Phase III – Stealth Is.

From Age of America nears end:

The International Monetary Fund has just dropped a bombshell, and nobody noticed.

For the first time, the international organization has set a date for the moment when the “Age of America” will end and the U.S. economy will be overtaken by that of China.

And it’s a lot closer than you may think.

According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now.

Put that in your calendar.

It provides a painful context for the budget wrangling taking place in Washington, D.C., right now. It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years. And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S. dollar and the giant Treasury market, which have been propped up for decades by their privileged status as the liabilities of the world’s hegemonic power.

According to the IMF forecast, whoever is elected U.S. president next year — Obama? Mitt Romney? Donald Trump? — will be the last to preside over the world’s largest economy.

Most people aren’t prepared for this. They aren’t even aware it’s that close. Listen to experts of various stripes and they will tell you this moment is decades away. The most bearish will put the figure in the mid-2020s.

From China ‘to overtake US on science’ in two years:

The country that invented the compass, gunpowder, paper and printing is set for a globally important comeback. China is on course to overtake the US in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013 – far earlier than expected.

That is the conclusion of a major new study by the Royal Society, the UK’s national science academy. The study, Knowledge, Networks and Nations, charts the challenge to the traditional dominance of the United States, Europe and Japan. The figures are based on the papers published in recognized international journals listed by the Scopus service of the publishers Elsevier.

In 1996, the first year of the analysis, the US published 292,513 papers – more than 10 times China’s 25,474. By 2008, the US total had increased very slightly to 316,317 while China’s had surged more than seven-fold to 184,080. After displacing the UK as the world’s second leading producer of research, [China] could go on to overtake America in as little as two years’ time.

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Did Osama bin Laden win? No. Did he succeed? Well, America is still standing, and he isn’t.

Bin Laden’s transition from scion of a wealthy family to terrorist mastermind came in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was trying to conquer Afghanistan. Bin Laden was part of the resistance, and the resistance was successful — not only in repelling the Soviet invasion, but in contributing to the communist super-state’s collapse a few years later. “We, alongside the mujaheddin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt,” he later explained.

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A new study of the 2008 collapse has joined economics and network theory in a graphic depiction of inevitable failure.

In the preceding years, formerly far-flung sectors of the economy had been pulled together, linked by a newly deregulated financial industry. Thus intertwined, the economy took a form known to network theorists as “intrinsically fragile,” in which a local glitch would cascade into system-wide catastrophe.

“The fact that the system became fundamentally fragile is very clear in the data,” said systems theorist Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. “The financial sector was responsible for many of the crucial links in the economy that allowed for shocks to be propagated from one sector to another.”

Economists have pointed to financial industry entanglement with the entire U.S. economy as a crucial factor in the 2008 collapse, but Bar-Yam’s team drives the point home with new clarity.

In the study, published November 16 on arXiv.org, the researchers used network-mapping tools to analyze the relationships between 500 corporations with the highest stock-trading volume. These were linked to oil prices, bond prices and interest rates.

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Other research on network dynamics has shown that interdependence can promote stability, but eventually reaches a point of reversing returns (see “Networked Networks Are Prone to Epic Failure“). Shortly after the peak of interdependence at the end of Bar-Yam’s graph came those fateful months when the real estate bubble popped, followed by financial-sector collapse and a hastily averted implosion of the U.S. economy.

Since then, long-standing debates about the role and nature of financial regulation have taken center stage in American politics. Often these degenerate into ideological battles between people who believe market regulation is necessary, and those who think markets should be completely free.

Bar-Yam’s group doesn’t overtly take a side, but they hope their analysis can provide an understanding of the economy’s systemic properties and how they’ve changed.

“We’re identifying the actual system. We’re not coming in here as ideologues. We’re asking, what’s going on, and how do we characterize it,” he said. “If we don’t recognize the vulnerabilities of the system, we will repeat and suffer the consequences.”

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The United States has spent more than $1 trillion on wars since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, a recently released Congressional report says.

Adjusting for inflation, the outlays for conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere around the world make the “war on terrorism” second only to World War II.

The report “Cost of Major U.S. Wars” by the Congressional Research Service attempts to compare war costs over a more than 230-year period — from the American Revolution to the current day — noting the difficulties associated with such a task.

Since the the 9/11 terror attacks, the United States has spent an estimated $1.15 trillion. World War II cost $4.1 trillion when converted to current dollars, although the tab in the 1940s was $296 billion.

To drive the point home, the U.S. spends $400 a gallon on gasoline for vehicles in Afghanistan.

The stunning revelation emerged Thursday in a report from the Pentagon to House officials. The information conveyed offers new insight into a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, which found that the US spends $1 million per year for each servicemember on the ground in Afghanistan.

Why so much? The cost includes shipping, which sometimes includes the pricetag of a helicopter flight. Sending fuel by helicopter is woefully inefficient, because it uses up almost as much fuel as it carries.

All for a “war” built on lies:

1,000 Architects & Engineers call for a new investigation into 9-11

CIA admits to faking Bin Laden video

Ten appalling lies we were told about Iraq

Obama and the Military industrial complex are tight homies.

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