Yemen President Steps Down, Iran Arrests U.S. Spies, Ahmadinejad Takes Over as Oil Minister, and Fascinating Doug Casey Interview on the Singularity

After 32 years, Yemen's president is finally resigning amid massive protests:

SANAA, Yemen — Under pressure from protesters and regional allies, Yemen's president said Saturday he will sign a deal to step down after 32 years in power. Still, he condemned the proposal as "a coup" and warned the U.S. and Europe that his departure will open the door for al-Qaida to seize control of the fragile nation on the edge of Arabia.

Iranian intelligence is claiming to have captured 30 U.S. spies:

Iran has arrested 30 people it said were spying for the United States.

“Due to the massive intelligence and counter-intelligence work by Iranian agents, a complex espionage and sabotage network linked to America’s spy organization was uncovered and dismantled,” an intelligence ministry statement read out Saturday on the television said.

“Elite agents of the intelligence ministry in their confrontation with the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) elements were able to arrest 30 America-linked spies through numerous intelligence and counter-intelligence operations,” it added.

And now Ahmadinejad is taking over position as Iran's "oil minister" even though it has been deemed illegal according to Al Jazeera:

Iran's constitutional watchdog has deemed illegal Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's decision to take over the role of oil minister, after Iran's president removed the previous minister along with two others earlier in the week.
Iran's president was said to have assumed the role earlier this week as part of a government shakeup that reduced the number of ministries from 21 to 17.
The move put him in direct control of the government unit responsible for the extraction and export of the world's fifth largest oil and gas reserves.

Still think our military presence in the Middle East is winding down?  With a new dictator to implant in Yemen, uncertainty about oil flow from Iran, captured spies, and Obama calling out Syria's murder of protesters, the CIA sure is gonna be busy.

Despite all the news in the Middle East, it was a rather boring day.  I caught a link off LewRockwell.com to this awesome, but dated, interview with Doug Casey by the International Speculator on the topic of increasing technology and the Singularity.  Some excerpts:

Doug: And that includes nuclear waste. Greens, who generally have little background in science, are completely unaware that spent reactor fuel is a potentially valuable future resource – in addition to being a trivial storage problem in the interim. Technology – it’s the most bullish thing possible for the standard of living of the average human being. Many people living below the poverty line in the U.S. have televisions, refrigerators, medicines, and luxuries that even kings and queens of only a hundred years ago couldn’t have dreamed of. That trend is going to continue – and accelerate. It’d be hard for me to overstate how favorable this is.

L: So, would you say you’re a techno-optimist as a matter of general principle – because that’s the way you’d bet on the multi-millennia trend – or because there are specific technologies you see developing that lead you to this conclusion?
Doug: Both.
A key fact my mind keeps returning to is that there are more engineers and scientists alive today than there have been in all of the rest of human history combined. And all of these people want to become the next Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein – they all want to become immensely wealthy or make major breakthroughs. The path to the former is by inventing better technologies, and the path to the latter adds to the understanding that allows us to do the same. These people are as motivated as any alive, and I expect a good number of them will succeed.
There is a countertrend, however: government. States all around the world are becoming increasingly virulent, both in terms of seizing capital and in terms of making capital accumulation more and more difficult. Further, they’re constantly creating new regulations on what can and can’t be done. And remember what I said before: technology isn’t enough – you have to have the wealth to implement the new technology. Whether it’s through power-hungry myopia, bureaucratic stupidity, or ideological insanity, governments are actively destroying the capital we need to advance, and slowing its accumulation.
Back on the positive side, I’m a huge believer in nanotechnology. I believe it is likely – even in the span of the next generation – to change the nature of life on this planet totally, unrecognizably, and irrevocably. It’s the single biggest thing on the horizon.

Editor’s Note: Here is a chart on this subject from Doug’s book, Crisis Investing for the Rest of the 90s.

The expected abrupt transition from the paleolithic to nanotechnic eras (a long-term perspective). Stone-age agriculture and Moon landings lie in the transitional zone.
L: Sounds even more like science fiction.
Doug: Well, if you look at a graph of the rate of change in technology, it’s basically flat for a long, long time, then slopes upward gently until about the 1750s. Then the Great Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution hit, and the curve rises more and more steeply. If you look at it now, it looks poised to basically go vertical. Short of a global catastrophe that knocks us back to the Stone Age, or wipes our species clean off the planet, there’s no stopping it. The rate of change is accelerating. If it’s not stopped, you get to the point at which the lifespan of your body – or a better one you make – has no natural limit, and your control over everything in the universe that can be controlled is complete.

L: There are people who might say that it was government science that put a man on the Moon…
Doug: Government doesn’t create anything. All it does is take resources from those who have discovered or created them, and, sometimes, focus some of them in a given area. I’m of the opinion that private space travel would have happened sooner and at lower cost if the government hadn’t first given itself a monopoly in the field. I can’t prove that, but that’s what I think.
L: I can believe it. And we have seen very blatant efforts by government to stop technological progress, such as the previous U.S. administration’s effort to stop stem-cell research.
Doug: Yes, and government imposes up to a billion dollars in unnecessary costs on developers of every new drug. All that money goes to pay lawyers and compliance experts, not scientists.

The interview is highly recommended.  Casey even goes into the topic of the Singularity:

Doug: It does, but it isn’t. This is hard science. One person I have great respect for is Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and thinker about the future who’s written about a coming “technology singularity” – a point at which technology doesn’t just get better, it all but instantly leaps to its full potential. Everything that is possible to do, we’ll know how to do. After this happens, people will look at this event as the single most important thing to ever happen – to ever happen. As we date things now BC and AD, in the future everything will be pre- and post-singularity. And this could happen within the next 20 or 30 years.

After all that rather deep stuff, I will end with a great chart showing the rise in U.S. debt and which presidents are responsible:

And some people still believe Democrats and Republicans are different...

Update- Both Bob Murphy and Don BouDreaux of CafeHayek have put this video up.  What a great case of police privatization.