Hired liars, buzz marketing, the feeling of being human and the collective subjective

Ebullient Excess with Pax Americana

"For the best of all possible worlds choice is the one force that drives the need to have needs. So many choices -- so many needs,
the invisible hand is the best hand for demanding supply –– supplying demand."

On American Exceptionalism
A Study in Exceptional Hubris

"That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality, and while you're studying that reality, we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

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Types Typed Trance Dance

Ebullient Excess
With Trompe O'eil Entrepreneurs, Politics within a
Democray can not standby helpless while the foundations for expression are left to spew shibboleths. . .

"It is most important never to question the exact meaning of any of these shibboleths, however, for it labels you as an outsider. Obviously the shibboleth means nothing in itself; what really matters is whether or not you are willing to use it in order to be identified as part of the group."
Jesus Christ of Nazareth

Bloggers Untie

Entries by:
John King who is also a realist of sorts and critic; a solid contributor to the meritocracy.

The future will be a synthesis that could be calculated to a tee with adequate data; however that synthesis will contain a high degree of non-intentional components, and no one's ideality will figure very strongly. The futurist ends up as a statistician anticipating desperate maneuvers.

As data is compiled, the statistician skews information received by observation of a body of knowledge that has not occurred; the coherent strings of data vaporize in the shuffle as the future is influenced by its observation.

MOSES THE EGYPTIAN

Feng Shui and
KULTURKAMPF
Surrealism and
kultur kampf
irony and
kultur kampf
Evangelical Drumming
Feng Shui surreal irony in this most perfect of all possible worlds

Coming Soon: John Poindexter,
Adam Smith and the invisible hand. Total Information Awareness Project -- PLACE YOUR BET

Booda Buddha

Feng Shui
Syntek Technologies,
DARPA,or Dharma
Total InformationAwareness Office (IAO) project
The Matrix
is moving along nicely. Bar Code implants are next.
John Poindexter
Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency

Looking for someone in particular? Want to take them out using simple market forces? Want to invest in unrest? Are you bored with parochial investments? Do you like to use revenge as a marketing tool, or are you just cynical enough to consider this investment opportunity for simple self-interest?
Brother Poindexter has a portfolio for you. Yes, Market Forces and Democracy combine into a Hyperneofascist blood letting betting pool.
Opportunity for all:
As institutional investor,
As an Indivitual investor,
As a mutual fund investor,
You or your organization can benefit form Poindexter's genius. Use Market Forces to drive destiny.

Given the golobal reach of Capitolism, Free Enterprise and Market Fixing, logic follows that all political issues will fall under the reach of the DARPA Lottery -- Dick Cheney's next heart attack, Gorge Bushe's next gaff, John Ashcroft's next attack on Civil Rights.
We here at SCARI want to bet on when Condolreezza Rice falls on her swords. When will Ronald Dumsfeld be tongue tied like his boss? When will there be an offical spelling change of the word Nuclear to Nukulur?

Had one bet on the longevity of John Poindexter and his tenure at DARPA, one could have cleaned up.

S. Han Yang, Feng Shui expert

The Tao of Excess
flimsy charm
schadenfreude
w/the usual suspects

Big Bird with feathers

Big Bird is an Omnivore,
However as a dedicated preditor/scavenger, opportunity is his credo. Opportunism is its own reward, and

You Break It,
You Fix It.

When involved
with the Crass struggle:
Fear the Exploitation
of Fear
no matter how much
it pays.
–– power is sex ––
–– sex is power ––
An objectification meritocracy,
schadenfreude and public good, have lived in harmony since the beginning.

Peter Kellogg with the law:
conspiring circumstances and
unintended consequences

Now caught between Iraq and a hard place –– in medias res.

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Iraq?
How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

choice war: War of Choice War by Choice
"war of our choosing" to protect the homeland
against evil doers because, well just because.

The last word On Regret
"Policy decisions were taken, Mistakes were made. Lives were lost, Damage was done. We regret the inconvenience to planetary awareness, there were lapses in comprehension, there were ethical compromises. The result is regrettable. The data observed was based on good intelligence by analysts of the highest caliber, it was the one bureaucratic reason we all could agree upon."

"It is regrettable to inform that a Grave and Gathering Threat is not Imminent but merely grave and gathering –– there is a difference you know. We regret The Paradigmatic Collective Subjective had Sexed up our Office of Special Plans to imply imminence when only grave and gathering threats were at hand."

My destiny! Droll thing life is-- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets.
Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"

"I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce."
Hoover J. Edgar

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare, "Macbeth"

"We regret the change of menu. Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast will no longer be served.
We are quite satisfied that the French have now learned their lesson. French Fries will be served in place of Freedom Toast and Feedom Toast will be, form now on, be known as French Fries. Sounds Orwellian but it makes sense to us; it's the one thing we all could agree on."
Capitol Cafeteria

Caveat from beyond: We regret one does not lose one's vestigial tail in heaven.
Gus O. Kahan, "The Day the Mirth Stood Still".

A nation with leadership doing the same thing over and over expecting different results is a recipe for history to repeat itself again and again. QED.

Alberto Gonzales Interview: 11/11/05
The Impeachment Question
"Bring it on?" "Yes, he has passionate Christian Beliefs, but, according to clinical specialists, they do not rise to the level of delusion. Yes, he is responsible for his actions, and does understand the level of his crimes and must stand trial. He may have been deluded by those with whom he associates, advisers who have blinded his judgment.
We have definitely moved beyond the lady in the blue dress, Monica; Impeachment should be reserved for the worthy."

The Mark Emery Question
"Ah, A question of the Mark Emery Extradition. Mark Every will be extradited and persecuted to the fullest extent of our laws."
Alberto Gonzales

reporter at large, Simon Chuy Bolivar

On Moyers as National Treasure
6/20/03
I happened to be up late last night, and I found on satellite TV an uninterrupted recording of a rousing speech given by Bill Moyers at some kind of Progressive function. What a sweeping oration. His leadership qualities have such a buffering effect on shrill political cant from all parties. He draws from great depth in his presentation of ideas. I just thought I would second your strong endorsement of Moyers as a Voice.

I would like to see at the highest level of public debate two peers, rooted respectively in the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian traditions, slug it out with honor, intellectual power, and elegance. The world has grown too grubby for this, but Moyers sustains an unflinching quality of discourse that points towards the supporting conditions we need.

6/1005
Where is Bill Moyers? We shunn the most human of a all and cheer Sibboleths to salve faith in, "everything is Ok and getting better." A pox on the house of the faithful -- need to believe bunch that require bushels of willful ignorance to maintain the conservatory for the preservation os the Satatus Quo.

John King: critic

HIGHER VOLTAGE FOR US ALL

Sun's Output Increasing in Possible Trend Fueling Global Warming
In what could be the simplest explanation for one component of global warming, a new study shows the Sun's radiation has increased by .05 percent per decade since the late 1970s.The increase would only be significant to Earth's climate if it has been going on for a century or more, said study leader Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The Sun's increasing output has only been monitored with precision since satellite technology allowed necessary observations. Willson is not sure if the trend extends further back in time, but other studies suggest it does. The recent trend of a .05 percent per decade increase in Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) in watts per meter squared, or the amount of solar energy that falls upon a square meter outside the Earth’s atmosphere, was measured between successive solar minima that occur approximately every 11 years. "This trend is important because, if sustained over many decades, it could cause significant climate change," Willson said. In a NASA-funded study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, Willson and his colleagues speculate on the possible history of the trend based on data collected in the pre-satellite era. "Solar activity has apparently been going upward for a century or more," Willson told SPACE.com. Further satellite observations may eventually show the trend to be short-term. But if the change has indeed persisted at the present rate through the 20th Century, "it would have provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years," he said. That does not mean industrial pollution has not been a significant factor, Willson cautioned. Scientists, industry leaders and environmentalists have argued for years whether humans have contributed to global warming, and to what extent. The average surface temperature around the globe has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1880. Some scientists say the increase could be part of natural climate cycles. Others argue that greenhouse gases produced by automobiles and
industry are largely to blame. Willson said the Sun's possible influence has been largely ignored because it is so difficult to quantify over long periods. Confounding efforts to determine the Sun's role is the fact that its energy output waxes and wanes every 11 years. This solar cycle, as it is called, reached maximum in the middle of 2000 and achieved a second peak in 2002. It is now ramping down toward a solar minimum that will arrive in about three years. Changes in the solar cycle -- and solar output -- are known to cause short-term climate change on Earth. At solar max, Earth's thin upper atmosphere can see a doubling of temperature. It swells, and denser air can puff up to the region of space where the International Space Station orbits, causing increased drag on the ship and forcing more frequent boosts from space shuttles. In 1996, near the last solar minimum, the Sun was nearly featureless. By 1999, approaching maximum, it was dotted by sunspots and fiery hot gas trapped in magnetic loops. Long-term: A previous study showed that changes in the Sun's output appear to be related to temperatures on Earth, based on studies of tree rings, sunspots and other data. Solar max has also been tied to a 2 percent increase in clouds over much of the United States. It might seem logical to tie climate to solar output, but firm connections are few. Other studies looking further back in time have suggested a connection between longer variations in solar activity and temperatures on Earth.Examinations of ancient tree rings and other data show temperatures declined starting in the 13th Century, bottomed out at 2 degrees below the long-term average during the 17th Century, and did not climb back to previous levels until the late 19th Century. Separate records of sunspots, auroral activity (the Northern Lights) and terrestrial deposits of certain substances generated in atmospheric reactions triggered by solar output, suggest the Sun was persistently active prior to the onset of this Little Ice Age, as scientists call the event.
Solar activity was lowest during the 17th Century, when Earth was most frigid. Large-scale ocean and climate variations on Earth can also mask long-term trends and can make it difficult to sort out what is normal, what is unusual, and which effects might or might not result from shifts in solar radiation. To get above all this, scientists rely on measurements of total solar energy, at all wavelengths, outside Earth's atmosphere. The figure they derive is called Total Solar Irradiance (TSI). The new study shows that the TSI has increased by about 0.1 percent over 24 years.That is not enough to cause notable climate change, Willson and his colleagues say, unless the rate of change were aintained for a century or more. On time scales as short as several days, the TSI can vary by 0.2 percent due to the number and size of sunspots crossing the face of the Sun. That shift, said to be insignificant to weather, is however equal to the total amount of energy used by humans, globally, for a year, the researchers estimate. The study analyzed data from six satellites orbiting Earth
at different times over the 24 years. Willson ferreted out errors in one of the datasets that had prevented previous studies from discovering the trend. A separate recent study of Sun-induced magnetic activity near Earth, going back to 1868, provides compelling evidence that the Sun's current increase in output goes back more than a century, Willson said. He said firm conclusions about whether the present changes involve a long-term trend or a relatively brief aberration should come with continued monitoring into the next solar minimum, expected around 2006.

MANAGEMENT EXCESS
30 March 2003 Genetically modified crops specially engineered to kill pests in fact nourish them, startling new research has revealed.The research – which has taken even the most ardent opponents of GM crops by surprise – radically undermines one of the key benefits claimed for them. And it suggests that they may be an even greater threat to organic farming than has been envisaged. It strikes at the heart of one of the main lines of current genetic engineering in agriculture: breeding crops that come
equipped with their own pesticide. Biotech companies have added genes from a naturally occurring poison, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which is widely used as a pesticide by organic farmers. The engineered crops have spread fast. The amount of land planted with them worldwide grew more than 25-fold – from four million acres in 1996 to well over 100 million acres (44.2m hectares) in 2000 – and the global market is expected to be worth $25bn (£16bn) by 2010. Drawbacks have already emerged, with pests becoming resistant to the toxin. Environmentalists say that resistance develops all the faster because the insects are constantly exposed to it in the plants, rather than being subject to occasional spraying. But the new research – by scientists at Imperial College London and the Universidad Simon Rodrigues in Caracas, Venezuela – adds an alarming new twist,
suggesting that pests can actually use the poison as a food and that the crops, rather than automatically controlling them, can actually help them to thrive. They fed resistant larvae of the diamondback moth – an increasingly troublesome pest in the southern US and in the tropics – on normal cabbage leaves and ones that had been treated with a Bt toxin. The larvae eating the treated leaves grew much faster and bigger – with a 56 per cent higher growth rate.They found that the larvae "are able to digest and utilise" the toxin and may be using it as a "supplementary food", adding that the presence of the poison "could have modified the nutritional balance in plants" for them. And they conclude: "Bt transgenic crops could therefore have unanticipated nutritionally favourable effects, increasing the fitness of resistant populations."
Pete Riley, food campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said last night: "This is just another example of the unexpected harmful effects of GM crops."If Friends of the Earth had come up with the suggestion that crops engineered to kill pests could make them bigger and healthier instead, we would have been laughed out of court. It destroys the industry's entire case that insect-resistant GM crops can have anything to do with sustainable farming." Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, said it showed that GM crops posed an even "worse threat to organic farming than had previously been imagined". Breeding resistance to the Bt insecticide sometimes used by organic farmers was bad enough, but problems would become even greater if pests treated it as "a high-protein diet".

Trance dancing, Dervishers without the trappings -- naked dnacers

Utopian Dances

Hindus like to go on and on about utopian ideals, but there is always a top dog guru and his elect. Also remember that the Laws of Manu (India's precursor to later civil society) do not attend to civil rights or human rights as we understand them. Modern India was established by the British Empire in great part.
Setting aside corruption, prejudice, and seized power, let's engage in conjecture about what MUST be in the climate of knowledge expansion going on in the world. The rigors of knowledge functionally result in a division of labor, which leads to an asymmetrical distribution of decision-making activity, hence a hierarchical division of classes. Mobility between classes in an upward direction requires a lot of energy in the form of effort, capital, and opportunity.

The totalitarian approach to addressing this mobility problem results in an overweaning bureaucratic hierarchy that squelches spontaneity and promotes mediocre types.
So some kind of Liberal Democracy must be in place to allow the most achievable possibilities. Then we get to the familiar never-ending debates about values and money. And what about money? Should all people be granted a certain amount of credit at birth, categorically earmarked for specific fundamental needs such as food, housing, and education? Probably. And this is where the more well-off nations are heading.

Of course people must take SOME responsibility for their number of offspring. Demographic asymmetry is a problem. Perhaps mandatory sterilization after two children should be required in some cases for participation in social benefits. But mere reproduction pales beside the advent of intelligent systems.

The modelling of intelligence will lead first to a revolution in the major professions (Law, Medicine, Engineering), then to fundamental changes in management and government planetwide (this is new -- hasn't happened before on the planet). This will mark a sharp break from all historical patterns, ancient or modern; and it will reduce to puny irrelevance all our present-day concerns about social problems.

let's make it real compared to what? relax –– accept those things one can not change.

DYNAMIC PHYSICAL ORGY RUNS RIOT
"Do not take the lecture too seriously . . . just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get...into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."

Richard Feynman

Who Owns My D.N.A.

"Reason might impel us to look a bit
further as our genes are not ours but
to the species; they are on loan to
us to do something besides stack
marbles to soothe our complacency."

Genes as property: interesting legal proposition. Impossible to enforce any derivative legislation without saturation of the world with surveillance efforts. The idea of property, extended beyond legal definitions into an indefinite nebular moral sphere becomes an infinite recursion ending in theology or mysticism; then your choices are according to your aesthetic preferences. And what is a species? What we romantically call nature can be emulated; designer species are already appearing: this will complicate and accelerate.

But let's look at your assertion that general scientific research is like your pejorative "complacent stacking of marbles."

Once again, your assertions are Kierkegaard all over again. Kierkegaard said that "existence precedes essence." This is a bracketing operation, and one is led again to an infinite recursion; since essence is an indispensable condition for existence. With a slightly different brain architecture, you might be inclined to say that "Our genetic basis compels us to find our true identity in pure reason, rather than dally in pathetic vicissitudes to soothe our complacency (or our antinomian compulsions)." When I tried to bring up Logos, I was not referring to a dalliance, but to something fundamental that imposes itself when we try to observe and understand.

The limbic structure of the brain, so important to our learning and remembering and emoting, is the natural product of tedious trial-and-error iterations of macromolecules over millions (I am tempted to evoke Sagan's billions) of years (building macromolecules is rather like stacking marbles). The stacking is according to the laws of thermodynamics,
just another bracketed condition in an indefinitely extended web of conditions subject to random variations.

It may not be possible for you to become passionate about this line of thinking; but others during the past 300 years have been VERY passionate about it. And what about others? With your existential relationship to ethos, one would think that you would be compelled to admit all key social drives into your circle of concerns as legitimate activities. It is absurd to demonize science and technology just because it doesn't suit your temperament and aptitudes, but I think you know this. Exaggeration is one of your favorite tools.

Here is a quote from Jacob Needleman (A Sense of the Cosmos, 1975):
"Western civilization as a whole now finds itself between dreams... much as during the Renaissance when Western man found hiumself between two dreams: behind him the dream of a Christianized world, before him the dream of the conquest of nature. The crisis of ecology, the threat of atomic war, and the disruption of the patterns of human
life by advanced technology have resulted in the fact that the lullaby of scientific progress, the dream of manipulating nature to suit our egoistic purposes, is ended."

The dream might be ended, but not the operational rules and guidelines left over from the past few hundred years. They will have to be changed piecemeal in a broken, jagged pattern, in crisis management style, since we have nothing like a Roman emperor who might lay down absolute edicts. I would prefer the emperor to a democracy of
idiots-but of course you know to what kind of emperor I am referring.

John King: critic

Beware, I am Caesar
Evangelical Drumming circle
"Beware the leader who beats the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into patriotic fervor, for patriotism is a double-edged sword.  It emboldens the blood and narrows the mind.  And when the drums of war have reached fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need to seize the rights of the citizenry.  Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so.  How do I know?  For this is what I have done.  And I am Caesar."
-- Attributed to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

man in the box

Ethics in a Postmodern World
Karl Rove ersatz Haiku

Karl Rove can fool some of the people most of the time, what ever it takes to seal the deal

Karl Rove does what he should to promote himself and "do the Public Good"
Karl Rove ersatz Haiku 2
Karl Rove fools all the people some of the time, For him, a feeling beyond sublime, doing whatever he thinks he should
Karl Rove ersatz Haiku 3
Karl Rove wants order,
a meritocracy for man as machine,
lubrication helps run Bush's brain, like smuggling disparate thought across the neocortex of a tabula raza. "Stick to Principle, we must have order"
Karl Rove ersatz Haiku 4
Karl Rove believes a godless deity –– power, is the purist form of American Beauty
Karl Rove is a King Maker, a heart breaker
Karl Rove does whatever it takes to persuade your fealty
Karl Rove ersatz Haiku 5
Karl Rove wears sneakers, all of the time that's why he's so light on his feet, quite fast
Karl Rove is a scary little man that mocks the institution he worships –– This will not last
Karl Rove ersatz Haiku 6
Karl Rove gives even the R. N. C. a scare
Karl Rove, not the face to launch a thousand ships but with a wiggle like that, read his hips
Karl Rove ersatz Haiku 7
Karl Rove would purge his brother for votes or perks –– what ever it takes to win the election for jerks
Karl Rove, like Stalin, will do what it takes until he is slain or dies in a puddle of policy bile leaving those to look on in confusion and muse on his political style

By: Chuy Simon Bolivar
Translation by: Jaunity Sutbblefield

Patriots behaving badly
is the
Patriot Act

"And it Came to Pass"

If John Ashcroft can Speak in Tongues then
Orrin Hatch can cause it all "to come to pass." It's all in the scrupulous use of mirrors, i.e. scriptures. Check:
http://scari.org/conundrum2.exc4.html
http://scari.org/temple_now.html
When "it came to pass" that many times, one must doubt the source, Moroni the Angel must have been HI on something. If "the sky is falling" rule were applied," and it came to pass" would not pass as an intro for a bad fairy tale –– but an entire religion? Not even a good fable could stand up under such an unrelenting drubbing.
When John Ashcorft babbles to the great beyond and burns folks at the stake, we, the unwashed must defer to a secular higher power or it will come to pass, war is peace and lies are truth –– and don't forget the peace dividend. Poor Hester Prinn she was born in the wrong century.

Ephima Morphew

man in the box architype

Quanta

"And science is going to do what -- make
smarter bombs? What about the Day the Mirth Stood Still?" GOK

Humanity, from its beginnings, has struggled to deny the state of ambiguity with little success and no practical result. (M Randles)

There is a possiblity that quantum computers could achieve consciousness, if the theories about the quantum abilities of the brain are found to be true. There is much on the net about the brain’s quantum computations and quantum consciousness. Topics lead to collapsed wave functions, angstrom units and other difficult foci requiring studies in and of themselves.
The world exists when we don't look at it in some strange state that is indescribable. Then when we look at it, it becomes absolutely ordinary, as though someone were trying to pull something over our eyes -- the world is an illusion.
Quantum theory is a probabilistic theory. It just describes things like the world as essentially random and governed only by general laws that give the odds for things to happen, but within these odds anything can happen. There is also fuzzy ambiguity -- the world isn't made of things, it's not made of objects. Quantum theory doesn't describe the world that way. Big things aren't made of little things; they're made of entities whose attributes aren't there when you don't look, but become there when you do look.
Fuzzy logic sanctions contradiction and endorses ambiguity, and cutting edge physics is leading us there. So, though science must seek patronage from politicians and generals and scions of industry, it is also blazing paths not at all anticipated by those holding purse-strings. The “struggle to deny ambiguity” is just about at an end.

John King: critic

Bouton de Rose, Rosebud

Rose Bud
Does a rose by any other name smell the same?

e-mail to: Charlie Rose

11/22/03 Noam Chomsky interview

Charlie Rose, you really made a sop of yourself when interviewing Noam Chomsky. I thought you could keep it in your pants after pissing off Gore Vidal the night before with the same tactics. Geez, why don't you do that to Henry Kissinger, the war criminal, when he's on your show?
What kind of an agenda are you fostering? It would be nice to have some "informed thoughtful" discussion on the Middle East without you obfuscating and parrying the discourse. The Charlie Rose show is about the guests not you know who. If you know so fucking much why don't you sit on both sides of the table.
I'm disgusted,

Gus O. Kahan

Comment on comment:

I'm not much for watching TV for recreation.
I could have killed my set last night when Charlie Rose did his hayseed routine. In the middle of his shouting down Noam Chompsky for the 30th time, Charlie interrupted himself and commented, "Maybe I am interrupting too much, but I have questions. . ." He went back to blathering about the Israeli –– Palestinian accords while Noam patiently again and again let Charlie change the subject of the questions he, himself, had just asked. It was like he was "moving along" to get to a commercial.

"Why can't the Palestinians and Israelis work out something? Why can't Israel and Palestine get along?"
"Don't you understand, If we didn't have the Palestinians to fight, we'd be killing one another."

But what of the Natural World? Is anything left beside God alone?

For God's Sake: think of the wee ones, You know –– those lesser beings.

GOK

suicide, not always painless, both cathartic and banal. so many changes. Q.E.D.

A pathology for which there is little redemption, a statement of desire to return to the carbon of our origin –– a cosmic state in waiting for the next reincarnation. Spontaneous Remissions are rare. The affect can convey to those looking for symbolic meaning, a chastening effect with awareness of our fragility, our vulnerability, our struggle to understand.
The spectacle looms large in our collective memory. Awareness of this act affects humans and few other species. The act has few testimonials for success but we all comprehend the meaning viscerally. A choice to volunteer the carnal in preference to the unknowable is a very human pathology –– a leap of faith or the lack of faith, both being equally authentic.
The Choice:
For the sentient being, the devil one does not know is preferred to the one presented before us; for one who has made that choice the leap is short. . .

genital mutilation and beauty

More
Schadenfreude
w/the usual suspects

Martha Martha Martha this is what gives Goddesses a bad name

We believed in you. We believed in Martha Stewart Livnig, we believed your story. Now you've put your company in the tank and you are headed there too. We were betting on an uptick. What happened? Schadenfreude is our only recourse given your arrogance and duplicity –– we hope your prison sentence will be spent wisely, seeking solace in biblical scripture; a wise use regimine for a criminal. It's a shame, you have so much talent –– I have all your flower arragnging tapes.

Ephima Morphew

Trompe L'Oeil advertorial
spontaneous remissions  

Product Placement
Karl Rove National Treasure
or
Spawn of Satan

Message from a Karl Rove admirer, Malischia Wallerstein
"Do you also make toilet paper?
Please forgive my sarcastic sounding opening line, I was not referring to YOU, (Mon Dieu!) but ever my Rovey...
I am, of course, on the lookout for someone who can print my newest creative wish, "The Turd Blossom", matching Rove toilet paper, (Scented, of course) Alas, It might be cost prohibitive. The world will have to do without."

"Dear Malischia, I must complain about your possessive use of 'Your God and Your Rovey.'
As you know your god may not be mine and as for Karl Rove; he is a National Treasure to be shared by all equally, you may believe he is yours but he is mine too –– as National Treasure we must share our resources and "Karl" is easy to share; his little finger prints are everywhere. He's our little BIG BROTHER inspiring us to look to our better angels and a brighter day.
Excuse my rant but passions flare on topics of possession when it comes to deities. I believe every home should have a portrait of Karl over the dining room table, he with a wan knowing smile and twinkling eyes confirming "the Amerikan Way."
As for your scented paper Idea, I would not have a clue as to what perception that odor might impart, "Please help me?"
Suggestions?
As ever, yours truely, Wendell Tatley"

Daisy-head Kiddie Litter

hypnotic, all seeing, all knowing - Avatar
The paragon of dexterity with good bones

Yellowcake deception
and Anthrax Subterfuge

Yellow Cake

Yellow Cake Yellow Cake
baker man
bake me a cake as fast as you can
Roll it and pat it and mark it with B
and put in the oven for the country and B

AIPAC's yellowcake with viper,
and AIPAC's Anthrax too

Lewis Scooter Libby is off the team, WHIG is now a distant indiscretion, its function no longer needed, "Mission Accomplished," the heat of battle is over, mop up the lose ends and we will have brought democracy to the muslim world.
But the Dark Forces live on. Dick, Karl and Condi think they dodged the silver bullet of justice but their dates with destiny are fixed in the stars by AIPAC. Connecting the dots for the silver bullet requires more than a swagger. High Noon is yet to come. And fare thee well Ahab, I mean Cheney.

'Ye seek the white one ahy, and fare thee well.'

We all hope the chubby little fuck, Karl Rove, is having a great weekend.

"Yellowcake Remix"
with "AIPAC's Anthrax"

Beyond Yellow Cake, there are many other murkey mixes looking for a market. The Anthrax Mystery is but one. One must first ask of motive, means and opportunity? Israel's bio-weapons facilities are located at the Israel Institute of Biological Research (IIBR) in Ness Ziona (also Nes Ziona, Nes Tona) a few miles southeast of Tel Aviv. Given the casual relationship between soulmates, it's no stretch to dream of a thousand ways Anthrax in its multiple forms could find its way to its "host" (enabling) country. They most probably came by the same courier. Anthrax & Pax to the Max.

Chuy Simon Bolivar

DEEP THOUGHT BY:
Donald Rumsfeld –– Bill Clinton

'As we know, There are
known knowns.
There are things we know
we know.
We also know There are
known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some
things We do not know.
But
there are also
unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
we don't know,
however,
this paradigm is predicated
on some notion
of what
is is.'.

"unknown knowns are known unknowns that have been forgotten" ––– mark twain

Nattering Nabobs, Flaming Flag in tatters

Shoot the Messenger
This is not
the rhyme of history.
In 1971 John Kerry asked:

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
Now 2006 we all must ask?
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Iraq? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Criminal hypocrisy
has torn this country apart for apocalyptic eschatology.

As the oceans rise and the fishes weep we carry on damning and diking spillage of entropy

coming soon

Quote by Karl Rove
"It's alright to do it but don't get caught."

movie news 3/6/06
Now caught between Iraq and a hard place. . .
B-Movie lingers: Gulf Wars II
Still shooting on location
Gulf War II is a revisit to the memory of Vietnam and a bridge too far genre of film noir.

OVER BUDGET:
B Movie lingers. Despite the tawdry plot Gulf Wars II lingers on an on. Not since Apocalypse Now have budgets spun so out of control with no end in sight. Doubtful success at the box-office. Squabbling on set, actors behaving badly, extras are not happy with the portrayal of indigenous cultures, detractors contribute to the conplexity of organizing an enterprise so far away; some say a bridge too far –– all akimbo. Nagging questions arise as the shooting progresses, is
George W. Bush an Idealist without Illusion or an Illusionist without Ideals?
Plot: Gulf War II
Based on a anachronistic and counter-intuitive notion, Gulf War II makes the premise; "The Road to Jerusalem passes thru Baghdad." But everyone knows the road to Baghdad leads thru Jerusalem,
That road through Jerusalem leads to Tehran, Damascus, Cairo, Tripoli, Ahman, Islamabad and even Khartum
but, that doesn't fit to scripture, does It?

Ephima Morphew

B-Movie goes for the gold Originally intended to be a light uplifting drama of heroic dimension Gulf War II is now a hundred plus times over budget and has taken on more of an arthouse film noir script. Still shooting on location. The existential tension is palpabe on set. By the time this movie makes it to the boxoffice the public will have moved on. Move on to pay for all the collateral damage and environmental decay. Writer-Director As writer, director, and actor, George Bush has kept the end a secret. Oh, the mystery, Allah only know where Osama is, and George only knows how the story will end. Filming should be wraped up by next spring if all goes according to plan. Cast and crew will be happy to be coming home. Yoni Chockalingam

cost over runs are driving investors crazy cast speaks out

"It's alright to do it but don't get caught."
Ironically, Tom Delay made the same statement while on a junket; fact finding mission to Scotland. With a broad smile while teeing off on the seveth hole he said, " It's alright to do it but don't get caught." The statement was out of context to the patter around him; it seemed to erupt as a statment of undeniable truth, a revelation of sorts.

Stanley Goldburg

New Wave for Pax Amerika
the meritocracy delivers

An exotic kind of nuclear (aka nukulur) explosive being developed by the US Department of Defense could blur the critical distinction between conventional and nuclear
weapons. The work has also raised fears that weapons based on this technology
could trigger the next arms race.

The explosive works by stimulating the release of energy from the nuclei of
certain elements but does not involve nuclear fission or fusion. The energy,
emitted as gamma radiation, is thousands of times greater than that from
conventional chemical explosives.

The technology has already been included in the Department of Defense's
Militarily Critical Technologies List, which says: "Such extraordinary energy
density has the potential to revolutionise all aspects of warfare."
Scientists have known for many years that the nuclei of some elements, such as
hafnium, can exist in a high-energy state, or nuclear isomer, that slowly decays to
a low-energy state by emitting gamma rays. For example, hafnium-178m2, the
excited, isomeric form of hafnium-178, has a half-life of 31 years.

The possibility that this process could be explosive was discovered when Carl
Collins and colleagues at the University of Texas at Dallas demonstrated that they
could artificially trigger the decay of the hafnium isomer by bombarding it with
low-energy X-rays (New Scientist print edition, 3 July 1999). The experiment
released 60 times as much energy as was put in, and in theory a much greater
energy release could be achieved.

Before hafnium can be used as an explosive, energy has to be "pumped" into its
nuclei. Just as the electrons in atoms can be excited when the atom absorbs a
photon, hafnium nuclei can become excited by absorbing high-energy photons.
The nuclei later return to their lowest energy states by emitting a gamma-ray
photon.

Nuclear isomers were originally seen as a means of storing energy, but the
possibility that the decay could be accelerated fired the interest of the Department
of Defense, which is also investigating several other candidate materials such as
thorium and niobium.

For the moment, the production method involves bombarding tantalum with
protons, causing it to decay into hafnium-178m2. This requires a nuclear reactor
or a particle accelerator, and only tiny amounts can be made.

Currently, the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland, New Mexico, which is
studying the phenomenon, gets its hafnium-178m2 from SRS Technologies, a
research and development company in Huntsville, Alabama, which refines the
hafnium from nuclear material left over from other experiments. The company is
under contract to produce experimental sources of hafnium-178m2, but only in
amounts less than one ten-thousandth of a gram.

But in the future there may be cheaper ways to create the hafnium isomer - by
bombarding ordinary hafnium with high-energy photons, for example. Hill
Roberts, chief scientist at SRS, believes that technology to produce gram
quantities will exist within five years.

The price is likely to be high - similar to enriched uranium, which costs
thousands of dollars per kilogram - but unlike uranium it can be used in any
quantity, as it does not require a critical mass to maintain the nuclear reaction.
The hafnium explosive could be extremely powerful. One gram of fully charged
hafnium isomer could store more energy than 50 kilograms of TNT. Miniature
missiles could be made with warheads that are far more powerful than existing
conventional weapons, giving massively enhanced firepower to the armed forces
using them.

The effect of a nuclear-isomer explosion would be to release high-energy gamma
rays capable of killing any living thing in the immediate area. It would cause little
fallout compared to a fission explosion, but any undetonated isomer would be
dispersed as small radioactive particles, making it a somewhat "dirty" bomb. This
material could cause long-term health problems for anybody who breathed it in.

There would also be political fallout. In the 1950s, the US backed away from
developing nuclear mini-weapons such as the "Davy Crockett" nuclear bazooka
that delivered an explosive punch of 18 tonnes of TNT. These weapons blurred
the divide between the explosive power of nuclear and conventional weapons,
and the government feared that military commanders would be more likely to use
nuclear weapons that had a similar effect on the battlefield to conventional
weapons.

By ensuring that the explosive power of a nuclear weapon was always far greater,
it was hoped that they could only be used in exceptional circumstance when a
dramatic escalation of force was deemed necessary.

Then in 1994, the US confirmed this policy with the Spratt-Furse law, which
prevents US military from developing mini-nukes of less than five kilotons. But
the development of a new weapon that spans the gap between the explosive
power of nuclear and conventional weapons would remove this restraint, giving
commanders a way of increasing the amount of force they can use in a series of
small steps. Nuclear-isomer weapons could be a major advantage to armies
possessing them, leading to the possibility of an arms race.

André Gsponer, director of the Independent Scientific Research Institute in
Geneva, believes that a nation without such weapons would not be able to fight
one that possesses them. As a result, he says, "many countries which will not
have access to these weapons will produce nuclear weapons as a deterrent",
leading to a new cycle of proliferation.

The Department of Defense notes that there are serious technical issues to be
overcome and that useful applications may be decades away. But its Militarily
Critical Technologies List also says: "We should remember that less than six years
intervened between the first scientific publication characterising the phenomenon
of fission and the first use of a nuclear weapon in 1945."

excruciation

exhumation

Ethics in the Postmodern World
Recall the problems of ‘the self’. Fragmented, fragile, transient nature of identity poses problems for moral responsibility. (Note too the effects of email, ICT). If self-identity is the self as reflexively understood, and we can understand ourselves in different ways, what becomes of the central moral notion of autonomy? Of the connection between morality and reason?
Bauman: four characteristics of late modernity.
* With globalisation, our actions have distant consequences.
* Division of labour diminishes responsibility.
* Our occupation of roles is so fleeting as not to make it constitutive of our identity (cp military national service).
* Traditional sources of moral authority (rules, principles, commandments) have collapsed.Recall also the ‘loss of foundations’. ‘Disenchantment’ destroys sources of order and meaning. The rise of instrumental rationality.
This may seem to take us to one or other version of relativism: the impossibility of a universal ethics. Distinguish this from relativism as asserting the impossibility of using any moral language at all. The plurality of voices and relativistic tolerance may seem to take us in this direction. Multiculturalism. The attractiveness of virtue ethics.
The postmodern ethical condition as ‘incurably aporetic’.
According to Bauman, the essence of the postmodern approach to ethics lies
not in the abandoning of characteristically modern moral concerns, but in the rejection of the typically modern ways of going about its moral problems (that is, responding to moral challenges with coercive normative regulation in political practice, and the philosophical search for absolutes, universals and foundations in theory)
Postmodern ethics is thus, to use Bauman’s phrase (p. 31), ‘morality without ethical code’.
Human reality is messy and ambiguous – and so moral decisions, unlike abstract ethical principles, are ambivalent.  It is in this sort of world that we must live ….  Knowing that to be the truth … is to be postmodern.  Postmodernity, one may say, is modernity without illusions (the obverse of which is that modernity is postmodernity refusing to accept its own truth).  The illusions in question boil down to the belief that the “messiness” of the human world is but a temporary and repairable state, sooner or later to be replaced by the orderly and systematic rule of reason.  The truth in question is that the “messiness” will stay whatever we do or know, that the little orders and “systems” we carve out in the world are … as arbitrary and in the end contingent as their alternatives.32-3
Bauman’s response to the ambiguity of human reality is based in his position that it is our moral capacity that essentially defines us as human beings:
It is society, its continuing existence and its well-being, that is made possible by the moral competence of its members – not the other way round ….  Rather than reiterating that there would be no moral individuals if not for the training/drilling job performed by society, we move toward the understanding that it must be the moral capacity of human beings that makes them so conspicuously capable to form societies and against all odds to secure their – happy or less happy – survival ….  [I]t is the personal morality that makes ethical negotiation and consensus possible, not the other way round.32, 34
Compare Taylor: the necessity for commitment to others if we are to develop an authentic identity.
 
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Blackwell, 1993)
Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Harvard Univ. Press, 1991)

glimpse the Nanotech Apocalypse

One possible disaster facing the earth in the not too distant future is the grey goo problem, a hazard of the development of nanotechnology. Another even more likely scenario is utter war.
What is nanotechnology?
The normal progress of technology is towards making smaller and smaller versions of things by progressively reducing the size of the components.
Nanotechnology reverses that approach, and instead of making things progressively smaller, starts with the most basic building blocks possible - individual atoms and molecules. Devices are then built up using the minimum number of these fundamental building blocks. What results is the smallest possible device allowed by the laws of physics - further miniaturisation is fundamentally impossible.
The foundations for nanotechnology were laid in a speech given on December 29th, 1959 to the American Physical Society by later Nobel Laureate Professor Richard P. Feynmann, entitled "There's plenty of room at the bottom". In it, he described how, merely by "writing" using direct manipulation of atoms on the surface of a metal, it was physically possible to store the full text of every book ever written in a pamphlet you could carry in your hand. Furthermore, if one were to encode the information somehow, much more space could be saved - the full sum of recorded human knowledge could be stored in a piece of dust barely visible to the unaided eye. He offered no description of how this might be achieved, but noted that there is nothing in the laws of physics to prevent us from doing it - it's just a matter of technology.
But the possibilities extend well beyond the maximum possible density of data storage. Nanotechnology also encompasses mechanical devices and computers too small to see even with a normal microscope. The name "nanotechnology" refers to the fact that such devices would be of the order of a few nanometres across - a nanometer being one millionth of a millimetre.
Assemblers
A nanotech assembler is a device which can physically rearrange matter, atom by atom, according to some program to produce a desired result. The first faltering steps towards this aim have already been taken - a team of scientists in San Jose has managed to write the letters "IBM" (their sponsor) in individual xenon atoms on a crystal of nickel.
The aim of nanotechnology is to be able to manipulate matter atom by atom to produce whatever you want. The ultimate device - nanotech's "killer app" - would be a universal assembler. Such a device would incorporate some significant computing power, molecular manipulators, and some form of power conversion - either running on ambient heat or possible solar powered.
A simple example of the sort of thing a universal assembler could do would be to turn graphite (from the lead of a pencil) into diamond. Both are simply different arrangements of identical carbon atoms. The assembler would simply alter their arrangement, atom by atom. And since all organic matter contains lots of carbon (by definition - and that includes things like old plastic bags, used tyres, horse manure etc.) you could use that as raw material for your little diamond factory. And since you have control over the very atomic structure of the diamond, every one you turn out will be flawless and as big as you like in any shape you like. Want a greenhouse in your garden made of a single greenhouse-shaped diamond? No problem. Want a rocket engine combustion chamber lighter and stronger than anything ever built? Done.
Of course, the universal assembler won't just do carbon atoms. In principle it will be able to assemble anything, given the constituent atoms. Most of the things we throw away contain carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and a couple of dozen other common substances. All this garbage could be used as raw material for universal assemblers. These devices will be able to turn toxic chemical waste into rump steaks, horse manure into life-saving drugs, and lawn cuttings into petrol - for free. They'll be able to swim the seas, gobbling up oil spills and turning them into plankton, or cruise your bloodstream in their millions converting fat deposits on your artery walls into pleasant, side-effect free euphoric drugs.
Of course, developing and building a universal assembler will be expensive. Although they will most likely be too small to see with the naked eye, they will be the most complex devices ever made. The cost will be immense - for the first one. We are familiar with the concept of "economies of scale" - building the first Ford Model T cost millions of dollars, but because millions were built, they could each be sold for a reasonable price.
But even economies of scale don't apply to molecular assemblers. The first one will be vastly expensive. The second and subsequent ones will not be cheap - they will be free. The first task for the first assembler off the production line will be to build a copy of itself, using the discarded prototypes as raw materials.
And herein lies the possibility for disaster.
The perils of geometric progression
Imagine you have a molecular assembler on a table in front of you. You can't see it - it weighs only one thousandth of a gram. You instruct it to make a copy of itself. This process takes about a second - computing speeds for the assembler are high because it is so small, and the actual building process happens as fast as it can move atoms, which is quick indeed.
So after a second, you have two assemblers on the table in front of you - the second one constructed by the first using atoms it literally picked up off the table. You still can't see them. Each one of the two then carries on and builds a copy of itself.
Hang on to your chair, because after only twenty seconds, there'll be over half a kilogram of assemblers in front of you, furiously building copies of themselves from whatever comes to hand (except each other). Probably best, actually, if you get out of your chair, because after another ten seconds the pile of assemblers will weigh over half a tonne, and the table and most of the room will be gone - used up as raw material. You still can't see the individual assemblers - just half a tonne of seething dust consuming everything it touches.
Assuming for a moment that this rate of reproduction could be sustained, the assemblers will have consumed every atom on the planet - you included - in a little over a minute and a half.
Don't Panic
This is an extreme example, and makes many invalid assumptions.
Assemblers may take minutes or hours to copy themselves. They will not necessarily have instant access to all the atoms needed to build a copy - if you only have access to carbon, for instance, you can't make anything except graphite, diamond and fullerenes. Nanotech machines will not be able to change an atom of carbon into an atom of boron - that requires an altogether different level of energy expediture. They may have difficulty cooling themselves sufficiently to operate at those kind of speeds. And responsible designers will program in safeguards to prevent runaway reproduction. The planet will not be destroyed within hours of the invention of the first universal assembler.
Panic Now
Of course, successful nanotechnology will have all sorts of possible ill effects. First of all, as soon as you can effectively feed, clothe, house and educate every single person on the planet for free, money becomes obsolete. Most of the people in power are there because they control access to resources - money, healthcare, food - and if all these things become available to everyone for nothing, those in power will suddenly find themselves superfluous. It's difficult to predict what effect this will have on global society - but it's unlikely to be pretty.
The avenues nanotech opens up for more of man's inhumanity to man are manifold and unpleasant. Tailored mechanical "viruses" to eliminate specific nations, towns, ethnic groups, or even specific people in a variety of unpleasant ways are an obvious possibility. Weaponry built of nanotech would change warfare beyond recognition - no armour can stop a molecular assembler, it would literally crumble to dust under the onslaught, or more likely be remade as something dangerous to the person it had been protecting.
But all these deliberately conceived nightmare scenarios pale next to the biggest threat posed by nanotech - the grey goo problem.
The Grey Goo Problem
Almost all organisms on earth depend directly or indirectly on the sun. Food chains have at their base organisms which convert sunlight into energy. Plants do this using chemicals such as chlorophyll. Natural selection and fierce competition means they've grown reasonably good at it over the several billion years they've been doing it - but soon they may have competition they can't keep up with.
A nanotech assembler needs power. It could construct solar panels which absorb all the light that hits them - no wasteful reflecting the green wavelengths like plants do. It could build these things as small or as large as it needs to - and since the macroscopic design of plants IS very efficient, it's likely to look like a plant, with branches and overlapping leaves. But since its small scale design is so much more efficient than any plant - near 100% efficient use of the light hitting it - it would displace any plant from any ecological niche. Not a problem if your assemblers are confined to the lab - but an accidental release of these devices into the global ecosystem could result in a mass extinction unprecedented in its scope, devastating in its speed, and from which the earth would never recover.
Even if molecular assemblers were only 1% more efficient at turning sunlight into power than organic plants, they'd begin displacing them immediately. Insects, birds and animals wouldn't be able to eat these machines, so they'd begin to suffer. The maths of geometric progression alluded to above would mean that this displacement would occur not over thousands or millions of years, as is usual in nature, but in a matter of hours or days.
And eventually, when all plant life had been displaced, and all animal life died out, a terrible quiet would settle over the earth. The entire planet would be covered in a film of solar-powered self-replicating assemblers, all near-identical - a grey goo. And unlike every other mass extinction in this planet's history, there'd be no way back - no obscure class of organism to rise up and take over as the mammals did after the dinosaurs, because by their design the nanotech machines would be the very optimum energy users possible. Nothing could ever compete with them, so nothing could ever replace them, except better versions of themselves, built by themselves. And since they would, by design, be self-repairing, they'd never die out. No amount of climate change could affect them, until the sun exhausts its hydrogen fuel, expands into a red giant and envelops and destroys the earth.
The Blue Goo solution
One suggested solution to the problem of "grey goo" is "blue goo" - special "policeman" nanotech devices designed specifically to recognise and disassemble molecular machines which are out of control. The blue goo would be deliberately released into the world, and allowed to replicate to a pre-determined level, there to wait and monitor the activity of other nanotech and act in case of runaway self-replicators.
It's a physically possible solution to the problem - but the human race has a long history of developing technologies which destroy the environment well before they develop the technologies to control them. With nanotech, we will only get one chance - the first accidental release could be the end of all life on earth.
Conclusion
Nanotech promises a bright future for humanity - if we can control it. If we don't, or can't, it may be our last invention.
Now, let’s consider some ultrarealist facts:
Hitler came to power because the Treaty of Versailles had made Germany virtually defenseless against Stalin’s invasion, and Hitler was creating an “adequate defense.” But owing to dictatorship, his whims were the laws of the land, and one of his whims was world domination, for which purpose his adequate defense transformed into world aggression.
The dictators of China have been saying that they also are creating adequate defense. But in contrast to Hitler, world domination is not just their whim to tickle their vanity (was not China called the Center of the World?) but also a dire necessity.
The dictatorship in Russia fell in 1991. In 1989 in China, there originated what did not exist in Russia even in 1991 – a national student movement, inspired by the West and especially by the United States. The national movement had a kind of open-air headquarters in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, where the students came from all over China, stayed for a while to demonstrate their solidarity, and then were replaced by other students from other areas.
“What?!” Winston Churchill would have exclaimed, had he lived to 1989. “In 1918 we trembled lest the proletarian poor rob the rich bourgeoisie and come to power as a result of Lenin’s world proletarian revolution, and now the dictators of socialist China, where the proletarian poor carried out Lenin’s proletarian revolution in 1949, tremble lest the proletarians establish the Western, and in particular American, bourgeois rule?”
Yes, in 1918 Churchill helped to launch a Western invasion of Soviet Russia to stop its subversive appeal to a world proletarian revolution, and today the dictators of China want to annihilate the West in order to stop its subversive appeal to the habeas corpus act and universal suffrage of the bourgeois West.
The national student movement associated with Tiananmen Square endangered the Chinese dictatorship, but it did not fall as did the dictatorship in Soviet Russia two years later. For the Chinese dictatorship relies on four or five millennia of absolutism, while the entire history of Russia runs short of one millennium.
In Christendom, the rulers always tried to present themselves as kinder and less cruel than they actually are. Not in China. The Chinese dictators did not try to prevent or disperse peacefully the Tiananmen gathering. Quite the contrary – they let as many students as possible gather on the square, crushed them with the steel of armored troops, and let these mass executioners boast publicly of how ruthless they had been.
Now, I have heard in U.S. nanotechnological circles that New York Times Chinese staff reporter Nicholas Kristof represented the Tiananmen Square incident as the Chinese government’s reaction after the students “took a number of soldiers as hostages.” That is, the students attacked the armor, not the armor the students.
Unfortunately for this Christian representation of the Chinese dictators as good Christians, Zhang Liang published (Public Affairs, New York, 2002) a 514-page collection of official Chinese government documents in which the Tiananmen butchers (to use President Clinton’s word) boast of their ruthlessness.
Anyway, it was clear to the power holders in China that their absolutism was endangered, and the power holders understood that the only way to prevent further Tiananmens was to annihilate the source of subversion, viz., the West.
It has also been clear to the power holders in China that the way to world domination lies in a country’s ability to destroy by molecular nanotechnological weapons the enemy’s means of nuclear retaliation as envisaged by Mutual Assured (Nuclear) Destruction, on which world peace has been resting.
So, the Sino-American nano race is on. It is not unlike the German-American nuclear race of 1938 to 1945.
The United States won the nuclear race for the following reasons:
(1) Hitler made a mistake by launching in 1939 a conventional war instead of concentrating on the development of nuclear weapons. The United States was thus at war with Germany. If there had been no war, Germany (and possibly Stalin’s Russia) would have “built the bomb,” while the Manhattan Project probably would not have even been started.
The United States is not at war with China; on the contrary, the United States is at affectionate peace, with much of our trade and business depending on China.
(2) The emigres from Germany, led by the world-famous Albert Einstein, in cooperation with Jewish Americans and “anti-Fascists,” created a public consensus, according to which Hitler’s victory would be the worst disaster in recorded history.
Today there is no such sociopolitical force directed against the dictatorship of China. Publicly, many pundits speak about how the United States will win the nano race and establish a “single world.” Privately, many nanotechnologists speak about how China will win the nano race and establish ITS “single world,” which, in their opinion, will be safer than nanoweapons in several countries at loggerheads.
(3) Dictatorship achieves great military results by concentrating in peacetime all resources on the supreme military goal. At the close of the 1920s Stalin’s Russia was still a predominantly rural and industrially backward country. In the 1940s it defeated Hitler’s Germany and in the 1960s its military power matched that of the United States.
The Chinese dictators can concentrate in peacetime all resources on the development of nano weapons able to abolish Mutual Assured Destruction. In the United Stats, it is not clear whether any such project exists or is planned. According to the Congressional Quarterly, $5.5 billion is to be authorized for nanotechnology in 2003.
But first, it is useful to compare the figure with $200 billion for the war in Iraq and $600 billion for Iraq’s reconstruction. Second, nanotechnology is a field of many fields, including civilian ones. The strategically decisive weapon is a molecular nanotech assembler capable of destroying the enemy’s means of nuclear retaliation. In the United States, it is never mentioned publicly, and it is not clear whether a single cent has been allocated for it.
Imagine the year is 1944, and the White House and Congress have received Einstein’s famous letter about the development of nuclear weapons. “Weapons? You mean nuclear fuel!”
At this moment a German atomic bomb falls on Washington, D.C. “I mean nuclear WEAPONS!” Einstein has the time to answer.
But it is too late to fund their development in the United States.
Postscript:
It appears that, on top of eco-cataclysm, the world also is headed inevitably towards complete political chaos and a war that will consummately bring to an end the human cosmos. The modern era has the distinction of adding some horsemen to the apocalypse.

John King: critic

pretext

excruciation

exhumation

Forecast the forecast

John King: Critic and Seer of the future has weighed in, Karl Rove our National Treasure

Two predictions:
1) George W Bush will win a second term as president of the United States.
2) He will be sorry he did.
The dog that did not bark at the Democratic Party's convention was opposition to the Iraq war. To the chagrin of the Europeans, who oppose the war by vast margins, the Democratic leadership all but muzzled opponents of a war. The battle will be fought on Bush's ground.
Senator John Kerry set himself up for defeat by making an issue of the conduct of the Iraq war, rather than the war itself. Bush will pull a rabbit out of his hat or, to be more precise, a bear.
Replacing the commander-in-chief in the midst of war is something Americans never have done, although Abraham Lincoln had some sleepless nights before the 1864 elections. Americans want a war, and will choose the war party in the end, however they may chastise the president for his numerous errors. As in war, in politics as well, the threat is mightier than the execution. Poor results in the opinion polls are a warning to the president, not repudiation.
Bush opened Pandora's box a year ago, and not even Kerry proposes to shut it. In this case Pandora's box better resembles a nested set of Russian dolls. Open one, and a bevy of demons flies out, forcing you to open the next one, and so forth. Dubya will be the president who led the US into a world civilizational war, although it is more precise to say that civilizational war led the US into it. Many will be the night during his second term that Bush will wish he were still in Texas, and still drunk.
In his own unassuming fashion, Bush is a world-historical figure in Georg Hegel's sense of the term - never mind that he does not know who Hegel was. A more thoughtful man would recoil in horror at the choices before him and fade into paralysis, like the unfortunate president James Buchanan in 1859. World War I was declared by elderly statesmen who had spent their entire careers (since the 1878 Treaty of Berlin) avoiding a European war. By delaying until the Central and Allied powers had sorted themselves out into two equally matched entities, they ensured that the outcome of war would be the mutual destruction of all the combatants.
World War I could not be forever delayed, though. With its declining population, France stood one generation away from helplessness at the hands of the German Empire; with its rapid industrialization, Russia stood one generation away from military parity with Germany. By analogy, if Washington were to sit on its hands until Iran, Pakistan and other Islamic states developed nuclear weapons, the inevitable future conflict would be ruinous beyond imagination. Europe's demographic collapse and the replacement of European Christians by Middle Eastern and North African Muslims present an even deadlier long-term threat.
Washington will choose preemptive war. Narrow-minded but principled, trusting no one's judgment but his own, petty and ruthless, George W Bush is the man of the hour. The Weltgeist will give him a second term.
Among Pandora's nested boxes, the next one to be opened will extend the conflict into Central Asia. Turkey's status as the "sick man of Europe" drew the European powers into World War I, and it is Turkey's present role as the sick man of Central Asia that will draw in the Russians.

Washington, to be sure, would like Russian peacekeepers in the Sunni belt in Iraq: they have a great deal of experience operating in such Muslim hot spots as Bosnia and Kosovo ... One should take note that in all these areas, the Russian peacekeepers enjoyed a very good relationship with the locals, without incidents and terrorist acts. Truthfully, the Russian leadership should consider this option quite carefully.

Bush thinks he needs Putin to prove his strategy right before the American electorate, but Putin will do so precisely because US strategy in the region is dead wrong. Washington believes that stabilizing Iraq will stabilize the entire region: Moscow knows that the Iraq war already has destabilized the region. In the 21st century version of the Great Game, Russia's winning chess move is to replace Turkey as the dominant power in Central Asia.
Russia's most important strategic interest lies in the Black Sea oilfields, and its greatest worry is pan-Turkish agitation along its southern border. It is more probable that Turkey will revert to an Islamic model under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan than it is that Iraq will emerge as a secular democracy on the old Turkish model. Erdogan wants involvement in regional conflict less than anything in the world, except for one thing, which is the humiliation of Turkic populations in adjacent countries. He no more can remain indifferent to the plight of ethnic Turks in the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union than could Nicholas II of Russia abandon the Serbs to Austria in 1914. By the same token, Russia does not want to engage its weakened and demoralized army in a foreign venture. But it no more can remain indifferent to Turkish agitation in the Caucasus and Black Sea than could Austria tolerate Russian subsidies to Serbian terrorists in 1914.
Those are the characters in the next act of the tragedy, and their motivations. The role of tragic lead falls to George W Bush, who will be re-elected and regret it.

10/28/06

patrick fitzgerald or:
just the facts mam elliot spitzer.

Patrick Fitzgerald a crafty kinda guy
Patrick Fitzgerald has informed every leaker in Washington, be apprised of a new form of confidence, we need a new start, this democracy ain't workin -- how could we export what we now have?
He has challenged all those who believe Karl Rove must fall on whatever it is that he has created and with him, many others who want to doom history to repeat itself.

Hugo Baltzer

Our foreign correspondent Stehpen W. Heider sends his weekly report from our MOTHER TUNG COUNTRY, Very Great Britian. He is, in deed and stature, the latter day equivalent of Ed Morrow. "Good Night and Good Luck"

A nursery rhyme, from 1918, during the Spanish Influenza
Epidemic that took out some 50 millions.
I had a little bird,
It's name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flew-Enza.

Ruminating on birds, flu and history.
The bird flu is H5-N1.
Aids is HIV which, in Roman numeral fashion, can be read as H4.
Now, it has been a number of years since I saw the Robin Williams movie
about the gay nightclub owner, but I believe it made some reference to
"Birds" in the title.
It definitely took place in Miami.
I think we are undergoing an extraordinary moment, when all that could go
wrong is conspiring to occur at one place in space and time.
I think you know where this is going, in fact it seems quite obvious to me
now.
Gay men with parakeets in Miami are going to bring down civilisation as we know it,
because the viral strain created by those very special birds is going to be
carried up the east coast by the first major hurricane that hits Florida
moving NNE. Miami, DC, New York and Boston, from which the spread will go
global in a matter of hours –– just an humble submission adding to the body of knowlege

S.W. Heider

Google hard at work jiggering their algorithm for we The People

WWW scari.org

 

 

Notice:
Congratulations on your finding, scari.org
Google has little people in overalls and shoulder holsters, one with a gun, the other with a bible, looking and making entries, jiggering our perception of calm.
"This site has been picked by agenda driven folk that have our best interest in mind. This site: Scari.Org is classified."
Alberto Gonzales
Scari.Org has experienced an extraordinary rendition for the sake of Homeland and those who foster that notion, known or unknown. When the Homeland Folk censor a site like Scari.Org you know that it's a conspiracy or as the Chimera in "The Fly" said, "Please help me."
We are cosmic beings –– fancy carbon. Let us treat ourselves as such -- we can take it. It's guaranteed, we will all come back as part of something.
Why you may ask? Gus O. Kahan

To Fight the Good Fight,
battling Perfidious Angels

If we are to wage war on Radical Islamic Fundamentalism it might be efficacious to consider fighting a broader assault on fundamentalism. If we are to fight the good fight we must attack Christian Fundamentalists and Jewish Fundamentalists as well. There are Hindu Fundamentalists that might slip through the cracks but with snares set around their deities we may arrest the spread of Hindu radicalism too.

Thaddeus Quella

Hegemofascism and the evil twin Islamofascism

Really, to claim we are fighting an Islamofascist insurgency to save the realm?
It would be good to take into account the definition of fascism. We Good God Fearing Folk have contracted to go to battle with a centurion army backed by mercenaries, with an industrial machine coupled to the leadership of our righteous endeavor. We have chosen battle on foreign soil in a foreign land with a corporate profit / loss ledger ruling our actions –– a cost plus war
Hmm.
The Bad God people are convinced the Hegemofascist enterprise is devised to cowe its citizens to belief before understanding. The Hegemofascist is out to exterminate the Islamofacist culture, all for the prize of oil.
Sounds like our enemy is slapping the same behind of the same horse. The battle is over who is facing forward.
Let us get a grip and stop whipping the poor nag: she's been around the block, God Only Knows how many more leagues she is good for. Look up at the darkening sky.

Note: There are more than 14 points to Fascism, 15th point to Fascism is:
Point 15. Willful Ignorance:
A telling detatchment from facts presented. A noted lack of diologue between the public and the power elite. Insistence in the correctness of the course of national leadership. A preoccupation with personal wealth and property, a distraction from the public good to a personal adgenda for personal advantage.

Gus O. Kahan