Murrinations

The Human Genome Project  that mapped mankind's DNA has revolutionised our understanding of genetic diseases. As a natural continuation of this revolution in our knowledge, a new field of synthetic biology has been born which aims to build synthetic DNA and resultant synthetic organisms in the laboratory.

The recent elections in Israel have shown weakening support for Benjamin Netanyahu and his party. This must be pleasing to President Obama whose relations with the Israeli Prime Minister have been very poor of late, and also to Iran. The result significantly reduces the chances of Israel carrying out a pre-emptive strike on Iran without US support. As Obama has been consistently opposed to a strike on Iran, we should be reasonably confident that the chances of a strike on Iran by Israel have been reduced significantly.

The announcement by David Cameron that if the Tories are re-elected in 2015 they will hold a yes no referendum within that term, is a manifestation of the economic failure of Europe.

With a global human population currently totalling some 7 billion and expected to grow by a further 2 billion before 2050, everyone should be concerned about the consequences from the resource competition that this trend implies.

America        I have felt for some time that the US equity market has made its high of the year, and that the move to the lows of November were the first part of the decline in a new bear market, and the rally in the second half of November was in effect a wave two counter trend bounce, before the next phase of the decline. These bearish patterns are very clear in the NASDAQ, and the bellwether Apple stock.

After 50 years of service and the accolade of being the US Navy’s first nuclear carrier the USS Enterprise was retired in November 2012, leaving only ten carriers in service.   It must be a matter of some considerable concern that, with the requirement for maintenance and training schedules,  this will only allow the US to deploy five carriers at any one time to police the world’s oceans. As capable as these vessels are, they cannot be in more than one place at a time!

As human populations continue to grow, so larger organisational structures will need to be formed as an extension of a higher degree fractal of regionalisation, a concept I describe as 'super regionalisation'. The first real example of this is the European Union, although this structure is fatally flawed by the negative demographics at the heart of the old Europe. There will no doubt be other 'super regions' to come and one of these could well be an 'alliance of the Americas'.

The process of the regionalisation of Latin America has clearly seen Brazil emerge as the dominant single nation in the region, with some 193 million of a total of 572 million population on the continent, contributing to 40% of the region's total GDP. This massive success is partly  due to the underlying power of the demographic expansion of Brazil, as well as the pragmatic nature of its people, and has taken place despite the less than optimal policies of the country's popular President from 2003-2010 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Argentina has a rich history which is closely linked to its European origins and one that defines its very nature. It was the Spanish who first came for the silver, but after independence from Spain was declared in 1816, when the Argentine flag was officially adopted by the rebels, the ensuing Argentine War of Independence attracted disenfranchised ex French Bonapartists and Italians whose influence dominated for a few decades.

There is no doubt that Israel's PM Benjamin Netanyahu believes that the Iranian nuclear programme represents a clear and present danger to Israel, a risk that involves the potential destruction of his country. He is a hard liner and a very determined man who has been pushing against American attempts to prevent him from executing a pre-emptive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities for years.