Words of wisdom from Empress Galla Placidia: a message arriving to us across an abyss of time

Domina Nostra, Galla Placidia, Pia, Felix, Augusta,

Our Lady, Galla Placidia, Pious, Blessed and Venerable.

429 Anni Domini.

Digna vox maiestate regnantis legibus alligatum se principem profiteri: adeo de auctoritate iuris nostra pendet auctoritas. et re vera maius imperio est submittere legibus principatum. et oraculo praesentis edicti quod nobis licere non patimur indicamus. 

"That the Emperor profess to be bound by the laws is a sentiment worthy of the ruler's majesty, so much is our power dependent on the power of law and indeed that the imperial office be subject to the laws is more important than the imperial power itself. And by the pronouncement of the present decree, We point to what We do not allow to be permitted to Ourselves." (translation by Stewart Oost).

In this difficult moment, it may be unthinkable that we could find the wisdom we have lost so badly in the words of someone who lived more than 1500 years ago. And yet, history is a big wheel that keeps turning, and many times it retraces an old path. If you have a little time, you could spend some of it reflecting on Galla Placidia's words, pronounced so many years ago, and yet so resonating with what we are seeing happening around us. It takes an effort, I know, to ponder on just a few words in an age when we are used to skimming through the noise of infinite words overlapping on our screens. And yet, for once, it may be worth trying. Some more notes follow below. 

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-- Galla Placidia (388-450 AD). A fascinating figure in history, the daughter of Emperor Theodosius the Great, she was born a princess, married a Barbarian King, became Queen of the Goths, fought and defeated a usurper, and finally became Empress (Augusta), the sole ruler of the Western Roman Empire. She may have been the only Imperial ruler who understood the problems of the Roman Empire and acted accordingly, pushing it to its final dissolution. 

-- We have no texts left that we can directly attribute to Empress Placidia, but according to her biographer, Stewart Oost, her "hand" can be found in some articles of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, published almost a century after her death, although attributed to her son, Valentinian. These few articles are the only "voice" of the Empress we can still hear after more than one millennium and a half from her times. But it is a deep voice from someone who saw the decline of her world, not unlike our situation.

-- The state of today is the equivalent of the ancient Roman Emperors, an absolute ruler that can do whatever it wants: creating new laws when it does not want to obey the old ones. It can imprison people, kill them, start wars, destroy whatever it thinks is good to destroy. Placidia says that there is no absolute power, not even for Emperors. She says that the power (auctoritas) is the result of the law (iuris). Not the reverse. There are things, says the Empress, which are not permitted to the Empress, by decree of the Empress herself. It is the core of what we call "civilization:" who creates laws? On which basis? For what purpose? In this text, she shows that she understood that laws are more important than rulers, a concept that her contemporary, Augustine, stated as "an unjust law is not a law" (Lex iniusta non est lex). It is the concept of a "natural law" or "divine law" which should guarantee against arbitrariness, but that we seem to have lost, nowadays. 

More about Galla Placidia at this link

Back to Reality: We are All Children of Oil

 

Colin Campbell, founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), speaks in Pisa in 2006. Officially, the Powers that Be (PTB) ignored the ASPO message, but it could be that they understood it all too well. That would explain many things about the current situation. For two years, we thought that all our problems were caused by a microscopic, peduncled critter. Now, we are back to reality: we are all children of oil, and we cannot survive without it.

A few days ago, I found by chance on my shelves some documents from the 2006 conference of ASPO (the association for the study of peak oil) that I and others organized in Pisa, in Tuscany. The conference had a certain global resonance: it was sponsored by the Tuscan government, hundreds of people from all over the world came to attend, and the international media commented on it. It was part of a wave of interest on peak oil and its consequences. Just as another example, see the leaflet on the right that I also found rummaging among old documents. It announces a meeting to be held in the Tuscan countryside in 2004, titled, "The Party is Over", and subtitled "How to exit from the petroleum-based economy"

Today, it looks as if these things are a hundred years old. How was it that there was an age in which you could express this kind of subversive thoughts in public and be given some space in the media? And how could we delude ourselves into thinking that we could have convinced that nebulous entity called "humanity" that we were running out of our natural resources, crude oil in the first place? Even more subversive, that we should reduce consumption and move to renewable sources before it was too late?

At the time, we didn't know exactly how much time we had before troubles were to start, but our estimates were correct in terms of orders of magnitude. In the early 2000s, Colin Campbell proposed that the peak of "conventional" oil production would come around 2012. It probably did, but the peak was masked by the production of non-conventional resources. "Shale oil" bought us another decade of growth, although at a modest rate and at a high cost. So, we had more than 20 years to prepare from when, in 1998, Colin Campbell and Jean Lahérrere had first flagged the problem with an article published on "Scientific American." But, as we should have expected, nothing serious was done.

On the contrary, the entity called "humanity" showed the maturity and wisdom of someone in the grip of convulsions and possessed by demonic forces. We have seen 20 years of a roller coaster in the desperate search for an enemy to destroy and turn the clock back, to when things were good. The enemy has been singled out as Osama, Saddam, Assad, Qaddafi, and many others, destroyed only to be replaced by the new monster of the year. 

For two years, then, the monster was not a human being, but a microscopic peduncled creature that nicely played its role of bugaboo, until it was officially vaporized by the microscopic equivalent of carpet bombing. Now, it is over, and a new, more conventional monster is advancing: the soulless Vladimir Putin. Chances are that he will not be the last monster in the demonization chain.

Every time we seemed to have destroyed our arch-enemy, it came back in another form, bigger and uglier than before. And each time, in the fight against the monster on duty, we lost something of our wisdom, our freedom, our humanity. 

We never realized that what we were fighting was not a monster, but a reflection of ourselves in the desperate search for a way to continue a way of life that some of our leaders defined as "not up for negotiations." But when you deal with Nature, everything is up for negotiations. And Nature always wins the game. 

Peak oil never reached the level of the official monster of the day, but it was worrisome enough that it deserved the standard demonization treatment. It could not be bombed and there was no vaccine against it. But we marginalized it, ridiculed it, and made it disappear from view as if we had bombed it to smithereens. Yet, it is returning, even though not mentioned, during the current crisis. 

We are 8 billion on this planet, all children of crude oil. Without crude oil and other fossil fuels, most of us simply wouldn't exist. And without crude oil, we cannot continue to exist. As a monster, peak oil is much scarier than any of the bugaboos that the mainstream media have been proposing to us. Gas and coal are in the same group.

We should have known what to expect. It was all written already in 1972 in the study titled "The Limits to Growth." To be sure, the authors never mentioned wars for resources in their discussion. But just by taking a look at the curves for the most likely scenarios, it wasn't difficult to imagine that the global collapse was not going to be a friendly party. 

With the world's economic system expected to crash at some moment during the first decades of the 21st century, we should have expected the race to grab what was left would get uglier and uglier. It is happening. 

Is it the story of a failure? Maybe, but in a strangely twisted way. Thinking about what's happening right now in the world, I have a strong impression that our leaders didn't ignore our message. Not at all. Already in 2001, it was said that George Bush Jr. had decided to invade Iraq because he had read some material produced by ASPO and was worried about peak oil. It is probably just a legend, but the so-called "Carter Doctrine" of 1980 already recognized that the US couldn't survive without the oil resources of the Middle East. Our leaders are not smarter than us, but not stupid, either. 

So, it may well be that the PTBs perfectly understand the situation and that they are maneuvering to place themselves in a position to gain from the coming (actually ongoing) collapse. After all, the game that the elites know best is putting the commoners one against the other. It is the game being played right now. Like the Russian Roulette, it is one of those games you won't necessarily survive. 

Why did the Taliban Win? Lessons From Ancient History

 

How did the Taliban manage to defeat the most powerful army in the world? One word: corruption. It is not new, it has already happened in many other cases in history. Here, I propose a comparison of the recent Taliban campaign with the case of the Numidian wars at the time of the Roman Republic.  (above: these fighters are probably Tajiki, not Taliban, but that does not affect the substance of my interpretation) 

During the 2nd century BC, the Roman Republic attempted to defeat the Numidians, a tribal population inhabiting a desertic area of North-Western Africa. Surely, the Numidian fighters were no match for the mighty Roman armies, yet the Numidian kings held on their own for decades. It was only in 105 BC that their last king, Jugurtha, was definitively defeated by the Romans.

The ups and downs of the Numidian wars left the Romans perplexed. How could it be that those unrefined Barbarians could keep at bay the Romans for so long? The opinion of the historian Sallustius was that the Numidians had used corruption to buy the Roman commanders. Sallustius reports that Jugurtha himself said about Rome, "Venal city! You would sell yourself if a buyer were to appear!".

Sallustius' interpretation is believable, even though it is not substantiated by historical data. Corruption is an unavoidable side effect of money and Rome was the most monetarized society of antiquity. The Romans had built their prosperity on the precious metal mines of Northern Spain and used their wealth to pay the large armies that they used to dominate the Mediterranean Region. But money is a double-edged weapon: it can be used to pay soldiers to fight, but also not to fight, or to fight someone they were not supposed to fight. 

Once corruption has infiltrated society, money becomes everything, and the rule of the game, at all levels, becomes enriching oneself. But what role did corruption play in the war, exactly? Sallustius diplomatically faults King Jugurtha, but the Numidian economy was small, the Numidians were mostly poor shepherds. Where would Jugurtha find the money needed to buy the rich Roman leaders? 

More likely, the Roman Army bought itself off. Setting up a military expedition implies a lot of money being spent at various levels for supplies, weapons, salaries, transportation, etc. And, at all levels, there are chances for bribery. Once the mechanism started, nobody in Rome really wanted Jugurtha defeated. As long as he was alive and fighting, there was money to be made. That's the likely reason why the war dragged for so long. 

On their side, the Numidians were not so badly affected by corruption simply because they were a tribal society. In this kind of society, interpersonal relations are governed by honor, revenge, fealty, and the like -- NOT by money. Trying to corrupt a tribal warlord is not easy: for one thing, where could he spend the money? Besides, a corrupt leader is always at risk of revenge from his own followers. The end result was that the Numidian fighters were fewer in number not as efficient as the Roman legionnaires, but more trustworthy and surely cheaper. 

The Roman surely realized what the problem was. But fighting corruption is always a difficult task, if nothing else because those who are supposed to fight it can be corrupted as well. So, how to solve the problem? There was an interesting trick that could be played. Powerful warlords were among the most corrupt of the corrupted, but with a twist. Whereas petty leaders profited from an ongoing war, rather than from a victory, the top commanders needed victories to gain prestige and money. So, they were efficient war leaders. The solution, then, was to give all the power to a warlord. 

That was already happening at the time of Gaius Marius, with the Roman Republic in a "pre-imperial" condition. In about one century, Rome would be turned into a full-fledged imperial state, ruled by a single, all-powerful emperor. Of course, the emperor could not be corrupted: he already had everything. 

Emperors could keep the empire together, at least as long as there were the resources for doing so. Then, with the exhaustion of the precious metal mines, the Roman state ceased to be a monetarized society. No more money, no more corruption. No corruption, no need for an emperor. And not even for a state. That's how history moves. 

Fast forward to our times, and we can compare the US campaign in Afghanistan with the Roman campaign in Numidia. With all their might, the Romans and the Americans were hampered by the enormous costs of their military apparatuses, in both cases amplified by corruption at all levels. In comparison, the Numidians and the Taliban fighters were much less expensive. 

It is true that the Romans did better than the Americans and eventually succeeded at subduing the Numidians. But think of just one thing: nowadays the descendants of the Berbers who fought the Romans in Numidia are still there, and still call themselves "Berbers." (more exactly ⵉⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵏ, ⵎⵣⵗⵏ, Imaziɣen) And where has the Roman Empire gone? Alas...

Note also that to estimate the degree of corruption of the Roman society we need to rely on qualitative reports. But for the degree of corruption of our society, we have more data, even though uncertain: look at this image (source).

That correlates the perceived corruption with the Gini index, a measure of wealth inequality (note that a high corruption index means LOW corruption and vice versa). The US is not in this diagram, but it is more or less in the middle. 

Note the correlation between corruption and inequality: the higher the inequality, the higher the degree of corruption. The least corrupt states (e.g. Denmark) are also the most egalitarian. The opposite holds for corrupt states, say, the Dominican Republic. 

It makes a lot of sense that inequality and corruption are correlated, even though we can't say that one of the two causes the other. More likely, they go in parallel. Of course, in order to corrupt someone, you need to have much more money than they have. Could you corrupt Bill Gates? Of course not, but Bill Gates can corrupt anyone if he wants to. Conversely, in an egalitarian society, it is hard to corrupt a person, especially if you are linked to him or her by bonds involving honor and respect. 

I don't claim to be an expert in Pashtunwali, the code of honor of the Pashtun Afghans, but it looks close enough to societies that I know, such as that of the Italian peasants. It is a section of the Italian society that has mostly disappeared, but it still existed not long ago, so that we can still figure out how that world worked. If you understand that, then it is not difficult to understand how a tribal society can sometimes defeat an empire. It is a question of persistence. It has happened, it will happen again. 

Finally note that, if corruption is linked to inequality, the fact that most Western societies have become more unequal during the past decades means that also corruption has been on the increase -- and that seems to correspond to the general perception. It means that the West is less and less able to win wars, although it may well keep fighting them for the sake of those who profit from them. 

Again, this observation seems to correspond to the events of the past 2-3 decades. Despite its immense military power, the West hasn't been able to gain a definitive victory even against much weaker opponents. Does that mean we need an incorruptible Emperor? 

Ave, Gates Caesar!

Afghanistan: The Twilight of the Global Empire

 

Afghanistan: a ragged blot of land more or less at the center of the mass of Eurasia and Africa. Over a couple of centuries, it repelled invasions from the largest empires in modern history: Britain, the Soviet Union, and now the United States. It is possible to make an educated guess on what led the United States to invade Afghanistan in 2001 (oil, what else?), but now the time of expansion is over for the Global Empire. We are entering the twilight zone that all empires tend to reach and maintain for a short time before their final collapse.

In 117 AD, Emperor Trajan died after having expanded the Roman Empire to the largest extension it would ever have. It was at the same time a military triumph and an economic disaster. The coffers of the state were nearly empty, the production of the mines was in decline, the army was overstretched and undermanned, unrest was brewing in the provinces. Trajan's successor, Hadrian, did his best to salvage the situation (*). He abandoned the territories that could not be kept, quelled the internal unrest, directed the remaining resources to build fortification at the borders of the Empire. It was a successful strategy and the result was about one century of "Pax Romana." It was the twilight of the Roman Empire, a century or so of relative peace that preceded the final descent.

Empires in history tend to follow similar paths. Not that empires are intelligent, they are nearly pure virtual holobionts and they tend to react to perturbations only by trying to maintain their internal homeostasis. In other words, they have little or no capability to plan for the future. Nevertheless, they are endowed with a certain degree of "swarm intelligence" and they may be able to take the right path by trial and error. Sometimes the process is eased by an intelligent decision-maker at the top. We may attribute the Pax Romana period to the decisions of Hadrian and his successors but, more likely, the Roman Empire simply followed the path it had to follow,

The current empire, the Western (or Global) one may be entering a similar period of retrenching and stabilization: a Pax Americana. I noted this trend when I realized that in the past ten years the Global Empire had not engaged in new major military campaigns. You may argue that 10 years is too short to use to detect meaningful trends. Correct, but there are other elements showing that the Global Empire is retreating and retrenching. For instance, global terrorist attacks and war casualties have been declining for at least five years in a row. And, of course, there has been the announcement that the US is leaving Afghanistan. There will remain "contractors" fighting there, and we can imagine that drones will keep patrolling the sky of Afghanistan, continuing their ongoing spree of senseless killing. But, on the whole, this war is over.

The Afghan campaign was a small military miracle. Just think of the challenges of maintaining an army in a hostile territory, in a remote region not connected to the mainland, and that for 20 years! I think it was never done before in history, not successfully at least. In an earlier Afghan campaign, the British army was not so lucky with only one survivor of an entire army during the retreat from Kabul in 1842. Later, in 1954, the French went through a similar disaster with their base of Dien Bien Phu, in Vietnam. Instead, the Western army is returning from Afghanistan more or less intact. 

The Global Empire didn't really lose this war, it just realized that it was impossible to keep fighting it. Indeed, Afghanistan was often termed "Graveyard of Empires" but it never really was. Empires didn't die because they had to leave this remote country, they died for other reasons and, in their agony, they let go this remote and untenable possession of theirs. But, before the Western Empire disappears for good, we may perhaps be able to enjoy a period of Pax Americana, just as the Romans did after that Hadrian became emperor.

With the Afghan campaign over, we may ask ourselves why did the empire engage in it. Wars, like all human enterprises, are generated by those virtual entities we call memes. These are patterns of ideas that dominate the human mind, it was Daniel Dennett who said that human beings are meme-infested apes. So, the general interpretation of this story is related to a meme that appeared in the aftermath of the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, supposed to have been masterminded by an evil sheik named Osama bin Laden who had a hidden military base in a complex of caves in North Afghanistan. The connection of this meme with reality was always flimsy, to say the least, not better than that of "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. And, indeed, no traces of Osama or of an important military base hiding terrorists in Afghanistan were ever found. But the power of memes does not depend on their link with reality.

But there probably was a much more powerful meme that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. It had nothing to do with a bearded sheik hiding in a cave. Rather, it was about the issue that generated most of the recent wars: crude oil. 

Of course, Afghanistan has no oil, and this much was known. But in the 1990s the oil reserves of the Caspian region, adjacent to Afghanistan, had been the object of a game of aggrandizing that led to exaggerating their extent at least of an order of magnitude. As a result, the US may have been looking for the dark brown meme of "A New Saudi Arabia" that involved taking control of Afghanistan.

Back in 2004, I wrote the story of the development of this meme in a post in Italian. Below, I updated and condensed it into a version in English. At that time, I couldn't imagine that the Afghan campaign would go on for nearly two decades more, but memes are unstoppable when they take hold of human minds. 

Nevertheless, I don't think there is a rational explanation for these events. Just like what Tolstoy said about the French invasion of Russia, in 1812, the Afghan war happened "because it had to happen." And if it is over, now, it is because it had to be. 

My interpretation is that during the past 10 years or so, we created a Web creature endowed with swarm intelligence that is taking over humankind's memesphere. Maybe I am wrong and, of course, I have no proof that this is the case. But I have the strong impression that the great games that empires play may not be anymore in the hands of those psychopaths who call themselves "emperors". And the future will be what it has to be.

See also this post by Tom Engelhart that makes very similar observations on the withdrawal phase of the American Empire. 

(*) About Hadrian, you probably know the book titled "Memoirs of Hadrian" by Marguerite Yourcenar. It is an excellent book in many respects, first of all as a literary masterpiece, but also because it clearly understand and describes the situation of the Roman Empire after that Trajan had nearly destroyed by overextending its borders. But, despite Yourcenar's flattering portrait, Hadrian was no Mr. Nice Emperor. He was ruthless against his political enemies and against all opposition. In 136 AD, he destroyed what was left of Jerusalem after the siece of 70 AD, attempting to erase even the name of the city that was rebuilt under the name of Aelia Capitolina.

THE CASPIAN OIL FEVER.

By Ugo Bardi

A longer version of this story was published in Italian on the “ASPOITALIA” website in August 2004.

The Caspian oil fever started in the late 1990s, when it became fashionable in the West to speak about the "immense reserves" of crude oil that could be found in the area around the Caspian Sea. So rich was this region supposed to be that it would be possible to turn it into a "New Saudi Arabia" (sometimes "A New Persian Gulf"). But the story had started much earlier than that. 

Already in mid 19th century, the first oil wells were dug near Baku in the Azerbaijan region. In 1873, Robert Nobel, the brother of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, led an expedition southward from St. Petersburg. He found in Baku, on the Caspian shore, an already operating oil industry. Nobel invested in this industry, developing it considerably. At the end of the nineteenth century, Baku was the largest oil-producing area in the world, even surpassing the American oil industry of the time.

At that time, oil was mainly turned into kerosene and then used as fuel for oil lamps. Our great-grandparents' lamps in Western Europe were almost certainly lit with oil supplied by the Caucasus mining industry (the advertising for kerosene, in the figure, seems to come from Latvia, but the oil surely came from the Caucasus). With the development of the internal combustion engine, in the early twentieth century, oil began to be used more and more as a fuel. The strategic value of the Caucasus fields was already important in the First World War, when the shortage of oil was one of the factors that caused the defeat of the Central Empires. But it became evident with the Second World War which was, in many ways, the first, true "war for oil."

When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, one of their main strategic objectives was the oil fields of the Caucasus. In the offensives of 1941 and 1942, the Germans tried to advance towards the Caucasus, but the battle of Stalingrad put an end to their attempts. That was the turning point of the war. Had the Germans succeeded in taking hold of the Caucasus, history could have been very different (and maybe you would be reading this post in German).

After the Second World War, the Soviet Union began to find difficulties with expanding the production of oil from the Caucasus. From the 1950s onward, the reserves of the Urals, the Volga region, and eastern Siberia were the main target for development. These reserves made the Soviet Union the largest oil producer in the world until about 1990.

By the end of the 1980s, the Soviet oil production began to show signs of difficulty and, in 1991 the production peak was reached, with decline starting afterward. At the same time, there arrived the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. There are many interpretations of the reason for this collapse, but it is possible that the decline of oil production was not a consequence but the main cause of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the political structure that was created to exploit it.
 

This story tells us a lot about the situation in the Caucasus after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since the oil fields had been exploited for over a century, we should not be surprised if they were depleted and declining. But the Western oil industry looked with some interest at the Caspian area, believing that their superior technology could extract oil not accessible to the Soviets. As early as in 1985, Harry E. Cook, of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) began exploring Central Asia for possible new oil reserves. Later, under Cook's leadership, a consortium called “USGS-Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan Oil Industry project” was formed which included ENI/AGIP as well as BG, BP, ExxonMobil, Inpex, Phillips, Royal Dutch Shell, Statoil, TotalFinaElf, and several ex-Soviet research institutes.

The first contract with the consortium to export Caspian oil to the West was signed in 1994. It turned out to be a difficult task because of the need to carry equipment to a remote geographical location, not accessible by sea. It was necessary to wait until 1999 before it became possible to export Caspian oil through the Baku-Novorossiirsk pipeline, which ends on the Black Sea. From there, the oil could be shipped worldwide.

But in the 1990s a virtual kind of oil that existed only in the minds of people had also appeared. The story started in 1997 with the publication of a U.S. Department of State Report: (U.S. Department of State, Caspian Region Energy Development Report, April 1997). (a version of the report can be found at this link). 

 

In the report, the following table could be found:

It seems that the data of the report were derived from Cook's work stating that the Kashagan field could hold up to 50 billion barrels, a value that had been further inflated here to 85 billion, so that the total for Kazakhstan arrived at a whopping 95 billion barrels. The total amount of "possible" reserves in the area was estimated at 178 billion barrels of oil. It is not clear what the authors meant by the term "possible oil." In the practice of reporting oil reserves, the term "possible reserves" is normally coupled with a probabilistic estimate, usually 5%. So, what the table said was that there was "a 5% chance of finding 163 billion barrels"

Such a statistical estimate was incomprehensible to the average politician and these data were badly misunderstood. The first political exponent to speak publicly about the discovery of new, "immense reserves" of the Caspian Sea seems to have been the US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott in 1997. Talbot used on that occasion, perhaps for the first time, the phrase "reserves up to two hundred billion barrels of oil."

Talbot had rounded up the "possible reserves" to 200 billion barrels. Other people spoke of 250 billion, and in some case, you heard of 300 billion barrels. If these estimates were true, it would have meant that the Caspian could have increased the global oil reserves of about by 20%, not a trifle! But the main effect of these new reserves would have been to drastically break the quasi-monopoly of OPEC countries and the Middle East on oil and completely changing the geopolitical framework of world oil production. This was the origin of the enthusiasm about "A New Saudi Arabia"  that could exist in the Caspian region. 

As the exploration proceeded, the available data was further processed. In 2000, the USGS released a report signed by Thomas Ahlbrandt that arrived at an estimate of world reserves at least 50% higher than all previous estimates. This report was criticized by many experts and contradicted by the trend of subsequent finds, but it was another of the elements that led to the myth of the Caspian Sea as a new oil El Dorado.

The "200 billion barrels" story began to generate doubts from the moment it appeared. Already in 1997, a report by Laurent Ruseckas to the United States congress scaled down the estimates by speaking of a "possible maximum" of 145 billion barrels, a value that had to be taken as an unlikely extreme, with a reasonable maximum value of around 70 billion barrels. Ruseckas also pointed out that someone was getting too enthusiastic.

Skepticism rapidly began to spread. A 1998 article in Time magazine stated that if these estimates were correct, the Caspian region could contain "the equivalent of 400 giant fields," yet there are only 370 giant fields in the world (Robin Knight, “Is The Caspian An Oil El Dorado? Time Magazine, June 29, 1998, Vol. 151 No.26). In 1999, a report presented to the SPD group in the German parliament (1999 by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Washington Office 1155 15th Street, NW Suite 1100 Washington, A.D 20005) was titled, significantly, "No longer the 'Great Game' in the Caspian". In one section of this report, Friedemann Muller stated that: "The often reported figure - preferably by politicians of a certain age - 200 billion barrels is a figment of the imagination ”. The issue of inflated reserves also appeared in the popular press, for example, in a November 11, 2001, Toronto "NOW" article, Damien Cave described the Caspian estimates of 200 billion barrels as "insanely optimistic, at least in the next twenty years." 

The real world started intruding into the fantasy of politicians when the OKIOC consortium (ENI, BP, BG, ExxonMobil, Inpex, Phillips, Shell, Statoil, and TotalFinaElf) started actually drilling at the bottom of the Caspian sea. Apparently, the results were not impressive, since the consortium began to fall apart after the first exploratory drilling. By 2003 ExxonMobil, Statoil, BP, and BG had left. Agip remained and became the main operator of the consortium. In April 2002, Gian Maria Gros-Pietro, then the president of ENI, speaking at the Eurasian Economic Summit in Almaty, Kazakhstan, declared that the entire Caspian could contain only 7-8 billion barrels. Others have estimated up to 13 billion barrels for the Kashagan field alone. For the whole area around the Caspian Sea, it is possible to speak of amounts ​​between 30 and 50 billion barrels. These reserves are not negligible but available only at high costs and certainly not a new Saudi Arabia.

By the early 2000s, the situation was reasonably clear, at least in the eyes of the experts. Colin Campbell, the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) summed it up like this in a private communication to the author of these notes.

  “ There were rumors that the area contained over 200 Gb [billion barrels] of oil (I think those rumors came from the US Geological Survey), but the results after ten years of construction have been disappointing. As early as 1979, the Soviets had found the Tengiz field on the mainland in Kazakhstan. It contains about 6 billion barrels of oil in a limestone reef at a depth of about 4500 m.This oil, however, contains up to 16% sulfur, which was too much even for Soviet steel, so they chose to not to exploit the field. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Chevron, and other American companies arrived and managed to extract that oil, but with many difficulties and at high economic and environmental costs.

Later, in a series of surveys made on the bottom of the Caspian Sea, a huge structure was found at about 4000 meters deep that in many ways resembled that of Tengiz.  This area (Kashagan) also had geological features similar to those of the giant Al Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia. Had it been full, it could have actually held 100 billion barrels or perhaps more and competed with Saudi wells.

At that point, an American businessman, Jack Grynberg, put together a large consortium of oil companies that included BP, Statoil, Total, Agip, Phillips, British Gas, and others. This consortium set out to exploit the deposits thought to exist in this facility.

Exploratory drilling has been enormously difficult. The field was offshore, so it was difficult and complex to transport equipment to the area. In addition, those waters were a breeding ground for the sturgeons that produce Russian caviar. Finally, the winter climate of the area is harsh with ice formations on the surface of the water and very strong winds. Eventually, at a cost of $ 400 million, the consortium managed to drill a 4,500-meter deep well in the easternmost area of ​​the facility. A deadly silence followed, followed shortly after by BP and Statoil's withdrawal from the company. British Gas announced in a report that the field could contain between 9 and 15 billion barrels. The reason is that,- unlike Al Ghawar - the field is very fragmented with the fields separated by low quality rocks. It is an interesting field and it is certain that further reserves will be found, but it is certainly not capable of having any significant effect on world supplies. There is a lot of gas nearby, but the transportation difficulties are immense. "

Nevertheless, the two worlds, that of the politicians and that of the experts had decoupled from each other and plenty of people were still believing in the existence of "200 billion barrels" in the Caspian region. From the left, the "immense reserves" of the Caspian were cited. as proof of evil Western imperialism. From the right, there was a clamor to get their hands on that bonanza as soon as possible. As an example, we can cite the speech that US Senator Conrad Burns, who had traveled to Kazakhstan himself, gave to the Heritage Foundation, on March 19, 2003

"Every dollar we spend of Middle East oil, we are really dealing in rogue oil. Money that goes to build weapons of mass destruction and also the fuel those terrorist groups that need money to operate around the world," Burns said. "We don't have to look to the Middle East, because the reserves in the Caspian Basin could be as large as what is in the Middle East"

and:

Internationally, our country is ignoring the opportunities that exist in Russia and in the Caspian Sea basin. In the Caspian Sea area, reserves of up to 33 billion barrels have been found, a potential greater than that of the United States and the double that of the North Sea. Estimates speak of an additional 233 billion barrels of reserves in the Caspian. These reserves could represent up to 25% of the world's proven reserves. Russia may have even more abundant reserves. 

These numbers are all wrong. For one thing, the North Sea reserves are estimated at around 50 billion barrels, and 33 is certainly not double 50. As for the "255 billion barrels", added to the other 33 make a total of 288 billion of barrels, which is out of the grace of God. But, clearly, Burns was not the only American politician who thought in these terms. And much of what happened after the 9/11 attacks of 2001 can be explained as an attempt by the US government to take direct control of the strategic oil fields of the Middle East and of Central Asia. Not for nothing Conrad Burns was a convinced supporter also of the invasion of Iraq.

In the end, it doesn't seem to be paranoid to think that the United States attacked Afghanistan in 2001 in order to clear the field at the passage of an oil pipeline from the Caspian that would reach the Indian Ocean passing through Pakistan. A grand dream, if ever there was one. But there were no "immense reserves" in the Caucasus and, therefore, no need for a pipeline to transport them. And reality, as usual, eventually took over.

Phrasing the Question Right is the First Step to Find an Answer. How to Prevent Nuclear War

 

 

Professor Bernard Lown died this February at 99. A great man by all means: Physician, cardiologist, professor at Harvard University, and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He was the inventor of the defribrillator, the proposer of many successful ways to help people suffering from heart failure. He was also the recipient of the Nobel prize for peace for his activity against nuclear war.

 

 

It was in the 1980s when I attended a seminar in Berkeley given by a member of the group called "International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War." Some decades later, I am not completely sure the talk was given by the founder of the group, Dr. Bernard Lown, but from what I remember, it was him. I was impressed by the clarity of the talk. The speaker said it very simply, "it is not a question of being left or right: nuclear war is the greatest medical emergency I can imagine." 

 

It is the way you frame a problem that gives you the tools to solve it! Just like "The Seneca Effect" gives a name to a typical behavior of complex systems, that of collapsing, framing the nuclear confrontation as a medical emergency and not as a political struggle brought it to the realm of concrete problems that people could understand. We might also frame nuclear war as an especially nasty kind of Seneca Cliff affecting humankind and the whole planet. 

 

Probably because the problem was framed right, the Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War had a remarkable success. At some point, it had some 200,000 members, and Bernard Lown, its Western founder, was invited to Moscow to meet the newly elected secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev (an encounter that the Western Media refused to cover). One of the results was the group was awarded the Nobel prize for peace in 1985. Whether their work was one of the reasons why we remained free from nuclear war up to now, it is hard to say. But efforts in a good cause are never wasted.

The Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War is still active, nowadays. The interest in preventing a nuclear war faded with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but we may be actually closer to war today than we were in the 1980s -- it is just that we haven't been thinking so much about the matter. 

So, I missed the news of the death of Dr. Bernard Lown, less than one month ago.

 

You can read Lown's thoughts on his blog that he kept until 2012. It is a fascinating read, it was this blog that had made me rediscover him more than 30 years after that (perhaps) I had met him. In the blog, he describes his career and how often he had to fight with the medical establishment to make them accept that some traditional healing methods were not only useless but harming the patients. A case in point was the habit of keeping bedridden people who had suffered a heart attack. It took a remarkable effort to convince physicians that setting patients on a chair was a way to give them the psychological comfort they needed to heal themselves. Lown was a man who always did his best to do what he thought was right.  We would need people like him, now, but where have they gone?

 

Lown died at 99 this February. Gaia was gentle with this son of hers who did so much for all of us and she gave him a long life that I can imagine was full of satisfactions. May he rest in peace.

 

 

 

 

Bernard Lown's Blog: worth reading as an unending source of wisdom on the practice of medicine.

The Next Stage of Human Evolution: The Revenge of the Aspies

 

 I had never thought of Spock as a case of Asperger's syndrome (an "aspie"), in turn, a mild version of autism. But it is a concept that others had noted and that perfectly describes the way Spock behaves in the "Star Trek" series. Spock's character was so successful because he may have been perceived as a possible new stage in human evolution, someone who can use logic to resist the onslaught of manipulation and propaganda that's destroying our civilization. Star Trek also illustrated how emotion and rationality can be balanced by respecting and valuing diversity. Live long and prosper, fellow aspies!

 

I keep discovering new things that completely change my view of the world. The latest one was just a few days ago when I found that I am probably an aspie, a term that describes Asperger's syndrome, in turn, a variant of the broader spectrum of autism.

What brought this revelation for me was the book by Temple Grandin "Thinking in Images." (1995) (1) Grandin was born with a serious case of autism, a condition that made her life very difficult in her youth. I never experienced the same level of difficulties but, as I was reading the book, I started seeing myself in Grandin's shoes. Things like being clumsy in everyday tasks, finding it difficult to follow a group conversation, getting lost in your thoughts while other people speak to you, and more. 

What clinched it was when Grandin said that most autistic people love Star Trek, especially the cold logic of first officer Spock. That's me: a Trekkie if there has ever been one. So, I concluded that I am a probable case of Asperger's, although in a mild form -- the kind familiarly know as "Aspie." (BTW, I have also been a member of ASPO, the association for the study of peak oil. Maybe that was a premonition, but it is another story!)

On the fact of considering myself an aspie, I know that there is such a thing as "confirmation bias," typically operating with horoscopes. You may also remember Jerome K. Jerome's book "Three Men in a Boat" where the protagonist describes how he became convinced to have all kinds of possible ailments (except the housemaid's knee) by reading a book of medical symptoms. Maybe I am just a little eccentric, as university professors often are. But I think there is something real in my self-diagnosis of mild autism. 

It is not just character that makes me behave in a certain way: my mind really clicks a little different. Let me give you just an example: I can't remember street names. It is not a choice. Really, I can't. Call it "toponymic dyslexia" if you like (a term I invented), but it is the way my mind works. With a few exceptions, such as the street where I live, my mental map of my town is purely visual, not verbal -- it contains no street names. As far as I can tell, I have always been like this.

That's not an impairment, I have no difficulties in orienting myself in my city. But people find strange, and sometimes maddening, that I go completely blank when they tell me something that has to do with a specific street name that they think everyone should know. I didn't find this symptom described exactly in this way as typical of autism, but it agrees with Grandin's description of how she doesn't think verbally, but by images.

There is more that I could tell you, but let me just add that my wife confirms my interpretation. When I told her, a few days ago, about having discovered I am an aspie, she was a little surprised at the idea of having lived with a neuropath for more than 40 years, without realizing it! But then she thought about that for a while and she said that, yes, that's what I am. She agrees that the term "aspie" describes me very well. 

 

Empathy and Autism

Autism is strongly related to the concept of "empathy" and autistic people are often supposed to be unable to feel empathy toward other people. But is it true? And what is empathy, exactly? It is often defined as the capability of "stepping into someone else's shoes." That's a necessary social skill: if we can't do that, we are bound to make people angry at us. Even worse, if we don't understand how Earth's ecosystem (aka Gaia) works, we are bound to make the Goddess angry at us. And that could be much worse. But what are we doing wrong, exactly? And what would it mean to do it right?

It is a subject that I have been discussing a lot with the "Empathy Guru," Chuck Pezeshky. We are even planning to write a book together on it. As you can imagine from the photo, working with Chuck may be a lot of fun, and his blog is a mine of ideas and concepts about empathy (a fundamental one being, "as we relate, so we think." It applies very well to aspies). 

 

It is a complex matter and, here, I can only summarize my views (not necessarily Chuck's ones) by referring to a rather abused metaphor, that of Zen story of how you can excel in the art of archery by "becoming the arrow." An even better way is to use the term that Robert A. Heinlein invented in one of his novels: "grokking," nowadays becoming common with Earthlings (especially with the one named Chuck Pezeshky).

 

"To grok" is a verb in the Martian language,  It is impossible to translate it exactly in earthling languages, but it means that you become the person, the animal, or the object you are trying to understand. 

Perhaps the best way to recursively grok grokking is to refer to an extremely ancient kind of earthling lore called "Shape-Shifting," the capability of wizards and deities to take the shape of other humans or animals. Of course, ancient wizards couldn't actually transform themselves into -- say -- stags. But grokking stags meant gaining something of the powers of the stags. Wearing a horned hat surely helped. The image on the left shows an ancient horned wizard from the Gundestrup Cauldron. That style of dressing seems to be still popular, nowadays, as some recent events showed. But let me not go into that. 

So, empathy means grokking and how do aspies fare with that? They are often described as people who can't feel empathy, but I think that is wrong. They are not cold-blooded, reptile-like individuals, unable to feel anything. Not at all! Aspies are potential, and sometimes real, hyper-grokkers.

Think about that: Spock, the prototypical aspie, is not someone who doesn't feel anything. He just uses logic to dominate emotion. The same is true for me, although I am not so glacial as Spock (and I am not even the first officer of a starship!). And it is true also of Temple Grandin who is a compassionate individual who dedicated much of her life to reduce the suffering of livestock. (1) That's true for most Aspies who are not impaired individuals, just people who behave a little differently from those we call "neurotypicals."

But why do aspies give the impression that they are the opposite of what they really are? It is because shape shifting/grokking is associated with the "imprisoning metamorphosis," The risk of turning oneself into something or someone else is to become that person or animal. Worse, the wizard may be unable to change back to his/her original form. In a modern version, this problem was masterfully described by Ursula le Guin in her Earthsea books. 

Grokking another mind is empathy in its purest form. And it is dangerous: mystics try that with God and they risk being burned to ashes by the pure brightness of God's spirit. With other humans, that's not the problem but, if you grok an evil person, you may become evil. If you grok a deranged person, you may become deranged in the same way. And if someone whom you grok wants you to do something bad, he or she may succeed at that.

It is a risk aspies run, so they put up a shield that protects their inside feelings. Sometimes, this shield becomes so heavy to be impenetrable. It is when a person becomes dysfunctional: too much protection shuts them off from the rest of the world. But, without shields, aspies would be an easy target for those predators who exploit empathy for their personal advantage. These people are called "psychopaths." (in short, "psychos").

Psychos are the exact opposite of aspies in terms of personality. Normally, they have little or no emphatic skills and, for them, other people are valuable only as tools. You can say that psychos are vampires of the mind: they will try to devour other people's souls if they have a chance to. 

The strategies of psychos are rarely subtle. Typically, they use intimidation. But they may exploit other weaknesses: greed, lust, pride, and vanity, as much as positive qualities such as kindness and compassion. Often, psychopaths tend to gang together to amplify their powers. National governments are typically colonized by psychopaths of the worst kind.

Now you can see how the counter-strategy of aspies works. Their personality is a defensive/evasive mechanism against psychopathic predators. They can "tune out," at least from the most blatant manipulation methods, for instance by their capability of intensely concentrating on something. It is what makes them poor socialites, but good scientists. It works especially well against government propaganda.

I understand that this is a controversial interpretation and I can't prove that it is correct. You could object, for instance, that autistic people just can't read some non verbal signals that are clear to "normal" people. And how would that be a barrier? It looks like a handicap. Besides, the fact that I can't remember street names, as I noted, is a barrier against exactly what?

True. But, as a rebuttal I could say that there may be several kinds of barriers that aspies build, not all of them are effective and some are counterproductive.  On the whole, I do think that my explanation works best for that fraction of aspies who are on the mild side of the spectrum of the condition, as Temple Grandin is. In that case, you may see autism not as a pathology, but as an ability. 

Of course, it is a delicate balance that these aspies seek for. If their barrier is truly impassable, they become dysfunctional people, useless to themselves and to others. If they can't keep the barrier strong enough, then they can be manipulated just like normal people. But when it works, the mechanism is effective as defense against the many attempts of manipulation that you face every day.

 

The Arms Race in the Social Holobiont

Why is it that there are psychopaths and aspies in the world? I think it is the result of an evolutionary mechanism. The human society can be described in terms of a "social holobiont" that changes and evolves all the time. A holobiont is an entity composed of various elements normally in symbiosis with each other. But, at times an unbalance develops, some elements of the holobiont become parasites of others, and the system must change and adapt to regain some balance.

In small social groups, as in the tribal societies where our ancestors lived, psychos may have played a useful role for the group. Their aggressive tendencies may have helped the tribe in war or in other occasions when the tribe needed to act fast and with all the members had to agree on some plan: migration, for instance. 

But, with larger societies, the role of psychos changed from symbionts to parasites. No more just the local big men, they became god-kings, then absolute rulers who pretended not just obedience, but uniformity of thought. With the development of mass media, the psychos in charge found that they could get whatever they wanted by hurling at the rest of the people the monster of the year to hate, just like, in the old days, the Detroit automakers would convince people to buy a new car using the trick of the "model of the year." It is the way our society works, nowadays. Psychos are social super-parasites that force all the other to follow a continuous emotional roller-coaster generated by the media. 

Of course, the dominance of psychopaths on society is generating tremendous damage to everybody and everything. It is pushing us toward disastrous choices in all fields, from developing nuclear weapons to polluting everything, and overexploiting all resources. 

Is it possible that the growing number of aspies is a manifestation of society moving toward a certain degree of resistance to this kind of manipulation? For sure, the growth has been unbelievably fast. Autism was nearly unknown 50 years ago, today about one person in 30 is born autistic in the US, an increase of nearly a factor of 300. In part, it is also the result of better detection techniques, but it is also true that there are many unrecognized mild cases, so aspies are not anymore a tiny minority of handicapped people.

 

This is, again, a controversial proposal. Assuming that autism is a genetic trait, as it seems to be, according to the standard interpretation of evolution by natural selection, you might well object that it is hard to see how genetic evolution could lead to such a rapid change in just 50 years. And you would have to assume that the aspies have more children than the non aspie -- hard to maintain, to say the least. 

What I can say on this point is that the modern views on evolution allow for much faster change than the traditional Neo-Darwinian version. Concepts such as horizontal gene transfer and epigenetics have completely changed our views (if you want a hint of the complexity of the evolution of the human brain, just take a look at this review!) Once you note how the human mind is affected by the microbiome of the human holobiont, you understand how the human mind is plastic. It can change, and change a lot as the result of changes in the chemical and physical environment. Besides, the behavior of a human being is a complex mix of cultural and genetic factors. In mild cases of autism, cultural factors may be important and we know that they can change very fast.

In the human societal holobiont, we can see aspies and psychos as two levels of a trophic chain where psychos are the predator and aspies are the prey. As in biological ecosystems, say, rabbits and foxes, in the social holobiont predators and prey are locked together in an arms race where they keep trying to improve their survival chances. So, the increasing number of aspies might be the result of society rebalancing itself to counteract the excessive power of psychos. A society where most people are aspies would be much less sensitive to propaganda and could be managed according to reason for the advantage of everyone. 

Is it possible? As usual, complex systems have always ways to surprise you, and the human society is one of the most complex systems known. So, it may well surprise us for its adaptive capabilities. Think of the command deck of the Enterprise in Star Trek. The rational approach of Spock (the aspie) was balanced, complemented, and enhanced by the approach of Captain Kirk. He was not a psychopath, but a person who could be driven by emotions and who needed some rational complement. The Enterprise was an example of a well-balanced holobiont. It perfectly illustrated the awesome power of diversity and reciprocal respect that's the strength of all holobionts, including the societal one. And don't forget that Greta Thunberg is an aspie, too!

And so, live long and prosper, fellow aspies!

 

 

image source

 

Notes

(1) Temple Grandin's book "Thinking in Images" is a remarkable book, even for those who are not aspies. It is, clearly, something different from the average self-help book. The first chapters are hard to describe: they are "strange" -- the author wanders among many different subjects, giving the impression that you are really reading something written by someone whose mind works differently from yours. But, as you progress, you start understanding what Grandin wants to say. The first chapters are a sort of test. As it is typical for aspies/autistic people, she is not opening herself to you right away. You have to read through more than half of the book before she really starts opening up herself and her inner thoughts to the reader. If you arrive to that point, you start understanding that she respects the reader and that she asks respect from the reader. She never opens up herself completely, but enough for the reader to appreciate her as a human being, a little different from the average, but worth of respect for her caring attitude for humankind and all living beings. 

(2). World leaders are typical examples of psychopaths, with a few exceptions. One may be Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, who has been described as suffering of the Asperger's disease in the Western media. That was intended as an insult, but perhaps it is not so wrong as a description of Putin's personality. If you examine Putin's speeches, you will note that he never uses the kind of aggressive demonizing of enemies that Western leaders use all the time. He looks cold and rational, but occasionally he may show his feelings, as when he was shown to weep at a military parade. In the West, this behavior was understood as an especially devious trick. That would have been the case if Putin were a psychopath (imagine Donald Trump weeping at a parade!). But if Putin is an aspie, then an occasional puncturing of his defensive barrier might generate this behavior. Incidentally, have you noticed how all Russians seem to have some aspects of aspies? Try to ask for directions in the streets of Moscow, and you'll understand what I mean! In any case, that's not meant to disparage the Russians -- not at all! Once you pass the barrier, the Russians are the best people in the world. In fact, all the people in the world are the best people in the world once you come to know them well.