War is profit. Here's the proof.

I was going to blog about the lovely autumn leaves and how beautiful it looks. Just like this.

...and that's quite nice, but maybe later.

I was going to post about local politics in Pennsylvania. How we met Bob Casey, how I used to live half a block away from him. How he's going to be the new Senator.

...and that's quite nice, but maybe later.

What I want to talk about is the war in Iraq. Now; you may argue against the viewpoint of Generals that are actually in Iraq and say "it's all going swimmingly". One Conservative spokesperson here in the US really said it was going "swimmingly". Ann Coulter. Sheesh, talk about a disconnect from reality. But I want to address one core idea about the war. It's an idea that was first voiced by people you might consider hippies.

And guess what? It turns out that, just like with Vietnam, the hippies were right!

I decided to see if the war was really all about the cold hard cash. Halliburton, a company that Dick Cheney used to be on the Board of Directors for (and a company that 'won' no-bid contracts in Iraq) will make or break the theory. War is profit.

This took just a few seconds of searching online. And it's not from a Liberal or Conservative political site. It's not a political site at all.

It's the Financial website of Yahoo! in the UK.

They have a graph function on their pages. Compare any share price's rise and fall to the Dow Jones Industrial in the US (_DJI) or the Financial Times Stock Exchange in England (_FTSE). Let's see how Halliburton (HAL) did against the US and UK average of 130 companies, over the last 20 years or so.

OK, not too well. Halliburton has done about as well as the 100 companies in the FTSE in London, but the 30 companies in the DJI completely trounced it. Mathematics don't lie. The benchmark of American companies was twice as good as Halliburton, an American company.

But now we're going to change the search parameters a little bit. Let's get rid of everything but the last five years. The Dow rose over 250% under Reagan (Republican) and over 300% under Clinton (Democratic), but let's keep this totally Cheney and G.W.Bush.

How did a company that barely keeps up with the FTSE do with friends in high places?

This is not some trick of mathematics. This is not 'spin'. We took the value of the DJI, the FTSE, and HAL. Rated them all at their 2001 (October 20th) closing price, and said "let's see how much you make for investors now..."

Those low points in the red line was when Halliburton was at $10 a share or so. Its 2006 high was $41.99.

A share that kind-of kept up with the market but underperformed it for decades suddenly shot off like a bottle rocket. A company that usually gave 50% suddenly went and gave canny investors eight times that in a few years. And it all seems to be concentrated just before that yellow line.

That yellow line in March, 2003. The start of the American invasion of Iraq. War is profit, if your ex-chairman is now Vice President of the invading country. Not spin, not bullshit. Fact. Mathematical, easy to see, no doubts at all.

Fact. War is profit. And there's the proof.

Listen: Don't Believe The Hype - Public Enemy.

We still don't have internet at the house, so I'm using the miracle of modern technology of a DSL connection and a MMC/SD card reader at my in-laws' house!

Want to see the house with some furniture in it?

We still don't have cable TV. The people came on Friday, and they couldn't get a signal at the post outside. They promised someone would be out yesterday (nobody came out). There's a new episode of House on Tuesday ...I don't watch much telly, but I don't want to miss the new 'House' in the new house. Although I have to admit, I get a lot more done without the distractions of technology...

Listen : Kill Your Television - Ned's Atomic Dustbin ... Television, The Drug Of The Nation - Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy ... Television, Television - OK Go.

Well, we took our sweet time about it, but tomorrow is the day. We move house. This is the twelfth place I have ever lived in; four counties in two countries. We could have moved right at the end of August, but we couldn't get a moving company so we decided to do it nice and easy. Which it isn't, it's a bucket of stress. One of these days I might actually manage to stay put for a decade!

Listen: Moving - Supergrass ... The Old Apartment - Barenaked Ladies ... Movers and Shakers - The Clash.

This, like most ideas, came to me after waking up. If the Universe, black holes and theoretical physics is just the sort of thing that makes you fall asleep at your keyboard ...well, you might want to look elsewhere on the web. Or be happy with this picture of a kitten. It's extremely cute and furry and purry.

Aw, the cuteness!

OK, what do we know about the Universe we're in? Here are a few things we're pretty sure of.

1 - Universe's boundary is accelerating away from us at the speed of light, to our observations (and we're inside of it) so nothing can escape the Universe. Not even light.

2 - Because of this, we have no way of telling what is outside the Universe. We can hypothesize that there's either nothing of any form outside the Universe or that if there IS something beyond the boundary, it can't see in.

3 - There's a lot of debate about what happens to the matter in our Universe with all this expansion. Will gravity eventually get the better of it all and pull us back into a big crunch or will the matter fly off, eventually expanding to the point where all there exists is a cold nothingness? One molecule every light-year or more, or all the molecules back in a single point? No light or discernable energy because the Universe is spread so thin, or the ingredients for another Big Bang? That kind of thing.

OK, that's part one of three. Part two is: what do we know about black holes.

1 - because of the nature of a black hole, nothing pulled inside (beyond the point of no return called the 'event horizon') can escape. For us outside, it seems that time slows infinitely for the thing or person pulled in. To the observer getting pulled in, time dilates so the stars are born and die in an instant. If anyone survives, it would appear, we can speculate, that even going at the speed of light will not get them out of the black hole. The event horizon is accelerating away from their point-of-view at the speed of light. Like the Universe, light can't escape it.

2 - Because of this, we have no way of telling what is inside the black hole. We can hypothesize that there's either nothing of any form inside the black hole or that if there IS something beyond the boundary, it can't see out.

3 - There's a lot of debate about what happens to the matter in a black hole with all this expansion. Will tidal forces eventually get the better of it all and pull it all into a big crunch or will the matter expand as the hole does, eventually expanding to the point where the black hole slowly evaporates its mass as energy (and yes, black holes do this, as Hawking proved as described here)? And the bigger the black hole gets, Hawking said the hole radiates less radiation.

That's where the final part occurred to me this morning. Nothing inside can get out, no way of telling what's happening either side of the boundary, no idea yet if the end result is all or nothing. When we're describing what happens to a theoretical Universe, it's the same as a black hole. Are they both the same thing, just observed from different locations?

Professor Stephen Hawkin once said that "this would imply that the area of a horizon of a black hole could only increase in time, never shrink". But he also says that, because of Hawking Radiation, energy density can sometimes be negative on the quantum level and (true enough) that's why black holes can radiate.

But that applies more as the black hole is small. The larger the hole, the less it radiates. So; as the black hole (or the Universe) gets bigger, can we say it can only radiate less into the domain beyond its boundary? And also, that the Universe and the black holes inside it continue to grow?

In effect, is our visible Universe nothing more than just a black hole devouring up matter from beyond its Universal Event Horizon, and are the black holes in our Universe merely doing the same? Could there be an infinite number of steps, getting sucked into an infinite number of Universes within Universes? Is the idea of other Universes a valid one, but wrong in the respect that the Universes aren't like bubbles in a bath but more like an infinite number of Russian dolls?

I want to be the first to say yes. Seabrook's Layered Dimensional Theory, until someone else comes up with a better name for it.

You are here. In one of these layers. Anything further in from your layer appears to be a singularity, anything further out appears to be expanding away from us at the maximum speed possible. Not so much an explosion in a black hole as postulated here but the contents of an outer level's singularity in and of itself. This means that there would not need to be a white hole because the entire outer horizon of the Universe you're in IS the point where matter seems to be created.

I hope it's an infinite thing, otherwise one Universe will end up with all the matter. Like having one room in the world having all the furniture, it would make it a lot harder to sort out the space!

Listen : Out There In The Universe - Spacetribe ... Supermassive Black Hole - Muse ... The Emptiness Of Nothingness - Amorphous Androgynous (FSOL).

Over a month, eh? Time I put in another blog entry, otherwise people might think I was too busy.

Which I still am. Building a house is a stressful thing, but this video shows you why it's all worth it. It's 90 seconds long, and is me running through the house (front room, dining room, kitchen, hall, half bathroom, up the stairs, main bathroom, two spare rooms and the master suite).

Ooooh, first streaming video on my blog. Might use that function in future. If you can't hear anything, that's because my little digital camera has no microphone.

So, apart from the house, what else do I have to report? Well, I had my first eye exam since 1998. That one was in the medical for work after my car crash. Since then, my eyesight has 'mellowed' from 20/15 to 20/30. I 'm very slightly near-sighted in both eyes and so I have decided to wear glasses. I'll be buying a pair or two this weekend.

Look at me, I'm old!

Listen : Eyesight To The Blind - The Who ... Glass - Joy Division ... Visible Noise - Hybrid. I might be taking the whole 'glasses' thing a bit seriously!