But more recently the number of doubters has started to climb steadily. The U.S. is desperately dependent on the availability of cheap, plentiful oil and natural gas, and addicted to economic growth. Once oil and gas become expensive (as they already have) and in ever-shorter supply (a matter of one or two years at most), economic growth will stop, and the U.S. economy will collapse.

Many may still scoff at this cheerless prognosis, but this article should find a few readers anyway. In October 2004, when I started working on it, an Internet search for "peak oil" and "economic collapse" yielded about 16,300 documents; by April of 2005 that number climbed to 4,220,000. This is a dramatic change in public opinion only, because what is known on the subject now is more or less what was known a decade or so ago, when there was exactly one Web site devoted to the subject: Jay Hanson's Dieoff.org. This sea change in public opinion is not restricted to the Internet, but is visible in the mainstream and the specialist press as well. Thus, the lack of attention paid to the subject over the decades resulted not from ignorance, but from denial: although the basic theory that is used to model and predict resource depletion has been well understood since the 1960s, most people prefer to remain in denial.

Denial

Although this is a bit off the subject of Soviet collapse and what it may teach us about our own, I can't resist saying a few words about denial, for it is such an interesting subject. I also hope that it will help some of you to go beyond denial, this being a helpful step towards understanding what I am going to say here.

Now that a lot of the predictions are coming true more or less on schedule, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the steady climb of energy prices and the dire warnings from energy experts of every stripe, outright denial is being gradually replaced with subtler forms of denial, which center around avoiding any serious, down-to-earth discussion of the likely actual consequences of peak oil, and of the ways one might cope with them.

Instead, there is much discussion of policy: what "we" should do. The "we" in question is presumably some embodiment of the great American Can-Do Spirit: a brilliantly organized consortium of government agencies, leading universities and research centers, and major corporations, all working together toward the goal of providing plentiful, clean, environmentally safe energy, to fuel another century of economic expansion. Welcome to the sideshow at the end of the universe!

One often hears that "We could get this done, if only we wanted to." Most often one hears this from non-specialists, sometimes from economists, and hardly ever from scientists or engineers. A few back-of-the-envelope calculations are generally enough to suggest otherwise, but here logic runs up against faith in the Goddess of Technology: that she will provide. On her altar are assembled various ritualistic objects used to summon the Can-Do Spirit: a photovoltaic cell, a fuel cell, a vial of ethanol, and a vial of bio-diesel. Off to the side of the altar is a Pandora's box packed with coal, tar sand, oceanic hydrates, and plutonium: if the Goddess gets angry, it's curtains for life on Earth.

But let us look beyond mere faith, and focus on something slightly more rational instead. This "we," this highly organized, high-powered problem-solving entity, is quickly running out of energy, and once it does, it will not be so high-powered any more. I would like to humbly suggest that any long-term plan it attempts to undertake is doomed, simply because crisis conditions will make long-term planning, along with large, ambitious projects, impossible. Thus, I would suggest against waiting around for some miracle device to put under the hood of every SUV and in the basement of every McMansion, so that all can live happily ever after in this suburban dream, which is looking more and more like a nightmare in any case.

The next circle of denial revolves around what must inevitably come to pass if the Goddess of Technology were to fail us: a series of wars over ever more scarce resources. Paul Roberts, who is very well informed on the subject of peak oil, has this to say: "what desperate states have always done when resources turn scarce… [is] fight for them." [ MotherJones.com, 11/12 2004] Let us not argue that this has never happened, but did it ever amount to anything more than a futile gesture of desperation? Wars take resources, and, when resources are already scarce, fighting wars over resources becomes a lethal exercise in futility. Those with more resources would be expected to win. I am not arguing that wars over resources will not occur. I am suggesting that they will be futile, and that victory in these conflicts will be barely distinguishable from defeat. I would also like to suggest that these conflicts would be self-limiting: modern warfare uses up prodigious amounts of energy, and if the conflicts are over oil and gas installations, then they will get blown up, as has happened repeatedly in Iraq. This will result in less energy being available and, consequently, less warfare.

Take, for example, the last two US involvements in Iraq. In each case, as a result of US actions, Iraqi oil production decreased. It now appears that the whole strategy is a failure. Supporting Saddam, then fighting Saddam, then imposing sanctions on Saddam, then finally overthrowing him, has left Iraqi oil fields so badly damaged that the "ultimate recoverable" estimate for Iraqi oil is now down to 10-12% of what was once thought to be underground (according to the New York Times).

Some people are even suggesting a war over resources with a nuclear endgame. On this point, I am optimistic. As Robert McNamara once thought, nuclear weapons are too difficult to use. And although he has done a great deal of work to make them easier to use, with the introduction of small, tactical, battlefield nukes and the like, and despite recently renewed interest in nuclear "bunker busters," they still make a bit of a mess, and are hard to work into any sort of a sensible strategy that would reliably lead to an increased supply of energy. Noting that conventional weapons have not been effective in this area, it is unclear why nuclear weapons would produce better results.

But these are all details; the point I really want to make is that proposing resource wars, even as a worst-case scenario, is still a form of denial. The implicit assumption is this: if all else fails, we will go to war; we will win; the oil will flow again, and we will be back to business as usual in no time. Again, I would suggest against waiting around for the success of a global police action to redirect the lion's share of the dwindling world oil supplies toward the United States.

Outside this last circle of denial lies a vast wilderness called the Collapse of Western Civilization, roamed by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or so some people will have you believe. Here we find not denial but escapism: a hankering for a grand finale, a heroic final chapter. Civilizations do collapse – this is one of the best-known facts about them – but as anyone who has read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire will tell you, the process can take many centuries.

What tends to collapse rather suddenly is the economy. Economies, too, are known to collapse, and do so with far greater regularity than civilizations. An economy does not collapse into a black hole from which no light can escape. Instead, something else happens: society begins to spontaneously reconfigure itself, establish new relationships, and evolve new rules, in order to find a point of equilibrium at a lower rate of resource expenditure.

Note that the exercise carries a high human cost: without an economy, many people suddenly find themselves as helpless as newborn babes. Many of them die, sooner than they would otherwise: some would call this a "die-off." There is a part of the population that is most vulnerable: the young, the old, and the infirm; the foolish and the suicidal. There is also another part of the population that can survive indefinitely on insects and tree bark. Most people fall somewhere in between.

Economic collapse gives rise to new, smaller and poorer economies. That pattern has been repeated many times, so we can reason inductively about similarities and differences between a collapse that has already occurred and one that is about to occur. Unlike astrophysicists, who can confidently predict whether a given star will collapse into a neutron star or a black hole based on measurements and calculations, we have to work with general observations and anecdotal evidence. However, I hope that my thought experiment will allow me to guess correctly at the general shape of the new economy, and arrive at survival strategies that may be of use to individuals and small communities.

The Collapse of the Soviet Union – an Overview

What happens when a modern economy collapses, and the complex society it supports disintegrates? A look at a country that has recently undergone such an experience can be most educational. We are lucky enough to have such an example in the Soviet Union. I spent about six months living, traveling, and doing business in Russia during the perestroika period and immediately afterward, and was fascinated by the transformation I witnessed.

The specifics are different, of course. The Soviet problems seem to have been largely organizational rather than physical in nature, although the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed just 3 years after reaching peak oil production is hardly a coincidence. The ultimate cause of Soviet Union's spontaneous collapse remains shrouded in mystery. Was it Ronald Reagan's Star Wars? Or was it Raisa Gorbachev's American Express card? It is possible to fake a missile defense shield; but it is not so easy to fake a Herod's department store. The arguments go back and forth. One contemporary theory would have it that the Soviet elite scuttled the whole program when they decided that Soviet Socialism was not going to make them rich. (It remains unclear why it should have taken the Soviet elite 70 years to come to this startlingly obvious conclusion).

A slightly more commonsense explanation is this: during the pre-perestroika "stagnation" period, due to the chronic underperformance of the economy, coupled with record levels of military expenditure, trade deficit, and foreign debt, it became increasingly difficult for the average Russian middle-class family of three, with both parents working, to make ends meet. (Now, isn't that beginning to sound familiar?) Of course, the government bureaucrats were not too concerned about the plight of the people. But the people found ways to survive by circumventing government controls in a myriad of ways, preventing the government from getting the results it needed to keep the system going. Therefore, the system had to be reformed. When this became the consensus view, reformers lined up to try and reform the system. Alas, the system could not be reformed. Instead of adapting, it fell apart.

Russia was able to bounce back economically because it remains fairly rich in oil and very rich in natural gas, and will probably continue in relative prosperity for at least a few more decades. In North America, on the other hand, oil production peaked in the early 1970s and has been in decline ever since, while natural gas production is now set to fall off a production cliff. Yet energy demand continues to rise far above what the continent can supply, making such a spontaneous recovery unlikely. When I say that Russia bounced back, I am not trying to understate the human cost of the Soviet collapse, or the lopsidedness and the economic disparities of the re-born Russian economy. But I am suggesting that where Russia bounced back because it was not fully spent, the United States will be more fully spent, and less capable of bouncing back.

But such "big picture" differences are not so interesting. It is the micro-scale similarities that offer interesting practical lessons on how small groups of individuals can successfully cope with economic and social collapse. And that is where the post-Soviet experience offers a multitude of useful lessons.

Returning to Russia

I first flew back to Leningrad, which was soon to be rechristened St. Petersburg, in the summer of 1989, about a year after Gorbachev freed the last batch of political prisoners, my uncle among them, who had been locked up by General Secretary Andropov's final, senile attempt at clenching an iron fist. For the first time it became possible for Soviet escapees to go back and visit. More than a decade had passed since I left, but the place was much as I remembered it: bustling streets full of Volgas and Ladas, Communist slogans on the roofs of towering buildings lit up in neon, long lines in shops.

About the only thing new was a bustle of activity around a newly organized Cooperative movement. A newly hatched entrepreneurial class was busy complaining that their cooperatives were only allowed to sell to the government, at government prices, while hatching ingenuous schemes to skim something off the top through barter arrangements. Most were going bankrupt. It did not turn out to be a successful business model for them or for the government, which was, as it turned out, also on its last legs.

I went back a year later, and found a place I did not quite recognize. First of all, it smelled different: the smog was gone. The factories had largely shut down, there was very little traffic, and the fresh air smelled wonderful! The stores were largely empty and often closed. There were very few gas stations open, and the ones that were open had lines that stretched for many blocks. There was a ten-liter limit on gasoline purchases.

Since there was nothing better for us to do, my friends and I decided to take a road trip, to visit the ancient Russian cities of Pskov and Novgorod, taking in the surrounding countryside along the way. For this, we had to obtain fuel. It was hard to come by. It was available on the black market, but no one felt particularly inclined to let go of something so valuable in exchange for something so useless as money. Soviet money ceased to have value, since there was so little that could be bought with it, and people still felt skittish around foreign currency.

Luckily, there was a limited supply of another sort of currency available to us. It was close to the end of Gorbachev's ill-fated anti-alcoholism campaign, during which vodka was rationed. There was a death in my family, for which we received a funeral's worth of vodka coupons, which we of course redeemed right away. What was left of the vodka was placed in the trunk of the trusty old Lada, and off we went. Each half-liter bottle of vodka was exchanged for ten liters of gasoline, giving vodka far greater effective energy density than rocket fuel.

There is a lesson here: when faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money. Access to actual physical resources and assets, as well as intangibles such as connections and relationships, quickly becomes much more valuable than mere cash.

***

Two years later, I was back again, this time in the dead of winter. I was traveling on business through Minsk, St. Petersburg and Moscow. My mission was to see whether any of the former Soviet defense industry could be converted to civilian use. The business part of the trip was a total fiasco and a complete waste of time, just as one would expect. In other ways, it was quite educational.

Minsk seemed like a city rudely awakened from hibernation. During the short daylight hours, the streets were full of people, who just stood around, as if wondering what to do next. The same feeling pervaded the executive offices, where people I used to think of as the representatives of the "evil empire" sat around under dusty portraits of Lenin bemoaning their fate. No one had any answers.

The only beam of sunshine came from a smarmy New York lawyer who hung around the place trying to organize a state lottery. He was almost the only man with a plan. (The director of a research institute which was formerly charged with explosion-welding parts for nuclear fusion reactor vessels, or some such thing, also had a plan: he wanted to build summer cottages.) I wrapped up my business early and caught a night train to St. Petersburg. On the train, a comfortable old sleeper car, I shared a compartment with a young, newly retired army doctor, who showed me his fat roll of hundred-dollar bills and told me all about the local diamond trade. We split a bottle of cognac and snoozed off. It was a pleasant trip.

St. Petersburg was a shock. There was a sense of despair that hung in the winter air. There were old women standing around in spontaneous open-air flea markets trying to sell toys that probably belonged to their grandchildren, to buy something to eat. Middle-class people could be seen digging around in the trash. Everyone's savings were wiped out by hyperinflation. I arrived with a large stack of one-dollar bills. Everything was one dollar, or a thousand rubles, which was about five times the average monthly salary. I handed out lots of these silly thousand-ruble notes: "Here, I just want to make sure you have enough." People would recoil in shock: "That's a lot of money!" "No, it isn't. Be sure to spend it right away." However, all the lights were on, there was heat in many of the homes, and the trains ran on time.

My business itinerary involved a trip to the countryside to tour and to have meetings at some scientific facility. The phone lines to the place were down, and so I decided to just jump on a train and go there. The only train left at 7 am. I showed up around 6, thinking I could find breakfast at the station. The station was dark and locked. Across the street, there was a store selling coffee, with a line that wrapped around the block. There was also an old woman in front of the store, selling buns from a tray. I offered her a thousand-ruble note. "Don't throw your money around!" she said. I offered to buy her entire tray. "What are the other people going to eat?" she asked. I went and stood in line for the cashier, presented my thousand-ruble note, got a pile of useless change and a receipt, presented the receipt at the counter, collected a glass of warm brown liquid, drank it, returned the glass, paid the old woman, got my sweet bun, and thanked her very much. It was a lesson in civility.

***

Three years later, I was back again, and the economy had clearly started to recover, at least to the extent that goods were available to those who had money, but enterprises were continuing to shut down, and most people were still clearly suffering. There were new, private stores, which had tight security, and which sold imported goods for foreign currency. Very few people could afford to shop at these stores. There were also open air markets in many city squares, at which most of the shopping was done. Many kinds of goods were dispensed from locked metal booths, quite a few of which belonged to the Chechen mafia: one shoved a large pile of paper money through a hole and was handed back the item.

There were sporadic difficulties with the money supply. I recall standing around waiting for banks to open in order to cash my traveler's checks. The banks were closed because they were fresh out of money; they were all waiting for cash to be delivered. Once in a while, a bank manager would come out and make an announcement: the money is on its way, no need to worry.

There was a great divide between those who were unemployed, underemployed, or working in the old economy, and the new merchant class. For those working for the old state-owned enterprises – schools, hospitals, the railways, the telephone exchanges, and what remained of the rest of the Soviet economy - it was lean times. Salaries were paid sporadically, or not at all. Even when people got their money, it was barely enough to subsist on.

But the worst of it was clearly over. A new economic reality had taken hold. A large segment of the population saw its standard of living reduced, sometimes permanently. It took the economy ten years to get back to its pre-collapse level, and the recovery was uneven. Alongside the nouveau riche, there were many whose income would never recover. Those who could not become part of the new economy, especially the pensioners, but also many others, who had benefited from the now defunct socialist state, could barely eke out a living.

This thumbnail sketch of my experiences in Russia is intended to convey a general sense of what I had witnessed. But it is the details of what I have observed that I hope will be of value to those who see an economic collapse looming ahead, and want to plan, in order to survive it.

Similarities between the Superpowers

Some would find a direct comparison between the United States and the Soviet Union incongruous, if not downright insulting. After all, what grounds are there to compare a failed Communist empire to the world's largest economy? Others might find it humorous that the loser might have advice for the winner in what they might see as an ideological conflict. Since the differences between the two appear glaring to most, let me just indicate some similarities, which I hope you will find are no less obvious.

The Soviet Union and the United States are each either the winner or the first runner-up in the following categories: the space race, the arms race, the jails race, the hated evil empire race, the squandering of natural resources race, and the bankruptcy race. In some of these categories, the United States is, shall we say, a late bloomer, setting new records even after its rival was forced to forfeit. Both believed, with giddy zeal, in science, technology, and progress, right up until the Chernobyl disaster occurred. After that, there was only one true believer left.

They are the two post-World War II industrial empires that attempted to impose their ideologies on the rest of the world: democracy and capitalism versus socialism and central planning. Both had some successes: while the United States reveled in growth and prosperity, the Soviet Union achieved universal literacy, universal health care, far less social inequality, and a guaranteed - albeit lower - standard of living for all citizens. The state-controlled media took pains to make sure that most people didn't realize just how much lower it was: “Those happy Russians don't know how badly they live,” Simone Signoret said after a visit.

Both empires made a big mess of quite a few other countries, each one financing and directly taking part in bloody conflicts around the world in order to impose its ideology, and to thwart the other. Both made quite a big mess of their own country, setting world records for the percentage of population held in jails ( South Africa was a contender at one point). In this last category, the U.S. is now a runaway success, supporting a burgeoning, partially privatized prison-industrial complex (a great source of near-slave wage labor).

While the United States used to have far more goodwill around the world than the Soviet Union, the “evil empire” gap has narrowed since the Soviet Union disappeared from the scene. Now, in many countries around the world, including Western countries like Sweden, the United States ranks as a bigger threat to peace than Iran or North Korea. In the hated-empire race, the United States is now beginning to look like the champion. Nobody likes a loser, but especially if the loser is a failed superpower. Nobody had any pity for the poor defunct Soviet Union; and nobody will have any pity for poor defunct America either .

The bankruptcy race is particularly interesting. Prior to its collapse, the Soviet Union was taking on foreign debt at a rate that could not be sustained. The combination of low world oil prices and a peak in Soviet oil production sealed its fate. Later, the Russian Federation, which inherited the Soviet foreign debt, was forced to default on its obligations, precipitating a financial crisis. Russia's finances later improved, primarily due to rising oil prices, along with rising oil exports. At this point, Russia is eager to wipe out the remaining Soviet debt as quickly as possible, and over the past few years the Russian rouble has done just a bit better than the U.S. dollar.

The United States is now facing a current account deficit that cannot be sustained, a falling currency, and an energy crisis, all at once. It is now the world's largest debtor nation, and most people do not see how it can avoid defaulting on its debt. According to a lot of analysts, it is technically bankrupt, and is being propped up by foreign reserve banks, which hold a lot of dollar-denominated assets, and, for the time being, want to protect the value of their reserves. This game can only go on for so long. Thus, while the Soviet Union deserves honorable mention for going bankrupt first, the gold in this category (pun intended) will undoubtedly go to the United States, for the largest default ever.

There are many other similarities as well. Women received the right to education and a career in Russia earlier than in the U.S. Russian and American families are in similarly sad shape, with high divorce rates and many out-of-wedlock births, although the chronic shortage of housing in Russia did force many families to stick it out, with mixed results. Both countries have been experiencing chronic depopulation of farming districts. In Russia, family farms were decimated during collectivization, along with agricultural output; in the U.S., a variety of other forces produced a similar result with regard to rural population, but without any loss of production. Both countries replaced family farms with unsustainable, ecologically disastrous industrial agribusiness, addicted to fossil fuels. The American ones work better, as long as energy is cheap, and, after that, probably not at all.

The similarities are too numerous to mention. I hope that what I outlined above is enough to signal a key fact: that these are, or were, the antipodes of the same industrial, technological civilization.

The United States remains a powder keg of ethnic tension, where urban blacks feel oppressed by suburban whites, who in turn fear to venture into major sections of the cities. In a time of permanent crisis, urban blacks might well riot and loot the cities, because they don't own them, and the suburban whites are likely to get foreclosed out of their "little cabins in the woods," as James Kunstler charmingly calls them, and decamp to a nearby trailer park. Add to this already volatile mixture the fact that firearms are widely available, and the fact that violence permeates American society, particularly in the South, the West, and the dead industrial cities like Detroit.

In short, the social atmosphere of post-collapse America is unlikely to be as placid and amicable as that of post-collapse Russia. At least in parts, it is more likely to resemble other, more ethnically mixed, and therefore less fortunate parts of the Former Soviet Union, such as the Fergana valley and, of course, that "beacon of freedom" in the Caucasus, Georgia (or so says the U.S. President).

No part of the United States is an obvious choice for the survival-minded, but some are obviously riskier than others. Any place with a history of racial or ethnic tension is probably unsafe. This rules out the South, the Southwest, and many large cities elsewhere. Some people might find a safe harbor in an ethnically homogeneous enclave of their own kind, while the rest would be well-advised to look for the few communities where inter-ethnic relations have been cemented through integrated living and intermarriage, and where the strange and fragile entity that is multi-ethnic society might have a chance of holding together.

Differences between the Superpowers: Ownership

Another key difference: in the Soviet Union, nobody owned their place of residence. What this meant is that the economy could collapse without causing homelessness: just about everyone went on living in the same place as before. There were no evictions or foreclosures. Everyone stayed put, and this prevented society from disintegrating.

One more difference: the place where they stayed put was generally accessible by public transportation, which continued to run during the worst of times. Most of the Soviet-era developments were centrally planned, and central planners do not like sprawl: it is too difficult and expensive to service. Few people owned cars, and even fewer depended on cars for getting around. Even the worst gasoline shortages resulted in only minor inconveniences for most people: in the springtime, they made it difficult to transport seedlings from the city to the dacha for planting; in the fall, they made it difficult to haul the harvest back to the city.

Differences between the Superpowers: Labor Profile

The Soviet Union was entirely self-sufficient when it came to labor. Both before and after the collapse, skilled labor was one of its main exports, along with oil, weapons, and industrial machinery. Not so with the United States, where not only is most of the manufacturing being carried out abroad, but a lot of service back home is being provided by immigrants as well. This runs the gamut from farm labor, landscaping, and office cleaning to the professions, such as engineering and medicine, without which society and its infrastructure would unravel. Most of these people came to the United States to enjoy the superior standard of living — for as long as it remains superior. Many of them will eventually head home, leaving a gaping hole in the social fabric.

I have had a chance to observe quite a few companies in the U.S. from the inside, and have spotted a certain constancy in the staffing profile. At the top, there is a group of highly compensated senior lunch-eaters. They tend to spend all of their time pleasing each other in various ways, big and small. They often hold advanced degrees in disciplines such as Technical Schmoozing and Relativistic Bean-counting. They are obsessive on the subject of money, and cultivate a posh country set atmosphere, even if they are just one generation out of the coal mines. Ask them to solve a technical problem — and they will politely demur, often taking the opportunity to flash their wit with a self-deprecating joke or two.

Somewhat further down the hierarchy are the people who actually do the work. They tend to have fewer social graces and communication skills, but they do know how to get the work done. Among them are found the technical innovators, who are often the company's raison d'être.

More often than not, the senior lunch-eaters at the top are native-born Americans, and, more often than not, the ones lower down are either visiting foreigners or immigrants. These find themselves in a variety of situations, from the working visa holders who are often forced to choose between keeping their job and going home, to those who are waiting for a green card and must play their other cards just right, to those who have one, to citizens.

The natives at the top always try to standardize the job descriptions and lower the pay scale of the immigrants at the bottom, playing them against each other, while trying to portray themselves as super-achieving entrepreneurial mavericks who can't be pinned down to a mere set of marketable skills. The opposite is often the case: the natives are often the commodity items, and would perform similar functions whether their business were biotechnology or salted fish, while those who work for them may be unique specialists, doing what has never been done before.

It is no surprise that this situation should have come about. For the last few generations, native-born Americans have preferred disciplines such as law, communications, and business administration, while immigrants and foreigners tended to choose the sciences and engineering. All their lives the natives were told to expect prosperity without end, and so they felt safe in joining professions that are mere embroidery on the fabric of an affluent society.

This process became known as "brain drain" — America's extraction of talent from foreign lands, to its advantage, and to their detriment. This flow of brain power is likely to reverse direction, leaving the U.S. even less capable of finding ways to cope with its economic predicament. This may mean that, even in areas where there will be ample scope for innovation and development, such as restoration of rail service, or renewable energy, America may find itself without the necessary talent to make it happen.

Differences between the Superpowers: Religion

The last dimension worth mentioning along which the Soviet Union and the United States are in stark contrast is that of religion.

Pre-revolutionary Russia's two-headed eagle symbolized the monarchy and the church, with a crown on one head and a miter on the other. Along with its somewhat holier manifestations, such as its iconography and its monastic tradition, the Russian church was as bloated with wealth and ostentation, and as oppressive, as the monarchy whose power it helped legitimize. But over the course of the 20th century Russia managed to evolve in a distinctly secular way, oppressing religious people with compulsory atheism.

The United States, uncharacteristically for a Western nation, remains a fairly religious place, where most people look for and find God in a church, or a synagogue, or a mosque. The colonies' precocious move to leave the fold of the British Empire has made the U.S. something of a living fossil in terms of cultural evolution. This is manifested in some trivial ways, such as the inability to grasp the metric system (a problem considered mostly solved in England itself) or its distinctly 18th century tendency to make a fetish of its national flag, as well as in some major ones, such as its rather half-hearted embrace of secularism.

What this difference means in the context of economic collapse is, surprisingly, next to nothing. Perhaps the American is more likely than not to start quoting the Bible and going on about the Apocalypse, the end of times, and the Rapture. These thoughts, need I say, are not conducive to survival. But the supposedly atheist Russian turned out to be just as likely to go on about The End of the World, and flocked to the newly opened churches in search of certainty and solace.

Perhaps the more significant difference is not between the prevalence and the lack of religion, but the differences between the dominant religions. In spite of the architectural ostentation of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the pomp and circumstance of its rituals, its message has always been one of asceticism as the road to salvation. Salvation is for the poor and the humble, because one's rewards are either in this world or the next, not both.

This is rather different from Protestantism, the dominant religion in America, which made the dramatic shift to considering wealth as one of God's blessings, ignoring some inconvenient points rather emphatically made by Jesus to the effect that rich people are extremely unlikely to be saved. Conversely, poverty became associated with laziness and vice, robbing poor people of their dignity.

Thus, a Russian is less likely to consider sudden descent into poverty as a fall from God's grace, and economic collapse as God's punishment upon the people, while the religions that dominate America — Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam — all feature temporal success of their followers as a key piece of evidence that God is well-disposed toward them. What will happen once God's good will toward them is no longer manifest? Chances are, they will become angry and try to find someone other than their own selves to blame, that being one of the central mechanisms of human psychology. We should look forward to unexpectedly wrathful congregations eager to do the work of an unexpectedly wrathful God.

The United States is by no means homogeneous when it comes to intensity of religious sentiment. When looking for a survivable place to settle, it is probably a good idea to look for a place where religious fervor does not run to extremes.

The Loss of Technological Comforts

Warning: what I am about to say may be somewhat unpleasant, but I'd like to get the issue out of the way. Most of the technological progress of the 20th century resulted in a higher level of physical comfort. Yes, that's why we caused global warming, a hole in the ozone layer, and a mass extinction of plants, fish, birds, and mammals: to be somewhat more comfortable for a little while.

We all expect heating and air-conditioning, hot and cold water, reliable electricity, personal transportation, paved roads, illuminated streets and parking lots, maybe even high-speed Internet. Well, what if you had to give up all that? Or, rather, what will you do when you have to give up all that?

Most of our ancestors put up with a level of physical discomfort we would find appalling: no running hot water, an outhouse instead of a flush toilet, no central heat, and one's own two feet, or a horse, as the main means for getting around. And still they managed to produce a civilization and a culture that we can just barely manage to emulate and preserve.

It doesn't take a crisis to make public utilities go on the blink, but a crisis certainly helps. Any crisis will do: economic, financial, or even political. Consider the governor of Primorye, a region on the far side of Siberia, who simply stole all the money that was supposed to buy coal for the winter. Primorye froze. With winter temperatures around 40 below, it's a wonder there's anyone still living there. It's a testament to human perseverance. As the economic situation degenerates, events seem to unfold in a certain sequence, regardless of locale. They always seem to lead to the same result: unsanitary conditions. But an energy crisis seems to me by far the most efficacious way of depriving one of one's treasured utility services.

First, electricity begins to wink in and out. Eventually, this settles into a rhythm. Countries such as Georgia, Bulgaria and Romania, as well as some peripheral regions of Russia, have had to put up with a few hours of electricity a day, sometimes for several years. North Korea is perhaps the best Soviet pupil we have, surviving without much electricity for years. Lights flicker on as the sun begins to set. The generators struggle on for a few hours, powering light bulbs, television sets, and radios. When it's time for bed, the lights wink out once again.

Second in line is heat. Every year, it comes on later and goes off sooner. People watch television or listen to the radio, when there's electricity, or just sit, under piles of blankets. Sharing bodily warmth has been a favored survival technique among humans through the ice ages. People get used to having less heat, and eventually stop complaining. Even in these relatively prosperous times, there are apartment blocks in St. Petersburg that are heated every other day, even during the coldest parts of winter. Thick sweaters and down comforters are used in place of the missing buckets of coal.

Third in line is hot water: the shower runs cold. Unless you've been deprived of a cold shower, you won't be able to appreciate it for the luxury that it affords. In case you are curious, it's a quick shower. Get wet, lather up, rinse off, towel off, dress, and shiver, under several layers of blankets, and let's not forget shared bodily warmth. A less radical approach is to wash standing in a bucket of warm water — heated up on the stove. Get wet, lather, rinse. And don't forget to shiver.

Next, water pressure drops off altogether. People learn to wash with even less water. There is a lot of running around with buckets and plastic jugs. The worst part of this is not the lack of running water; it is that the toilets won't flush. If the population is enlightened and disciplined, it will realize what it must do: collect their excretions in buckets and hand-carry them to a sewer inlet. The super-enlightened build outhouses and put together composting toilets, and use the proceeds to fertilize their kitchen gardens.

Under this combined set of circumstances, there are three causes of mortality to avoid. The first is simply avoiding freezing to death. It takes some preparation to be able to go camping in wintertime. But this is by far the easiest problem. The next is avoiding humans' worst companions through the ages: bedbugs, fleas, and lice. These never fail to make their appearance wherever unwashed people huddle together, and spread diseases such as typhoid, which have claimed millions of lives. A hot bath and a complete change of clothes can be a lifesaver. The hair-free look becomes fashionable. Baking the clothes in an oven kills the lice and their eggs. The last is avoiding cholera and other diseases spread through feces by boiling all drinking water.

It seems safe to assume that the creature comforts to which we are accustomed are going to be few and far between. But if we are willing to withstand the little indignities of reading by candlelight, bundling up throughout the cold months, running around with buckets of water, shivering while standing in a bucket of tepid water, and carrying our poop out in a bucket, then none of this is enough to stop us from maintaining a level of civilization worthy of our ancestors, who probably had it worse than we ever will. They were either depressed or cheerful about it, in keeping with their personal disposition and national character, but apparently they survived, or you wouldn't be reading this.

Economic Comparison

It can be said that the U.S. economy is run either very well or very badly. On the plus side, companies are lean, and downsized as needed to stay profitable, or at least in business. There are bankruptcy laws that weed out the unfit and competition to keep productivity going up. Businesses use just-in-time delivery to cut down on inventory and make heavy use of information technology to work out the logistics of operating in a global economy.

On the minus side, the U.S. economy runs ever larger structural deficits. It fails to provide the majority of the population with the sort of economic security that people in other developed nations take for granted. It spends more on medicine and education than many other countries, and gets less for it. Instead of a single government-owned airline, it has several permanently bankrupt government-supported ones. It spends heavily on law enforcement, and has a high crime rate. It continues to export high-wage manufacturing jobs and replace them with low-wage service jobs. As I mentioned before, it is, technically, bankrupt.

Both in the former Soviet Union and in North America, the landscape has fallen victim to a massive, centrally managed uglification program. Moscow's central planners put up identical drab and soulless buildings throughout its territory, disregarding regional architectural traditions and erasing local culture. America's land developers have played a largely similar role, with a similarly ghastly result: the United States of Generica, where many places can be told apart only by reading their highway signs.

In North America, there is also a pervasive childish idiocy that has spread desolation across the entire continent: the idiocy of the traffic engineer. As Jane Jacobs cleverly illustrates, these are not engineers of the sort that solve problems and draw conclusions based on evidence, but "little boys with toy cars happily murmuring 'Zoom, Zooom, Zooooom!'" [Dark Age Ahead, p. 79] The landscape that makes them happy is designed to waste as much fuel as possible by trapping people in their cars and making them drive around in circles.

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It can also be said that the Soviet economy was run either very well or very badly. On the plus side, that system, for all its many failings, managed to eradicate the more extreme forms of poverty, malnutrition, many diseases, and illiteracy. It provided economic security of an extreme sort: everyone knew exactly how much they would earn, and the prices of everyday objects remained fixed. Housing, health care, education, and pensions were all guaranteed. Quality varied; education was generally excellent, housing much less so, and Soviet medicine was often called "the freest medicine in the world" — with reasonable service achievable only through private arrangements.

On the minus side, the centrally planned behemoth was extremely inefficient, with high levels of loss and outright waste at every level. The distribution system was so inflexible that enterprises hoarded inventory. It excelled at producing capital goods, but when it came to manufacturing consumer goods, which require much more flexibility than a centrally planned system can provide, it failed. It also failed miserably at producing food, and was forced to resort to importing many basic foodstuffs. It operated a huge military and political empire, but, paradoxically, failed to derive any economic benefit from it, running the entire enterprise at a net loss.

Also paradoxically, these very failings and inefficiencies made for a soft landing. Because there was no mechanism by which state enterprises could go bankrupt, they often continued to operate for a time at some low level, holding back salaries or scaling back production. This lessened the number of instant mass layoffs or outright closings, but where these did occur, they were accompanied by very high mortality rates among men between the ages of 45 and 55, who turn out to be psychologically the most vulnerable to sudden loss of career, and who either drank themselves to death or committed suicide.

People could sometimes use their old, semi-defunct place of employment as a base of operations of sorts, from which to run the kind of black market business that allowed many of them to gradually transition to private enterprise. The inefficient distribution system, and the hoarding to which it gave rise, resulted in very high levels of inventory, which could be bartered. Some enterprises continued to operate in this manner, bartering their leftover inventory with other enterprises, in order to supply their employees with something they could use or sell.

What parallels can we draw from this to employment in the post-collapse United States? Public sector employment may provide somewhat better chances for keeping one's job. For instance, it is unlikely that all schools, colleges, and universities will dismiss all of their faculty and staff at the same time. It is somewhat more likely that their salaries will not be enough to live on, but they may, for a time, be able to maintain their social niche. Properties and facilities management is probably a safe bet: as long as there are properties that are considered valuable, they will need to be looked after. When the time comes to dismantle them and barter off the pieces, it will help if they are still intact, and one has the keys to them.

Economic Collapse in the U.S.

A spontaneous soft landing is unlikely in the U.S., where a large company can decide to shut its doors by executive decision, laying off personnel and auctioning off capital equipment and inventory. Since in many cases the equipment is leased and the inventory is just-in-time and therefore very thin, a business can be made to evaporate virtually overnight. Since many executives may decide to cut their losses all at once, seeing the same economic projections and interpreting them similarly, the effect on communities can be utterly devastating.

Most people in the U.S. cannot survive very long without an income. This may sound curious to some people — how can anyone, anywhere survive without an income? Well, in post-collapse Russia, if you didn't pay rent or utilities — because no-one else was paying them either — and if you grew or gathered a bit of your own food, and you had some friends and relatives to help you out, then an income was not a prerequisite for survival. Most people got by, somehow.

But most people in the U.S., once their savings are depleted, would in due course be forced to live in their car, or in some secluded stretch of woods, in a tent, or under a tarp. There is currently no mechanism by which landlords can be made not to evict deadbeat tenants, or banks be prevailed upon not to foreclose on nonperforming loans. A wholesale reintroduction of rent control seems politically unlikely. Once enough residential and commercial real estate becomes vacant, and law enforcement becomes lax or nonexistent, squatting becomes a real possibility. Squatters usually find it hard to get mail and other services, but this is a very minor issue. More importantly, they can be easily dislodged again and again.

Homelessness

The term "loitering" does not translate into Russian. The closest equivalent one can find is something along the lines of "hanging around" or "wasting time," in public. This is important, because once nobody has a job to go to, the two choices they are presented with are sitting at home, and, as it were, loitering. If loitering is illegal, then sitting at home becomes the only choice.

The U.S. and the Soviet Union were at two extremes of a continuum between the public and the private. In the Soviet Union, most land was open to the public. Even apartments were often communal, meaning that the bedrooms were private, but the kitchen, bathroom, and hallway were common areas. In the U.S., most of the land is privately owned, some by people who put up signs threatening to shoot trespassers. Most public places are in fact private, marked "Customers Only" and "No Loitering." Where there are public parks, these are often "closed" at night, and anyone trying to spend a night there is likely to be told to "move along" by the police.

After the collapse, Russia experienced a swelling of the ranks of people described by the acronym "BOMZh," which is actually short for "BOMZh i Z," and stands for "persons without a definite place of residence or employment." The bomzhies, as they came to be called, often inhabited unused bits of the urban or rural landscape, where, with nobody to tell them to "move along," they were left largely in peace. Such an indefinite place of residence was often referred to as bomzhatnik. English badly needs a term for that. Perhaps we could call it a "bum garden" — it is as much a garden as an "office park" is a park.

When the U.S. economy collapses, one would expect employment rates, and, with them, residency rates, to plummet. It is hard to estimate what percentage of the U.S. population would, as a result, become homeless, but it could be quite high, perhaps becoming so commonplace as to remove the stigma. A country where most of the neighborhoods are structured so as to exclude people of inadequate means, in order to preserve property values, is not a pleasant place to be a bum. Then again, when property values start dropping to zero, we may find that some of the properties spontaneously re-zone themselves into "bum gardens," with no political will or power anywhere to do anything about it.

I do not mean to imply that Russian bums have a good time of it. But because most of the Russian population was able to keep their place of residence in spite of a collapsing economy, the percentage of bomzhies in the general population never made it into the double digits. These most unfortunate cases led short, brutal lives, often in an alcoholic haze, and accounted for quite a lot of Russia's spike in post-collapse mortality. Some of them were refugees — Russians ethnically cleansed from the newly independent, suddenly nationalistic republics — who could not be easily reabsorbed into the Russian population due to Russia's chronic housing shortage.

Communal Survival

Russia's chronic housing shortage was partly caused by the spectacular decline of Russian agriculture, which caused people to migrate to the cities, and partly due simply to the inability of the government to put up buildings quickly enough. What the government wanted to put up was invariably an apartment building: 5 floors, 9 floors, and even some 14-floor towers. The buildings went up on vacant, or vacated, land, and were usually surrounded by a generous portion of wasteland, which, in the smaller cities and towns, and in places where the soil is not frozen year-round, or covered with sulfur or soot from a nearby factory, was quickly converted into kitchen gardens.

The quality of construction always looked a bit shabby, but has turned out to be surprisingly sound structurally and quite practical. Mostly it was reinforced concrete slab construction, with ceramic tile on the outside and hard plaster for insulation on the inside. It was cheap to heat, and usually had heat, at least enough of it so that the pipes wouldn't freeze, with the steam supplied by a gigantic central boiler that served an entire neighborhood.

One often hears that the shabbiest of these Soviet-era apartment blocks, termed "Khrushcheby" — a melding of Khrushchev, who ordered them built, and "trushcheby" (Russian for "slums") — are about to start collapsing, but they haven't done so yet. Yes, they are dank and dreary, and the apartments are cramped, and the walls are cracked, and the roof often leaks, and the hallways and stairwells are dark and smell of urine, but it's housing.

Because apartments were so hard to come by, with waiting lists stretched out for decades, several generations generally lived together. This was often an unpleasant, stressful, and even traumatic way to live, but also very cheap. Grandparents often did a lot of the work of raising children, while the parents worked. When the economy collapsed, it was often the grandparents who took to serious gardening and raised food during the summer months. Working-age people took to experimenting in the black market, with mixed results: some would get lucky and strike it rich, while for others it was lean times. With enough people living together, these accidental disparities tended to even out at least to some extent.

A curious reversal took place. Whereas before the collapse, parents were often in a position to provide some financial help to their adult children, now the opposite is true. Older people who do not have children are much more likely to live in poverty than those who have children to support them. Once financial capital is wiped out, human capital becomes essential.

A key difference between Russia and the U.S. is that Russians, like most people around the world, generally spend their entire lives living in one place, whereas Americans move around constantly. Russians generally know, or at least recognize, most of the people who surround them. When the economy collapses, everyone has to confront an unfamiliar situation. The Russians, at least, did not have to confront it in the company of complete strangers. On the other hand, Americans are far more likely than Russians to help out strangers, at least when they have something to spare.

Another element that was helpful to Russians was a particular feature of Russian culture: since money was not particularly useful in the Soviet era economy, and did not convey status or success, it was not particularly prized either, and shared rather freely. Friends thought nothing of helping each other out in times of need. It was important that everyone had some, not that one had more than the others. With the arrival of market economics, this cultural trait disappeared, but it persisted long enough to help people to survive the transition.

Smelling the Roses

Another note on culture: once the economy collapses, there is generally less to do, making it a good time for the naturally idle and a bad time for those predisposed to keeping busy.

Soviet-era culture had room for two types of activity: normal, which generally meant avoiding breaking a sweat, and heroic. Normal activity was expected, and there was never any reason to do it harder than expected. In fact, that sort of thing tended to be frowned upon by "the collective," or the rank and file. Heroic activity was celebrated, but not necessarily rewarded financially.

Russians tend to look in bemused puzzlement on the American compulsion to "work hard and play hard." The term "career" was in the Soviet days a pejorative term — the attribute of a "careerist" — someone greedy, unscrupulous, and overly "ambitious" (also a pejorative term). Terms like "success" and "achievement" were very rarely applied on a personal level, because they sounded overweening and pompous. They were reserved for bombastic public pronouncements about the great successes of the Soviet people. Not that positive personal characteristics did not exist: on a personal level, there was respect given to talent, professionalism, decency, sometimes even creativity. But "hard worker," to a Russian, sounded a lot like "fool."

A collapsing economy is especially hard on those who are accustomed to prompt, courteous service. In the Soviet Union, most official service was rude and slow, and involved standing in long lines. Many of the products that were in short supply could not be obtained even in this manner, and required something called blat: special, unofficial access or favor. The exchange of personal favors was far more important to the actual functioning of the economy than the exchange of money. To Russians, blat is almost a sacred thing: a vital part of culture that holds society together. It is also the only part of the economy that is collapse-proof, and, as such, a valuable cultural adaptation.

Most Americans have heard of Communism, and automatically believe that it is an apt description of the Soviet system, even though there was nothing particularly communal about a welfare state and a vast industrial empire run by an elitist central planning bureaucracy. But very few of them have ever heard of the real operative "ism" that dominated Soviet life: Dofenism, which can be loosely translated as "not giving a rat's ass." A lot of people, more and more during the "stagnation" period of the 1980's, felt nothing but contempt for the system, did what little they had to do to get by (night watchman and furnace stoker were favorite jobs among the highly educated) and got all their pleasure from their friends, from their reading, or from nature.

This sort of disposition may seem like a cop-out, but when there is a collapse on the horizon, it works as psychological insurance: instead of going through the agonizing process of losing and rediscovering one's identity in a post-collapse environment, one could simply sit back and watch events unfold. If you are currently "a mover and a shaker," of things or people or whatever, then collapse will surely come as a shock to you, and it will take you a long time, perhaps forever, to find more things to move and to shake to your satisfaction. However, if your current occupation is as a keen observer of grass and trees, then, post-collapse, you could take on something else that's useful, such as dismantling useless things.

The ability to stop and smell the roses — to let it all go, to refuse to harbor regrets or nurture grievances, to confine one's serious attention only to that which is immediately necessary, and not to worry too much about the rest — is perhaps the one most critical to post-collapse survival. The most psychologically devastated are usually the middle-aged breadwinners, who, once they are no longer gainfully employed, feel completely lost. Detachment and indifference can be most healing, provided they do not become morbid. It is good to take your sentimental nostalgia for what once was, is, and will soon no longer be, up front, and get it over with.

Asset Stripping

Russia's post-collapse economy was for a time dominated by one type of wholesale business: asset stripping. To put it in an American setting: suppose you have title, or otherwise unhindered access, to an entire suburban subdivision, which is no longer accessible by transportation, either public or private, too far to reach by bicycle, and is generally no longer suitable for its intended purpose of housing and accumulating equity for fully employed commuters who shop at the now defunct nearby mall. After the mortgages are foreclosed and the properties repossessed, what more is there to do, except board it all up and let it rot? Well, what has been developed can be just as easily undeveloped.

What you do is strip it of anything valuable or reusable, and either sell or stockpile the materials. Pull the copper out of the streets and the walls. Haul away the curbstones and the utility poles. Take down the vinyl siding. Yank out the fiberglass insulation. The sinks and windows can surely find a new use somewhere else, especially if no new ones are being made.

Having bits of the landscape disappear can be a rude surprise. One summer I arrived in St. Petersburg and found that a new scourge had descended on the land while I was gone: a lot of manhole covers were mysteriously missing. Nobody knew where they went or who profited from their removal. One guess was that the municipal workers, who hadn't been paid in months, took them home with them, to be returned once they got paid. They did eventually reappear, so there may be some merit to this theory. With the gaping manholes positioned throughout the city like so many anteater traps for cars, you had the choice of driving either very slowly and carefully, or very fast, and betting your life on the proper functioning of the shock absorbers.

Post-collapse Russia's housing stock stayed largely intact, but an orgy of asset stripping of a different kind took place: not just left-over inventory, but entire factories were stripped down and exported. What went on in Russia under the guise of privatization, is a subject for a different article, but whether it's called "privatization" or "liquidation" or "theft" doesn't matter: those with title to something worthless will find a way to extract value from it, making it even more worthless. An abandoned suburban subdivision might be worthless as housing, but valuable as a dump site for toxic waste.

Just because the economy is going to collapse in the most oil-addicted country on earth doesn't necessarily mean that things will be just as bad everywhere else. As the Soviet example shows, if the entire country is for sale, buyers will materialize out of nowhere, crate it up, and haul it away. They will export everything: furnishings, equipment, works of art, antiques. The last remnant of industrial activity is usually the scrap iron business. There seems to be no limit to the amount of iron that can be extracted from a mature post-industrial site.

Food

The dismal state of Soviet agriculture turned out to be paradoxically beneficial in fostering a kitchen garden economy, which helped Russians to survive the collapse. At one point it became informally known that 10% of the farmland — the part allocated to private plots — was being used to produce 90% of the food. Beyond underscoring the gross inadequacies of Soviet-style command and control industrial agriculture, it is indicative of a general fact: agriculture is far more efficient when it is carried out on a small scale, using manual labor.

Russians always grew some of their own food, and scarcity of high-quality produce in the government stores kept the kitchen garden tradition going during even the more prosperous times of the 60s and the 70s. After the collapse, these kitchen gardens turned out to be lifesavers. What many Russians practiced, either through tradition or by trial and error, or sheer laziness, was in some ways akin to the new organic farming and permaculture techniques. Many productive plots in Russia look like a riot of herbs, vegetables, and flowers growing in wild profusion.

Forests in Russia have always been used as an important additional source of food. Russians recognize, and eat, just about every edible mushroom variety, and all of the edible berries. During the peak mushroom season, which is generally in the fall, forests are overrun with mushroom-pickers. The mushrooms are either pickled or dried and stored, and often last throughout the winter.

Recreational Drug Use

A rather striking similarity between Russians and Americans is their propensity to self-medicate. While the Russian has traditionally been single-heartedly dedicated to the pursuit of vodka, the American is more likely than not to have also tried cannabis. Cocaine has also had a big effect on American culture, as have opiates. There are differences as well: the Russian is somewhat less likely to drink alone, or to be apprehended for drinking, or being drunk, in public. To a Russian, being drunk is almost a sacred right; to an American, it is a guilty pleasure. Many of the unhappier Americans are forced by their circumstances to drink and drive; this does not make them, nor the other drivers, nor the pedestrians (should any still exist) any happier.

The Russian can get furiously drunk in public, stagger about singing patriotic songs, fall into a snow bank, and either freeze to death or be carted off to a drunk tank. All this produces little or no remorse in him. Based on my reading of H. L. Mencken, America was also once upon a time a land of happy drunks, where a whiskey bottle would be passed around the courtroom at the start of the proceedings, and where a drunken jury would later render a drunken verdict, but Prohibition ruined all that. Russia's prohibition lasted only a few short years, when Gorbachev tried to save the nation from itself, and failed miserably.

When the economy collapses, hard-drinking people everywhere find all the more reason to get drunk, but much less wherewithal with which to procure drink. In Russia, innovative market-based solutions were quickly improvised, which it was my privilege to observe. It was summer, and I was on a local electric train heading out of St. Petersburg. It was packed, so I stood in the vestibule of the car, and observed rainbows (it had just rained) through the missing windowpane. Soon, activity within the vestibule caught my attention: at each stop, grannies with jugs of moonshine would approach the car door and offer a sniff to the eager customers waiting inside. Price and quality were quickly discussed, an agreed-upon quantity was dispensed in exchange for a fistful of notes, jug to mug, and the train moved on. It was a tense atmosphere, because along with the paying customers there came many others, who were simply along for the ride, but expected their fair share nevertheless. I was forced to make a hasty exit and jam myself into the salon, because the freeloaders thought I was taking up valuable freeloading space.

There might be a few moonshine-makers left in rural parts of the United States, but most of the country seems to be addicted to cans and bottles of beer, or jugs, plastic or glass, of liquor. When this source dries up due to problems with interstate trucking, local breweries will no doubt continue to operate, and even expand production, to cope with both old and new demand, but there will still be plenty of room for improvisation. I would also expect cannabis to become even more widespread; it makes people less prone to violence than liquor, which is good, but it also stimulates their appetite, which is bad if there isn't a lot of food. Still, it is much cheaper to produce than alcohol, which requires either grain or natural gas and complicated chemistry.

In all, I expect drugs and alcohol to become one of the largest short-term post-collapse entrepreneurial opportunities in the United States, along with asset stripping, and security.

In the Soviet Union, as this thing called normalcy wore thin due to the stalemate in Afghanistan, the Chernobyl disaster, and general economic stagnation, it continued to be enforced through careful management of mass media well into the period known as glasnost. In the United States, as the economy fails to create enough jobs for several years in a row, and the entire economy tilts towards bankruptcy, business as usual continues to be a top-selling product, or so we are led to believe. American normalcy circa 2005 seems as impregnable as Soviet normalcy circa 1985 once seemed.

If there is a difference between the Soviet and the American approaches to maintaining a sense of normalcy, it is this: the Soviets tried to maintain it by force, while the Americans' superior approach is to maintain theirs through fear. You tend to feel more normal if you fear falling off your perch, and cling to it for dear life, than if somebody nails your feet to it.

More to the point: in a consumer society, anything that puts people off their shopping is dangerously disruptive, and all consumers sense this. Any expression of the truth about our lack of prospects for continued existence as a highly developed, prosperous industrial society is disruptive to the consumerist collective unconscious. There is a herd instinct to reject it, and therefore it fails, not through any overt action, but by failing to turn a profit, because it is unpopular.

In spite of this small difference in how normalcy is or was enforced, it was, and is being brought down, in the late Soviet Union as in the contemporary United States, through almost identical means, though with different technology. In the Soviet Union, there was something called samizdat, or self-publishing: with the help of manual typewriters and carbon paper, Russian dissidents managed to circulate enough material to neutralize the effects of enforced normalcy. In contemporary United States, we have web sites and bloggers: different technology, same difference. These are writings for which enforced normalcy is no longer the norm; the norm is the truth - or at least someone's earnest approximation of it.

So what has become of these Soviet mavericks, some of whom foretold the coming collapse with some accuracy? To be brief, they faded from view. Both tragically and ironically, those who become experts in explaining the faults of the system and in predicting the course of its demise are very much part of the system. When the system disappears, so does their area of expertise, and their audience. People stop intellectualizing their predicament and start trying to escape it - through drink or drugs or creativity or cunning - but they have no time for pondering the larger context.

Security

Security in post-collapse Soviet Union was, shall we say, lax. I came through unscathed, but I know quite a few people who did not. A childhood friend of mine and her son were killed in their apartment over the measly sum of 100 dollars. An elderly lady I know was knocked out and had her jaw broken by a burglar who waited outside her door for her to come home, assaulted her, took her keys, and looted her place. There is an infinite supply of stories of this sort. Empires are held together through violence or the threat of violence. Both the U.S. and Russia were, and are, serviced by a legion of servants whose expertise is in using violence: soldiers, policemen, prison wardens, and private security consultants. Both countries have a surplus of battle-hardened men who have killed, who are psychologically damaged by the experience, and have no qualms about taking human life. In both countries, there are many, many people whose stock in trade is their use of violence, in offense or defense. No matter what else happens, they will be employed, or self-employed; preferably the former.

In a post-collapse situation, all of these violent men automatically fall into the general category of private security consultants. They have a way of creating enough work to keep their entire tribe busy: if you don't hire them, they will still do the work, but against you rather than for you. Rackets of various sizes and shapes proliferate, and, if you have some property to protect, or wish to get something done, a great deal of your time and energy becomes absorbed by keeping your private security organization happy and effective. To round out the violent part of the population, there are also plenty of criminals. As their sentences expire, or as jail overcrowding and lack of resources force the authorities to grant amnesties, they are released into the wild, and return to a life of violent crime. But now there is nobody to lock them up again because the machinery of law enforcement has broken down due to lack of funds. This further exacerbates the need for private security, and puts those who cannot afford it at additional risk.

There is a continuum of sorts between those who can provide security and mere thugs. Those who can provide security also tend to know how to either employ or otherwise dispose of mere thugs. Thus, from the point of view of an uneducated security consumer, it is very important to work with an organization rather than with individuals. The need for security is huge: with a large number of desperate people about, anything that is not watched will be stolen. The scope of security-related activities is also huge: from sleepless grannies who sit in watch over the cucumber patch to bicycle parking lot attendants to house-sitters, and all the way to armed convoys and snipers on rooftops.
As the government, with its policing and law enforcement functions, atrophies, private, improvised security measures cover the security gap it leaves behind. In Russia, there was a period of years during which the police was basically not functioning: they had no equipment, no budget, and their salaries were not sufficient for survival. Murders went unsolved, muggings and burglaries were not even investigated. The police could only survive through graft. There was a substantial amount of melding between the police and organized crime. As the economy came back, it all got sorted out, to some extent. Where there is no reason to expect the economy to ever come back, one must learn how to make strange new friends, and keep them, for life.

Political Apathy

Before, during, and immediately after the Soviet collapse, there was a great deal of political activity by groups we might regard as progressive: liberal, environmentalist, pro-democracy reformers. These grew out of the dissident movements of the Soviet era, and made quite a significant impact for a time. A decade later "democracy" and "liberalism" are generally considered dirty words in Russia, commonly associated with exploitation of Russia by foreigners and other rot. The Russian state is centrist, with authoritarian tendencies. Most Russians dislike and distrust their government, but are afraid of weakness, and want a strong hand at the helm.

It is easy to see why political idealism fails to thrive in the murky post-collapse political environment. There is a strong pull to the right by nationalists who want to find scapegoats (inevitably, foreigners and ethnic minorities), a strong pull to the center by members of the ancien regime trying to hold on to remnants of their power, and a great upwelling of indecision, confusion, and inconclusive debate on the left, by those trying to do good, and failing to do anything. Sometimes the liberals get a chance to try an experiment or two. Yegor Gaidar got to try some liberal economic reforms under Yeltsin. He is a tragicomic figure, and many Russians now cringe when remembering his efforts (and to be fair, we don't even know how helpful or damaging his reforms might have been, since most of them were never implemented).

The liberals, reformists, and progressives in the United States, whether self-styled or so labeled, have had a hard time implementing their agenda. Even their few hard-won victories, such as Social Security, may get dismantled. Even when they managed to elect a president more to their liking, the effects were, by Western standards, reactionary. There was the Carter doctrine, according to which the United States will protect its access to oil by military aggression if necessary. There was also Clinton's welfare reform, which forced single mothers to work menial jobs while placing their children in substandard daycare.

People in the United States have a broadly similar attitude toward politics with people of the Soviet Union. In the U.S., this is often referred to as "voter apathy", but it might be more accurately described as non-voter indifference. The Soviet Union had a single, entrenched, systemically corrupt political party, which held a monopoly on power. The U.S. has two entrenched, systemically corrupt political parties, whose positions are often indistinguishable, and which together hold a monopoly on power. In either case, there is, or was, a single governing elite, but in the United States it organized itself into opposing teams to make its stranglehold on power seem more sportsmanlike.

In the U.S., there is an industry of political commentators and pundits which is devoted to inflaming political passions as much as possible, especially before elections. This is similar to what sports writers and commentators do to draw attention to their game. It seems that the main force behind political discourse in the U.S. is boredom: one can chat about the weather, one's job, one's mortgage and how it relates to current and projected property values, cars and the traffic situation, sports, and, far behind sports, politics. In an effort to make people pay attention, most of the issues trotted out before the electorate pertain to reproduction: abortion, birth control, stem cell research, and similar small bits of social policy are bandied about rather than settled, simply because they get good ratings. "Boring" but vitally important strategic issues such as sustainable development, environmental protection, and energy policy are studiously avoided.

Although people often bemoan political apathy as if it were a grave social ill, it seems to me that this is just as it should be. Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power? In Soviet-era Russia, intelligent people did their best to ignore the Communists: paying attention to them, whether through criticism or praise, would only serve to give them comfort and encouragement, making them feel as if they mattered. Why should Americans want to act any differently with regard to the Republicans and the Democrats? For love of donkeys and elephants?

Political Dysfunction

As I mentioned before, crisis-mitigating agendas for "us" to implement, whether they involve wars over access to resources, nuclear plant construction, wind farms, or hydrogen dreams, are not likely to be implemented, because this "we" entity will no longer be functional. If we are not likely to be able to implement our agenda prior to the collapse, then whatever is left of us is even less likely to do so afterward. Thus, there is little reason to organize politically in order to try to do good. But if you want to prepare to take advantage of a bad situation - well, that's a different story!

Politics has great potential for making a bad situation worse. It can cause war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Whenever people gather into political organizations, whether voluntarily or forcibly, it is a sign of trouble. I was at the annual meeting of my community garden recently, and among the generally placid and shy group of gardeners there were a couple of self-styled "activists." Before too long, one of these was raising the question of expelling people. People who don't show up for annual meetings and don't sign up to do cleaning and composting and so on - why are they allowed to hold on to their plots? Well, some of the "rogue elements" the activist was referring to consisted of elderly Russians, who, due to their extensive experience with such things during the Soviet times, are exceedingly unlikely to ever be compelled to take part in communal labor or sit through meetings with the collective. Frankly, they would prefer death. But they also love to garden.

The reason the "element" is allowed to exist in this particular community garden is because the woman who runs the place allows them to hold on to their plots. It is her decision: she exercises leadership, and she does not engage in politics. She makes the garden function, and allows the activists to make their noise, once a year, with no ill effects. But if the situation were to change and the kitchen garden suddenly became a source of sustenance rather than a hobby, how long would it take before the activist element would start demanding more power and asserting its authority?

Leadership is certainly a helpful quality in a crisis, which is a particularly bad time for lengthy deliberations and debates. In any situation, some people are better equipped to handle it than others, and can help others by giving them directions. They naturally accumulate a certain amount of power for themselves, and this is fine as long as enough people benefit from it, and as long as nobody is harmed or oppressed. Such people often spontaneously emerge in a crisis.

An equally useful quality in a crisis is apathy. The Russian people are exceptionally patient: even in the worst of post-collapse times, they did not riot, and there were no significant protests. They coped as best they could. The safest group of people to be with in a crisis is one that does not share strong ideological convictions, is not easily swayed by argument, and does not possess an overdeveloped, exclusive sense of identity.

Clueless busybodies who feel that "we must do something" and can be spun around by any half-wit demagogue are bad enough, but the most dangerous group, and one to watch out for and run from, is a group of political activists resolved to organize and promote some program or other. Even if the program is benign, and even if it is beneficial, the politicized approach to solving it might not be. As the saying goes, revolutions eat their children. Then they turn on everyone else. The life of a refugee is a form of survival; staying and fighting an organized mob generally isn't.

The Balkans are the post-collapse nightmare everyone is familiar with. Within the former Soviet Union, Georgia is the prime example of nationalist politics pursued to the point of national disintegration. After winning its independence, Georgia went through a paroxysm of nationalist fervor, resulting in a somewhat smaller, slightly less populous, permanently defunct state, with widespread poverty, a large refugee population, and two former provinces stuck in permanent political limbo, because, apparently, the world has lost its ability to redraw political boundaries. In its current form, it is politically and militarily a client of Washington, treasured only as a pipeline route for Caspian oil. Its major trading partner and energy supplier is the Russian Federation.

The U.S. is much more like the Balkans than like Russia, which is inhabited by a fairly homogeneous Caucasian/Asian population. The U.S. is very much segregated, usually by race, often by ethnicity, and always by income level. During prosperous times, it is kept relatively calm by keeping a percentage of people in jail that has set an all-time world record. During less prosperous times, it is at a big risk of political explosion. Multi-ethnic societies are fragile and unstable; when they fall apart, or explode, everyone loses.

Collapse in the U.S.

In the U.S., there appear to be few ways to make the collapse scenario work out smoothly for oneself and one's family. The whole place seems too far gone in a particular, unsustainable direction. It is a real creative challenge, and we should be giving it a lot of serious thought.

Suppose you live in a big city, in an apartment or a condo. You depend on municipal services for survival. A week without electricity, or heat, or water, or gas, or garbage removal spells extreme discomfort. Any two of these is a calamity. Any three is a disaster. Food comes from the supermarket, with help from the cash machine or the credit card slot at the checkout station. Clean clothes come from the laundromat, which requires electricity, water, and natural gas. Once all the businesses have shut down and your apartment is cold, dark, smells like garbage (because it isn't being collected) and like excrement (because the toilet doesn't flush), perhaps it is time to go camping and explore the great outdoors.

So let's consider the countryside. Suppose that you own a homestead and have a tiny mortgage that shrivels to next to nothing after a good bout of inflation, or that you own it free and clear. If it's in a developed suburban subdivision, there will still be problems with taxes, code enforcement, strangers from outer space living next door, and other boondoggles, which could get worse as conditions deteriorate. Distressed municipalities may at first attempt jack up rates to cover their costs instead of simply closing up shop. In a misguided effort to save property values, they may also attempt to enforce codes against such necessities as compost heaps, outhouses, chicken coops, and crops planted on your front lawn. Keep in mind, also, that the pesticides and herbicides lavished on lawns and golf courses leave toxic residues. Perhaps the best thing to do with suburbia is to abandon it altogether.

A small farm offers somewhat better possibilities for farming, but most farms in the U.S. are mortgaged to the hilt, and most land that has been under intensive cultivation has been mercilessly bombarded with chemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides, making it an unhealthy place, inhabited by men with tiny sperm counts. Small farms tend to be lonely places, and many, without access to diesel or gasoline, would become dangerously remote. You will need neighbors to barter with, to help you, and to keep you company. Even a small farm is probably overkill in terms of the amount of farmland available, because without the ability to get crops to market, or a functioning cash economy to sell them in, there is no reason to grow a large surplus of food. Tens of acres are a waste when all you need is a few thousand square feet. Many Russian families managed to survive with the help of a standard garden plot of one sotka, which is 100 square meters, or, if you prefer, 0.024710538 acres, or 1076.391 square feet.

What is needed, of course, is a small town or a village: a relatively small, relatively dense settlement, with about an acre of farmland for every 30 or so people, and with zoning regulations designed for fair use and sustainability, not opportunities for capital investment, growth, property values, or other sorts of "development". Further, it would have to be a place where people know each other and are willing to help each other - a real community. There may still be a few hundred communities like that tucked away here and there in the poorer counties in the United States, but there are not enough of them, and most of them are too poor to absorb a significant population of economic migrants.

Investment Advice

Often when people hear about the possibility of economic collapse, they wonder: "Let's suppose that the U.S. economy is going to collapse soon. Why is this even worth thinking about, if there is nothing I can do about it?" Well, I am not a professional investment adviser, so I risk nothing by making some suggestions for how one can collapse-proof one's investment portfolio.

The nuclear scare gave rise to the archetype of the American Survivalist, holed up in the hills, with a bomb shelter, a fantastic number of tins of spam, and an assortment of guns and plentiful ammunition with which to fight off neighbors from further downhill, or perhaps just to shoot beer-cans when the neighbors come over for beer and spamwiches. And, of course, an American flag. This sort of survivalism is about as good as burying yourself alive, I suppose.

The idea of stockpiling is not altogether bad, though. Stockpiling food is, of course, a rotten idea, literally. But certain manufactured items are certainly worth considering. Suppose you have a retirement account, or some mutual funds. And suppose you feel reasonably certain that by the time you are scheduled to retire it won't be enough to buy a cup of coffee. And suppose you realize that you can currently buy a lot of good stuff that has a long shelf life and will be needed, and valuable, far into the future. And suppose, further, that you have a small amount of storage space: a few hundred square feet. Now, what are you going to do? Sit by and watch your savings evaporate? Or take the tax hit and invest in things that are not composed of vapor?

Once the cash machines are out of cash, the stock ticker stops ticking, and the retail chain breaks down, people will still have basic needs. There will be flea markets and private barter arrangements to serve these needs, using whatever local token of exchange is available; bundles of $100 bills, bits of gold chain, packs of cigarettes, or what have you. It's not a bad idea to own a few of everything you will need, but you should invest in things you will be able to trade for things you will need. Think of consumer necessities that require high technology and have a long shelf life. Here are some suggestions to get you started: drugs (over-the-counter and prescription); razor blades; condoms. Rechargeable batteries (and solar chargers) are sure to become a prized item (Ni-MH are the less toxic ones). Toiletries, such as good soap, will be luxury items. Fill some shipping containers, nitrogen-pack them so that nothing rusts or rots, and store them somewhere.

After the Soviet collapse, there swiftly appeared a category of itinerant merchants who provided people with access to imported products. To procure their wares, these people had to travel abroad, to Poland, to China, to Turkey, on trains, carrying goods back and forth in their baggage. They would exchange a suitcase of Russian-made watches for a suitcase of other, more useful consumer products, such as shampoo or razor blades. They would have to grease the palms of officials along their route, and were often robbed. There was a period of time when these people, called "chelnoki," which is Russian for "shuttles," were the only source of consumer products. The products were often factory rejects, damaged, or past their sell-by date, but this did not make them any less valuable. Based on their example, it is possible to predict which items will be in high demand, and to stockpile these items ahead of time, as a hedge against economic collapse. Note that chelnoki had intact economies to trade with, accessible by train - while this is not guaranteed to be the case in the U.S.

A stockpile of this sort, in a walkable, socially stable place, where you know everybody, where you have some close friends and some family, where you own your shelter and some land free and clear, and where you can grow most of your own food, and barter for the rest, should enable you to survive economic collapse without too much trouble. And, who knows, maybe you will even find happiness there.

Conclusion

Although the basic and obvious conclusion is that the United States is worse prepared for economic collapse than Russia was, and will have a harder time than Russia had, there are some cultural facets to the United States that are not entirely unhelpful. To close on an optimistic note, I will mention three of these.

Firstly, and perhaps most surprisingly, Americans make better Communists than Russians ever did, or cared to try. They excel at communal living, with plenty of good, stable roommate situations, which compensate for their weak, alienated, or nonexistent families. These roommate situations can be used as a template, and scaled up to village-sized self-organized communities. Big households that pool their resources make a lot more sense in an unstable, resource-scarce environment than the individualistic approach. Without a functioning economy, a household that consists of a single individual or a nuclear family ceases to be viable, and people are forced to live in ever larger households, from roommate situations to taking lodgers to doubling up to forming villages. Where any Russian would cringe at such an idea, because it stirs the still fresh memories of the failed Soviet experiment at collectivization and forced communal living, many Americans are adept at making fast friends and getting along, and generally seem to posses an untapped reserve of gregariousness, community spirit, and civic-minded idealism.

Secondly, there is a layer of basic decency and niceness to at least some parts of American society, which has been all but destroyed in Russia over the course of Soviet history. There is an altruistic impulse to help strangers, and pride in being helpful to others. In many ways, Americans are culturally homogeneous, and the biggest interpersonal barrier between them is the fear and alienation fostered by their racially and economically segregated living conditions.

Lastly, hidden behind the tawdry veneer of patriotic bumper stickers and flags, there is an undercurrent of quiet national pride, which, if engaged, can produce high morale and results. Americans are not yet willing to simply succumb to circumstance. Because many of them lack a good understanding of their national predicament, their efforts to mitigate it may turn out to be in vain, but they are virtually guaranteed to make a valiant effort, for "this is, after all, America."

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.

According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters. Some of the questions about the agency's new powers led the administration to temporarily suspend the operation last year and impose more restrictions, the officials said.

The Bush administration views the operation as necessary so that the agency can move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to this country, the officials said. Defenders of the program say it has been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent attacks inside the United States.

Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, the officials say. In some cases, they said, the Justice Department eventually seeks warrants if it wants to expand the eavesdropping to include communications confined within the United States. The officials said the administration had briefed Congressional leaders about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals with national security issues.

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it said the N.S.A. eavesdropped without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands over the past three years, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials.

Several officials said the eavesdropping program had helped uncover a plot by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches. What appeared to be another Qaeda plot, involving fertilizer bomb attacks on British pubs and train stations, was exposed last year in part through the program, the officials said. But they said most people targeted for N.S.A. monitoring have never been charged with a crime, including an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden.

Dealing With a New Threat

The eavesdropping program grew out of concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks that the nation's intelligence agencies were not poised to deal effectively with the new threat of Al Qaeda and that they were handcuffed by legal and bureaucratic restrictions better suited to peacetime than war, according to officials. In response, President Bush significantly eased limits on American intelligence and law enforcement agencies and the military.

But some of the administration's antiterrorism initiatives have provoked an outcry from members of Congress, watchdog groups, immigrants and others who argue that the measures erode protections for civil liberties and intrude on Americans' privacy. Opponents have challenged provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the focus of contentious debate on Capitol Hill this week, that expand domestic surveillance by giving the Federal Bureau of Investigation more power to collect information like library lending lists or Internet use. Military and F.B.I. officials have drawn criticism for monitoring what were largely peaceful antiwar protests. The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security were forced to retreat on plans to use public and private databases to hunt for possible terrorists. And last year, the Supreme Court rejected the administration's claim that those labeled "enemy combatants" were not entitled to judicial review of their open-ended detention.

Mr. Bush's executive order allowing some warrantless eavesdropping on those inside the United States ­ including American citizens, permanent legal residents, tourists and other foreigners ­ is based on classified legal opinions that assert that the president has broad powers to order such searches, derived in part from the September 2001 Congressional resolution authorizing him to wage war on Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, according to the officials familiar with the N.S.A. operation.

The National Security Agency, which is based at Fort Meade, Md., is the nation's largest and most secretive intelligence agency, so intent on remaining out of public view that it has long been nicknamed "No Such Agency.'' It breaks codes and maintains listening posts around the world to eavesdrop on foreign governments, diplomats and trade negotiators as well as drug lords and terrorists. But the agency ordinarily operates under tight restrictions on any spying on Americans, even if they are overseas, or disseminating information about them.

What the agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, the officials said.

In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said.

Under the agency's longstanding rules, the N.S.A. can target for interception phone calls or e-mail messages on foreign soil, even if the recipients of those communications are in the United States. Usually, though, the government can only target phones and e-mail messages in this country by first obtaining a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which holds its closed sessions at the Justice Department.

Traditionally, the F.B.I., not the N.S.A., seeks such warrants and conducts most domestic eavesdropping. Until the new program began, the N.S.A. typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions in Washington, New York and other cities, and obtained court orders to do so.

Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.

Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court.

A White House Briefing

After the special program started, Congressional leaders from both political parties were brought to Vice President Dick Cheney's office in the White House. The leaders, who included the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees, learned of the N.S.A. operation from Mr. Cheney, Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, who was then the agency's director and is now the principal deputy director of national intelligence, and George J. Tenet, then the director of the C.I.A., officials said.

It is not clear how much the members of Congress were told about the presidential order and the eavesdropping program. Some of them declined to comment about the matter, while others did not return phone calls.

Later briefings were held for members of Congress as they assumed leadership roles on the intelligence committees, officials familiar with the program said. After a 2003 briefing, Senator Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who became vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that year, wrote a letter to Mr. Cheney expressing concerns about the program, officials knowledgeable about the letter said. It could not be determined if he received a reply. Mr. Rockefeller declined to comment. Aside from the Congressional leaders, only a small group of people, including several cabinet members and officials at the N.S.A., the C.I.A. and the Justice Department, know of the program.

Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the legality of the program. But nothing came of his inquiry. "People just looked the other way because they didn't want to know what was going on," he said.

A senior government official recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation. "My first reaction was, ‘We're doing what?' " he said. While he said he eventually felt that adequate safeguards were put in place, he added that questions about the program's legitimacy were understandable.

Some of those who object to the operation argue that is unnecessary. By getting warrants through the foreign intelligence court, the N.S.A. and F.B.I. could eavesdrop on people inside the United States who might be tied to terrorist groups without skirting longstanding rules, they say.

The standard of proof required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is generally considered lower than that required for a criminal warrant ­ intelligence officials only have to show probable cause that someone may be "an agent of a foreign power," which includes international terrorist groups ­ and the secret court has turned down only a small number of requests over the years. In 2004, according to the Justice Department, 1,754 warrants were approved. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant emergency approval for wiretaps within hours, officials say.

Administration officials counter that they sometimes need to move more urgently, the officials said. Those involved in the program also said that the N.S.A.'s eavesdroppers might need to start monitoring large batches of numbers all at once, and that it would be impractical to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first, according to the officials.

Culture of Caution and Rules

The N.S.A. domestic spying operation has stirred such controversy among some national security officials in part because of the agency's cautious culture and longstanding rules.

Widespread abuses ­ including eavesdropping on Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists ­ by American intelligence agencies became public in the 1970's and led to passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which imposed strict limits on intelligence gathering on American soil. Among other things, the law required search warrants, approved by the secret F.I.S.A. court, for wiretaps in national security cases. The agency, deeply scarred by the scandals, adopted additional rules that all but ended domestic spying on its part.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, though, the United States intelligence community was criticized for being too risk-averse. The National Security Agency was even cited by the independent 9/11 Commission for adhering to self-imposed rules that were stricter than those set by federal law.

Several senior government officials say that when the special operation first began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.

In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.

For the first time, the Justice Department audited the N.S.A. program, several officials said. And to provide more guidance, the Justice Department and the agency expanded and refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether probable cause existed to start monitoring someone's communications, several officials said.

A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials. While not knowing all the details of the exchange, several government lawyers said there appeared to be concerns that the Justice Department, by trying to shield the existence of the N.S.A. program, was in danger of misleading the court about the origins of the information cited to justify the warrants.

One official familiar with the episode said the judge insisted to Justice Department lawyers at one point that any material gathered under the special N.S.A. program not be used in seeking wiretap warrants from her court. Judge Kollar-Kotelly did not return calls for comment.

A related issue arose in a case in which the F.B.I. was monitoring the communications of a terrorist suspect under a F.I.S.A.-approved warrant, even though the National Security Agency was already conducting warrantless eavesdropping. According to officials, F.B.I. surveillance of Mr. Faris, the Brooklyn Bridge plotter, was dropped for a short time because of technical problems. At the time, senior Justice Department officials worried what would happen if the N.S.A. picked up information that needed to be presented in court. The government would then either have to disclose the N.S.A. program or mislead a criminal court about how it had gotten the information.

The Civil Liberties Question

Several national security officials say the powers granted the N.S.A. by President Bush go far beyond the expanded counterterrorism powers granted by Congress under the USA Patriot Act, which is up for renewal. The House on Wednesday approved a plan to reauthorize crucial parts of the law. But final passage has been delayed under the threat of a Senate filibuster because of concerns from both parties over possible intrusions on Americans' civil liberties and privacy.

Under the act, law enforcement and intelligence officials are still required to seek a F.I.S.A. warrant every time they want to eavesdrop within the United States. A recent agreement reached by Republican leaders and the Bush administration would modify the standard for F.B.I. wiretap warrants, requiring, for instance, a description of a specific target. Critics say the bar would remain too low to prevent abuses.

Bush administration officials argue that the civil liberties concerns are unfounded, and they say pointedly that the Patriot Act has not freed the N.S.A. to target Americans. "Nothing could be further from the truth," wrote John Yoo, a former official in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and his co-author in a Wall Street Journal opinion article in December 2003. Mr. Yoo worked on a classified legal opinion on the N.S.A.'s domestic eavesdropping program.

At an April hearing on the Patriot Act renewal, Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., "Can the National Security Agency, the great electronic snooper, spy on the American people?"

"Generally," Mr. Mueller said, "I would say generally, they are not allowed to spy or to gather information on American citizens." President Bush did not ask Congress to include provisions for the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program as part of the Patriot Act and has not sought any other laws to authorize the operation. Bush administration lawyers argued that such new laws were unnecessary, because they believed that the Congressional resolution on the campaign against terrorism provided ample authorization, officials said.

Seeking Congressional approval was also viewed as politically risky because the proposal would be certain to face intense opposition on civil liberties grounds. The administration also feared that by publicly disclosing the existence of the operation, its usefulness in tracking terrorists would end, officials said.

The legal opinions that support the N.S.A. operation remain classified, but they appear to have followed private discussions among senior administration lawyers and other officials about the need to pursue aggressive strategies that once may have been seen as crossing a legal line, according to senior officials who participated in the discussions.

For example, just days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Mr. Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer, wrote an internal memorandum that argued that the government might use "electronic surveillance techniques and equipment that are more powerful and sophisticated than those available to law enforcement agencies in order to intercept telephonic communications and observe the movement of persons but without obtaining warrants for such uses."

Mr. Yoo noted that while such actions could raise constitutional issues, in the face of devastating terrorist attacks "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties."

The next year, Justice Department lawyers disclosed their thinking on the issue of warrantless wiretaps in national security cases in a little-noticed brief in an unrelated court case. In that 2002 brief, the government said that "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."

Administration officials were also encouraged by a November 2002 appeals court decision in an unrelated matter. The decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which sided with the administration in dismantling a bureaucratic "wall" limiting cooperation between prosecutors and intelligence officers, noted "the president's inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance."

But the same court suggested that national security interests should not be grounds "to jettison the Fourth Amendment requirements" protecting the rights of Americans against undue searches. The dividing line, the court acknowledged, "is a very difficult one to administer."

According to the “instant experts” who expound ad infinitum behind anonymous handles on partisan computer bulletin boards, we sit in our den in our mountaintop retreat and make all this stuff up, that nothing we print ever ends up in the so-called “mainstream media.”

No wonder they don’t use their real names. If I was as wrong as these keyboard commandos, I’d hide behind an anonymous name too.

From the Capitol Hill Blue archives:

June 7, 2004: Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7.

June 8, 2004: How Big Brother is Watching, Listening and Misusing Information About You.

November 20, 2002: Welcome to the American Gestapo

We realized early on that the Bush Administration has discarded the Constitution and set the federal government on a course to snoop, pry and invade the private lives of Americans at will.

We knew it. We reported it and the naysayers claimed it couldn’t possibly be true.

As usual, they were wrong. As usual, we were right. And, as usual, it took the rest of the “mainstream media” about a year to catch up.

© Copyright 2005 by Capitol Hill Blue

Excerpts from NY Times article: Original HERE.

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it said the N.S.A. eavesdropped without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands over the past three years, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials.

Several officials said the eavesdropping program had helped uncover a plot by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches. What appeared to be another Qaeda plot, involving fertilizer bomb attacks on British pubs and train stations, was exposed last year in part through the program, the officials said. But they said most people targeted for N.S.A. monitoring have never been charged with a crime, including an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden.

The House on Wednesday passed a House-Senate compromise bill to renew the Act that supporters say added significant safeguards to the law. These supporters predict doom and gloom if the Patriot Act's critics win and the provisions expire.

The failure to renew the provisions would be "interpreted by our enemies as somehow inviting or even enabling further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil," Sen. Orrin Hatch (news, bio, voting record), R-Utah, said.

But the critics, who include senators like Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Republican Larry Craig of Idaho, say they don't want the Patriot Act to expire — they just want enough time to improve the bill to the point where it doesn't infringe on American liberties.

"Continued good-faith negotiation will result in solving the problems in a way that will be acceptable to a vast majority of this body and will not in any way diminish the ability of our law enforcement and intelligence organizations to do their job," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., one of the original Democratic sponsors of the Patriot Act.

Congress passed the Patriot Act overwhelmingly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The law expanded the government's surveillance and prosecutorial powers against suspected terrorists, their associates and financiers.

The bill's supporters, who include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., must get 60 votes to overcome the critics' filibuster threat. Bush, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Republican congressional leaders have been lobbying hard this week to secure those votes and avoid a filibuster.

A filibuster would be "a bad decision for the security of the United States," the president said Thursday. "I call upon the Senate to end the filibuster and to pass this important legislation so that we have the tools necessary to defend the country in a time of war."

Moments later, the senior Democrat on the issue, Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record), D-Vt., told reporters that more than 40 votes exist to sustain a filibuster in a test vote Friday.

The bill's opponents say the original act was rushed into law, and Congress should take more time now to make sure the rights of innocent Americans are safeguarded before making most of the expiring provisions permanent.

They says the current Patriot Act gives government too much power to investigate people's private lives.

"Folks, when we're dealing with civil liberties, you don't compromise them," said Craig, a board member of the National Rifle Association.

Chief among the critics' concerns are the National Security Letters that the FBI can use to compel the release of such private records as financial, computer and library transactions. The bill for the first time explicitly says the third-party recipients of NSLs — banks, Internet service providers and libraries — may hire lawyers and challenge the letters in court.

Feingold and his allies want more reports from the Justice Department on how the letters and other tools are used in terror investigations. They also want to set limits on how long law enforcement officials may continue to use NSLs in terror investigations.

"We've sent a message to the world that the United States is not like the terrorists," Senator McCain said, sitting next to the president in the Oval Office yesterday. "This will help us enormously in winning the hearts and minds of the people throughout the world in winning the war on terror."

Mr Bush said the agreement will "make it clear to the world that this government does not torture and that we adhere to the international convention of torture, whether it be here at home or abroad".

The bipartisan front by the Senate and the House was one element in a formidable show of defiance by Congress over the White House's conduct of the war on terror. Republican senators also joined Democrats to demand facts about secret CIA prisons abroad, while moderate Republican senators threatened to block anti-terror legislation on the grounds that it infringed civil liberties.

The united stand reflected widespread concern among legislators that the administration's counter-terrorism methods are damaging America's standing in the world. It also represented an assertion of congressional power and a growing reluctance to leave the conduct of "the war on terror" to the executive alone.

The White House accepted the McCain bill almost unchanged from the form it had vehemently opposed for months, even threatening the first use of a Bush veto. Vice-president Dick Cheney had lobbied for an exception to the bill for CIA officials operating abroad.

Under the agreed draft, US personnel accused of violations could argue that a "reasonable" person might have concluded they were following a lawful order.

The legislation, which forms part of a defence spending bill, also stipulates that members of the US armed forces follow interrogation procedures laid down in the army field manual, removing discretionary power from local commanders.

Meanwhile, MPs from across the political spectrum in Britain yesterday stepped up pressure on the government to provide information on its role in CIA "torture flights". Andrew Tyrie, Conservative chairman of the all-party group on extraordinary rendition, said the issue, would not go away. At a Commons press conference, with Labour MP Lynne Jones, Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris and Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti, Mr Tyrie said: "There is a real risk that the government may find themselves complicit by inaction. Turning a blind eye becomes something more than negligence and may be shown to be unlawful."

In a letter to Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, he demanded to know whether the government had asked the US administration how many CIA flights transporting detainees had passed through British airspace and whether it had sought permission for them. He also asked Mr Straw whether he had checked flight records of the Ministry of Defence, air traffic control, and the records of private companies such as BAA, Infratil, and TBI Group, which run Glasgow, Prestwick and Luton airports.

Mr Straw has said only that Foreign Office and Home Office records had been searched. The Home Office has already said it destroys records of transit flights. The MoD says its records could be supplied only at "disproportionate cost".

Ms Jones said details of the flights were bound to be made public as those freed after being subjected to rendition spoke out.

Backstory

Yesterday's deal between the White House and Senator John McCain marked the end of long and bumpy road that began in Abu Ghraib last year.

A Pentagon report on gross abuse of detainees at the US-run military prison, and subsequent revelations of maltreatment and deaths in custody in Afghanistan, led to allegations that the White House had created a "climate of abuse" by flouting the Geneva conventions. President Bush repeatedly insisted "we do not torture", but unease spread to the Republican party.

In October Senator McCain, a victim of torture in Vietnam, introduced legislation banning abuse of detainees in US custody. Dick Cheney led the White House resistance, demanding an exception for CIA agents abroad. Yesterday's deal is a measure of his declining influence on Capitol Hill.

The change of course by the White House was a big victory for Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was Mr Bush's rival for their party's presidential nomination in 2000, and is likely to make a second run in 2008.

Last month, Mr McCain crafted a resolution outlawing "degrading, cruel and inhumane" treatment of detainees that passed the Senate by 90 votes to nine.

Vice-President Dick Cheney lobbied senators in person to revoke the amendment, but was undercut when the Republican- controlled House, normally more obedient to the White House, also voted by an overwhelming margin for a similar measure.

To continue resistance, George Bush would have had to issue the first presidential veto of his near-five years in office, effectively in support of torture. As Mr McCain and other Republicans reminded him, this would have been a disastrous blow to the image abroad of the US, already tarnished by the renditions row, and allegations the CIA operated secret prisons for terror suspects abroad.

In the end, only cosmetic adjustments to the wording were made. The deal, Mr Bush said, "will make it clear to the world that this government does not torture and that we adhere to the international convention of torture, whether it be here at home or abroad."

Mr McCain called the agreement "a message to the world that the US is not like the terrorists". The most obvious loser is Mr Cheney, in effect disavowed by his own boss.

But there could yet be problems. Though the Senate Armed Service Committee is fully behind the amendment, the Republican Congressman who chairs the corresponding House committee, Duncan Hunter, said he would not support it unless further changes were made.

In a poll, 38 per cent of Americans said they supported torture to interrogate terror suspects. The Ipsos Mori poll, carried out in nine countries, found 30 per cent of Britons backed its use. Germany and France had similar results to Britain.

Amnesty International, which disclosed in The Independent yesterday that the UK authorities failed to interview four men detained for four years under terror legislation, called the findings "deeply worrying". A spokesman, Mike Blakemore, said: "People are losing sight of the horrific reality of torture, enabling the UK to turn a blind eye to other countries' torture records by seeking 'memoranda of understanding' with countries like Algeria.

With sparks flying across the Atlantic again, Condoleezza Rice faced a barrage of questions during her European tour: the secretary of state admitted that renditions do take place but insisted that the US does not condone torture. That, it was widely noted, however, does not constitute a denial that torture is used. And American definitions of what constitutes torture have in any event become alarmingly elastic.

Washington has also conspicuously failed to confirm or deny reports that the CIA has been using secret "black" prisons in eastern Europe - Poland and Romania insist they are not involved - to hold prisoners outside any legal jurisidiction. At the same time, more information has surfaced about clandestine flights - thanks to planespotters who recorded registration numbers and journalists who painstakingly traced the ownership of the aircraft, plotted their routes, cross-referenced them with prisoner testimonies and pieced the jigsaw together.

The most damaging statement from the bearded, bespectacled Mr Marty was that secret services in some EU countries may have collaborated over the flights - though he admitted he had no evidence to corroborate the claim. "I think it would have been difficult for these actions to have taken place without a degree of collaboration," he said. "But it is possible that secret services did not inform their governments."

Many observers have argued that it seems barely credible that intelligence and security agencies, which work closely with the CIA, were unaware of what was going on. It is possible of course that the US decided not to officially inform friendly governments precisely in order to avoid a ruckus. Experts warn though that turning a blind eye to illegality is itself illegal.

The revelations have proved especially awkward for Germany, where the government has admitted it knew of the case of Khaled al-Masri, a Lebanese-born citizen kidnapped by the Americans in Macedonia and held in Afghanistan - though only after he had been freed in Albania. But Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the foreign minister, denied flatly that it had given any assistance to the abduction of German citizens. An admission to the contrary would have been remarkable since the Red-Green government of Gerhard Schröder, in office at the time, was a vigorous opponent of the Iraq war.

Controversy over the issue is also strong in Britain, where Iraq is still an open wound and MPs have set up an all-party committee on renditions, working with civil liberties groups to maintain pressure on the government. Coincidentally, the Law Lords last week ruled that evidence obtained using torture was inadmissible in British courts.

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, has insisted the government had no evidence of rendition flights - though he did acknowledge that it had been informed when the practice began under the Clinton administration. To some, his answer was similar to Dr Rice's: careful, evasive and lawyerly. He might well have no records, but maybe records weren't the point. More direct and detailed questions may prove harder to deflect.

Fresh information seems certain to emerge, probably from ever-leaky Washington. But renditions have already highlighted sharp differences between Europe and America about how to fight terrorism and respect the law. On Thursday, the European Parliament (EP) followed the Council of Europe and set up its own investigation. "This is a crucial and fundamental issue," declared Elmar Brok, chairman of the EP foreign affairs committee. "The West's credibility is at stake."

Europeans have watched in dismay since the September 11 attacks as the Bush administration has re-interpreted international obligations, from the Geneva conventions on prisoners of war to the UN convention on torture, to suit its own purposes. The scandals involving prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib have been highly damaging. But so have the attempts by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, to allow the CIA to use illegal techniques such as "waterboarding", when a prisoner is made to feel he is drowning.

Americans sometimes complain that Europeans patronise them when it comes to terrorism, lecturing them on their long experience with the IRA, Red Brigades, ETA, Baader-Meinhof and Middle Eastern groups from Algerians to Palestinians. Europeans counter that the Americans have simply got it wrong. As Chris Patten, the former EU external affairs commissioner, wrote in his recent memoirs: "The 'war on terrorism' has been understood in Europe as a metaphor: a phrase to describe the myriad responses required of the civilised world to address problems that do not admit of definitive solutions, let alone military ones."

Still, despite disagreements, the last four years have seen intensified transatlantic and intra-European anti-terrorist cooperation in many areas: retention of internet and telephone data, asset freezes, border security arrangements, and the new EU arrest warrant replacing lengthy extradition arrangements. Intriguingly, in a passage that was expunged from the official EU record at US request, Washington and Brussels agreed in 2003 to improve cooperation on "increased use of European transit facilities to support the return of criminal/inadmissible aliens ... and improving co-operation in removals". That statement, unearthed by the Statewatch human rights monitor, seems destined to become part of the growing mountain of documentation about extraordinary renditions.

European anger has been matched by annoyance in the US, reviving prejudices of the old "warriors versus wimps" variety. "Europe," complained a columnist in the conservative Washington Times, "is in the throes of one of those fits of anti-American hysteria that seems to seize the Old Continent with predictable regularity. Any shadow of a rumour, any smidgeon of information that, if true, could reflect badly on the United States, sells newspapers in Europe like hotcakes and tends to warm people's hearts with the thought that at least they are not like Americans."

But Card, bolstered by the President’s willingness to try a new approach in speeches on Irag policy, admitting some mistakes while vowing to complete the mission in Iraq, pushed for the big one – a public Presidential admission that the intelligence information used to sell the war to Congress and the American people was wrong in the claims that Irag possessed weapons of mass destruction, posed an immediate threat to the United States or that proof existed of a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Armed with polls that showed the President rebounding in public approval after his first speeches, Card pushed for the big one – a Presidential admission that the primary reasons given for the Iraq war was wrong – with Bush still insisting the war was justified.

It was, Card admitted, a risky strategy. The press and public could zero in on the false intel and the President’s many claims that the intel was correct and miss the overall point of the speech but the Chief of Staff argued that the risk was worth taking.

“The intelligence was flawed,” Card said. “Everyone in the nation knows that. It’s time we admitted the truth.”

Rove wasn’t convinced. The White House, could, he claimed, continue to claim that it had more access to intelligence than the public and could claim that information supported the earlier reports.

“That won’t fly,” Card said. “The truth is out on this. As long as we continue to deny the truth the President’s credibility is at stake.”

Bush wavered but came down on Card’s side when Karen Hughes, the Presidential confidante that Bush trusts even more than Rove, sided with the Chief of Staff.

Bush’s speech, delivered Wednesday, went through more than a dozen drafts before settling on the language the President would use:

“It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong,” Bush said in the final draft. “As president, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq.”

But, in typical Bush style, the President remained committed to the war.

“Saddam was a threat — and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power," Bush said.

The debate over admitting the use of false intelligence marked the second straight defeat for Rove in determining the President’s course is trying to resell his Iraq war to a skeptical American public. He argued against the current strategy used by Bush to admit some setbacks, saying “a real leader doesn’t act that way.”

Some White House aides say the President’s willingness to ignore the advice of his most trusted aide signals Bush’s weariness with Rove’s scorched earth political strategies.

“The President realizes that listening to Karl got him into the fix he’s in now,” says one senior GOP consultant who, like all who comment on Bush for publication, insisted on anonymity for fear of angering the President. “He's listening to others now and taking their advice is why you’re seeing a new approach.”

Two other developments conspired to make Bush's executive order look like public relations rather than policy. A small provision that seems to have emanated from the administration, tucked into a big defense bill, would exempt the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency from the Freedom of Information Act altogether.

Since 1816, the U.S. government has annually published the name, workplace and salary for each of its civilian employees, who currently number 2.7 million. There are some exemptions _ certain law enforcement officers, for example _ but they are few. But quietly, without notice or explanation, the Bush administration began withholding 900,000 names. In other words, it's none of the public's business who works for it and where.

This secrecy _ over the energy bill, prewar intelligence on WMD, the cost of the prescription drug bill, the impact of his tax cuts on the deficit, the treatment of detainees _ has cost the president with the Congress, including his own Republicans, and the public. When he speaks, he no longer gets the benefit of the doubt, and in Washington, that's no secret.

(Contact Dale McFeatters at McFeattersD(at)SHNS.com.)

© Copyright 2005 by Capitol Hill Blue

During an interview Wednesday on the Fox News Channel, Bush was asked whether he believes DeLay is innocent of the charges of money laundering and conspiracy that led to his indictment in Texas and resignation from the House Republican leadership in September. "Yes, I do," the president replied.

That response pushed the White House on the defensive yesterday. Administration officials have repeatedly deflected questions about other legal probes -- especially Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's inquiry into the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name -- by saying they could not comment on ongoing investigations. White House spokesman Scott McClellan called the apparent inconsistency a "presidential prerogative."

"The president was asked a question and he responded to that question in the interview yesterday, and made very clear what his views were," McClellan said. "We don't typically tend to get into discussing legal matters of that nature, but in this instance, the president chose to respond to it. Our policy regarding the Fitzgerald investigation and ongoing legal proceeding is well-known and it remains unchanged."

"Call it a presidential prerogative," he added.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) fired back that Bush's comments on the DeLay investigation should free him to reveal who leaked Plame's name. Conservative columnist Robert D. Novak, who published Plame's identity in July 2003, suggested this week that Bush knows who in the White House leaked it.

Democrats yesterday charged that Republican leaders on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are going to extraordinary lengths to protect DeLay. Once the House adjourns for the year, it will not reconvene until the end of January, the latest reassembly since 1933, said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Pelosi contends that the timing is designed to protect DeLay from a challenge to his hope of reclaiming his leadership post.

Jessica Boulanger, a spokeswoman for acting Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), said the proposed Jan. 31 return date is only a few days later than those of recent congresses. It is "absolutely false" to say the date was picked with DeLay in mind, she said.

Boulanger said House members are in session unusually late this year, and need time at home. She also said the Senate will devote most of its time to a Supreme Court nomination in January, and thus the House would have little interaction with the other chamber.

Accused of being inconsistent

Bush’s support of DeLay drew criticism from Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who told the president in a letter, “You were willing to break your stated policy of not commenting on pending investigations to express clear and unequivocal support for Tom DeLay.”

McClellan denied there was any inconsistency between the president’s remarks in the DeLay case and the White House’s “no comments” in the CIA matter, because the CIA case involves a continuing investigation affecting the Bush administration and the DeLay’s is further along in the legal process. McClellan also noted that the White House has commented previously on legal matters, such as charges against former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

A special prosecutor has been looking into whether anyone in the administration revealed the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame in 2003 to punish her husband for his criticism of the president on the Iraq war.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, has been indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI, and the prosecutor continues to examine the involvement of Karl Rove, the president’s deputy chief of staff and top political adviser.

‘No comment’ strategy

From the start of the CIA leak probe in 2003, the White House issued denials that Rove and Libby were involved. Those statements gave way to the current “no comment” strategy following revelations in July that Rove and Libby had been sources for Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper in a story that identified Plame, the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, as a CIA employee.

Plame’s identity was exposed eight days after her husband accused the administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq regarding weapons of mass destruction.

In the days leading up to the leaked stories, Rove also spoke with conservative columnist Robert Novak about the CIA status of Wilson’s wife.

This week, Novak said that he is confident that Bush knows who leaked Plame’s name and that the public should “bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is.”

In response, Wilson said, “For the first time in 29 months I agree with Bob Novak. The president needs to answer one simple question: Does he know?”

Novak has repeatedly declined to discuss his role in disclosing Plame’s identity. It was his column on July 14, 2003, that outed Plame and triggered an ongoing investigation into the leak.

Plame’s cover at the CIA was blown after her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of twisting prewar intelligence to support invading Iraq. Wilson said it was done to undercut his credibility.

The two-year investigation, which has reached into the highest levels of the White House, resulted in charges in October of perjury and obstructing justice against Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Libby, who pleaded not guilty, has resigned from the administration.

Bush’s top political adviser and deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, was told by prosecutors that he remained under investigation and could still be charged.

TALLAHASSEE - A political operative with hacking skills could alter the results of any election on Diebold-made voting machines -- and possibly other new voting systems in Florida -- according to the state capital's election supervisor, who said Diebold software has failed repeated tests.

Ion Sancho, Leon County's election chief, said tests by two computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on Diebold's optical-scan machines.

After receiving county commission approval Tuesday, Sancho scrapped Diebold's system for one made by Elections Systems and Software, the same provider used by Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The difference between the systems: Sancho's machines use a fill-in-the-blank paper ballot that allows for after-the-fact manual recounts, while Broward and Miami-Dade use ATM-like touchscreens that leave no paper trail.

''That's kind of scary. If there's no paper trail, you have to rely solely on electronic results. And now we know that they can be manipulated under the right conditions, without a person even leaving a fingerprint,'' said Sancho, who once headed the state's elections supervisors association.

The Leon County test results are likely to further fuel suspicions that the new electronic voting systems in Florida, in place since the 2002 elections, are susceptible to manipulation.

When the debate hit fever pitch before last year's presidential election, many conservatives said questions about the machinery were a liberal ploy to undermine confidence in the voting system.

Elections chiefs in Broward and Miami-Dade said Wednesday they have good security and are not particularly concerned -- though both have had ''glitches'' that have been tough to explain.

Sancho agrees that good security is key, but said he's not sure he won't also have problems with the $1.3 million ES&S system, which he'll also test.

DIEBOLD USERS

Twenty-nine counties, including Monroe, use different versions of paper-ballot voting systems manufactured by Diebold, a leading manufacturer of security systems and voting machines. One county uses Diebold touchscreens.

A spokesman for Diebold Election Systems Inc. could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Sancho said Diebold isn't the only one to blame for hacker-prone equipment. The Florida secretary of state's office should have caught these problems early on, he said, and the Legislature should scrap a law severely restricting recounts on touch-screen machines and equip them with the means of producing a paper trail.

A spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office said any faults Sancho found were between him and Diebold.

''If Ion Sancho has security concerns with his system, he needs to discuss them with Diebold,'' spokeswoman Jenny Nash said.

Sancho first clashed with Diebold in May, when he teamed up with a nonprofit election-monitoring group called BlackBoxVoting.org, which has made a crusade of showing that electronic voting machines are subject to fraud. BlackBox hired Herbert Thompson, a computer-science professor and strategist at Security Innovation, which tests software for companies such as Google and Microsoft.

Thompson couldn't hack into the system from the outside. So Sancho gave him access to the central machine that tabulates votes and to the last school election at Leon County High.

Thompson told The Herald he was ''shocked'' at how easy it was to get in, make the loser the winner and leave without a trace. The machine asked for a user name and password, but didn't require it, he said. That meant it had not just a ''front door, but a back door as big as a garage,'' Thompson said.

From there, Thompson said, he typed five lines of computer code -- and switched 5,000 votes from one candidate to another.

''I am positive an eighth grader could do this,'' Thompson said.

After BlackBox and Sancho announced the results, Diebold's senior lawyer, Michael Lindroos, wrote Sancho, Leon County and the state of Florida questioning the results and calling the test ''a very foolish and irresponsible act'' that may have violated licensing agreements.

Over the past few months, computer expert Harri Hursti tried to manipulate election results with the memory card inserted into each Diebold voting machine. The card records votes during an election, then at the end of the day is taken to a central location where results are totaled.

Hursti figured out how to hack into the memory card by using an agricultural scanning device easily available on the Internet, said BlackBox founder Bev Harris. He learned how to hide votes, make losers out of winners and leave no trace, she said.

Hursti couldn't be reached for comment.

With some variation, both Miami-Dade and Broward use these cartridge-like cards to record votes and report election results. Experts like Thompson say they believe the counties could be subject to electronic ballot-rigging -- which would be hard to detect and correct without a paper trail.

FINAL TEST

Sancho said he tried to discuss the problems with Diebold, but met with resistance. On Monday, he did one final test with Hursti at the Leon County supervisor's office, Hursti hacked the memory card to spit out seven ''yes'' votes on an issue and one ''no'' vote.

Then, six ''no'' votes and two ''yes'' votes were cast into the machine the same way voters would. Those results didn't show up in the final tally -- just the ones hacked into the card.

Officials for ES&S, which makes the systems used in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, couldn't be reached for comment Wednesday.

Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade elections office, said officials continually monitor the quality and security of their machines.

''The problem of election fraud predates current technology by hundreds of years. We have people we trust and in our case we have checks to reconcile the results,'' Kaplan said.

But Broward's election supervisor, Brenda Snipes, said she's at least intrigued. She, too, vouches for her office's security, but says there's a need to remain vigilant.

''Is hacking possible? We think we have a secure system. With technology, those people who have that level of expertise, I guess that could be possible,'' Snipes said. ``We need to see what Ion did. He tries a lot of things. He's always analyzing things.''

But Sancho said the time for passive monitoring is over. The Diebold problems show that simple tests haven't been done on at least one major voting system, he said.

''These were sold as safe systems. They passed tests as safe systems,'' Sancho said. ``But even in the so-called safe system, if you don't follow the paper ballots, there is a way to rig the election. Except it's not a bunch of guys stuffing ballots in a precinct. It's possibly one person acting in secret changing thousands of votes in a second.''

Bush first clubbed Iran along with North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as an axis of evil in his State of the Union address to the Congress in 2002.

Washington has slammed Tehran for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's comments that Israel had no right to exist and that it was a tumour in the Middle East. Ahmadinejad had also termed the Holocaust as a myth.

The Bush administration is also stepping up the heat on Tehran, accusing it of using a civilian nuclear programme to hide the urge to produce nuclear weapons.

"We continue to work on the diplomatic front," Bush replied when asked how he will deal with Iran.

"I am concerned about theocracy that has got little transparency, a country whose President has declared the destruction of Israel as part of their foreign policy, and a country that will not listen to the demands of the free world to get rid of its ambitions to have a nuclear weapon," Bush said on Wednesday.

Asked if he had a specific message for Iran, Bush said, "I would hope they had be wise enough to begin listening to the people and allow them to participate in their government."

From July 2002 to June 2005, when he retired, General Yaalon was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force, the top job in the Israeli military, analogous to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the American military. He is now a military fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He made similar, but more speculative, remarks in April 2004 that attracted little notice in America; at that time he was quoted as saying of the Iraqi weapons, "Perhaps they transferred them to another country, such as Syria."

The Israeli general's remarks came on the eve of Mr. Bush's speech to the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, in which the president addressed the issue of intelligence and defended the decision to go to war. "When we made the decision to go into Iraq, many intelligence agencies around the world judged that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. This judgment was shared by the intelligence agencies of governments who did not support my decision to remove Saddam. And it is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Mr. Bush said in remarks that were one of a series of speeches he has given recently on the war.

Mr. Bush's defense of the war echoed themes he has been pressing since before the war began and through his successful campaign for re-election. "Given Saddam's history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. Saddam was a threat - and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power."

An official at the Iraqi embassy in Washington, Entifadh Qanbar, said he believed the Israeli general's account, but that the Iraqi government is "basically operating in the dark" because it does not have its own intelligence agency. He said the issue underscored the need for the new Iraqi government to have control of its own intelligence service. "We don't have any way to find anything out about Syria because we don't have intelligence," Mr. Qanbar said. He said there is a high-rise building in Baghdad with 1,000 employees working on intelligence but that it has no budget appropriation from the Iraqi government and "doesn't report to the Iraqi government."

"Nobody knows who it belongs to, but you should understand who it belongs to," he said, in what was apparently a reference to American involvement.

An Iraqi politician, Mithal Al-Alusi, whose sons were both assassinated in Iraq last year, told The New York Sun's Eli Lake last month that his party would press the Iraqi government to renew the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mr. Al-Alusi said he believes Saddam clearly had the weapons before the invasion. "They will find the weapons, I am sure they will," Mr. Al-Alusi said.

A spokesman at the Syrian embassy in Washington did not return a call seeking comment. But General Yaalon's comment could increase pressure on the Syrian government that is already mounting from Washington and the United Nations. Mr. Bush has been keeping the rhetorical heat on Damascus. On Monday, he said in a speech, "Iraq's neighbor to the west, Syria, is permitting terrorists to use that territory to cross into Iraq."

Also Monday, Mr. Bush issued a statement saying, "Syria must comply with United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1559, 1595, and 1636 and end its interference in Lebanon once and for all. "The resolutions call for ending Syria's occupation of Lebanon and for Syrian cooperation into the investigation of the assassination of a Lebanese politician, Rafik Hariri.

On Saturday, the White House issued a statement calling attention to Syrian prisoners of conscience such as Kamal Labwani. "The Syrian Government must cease its harassment of Syrians peacefully seeking to bring democratic reform to their country. The United States stands with the Syrian people in their desire for freedom and democracy," said the statement, issued in the name of the White House press secretary.

Yesterday, the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, described Syria as an "oppressive regime." He also pointed to a recent report by a United Nations investigator looking into the assassination of Hariri. "The Syrian Government has failed to offer its full cooperation," Mr. McCormack said, citing the U.N. investigator's report that "details allegations of document burning by the Syrians, of intimidating witnesses."

When, during an interview with the Sun in April, Vice President Cheney was asked whether he thought that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had been moved to Syria, Mr. Cheney replied only that he had seen such reports.

An article in the Fall 2005 Middle East Quarterly reports that in an appearance on Israel's Channel 2 on December 23, 2002, Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon stated, "Chemical and biological weapons which Saddam is endeavoring to conceal have been moved from Iraq to Syria." The allegation was denied by the Syrian government at the time as "completely untrue," and it attracted scant American press attention, coming as it did on the eve of the Christmas holiday.

Syria shares a 376-mile border with Iraq. The Syrian ruling party and Saddam Hussein had in common the ideology of Baathism, a mixture of Nazism and Marxism.

Syria is one of only eight countries that has not signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, a treaty that obligates nations not to stockpile or use chemical weapons. And it has long been the source of concern in America and Israel and Lebanon about its chemical warfare program apart from any weapons that may have been received from Iraq. The director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March of 2004, "Damascus has an active CW development and testing program that relies on foreign suppliers for key controlled chemicals suitable for producing CW."

* The nuclear hitmen: Stephen Hadley, Stephen Cambone, Robert Joseph, William Schneider Jr., J.D. Crouch II, Linton Brooks, and John Bolton are nuclear-weapons enthusiasts who advocate aggressive policies and occupy key positions in the top echelons of the Bush administration.
* A nuclear doctrine that advocates nuclear strikes against non-nuclear countries that precisely fit the Iran profile: the "Nuclear Posture Review" and the "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations."
* The doctrine of preemptive attack adopted by the Bush administration and already put into practice in Iraq, and the "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction" (NSPD 17), which promises to respond to a WMD threat with nuclear weapons.
* 150,000 American soldiers in Iraq, whose lives are at risk if a military confrontation with Iran erupts, and who thus provide the administration with a strong argument for the use of nuclear weapons to defend them.
* Americans' heightened state of fear of terrorist attacks and their apparent willingness to support any course of action that could potentially protect them from real or imagined terrorist threats.
* The allegations of involvement of Iran in terrorist activities around the world [1], [2], including acts against America [1], [2], and its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction.
* The determination of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission that Iran has connections with al-Qaeda.
* Senate Joint Resolution 23, "Authorization for Use of Military Force," which allows the president "to take action to deter and prevent acts of terrorism against the United States" without consulting Congress, and the War Powers Resolution [.pdf], which "allows" the president to attack anybody in the "global war on terror."
* The Bush administration's willingness to use military power based on unconfirmed intelligence and defectors' fairy tales.
* The fact that Iran has been declared in noncompliance [.pdf] with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which makes it "legal" for the U.S. to use nuclear weapons against Iran.
* The course of action followed by the Bush administration with respect to Iran's drive for nuclear technology, which can only lead to a diplomatic impasse.
* The Israel factor [1], [2] .

I have discussed many of these elements in previous columns. Here I will focus on the people, the doctrine, and the weapons. [Click Here to go to original and continue reading.]

Eustace Mullins is a veteran of the United States Air Force, with thirty-eight months of active service during World War II. A native Virginian, he was educated at Washington and Lee University, New York University, Ohio University, the University of North Dakota, the Escuelas des Bellas Artes, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Washington, D.C.

The original book, published under the title Mullins On The Federal Reserve, was commissioned by the poet Ezra Pound in 1948. Ezra Pound was a political prisoner for thirteen and a half years at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C. (a Federal institution for the insane). His release was accomplished largely through the efforts of Mr. Mullins.

The research at the Library of Congress was directed and reviewed daily by George Stimpson, founder of the National Press Club in Washington, whom The New York Times on September 28, 1952 called, "A highly regarded reference source in the capitol. Government officials, Congressmen, and reporters went to him for information on any subject."

Published in 1952 by Kasper and Horton, New York, the original book was the first nationally-circulated revelation of the secret meetings of the international bankers at Jekyll Island, Georgia, 1907-1910, at which place the draft of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was written.

During the intervening years, the author continued to gather new and more startling information about the backgrounds of the people who direct the Federal Reserve policies. New information gathered over the years from hundreds of newspapers, periodicals, and books give corroborating insight into the connections of the international banking houses.*

While researching this material, Eustace Mullins was on the staff of the Library of Congress. Mullins later was a consultant on highway finance for the American Petroleum Institute, consultant on hotel development for Institutions Magazine, and editorial director for the Chicago Motor Club’s four publications.

Bolivians will vote to elect a new leader on Sunday and opinion polls show Morales holding a slight lead over his two rival candidates. He is aiming to become the country's first indigenous president.

Morales is something of a pariah in Washington due to his defence of coca-leaf growing. The crop, which is a key ingredient in producing cocaine, is the target of US anti-drug efforts in the country. Bolivia is the world's third-largest producer of cocaine.

The presidential hopeful has voed that, if elected, he would move to legalise coca. Bolivian Indians chew the shiny green leaf to prevent altitude sickness and brew it in herbal teas.

"We are betting against narco-trafficking, we want 'zero' cocaine but we say no to 'zero' coca," he said.

US concern

Washington claims that most of the coca leaf grown in Bolivia is eventually processed into cocaine, but coca farmers say they aim to supply a legal market.

Sean McCormack, the US State Department spokesman, said the Bush administration supported the current Bolivian government's counter-narcotics policy and hoped that the next government would have the same approach.

"We expect whatever government comes next in Bolivia to honour those commitments that they have made to fight the production and transport of illegal drugs," he told a news briefing.

The Cochabamba rally ended months of election campaigning. Morales has travelled throughout Bolivia's mountain hamlets and big cities, hoping to galvanise the country's poor Indian majority that he hopes will sweep him to power.

He has also used his campaign to criticise US policies on free-trade, arguing that they have plunged South America's poorest country deeper into poverty.

Despite his lead in polls, Morales is unlikely to secure the 50% of the vote needed for outright victory and a new president is likely to be chosen by a new Congress, which will also be elected on Sunday, in a vote next month.

Armstrong is being investigated for pursuing Simeoni during an early stage breakaway in last year's Tour de France and reportedly threatening him for testifying about doping abuse in the trial of an Italian doctor associated with Armstrong.

Simeoni told an Italian court in 2002 that doctor Michele Ferrari advised him to take performance-enhancing drugs. Later, Armstrong reportedly called Simeoni a liar, and the Italian sued the American for libel.

Ferrari was given a 12-month suspended jail sentence in October 2004 for sports fraud and malpractice. He has always denied he dispensed illegal substances to athletes and is appealing the sentence.

The new charges were contained in an indictment returned by a grand jury in Chicago and announced by U.S. District Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

The obstruction charge relates to an incident in May when Black and two employees were seen on videotape lugging boxes out the back door of the downtown Toronto office of Hollinger Inc., the company from which he once ruled his news empire.

After the security tape was played in a court in Ontario, Black agreed to return the boxes, which he said contained only personal items.

The racketeering count, brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, alleges that Black was the principal leader, manager and organizer of the group of the people and entities that made up the "Hollinger Enterprise."

The racketeering charge alleges that Black, together with other defendants, operated Hollinger between 1998 and 2002 "through a pattern of seven racketeering acts, each containing one or more underlying allegations of fraud."

The racketeering and obstruction charges each carrry a maximum of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 US fine upon conviction.

The money laundering charges carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of twice the amount of illegally transferred funds – $4.3 million US in this case. The wire fraud charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago charged Black on Nov. 17 with eight counts of mail fraud and wire fraud relating to the alleged diversion of millions of dollars from Hollinger International. He faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted on those charges.

Black pleaded not guilty Dec. 1 to the eight fraud charges.

Black is to appear in a Chicago court Friday morning to face the new charges.

Black's co-accused, former Hollinger International executive Peter Atkinson, John Boultbee and Mark Kipnis, have all pleaded not guilty to fraud charges.

Thursday's indictments also included one new charge of wire fraud against Boultbee.

Last month's drop of 0.6 per cent in the Consumer Price Index was the largest on record since the 0.9 per cent retreat back in July 1949, the U.S. Labour Department said.

Economists had been expecting a pullback of 0.4 per cent last month.

Boosted by production disruptions in the wake of hurricanes that hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, the nationwide price of gasoline briefly rose above $3 US per gallon in early September.

However, prices have declined since then. Gasoline prices fell by about 42 cents per gallon in November.

The U.S. government said gasoline prices fell by a record 16 per cent in the November inflation report, after a 4.5 per cent decline in October.

After factoring out the volatile food and energy categories, consumer prices were up by a modest 0.2 per cent.

The adult population did make gains in handling quantitative tasks, such as calculating numbers found on tax forms or bank statements. But even in that area of literacy, the typical adult showed only basic skills, enough to perform simple daily activities.

Perhaps most sobering: Adult literacy dropped or was flat across every level of education, from people with graduate degrees to those who dropped out of high school.

Inside the numbers, black adults made gains on each type of task tested in the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, run by the Education Department. Hispanics, though, showed sharp declines in their ability to handle prose and documents. White adults made no significant changes except when it came to computing numbers, where they got better.

The results are based on a sample of more than 19,000 adults, age 16 or older, in homes, college housing or prisons. It is representative of a population of 222 million adults.

The 11 million adults who are not literate in English include people who may be fluent in another language, such as Spanish, but are unable to comprehend text in English.

And it certainly doesn't hurt that the state's tumultuous Republicans don't have a Rudolph Giuliani-like candidate waiting to take her on this time around. The GOP is in such a muddle, it can't agree on a candidate, period.

On Monday, the leaders of the state GOP told Jeanine Pirro, the former first lady's best-known opponent, that she should drop out of the Senate race and run instead for state attorney general.

Since Pirro's gaffe-marred formal announcement, when she lost a page from her speech and stood silent for 32 seconds, fundraising has lagged. And The New York Post has reported that her own husband was working behind the scenes to get her out of the Senate race.

Pirro says she's still in the race, but many GOP leaders believe it's a question of when she drops out, not if.

"Hillary Clinton is probably laughing hysterically at the Republican chaos," said Hank Sheinkopf, a New York-based Democratic strategist who worked on President Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign, but is not part of his wife's campaign team.

Republican strategist Nelson Warfield said there is still hope for the GOP.

"As soon as Jeanine Pirro's sitcom gets canceled, voters can start tuning in on Hillary Clinton's failures," said Warfield, a top aide on Bob Dole's 1996 presidential run. "Her time in the Senate has done a lot for Hillary, but not a lot for New York."

Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, is skeptical about GOP chances.

"It's hard to knock off any incumbent, but particularly an incumbent who has a zillion dollars, 100 percent name recognition and who works at the job," Carroll said.

Still, Wolfson noted that after then-New York City Mayor Giuliani left the Senate race in May 2000 in the face of prostate cancer, the GOP's understudy, then-U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio, raised a quick $40 million. The little-known Lazio wound up losing to Clinton by 12 percentage points.

"But that doesn't mean whoever we end up running against (in 2006) isn't going to be well-funded," Wolfson said. "Given that, we need to prepare."

Keeping the money flowing has another benefit for Clinton. Any money she doesn't spend in 2006 could be used for a 2008 run for the White House. Most polls have her leading the Democratic field for the nomination.

Warfield said the Republican side could suffer on the money front.

"There's a limited universe of donors out there and they've been revved up about Pirro, and then Pirro flames out on them," he said.

If Pirro does bow out of the GOP Senate race, former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer and tax attorney William Brenner are actively seeking the nomination.

For many years, the web has been heavily censored in countries around the world. That censorship continues at this very moment. Now it is happening right here in America. The agreement by the Congress to extend an enhanced Patriot Act for another four years will permit the political enforcers of the Bush administration, who use law enforcement as their proxies, to further clamp censorship controls on the web.

The warning signs for the crackdown on the web have been with us for over a decade. The Clipper chip controversy of the 90s, John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) system pushed in the aftermath of 9-11, backroom deals between the Federal government and the Internet service industry, and the Patriot Act have ushered in a new era of Internet censorship, something just half a decade ago computer programmers averred was impossible given the nature of the web. They were wrong, dead wrong.

Take for example of what recently occurred when two journalists were taking on the phone about a story that appeared on Google News. The story was about a Christian fundamentalist move in Congress to use U.S. military force in Sudan to end genocide in Darfur. The story appeared on the English Google News site in Qatar. But the very same Google News site when accessed simultaneously in Washington, DC failed to show the article. This censorship is accomplished by geolocation filtering: the restriction or modifying of web content based on the geographical region of the user. In addition to countries, such filtering can now be implemented for states, cities, and even individual IP addresses.

With reports in the Swedish newspaper Svensa Dagbladet today that the United States has transmitted a Homeland Security Department "no fly" list of 80,000 suspected terrorists to airport authorities around the world, it is not unreasonable that a "no [or restricted] surfing/emailing" list has been transmitted to Internet Service Providers around the world. The systematic disruptions of web sites and email strongly suggests that such a list exists.

News reports on CIA prisoner flights and secret prisons are disappearing from Google and other search engines like Alltheweb as fast as they appear. Here now, gone tomorrow is the name of the game.

Google is systematically failing to list and link to articles that contain explosive information about the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, Al Qaeda, and U.S. political scandals. But Google is not alone in working closely to stifle Internet discourse. America On Line, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are slowly turning the Internet into an information superhighway dominated by barricades, toll booths, off-ramps that lead to dead ends, choke points, and security checks.

America On Line is the most egregious is stifling Internet freedom. A former AOL employee noted how AOL and other Internet Service Providers cooperate with the Bush administration in censoring email. The Patriot Act gave federal agencies the power to review information to the packet level and AOL was directed by agencies like the FBI to do more than sniff the subject line. The AOL term of service (TOS) has gradually been expanded to grant AOL virtually universal power regarding information. Many AOL users are likely unaware of the elastic clause, which says they will be bound by the current TOS and any TOS revisions which AOL may elect at any time in the future. Essentially, AOL users once agreed to allow the censorship and non-delivery of their email.

Microsoft has similar requirements for Hotmail as do Yahoo and Google for their respective e-mail services.

There are also many cases of Google’s search engine failing to list and link to certain information. According to a number of web site administrators who carry anti-Bush political content, this situation has become more pronounced in the last month. In addition, many web site administrators are reporting a dramatic drop-off in hits to their sites, according to their web statistic analyzers. Adding to their woes is the frequency at which spam viruses are being spoofed as coming from their web site addresses.

Government disruption of the political side of the web can easily be hidden amid hyped mainstream news media reports of the latest "boutique" viruses and worms, reports that have more to do with the sales of anti-virus software and services than actual long-term disruption of banks, utilities, or airlines.

Internet Censorship in the US: No Longer a Prediction

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco Systems have honed their skills at Internet censorship for years in places like China, Jordan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and other countries. They have learned well. They will be the last to admit they have imported their censorship skills into the United States at the behest of the Bush regime. Last year, the Bush-Cheney campaign blocked international access to its web site -- www.georgewbush.com -- for unspecified "security reasons."

Only those in the Federal bureaucracy and the companies involved are in a position to know what deals have been made and how extensive Internet censorship has become. They owe full disclosure to their customers and their fellow citizens.

Mr Williams highlighted new concerns about the additive's safety, raised by a recent Italian study that linked it to cancer in rats. He said the history of aspartame's licensing put "regulators and politicians to shame", with the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary and former head of Searle, the company that discovered the sweetener, "calling in his markers" to get it approved.

Responding for the government, the public health minister, Caroline Flint, said a thorough independent review of safety data had been conducted as recently as 2001 and the Food Standards Agency advice remained the same: aspartame is safe for use in food. She said the government took food safety very seriously.

The European Food Safety Authority would be reviewing the Italian study as soon as it had full data on it, but an initial review by the UK's expert committee on toxicity had not been convinced by its authors' interpretation of their data. "I am advised that aspartame does not cause cancer," she said, adding that artificial sweeteners also help to control obesity.

Aspartame is now consumed on average every day by one in 15 people worldwide, most of whom are children, according to the MP. It is used to sweeten no fewer than 6,000 products, from crisps, confectionery, chewing gums, diet and sports drinks to vitamin pills and medicines, including those for children. Yet the science that supported its approval was "biased, inconclusive and incompetent".

Mr Williams said he was using the immunity he was afforded under parliamentary privilege to initiate a debate about aspartame's safety which had been largely repressed since the early 1980s, with the help of the sweetener industry's lawyers.

Independent research published last month by the European Ramazzini Foundation showed moderate regular consumption of aspartame led to a repeated incidence of malignant tumours in rats and "should have set alarm bells ringing in health departments around the world", he said. "The World Health Organisation recognises such findings in rats as being highly predictive of a carcinogenic risk for humans. The contrast between the quality of the science in the Ramazzini study and the industry studies could not be more clear and more damaging to the industry."

Mr Williams, the MP for Brecon and Radnorshire and a Cambridge science graduate, said he had been looking into the safety of aspartame for more than a year. At first he had been unconvinced by the "internet conspiracy theories" but he said what he had found had "truly horrified" him.

Sound science and proper regulatory and political independence had been notable by their absence from the approval of aspartame, he said. In addition to Mr Rumsfeld being instrumental in securing aspartame's approval, with the support of the then newly elected president Ronald Reagan, there had been numerous examples of decision makers who were worried about aspartame's safety being discredited or being removed from their positions. Industry sympathisers had been appointed to replace them and were in turn recompensed with lucrative jobs working for the sweetener industry.

The European Food Safety Authority said last night that it planned to review the safety of aspartame as "a matter of high priority" in the light of the Ramazzini Foundation study. The foundation's director, Dr Morando Soffritti, said he expected to send the authority a 1,000-page dossier by the end of the month.

The industry's Aspartame Information Service said Mr Williams' material brought no new information to the public. "The minister's response was accurate and on point," a statement said.

Mrs. Silvius, a waitress at a truck stop in Doswell, Va., calls herself "highly disappointed" with the court's ruling.

"I'm an adult. Who is anybody to tell me I can't smoke or drink?" she said in an interview yesterday.

An appeals court upheld the ruling, but not before one judge raised questions about the extent to which a court should become involved in parental rights and whether certain behavior is harmful or simply not in a child's best interest.

Mrs. Silvius says she complied with the decision by altering her smoking habits.

"My children know not to come around when I'm on the front porch with my morning coffee, tending to my cows or out in my garden, because I'm having a cigarette," she said.

Still, she thinks this was not a matter for the courts because it was not proven that she posed a risk to her children's health.

"If a child suffers from asthma or some sort of problem, the courts shouldn't even have to be told to [step in]," Mrs. Silvius said. "That should be the parent's better judgment. But my kids aren't sick. If there's no health issue, it isn't the court's place to say someone can't do something that's perfectly legal, just because the other spouse doesn't want them to."

The smoking-at-home issue also sparked debate about whether such rulings will lead courts to become involved in such matters as parents' making poor TV programming choices for their children.

The nonprofit group Action on Smoking and Health is among the most outspoken on stopping parents from smoking around children.

"Children are the most vulnerable and the most defenseless victims of tobacco smoke," Executive Director John F. Banzhaf III said. "They should be entitled to the same protection as adults."

Mr. Banzhaf, also a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, said most complaints are made by nonsmoking ex-spouses, although some are filed by neighbors, relatives and physicians.

Maryland's Department of Human Resources, which provides adoption services, considers smoking a factor in deciding who will receive a child, but guidelines do not specifically address the issue.

"It's discussed and presented and looked at by caseworkers," said Judith Eveland, a program manager for the agency.

However, Miss Eveland said the agency would welcome regulations on restricting smoking in the homes of foster children.

"We certainly would be supportive [given] all the health issues associated with smoking," she said.

Adele L. Abrams, an attorney in Prince George's County specializing in child custody, divorce and family law, said smoking has been a factor in several custody disputes in recent years.

"Restraints might be put on visitation if one parent insists upon smoking or bringing in a girlfriend or boyfriend who smokes," said Ms. Abrams, whose practice serves the District and Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Howard and Montgomery counties.

She said children have a "more protective status" and that laws should protect children from secondhand smoke just as they are protected from parents and guardians who drink excessively or use drugs.

"Frankly, if it was a factor before the divorce, it's going to be a factor after the divorce," she said, "particularly if the child has asthma or some other respiratory disease."

Mindy Good, spokeswoman for the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, said foster parents are not prohibited from smoking, but prospective ones are screened to fit a child's best interests.

"People who smoke are not barred from becoming foster parents," she said. "However, we are careful about children who have certain medical conditions. We would not, for example, place a child who has asthma in the home of a smoking foster parent. We are careful about those issues."

Some years earlier I had read a book about brain enhancment, and of the many substances tested, it seemed that intake of nicotine had been the only one that actually IMPROVED test scores. Caffiene, one of the other substances tested, was not useful in this respect nor were many of the things traditionally thought to "boost" brain performance. I remembered this study, and was curious.

Another thing I had noted over the years was that MANY psychics I had met in my investigations, if not ALL of them, smoked! Not only that, but the Native Americans used tobacco as a sort of "connector" to the psychic realms. For them, it was an act of communication with the Great Spirit. So, putting these ideas together, we asked some questions:

10-28-94
Q: (L) Is smoking detrimental to any of our bodies?
A: Not if mild. Not if mind is in right mode.
Q: (L) Does smoking enhance psychic abilities?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) Is it true that the government program to stamp out smoking is inspired by the Lizzies?
A: Yes because they know it may heighten psychic abilities.
Q: (L) What is causing the lung cancer they are attributing to smoking?
A: Mental conditioning and subliminal programming to expect it.
Q: (L) So, it only happens if you are convinced that it can and must happen?
A: Correct.
Q: (L) Is there any particular brand of cigarettes to smoke?
A: No.

Some considerable time went by, and Ark entered the picture. His ideas on smoking were that it had been a "monkey on his back," and something that had detrimental control over him. He struggled with it over twenty years ago, and conquered the habit and was, like many who have quit, rather strict in his opinions about the practice. So, out of consideration for him, I decided to quit. And did. But, the result was not only rapid weight gain (and being plump naturally, this was a DISASTER), but I also began to contract every sort of illness that came along, suffering colds and bronchitis constantly. I had no energy, my brain did not work, and I was in despair as to what to do. Of course, I did not connect it to stopping smoking; I thought that it was simply my metabolism that was going downhill.

Another curious thing happened: in my investigations into the subject of "bloodlines," I was doing a lot of reading on "blood." I wanted to know what it was about blood that made it such a focus of so much esoteric lore and literature.

For a period of time Ark was teaching at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and until we could arrange for a permanent apartment there, we used a local motel during the week and came home on weekends. In negotiating the weekly rate with the owner, I discovered that he was a retired professor of hematology! We had numerous talks about blood during the times that Ark was teaching and I was left to entertain myself.

In one of these conversations I asked: What, if anything, can increase the level of hemoglobin in the blood? I was interested since the hemoglobin is the carrier of the iron in the blood and we had already learned that the level of iron in the blood was very important for psychic and trans-dimensional activities. The answer surprised me: barring the presence of pathogenic conditions, the one thing that increases the hemoglobin, is NICOTINE. The professor told me that this is why it is important for doctors to know if their patients smoke because then, they can discount abnormally high red blood cell counts as being an artifact of smoking and NOT a pathological condition!

What a surprise!

In any event, I was mostly concerned about my weight gain, so more questions:

06-27-98
Q: Now, I have such a screwy metabolism; I know that you once told me that my thyroid had been tampered with from other densities in an effort to dissuade me or prevent me from doing my work. The result of this is that I can go for days and eat almost nothing, and still gain weight! Why?
A: Because you have changed your third density frequency.
Q: What am I supposed to do now? Just stop eating altogether?
A: You lost, altered your chosen balancing mechanism.
Q: What altered my chosen balancing mechanism?
A: First: what is your chosen balancing mechanism?
Q: Do you mean something physical in my body?
A: Close.
Q: I don't know. Going to the gym? I haven't been going to the gym lately...
A: No.
Q: Something about the way I work or function?
A: No. Something you, or one, takes into the body.
Q: Thyroid pills? Do I need to increase the dosage?
A: This substance raises hemoglobin levels.
Q: What?! I quit smoking?!
A: Yes.
Q: How can smoking be a balancing mechanism?
A: Speeds up metabolism, thus allowing greater food intake.
Q: Well, all it did for me was allow me to eat at all! I guess that now I will have to quit eating completely forever!
A: Or bring nicotine back.
Q: Well, that's not gonna happen! Ark doesn't like it at all! Isn't there something else that would work?
A: No.
Q: So, you are saying that nicotine is actually good for me?
A: Yes. Without it, you will remain with weight problems, because you will not be able to lower food intake enough to compensate. Why do you think you had the inkling to start smoking in the first place?
Q: Well, I just was going along with my friends, I thought. [I had started smoking when I was 16, though I had experimented with it when I was 15.]
A: No.
Q: What other things does nicotine do?
A: Raises immunological defences.
Q: Anything else?
A: Excites neurotransmitters. You require less sleep.
Q: Is this true for everyone?
A: No.
Q: (A) How much nicotine is necessary?
A: 100 mg per day.
Q: (A) Can it be in pill form? [Ark is CLEARLY unhappy with the idea of me smoking!]
A: Cigarettes infuse it to brain tissues most effectively.
Q: Well, I am certainly relieved! Now I know that I do not have a 'smoking demon' possessing me! I was really getting worried! [While I had quit, I was constantly and incessantly plagued with the urge to smoke. I had become convinced that it was a spirit attachment or some sort of "control mechanism" that would not let me go!]
A: Those who fit this profile find it nearly impossible to "quit" completely.
Q: So, there are people who are actually benefitted by smoking?
A: Genetics will offer proof of this.
Q: You mean that one can see changes in DNA before and after smoking?
A: Close
Q: Is this also true for Frank?
A: Yes.
Q: Why us?
A: It is simply part of your "profiles."
Q: Is that also why I have been having more stomach problems than usual? [I could barely eat anything without having an upset stomach.]
A: Yes.
Q: Well, I always noticed that smoking could settle my stomach. It also stimulated my digestive tract... (F) Yes.
A: (A) What is serious here is the number. How many milligrams... (L) How many cigarettes does this number of 100 milligrams translate into?
A: 20.
Q: Well, I never smoked that much! Only about 15...
A: No.
Q: Well, I told myself 15!
A: It was not. [They were right.]
Q: Ark doesn't need to smoke, does he?
A: No. He does not fit the profile. He actually had to "work" to start smoking.
Q: (L) Did you? (A) Yeah, probably. (L) Well, then why did you? (A) Well, it was somewhat self-annihilating. (L) Ark is NOT happy with this explanation you guys have given. [And he STILL isn't, though he tolerates my smoking, and I DO feel enormously better having resumed without carrying all the guilt that our society is attempting to impose on cigarette smoking.]
A: Life contains unhappy explanations at 3rd density, sometimes.
Q: Well, I was really beginning to think I was possessed...
A: No.

Some time later, a reader wrote to me about this subject:

09-19-98
Q: Here is a note from M__. He writes: "Laura, I was very dismayed to read your post on Diet and Nutrition on the Web Page. The C's are saying that Love is enough and that sex is a pure physical craving and that orgasm energy feeds the 4th D STS buggers. Then, they go on to say that you should smoke, and consume x mg of nicotine, because you need it. Those 2 ideas seem contrary to me, since smoking is also a 'physical craving.' Yes, people gain weight after they quit smoking, but the metabolism does settle down after a year or so. Are you sure of the source of this message? Could STSers be getting through and are getting you and others to try to kill yourself slowly? Covering ones lungs with ash cannot be good for you, regardless of what the ash is made of. Even wood smoke causes breathing disorders. I felt sick when I read that part. It didn't fit into my world view of the C's." Could you comment on his remarks?
A: We did not suggest that smoking was advisable per se, the response was in regard to a personal inquiry about difficulty in achieving weight loss on the part of Laura. And, we did not say that this was a permanent solution.
Q: Well, you DID say that it enhances resistance to disease and that it did other beneficial things.
A: Yes, but, it is best accomplished with pure tobacco products, not the corrupted variety available on the mass market.
Q: Well, what about the sex issue?
A: Specifics, please.
Q: He says that the two ideas seem contrary...
A: How so?
Q: I guess his idea is that is if you are gonna give up sex, you ought to also give up smoking because they are both physical cravings. Or, that if smoking is okay, then sex ought to also be okay. I am not altogether clear on the perspective. I did write back that my understanding was that it is not sex, per se, that was bad, but rather the drive for self gratification that was feeding STS.
A: True.
Q: He then says: 'Are you sure of the source of this message. Could STS be getting through and getting you and others to try and kill yourself slowly?'
A: No, and besides, "killing of one's self slowly," is occurring anyway, whether triggered by one's self or not.
Q: He says: 'Covering one's lungs with ash cannot be good for you, regardless of what the ash is made of.'
A: Noncorrupted tobacco product does not have that effect.
Q: I also mentioned the fact that this professor of Hematology in Gainesville told me that the only thing they know of, aside from some pathological process, that increases the red blood cell count, thereby the hemoglobin, and thus the iron content of the blood and brain, is smoking tobacco.
A: True.
Q: It was my assessment from this information, coupled with all the work done on tracking this 'blood issue' that is so dominant in the 'Grail quest' and the ancient literature, that increasing the red blood cell count was a VERY desirable thing to do to enhance one's ability to transit densities with ease. Is that a correct idea?
A: Yes and makes one more resistant to microbial infection.
Q: (A) Where can one find non-corrupted tobacco products?
A: Tobacco shop.
Q: So, I guess I have to roll my own!
A: Machine can be purchased which does this.
Q: He said: 'I felt sick when I read that.' I can identify with this feeling because there are a number of things I have learned in this process that has had the same effect on me. But, I have also learned that when this happens, it is only my resistance that causes this suffering. Can you comment?
A: Emotions cause views.

As it turned out, some time later I obtained a copy of The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge by Jeremy Narby Ph.D., an anthropologist who studied at Stanford University. Dr. Narby writes:

In their visions, shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to information related to DNA, which they call 'animate essences' or 'spirits.' This is where they see double helixes, twisted ladders, and chromosome shapes. This is how shamaic cultures have known for millennia that the vital principle is the same for all living beings and is shaped like two entwined serpents (or a vine, a rope, a ladder...) DNA is the source of their astonishing botanical and medicinal knowledge, which can be attained only in defocalized and 'nonrational' states of consciousness, though its results are empirically verifiable.

I would like to mention that I think Dr. Narby is going in the right direction, but that he hasn't yet come face to face with the realization that it is THROUGH the DNA and not FROM the DNA, that these states are accessed, and that the states permit access to realities that are not only physical, but also ethereal, or partly ethereal, such as the variable physicality of 4th density.

But, to continue with what Dr. Narby has discovered:

I knew this hypothesis would be more solid if it rested on a neurological basis, which was not yet the case. [...] The Ashaninca say that by ingesting ayahuasca or tobacco, it is possible to see the normally invisible and hidden maninkari spirits. [...] There ought to be an analogous connection between nicotine and DNA contained in the nerve cells of a human brain.

A molecule of nicotine shares structural similarities with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and fits like a skeleton key into its receptor on certain neurons.

The note in Narby's book that is appended to the above remark reads:

In the human brain there are tens of billions of neurons, and they are of several sorts. Each neuron is equipped with approximately a thousand synapses, which are junction sites connecting the cells to each other. Each synapse has ten million or so receptors. The number of neurons is frequently estimated at ten billion; [some researchers put the number at a 100 billion to a trillion.] There are approximately 50 known neurotransmitters, and a given cell can have different receptors for several of these. The nicotine and acetylcholine molecules have different shapes, but the receptor cannot tell them apart because they have the same size and the distribution of their electrical charges is similar.

And, from the The New Columbia Encyclopedia we find the following under acetylcholine:

An organic compound containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. It is liberated at nerve cell endings, and there is strong evidence that it is the transmitter substance that conducts impulses from one cell to another in the ganglia of the autonomic nervous system; from nerve cells to smoothe muscle, cardiac muscle, and exocrine glands; and from motor nerve cells to skeletal muscle. Its role in the conduction of nerve impulses elsewhere is still uncertain. The stimulation of skeletal muscle by acetylcholine is inhibited by curare.

Back to Dr. Narby:

The more you give nicotine to your neurons, the more the DNA they contain activates the construction of nicotinic receptors, within certain limits. [...] However, scientific accounts in terms of 'receptors,' 'flux of positively charged atoms,' and 'stimulation of the transcription of the genes coding for the subunits of nicotinic receptors' did not explain in any way the effects of nicotine on consciousness.

The discovery that nicotine stimulates the construction of nicotinic receptors was only made at the beginning of the 1990s; the connection between this phenomenon and the addiction displayed by tobacco users seems obvious, but has yet to be explored in detail. [...]

There are fundamental differences between the shamanic use of tobacco and the consumption of industrial cigarettes. The botanical variety used in the Amazon contains up to eighteen times more nicotine than the plants used in Virginia-type cigarettes. Amazonian tobacco is grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides and contains none of the ingredients added to cigarettes, such as aluminum oxide, potassium nitrate, ammonium phosphate, polyvinyl acetate, and a hundred or so others, which make up approximately 10 percent of the smokable matter.

During combustion, a cigarette emits some 4,000 substances, most of which are toxic. Some of these substances are even radioactive, making cigarettes the largest single source of radiation in the daily life of an average smoker. Cigarette smoke is directly implicated in more than 25 serious illnesses, including 17 forms of cancer. [According to popularized medical studies. But, one might wish to consider if it is the nicotine, or the additives?]

In the Amazon, on the other hand, tobacco is considered a remedy. The Ashaninca word for 'healer, ' or 'shaman,' is sheripiari - literally, 'the person who uses tobacco.' The oldest Ashaninca men I knew were all sheripiari. They were so old that they did not know their own age, which only their deeply wrinkled skin suggested, and they were remarkably alert and healthy.

Intrigued by these disparities, I looked through data banks for comparative studies between the toxicity of the Amazonian variety, (nicotiana rustica) and the variety used by the manufacturers of cigarettes, cigars, rolling tobacco, and pipe tobacco (nicotiana tabacum). I found nothing. The question, it seemed, had not been asked. I also looked for studies on the cancer rate among shamans who use massive and regular doses of nicotine: again, nothing. So, I decided to write to the main authority on the matter, Johannes Wilbert, author of the book Tobacco and shamanism in South America, to put my questions to him. He replied:

"There is certainly evidence that Western tobacco products contain many different harmful agnets which are probably not present in organically grown plants. I have not heard of shamans developing cancers but that may, of course, be a function of several things like lack of Western diagnosis, natural life span of indigenous people, magico-religious restriction of tobacco use in tribal societies, etc."

It seems clear that nicotine does not cause cancer, given that it is active in the brain and that cigarettes do not cause cancer in the brain, but in the lungs, esophagus, stomach, pancreas, rectum, kidneys, and bladder, the organs reached by the carcinogenic tars, which are also swallowed. (Emphasis, mine)

In any case, scientists have never really considered tobacco as a hallucinogen, because Westerners have never smoked large enough doses to reach the hallucinatory state. Consequently, the neurological mechanisms of hallucinations induced by tobacco have not been studied. Paradoxically, nicotinic receptors are the ones best known to neurologists, who have been studying them for decades, given that there are both substances that stimulate these receptors, like acetylcholine and nicotine, and others that block them, like curare and the venom of certain snakes. Indeed, by one of those curious conincidences, tobacco, curare, and snake venom all fit into exactly the same locks inside our brains. [Narby, 1998] (Emphasis, mine.)

Now, it seems strange that these same receptors are stimulated by both nicotine and snake venom, though in opposite modes... hmmm... are we close to a "Reptilian" reason for the enormous campaign to stamp out smoking? And, further, are we close to the chemical condition of the "paralysis" induced in alien abductions? (See Delgado.)

The reader is strongly encouraged to read The Wave Series, particularly the chapter entitled: You take the high road and I'll take the low road for research on the subject of neurochemicals, including acetylcholine which is very enlightening.

"The two defendants set out to commit the perfect crime, but instead they created the perfect prosecution," said Justice Bruce Duncan, who heard the case without a jury.
Judge addresses Mississauga teenagers found guilty of drugging and drowning their mother.

"The case against them is overwhelming. It is probably the strongest case I have ever seen in over 30 years of prosecuting, defending and judging criminal cases."

Prosecutors say the teens, who were 15 and 16 at the time of the crime, plied their mother with drugs and alcohol on Jan. 18, 2003, before one of them held the victim's head underwater until she drowned.

The defence argued that the mother was an alcoholic who was in a self-induced stupor when she accidentally drowned in the tub.

However, the court heard that the defendants described to a family friend how they had killed the 44-year-old victim and planned to make it look like an accident. When the friend contacted police, the investigation was reopened into what had been classified as an accidental death.

During the trial, the court saw a videotape in which the defendants separately admitted to the murder.

Defence lawyers argued the girls falsely claimed to have killed their mother because they craved attention.

The two women, now aged 18 and 19, had pleaded not guilty to the charges. Neither showed any emotion as the verdict was read.

The pair, who had been under house arrest since their arrests, were taken into custody after the verdict was delivered.

Because of their ages at the time of the death, neither they nor their mother can be identified under the terms of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

They are expected to be sentenced in the next two or three months.

If sentenced as adults, the two could face life in prison with no chance of parole for a minimum seven years and their identities could be revealed.

Should they be sentenced as youths, they could face a maximum of 10 years with no parole for six years and their identities would remain protected.

The teenager is accused of firing an air gun from the attic window of his parents' home. The school yard was full at the time,and panic broke out when the shooting started. One child was slightly injured in the incident, ANP said.

The youth allegedly kept firing the air gun while parents and teachers scrambled to bring the children to safety.

The shooting stopped as the police arrived at the house. Officers located the suspect after a search of the local area.

Muhittin Altun, 17, wearing a T-shirt with the words "Dead for Nothing" on it, arrived in his northwestern Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois in the company of his father and a cousin after receiving hospital treatment for burns suffered in the October 27 incident.

In an interview published in the newspaper Le Parisien, Altun contradicted the police version of events surrounding the electrocution in a sub-station in the suburb which killed his friends, Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17.

Youths in the suburb, after learning of the deaths, went on a rampage that spread around most of France's big cities and towns and prompted the government to declare a state of emergency that still remains in force, even though the riots ended November 16.

Altun said he and his friends entered the sub-station to escape a police identity check. He told Le Parisien that officers had given chase to them -- something police and officials up to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy have denied.

"We didn't want to go through an identity check. I've already undergone that and it doesn't go well," he said.

Youths in the riot-hit areas have said part of the reason for the unrest was longstanding harassment by police and often racist stereotyping by officers, some of whom used brutal tactics when seizing or questioning them.

Altun said the three of them had decided to climb over a high gate into the sub-station and remain inside because they heard "voices, dogs barking" outside. After about 30 minutes, he said, an electrical current hit them.

"My friends were knocked to the left, me to the right. I saw my clothes burning, like in a dream. There was a second flash. When I looked at Bouna, his neck had gone grey. I was very scared," he said.

Ignoring his own injuries, Altun said he raced out to get help, and only learned his friends Bouna Traore, a 15-year-old of Malian background, and Zyed Benna, a 17-year-old of Tunisian origin, were dead after being taken to hospital.

He added that police visited him at his bedside, when he was alone, and questioned him. He said he was made to sign several pages of his statement after one of them told him: "You know what's happening in Clichy because of your stupidity? Thirteen cars have been burnt."

After three weeks of unrest across the country, the final toll rose to 10,000 vehicles torched and more than 3,200 people arrested.

Altun's lawyer, Jean-Pierre Mignard, said it was clear "there was a chase" by police on October 27 and that the teenagers had been "gripped by panic".

"The question that has to be asked is: did the police know that they had gone into the site and did they let them enter?" he said.

Judge Ana Maria Raya Razo, who committed each family member for 40 years, told The Associated Press they had acknowledged killing the girls to save themselves from demons. The slayings were accompanied by prayers, candle-lighting and the sacrifice of farm animals, officials said.

A ninth suspect — an aunt described as the instigator of the slayings — was also sent to a psychiatric hospital after she became catatonic on the heels of her arrest. The killings were prompted by her visit to a faith healer, authorities said.

The family members were suffering "from a delusional psychotic state, with paranoia and hallucinations," Raya Razo said by telephone from Penjamo, the Guanajuato state township in remote western Mexico where the killings occurred.

"For example, they said they saw animals, demons in the girls," she said. "They said they had animals' faces, the faces of monkeys, that they had demons inside and had to be killed in order to for (the adults) to save themselves."

After being tipped off to the killings by an anonymous phone call, officers traveled on foot to the family's hamlet and found the baby girl mutilated and the body of the 13-year-old tied to a stake and battered to death.

About 10 children and adults — members of the extended family of about 30 — were found locked in a house, where they had been confined for three days, apparently because they also were suspected of being possessed, authorities said.

Goats, pigs and chickens had been sacrificed at the site, according to police reports.

The judge found that the children's parents took part in the killings but were not responsible for murder due to insanity. The teenager's grandfather and three aunts also were ordered committed.

The family members could be released before 40 years if psychiatric tests prove they have recovered, Raya Razo said.

"Begging should be decriminalized because those who beg are often in difficult life situations," said a resolution Norwegian parliament passed on Thursday.

The parliament said that begging was a relatively small problem and the old law was virtually never enforced.

In this rich Nordic country, which is the world's third largest oil exporter, beggars are provided with welfare benefits as long as they are legal residents, but in most cases, the allotment is not enough to make a living.

"Social welfare policies, rather than criminal policies, should be used to meet the challenges associated with begging," the resolution said.

The proposal also called for a review of the entire budget applicable from 2014, after the 2007-2013 budget round which is the focus of fierce wrangling between European Union leaders.

"We have just presented a joint initiative to the British (EU) presidency which broaches the crucial issue in the negotiations of the equitable sharing out of the costs of enlargement," said Spain's Europe minister Alberto Navarro.

Specifically, they called for Britain to "fully assume the cost of enlargement on a permanent basis...We can talk about the amounts, but the principle is very clear, that enlargement is paid for by all member states."

Accord on the seven-year budget round is blocked notably by Britain's refusal to surrender its treasured rebate, and French resistance to calls for reform of Europe's long-disputed farm subsidy system.

Two independent physicists say in the report that the state-run Central Service for Protection against Radioactive Rays (SCPRI) knew of high levels of contamination in Corsica and southeastern France but kept the details under wraps.

The study was commissioned by magistrate Marie-Odile Bertella-Geffroy, who since 2001 has been examining allegations that the atomic cloud from Chernobyl caused a surge in cases of thyroid cancer in parts of France.

This week Bertella-Geffroy handed over the report -- originally completed in March -- to civil plaintiffs in the case, who passed details to AFP.

"Now we have proof that there was a breakdown in the system. So now the judicial case will succeed -- I can't see how it can do otherwise," said Chantal Hoir, president of the French Association of Victims of Thyroid Cancer.

The report states that the SCPRI issued imprecise maps that concealed the high levels of fallout in certain areas, according to sources who saw the document.

It also states that with full information health authorities could have taken targeted steps to reduce the exposure of vulnerable people such as children and pregnant mothers.

It was the first time an independent study gave substance to long-standing accusations from anti-nuclear groups that the French government deliberately played down the risk posed by the nuclear cloud.

"There was a veritable campaign of lies instigated by the state in order to protect the image of the French nuclear industry," said the campaigning organisation Sortir du Nucleaire (Get Out of Nuclear Power), welcoming details of the report.

"As in other European countries, people should have been told not to eat fresh vegetables and milk products, which absorb most radioactivity, or to let their children play in sand-pits and so on," it said.

Earlier this year anti-nuclear campaigners demanded that SCPRI's director at the time of the disaster, Pierre Pellerin, be placed under judicial investigation in the case.

However scientific opinion remains deeply divided, with several renowned physicists sending an open letter to President Jacques Chirac in June commending Pellerin for not giving way to panic in his handling of the crisis.

In April, France's high court of appeal confirmed a conviction for libel against leading Green party deputy Noël Mamère, who wrongfully accused Pellerin of claiming that the Chernobyl nuclear cloud stopped at the French border.

Doctors also question the supposed link between Chernobyl and the rise in thyroid cancer, a trend which began in the mid-1970s.

My professional colleagues say that over at Le Nouvel Observateur [a left-leaning, French weekly news magazine], I belong to a new intellectual family, the "neo-reactionaries," enjoying the excellent company of Hélène Carrère d'Encausse [the permanent secretary of the Académie Française], Alain Finkielkraut [a French philosopher and essayist [READ MORE], among others. To paraphrase Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, "If such were the case, it would be a serious mistake, which we would be gravely called upon one day to answer for."

Reaching beyond the contemporary debates, I have attempted to understand exactly what this new epithet might signify. And here's my answer: a neo-reactionary is "neo" in so far as the form of reactionism espoused is new, just as the progressivism which he opposes rests upon a paradigm no less novel.

I have therefore tried to summarize the strategic directions of neo-progressivism, of which I count six.

1) The new progressivism is first of all an environmental movement. It considers the planet's very future in peril and calls for slowing down, at all cost, the current disastrous growth. In this regard, it is considerably mistrustful of science, from GMOs [genetically modified organisms] that poison crops to nanotechnologies that may one day lead to mind-control. To combat global warming, it advocates extreme frugality, which is obviously new.

2) Neo-progressivism opposes globalization. In his day, Adam Smith revealed the paradoxical benefits arising from the individual consumer's narrow self-interest and greed. By favoring competition, this process creates wealth for all; so, too, do today's rioting demonstrators who accompany G-8 meetings, strikers who refuse industry relocations and protectionists who burn tires when they're not re-establishing trade barriers - do good in the end, by slowing down the liberalization process which is unsustainable for our economies, let alone our societies.

We must retake control of European reunification - again, in order to slow the process down - and use it to increase Continental protectionism against the United States and China.

Neo-protectionism seeks to unhinge the salary-job- productivity tricycle by demonstrating that there exist other means of production, which generate jobs (the 35-hour work week), and other sources of income beyond increases in productivity. For instance, the raising of taxes – an irrefutable means of attaining genuine wealth redistribution.

3) Neo-progressivism identifies the United States as the world's enemy. Because the United States is the nerve center of the global spread of capitalism, it destroys biodiversity just as it destroys those societies that resist. As any equation can be read in both directions, the result is that no opponent of the United States is completely bad: certain leaders, such as Venezuela's Chavez, Zimbabwe's Mugabe and some Iranian mullahs still present a few rough patches, which are at times embarrassing. But in the end, the essence of their struggle produces the same progressive effects as any other resistance to change against the way things work in the Northern hemisphere. Only one Third World regime is completely perverse and that is China, which imitates both our productivity and our indifference to the true damned of the earth.

4) Neo-progressivism condemns just as strongly America's allies, which serve to either spread the American social model (England) or prop up its strategic world order (Israel and Japan). It obviously distrusts the pro-globalization lobbies which would force a form of globalization deemed too extreme by France. While the English and Japanese lobbies are above all economic in nature, the Israeli lobby is based upon a novel form of communitarianism, which renders the various Jewish communities and Jews supportive of Zionism wholly committed to the neo-reactionary phenomenon - and so especially worthy of suspicion. Good Jews are clearly those who oppose Zionism, as were those Jews who wisely chose baptism in response to the Dreyfus Affair.

[Editor's Note: The "Dreyfus Affair" was a political scandal which divided France for many years during the late 19th century. It centered on the 1894 treason conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French army.]

5) and 6) By taking into account the above considerations, one necessarily comes to the conclusion that the planet is to be saved by the damned of the earth, or in other words that Southern fraction which, forsaken by globalization, is gathering support for a Great Refusal, from Porto Alegre to Pyongyang and even in our own banlieus, which has replaced the working class struggle today extinguished in the major cities. [The banlieus are the peripheral areas outside major cities, where the government built high-rise housing for its immigrant worker population after World War II].

Of course, a new political Islam is playing an ever greater role in this movement, following the example of what has already taken place in the United States with Farrakhan's brand of African-American Islamic proselytizing. It is time, particularly for the Europeans, to reach out to these movements and to clearly distance ourselves from the anti-Islamic practices of, on the one hand, the American Zionists and, on the other, the neo-Stalinist Russians.

Beyond any doubt, I find myself on the opposite side of the fence following the exposition of these six arguments, which closely mirror my own six counter arguments (which I will here spare the reader). Therefore, I am comfortable with the neologism "neo-reactionary." But is neo-progressivism really so progressive, once thus redefined?

In my opinion, such a philosophy is the harbinger of a genuine, global conservative revolution. So, wouldn't it make more sense to say that the fight of the neo-reactionary is against tomorrow's neoconservatives - or "neocons" in the abbreviated form, of course. This is the final struggle.

The storm is expected to bring periods of heavy snow, wind in places and possibly ice pellets and freezing drizzle.
Salt trucks hit the streets of Toronto

As well, the weather could cause traffic delays on roads and highways and result in airline flights either being delayed or possibly cancelled.

"Ottawa right up to Cornwall are going to get hammered today," says the CBC's Colleen Jones.

"So will Montreal, right up to Quebec City."

As the storm moves east, it could dump as much as 20-30 centimetres of snow on places like Montreal and the Eastern townships in Quebec.

"That's a whack of snow," says Jones, who notes that for Montreal, the biggest one-day snowfall for this particular day in history was 24 centimetres.

Parts of New Brunswick, P.E.I. and Nova Scotia could end up with a wet, freezing evening, according to the latest reports from Environment Canada.

The same storm system is also affecting much of the Northeastern United States which was under as winter storm warning on Friday.

The U.S. National Weather Service was warning that travel conditions in some areas could be hazardous.

Overnight, there were visions of a white holiday season – and heavy shovelling work – in southern Ontario.

On Friday morning, Air Canada in Toronto was warning passengers the severe weather could delay flights.

And the City of Toronto's road operations manager, Rob Orpin, was warning that the morning drive could be slow-going.

"It's going to be a long rush hour," Orpin said.

"Take your time. Leave early. It's winter in Canada. Enjoy it."

Jones also says there's more bad weather on the way for southern Ontario.

"As soon as this system all pushes out, there's going to be big snowsqualls tonight in parts," she said.

The outages were caused by ice that formed on tree limbs, which then fell onto power lines. About 160,000 were without power in northern South Carolina, 102,000 in northeast Georgia, 57,000 in the Atlanta area and 40,000 in western and central North Carolina.

"The trees and power lines are down everywhere on the road. It's just dangerous to be out," said Rebecca Neal, who was using blankets to keep warm in her powerless Greenville, S.C., home and thinking about finding a hotel for the night.

Earlier in the day, Neal had gone to her job at a public relations firm, only to find that her office didn't have power either.

School systems cancelled or cut short classes from northern Georgia to western stretches of Virginia.

The National Weather Service said the freezing rain was expected to continue in the region through Thursday evening, and overnight temperatures were forecast to dip to about -6 C. More power lines and tree limbs could snap under ice layers expected to grow to up to three-quarters of an inch thick.

Mountains of North Carolina and Virginia were being hit with a hazardous mix of snow and sleet, with accumulations from 2.5 to 7.5 centimetres expected overnight.

"Snow we can plow. Ice we can't," said Virginia Department of Transportation spokesman Chuck Lionberger.

The wintry mix was blamed for a school bus accident in Cherokee County, on the northern end of suburban Atlanta. The driver swerved to avoid a large tree branch that had fallen across the road, forcing the vehicle's rear tires to slide off the road. None of the 23 students aboard the bus was injured.

A spokeswoman for Duke Power, the main supplier of electricity in the hard-hit stretches of the Carolinas, said crews were working to restore power, but added that it could be a long process.

The 4,134-foot volcano hasn't shown such signs since it last erupted in 1986, when ash from a 7-mile-high column drifted over Anchorage, the state's most populous city, and kept flights out of the skies over Cook Inlet.

"It's steaming more vigorously right now than it has at any point since 1986," Steve McNutt, research professor of volcano seismology with the Alaska Volcano Observatory, said Wednesday.

The observatory has been monitoring the uninhabited volcanic island more closely since bumping its status up to code yellow from green on Nov. 29. Code yellow means the volcano is restless and showing signs of an eruption.

Steam mixed with sulfur dioxide gas has been billowing vigorously since late last week from a space between lava domes formed during Augustine's most recent eruptions, in 1976 and 1986.

The presence of sulfur, one of the main magmatic gases, is a sign that molten rock has moved closer to surface, McNutt said.

Residents on the Kenai Peninsula about 50 miles across Cook Inlet have reported the rotten-egg smell of sulfur fumes floating into their communities.

"On Sunday night I woke up with the taste of sulfur in the back of my throat," said Kevin Seville, who lives in the Russian and Alutiiq village of Nanwalek.

Seismometers have recorded more than 170 small temblors over the last week, and 74 on Sunday alone. The average for the past 15 years has been about one to two per week.

The jump is "very dramatic," McNutt said. But he noted the magnitudes - less than 1 - were still smaller than the bulk of the earthquakes preceding the 1986 eruption.

The entire island, located 171 miles southwest of Anchorage, has inflated by as much as one inch as injections of molten rock rise into the mountain from beneath the earth's surface, he said.

Scientists on a flyover earlier this week also spotted a swath of new ash on the snow-covered peak. The thin dusting indicates cracks have opened on the mountain to vent steam.

"It could be days, weeks, months before we see something else, or at any point here things could just stop," said Chris Nye, research assistant professor at the observatory, a joint program between the U.S. Geological Survey, University of Alaska Fairbanks and state Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys.

Nanwalek residents are monitoring the volcano observatory's Web site and have packed emergency supplies in case an ash cloud cuts out air service, the main source of transportation to and from the village.

"We're isolated as it is, when you throw ash into the mix, it makes it really hard to connect," Seville said.

This morning, another small explosion occurred, similar to one last week. The Alaska Volcano Observatory says it stopped receiving a signal from the site this morning, indicating the explosion damaged it. Clouds made it too difficult to see the small plume emitted today.


Last Friday night, a similar but bigger explosion occurred, and scientists say more could be on the way.

The latest statistics from instruments monitoring the bulge indicate that the uplift has slowed to about half its former rate of an inch or so a year.

Geologists think the bulge is being created by magma being pushed into a chamber about four or five miles underground, and its slowing means less of the liquid rock is flowing upward. They don't know why the rate of magma has seemed to ease.

"It's possible it's slacking off, but over the coming years the rate will change," said geologist Willie Scott of the at the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash. "That's why we want to continue to monitor it as closely as we can, because we're seeing a phenomenon that we haven't been able to study before and we want to see where it goes."

Scientists have monitored the Central Oregon volcano since 2001, when a comparison of newly acquired satellite measurements showed that a 10-mile-wide chunk of the mountain had risen more than four inches over the preceding four years.

Since then, numerous instruments have been set up around the mountain, and geologists are using three different techniques to measure ground movement.

The deformity is centered just west of the mountain, but the affected area stretches as far northwest as Dee Wright Observatory on the Old McKenzie Highway and as far southeast as Devil's Lake on the Cascades Lake Highway.

A swarm of more than 300 tiny earthquakes struck the area in March 2004, but the bulge has since been quiet. Only five quakes were recorded this year, none with a magnitude greater than 1.5.

By comparison, thousands of earthquakes as strong as magnitude 4 or 5 struck the area around Mount St. Helens in the months leading up to its eruption.

"There are times when there's deformation like this that goes on and leads to eruption," Scott said. "And then there's times when the deformation just reverses and goes away. The possibilities are endless."

Until the ruined city of Hamoukar was discovered in the riverless plains of northern Syria, urbanized civilization from its time was thought to hug closely to the palm groves, marshes and fisheries of Southern Mesopotamia, hundreds of miles to the south.

Current archeological thought has it that settlements as far north as Hamoukar would have been outposts of the southern Uruk society.

Others dating from the period are small, and if the theory is right, imported their culture solely from city-states near the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates.

Hamoukar has turned that assumption on its head, offering archeologists a full-blown city in far northern Mesopotamia, complete with independent pottery styles and a fully functioning urban society--a thousand years before it was supposed to be there.

"You wouldn't expect to find cities like this until the 3rd Millennium B.C.," said Clemens Reichel, a research associate at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, who excavated the site this year with archaeologist Salam al-Quntar of the Syrian Department of Antiquities.

Hamoukar appears to have reached big-city status by 4,500 B.C. and may have been settled as long ago as 8,000 years ago.

"This is the root of all the civilizations. It's not only Syrian heritage. This is also yours," said Abdal-Razzaq Moaz, Syria's deputy minister of culture in charge of archaeology and cultural heritage. "It's heritage belonging to all humanity."

For years, scholars thought urbanized society began and was isolated in Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia. The future of modern human society rested on Uruk's growth, archeologists say.

"The middle of the 4th Millennium is the time of some of the most important changes in the history of civilizations," said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute. "This is the time when the first cities developed. The first state societies--the things we would call the first true civilizations--develop. The first kings, the use of the wheel."

About 30 years ago, archeologists determined that Uruk expanded by building far-flung colonies.

Within the last decade, archeologists at Hamoukar and Tell Brak in central Syria have also discovered what appear to be full-blown cities in the north by the time Uruk colonists arrived.

"What we're seeing now is that northern Mesopotamia had developed a complex society and developed urbanism apparently in parallel, and more or less independently of these emerging Uruk cities in the south," Stein said.

By 3,500 B.C.--the period in the Copper Age when Hamoukar was wiped out--archeologists say Uruk would have been the largest city on the planet, a metropolis far to the south of Hamoukar with a square-mile footprint, more than 40,000 residents, huge public buildings and fortified walls.

In the next hundred years, the society would spread north as far as Syria, Turkey and western Iran, scholars say.

In Hamoukar's heyday it had a population of about 3,000 people living on 80 acres. The closest significant center of the civilization's northern push was about 100 miles away, near what is modern-day Mosul in Iraq.

Tantalizing glimpses of trade with that civilization have been found in Hamoukar since Oriental Institute scholar McGuire Gibson began excavations at Hamoukar in 1999, and they may play a role in explaining why the city at the crossroads of northern trade routes was wiped out.

Reichel and his colleagues in 2005 discovered evidence of the battle that abruptly ended Hamoukar's independence. That year, a University of Chicago archeological team returned to the dig site after a hiatus for the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.

Their dig this year revealed that Hamoukar had been pelted by invaders who hurled more than a thousand sling-fired bullets at it and over 100 heavy, 4-inch clay balls. The walls were toppled and burned.

But beneath them, strangely preserved by the devastation, was evidence of Hamoukar urban life from 3,500 B.C.

It offers a picture of startling complexity and prosperity. There were storehouses, kitchens, unique pottery forms, evidence of wide trading and the leftover junk of specialized stoneworkers.

Large animal bones suggest the locals herded sheep and cattle, and Reichel said barley, lentils and peas likely grew in the rain-fed fields around the town. Though the city wasn't built next to a river, several wells supplied water for Hamoukar's inhabitants. Ancient trade routes, tracks that carve north toward Turkey and west toward the Mediterranean, can still be seen. Modern towns with ancient roots can be seen in each direction along the old routes.

"It's a pretty stable environment," Reichel said. "Something that would really sustain communities."

Trenches dug this summer by researchers turned up obsidian plugs and flakes left over from the production of specialized blades, said Reichel. Likewise, two large buildings with square courtyards housed what look to be a warehouse and a giant kitchen with large grinding stones, clay benches and a room-sized clay oven.

In the warehouse were stamp seals and tamper-proof clay sealings remarkably similar to devices used in southern Mesopotamia and what is now southwestern Iran. But the pottery found alongside them--until the cataclysmic battle--was entirely local in origin.

Who conducted the attack remains unknown. But after the invasion, the southern Uruk civilization clearly took over.

Previously, experts believed Uruks were the first to build cities in the north, growing from colonies sent up the Euphrates River to obtain raw materials like wood, stone and metals absent in southern Mesopotamia.

That may have been the case.

But Hamoukar shows the Uruks weren't alone when they got there.

The scientists teamed with television crews from the BBC and Discovery Channel to investigate the heart of the deadliest tsunami on record. On Boxing Day last year an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.3 tore the earth apart off the west coast of Sumatra. Part of the ocean floor was thrust up to create a 40-metre-high undersea cliff that then collapsed.

Huge volumes of water were displaced in the process, creating the giant waves that killed more than 270,000 people.

"Normally, when you go to the bottom of the sea anywhere and take a sample or look around, there's always something alive," Professor O'Dor said. "But five months after the earthquake, this entire plain, created by the collapse of the cliff, was essentially devoid of life."

The group had expected to find several species of fish, plus cephalopods, sea cucumbers, brittle stars, corals and sponges, crustaceans and worms.

Professor O'Dor thought the collapsing cliff had buried the food sources of bottom feeders, which in turn had an effect on larger predators. "No one has ever got to a site like this so quickly before," he said. "It may just be that it takes a while for things to get back to normal. The sea is very cold at this depth, and typically the speed of life is proportional to temperature. Nothing happens very fast at 4C."

The tsunami epicentre findings were included in a report marking the halfway point in an ambitious project to catalogue all life in the oceans by 2010.

About 1700 scientists from 73 countries are taking part in the project. So far they have electronically tagged almost 2000 animals from 21 species, including sharks, fish, birds, turtles, seals and sea lions.

Large numbers of new species have also been discovered in some of the deepest and remotest corners of the ocean.

Scientists believe that all the marine species known at present may only account for about a tenth of those that exist.

Derek Erstelle of Winnipeg has become the first Canadian to discover three separate meteorites, planetary scientists at the University of Calgary have confirmed. Across the country, 68 meteorites have been found.

"The third was incredible," said Erstelle said of the discovery last October.

Erstelle's hunt for space rocks began five years ago when he was walking with a friend who tried to move an unusual looking rock that turned out to be a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite worth about $50,000.

The Métis artist, who makes carvings out of antlers, rocks and driftwood, doesn't have any formal scientific training.

"This third find was made testing a theory, that a meteorite dumping zone lies in eastern Manitoba," said Alan Hildebrand, a planetary scientist at the University of Calgary and co-director of the Prairie Meteorite Search. "The obvious culprit to put those meteorites there is the Laurentide ice sheet."

Erstelle used binoculars, a metal detector and a map that showed how glaciers melted during the last Ice Age to focus his most recent search .

There could be thousands of meteorites in Manitoba's Whiteshell area, near the province's southeastern border with Ontario, said Scott Young, a planetarium manager at the Manitoba Museum.

"Hopefully,more people will go out and beat the bush and look around, or just bring in the rocks from that area that they've had on their mantlepiece," he said.
Meteorite hunters have found eight space rocks in Manitoba, but the museum is seeking one for its collection.

Hildebrand agreed, saying he hoped the most recent discovery will lead to a rush of meteorite seekers in Manitoba. The rocks are worth up to $10 a gram, but the scientific value and bragging rights are priceless.

Although it seems a long time ago, it really wasn't, that people who came here from other places made every attempt to fit in. Assimilation wasn't a threat to anyone – it was what the Statue of Liberty represented. E pluribus unum, one out of many, was our motto. The world's melting pot was our nickname. It didn't mean that any group of people had to check their customs, culture or cuisine, at the door. It did mean that they, and especially their children, learned English, and that they learned to live and let live.

That has changed, you may have noticed. And I blame my fellow Jews. When it comes to pushing the multicultural, anti-Christian agenda, you find Jewish judges, Jewish journalists, and the American Civil Liberties Union, at the forefront.

Being Jewish, I should report, Christmas was never celebrated by my family. But what was there not to like about the holiday? To begin with, it provided a welcome two-week break from school. The decorated trees were nice, the lights were beautiful, "It's a Wonderful Life" was a great movie, and some of the best Christmas songs were even written by Jews.

But the dirty little secret in America is that anti-Semitism is no longer a problem in society – it's been replaced by a rampant anti-Christianity. For example, the hatred spewed toward George W. Bush has far less to do with his policies than it does with his religion. The Jews voice no concern when a Bill Clinton or a John Kerry makes a big production out of showing up at black Baptist churches or posing with Rev. Jesse Jackson because they understand that's just politics. They only object to politicians attending church for religious reasons.

My fellow Jews, who often have the survival of Israel heading the list of their concerns when it comes to electing a president, only gave 26 percent of their vote to Bush, even though he is clearly the most pro-Israel president we've ever had in the Oval Office.

It is the ACLU, which is overwhelmingly Jewish in terms of membership and funding, that is leading the attack against Christianity in America. It is they who have conned far too many people into believing that the phrase "separation of church and state" actually exists somewhere in the Constitution.

You may have noticed, though, that the ACLU is highly selective when it comes to religious intolerance. The same group of self-righteous shysters who, at the drop of a "Merry Christmas" will slap you with an injunction, will fight for the right of an American Indian to ingest peyote and a devout Islamic woman to be veiled on her driver's license.

I happen to despise bullies and bigots. I hate them when they represent the majority, but no less when, like Jews in America, they represent an infinitesimal minority. I am getting the idea that too many Jews won't be happy until they pull off their own version of the Spanish Inquisition, forcing Christians to either deny their faith and convert to agnosticism or suffer the consequences.

According to the report, sections of the documents— "almost invariably the most crucial passages"—are marred by an indelible black ink that renders the lines impossible to read, due to a top-secret highlighting policy that began at the agency's inception in 1947.

CIA Director Porter Goss has ordered further internal investigation.

"Why did it go on for this long, and this far?" said Goss in a press conference called shortly after the report's release. "I'm as frustrated as anyone. You can't read a single thing that's been highlighted. Had I been there to advise [former CIA director] Allen Dulles, I would have suggested the traditional yellow color—or pink."

Goss added: "There was probably some really, really important information in these documents."

When asked by a reporter if the black ink was meant to intentionally obscure, Goss countered, "Good God, why?"

Goss lamented the fact that the public will probably never know the particulars of such historic events as the Cold War, the civil-rights movement, or the growth of the international drug trade.

"I'm sure the CIA played major roles in all these things," Goss said. "But now we'll never know for sure."

In addition to clouding the historical record, the use of the black highlighters, also known as "permanent markers," may have encumbered or even prevented critical operations. CIA scholar Matthew Franks was forced to abandon work on a book about the Bay Of Pigs invasion after declassified documents proved nearly impossible to read.

"With all the highlighting in the documents I unearthed in the National Archives, it's really no wonder that the invasion failed," Franks said. "I don't see how the field operatives and commandos were expected to decipher their orders."

The inspector general's report cited in particular the damage black highlighting did to documents concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy, thousands of pages of which "are completely highlighted, from top to bottom margin."

"It is unclear exactly why CIA bureaucrats sometimes chose to emphasize entire documents," the report read. "Perhaps the documents were extremely important in every detail, or the agents, not unlike college freshmen, were overwhelmed by the reading material and got a little carried away."

Also unclear is why black highlighters were chosen in the first place. Some blame it on the closed, elite culture of the CIA itself. A former CIA officer speaking on the condition of anonymity said highlighting documents with black pens was a common and universal practice.

"It seemed counterintuitive, but the higher-ups didn't know what they were doing," the ex-officer said. "I was once ordered to feed documents into a copying machine in order to make backups of some very important top-secret records, but it turned out to be some sort of device that cut the paper to shreds."