Nay-sayers and doom-sayers: August MensaMag makes free with their arguments that we’ll outgrow our reliance on oil, there’s no hope we shall, money and power matter most in this world, and men kill for any excuse they can find. But whichever apocalyptic disaster comes about, make no mistake. The world is going from bad to worse. Events seem, in fact, like the result of a poorly conceived pharmaceutical adventure. Why oh why can’t we marshal all the pros and cons surrounding any particular issue instead of the few that support the viewpoint we favour? No wonder most of us condemn politicians and lawyers in the same breath; both are paid to take positions, and no viewpoint rises higher in ethics than the eloquence of its proponent. We’re best off, it appears, buying gold at any price and tucking it under the mattress. These are troubled times, good Mensans, troubled times indeed. Our rescue seems in the hands of the gods whom we ceaselessly offend.

And speaking of offence, Mensans who believe in gender equality will want to oppose the cultural relativism preached by well-meaning sociologists. They and their legal brethren consider that women may voluntarily elect male dominion under a veil of cultural freedom. Small religious cults or large and rich communities, both have proposed power structures in which women take little public part, something like Canada before women could own property or vote. We wouldn’t suggest that our black fellow citizens should have the right to be slaves, but this is OK for women. Or is it?

Contact us with your comments, articles and queries.

General

Do you know someone who delivers a great lecture? Have an idea for a topic? Quick, switch to email and tell Patricia at almostp@shaw.ca. Do you feel life is passing you by? The answer is not tabloid press or Prozac. Activities with fellow Mensans will turn your life around. Think coffees, martinis, irrepressible joy and stirring movies, dinners, quizzes, anything that ravels up the tired sleeve of care. We’re informal and unstructured, on occasion intellectually stimulating. Mensa Calgary is a community where members interact, network, support each other, and enjoy each other’s company. For further info, contact Patricia at kathleen4057@yahoo.ca ["There's no pleasure on earth that's worth sacrificing for the sake of an extra five years in the geriatric ward of the Sunset Old People's Home." (John Mortimore)]

MensaTest

The date of the next Mensa testing session isn’t yet known. Watch this page for info when it becomes available or, better idea, talk to Vicki Herd at vherd@shaw.ca, telephone 403-243-6144. Testing should take just over an hour and is user-friendly.

The testing fee is $90. This covers the cost of writing 2 tests, receiving feedback on eligibility for Mensa membership, plus the first year’s membership fee if you qualify. You write 2 tests so you have 2 chances to qualify for Mensa.  Full time students pay only $70.

A pictorial test is available if your mother tongue is not English and you do not want your test scores to be disadvantaged by language.

You need to score in the top 2% of the population in one of the two tests to qualify.

Please contact Vicki if you have questions about Mensa or the testing, and let Vicki know if you want to write the tests in August so she can allocate resources and give directions to the testing site: meeting Room 2, Basement, W R Castell Central Library, 616 Macleod Trail SE, Calgary.

MensaGenerationX

The under-30’s sig rolls along. For events and fixtures, contact Leslie Joanne at august_83@hotmail.com

CoffeeFests

Friday, August 8th at Patricia’s home, 7:30 pm, 2215 – 18A St SW, near the old Childrens Hospital in Bankview/Knobhill. Meet Nick visiting from Bulgaria and Jeff Pugh back from holiday. If you don’t usually attend our events, we’d like to meet you at this coffee evening. Refreshments provided. And at The Purple Perk as usual on August 21: 2212 – 4th St SW, 7:00pm. No subject too hot, no view too bold, no humour too sublime. At The Purple Perk, recognize us by the Harry Potter book on the table.

DinnerNight

The next Mensa dinner takes place at Cilantro’s on Friday, August 15, 6:30 pm. The address is 338 – 17th Ave SW. Weather permitting, we’ll be on the patio, a great place. Contact Patricia for more detail and to reserve your seat (almostp@shaw.ca).

BookClub

Mensa’s book club for August meets in Banff, August 22/23. How? Friday evening we’ll attend Pride and Prejudice at the Citadel Theatre in Banff, stay overnight, and chew over all of Jane Austen (or just P&P) on Saturday morning. Q: was she really the J Lo of her generation? Location of the Saturday get together is tbd. If you prefer not to do the theatre event, just travel up for the Saturday meet. Contact Patricia at almostp@shaw.ca or 212-1461 to join us.

Previous Mensa Club books have included Literacy and Longing in L.A., Night, The Alchemist, Water for Elephants and A Thousand Splendid Suns.

SecondTuesdays(of the Month)

Everyone is invited on August 12th to our casual open house and gabfest chez Vicki Herd, 2469 Sorrel Mews SW (a couple of blocks south of 33 Ave, east of Crowchild Tr), 7:30pm. BYOB. No RSVP is needed, but if you wish you can contact Vicki @ vherd@shaw.ca / 243-6144 or Patricia @ almostp@shaw.ca / 212-1461 for more info.

Movie Night

August 29, with choice tbd. Watch this space or contact Patricia at almostp@shaw.ca

For other and general event queries, email Vicki Herd (vherd@shaw.ca).

1) Imagine a large sheet of rice paper one-thousandth of an inch thick. Tear it in half and stack the pieces, then tear the stack in half and stack those, and so on. If you could do this 50 times in succession, how tall would the final stack be?

2) Jack bought 100 pieces of fruit for $8. He bought apples, peaches and pears. Apples cost 5 cents each, peaches 7 cents, and pears 9 cents. How many more pears than apples did Jack buy?

The answers to July’s puzzles were supplied in the July issue.

Here are the answers to August’s puzzles:
1) Take 2 to the power of 50 and multiply the result by 0.001 inches/ply
= (1.12589991 × 1012) inches
= 17,769,884.9 miles
2) Jack spent $1 more than the 7 cent average per piece of fruit. Because each apple is 2 cents below the average and each pear is 2 cents above, he must have bought 50 more pears than apples.

The world will kick its addiction to oil. It’s just a matter of time. Markets won’t correct the soaring prices that threaten our economic wellbeing, so governments must.

At the time of the last energy shock in the 1970s, Sheikh Yamani, the shrewd Saudi Oil Minister, famously told his greedier Opec colleagues that they would encourage replacement of oil by other energy sources and kill the golden goose that had made them wealthy if they kept pushing the oil price too high. "Remember," he said, "the Stone Age didn’t end because the cavemen ran out of stone."

The last three global recessions – in 1974, 1980 and 1991 – were all triggered by an oil shock and it looks as if Opec is now determined to repeat this experience. How many such shocks will it take before we control our addiction to oil? Cynics will say that all the world’s oil will have to run dry before we see any decisive action in the US or China to reduce and ultimately eliminate their oil demand. But a confluence of economics, politics, diplomacy, environmentalism and finance has suddenly been created which may unexpectedly prove the cynics wrong. An oil price of $140, never mind $200 or $300, is simply too economically damaging to be tolerated much longer.

The question is no longer whether oil prices will be left to the market, but whether political interventions that override market forces will improve or worsen the situation.

The usual answer to this question is the latter, which is why Western policymakers have been reluctant to do very much so far to curb the oil price. Such, in fact, is the faith in "oil market fundamentals" expressed, for example, by Gordon Brown and the recent Treasury paper he commissioned on the oil shock that one is drawn to a surprising conclusion: the main reason for inaction in the face of the oil shock may not be the lack of political will to implement difficult decisions, such as higher petrol taxes or government guarantees for nuclear construction, but simply the ideology of market fundamentalism, expressed in such slogans as "the market is always right".

But the market is not always right. It is usually right, but sometimes it is spectacularly wrong – as in the recent sub-prime saga. To acknowledge that governments must sometimes correct market failures is not to reject the economic lessons of the 1980s but rather to apply a proper understanding of economics.

There are three main reasons why the market cannot be trusted in the case of oil. First, there is the enormous gap between the cost of producing oil in areas where it is abundant and the cost of producing any close substitutes for this oil. Easily accessible oil in places such as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria costs only a few dollars a barrel to pump once an oilfield is producing. Even including exploration expenses, the total cost of production of Opec oil is well below $10 a barrel.

However, the cost of any substitute runs to $50 or $60 a barrel, whether the Opec oil is replaced by oil from more hostile environments, such as deep-sea drilling in the Arctic, or by some other energy source such as nuclear or wind power. The gap between cheap Opec oil and any other energy source creates an enormous "rent", beyond any normal return on capital and costs of production, which either accrues to Opec as profits or to consumers as the benefit they enjoy from an energy source cheaper than any alternative in their own economies.

This rent, currently running at around $2 trillion annually, is at the heart of the perennial struggle between oil-producing and consuming governments. Either Western governments claim most of the rent for themselves by levying high taxes on domestic oil consumers, or Opec governments pocket most of the rent, as they are doing today.

But why shouldn’t this rent be distributed "fairly" or "rationally" by market forces? The answer lies in the second "market failure" inherent in the oil business – monopoly power. Because almost all of the world’s readily accessible oil is concentrated in a handful of nations, they have been able to achieve almost total monopoly power through Opec. With the supply of oil controlled by a monopoly, there is nothing "efficient" about the level of prices set in the market; and the competition between producers and consumers inevitably becomes an issue of politics, rather than economics.

The rational response of Western governments to this monopoly power is to lower the cost of energy substitutes by accelerating technological advances and increasing economies of scale. This can be done by imposing very high taxes on oil consumption to guarantee high profits for producers of non-oil fuels. At the same time, such taxes can ensure that most of the rent earned from the difference between consumer prices and Opec production costs stays in Western treasuries instead of going to producer governments.

The use of tax policy to capture rents for Western governments would be particularly effective if combined with regulations designed to prevent money being poured into speculative markets for "paper oil" – which brings us to the third reason why price signals are misleading in the market for oil.

The gap between physical trading in oil and the paper markets in oil futures and oil-company shares raises all sorts of financial anomalies. One is the ramping-up of oil prices by institutional investors. Another is the strong incentive for Western oil companies to invest in oil exploration, which is inherently inefficient, when competing with low-cost state-owned producers, instead of investing in new technologies to replace oil, where Western economies have a comparative advantage over Opec.

As a result of these perverse incentives, Western energy executives invariably insist that there is no plausible alternative to oil. For example, Rex Tillerson, chairman of Exxon, remarked last year that he wasn’t interested in biofuel research because "I don’t have a lot of technology to add to moonshine". Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, wrote a few weeks ago that "humankind remains dependent on fossil fuels" because renewable sources now account for only 2 per cent of global energy use. This is hardly surprising, since companies such as BP and Exxon have no special skills in nuclear power, wind turbines or photovoltaics, and they have strong vested interests in political and fiscal support to explore for oil in ever more difficult and hostile regions of the world. But such support cannot be economically justified since Opec will always have an unbeatable comparative advantage in producing oil.

If Western governments play their cards correctly, people such as Mr Tillerson and Mr Hayward will be proved wrong – and ironically Sheikh Yamani will eventually be proved right. The world will wean itself off oil long before the sands of Saudi Arabia run dry.

(by anatole kaletsky, the Times, 3July, 2008)

Soixante ans après la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme, l’adjectif "universelle" est-il toujours valable ? Des pays émergents comme la Chine, la Russie, et certains, dans le monde musulman, font valoir des visions différentes de celle de l’Occident…

Il y a une fracture, en partie héritée de la guerre froide : les pays en développement ont favorisé les droits économiques et sociaux, tandis que les pays occidentaux ont toujours mis l’accent sur les droits civils et politiques. Il est significatif que la Chine ait ratifié le Pacte sur les droits économiques et sociaux, et non celui sur les droits civils et politiques, tandis que les Etats-Unis ont fait l’inverse. Mais la principale difficulté vient aujourd’hui d’un autre facteur : l’essor des religions, la force des voix religieuses. On entend dire : "Ce sont peut-être des droits universels, mais ils sont séculaires, ils entrent en conflit avec des traditions religieuses, il faut donc les ajuster."

Face à cette atteinte à l’universalité des droits de l’homme au nom d’un relativisme culturel ou religieux, la solution est de mener le débat avec les bons interlocuteurs. Non pas avec, d’un côté, les ambassadeurs des pays de l’Organisation de la Conférence islamique, et de l’autre, ceux de l’Union européenne. Mais en demandant à des femmes musulmanes, par exemple, car elles ont beaucoup à dire sur la façon de concilier convictions religieuses et droits. Il faut aussi ramener le débat à une dimension juridique, et non politique. Suggérer qu’il y a un grand conflit entre liberté d’expression et liberté de religion est un faux débat. La question est : "Quelles sont les limites raisonnables à la liberté d’expression dans une société libre et démocratique ?"

Comment la "guerre contre le terrorisme" a-t-elle affecté le combat pour les droits de l’homme ?

Les démocrates ont toléré beaucoup d’érosion des droits de l’homme ces dernières années, ouvrant tant de possibilités d’abus. Mais l’opinion a commencé à réagir. Ce qui s’est passé après le 11-Septembre, c’est qu’au lieu d’être placé devant la question : "Dans quelle mesure es-tu prêt à sacrifier un peu de ta liberté pour être plus en sécurité ?", on a entendu la question : "Dans quelle mesure es-tu prêt à sacrifier un peu plus de la liberté des autres pour être plus en sécurité ?" Cela a faussé l’équation. Les gouvernements parlent des terroristes comme s’ils étaient prédéterminés, alors que ce sont des présumés terroristes.

Par ailleurs, on a toléré de la part de nos gouvernements un niveau de secret inouï, soi-disant à des fins de sécurité de l’Etat. On découvrira peut-être dans dix ans seulement l’ampleur des abus. Mais la récente décision de la Cour suprême des Etats-Unis (reconnaissant le droit des prisonniers de Guantanamo à se défendre devant la justice civile fédérale) montre que, dans ce pays, le judiciaire a commencé à regagner le terrain qui lui appartient, et qui est celui de la garantie des libertés fondamentales.

Après la décennie des années 1990, marquée par certains progrès, comme le développement de la justice internationale, est-on aujourd’hui dans une phase de recul des droits de l’homme ?

Je ne suis pas certaine que ce soit le cas. Les acquis sont quand même assez importants. Les travaux de la Cour pénale internationale, ca marche ! C’est lent, mais on n’a reculé sur rien. Et il y a la doctrine de la "responsabilité de protéger", qui est une approche intéressante, très différente du droit d’ingérence humanitaire. Car un droit, c’est discrétionnaire, on peut y donner suite ou pas. Mais si on accepte une "responsabilité" d’intervenir, ce n’est plus discrétionnaire, c’est obligatoire.

La réaction internationale à la crise au Zimbabwe met-elle aux prises deux visions des droits de l’homme, l’une occidentale, l’autre non ?

Cette crise est perçue dans les pays occidentaux sous l’angle de la démocratie mise en morceaux, pervertie. Sur place, elle est vécue tout aussi intensément au plan économique et social, avec une inflation à 100 000 %, et des mouvements de réfugiés. Il y a des perceptions différentes. L’Afrique, les pays de la région en particulier, ne peuvent pas se prévaloir d’un grand succès au Zimbabwe. Il y a eu à un moment une faillite de l’engagement régional. Mais les pays africains ont aussi été forcés d’articuler des positions beaucoup plus respectueuses des droits de l’homme, beaucoup plus sensibles à la nécessité d’intervenir, même si ce n’est qu’au plan politique : ne pas fermer les yeux devant les abus.

Le phénomène des émeutes de la faim annonce-t-il une nouvelle phase dans la lutte pour les droits de l’homme ?

On ne va pas pouvoir continuer à accepter longtemps encore des inégalités aussi profondes et injustifiables entre les pays, et à l’intérieur des pays. Face à ces émeutes, le débat a porté sur les aspects économiques : protectionnisme, biocarburants, spéculation, etc. Mais moi, je dis : qu’en est-il du droit à l’alimentation, du droit à un niveau de vie adéquat ? C’est difficile d’articuler comme un droit fondamental, avec l’obligation des Etats à l’égard de leur propre population, et le droit à une assistance internationale. C’est l’enjeu du droit au développement. On a entendu les pays occidentaux se dire fermement engagés à prohiber le génocide… Mais quelle est la différence entre un gouvernement qui tue une partie de sa population et un gouvernement qui la laisse mourir de faim ou de maladie par négligence criminelle ? Il nous reste à mener une réflexion là-dessus. D’autant qu’un autre problème, je pense, va surgir à l’avenir : le droit à l’eau.

(Comments by Louise Arbour, presented by Natalie Nougayrède, June 27, 2008, Le Monde)

The Sharia debate: allowing British Muslims recourse to Islamic law would be a charter for male dominance and peer-group bullying. Sneakily, Britain’s first Muslim Minister, Shahid Malik, has ducked the critics that he will enrage in an interview to be broadcast on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme on Monday [July 7, 2008].

Knowing that the phrase he uses to describe the situation of British Muslims – "the Jews of Europe" – will make the headlines, he has put it in the mouths of others. "If you ask Muslims today what do they feel like," he says, "they feel like the Jews of Europe." He does not say if he thinks that they are right.

I’ll respond in the Malik method. If you asked most non-Muslims what they feel about the suggestion, they would say that it was disgraceful, outrageous and insulting.

Mr Malik’s assessment of how some British Muslims feel may be accurate; but they are wrong. Race is not the issue. Unless we face up honestly to the incompatibilities between aspects of the ways of life of some (not all) Muslim groups in Britain, and the British mainstream culture, we shall find ourselves babbling about racism when the issue has less to do with race than with culture.

That is why I thought the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, in a careful speech at the East London Muslim Centre on Thursday, slid too quickly over the trickiest parts of his argument. He was discussing the application of Sharia in England and Wales.

The speech has been variously reported as anything from a gentle warning to cultural separatists within Islam, to a craven endorsement of the compromising speech about Sharia made by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, last year. Lord Phillips took as his theme and title Equality Before the Law. This was shrewder than it was brave.

"Equality" is a dummy concept in the philosophy of law. Here it allowed both speaker and audience to overlook real differences between them, because everyone is in favour of equality. But Lord Phillips was wrong to say that only recently has English law developed a respect for equality. Common Law and Statute have always regarded everyone as "equal before the law", but depending on who and what you are and what you’ve done, your rights may differ. A cat burglar and a householder are not equal before the law. An under-age teenager and an adult, a British citizen and an illegal immigrant, are not equal. An in-catchment-area and out-of-catchment-area parent are not (in their children’s access to a local school) equal. It’s all a question of category; the categories of citizen that our laws create do and must create differences – inequalities – in the rights of individuals.

The only interesting question is whether these inequalities are fair and in the public interest. This must depend on moral and cultural standpoints, which change over time. The argument about "equality" for (say) women who wanted the right to vote, gays who want the right to marry, slaves who wanted to be free, or convicted paedophiles who want the right to be considered for employment in children’s homes, has only and always been about the suitability of these categories to enjoy the rights urged for them; not whether the law should be "equal".

No more than English law does even the most brutal Sharia advocate "inequality". It simply reflects a cultural belief that women are different. Lord Phillips ducked that by taking equality as his theme.

He ducked again by denying that Dr Williams had said anything surprising. He reminded his audience (as Dr Williams had) that it is possible under English law for groups to agree on whatever rulebook (or adjudicator) they like, and that Sharia cannot be excluded from the available range of rulebooks.

That apparently bland reminder steers round some serious difficulties about jurisdictions-within-a-jurisdiction. The key paragraph in Lord Phillips’s speech is this: "A point that the Archbishop was making was that it was possible for individuals voluntarily to conduct their lives in accordance with Sharia principles without this being in conflict with the rights guaranteed by our law. To quote him again ‘the refusal of a religious believer to act upon the legal recognition of a right is not, given the plural character of society, a denial to anyone inside or outside the community of access to that right’."

There are two statements here, both doubtful. It is by no means certain that a group of individuals may voluntarily conduct themselves according to Sharia without breaking English law. It depends what Sharia says. We are not free under English law to agree (however willingly) to break English law. We may not agree to discriminate on racial or (usually) on religious grounds against third parties or even each other. A woman may not agree to accept diminished employment rights. We may not agree to punish each other (as elsewhere Phillips acknowledges) unlawfully. Without a clear account of what Sharia demands, Lord Phillips cannot know.

But the second claim that Lord Phillips endorses is more dangerous. Decoded, Dr Williams is saying that in a multicultural society it is fine for people within a culture to agree not to exercise certain rights, even if English law would allow them to.

This is a charter for male dominance. It’s a charter for cultural bullying; for peer-group pressurising; for self-oppression. It’s a charter against women and teenagers who cannot make wholly free choices because they have nowhere else to go; a charter against individuals whose circumstances have made it difficult to think outside the cultural box; a charter for discreet duress. I am sorry to hear the Lord Chief Justice endorsing it.

Public policy in Britain, however cloudy a thing, goes wider than law but informs the law and lawmaking. Make no bones about what 21st-century British public policy thinks of arranged marriage, the subjection and seclusion of women, unequal divorce and property arrangements within marriage, preaching hatred against apostasy, or the ostracising of homosexuals.

Public policy dislikes these things. Sometimes the State legislates to discourage them. Sometimes the State stands back.

Whether or when to intervene will in the end depend on no clear doctrine, but on a general understanding that things must not be allowed to get out of hand. How widespread, how deep, how harmful and how infectious are bad cultural attitudes, will ultimately be the decider.

Neither the Archbishop nor Lord Phillips do any service to public policy by seeming to encourage a recourse to religious rulebooks that runs against the modern British grain.

It made me sad to note that Lord Phillips began his speech by describing his maternal grandparents’ arrival in Britain in 1903, Sephardic Jews who eloped from Alexandria and their families’ attitudes "because they understood that England was a country in which they would enjoy freedom". How fortunate that the attitudes they were escaping did not pursue them here with "voluntary" codes pushed forward by a "shared" culture whose compelling nature is more insidious in reality than it seems in law.

(by matthew parris, the Times, July 5, 2008)

What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience.

The author underwent the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist-not inflict-it.

Here is the most chilling way I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, "waterboarding" was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as sere (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.

Exploring this narrow but deep distinction, on a gorgeous day last May I found myself deep in the hill country of western North Carolina, preparing to be surprised by a team of extremely hardened veterans who had confronted their country’s enemies in highly arduous terrain all over the world. They knew about everything from unarmed combat to enhanced interrogation and, in exchange for anonymity, were going to show me as nearly as possible what real waterboarding might be like.

It goes without saying that I knew I could stop the process at any time, and that when it was all over I would be released into happy daylight rather than returned to a darkened cell. But it’s been well said that cowards die many times before their deaths, and it was difficult for me to completely forget the clause in the contract of indemnification that I had signed. This document (written by one who knew) stated revealingly:

"Water boarding" is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.

As the agreement went on to say, there would be safeguards provided "during the ‘water boarding’ process, however, these measures may fail and even if they work properly they may not prevent Hitchens from experiencing serious injury or death."

On the night before the encounter I got to sleep with what I thought was creditable ease, but woke early and knew at once that I wasn’t going back to any sort of doze or snooze. The first specialist I had approached with the scheme had asked my age on the telephone and when told what it was (I am 59) had laughed out loud and told me to forget it. Waterboarding is for Green Berets in training, or wiry young jihadists whose teeth can bite through the gristle of an old goat. It’s not for wheezing, paunchy scribblers. For my current "handlers" I had had to produce a doctor’s certificate assuring them that I did not have asthma, but I wondered whether I should tell them about the 15,000 cigarettes I had inhaled every year for the last several decades. I was feeling apprehensive, in other words, and beginning to wish I hadn’t given myself so long to think about it.

I have to be opaque about exactly where I was later that day, but there came a moment when, sitting on a porch outside a remote house at the end of a winding country road, I was very gently yet firmly grabbed from behind, pulled to my feet, pinioned by my wrists (which were then cuffed to a belt), and cut off from the sunlight by having a black hood pulled over my face. I was then turned around a few times, I presume to assist in disorienting me, and led over some crunchy gravel into a darkened room. Well, mainly darkened: there were some oddly spaced bright lights that came as pinpoints through my hood. And some weird music assaulted my ears. (I’m no judge of these things, but I wouldn’t have expected former Special Forces types to be so fond of New Age techno-disco.) The outside world seemed very suddenly very distant indeed.

Arms already lost to me, I wasn’t able to flail as I was pushed onto a sloping board and positioned with my head lower than my heart. (That’s the main point: the angle can be slight or steep.) Then my legs were lashed together so that the board and I were one single and trussed unit. Not to bore you with my phobias, but if I don’t have at least two pillows I wake up with acid reflux and mild sleep apnea, so even a merely supine position makes me uneasy. And, to tell you something I had been keeping from myself as well as from my new experimental friends, I do have a fear of drowning that comes from a bad childhood moment on the Isle of Wight, when I got out of my depth. As a boy reading the climactic torture scene of 1984, where what is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world, I realize that somewhere in my version of that hideous chamber comes the moment when the wave washes over me. Not that that makes me special: I don’t know anyone who likes the idea of drowning. As mammals we may have originated in the ocean, but water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element. In brief, when it comes to breathing, give me good old air every time.

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it "simulates" the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning-or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The "board" is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and-as you might expect-inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

This is because I had read that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, invariably referred to as the "mastermind" of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, had impressed his interrogators by holding out for upwards of two minutes before cracking. (By the way, this story is not confirmed. My North Carolina friends jeered at it. "Hell," said one, "from what I heard they only washed his damn face before he babbled.") But, hell, I thought in my turn, no Hitchens is going to do worse than that. Well, O.K., I admit I didn’t outdo him. And so then I said, with slightly more bravado than was justified, that I’d like to try it one more time. There was a paramedic present who checked my racing pulse and warned me about adrenaline rush. An interval was ordered, and then I felt the mask come down again. Steeling myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, "Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water." I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

(by christopher hitchens, Vanity Fair, August 2008)

An Afghan government investigation has concluded that 45 women and children and two men were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan last Sunday [July 6, 2008].

The nine-man investigation team appointed by the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, found that only civilians were hit during the airstrike.

Burhanullah Shinwari, the leader of the investigation team and the deputy speaker of Afghanistan’s Upper House, said: "We found that 47 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in the airstrikes and another nine were wounded."

The claims of civilian casualties were initially strongly rebutted by the US military. A US military statement released last Sunday claimed: "intelligence revealed a large group of militants operating in Deh Bala district. Coalition forces identified the militants in a mountainous region and used precision air strikes to kill them."

This morning, a military spokesman said that a separate US investigation into the incident was ongoing.

A US military spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Rumi Nielson-Green, told The Times: "We don’t have a position on this. There is an ongoing investigation, which has not concluded yet. Any loss of civilian life is tragic and we go to great lengths to avoid civilian deaths. Certainly, I can say that no civilians were targeted."

Local officials in Deh Bala produced graphic testimony of what they said was a bomb strike on a party of around 70 or 80 civilians accompanying a wedding party on foot.

The Governor of Deh Bala, Haji Amishah Gul, told The Times: "The attack happened at 6.30am. Just two of the dead are men, the rest are women and children. The bride is among the dead."

Injured civilians later arrived at the main hospital in Jalalabad, repeating claims that a wedding party had been hit near the village of Ka Chona.

One of the injured, who identified himself as Kerate, said that a group of around 70 people, mostly women, were escorting the bride to meet her groom, as local tradition dictates. He said: "We were bombed. I couldn’t figure out what had happened and I went unconscious. When I woke up, I saw lots of people killed and injured."

The incident in Deh Bala came two days after another claim that US forces killed 15 civilians during an airstrike on two vehicles in the province of Nuristan. A charity, the International Medical Corps (IMC), reported the deaths of three of its medical workers in the incident. A statement on the IMC website said that they died with local villagers while trying to flee fighting in Waygal Dstrict after US forces issued a warning to local people to evacuate the area. US military officials said an investigation into the incident was still ongoing.

Civilian deaths are a deeply emotive issue amongst ordinary Afghans and one on which President Karzai has directly criticised Western forces on numerous occasions.

An early public relations disaster for Western forces was the bombing of a wedding party in Uruzgan Province in July 2002 after US pilots mistook celebratory gunfire for an attack.

Figures released at the end of June by the United Nations claimed that around 700 Afghan civilians lost their lives in the first half of the year in violence, an increase of around two thirds on the same period last year.

(by tom coghlan, The Times, July 11, 2008)

Koka has had a Nato makeover. As he stares out from a British poster in Musa Qala, tending a wounded civilian, it is not just his beard and hair – once more reminiscent of a Barbary Corsair than a police commander – that have been trimmed and combed. His whole past has been reinvented.

"We’re lucky to have Koka here," Captain Chris Howard, the British psychological operations officer who produced the poster, said. "We’ve kind of turned him into a celebrity."

Other posters decorating the bazaar’s notice board have superimposed a photo of Koka and his men receiving their police training certificates on to a cinema screen. The seated audience is Western. "They are not actors. They are real policemen now," the caption elaborates.

Musa Qala’s farmers and tradesmen could be forgiven for thinking that their police chief’s career is indeed celebrity news. Yet his past makes him an unlikely choice as a real policeman in Musa Qala, the Helmand town recaptured from the Taleban in December, and Koka’s fate is something of a test case for Britain’s stabilisation efforts in the province.

Koka – real name Abdul Wali Khan – served a 14-month sentence in Bagram jail, north of Kabul, where he was imprisoned by the Americans for suspected insurgent involvement after the Taleban were ousted in 2001.

Released, he reappeared as a militia commander and lawman for the Afghan Government in Musa Qala, where by 2006 his tenure was marked by allegations of human rights abuses, killings and robberies.

"The last time he was here he used to kill people all the time on orders," Mullah Salaam, Musa Qala’s Governor, said yesterday. "And he took $20,000 (£10,000) a day in opium taxes. There were so many people killed in Musa Qala, either by his militia or the Taleban."

The behaviour of Koka’s militia so inflamed tensions that many locals chose to support the Taleban, who later captured the town. After that, there was scant evidence that he might have reformed.

A senior UN official, speaking to The Times on condition of anonymity, cited Koka’s direct involvement in an April 2007 massacre of 40 civilians in a Helmand village southwest of Lashkar Gar, where his militia conducted operations against the Taleban.

However, after the recapture of Musa Qala by Nato and government forces eight months ago, rumours of Koka’s reappointment as police chief grew. Locals and British officers alike seemed unambiguous in their opposition to the move.

Nevertheless, Koka was reinstated three months ago after pressure from the Interior Ministry and the Afghan Army. His men are with him. Haji Lala, his deputy, estimated that 75 per cent of Koka’s 220-strong police force were made up from his 2006 militia.

"They are never going to be Strathclyde Police," remarked Sergeant Don Wilson, of the 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, who has been mentoring Koka’s police. "But the Taleban are afraid of them. And people respect him. Anything goes wrong and he’s the first one there."

The shadows of history stretch long in Helmand however. "Some people may forget Koka’s actions last time he was here," another police official said. "Or they may support him because of his new power. But not everyone will forget his behaviour, the killings, robbery and burning of shops, whatever the posters and pictures now."

(by anthony loyd, The Times,  July 11, 2008)

President George W Bush has told the Israeli government that he may be prepared to approve a future military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations with Tehran break down, according to a senior Pentagon official.

Despite the opposition of his own generals and widespread scepticism that America is ready to risk the military, political and economic consequences of an airborne strike on Iran, the president has given an "amber light" to an Israeli plan to attack Iran’s main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties, the official told The Sunday Times.

"Amber means get on with your preparations, stand by for immediate attack and tell us when you’re ready," the official said. But the Israelis have also been told that they can expect no help from American forces and will not be able to use US military bases in Iraq for logistical support.

Nor is it certain that Bush’s amber light would ever turn to green without irrefutable evidence of lethal Iranian hostility. Tehran’s test launches of medium-range ballistic missiles last week were seen in Washington as provocative and poorly judged, but both the Pentagon and the CIA concluded that they did not represent an immediate threat of attack against Israeli or US targets.

"It’s really all down to the Israelis," the Pentagon official added. "This administration will not attack Iran. This has already been decided. But the president is really preoccupied with the nuclear threat against Israel and I know he doesn’t believe that anything but force will deter Iran."

The official added that Israel had not so far presented Bush with a convincing military proposal. "If there is no solid plan, the amber will never turn to green," he said.

There was also resistance inside the Pentagon from officers concerned about Iranian retaliation. "The uniform people are opposed to the attack plans, mainly because they think it will endanger our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan," the source said.

Complicating the calculations in both Washington and Tel Aviv is the prospect of an incoming Democratic president who has already made it clear that he prefers negotiation to the use of force.

Senator Barack Obama’s previous opposition to the war in Iraq, and his apparent doubts about the urgency of the Iranian threat, have intensified pressure on the Israeli hawks to act before November’s US presidential election. "If I were an Israeli I wouldn’t wait," the Pentagon official added.

The latest round of regional tension was sparked by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which fired nine long and medium-range missiles in war game manoeuvres in the Gulf last Wednesday.

Iran’s state-run media reported that one of them was a modified Shahab-3 ballistic missile, which has a claimed range of 1,250 miles and could theoretically deliver a one-ton nuclear warhead over Israeli cities. Tel Aviv is about 650 miles from western Iran. General Hossein Salami, a senior Revolutionary Guard commander, boasted that "our hands are always on the trigger and our missiles are ready for launch".

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, said she saw the launches as "evidence that the missile threat is not an imaginary one", although the impact of the Iranian stunt was diminished on Thursday when it became clear that a photograph purporting to show the missiles being launched had been faked.

The one thing that all sides agree on is that any strike by either Iran or Israel would trigger a catastrophic round of retaliation that would rock global oil markets, send the price of petrol soaring and wreck the progress of the US military effort in Iraq.

Abdalla Salem El-Badri, secretary-general of Opec, the oil producers’ consortium, said last week that a military conflict involving Iran would see an "unlimited" rise in prices because any loss of Iranian production – or constriction of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz – could not be replaced. Iran is Opec’s second-largest producer after Saudi Arabia.

Equally worrying for Bush would be the impact on the US mission in Iraq, which after years of turmoil has seen gains from the military "surge" of the past few months, and on American operations in the wider region. A senior Iranian official said yesterday that Iran would destroy Israel and 32 American military bases in the Middle East in response to any attack.

Yet US officials acknowledge that no American president can afford to remain idle if Israel is threatened. How genuine the Iranian threat is was the subject of intense debate last week, with some analysts arguing that Iran might have a useable nuclear weapon by next spring and others convinced that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is engaged in a dangerous game of bluffing – mainly to impress a domestic Iranian audience that is struggling with economic setbacks and beginning to question his leadership.

Among the sceptics is Kenneth Katzman, a former CIA analyst and author of a book on the Revolutionary Guard. "I don’t subscribe to the view that Iran is in a position to inflict devastating damage on anyone," said Katzman, who is best known for warning shortly before 9/11 that terrorists were planning to attack America.

"The Revolutionary Guards have always underperformed militarily," he said. "Their equipment is quite inaccurate if not outright inoperable. Those missile launches were more like putting up a ‘beware of the dog’ sign. They want everyone to think that if you mess with them, you will get bitten."

A former adviser to Rice noted that Ahmadinejad’s confrontational attitude had earned him powerful enemies among Iran’s religious leadership. Professor Shai Feldman, director of Middle East studies at Brandeis University, said the Iranian government was getting "clobbered" because of global economic strains. "His [Ahmadinejad's] failed policies have made Iran more vulnerable to sanctions and people close to the mullahs have decided he’s a liability," he said.

In Israel, Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, has his own domestic problems with a corruption scandal that threatens to unseat him and the media have been rife with speculation that he might order an attack on Iran to distract attention from his difficulties. According to one of his closest friends, Olmert recently warned him that "in three months’ time it will be a different Middle East".

Yet even the most hawkish officials acknowledge that Israel would face what would arguably be the most challenging military mission of its 60-year existence.

"No one here is talking about more than delaying the [nuclear] programme," said the Pentagon source. He added that Israel would need to set back the Iranians by at least five years for an attack to be considered a success.

Even that may be beyond Israel’s competence if it has to act alone. Obvious targets would include Iran’s Isfahan plant, where uranium ore is converted into gas, the Natanz complex where this gas is used to enrich uranium in centrifuges and the plutonium-producing Arak heavy water plant. But Iran is known to have scattered other elements of its nuclear programme in underground facilities around the country. Neither US nor Israeli intelligence is certain that it knows where everything is.

"Maybe the Israelis could start off the attack and have us finish it off," Katzman added. "And maybe that has been their intention all along. But in terms of the long-term military campaign that would be needed to permanently suppress Iran’s nuclear programme, only the US is perceived as having that capability right now."

(uzi mahnaimi and tony allen-mills, The Sunday Times, July 13, 2008)

China and Russia seldom do the right thing at the United Nations, but on Friday [July 11] they vetoed an economic war on Zimbabwe. They are also balking a similar war on Iran. Whatever their motives, they are right. Sanctions are an ineffective, or worse a counterproductive, weapon of interstate aggression.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, yesterday called the veto a "severe blow . . . to timely and decisive security council action". Sanctions are never timely or decisive. They are a political demonstration. While the decision will be greeted with glee by Robert Mugabe, Britain’s UN ambassador, John Sawers, should never have proposed them as offering the Zimbabwean people "an end in sight to their miseries". They offer no such thing.

Unlike war, which is violence aimed at conquering and replacing a regime, merely engineering a shift in terms of trade is play-acting. As a gesture of soft power, sanctions were first imposed on Italy during the Abyssinian crisis of 1935 and did not work. Yet their appeal is undiminished. Macho in rhetoric yet painless to the imposing nation, they replace guns and bombs with trade returns and computers.

History offers one generalisation: that sanctions add longevity to anyone on whom the West imposes them.The most sanctioned leaders of the past half-century have been Fidel Castro, Colonel Gadaffi, Saddam Hussein, Aya-tollah Khomeini, the Taliban, the Burmese generals and the rulers of North Korea. None was brought down by them. Where intervention was effective, as in the Falklands, Haiti, Afghanistan, Serbia and Iraq, it required force.

Nothing is more arrogant than a powerful nation’s belief in the efficacy of all it does. If a sanction is imposed and does not achieve its goal, it was not tough enough. If the goal does occur, then its sanctions must have been the cause. Such is the West’s omnipotence that lesser states must always be dancing to its tune. Whenever there is trouble in the world, said Kipling, "An’ then comes up the Regiment an’ pokes the ‘eathen out" – even if the regiment is nowadays a trade regulator.

Students of sanctions remain mystified by their appeal. They are near impossible to make leak-proof and just establish more costly and corrupt conduits of trade. Kofi Annan of the UN calls them a "blunt and even counterproductive instrument".

The most detailed examination, by Richard Haass of the Brookings Institution for Congress in 1999, concluded that they were so blunt as "often to produce unintentional and undesirable consequences", such as strengthening the regime they were supposed to be undermining. Free trade economies are by their nature open and thus susceptible to pressure. Besieged ones are authoritarian and closed against pressure.

This has not stopped South Africa being constantly cited as a prize exhibit of the sanctions lobby. Through the 1980s that country experienced comprehensive (although not leak-proof) embargoes on trade and finance. This was indeed followed by regime change, albeit some 10 years later. It is true that financial sanctions and, later, disinvestment, complicated credit lines, but the central bank behaved responsibly in controlling money supply, unlike Zimbabwe’s. Ownership of foreign food, retail and car manufacturing shifted into Afrikaner hands. Profit was no longer exported to America and Europe.

Studying sanctions at the time, I concluded that they helped to prolong the white regime by as much as a decade, shifting power from more liberal to less liberal groups. Sanctions did not weaken the regime.

Ostracism hurt the pockets and the pride of many cosmopolitan South Africans – the sort westerners meet – but they did not hurt half as much as socialism hurt the rest of Africa. South Africa under sanctions was not poor in African terms. Its leaders decided in 1989-90 to transfer power peacefully to blacks, largely because they thought it was safe to do so. A body of white opinion found apartheid intellectually and morally unsupportable.

In so far as South Africa felt under pressure it was not economic but military. As long as Nelson Mandela was in prison he was a catalyst for terrorism, as was the presence of hostile regimes along the northern border. Sanctions "worked" only for those outside the country, such as America’s Jesse Jackson, determined to cast themselves as agents and heroes of change. They were as patronising as they were wrong.

Sanctions may not make a country wealthy in the longer term, but they can make a regime more secure in the short one. They also enrich its ruling elite. Sanctions made Saddam the sixth richest man in the world and Serbia’s Milosevic the king of a mafia organisation. They are pouring money into the pockets of the cronies of Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahma-dinejad and the Burmese generals.

The recent drift from general sanctions into "smart" ones is a measure of their futility. But smart sanctions are no less absurd. In South Africa the exclusion from Test matches did not lead Afrikaners to vote for progressive MPs. The idea that Mugabe might decide to stand down because his wife cannot shop at Harrods is like imagining the Iranian mullahs crying over their exclusion from the Rue St-Honoré.

The threat of economic siege drives a nation towards state power, as does the threat of terrorism in the West. It makes governments behave more not less repressively and the populace become more not less dependent on it. The middle-class customary reservoir of opposition to dictatorship is debilitated and driven into exile, as happened in Iran and Iraq.

That impoverishing the poor and inconveniencing the rich somehow leads to bloody revolution must be the most brainless concept ever to pollute international relations. People rarely rise up and topple governments and if they do it is at the point of a gun, usually their own. Violence works. Economics does not.

The appeal of sanctions is that they are a quick answer to public opinion demanding that "something must be done", something that does not mean body bags. They are war by other means, bloodcurdling but not bloodthirsty. But they are cowards’ war because those they hurt, usually the poor, are also defenceless. Zimbabwe’s sanctions are inducing its regime to ensure that only its supporters have food. That may make our Foreign Office feel better but what good does it do?

The last desperate cry of the sanctions lobby is: if not sanctions, what? It is as if any gesture were better than none. The truth is that if you want to overthrow a regime you should do it, as the Victorians did. If not, stop pretending.

In 1925, after the great war, the international community outlawed chemical weapons as repellent even in total war. The agreement was remarkably successful, at least until Saddam’s day. So too was a similar revulsion against nuclear weapons after Hiroshima. There is honour even among warmongers.

Perhaps one day economic sanctions, a weapon of international conflict that uniquely attacks civilians, might also be removed from the arsenal.

(by simon jenkins, The Sunday Times, July 13, 2008)

A magazine recently ran a "Dilbert Quotes" contest. They were looking for people to submit quotes from their real-life Dilbert-type managers. The following were voted the top ten quotes in corporate America:

"As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday, and employees will receive their cards in two weeks." (This was the winning quote from Fred Dales, Microsoft Corp. in Redmond WA )

"What I need is an exact list of specific unknown problems we might encounter."
(Lykes Lines Shipping)

"E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be used only for company business." (Accounting manager, Electric Boat Company)

As the fading light of a dying day filtered through the window blinds, Roger stood over his victim with a smoking .45, surprised at the serenity that filled him after pumping six slugs into the bloodless tyrant that mocked him day after day, and then he shuffled out of the office with one last look back at the shattered computer terminal lying there like a silicon armadillo left to rot on the information superhighway.

- Larry Brill, Austin, Texas (1994 Winner)

The first half of the year is over, and now all those brokerage accounts and retirement accounts will be sending out statements to hapless account holders, and it is bad news in spades. This is why (I assume) the Plunge Protection Team (composed of the US Federal Reserve, the Treasury and bank insiders) tried to drive the stock markets up on Monday, June 30 – to make those account statements look not quite as bad, and, hopefully, prevent people from dumping all of their stock and bond holdings in a desperate attempt to save something before the whole idiotic, fiat-currency, unlimited-fractional-banking thing just collapses.

Perhaps this drop in the market averages (as demand overwhelms supply) is what prompted John Williams at shadowstats.com to write, "Overhanging the markets for a number of years has been the question as to when the major holders of excess US dollars in the global financial system might look to dump those holdings. An opportunity for that dumping is at hand."

The reason is that "Most central banks know that their unwanted dollar hoards are going to generate long-term losses, but the oil markets have opened up an opportunity to mitigate some of those losses. For the rest of the world, dollar dumping now would reduce inflation risks outside the United States."

This means that "Over the longer term, US equities, bonds and the greenback should suffer terribly, while gold and silver prices should boom."

And it is not just him and me that are so gloomy, but a new study from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) noted that a plunge in the dollar "may happen", as the dollar has slid 14% against the euro in the past year, handing foreign investors in US dollar assets "big losses measured in dollars, and still bigger ones measured in their own currency", and which is making people so nervous that "a sudden rush for the exits cannot be ruled out completely."

Bob Janjuah, analyst at the Royal Bank of Scotland, has also advised clients that "A very nasty period is soon to be upon us – be prepared," which goes along with that bank’s warning that inflation has paralyzed the world’s central banks, and that of a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months looks more and more likely.

And the stupid banks (always the cause of all of economic troubles) are suffering from their own stupidity, and Bill Buckler of The-Privateer.com newsletter notes that "US banks have suffered US$391 billion of losses and write-downs from mortgage-related securities since the start of 2007, according to the data compiled by Bloomberg. US banks could lose another $300 billion on real estate loans during the year ahead."

What makes this $691 billion loss so special is that "such losses could jeopardize balance sheets because the US banking system had only $1,350 billion of equity capital". Hahaha! They’ve lost two-thirds of the banks capital! Hahaha! Morons!

Since all things are connected to all things, he says, "The sum of it all is that the entire US banking and financial system is so threadbare, fragile and short of capital that a collapse or crash in one place could knock the underpinnings out from under several other US financial sectors which would take even more down with them. A systemic crash – at any time – is today a distinct possibility."

This is all in addition to the fact that morons who have kept investing in the American stock market are suffering losses, proving once again that the majority of investors must lose money over the long term. Spengler at atimes.com notes that when he says, "American equity markets show no real capital gains since 1997. That is, an American who bought the equivalent of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index at $954 in January 1997 and sold today at $1,278 would have exactly the same number of inflation-adjusted dollars." Mr Spengler concludes, "My advice to individual investors? Invest in some popcorn, because the next six months will be something to watch." (See How to stop the Great Crash of ‘08, Asia Times Online, July 1, 2008.)

Jim Sinclair of jsmineset.com is more humorously laconic when he says, "You can be sure something really stupid is about to happen."

He might have been referring to me, but I am usually stupid to start with, and so why would he just be mentioning it now? So, I think he means something more sinister. Much more sinister. And ugly.

(by The Mogambo Guru, July 10, 2008. Copyright 2008, The Daily Reckoning. Richard Daughty is general partner and senior executive for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the editor of The Mogambo Guru economic newsletter – an exercise to heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it.)

[with grateful thanks to Jim Szpajcher]