German engagement was not simple when Putin could employ the legacy of the Cold War regarding the presence of three million Russian-speakers living in Germany who comprised the second largest group after the Turks. He was also adept at employing a network of Eastern German officials who had been recruited to look after the interests of the Russian companies in Germany, let alone recruiting a number of ex-Eastern German State Security Service agents (ex-Stasi agents) including Gazprom Germania’s director of personnel and its director of finance, and director of finance of the Nord Stream Consortium Matthias Warnig who the Wall Street Journal reported as having helped Putin recruit spies in the Eastern – Germany City of Dresden when Putin was a young KGB operative.

To be fair, Russia’s employment of its former relations was not unripe; rather, it was for the benefit of Germany as a whole. That made the clash between the two countries not possible as long as interests were attained by both parties without having one dominating the other.

JPEG - 20.4 kb

The Nord Stream Project, the major link between Russia and Germany, has been inaugurated recently with pipeline cost of 4.7 billion euros. Although the Nord Stream Pipeline links Russia and Germany, Europeans’ recognition that such a project would be part of the Energy Security made France and Holland hasten to declare it a European project. In this regard, it is good to mention that Lindner of the Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations said without hesitation that it was a European not a German project and that they would not lock Germany into greater dependence on Russia. Such a declaration indicates the apprehension of the expanding Russian influence in Germany; however, the project of the Nord Stream, in structure, represents Moscow’s plan not the EU’s.

Russians can cripple energy distribution to Poland and other countries the way they like and will be able to sell gas to whoever pays more. However, the importance of Germany to Russia lies, practically, in the fact that it constitutes a platform from which to launch its strategy across the continent where Gazprom Germania has stakes in twenty-five joint projects in Britain, Italy, Turkey, Hungary and other countries. This – actually – leads us to say that Gazprom will – after a while – become one of the largest companies of the world if not the largest.

Not only did Gazprom leaders build this project, they also tried to interfere in the Nabucco Project that will – as aforementioned – be delayed until 2017, taking into consideration that the latter constitutes a serious challenge. Therefore, Gazprom – which owns 30% of a project designed for building a second major huge pipeline that reaches Europe roughly along Nabucco’s route; a project even Gazprom supporters call "political" – began a political auctioneering to show its muscles by stopping Nabucco or crippling it.

Nevertheless, Moscow hastened to buy up gas in Central Asia and the Caspian in a bid to starve Nabucco at the same time it is ridiculing Washington politically, economically and strategically.

Outlining Europe’s and – later – the world’s Map:

Gazprom operates gas facilities in Austria; i.e., facilities in the strategic Germanic roundabouts. It also leases facilities in Britain and France. However, the growing number of storage facilities in Austria will be the basis for drawing the energy map of Europe since it is going to provide the Slovenian, Slovakian, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian and somewhat German benefiting from a newly-established a repository called (Katrina) which Gazprom builds in cooperation with Germany with the aim of exporting gas to the hubs of Western Europe.

Gazprom established a joint storage facility with Serbia to export gas to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia itself. Feasibility studies have been conducted on similar storage ventures in the Czech Republic, Romania, Belgium, Britain, Slovakia, Turkey, Greece and even France. Such a venture, on the part of Gazprom, strengthens Moscow’s position as a provider of 41% of Europe’s needed supplies of gas. This, undoubtedly, means an substantial change in the relations between the East and the West in the short, mid and long runs. It also indicates an ebb in the American influence or a collision being prepared to along with considering the missile shield to establish a new world order where gas is the most essential pillar of its formation. This is a clear indication of the heating struggle in the Middle East over gas of the Eastern Coast of the Mediterranean.

JPEG - 35.6 kb
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, right, and gas monopoly Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller, left

Nabucco in a tight spot:

Nabucco was conceived to funnel gas 3,900 kilometers from Turkey to Austria and was designed to carry 31 bcm of natural gas annually from the Middle East and the Caspian region to markets in Europe. The Nato-American-French hastening towards decisively ending all matters in the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Lebanon in a way that harmonizes with their interests, lies in the necessity to maintain calm situations supporting the investment and transportation of gas. Syria responded by signing a contract that aims at transferring gas from Iran to Syria passing by Iraq. As a matter of fact, it is the very Syrian and Lebanese gas that is the focal point of the struggle that aims at annexing it either to the Nabucco gas reserves or Gazprom, thus, the South Stream.

The consortium of Nabucco consists of the German energy companies REW, Austrian OML, Turkish Botas, Bulgarian Energy Holding Company and Romanian Transgaz.

Five years ago, the initial costs of the rival project of Gazprom were estimated to be $ 11.2 billion and the project was expected to have lesser prices than the Russian one. The costs could drive up to reach $ 21.4 billion by 2017. This raises many questions about the viability of this economic project in particular taking into consideration that Gazprom has had enough deals in various regions in an attempt to encompass Nabucco that would feed on the surplus capacity of the gas of Turkmenistan, especially when we know that the ineffective pursuit of the Iranian gas precludes the possibility of achieving the Nabucco dream. This is, in fact, one of the unknown secrets of the struggle over Iran that has gone too far into defiance by choosing Iraq and Syria to be routes for its gas transport, or – at least – part of that route.

Thus, Nabucco’s best hope lies in gas supplies from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz 2 field which would almost be the only source of a project that seems to be stumbling from the very beginning. This manifests in the accelerating deals and in Moscow’s success in buying the sources of Nabucco, on the one hand, and the hardships encountered in achieving geopolitical changes in Iran and the Mediterranean (Syria and Lebanon), on the other hand. This comes at a time in which Turkey hastens to claim a share in the Nabucco Project either through signing a contract with Azerbaijan to buy 6 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas in 2017 or trying to lay hands on Syria and Lebanon with the aim of hampering the transfer of Iranian oil or receiving a share of the Lebanese or Syrian gas affluence (or Syria and Lebanon altogether). The race towards occupying a position in the New World Order escalates through gas and other things ranging from small military services to the strategic domes of the missile shield.

Perhaps what poses a threat to Nabucco most is Russia’s attempt to ditch it through negotiating over more advantageous and competitive contracts of gas supplies in favor of Gazprom’s Nord and South Streams, hampering, thus, any effort to endow the United States and Europe with any kind of influence, politics and energy wise, whether in Iran or the Mediterranean. Moreover, Gazprom could be one of the most important investors or operators of the new gas fields in Syria or Lebanon. The date of August 16, 2011 was not randomly chosen by the Syrian Ministry of Oil to announce the discovery of a gas well in the Area of Qarah in the Central Region of Syria near Homs. The well has the capacity of producing 400.000 cubic metres a day (146 million cubic metres a year). However, the Syrian Ministry of Oil did not breathe a syllable about the Mediterranean Gas.

The Nord and South Streams lessened the importance of the American policy that appeared to be lagging behind. However, the sings of detest between the states of Central Europe and Russia have ebbed, but Poland does not seem to be dragging out of the play soon, nor does the US seem to be willing to retreat since it announced in late October 2011 the shift in the energy policies after the discovery of coal mines in Europe which will lessen dependence on Russia … and the Middle East. This seems to be a far-reaching or long-term goal due to the fact that there is a number of procedures to be taken before starting commercial production of coal. This coal can be attained from unconventional sources in the rocks found at thousands of feet underground by using the techniques of rock fracturing and the hydraulic fracturing of high pressure water. Those techniques are used to pump liquids and sand into a well to release gas. This issue, however, is coated with environmental risks due to the impacts of the fracturing techniques on water reserves.

JPEG - 21.7 kb

China’s Participation:

Sino-Russian cooperation in the field of energy is the power orienting the Sino-Russian strategic partnership. This is, in fact, what experts point to as the "base" for the double veto in the UNSC that came in favour of Syria.

Cooperation in the energy field is what lubricates the acceleration of the partnership between the two giants. It is not only a matter of gas supplies with preferences to China but it is a process that urges China to participate in gas distribution through selling new assets and facilities, in addition to attempting to have joint control over the executive administrations of the gas distribution networks where Moscow currently shows resilience in prices of gas supplies provided that they are allowed to access the local Chinese markets because of the profits there. It was agreed, thus, on that Russian and Chinese experts could work together in the following domains:

“coordinating energy strategies in Russia and china; predicting and outlining prospective scenarios; and developing market infrastructure, energy efficiency and sources of alternative energy”.

Despite cooperation in the field of energy, there are other strategic interests that represent in the mutual Chinese – Russian conception of the risks of the American so-called project “Missile Shield”. Not only has Washington involved Japan and South Korea in the Missile Shield, but it has also sent an invitation to India in early September 2011 to be a partner in the very project. Moscow’s concerns intersect with Beijing’s as regards Washington’s moves to revive the Strategy of Central Asia; i.e., the Silk Road. This project is the same as that initiated by George Bush (Greater Central Asia Project) to roll back Russia and China’s influence in Central Asia in collaboration with Turkey to resolve the situation in Afghanistan by 2014 so as to arrange for the Nato influence there. There are increasing allusions from Uzbekistan to play host of the Nato for such a project. Here, Vladimir Putin estimates that what can foil the Western invasion on Russia’s back scenes in Central Asia will be the expansion of the joint Russian-Kazakhstani-Belarusian economic space in cooperation with Beijing.

This image of the international struggle mechanisms allows access to see one side of the process of the New World Order Formation based on struggling for military influence and on holding the backbone of age; namely, energy, on top of which comes gas.

JPEG - 18.3 kb

The Gas of Syria:

As Israel started oil and gas extraction, it was clear that the basin of the Mediterranean had entered the game and that Syria was either to be attacked or that the whole region was going to enjoy peace since the twenty-first century was the century of clean energy.

What we know about this issue is that the Mediterranean basin is the wealthiest in gas and that Syria would be the wealthiest state, according to the Washington Institute which also speculates that struggle between Turkey and Cyprus would heat due to Ankara’s inability to bear its losses of the Nabucco gas despite the contract Moscow signed with Ankara on December 2011 to transport part of the South Stream gas via Turkey.

Embracing the secret of the Syrian gas will let all know how big the game over gas is. Who controls Syria could control the Middle East, grip on the Gateway to Asia, possess the Key to Russia’s House, as Catherine 2nd put it, and could set foot on the Silk Road, according to China. Most importantly, they who could penetrate Syria for gas have the ability to dominate the world especially that the coming century is the Century of Gas. And with the contract Damascus signed to transport Iranian gas to the Mediterranean through Iraq, the geopolitical space would open and the gas space would close on the scene of Nabucco that used to be Europe and Turkey’s lifeline. Syria, undoubtedly, would be the key to the coming epoch.

JPEG - 32.3 kb
Original Source: Here.

TED: Connected but Alone?

Sherry Turkle | Connected, but Alone? | Apr 2012 |

TED: Moral in Animals

Frans de Waal | Moral Behavior in Animals | Apr 2012 |

Friday, April 13, 2012

TRN: North vs South over Food

TRN | Global North VS South Over Financialization of Food | Vijay Prashad | 12 April 2012 | ws : ws |

Monday, April 9, 2012

Edge: Self-Replicating Code

[GEORGE DYSON:] When I started looking at the beginnings of the modern digital universe—at the origin of this two-dimensional address matrix—I became interested in the question of what had been done with it at the beginning. Of course, one of the things was the work on the hydrogen bomb.

Another thing that surprised and delighted me was to find that a Norwegian-Italian mathematical biologist and viral geneticist, Nils Aall Barricelli, had tried to come to Princeton in 1951, as soon as he heard this machine was being built. He had trouble getting a visa, so he finally shows up in early 1953 when the machine is running, and immediately begins these experiments, to see if he could inoculate this two-dimensional matrix with random strings of one-dimensional numbers that can self-replicate and cross-breed, and do all the things that we know that code does in biology, and see what happens.

And he observed. He was an observational biologist. He saw all sorts of behavior that he read all sorts of biological implications into. He was way too far ahead of the time, so no one paid attention and this was forgotten.

We now live in a world where everything he dreamed of really did happen. And, for some reason, von Neumann never publicized Barricelli's work. I don't know if there was a personal rivalry or what happened, but von Neumann died, and his papers on self-reproducing automata were published posthumously [edited by Arthur W. Burks] and there was no mention of Barricelli. Part of it was this fear that it really would provoke the public. They called computers "electronic brains" at that time. It was scary enough that we might be building machines that would think. But the idea of producing artificial life was even more Frankenstein-like. I think that's one reason we never heard about that.

Just as we later worried about recombinant DNA, what if these things escaped? What would they do to the world? Could this be the end of the world as we know it if these self-replicating numerical creatures got loose?

But, we now live in a world where theydid get loose—a world increasingly run by self-replicating strings of code. Everything we love and use today is, in a lot of ways, self-reproducing exactly as Turing, von Neumann, and Barricelli prescribed. It's a very symbiotic relationship: the same way life found a way to use the self-replicating qualities of these polynucleotide molecules to the great benefit of life as a whole, there's no reason life won't use the self-replicating abilities of digital code, and that's what's happening. If you look at what people like Craig Venter and the thousand less-known companies are doing, we're doing exactly that, from the bottom up.

What's, in a way, missing in today's world is more biology of the Internet. More people like Nils Barricelli to go out and look at what's going on, not from a business or what's legal point of view, but just to observe what's going on.

The defining moment for me was when I went back to Princeton to visit the scene of all of this. I believe in revisiting the physical scene of something, because you get cues that just aren't there from looking at documents. I went down in the basement to find the room where they had started building this machine in 1946. It's the storeroom in the basement next to the boiler room at the Institute for Advanced Study. It was the worst possible room in the building. I went back there in 2005, 60 years later, and it happened to be the main server room for the Institute. The Institute for Advanced Study is now connected to the entire rest of the world, and they had 54 megabits per second of fiber-optic data coming in and out.

When the engineer there on duty gave me a tour the most remarkable thing was an entire server, very high-end, very sophisticated—a few years ago, we would have called it a supercomputer. It was sitting there on the top shelf, and all the fiber-optic lines were going through it, and its sole, 24 hour a day job, was monitoring all the data coming in, trying to keep out self-replicating strings of code—trying to guard against what Barricelli had been trying to do at the beginning. So clearly, Barricelli's experiment was a tremendous success. It's almost so successful we can't see it, because it's happening all around us.

What's, in a way, missing in today's world is more biology of the Internet. More people like Nils Barricelli to go out and look at what's going on, not from a business or what's legal point of view, but just to observe what's going on.

Many of these things we read about in the front page of the newspaper every day, about what's proper or improper, or ethical or unethical, really concern this issue of autonomous self-replicating codes. What happens if you subscribe to a service and then as part of that service, unbeknownst to you, a piece of self-replicating code inhabits your machine, and it goes out and does something else? Who is responsible for that? And we're in an increasingly gray zone as to where that's going.

The most virulent codes, of course, are parasitic, just as viruses are. They're codes that go out and do things, particularly codes that go out and gather money. Which is essentially what these things like cookies do. They are small strings of code that go out and gather valuable bits of information, and they come back and sell it to somebody. It's a very interesting situation. You would have thought this was inconceivable 20 or 30 years ago. Yet, you probably wouldn't have to go … well, we're in New York, not San Francisco, but in San Francisco, you wouldn't have to go five blocks to find five or 10 companies whose income is based on exactly that premise. And doing very well at it.

Walking over here today, just three blocks from my hotel, the street right out front is blocked off. There are 20 police cars out there and seven satellite news vans, because Apple is releasing a new code. They're couching it as releasing a new piece of hardware, but it's really a new gateway into the closed world of Apple's code. And that's enough to block human traffic.

Why is Apple one of the world's most valuable companies? It's not only because their machines are so beautifully designed, which is great and wonderful, but because those machines represent a closed numerical system. And they're making great strides in expanding that system. It's no longer at all odd to have a Mac laptop. It's almost the normal thing.

But I'd like to take this to a different level, if I can change the subject... Ten or 20 years ago I was preaching that we should look at digital code as biologists: the Darwin Among the Machines stuff. People thought that was crazy, and now it's firmly the accepted metaphor for what's going on. And Kevin Kelly quoted me in Wired, he asked me for my last word on what companies should do about this. And I said, "Well, they should hire more biologists."

But what we're missing now, on another level, is not just biology, but cosmology. People treat the digital universe as some sort of metaphor, just a cute word for all these products. The universe of Apple, the universe of Google, the universe of Facebook, that these collectively constitute the digital universe, and we can only see it in human terms and what does this do for us?

We're missing a tremendous opportunity. We're asleep at the switch because it's not a metaphor. In 1945 we actuallydidcreate a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us. Can they record this interview? Can they play our music? Can they order our books on Amazon? If you cross the mirror in the other direction, there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that's not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It's a physical reality.

Very few people are looking at this digital universe in an objective way. Danny Hillis is one of the few people who is. His comment, made exactly 30 years ago in 1982, was that "memory locations are just wires turned sideways in time". That's just so profound. That should be engraved on the wall.

We're still here at the big bang of this thing, and we're not studying it enough. Who's the cosmologist really looking at this in terms of what it might become in 10,000 years? What's it going to be in 100 years? Here we are at the very beginning and we just may simply not be asking the right questions about what's going on. Try looking at it from the other side, not from our side as human beings. Scientists are the people who can do that kind of thing. You can look at viruses from the point of view of a virus, not from the point of view of someone getting sick.

Very few people are looking at this digital universe in an objective way. Danny Hillis is one of the few people who is. His comment, made exactly 30 years ago in 1982, was that "memory locations are just wires turned sideways in time". That's just so profound. That should be engraved on the wall. Because we don't realize that there is this very different universe that does not have the same physics as our universe. It's completely different physics. Yet, from the perspective of that universe, there is physics, and we have almost no physicists looking at it, as to what it's like. And if we want to understand the sort of organisms that would evolve in that totally different universe, you have to understand the physics of the world in which they are in. It's like looking for life on another planet. Danny has that perspective. Most people say just, "well, a wire is a wire. It's not a memory location turned sideways in time." You have to have that sort of relativistic view of things.

We are still so close to the beginning of this explosion that we are still immersed in the initial fireball. Yet, in that short period of time, for instance, it was not long ago that to transfer money electronically you had to fill out paper forms on both ends and then wait a day for your money to be transferred. And, in a very few years, it's a dozen years or so, most of the money in the world is moving electronically all the time.

The best example of this is what we call the flash crash of May 6th, two years ago, when suddenly, the whole system started behaving unpredictably. Large amounts of money were lost in milliseconds, and then the money came back, and we quietly (although the SEC held an investigation) swept it under the rug and just said, "well, it recovered. Things are okay." But nobody knows what happened, or most of us don't know.

There was a great Dutch documentary—Money and Speed: Inside the Black Box—where they spoke to someone named Eric Scott Hunsader who actually had captured the data on a much finer time scale, and there was all sorts of very interesting stuff going on. But it's happening so quickly that it's below what our normal trading programs are able to observe, they just aren't accounting for those very fast things. And this could be happening all around us—not just in the world of finance. We would not necessarily even perceive it, that there's a whole world of communication that's not human communication. It's machines communicating with machines. And they may be communicating money, or information that has other meaning—but if it is money, we eventually notice it. It's just the small warm pond sitting there waiting for the spark.

It's an unbelievably interesting time to be a digital biologist or a digital physicist, or a digital chemist. A good metaphor is chemistry. We're starting to address code by template, rather than by numerical location—the way biological molecules do.

We're living in a completely different world. The flash crash was an example: you could have gone out for a cup of coffee and missed the whole thing, and come back and your company lost a billion dollars and got back 999 million, while you were taking your lunch break. It just happened so fast, and it spread so quickly.

So, yes, the fear scenario is there, that some malevolent digital virus could bring down the financial system. But on the other hand, the miracle of this flash crash was not that it happened, but that it recovered so quickly. Yet, in those milliseconds, somebody made off with a lot of money. We still don't know who that was, and maybe we don't want to know.

The reason we're here today (surrounded by this expanding digital universe) is because in 1936, or 1935, this oddball 23-year-old undergraduate student, Alan Turing, developed this theoretical framework to understand a problem in mathematical logic, and the way he solved that problem turned out to establish the model for all this computation. And I believe we wold have arrived here, sooner or later, without Alan Turing or John von Neumann, but it was Turing who developed the one-dimensional model, and von Neumann who developed the two-dimensional implementation, for this increasingly three-dimensional digital universe in which everything we do is immersed. And so, the next breakthrough in understanding will also I think come from some oddball. It won't be one of our great, known scientists. It'll be some 22-year-old kid somewhere who makes more sense of this.

It's an unbelievably interesting time to be a digital biologist or a digital physicist, or a digital chemist. A good metaphor is chemistry. We're starting to address code by template, rather than by numerical location—the way biological molecules do.

But, we're going back to biology, and of course, it's impossible not to talk about money, and all these other ways that this impacts our life as human beings. What I was trying to say is that this digital universe really is so different that the physics itself is different. If you want to understand what types of life-like or self-reproducing forms would develop in a universe like that, you actually want to look at the sort of physics and chemistry of how that universe is completely different from ours. An example is how not only its time scale but how time operates is completely different, so that things can be going on in that world in microseconds that suddenly have a real effect on ours.

Again, money is a very good example, because money really is a sort of a gentlemen's agreement to agree on where the money is at a given time. Banks decide, well, this money is here today and it's there tomorrow. And when it's being moved around in microseconds, you can have a collapse, where suddenly you hit the bell and you don't know where the money is. And then everybody's saying, "Where's the money? What happened to it?" And I think that's what happened. And there are other recent cases where it looks like a huge amount of money just suddenly disappeared, because we lost the common agreement on where it is at an exact point in time. We can't account for those time periods as accurately as the computers can.

One number that's interesting, and easy to remember, was in the year 1953, there were 53 kilobytes of high-speed memory on planet earth. This is random access high-speed memory. Now you can buy those 53 kilobytes for an immeasurably small, thousandth of one cent or something. If you draw the graph, it's a very nice, clean graph. That's sort of Moore's Law; that it's doubling. It has a doubling time that's surprisingly short, and no end in sight, no matter what the technology does. We're doubling the number of bits in a extraordinarily short time.

What's the driver today? You want one word? It's advertising. And, you may think advertising is very trivial, and of no real importance, but I think it's the driver. If you look at what most of these codes are doing, they're trying to get the audience, trying to deliver the audience. The money is flowing as advertising.

And we have never seen that. Or I mean, we have seen numbers like that, in epidemics or chain reactions, and there's no question it's a very interesting phenomenon. But still, it's very hard not to just look at it from our point of view. What does it mean to us? What does it mean to my investments? What does it mean to my ability to have all the music I want on my iPhone? That kind of thing. But there's something else going on. We're seeing a fraction of one percent of it, and there's this other 99.99 percent that people just aren't looking at.

The beginning of this was driven by two problems. The problem of nuclear weapons design, and the problem of code breaking were the two drivers of the dawn of this computational universe. There were others, but those were the main ones.

What's the driver today? You want one word? It's advertising. And, you may think advertising is very trivial, and of no real importance, but I think it's the driver. If you look at what most of these codes are doing, they're trying to get the audience, trying to deliver the audience. The money is flowing as advertising.

And it is interesting that Samuel Butler imagined all this in 1863, and then in his bookErewhon. And then 1901, before he died, he wrote a draft for "Erewhon Revisited." In there, he called out advertising, saying that advertising would be the driving force of these machines evolving and taking over the world. Even then at the close of 19th century England, he saw advertising as the way we would grant power to the machines.

If you had to say what's the most powerful algorithm set loose on planet earth right now? Originally, yes, it was the Monte Carlo code for doing neutron calculations. Now it's probably the AdWords algorithm. And the two are related: if you look at the way AdWords works, it is a Monte Carlo process. It's a sort of statistical sampling of the entire search space, and a monetizing of it, which as we know, is a brilliant piece of work. And that's not to diminish all the other great codes out there.

We live in a world where we measure numbers of computers in billions, and numbers of what we call servers, which are the equivalent of in the old days, of what would be called mainframes. Those are in the millions, hundreds of millions.

Two of the pioneers of this—to single out only two pioneers—were John Von Neumann and Alan Turing. If they were here today Turing would be 100. Von Neumann would be 109. I think they would understand what's going on immediately—it would take them a few minutes, if not a day, to figure out, to understand what was going on. And, they both died working on biology, and I think they would be immediately fascinated by the way biological code and digital code are now intertwined. Von Neumann's consuming passion at the end was self-reproducing automata. And Alan Turing was interested in the question of how molecules could self-organize to produce organisms.

The question of how and when humans are going to expand into the universe, the space travel question, is, in my view, almost rendered obsolete by this growth of a digitally-coded biology, because those digital organisms—maybe they don't exist now, but as long as the system keeps going, they're inevitable—can travel at the speed of light. They can propagate. They're going to be so immeasurably far ahead that maybe humans will be dragged along with it.

They would be, on the other hand, astonished that we're still running their machines, that we don't have different computers. We're still just running your straight Von Neumann/Turing machine with no real modification. So they might not find our computers all that interesting, but they would be diving into the architecture of the Internet, and looking at it.

In both cases, they would be amazed by the direct connection between the code running on computers and the code running in biology—that all these biotech companies are directly reading and writing nucleotide sequences in and out of electronic memory, with almost no human intervention. That's more or less completely mechanized now, so there's direct translation, and once you translate to nucleotides, it's a small step, a difficult step, but, an inevitable step to translate directly to proteins. And that's Craig Venter's world, and it's a very, very different world when we get there.

The question of how and when humans are going to expand into the universe, the space travel question, is, in my view, almost rendered obsolete by this growth of a digitally-coded biology, because those digital organisms—maybe they don't exist now, but as long as the system keeps going, they're inevitable—can travel at the speed of light. They can propagate. They're going to be so immeasurably far ahead that maybe humans will be dragged along with it.

But while our digital footprint is propagating at the speed of light, we're having very big trouble even getting to the eleven kilometers per second it takes to get into lower earth orbit. The digital world is clearly winning on that front. And that's for the distant future. But it changes the game of launching things, if you no longer have to launch physical objects, in order to transmit life.
Edge | A Talk With George Dyson | A Universe of Self-Replicating Code | Mar 2012

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Lara Fabian: Je Suis Malade

JE SUIS MALADE - Original by Serge Lama

Je ne rêve plus je ne fume plus
Je n'ai même plus d'histoire
Je suis sale sans toi je suis laid sans toi
Je suis comme un orphelin dans un dortoir

Je n'ai plus envie de vivre ma vie
Ma vie cesse quand tu pars
Je n'ai plus de vie et même mon lit
Se transforme en quai de gare
Quand tu t'en vas

Je suis malade complètement malade
Comme quand ma mère sortait le soir
Et qu'elle me laissait seul avec mon désespoir

Je suis malade parfaitement malade
T'arrives on ne sait jamais quand
Tu repars on ne sait jamais où
Et ça va faire bientôt deux ans
Que tu t'en fous

Comme à un rocher comme à un péché
Je suis accroché à toi
Je suis fatigué je suis épuisé
De faire semblant d'être heureux quand ils sont là

Je bois toutes les nuits mais tous les whiskies
Pour moi ont le même goût
Et tous les bateaux portent ton drapeau
Je ne sais plus où aller tu es partout

Je suis malade complètement malade
Je verse mon sang dans ton corps
Et je suis comme un oiseau mort quand toi tu dors

Je suis malade parfaitement malade
Tu m'as privé de tous mes chants
Tu m'as vidé de tous mes mots
Pourtant moi j'avais du talent avant ta peau

Cet amour me tue et si ça continue
Je crèverai seul avec moi
Près de ma radio comme un gosse idiot
Écoutant ma propre voix qui chantera

Je suis malade complètement malade
Comme quand ma mère sortait le soir
Et qu'elle me laissait seul avec mon désespoir

Je suis malade c'est ça je suis malade
Tu m'as privé de tous mes chants
Tu m'as vidé de tous mes mots
Et j'ai le cour complètement malade
Cerné de barricades t'entends je suis malade
Lara Fabian | yt:ws

Friday, April 6, 2012

Was Gesagt Werden Muss

Warum schweige ich, verschweige zu lange,
was offensichtlich ist und in Planspielen
geübt wurde, an deren Ende als Überlebende
wir allenfalls Fußnoten sind.

Es ist das behauptete Recht auf den Erstschlag,
der das von einem Maulhelden unterjochte
und zum organisierten Jubel gelenkte
iranische Volk auslöschen könnte,
weil in dessen Machtbereich der Bau
einer Atombombe vermutet wird.

Doch warum untersage ich mir,
jenes andere Land beim Namen zu nennen,
in dem seit Jahren - wenn auch geheimgehalten -
ein wachsend nukleares Potential verfügbar
aber außer Kontrolle, weil keiner Prüfung
zugänglich ist?

Das allgemeine Verschweigen dieses Tatbestandes,
dem sich mein Schweigen untergeordnet hat,
empfinde ich als belastende Lüge
und Zwang, der Strafe in Aussicht stellt,
sobald er mißachtet wird;
das Verdikt "Antisemitismus" ist geläufig.

Jetzt aber, weil aus meinem Land,
das von ureigenen Verbrechen,
die ohne Vergleich sind,
Mal um Mal eingeholt und zur Rede gestellt wird,
wiederum und rein geschäftsmäßig, wenn auch
mit flinker Lippe als Wiedergutmachung deklariert,
ein weiteres U-Boot nach Israel
geliefert werden soll, dessen Spezialität
darin besteht, allesvernichtende Sprengköpfe
dorthin lenken zu können, wo die Existenz
einer einzigen Atombombe unbewiesen ist,
doch als Befürchtung von Beweiskraft sein will,
sage ich, was gesagt werden muß.

Warum aber schwieg ich bislang?
Weil ich meinte, meine Herkunft,
die von nie zu tilgendem Makel behaftet ist,
verbiete, diese Tatsache als ausgesprochene Wahrheit
dem Land Israel, dem ich verbunden bin
und bleiben will, zuzumuten.

Warum sage ich jetzt erst,
gealtert und mit letzter Tinte:
Die Atommacht Israel gefährdet
den ohnehin brüchigen Weltfrieden?
Weil gesagt werden muß,
was schon morgen zu spät sein könnte;
auch weil wir - als Deutsche belastet genug -
Zulieferer eines Verbrechens werden könnten,
das voraussehbar ist, weshalb unsere Mitschuld
durch keine der üblichen Ausreden
zu tilgen wäre.

Und zugegeben: ich schweige nicht mehr,
weil ich der Heuchelei des Westens
überdrüssig bin; zudem ist zu hoffen,
es mögen sich viele vom Schweigen befreien,
den Verursacher der erkennbaren Gefahr
zum Verzicht auf Gewalt auffordern und
gleichfalls darauf bestehen,
daß eine unbehinderte und permanente Kontrolle
des israelischen atomaren Potentials
und der iranischen Atomanlagen
durch eine internationale Instanz
von den Regierungen beider Länder zugelassen wird.

Nur so ist allen, den Israelis und Palästinensern,
mehr noch, allen Menschen, die in dieser
vom Wahn okkupierten Region
dicht bei dicht verfeindet leben
und letztlich auch uns zu helfen.
Source: Here | Günter Grass:17 Translations

Sunday, April 1, 2012