Metaphorical return of an ancient empire

Bolivia's recently elected leader Evo Morales underwent a traditional cleansing ceremony.

The day before Bolivia's president-elect Evo Morales dons the presidential sash in front of more than a dozen visiting heads of state Sunday, he will stand barefoot and wear a traditional woven poncho at the Tiahuanaco ruins near the shores of Lake Titicaca, paying homage to mother earth and father sun in an ancient indigenous ceremony.

The ceremony was held at the pre-Incan site of Tiwanaku, the ritual and administrative capital of a precursor to the Inca Empire.

According to Holbrook Travel, Aymara is the original language used by Incan nobility; it later gave way to Quecha, the common language of the Inca Empire. Morales is an Aymara Indian.

Genetically profiling the UK

According to the BBC, tens of thousands of teenagers in the UK have been genetically profiled.

The government has defended storing the DNA profiles of about 24,000 children and young people aged 10 to 18.
The youngsters' details are held on the UK database, despite them never having been cautioned, charged or convicted of an offence...

With regard to profiling the populace at large:

The Home Office announced earlier this month that 7% of the UK population would be on the database in two years' time. It is already the biggest in the world and has so far cost £300m.
Just over 5% of UK residents currently have their DNA profile held, compared with an EU average of 1.13% and 0.5% in the US.

As stated before, there's a clear advantage to having the DNA of family members on hand. Aside from victim identification, there's also offender identification.

Police can now track down offenders by matching samples with other family members who may be on the database.

Why ideologues never seem to budge

I ran across some interesting neuroimaging research of U.S. political partisans.

The investigators used functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to study a sample of committed Democrats and Republicans during the three months prior to the U.S. Presidential election of 2004. The Democrats and Republicans were given a reasoning task in which they had to evaluate threatening information about their own candidate. During the task, the subjects underwent fMRI to see what parts of their brain were active. What the researchers found was striking.
"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," says Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory who led the study. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." Westen and his colleagues will present their findings at the Annual Conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Jan. 28.
Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions -- essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted -- not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward -- similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.

Technically, they were rewarded for indoctrinating themselves and discounting problematic facts. Thus, being a partisan can itself be addictive. So much for Aristotle's notion of man being the "rational animal".

Extending this further, engaging in debate with a partisan is analogous to fighting with their addiction to their ideological stance. They are more focused on defending their positions than in engaging facts.

Fourth-generation warfare and the oil weapon

Last week, three events combined to drive up the price of crude oil. First, in the background, was the escalating tension over Iran's nuclear ambitions. Iran signalled that it may be willing to cut off oil in retaliation against any economic sanctions.

Emboldened by strong prices and stretched global supplies, Tehran could retaliate by removing all or part of its daily crude sales of 2.4 million barrels from thirsty world markets...
Further actual disruptions would be hard, if not impossible, for the world to cover with the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries holding only 1.5 million barrels per day in reserve.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is maximizing uncertainty as to what Iran will do, thus maximizing his options. Even the threat is sufficient to have the desired impact.

Attacks by militants in Nigeria have disrupted 10% of the country's oil production, an amount over 200,000 barrels/day. The militants promise more attacks. Their attacks have greater impact when oil supplies are tight. Perhaps coincidentally, one known militant leader is an American-educated convert to Islam.

Finally, a message apparently from Osama bin Laden was broadcast that threatened further attacks, allegedly in the planning stages. This resulted in further escalation of the price of oil.

It's worth remembering that maintaining a high oil price is effectively an attack on the U.S. economy, an aim in line with the goals of Iran and al Qaida. As well, selling oil at high prices further boosts Iraq's war chest of foreign capital.

Finally, sabotage has been blamed for explosions which hit a natural gas pipeline running from Russia to Georgia, though Interfax has blamed it on "malfunctions". It's quite possible that militants have been emboldened by Russia's recent use of the oil weapon against Ukraine. The blasts was in North Ossetia, a region known for violent Chechen separatism, e.g., the deadly siege at Beslan. It's also possible that radical Islam may be on the increase in the region.

The events possibly comprise a loosely-coordinated swarm attack with opportunistic timing.

It should also be noted that an alleged al Qaida web site recently called for attacks on the trans-Alaska oil pipeline and the Valdez tanker dock.

Attacking oil and gas targets in the United States and other countries is key to bringing down the economy of the "American devils," the author wrote, saying the message was posted in response to calls from Usama bin Laden and his top Al Qaeda deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
The Arabic posting was discovered and translated in late December by the SITE Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization that tracks international terrorists.

Axis of forgery

Tucked away in this Guardian article from 2004:

This week, reports warned that counterfeiters in North Korea are gearing up to make dodgy euros...
Beyond North Korea, Syria and Iran are known to indulge in highly advanced counterfeiting.

This mirror of a 2002 piece from Christian Science Monitor explains part of the motivation:

The last big wave of overseas counterfeiting was the high-quality copies of US $100 bills that flooded several continents in the 1990s, apparently originating in Iran and North Korea. These fakes had the dual aim of profit for the producers and distributors and destabilization of the US economy by attacking the world's favorite money, the almighty dollar.

Destabiliziation of the US economy by debasing its currency squarely fits within the framework of Fourth-Generation Warfare (4GW). Syria, Iran, and North Korea are definitely players on this front. I consider it highly probably that they've traded counterfeiting technology, given that other technology has been transferred as well.

According to Stacy Keach via PBS:

Over $360 million in counterfeit notes were confiscated in 1995 alone. Millions, perhaps billions more, went undetected...
Nearly two-thirds of US cash is overseas, so counterfeiting is a worldwide problem. Where demand for dollars is strong, such as in Russia, there has been a surge in high-quality counterfeiting. In 1993 alone, the amount confiscated abroad grew 300%. The most popular target of international counterfeiters is the $100 bill. These counterfeit hundreds support arms purchases, the drug trade, and terrorist activity. There are even suggestions that counterfeiting is being used as a calculated attack on the nation. A Republican congressional taskforce issued strong charges with this 1992 report, warning: "Evidence has recently come to light that the governments of Iran and Syria are actively engaged in economic warfare against the United States through the production and dissemination of high-quality counterfeit dollar bills." The report describes a conspiracy arising from the ruins of the war between Iran and Iraq. Short of hard currency, the Iranian government allegedly launched counterfeiting operations to help the country rebuild. The Iranian government dismisses these charges. But there are counterfeits of such high quality found in the Middle East, they're called "Supernotes."

Thanks to high oil prices, Iran is not lacking for hard currency these days. Given the appeal of economic warfare and illicit funding, said counterfeiting is not likely to stop.

Toward a mechanism for infidelity

There were two intriguing UCLA studies on women reported earlier this month:

One study published today by the University of California, Los Angeles Center on Behavior, Culture, and Evolution and the University of New Mexico says women have evolved to cheat on their mates during the most fertile part of their cycle, but only when those mates are less sexually attractive than other men...
A related study, which will be published in Evolution and Human Behavior, finds that women are more likely to fantasize about men other than their mates, but only when they don't consider their mates to be particularly sexy.

There was also this bit of research on men which came out earlier this month as well:

Research published in the recent issue of Ethology has discovered that men are able to potentially use smell as a mechanism to establish when their current or prospective sexual partners are at their most fertile.
Axillary odour from women in the follicular phase was rated as the most attractive and least intense. On the other hand, highest intensity and lowest attractiveness was found during the time of menstrual bleeding.
The results suggest that body odour can be used by men as a cue to the fertile period in current or prospective sexual partners. Therefore, the fertile period in humans should be considered non-advertised, rather than concealed.

The logical inference is that men can detect when women are most likely to stray and act upon it. Sexually attractive men would stand to benefit most from this.

A perfect storm for zinc

From this copy of a Bloomberg piece:

China's Zhuzhou Smelter will reopen its ... lead plant in two days after annual maintenance, despite a government order to stop production on pollution concerns, company officials said on Thursday...
Zhuzhou Smelter's zinc plant, which is China's largest by output, produced more than 320,000 tonnes of refined zinc and zinc products in 2005, according to company officials.
Cadmium pollution in a river in southern China's Guangdong province had forced Shenzhen Zhongjin Lingnan Non-ferrous Metal Co. Ltd's Shaoguan smelter to completely stop production from Dec. 21.
The Shaoguan smelter usually produces about 170,000 tonnes of zinc ... a year.

Why is zinc important? Take a look at this Reuters piece:

Prices for zinc, used to galvanize steel to prevent corrosion, may average 41 percent higher this year because of shrinking stockpiles and rising demand in China for autos and buildings, Daiwa Securities SMBC said...
Zinc's shortfall in production in 2006 will widen to 399,000 metric tons from 310,000 in 2005, Morgan Stanley said Dec. 15. Zinifex, the world's second largest zinc producer, said in November it expects a larger deficit in 2006 for the metal, compared with 2005.
"China's zinc metal exports have dried up almost to nothing in the last few months, while imports have rocketed," UBS AG analysts Matt Fernley and Peter Hickson said in a Jan. 4 report. "We see the major drivers for this as the recovery of the Chinese construction sector, where galvanized steel is a major building material."

To make matters worse:

Zinc prices rose to a record in London on Wednesday, topping $2,000 a metric ton, after Grupo México suspended production at a refinery in Mexico, reducing supplies as global stockpiles shrink.
The refinery was shut down by a power failure that caused "material damage," Grupo México said. It produced more than 100,000 metric tons of zinc in 2005, equal to about 1 percent of global demand. Zinc stockpiles have plunged 39 percent in a year.

Given the nature of fourth-generation warfare, what's to keep an aggressive hedge fund from hiring a few people to ensure some of their bets pan out?

Russia's energy weapon

Russia recently cut off natural gas supplies to Ukraine and Moldova. Gazprom is a state-owned monopoly; it's the Russian government calling the shots

There is probably some truth to Ukraine's claim that it is being punished for developing closer ties to the West and becoming more independent of Russia. It's worth recalling that the Russian national firm Yukos was effectively destroyed and a primary asset sold to a shell company later acquired by state-owned Rosneft; due to the timing, it appears Yukos was targeted in order to prevent the company from from joining Western firms in a merger.

It is clear that Russia's current main strength is its capacity to use energy as a weapon, not the projection of military power. A logical consequence of this is the scenario that Russia did intend for UN negotiations to fail and for the USA to lead an invasion of Iraq. Even a temporary loss of Iraqi oil supply would certainly increase Russia's bargaining position.

Russian nationalism appears to be a significant motivation:

Global energy supply is set to be a big issue, with Russia seeking to show the importance of its oil and gas reserves...
Mr Putin has made restoring Russian prestige central to his presidency.