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[crippled_avenger]

Shock Wave (Anti) Warrior?




From Future Shock to The Third Wave?
to his new book War and Anti-War,?
Alvin Toffler has been shocking us?
with his descriptions of the future.?


?By Peter Schwartz?







....../....

PS:


I'll just give you a really practical example. The other day a donor came in. She was perfect in every way, except her mother had been a serious alcoholic. Is this alcoholism inheritable? Is it genetic? Does she warn the receiving mother?


AT:


I'll tell you what I think hangs in the balance of all of this.?


For 300 years we have had a scientific ethos?
that says "information is good" -?
and the more we know the better.?


I believe we're heading into an era?
when there's going to be enormous pressure to block out,?
to prevent further development?
of certain kinds of knowledge.


PS:


Well, we already have it. ....../......


PS:


I found the title of your new book intriguing: War and Anti-War?


AT:


The thesis is very simple. The way you make war is the way you make wealth. If you change the way you make wealth, you inevitably change the way you make war. And if you change the way you make war, you ought to be thinking about changing the way you make peace.


War was initiated by the agrarian revolution, or in our terminology "the first wave of change." With the coming of the industrial revolution, particularly the French Revolution and Napoleon, you begin to get mass production, you begin to get mass conscription. You begin to get machine guns for the machine society. With mass production, you get mass destruction - industrialized warfare. And if we are now in the process of transforming the way we create wealth, from the industrial to the informational, or call it whatever you wish, there is a parallel change taking place with warfare, of which the Gulf War gives only the palest, palest little hint. The transition actually started back in the late-1970s, early-1980s, to a new form of warfare based on information superiority. It mirrors the way the economy has become information-dependent.


An important part of this will be?
what we call "knowledge strategies" -?
social knowledge strategies,?
national knowledge strategies,?


and so on.?


In military terms there will be attempts to coordinate all the knowledge- intensive activities of the military from education and training to high- precision weaponry to espionage to everything that involves the mind - propaganda - into coherent strategies.


PS:


What about anti-war?


AT:


The same thing has to happen to the way we make peace.?


More and more peace will depend?
on the acquisition, processing, dissemination,?
and control of knowledge.?


Whether we're talking about satellite surveillance of troop movements, or brain drains of nuclear scientists, or more refined sensors, knowledge is at the heart of peace.?




*? ?*? ?*



Here's just one example:?


It took two years for the United States?
to decide it ought to set up?


Radio Free Serbia.?


Instead of debating whether the world?
should send ground troops to the Balkans,?
or whether to use airstrikes,?
we should have been using information?
and information technology?


to strengthen the peace forces and moderates that exist in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia - but who have no access to the media.


PS:


So, instead of airdropping food, we ought to be airdropping -


AT:


We ought to be dropping receivers Transmitters.?
Laptops.?
Fax machines.?
Camcorders.?
Tape.?
We could have parked a transmitter right off the coast?
and bombarded the countryside with peace propaganda?


or at least?
moderating information.?


Or just plain news. Indeed, the question is, where the hell was CNN? Where the hell was NHK? Where was BBC? If they just broadcast into there -


*? ?*? ?*



PS:


Sure. Back in '87 I was interviewing Gorbachev's chief science advisor, Velakoff, and he was saying that his most important priority was getting enough satellite dishes distributed around the Soviet Union so that when the inevitable coup came, Moscow could no longer control the airwaves. And that is exactly what happened Exactly what happened. On the day of the coup in Moscow, they went for the TV station but it didn't matter any more. 'Cause you could get CNN everywhere.


But there's another side to all this, though, in terms of the war/anti-war issue. If you look around the world today, you can list approximately 51 significant conflicts going on somewhere at any given time. US military forces are active in about five places. But big conflict, big war seems to be a thing of the past. Are we in a new era of lots of persistent low-level conflicts, what could be called the?


"era of chaos wars"?


AT:


Well, look at it this way.?


We're going through a structural transformation -?
which you can call?


postmodern,?post-industrial,?
"the third wave,"?


whatever - and one of the characteristics of that change is the demassification of production. We go from "everything has to be the same" to custom production, small-run niche production.?


If you look at the marketplace,?
we go from mass distribution and mass markets?
to niche markets.?


And if you look at war?
we're going to niche economies and?
niche warfare.


PS:


But then if you carry the idea of niche wars further -


AT:


But, let me say we do not accept the idea that that means big wars are finished. And we do not accept the common assumption that there is a kind of zone of peace - that democracies don't fight. First of all,?


who says they stay democracies??


And second of all, democracies in the past have fought and democracies could fight in the future.


PS:


But, let's carry the metaphorical line of niche wars that you've laid out there a little further. One of the phenomena we see with the advent of information technology and markets is the ability to deal with smaller and smaller and smaller niches until we have what we think of as the segment of one.


AT:


That's right.?
And that segment of one?
will have his own nuke.


PS:


Well, so my question is, do we end up going the other way in the sense we won't target a country, we won't target a division, but?


we (do) target a military leader?


AT:


Exactly That's exactly what we say we didn't do vis-a-vis Saddam, but what we will do. In fact there is a kind of dialectic here. We've always believed that many of the changes that we identify as carrying us into a third-wave civilization, or whatever, actually re-create preindustrial conditions on a high-technology basis.?


And what you then see is individual assassination.?
That's the way the Medicis did it It creates a scary world,?
certainly not a serene and stable world.?
And it does look a lot more like chaos theory than it does like equilibrium.


One of the key concepts which should give every member of Congress and the President pause is the dominant belief that the US is and will remain the sole global military superpower. After the Gulf War it looked as though the US would have a 10- to 15-year lead. But the fact is, the more knowledge- intensive military action becomes, the more nonlinear it becomes; the more a small input someplace can neutralize an enormous investment. And having the right bit or byte of information at the right place at the right time, in India or in Turkistan or in God knows where, could neutralize an enormous amount of military power somewhere else. So it is no longer necessary to match battalion with battalion, tank with tank, in order to neutralize the other guy.


PS:


But that implies a level of sophistication on the part of the governments, the intelligence and military organizations, even the media organizations involved, that in most countries is rare.


AT:


Don't think in terms of countries. Think in terms of families. Think in terms of narco-traffickers. And think in terms of the very, very smart hacker sitting in Tehran.


PS:


Well, as you know, the Pentagon has become concerned with information war, but I think they've defined it fairly narrowly.


AT:


Yes, that's our thesis. But there is an untold history here.?


If you look at all of our big companies,?
they're trying to restructure like crazy.?


Not terribly many have been dramatically successful?
in going from demoralization?
to peak performance,?
but the US military has.


It's gone from the pits of post-Vietnam,?
drug-drenched, corrupt, bloated bureaucracy?
into an elegant force.








The Revolt of the Rich


PS:


My company [GBN] just completed a major study on the future of Asia. And one of our conclusions was that China figures so largely in whatever happens, you can't understand the future of Asia without understanding the future of China.


*? ?*? ?*



AT:


If that is the case, I think the future is very dire.


PS:


Dire in what sense?


AT:


Well, there is current euphoria about the growth of the Chinese economy. As I'm sure you know, The Economist recently did this 20-page pullout on China as the superpower of 2020. But our view is that linear trend extrapolation is the most treacherous form of forecasting. China-as- economic-superpower overlooks significant political, ethnic, and other issues. China's rise to superpowerdom might be the most probable future, but one must never ignore improbable futures. If an improbable future has massive impact, you'd better not ignore it just because it seems improbable.


PS:


Exactly. That's my business.


AT:


With the art of the long view, we should not look at China as it is today. And we should not assume that the transformation of China is a 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-year proposition.?


It took?
10 years after the death of Tito?
for Yugoslavia to explode.?


We cannot expect China ( or the Soviet Union ) -?
so much larger, much more complex -?
to settle down into some kind of stable?
political economic order in 10 years...... /.....?


*? ?*? ?*



We're looking at a really long period?
of potential instabilities.?


Potentially serious instabilities.


Look at China. The most rapidly growing regions like Guangdong are becoming electronically plugged in to Taiwan and Singapore. The third wave is there, and it's beginning to spread. You also have a lot of second wave muscle- based manufacturing still going on, and in agrarian regions like Guizhou you still have kids with swollen bellies. Like India and Brazil, China has all three civilizations within it pulling in different directions. And you have Beijing trying to keep control. Now, if I were sitting in southern China, and I spoke Cantonese and not Mandarin, just like the Taiwanese and the Singaporeans and the overseas Chinese, and some bureaucrat in Beijing said, "You're going to have to do such-and-such," I would say "Screw you " Which is in fact what they are saying?


Any attempt by Beijing?
to impose meaningful central control?
will lead to an explosion,?


and that could take?
many different forms.


PS:


Do you think that's a necessary thing?


AT:


No. I regard it as a low-probability scenario, but one that would be a terrible mistake to ignore.


PS:


Well, you know, if you look at Chinese history, one of the ways to see it is a kind of rhythm of control between Beijing and the provinces, over centuries of centralization and decentralization, not by design, but just simply by the accretion of power and the challenges against it. And that this may be a period where the power is moving away from Beijing and back out again.


AT:


I don't deny that pulsing at all. You can have this pulsing back and forth between centralization and decentralization in organizations, companies, countries, and cultures. The difference is this: It's not just Beijing and the provinces now. The provinces are now allied with Vancouver, and Los Angeles, and Indonesia, and so on. So, it doesn't work the same way.


There was, we were told, a novel by a Chinese author (who we believe is now in prison) that lays out the following scenario: Southern coastal China finds itself held back by Beijing and attempts to secede, allying itself with Taiwan and the overseas Chinese. That then leads to war, indeed nuclear war, as Beijing insists on maintaining its power.


The elites in the West have spent a century or two?
worrying about the revolt of the poor.?


But the next period is going to see a revolt of the rich.


Look at what happened to the Soviets. Ask yourself, who wanted to become independent and who wanted to stay? The regions and republics that wanted out were the Baltics, the Ukraine - those regions that were the most highly industrialized, the most developed, and the richest. Who wanted to stay? Kazakhstan, Turkistan, etc., etc., etc. The poor wanted in because Moscow was redistributing wealth to some degree, and the rich wanted out. They felt that Moscow was preventing their economic development.?


That is happening in Brazil today.?
You've got secessionist movements in the south,?
based in Porto Alegre.?


The southerners are saying, we produce more of the GNP, we pay more of the taxes. Who needs the rest of Brazil? And I believe that we're going to see that replicated in China.


PS:


So if China is not careful, the future of China will be the rich seceding from the poor in the rest of the country. What advice would you give the Chinese leadership now on how to manage this transition to the third wave with minimum stress?


AT:


I would say, keep your hands off the growing regions. They've got a very difficult and almost contradictory task. They've got to keep the peasants' situation improving and keep their hands off the growing parts of the economy. I think these are contradictory requirements. That was the magic of Deng Xiao Ping. When he first came in and talked about reform he said, we're going to pay off the peasants. Agricultural reform was Number One, allowing them to market some part of their goods. That made him extremely popular. Only then, after he had enormous political support from the peasantry, did he then say, and now we've got to cut down the military. Gorbachev began to cut down the military without having a base. He never had an agricultural policy that won him support. He never had an industrial policy. He had an anti-vodka campaign, which turned everybody against him!


But there's the whole underside of China, which is underreported and which is violent, which is seething with unrest, and which we never see because it's frequently out in the boondocks.?


There's a big invisible China.?


There are local provincial governments?
that are in the business of making rugs.?


And the way they do this is to create a barracks,?
and put 5,000 girls in the barracks.?
And the girls work seven days a week,?
and they do not get paid.?


They get a bed and they get three lousy meals.
I'm not talking about prison labor.?
I mean, this is slavery.?


The tendency is for the Western media to write about the success stories and the parts of China that they have easiest access to, and the part that they understand the best.


We all know that Asia is the driving force of the world economy.?


But what would happen?
if Asia stopped growing economically??
What would happen to Europe??
What would happen to the United States??


It would be disastrous?... / ...

[crippled_avenger]

Darfur conflict heralds era of wars
triggered by climate change - UN report warns

· Drought and advancing desert blamed for tensions
· Chad and southern Africa also at risk from warming

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
Saturday June 23, 2007
The Guardian


The conflict in Darfur has been driven by climate change and environmental degradation, which threaten to trigger a succession of new wars across Africa unless more is done to contain the damage, according to a UN report published yesterday.
"Darfur ... holds grim lessons for other countries at risk," an 18-month study of Sudan by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) concludes.

With rainfall down by up to 30% over 40 years and the Sahara advancing by well over a mile every year, tensions between farmers and herders over disappearing pasture and evaporating water holes threaten to reignite the half-century war between north and south Sudan, held at bay by a precarious 2005 peace accord.

The southern Nuba tribe, for example, have warned they could "restart the war" because Arab nomads - pushed southwards into their territory by drought - are cutting down trees to feed their camels.
The UNEP investigation into links between climate and conflict in Sudan predicts that the impact of climate change on stability is likely to go far beyond its borders. It found there could be a drop of up to 70% in crop yields in the most vulnerable areas of the Sahel, an ecologically fragile belt stretching from Senegal to Sudan. "It illustrates and demonstrates what is increasingly becoming a global concern," said Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director. "It doesn't take a genius to work out that as the desert moves southwards there is a physical limit to what [ecological] systems can sustain, and so you get one group displacing another."

He also pointed to incipient conflicts in Chad "at least in part associated with environmental changes", and to growing tensions in southern Africa fuelled by droughts and flooding.

Estimates of the dead from the Darfur conflict, which broke out in 2003, range from 200,000 to 500,000. The immediate cause was a regional rebellion, to which Khartoum responded by recruiting Arab militias, the janjaweed, to wage a campaign of ethnic cleansing against African civilians. The UNEP study suggests the true genesis of the conflict pre-dates 2003 and is to be found in failing rains and creeping desertification. It found that:

· The desert in northern Sudan has advanced southwards by 60 miles over the past 40 years;


· Rainfall has dropped by 16%-30%;


· Climate models for the region suggest a rise of between 0.5C and 1.5C between 2030 and 2060;


· Yields in the local staple, sorghum, could drop by 70%.


In the Washington Post, the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, argued: "Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur in a convenient military and political shorthand - an ethnic conflict pitting Arab militias against black rebels and farmers. Look to its roots, though, and you discover a more complex dynamic. Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change."

In turn, the Darfur conflict has exacerbated Sudan's environmental degradation, forcing more than two million people into refugee camps. Deforestation has been accelerated while underground aquifers are being drained.

A peace deal signed last year by rebels and the Khartoum government broke down, but this month President Omar al-Bashir said he would accept the deployment of a joint UN and African Union force. He has reneged on similar pledges, but UN diplomats are hopeful this one will stick. However, the UNEP report warns that no peace will last without sustained investment in containing environmental damage and adapting to climate change. Mr Steiner said: "Simply to return people to the situation there were in before is a high-risk strategy."

The G8 summit ended in Germany with consensus over the severity of the climate change problem but no agreement on how it should be contained.

A common approach is supposed to be negotiated under UN auspices at the end of the year.

[crippled_avenger]

SYNTHETIC life could be
just around the corner
(depending on what you mean by "synthetic")




Last week, genomics pioneer Craig Venter announced that his team has passed an important milestone in its efforts to create a bacterial cell whose genome is entirely synthetic -

constructed chemically from the building blocks of DNA.

Venter claims this goal could be achieved within months.

But while Venter's synthetic genome will be housed within an existing bacterial cell, other scientists are aiming for the even more ambitious target of building an entire living cell from the basic chemical ingredients. Giovanni Murtas of the Enrico Fermi Centre at the University of Rome 3, Italy, reported last week at the Synthetic Biology 3.0 meeting in Zurich, Switzerland, that his team had taken a step toward this goal by successfully synthesising proteins in cell-like compartments.

According to George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has devised a complete blueprint for a synthetic cell, an investment of around $10 million would be enough to turn the "bottom-up" dream into reality. "Our approach doesn't require any super new technology," he says.




Whichever definition of synthetic life you adopt,
it seems now to be a question of when rather than if.


"We are at the doorstep of being able to create life," -  


says Steen Rasmussen,
a physicist trying to create artificial living systems
at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Murtas and his team have managed to initiate the process of protein synthesis in cell-like self-assembling spheres bounded by lipid membranes, known as "liposomes". A similar feat was achieved in 2004 by Vincent Noireaux and Albert Libchaber of Rockefeller University in New York, but while they seeded their lipid vesicles with an extract of Escherichia coli bacterial cells, Murtas and his colleagues used a recipe of 37 enzymes and a range of smaller molecules to enable protein synthesis.

After drying lipid molecules onto the walls of a plastic tube, Murtas's team added the mix of enzymes and chemicals, plus the gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP). Some of the resulting liposomes subsequently made GFP for several hours.



This is clearly some way from a living cell,
and to obtain something indisputably alive
the genetic material needs to copy itself,
and the vesicles divide.


With this in mind, Murtas and his colleagues are trying to incorporate into their vesicles genes for enzymes that can form new lipids, which they hope will make the liposomes grow to the point that they split apart to form smaller daughter vesicles.

Murtas is interested in synthetic cells as a model of what happened when the earliest forms of life emerged. His team's achievement falls short of a true bottom-up construction because the recipe they used for protein synthesis had to include structures known as ribosomes, composed of RNA and proteins, which they obtained from E. coli. These "biochemical machines" direct protein synthesis, and to be truly synthetic a cell would have to include structures capable of a similar job that were assembled from their basic components.

"That is probably the biggest challenge," says Church. Though biochemists have been able to assemble ribosomes in the lab for some years, it has required high temperatures and harsh chemical conditions - not the sort of environment to be found in living cells.

But progress is being made, and last year Church, working with Tony Forster of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, published a detailed blueprint for assembling a synthetic cell from scratch (Molecular Systems Biology, DOI: 10.1038/msb4100090).

It includes 115 genes which would be combined with various biochemicals to make a self-assembling cell able to live under carefully controlled lab conditions. The details have still to be worked out, but Church believes there should be no fundamental barriers.

He sees the team's artificial organism becoming a workhorse for biotechnology that could be adapted to do useful tasks such as making complex biochemicals.

Despite the scope of Forster and Church's vision, it is Venter and his team who are grabbing the headlines.




They have been working for years
to develop a minimal genome containing less than 400 genes
but which nevertheless has everything it takes
to sustain a free-living cell.
They have investigated which genes are essential by a process of elimination: knocking out genes in the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, which itself has an exceptionally small genome. Venter ignited controversy last month by trying to patent the resulting minimal genome (New Scientist, 16 June, p 13),

Venter's next step will be to synthesise the minimal genome, and put it into a bacterial cell, and for this he needs a technique for replacing a bacterium's natural genome with a synthetic one. "It's really essential to what they want to do," says David Deamer, a biophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The novel "genome transplant" that Venter's team announced last week has proved in principle that they can do just that. The researchers, led by John Glass of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, managed to transfer the genome of Mycoplasma mycoides to a related parasite called Mycoplasma capricolum. Both species infect goats, sheep and cows. Judging from the proteins they produced, the resulting cells seem to have been completely transformed into M. mycoides (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1144622).

The team took a strain of M. mycoides resistant to the antibiotic tetracycline, broke open the cells and then used enzymes to digest away their proteins, leaving its circular chromosomes intact. Next, they incubated these chromosomes with M. capricolum cells in a culture medium containing a polymer called polyethylene glycol (PEG).

PEG makes cell membranes fuse, and the researchers speculate that some M. capricolum cells fuse together, encapsulating an M. mycoides chromosome as they do so. The cells containing multiple genomes soon divide, putting one genome into each daughter cell.

The researchers then treated their cultures with tetracycline, which wipes out those containing the host M. capricolum genome while cells containing the M. mycoides genome survive (see Diagram). Though the transplantation worked in only about 1 in every 150,000 cells, that was enough to give healthy colonies of transformed bacteria containing no M. capricolum DNA.

Venter says that efforts to synthesise his minimal genome from scratch are still in progress, but once it is ready, the transplant method should allow the first bacterium with a synthetic genome to be created with little delay. "It could be weeks or months," he says.

Not everyone accepts that Venter's bacterium will qualify as a "synthetic" organism. "It's a misnomer," says Deamer, who argues that a better name would be a radically engineered organism.

"Not everyone accepts Venter's bacterium as truly 'synthetic',
and say it would be better to call it radically engineered"
So when are we likely to see unequivocally synthetic life, with the entire cell built from scratch? "It could be five months or 10 years," says Church. "These things aren't so much a question of timescales as the amount of money available."







From issue 2611 of New Scientist magazine, 04 July 2007, page 6-7