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Showing posts from 2011

"Terrorism" and other manipulations

From The Next Big Future, which I believe is Brian Wang's website/blog (I'm new at this stuff) , I find a piece entitled Terrorism is a subset of Murder http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/terrorism-is-subset-of-murder.html (asserting, if I get it right, that Terrorism is illegitimate by virtue of being criminal). One commenter, Gigi, responded: As I have already tried to say before, I consider any use of the word “terrorism” more or less pointless. In fact, reading much of the western media about “terrorism” there is almost nowhere any clear definition of the word “terrorism”, for the simple reason that for any kind of such definition many of the military actions taken by the West against unarmed civilians in, say, Iraq or Vietnam may well fall in this definition. Is this an action of terrorism? http://boingboing.net/2010/04/... Simply put it, if Hamas kills one Israeli civilian it is terrorism, if the US or Israel directly kill 10 or more Palestinian it is

Fukushima perspective

Update: correction and contrition.  Friday August 14, 2015.  I screwed the pooch on this one. Japanese deference to corporate authority apparently caused the technicians in charge of the Fukushima power plants to withhold the truth of the dire circumstances of the Fukushima reactors from their corporate superiors, and to delay the emergency measures they knew were instantly required to save the reactors from total meltdown. They sat on their hands rather than “offend” their bosses, who in their culture are apparently seen as their god-like betters. No one wanted to be the messenger bringing the bad news. So all of the engineering work that went into making the reactors safe was thrown in the dumper because of a cultural twitch. As always the greatest danger lies in those human factors that lead to operator error. I did not take that into consideration, and so: my bad. Nippon's Nuclear Curse Justin Raimondo -- mucho kudos for the man,... but not this time -- writes th

The path to economic equilibrium

War is about money and power at the highest level of society, the level of the ruling elites. (Ruling "mafias", if you will.) When the elite of one nation is predominant in wealth -- and consequently power -- it dominates the rest: the archetype being the Roman Empire. When several states are equal in wealth, they become rivals, for example, England, France, Spain from the 1300's to the 1800's, with the Germans joining the group after the fall of Napoleon. Wars between rivals cost all participants, but when it's over, the winners have the power, by which they enrich themselves, and the losers are generally subjugated and taxed, and kept in a subordinate (ie, weakened) state. WW2 was part two of the first full-scale, total war of the industrial age. At its end, European and Japanese wealth, social infrastructure and industrial capacity had been destroyed. Among the "winners", only the US remained virtually undamaged. This fully explains what foll

Cryonic suspension facts

Will cryonic suspension "work"? Will the frozen "corpsicles" ever be restored to the realm of the living? The various objections -- knee jerk mostly -- boil down to "It's too strange, it's wrong, it'll never work." A manifestation of the human instinct to view the "strange" with suspicion, and reflexively reject it.  And to view as impossible anything not verified by one's own belief system. For example evolution, to Christian fundamentalists.  The good news is the "rejecters" will eventually die out, leaving more and more "accepters". Then, after a time cryonics and extended life will become the norm, and adherents of "the natural way" will become a cultural oddity like the Amish. More bad thinking on this topic, there is this default notion, accepted uncritically, even among cryonicists!, that cryonic suspension is a "long shot" ie has a very low probability of success. This is no

Bradley Manning and the Nuremberg Principles

Nuremberg Principle I Principle I states, "Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment." Principle II Principle II states, "The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law." Principle III Principle III states, "The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law." Principle IV Principle IV states: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him". This principle could be paraphra

To End War

Seymour Hersch at the New Yorker's News Desk Blog, submits this post: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/03/the-kill-team-photographs.html Why is the face of the dead Afghan obscured? Sensitivity? I don't think so. Why are the other 3996 photos being withheld? Sensitivity? I don't think so. Why did the flag-draped coffins arrive at Dover Air Force Base in the middle of the night, with photographs disallowed? Sensitivity? I don't think so. I think the answer is blatantly clear to absolutely everyone, both war supporters and war opponents. And it's not sensitivity. It's consequences. The war makers (political profiteers), war supporters (emotional profiteers), war reporters (media profiteers), and the war-equipment suppliers (commercial profiteers) require the up-close-and-personal horror of war be concealed from the view of regular folk. Because... well, I hardly have to state the obvious, do I? Personally, I want every gout of blood, every bit

The Accountability Party

"The Accountability Party? What's that?" you ask, puzzled, thinking you've missed some newsworthy "announcement". You haven't. The Accountability Party is my little fantasy, created at this most opportune moment, when the Dems and Repubs are both out of favor. The Accountability Party is intended to be broad-based, having only two planks, so as to be robustly resistant to destruction -- or irrelevance -- by fragmentation. The AP's two planks are Accountability and Jobs. Every other issue is relevant ONLY as seen through the lens of these two concerns. Otherwise the AP takes no position. "No position" means NO POSITION. No position means being "agnostic" on EVERYTHING else. Individual AP members have their own views of course, but as a unified organization, the AP takes no position on: abortion, taxes, gay marriage, gun rights, defense policy, campaign finance, racial discrimination, immigration, terrorism, hate-speech, Israel, e