What an interesting name the military plan for Iran has.... TIRRANT. You could be forgiven for pronouncing it as if it had a 'Y' instead of an 'I'.

There is a fair amount of detail in the New Statesman.

Here are some interesting bits:

The US army, navy, air force and marines have all prepared battle plans and spent four years building bases and training for "Operation Iranian Freedom". Admiral Fallon, the new head of US Central Command, has inherited computerised plans under the name TIRANNT (Theatre Iran Near Term).

The Bush administration has made much of sending a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf. But it is a tiny part of the preparations. Post 9/11, the US navy can put six carriers into battle at a month's notice. Two carriers in the region, the USS John C Stennis and the USS Dwight D Eisenhower, could quickly be joined by three more now at sea: USS Ronald Reagan, USS Harry S Truman and USS Theodore Roosevelt, as well as by USS Nimitz. Each carrier force includes hundreds of cruise missiles.

Then there are the marines, who are not tied down fighting in Iraq. Several marine forces are assembling, each with its own aircraft carrier. These carrier forces can each conduct a version of the D-Day landings. They come with landing craft, tanks, jump-jets, thousands of troops and, yes, hundreds more cruise missiles. Their task is to destroy Iranian forces able to attack oil tankers and to secure oilfields and installations. They have trained for this mission since the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Interesting link about media industries being in a state of constant change and transition by H. Shiva Roy Chowdhury focusing on Technological, Regulatory, Global and Social Forces - on Axeman's Archives.

This may sound like the title of a post-modern computer generated monster classic. Godzilla versus Mothra zapped through a Predator versus Alien filter!

But seriously, this may be the most important dichotomy of our blighted age.

I recently read two fantastic sci-fi novels, Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson and Accelerando by Charles Stross, which pose interesting scenarios of the Bottleneck and the Singularity, respectively.

Both novels suggest that humans (and posthumans) don't transcend natural (Darwinian) behaviour. This rings true and provides a great literary device, the tragic flaw, which lubricates the narratives.

Both authors are familiar with Sociobiology. The main character in Fifty Degrees Below, edits a sociobiology journal and exhibits, in his introspection, a growing awareness of the grip that hardwired routines have on his own and everyone's behaviour. Another scientist in this novel conducts an intriguing experiment in scientific democracy.

In Accelerando, "godlike" artificial intelligences, descended from corporations, behave like plague locusts and convert most of the solar system into Computronium.

This led me this think about our global predicament. The problem is timing. If we reach the bottleneck first, then the singularity won't happen in time to help. If we reach or approach the singularity before the bottleneck then perhaps we can survive it by applying powerful new technology (artificial intelligence, nanotech, 3D printers and so on). I guess, this is vaguely what we all hope will happen. Technology to the rescue.

But didn't technology cause the problem in the first place?

Technology is not the problem. The problem is human behaviour. While our wise men and women tell us that our survival is at stake, our leaders are obsessed by distracting territorial and ideological disputes. The resources of the final flowering of the post industrial economy are being squandered on the war machine.

Don't we all wonder from time to time why we are in this horrible predicament in the first place, and why we don't seem to be able to fix it?
 
The problem is human behaviour, which is stalled in prehistory. We are not adapted to the technosphere we have created. We are still running ancient war games, when we need to be running blue sky scenarios.

More than anything else we need to develop the ability to manage our own global behaviour.

The Shell Oil Company has signed a deal with Iran worth 6 Billion according to The Guardian. So while Bush talks up war with Iran, and Howard goes along for the ride, one of the largest oil companies in the world takes a bet essentially against the political rhetoric.

Interesting comment in the story from an oil analyst: