1. Followups
Bird’s Eye: A fine quartet of pieces that arrived too late for last week. We start with a superb War Tard column on just why the US wants to attack Iran, and it’s not about nuclear bombs, but oil. The first piece in a long while that’s made sense of the oncoming war. As always, War Tard does a fine job of looking at strategies. A quick and powerful graph shows the congressional support for PIPA/SOPA the day before and the day after the Internet blackout. Meet the Preppers! A subculture with the slogan, “Armegeddon ready: are you?” And music! The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, and the Thai Elephant Orchestra produce sounds the like of which you’ve never heard. Click on.
* Why The Us Wants To Attack Iran War Tard
Iran is sitting on the fourth largest oil deposit on the planet and has huge reserves of natural gas and that’s a sweet energy prize by any account. It’s kind of like Inca gold and the Spanish Main in the 16th century… everybody wants a piece of the action. …
The interesting player here in all this is China. Though a long way from being a military superpower, its economic power is rising fast, so fast that the US and Europe fear the loss of traditional Western dominance of the global economy. The gaping weakness of the Chinese rise is energy supply. And without a credible naval fleet to protect the flow of spice, the weakness of China gets exposed… Chinese dependence on sea borne oil delivery and their susceptibility to a blockade sometime in our proxy resource war future. What the West really fears here in the global energy game of Risk, is Iran having unfettered control of its own huge energy reserves, selling those reserves outside the dollar to geopolitical rivals (China) and facilitating the rise of a pan Pacific hegemon that could contest Western dominance at some point later this century.
That’s why Iran is in the cross hairs. Their whole nuke program is symbolic of their determination not to play nice in the petro dollar chess game and the question remains, will they get Tomahawked this year because of it?
* How The Internet Blackout Affected Congressional Support For Pipa/Sopa Boing Boing
* Subculture of Americans prepares for civilization’s collapse Reuters
When Patty Tegeler looks out the window of her home overlooking the Appalachian Mountains in southwestern Virginia, she sees trouble on the horizon. “In an instant, anything can happen,” she told Reuters. “And I firmly believe that you have to be prepared.” Tegeler is among a growing subculture of Americans who refer to themselves informally as “preppers.” Some are driven by a fear of imminent societal collapse, others are worried about terrorism, and many have a vague concern that an escalating series of natural disasters is leading to some type of environmental cataclysm.
…Tegeler, 57, has turned her home in rural Virginia into a “survival center,” complete with a large generator, portable heaters, water tanks, and a two-year supply of freeze-dried food that her sister recently gave her as a birthday present. She says that in case of emergency, she could survive indefinitely in her home. And she thinks that emergency could come soon. “I think this economy is about to fall apart,” she said.
* New Music Futility Closet
The 10-member Vienna Vegetable Orchestra plays instruments created entirely from fresh vegetables, including the carrot recorder, the pumpkin tympanum, the zucchini trumpet, and the bean maraca. These must be fashioned anew before each concert, because the old instruments are made into soup.
The Thai Elephant Orchestra, created by American expatriate Richard Lair and Columbia neurologist David Sulzer, improvise on drums, gongs, harmonicas, and sawmill blades. To date they’ve released three CDs.
