President Obama-'Mission Accomplished'- (in Iraq)

President Obama Declares Mission Accomplished in Iraq-U.S. Flag Returned to Ft. Bragg
edit | delete | in spotlight
December 15, 2011 04:18 PM EST (Updated: December 15, 2011 04:23 PM EST)
views: 1 | comments: 2
Invite your friends who aren't Gather members to view this post.
About eight years after the start of the 2003 Iraq war to change the regime of the Dictator Saddam Hussein the war finally ends with the last U.S. troops exiting that nation and the U.S. flag ceremonially lowered. President Obama spoke before an audience at Ft. Bragg about the success of the mission, though he and others believed it was an unnecessary conflict.

The Iraqi Government obviously has many challenges. I believe they even had a few of their own protesters at their own Tahrir Square in the Arab Spring. Iran has a new U.S. drone RQ-170 that it can use to spy on the vast U.s. Embassy in Baghdad I suppose, and life has finally returned to normal with only sporadic suicide bombers, high gasoline prices, adversely impacted wetlands and global warming.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/us-soldiers-leaving-iraq-finished/story?id=15154685

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204844504577098711180800398.html

There were more than 4000 U.S. combat fatalities in the Iraq mission, with hundreds of thousands of injuries from delayed combat stress syndrome to concussions, and so forth that will require a lifetime of public expense to treat. It is lucky that Obamacare may exist to pay for treatment for life for traumatized veterans in counseling and so forth because the V.A. is often under-funded. Rather than the quoted 1 trillion dollar cost of the war, the real cost over the future is anticipated to be another two trillion for a cost of 3 trillion dollars. Probably a super-sized V.A. system expanded to include treatment of all the poor citizens would have been cheaper and more practical than the Obamacare plan-and there may be another war out there over the temporal horizon.

In Reply to 'What is the Purpose of Religion?' etc.

For much of human civilization the effort to make life easier or better; to get food when hungry easier through agriculture than hunting and migrating, to find a cure for cancer rather than stoically croaking in agony, to have a nation driving cars and watching big screen TV’s and football instead of inventing super-conducting electromagnetic highways or jogging super-marathons to work-that sort of seek-consumer-comfort project has been an essential goal of western civilization and that of much of the rest. It is why one fixes a leaky roof, makes war on bedbugs across Europe and generates electrical power. The revision necessary today is to accomplish that without destroying the ecosphere or reducing the quality of life for the poor and middle class.

The most strong men, those using steroids and performance enhancing drugs, want huge pay for playing kids ball games in order to have huge luxury things, pay low taxes and receive applause, glory and maybe enhanced dating opportunities, admission to the growing planetary aristocracy of elite millionaires and billionaires etc. Intellectually strong men (and women) might want some things to be made easy and others to be made more difficult. Who wants easy illegal drug importation into California from Mexico, or automatic rifles sent to Mexico? I think it would be great if it were easy to fly on a spaceship all over the Universe. Working to make difficult or impossible things easy has led inventors to try to make it so

In ages past of course people like Achilles wanted a warriors death as noble. Battlefield death avoided cancer and a variety of unpleasant, less glorious and unprofitable alternative ways to die.

If one has comparative social privations one wants things as easy as one's peers if possible.

The coefficient of physical, mental and moral adversity varies from circumstance to circumstance socially and geo-historically. Seeking after comfort as an end in itself can be as dangerous to one's well being philosophically as too much social and environmental stress. Of course those following The Lord have a mission in progress allowing them to rate challenges with a prioritization of values not the same as those with rather epicurean goals I would think.

'What is the purpose of religion' places the word religion into a class itself as an existing thing. If one is a sociologist one might examine them from an entirely empirical perspective and note ala B.F. Skinner some of the amoebic purposes of conformable behavior in each respective case. Philosophically speaking it may be inappropriate to generalize outside of the historical context or in disregard of it on the purpose of some religions assuming that all have equal functions within the meta-class of religions.

I believe the word religion is derived from a French word-meaning liege or allegiance. Christ had a mission to the world's lost different from that of other religions. One should at least make a survey of religions to learn why followers of particular beliefs regarded the works of the founder as worth devotion.

What is the purpose of life is a larger question that entails human responses to life in sub-unit paradigms such as 'what is the purpose of religion'. Some religious actions such as Islam may have been created for political organizing and power, yet one cannot assume that human knowledge has all knowledge of the purpose of religion if the origin is atemporal and divine. The search for the ultimate particle-a Higgs possibly, or a Higgs field as a field giving value and form to all other particles paradoxically itself possibly deterministic and not an all-possible world locations continuum before downloaded to observation. That is a Higgs field that creates solid state quantum particle selections entangling and excluding sufficient probabilities of being at other locations to statistically create the apparent Universe of solid state matter, has a comparable sort of uncertainty for human observers to us intrinsically that substantial knowledge of a Divine Being and His purpose have for clerics and mystics enquiring into the nature of God-one has a lot of uncertainty even if the topic is fascinating.

Capture of Drone RQ-170 Leaves Unanswered Questions

When the Iranian evidently brought the secret C.I.A. operated aircraft in for a safe landing perhaps by skyjacking the wireless controls or given the power to fly the aircraft by an insider espionage agent it is remarkable that the U.S. Government simply gave up power and had no dead-man device inside the detonate the air vehicle.

The entire idea of reducing large size aircraft with high radar profiles or small stealthy size for surveillance missions is somewhat expensive. Besides drone aircraft having some sort of explosive package that goes off if it flies below a specified altitude without being in U.S. government control, maybe U.S. legislators unable to get full employment and a better standard of living with no public debt within a reasonable time could be made to detonate to and a new set of legislators installed again with built in performance packages for incentive.

Some sort of a public employment, environmental and economic quality of life index made with public debt cognizance and so forth could be formed to rate any given congress on performance.

Very expensive fixed wing aircraft that are spy planes might be augmented by ultra-light transparent or lighter-than aircraft with miniaturized electronics and launched from large air-force planes by the thousands to have a very low radar signature yet be far cheaper. Maybe one could develop disposable cheap spy aircraft to deliver small amounts of emergency food supplies to starving populations without runways as well. That would be an interesting experimental opportunity.

Ideas About the Omnipotence of God

The neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus wrote of the idea of The One in his Enneads. That concept of omnipotence of the One is consistent with what one might think about The One from a human point of view as contingent beings.

Cosmologists and physicists today have several paradigms regarding the nature of the solid-state matter-energy of the Universal phenomenality. It may be an exclusionary probability entanglement of the quantum world of all-possible worldlines of each waveform. One may view a Feynman diagram of a one- loop process within a field (probably in more than four dimensions) and extrapolate to a Higgs field donating mass or energy to the standard model's particles. The One however is initial meta-field at some point, and it always seems to me that the renormalization of philosophical explanations of cosmology with quantum mechanical foundation returns to the enigmatic monism of the One as well.

Quantifying things as referents linguistically or paradigmatically within Quinian categories of lexicons ontologically speaking seems a normal language practice. One might quantify a universe or universes in the abstract, quantify them as of infinite extension in space or time, or avoid specifying any sort of certainty in location or time and space as a routine part of theory. When one makes an idea description of all that a universe is the meta-paradigmatic boundaries of the description are cloudy and like the maps of the pre-Columbian era full of unknown shores. Uncertainty and incompleteness seem like quanta themselves that one might classify in some way.

It is difficult to imagine a universe made with quarks, strings, membranes, fields, monads, spirit, matter, energy or whatever as anything less than a monistic phenomenality given some pluralism for human observers with a process with uncertain local and non-local boundaries. The quantum universe and physical processes that occur before or after anything could be said to exist, or while a Universe exist is one aspect of the monistic power. For the indefinable God that emits or permits the Universe to appear the contingent events are his willed emanations malleable to fact of existence.

Without requiring pantheism, the pluralism of a Universe and quantum explanations, or field explanations of membrane and string phenomenalities is transparent and subjective within the will of God.

Use and Reference Theories of Meaning

Well, I have a couple of minutes to write something about the topic.

Wittgenstein of course was an early linguistic philosopher, son of the richest man in Europe, who served admirably in the First World War as a soldier in Europe. He actually worked on the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus while stationed in Italy. That was a little like Descartes in some respects who was stationed in Bavaria as a mercenary and wrote his Discourse on a Method after thinking contemplatively in a sauna. Descartes was never in love with a British fighter pilot though, and Wittgenstein was.

I was rather shocked to learn of that eccentricity of the philosopher whom was also a competent engineer. I believe his wealthy background and wierd life brought him to examine language for-itself as some sort of solid ground, though of course shfting and difficult to define linguistically speaking. His fighter jock was killed in the war.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/

Wittgenstein’s work after he moved to Cambridge as a PhD with Russell's help included writing the Blue and Brown books-those express his ideas about language rather well. He has a rabbit reffered to by natives as a 'gavagai'. By association a language translator learns what the meanings of gavagai might be and then forms a lexicon. Wittgenstein also uses the example of meanings such as 'bring a brick' in brick laying parlance. I reallize this is not a very technical discussion. Good reading.

Word meaning origins as explained within a philosophical context however may be found described a little more completely with W.V.O. Quine's 'Philosophy of Logic'-read the first few chapters, then try his 'Ontological Relativity'.

Quine placed all word structures within ontologies that may be regarded as sets. Sets of course have the elements of the set as potential referents and meanings. Wittgenstein associated word use with situation that conveyed a particular meaning to a given word use. Quine can acknowledge that implicitly however as a logician he has taken a look at the construction of language from phonemes and morphemes and built up from that an explanation of elements of interest to a logician rather than a grammarian the points of interest in discussing truth.

Intentional theories of meaning versus the extensional in some ways have a psychological component that was elaborated by empiricism working along Immanuel Kant's epistemological distinction of categories and meaning. Philosophically the location of meaning-in the mind or in the world, and the location of qualities such as objects seen, is a perennial topic perhaps resolved by quantum mechanics a little. Ideas that are of the mind such as 'I don't like strawberry pudding' differ from ideas with external referents such as scientists like. Extensional ideas refer to the material world while intentional ideas have a psychological and subjective component.

W.V.O. Quine of course abolished the analytic-synthetic distinction in his ’Two Dogmas of Empiricism'. Empiricism was given a real punch on the jaw from which it hasn't recovered. Quine helpfully provided his 'Ontological Relativity' to explain how language has a use and simultaneous reference basis. I enjoy reading Quine now and then and recommend his work.

.

Senate Should Vote to Defend Rights of Americans from Arrest and Exfiltration by U.S. Military

The U.S. Senate voted 99 to 1 not to clarify or defend the right of U.S. citizens to have due process of law when accused by the government of criminal or terrorist activity. Instead, because the laws are made by the rich and the rich were attacked by Al Qa'eda on 9-11, the Bush II provision allowing possible arrest of U.S. citizen sympathizers, associates or facilitators of Al Qa'eda and/or possible other activities deemed terrorist by the authorities greased the skids of the commoner Americans for rightless ransacking by black-bagging military exfiltration squads, anonymous foreign detention, stateless torture and military tribunals in-camera (secret). Seems like a rotten development.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/us/senate-declines-to-resolve-issue-of-american-qaeda-suspects-arrested-in-us.html

I understand well that overpaid politicians with bad bills ought to be given extraordinary rendition and water boarded at Guantanamo Bay until they come to their senses. Newt Gingrich perhaps might give back the Freddie Mac 1.6 million dollar payment for working up a history profile or whatever for the CEO as 14 billion dollars was pilfered and lost as bad investments (how do you get it done Newt?), yet ordinary citizens should be free from such perfidy even if they plan to revolt against the government and need to develop a plan of attack.

It should not be illegal to plan to revolt against the government especially if it is fiction used for gaming purposes. War gaming in the present should be as acceptable socially as re-enacting civil war battles. How otherwise could new Commandants of West Point make the difficult decision to field a coup and restore a good government?

The idea that the 58,000 millionaires of Boston and the U.S. military are in some way good enough citizens to have the right to arrest and exfiltrate U.S. citizens from Harvard U. for waterboarding interrogations because they have knowledge of networks of Palestinian and Somali terrorist life ways is silly. President Bush II's incompetent post-war reconstruction plans for Iraq did more harm to the U.S. economy than a dozen flights crashing into the Pentagon and other sinks of U.S. taxpayer funding ever could. Maybe a President should be exfiltrated to Gitmo for waterboarding to reveal if he intentionally planned to run up such a military debt that social spending could be cut-such wickedness lurks in the halls of the rich and of defense contractors!

The right to plan revolts even if they aren't used is as fundamental for American liberty as the right to own guns. Without plans it would be impossible to have a civil war to remove an aristocracy today-and the founders believed that Americans implicitly have the right to revolt against corrupt, unjust, capital concentrating, deficit spending, oppressive rotten government as they did themselves.

In times past actual revolutions against the rich and the feudal over-vampires have required actual violence to get on. Though the United States has entered the age of moral and economic perfection with perfected interpretation of the scripture of Adam Smith with impeccable exegesis by economist-monks of the Chicago School, and hence peace and domestic tranquility shall forever ensue, one day some substantial element of the population may want to roll the heads of the rich again. Americans must protect that right-of-revolt for future generations since it a foundational element of liberty, equality and social justice as well as of full employment and good pay for all citizens.

Economics take note of the comparative thriftiness of revolutions. In the Al Qa'eda incident the assymetric economic warfare was entirely in favor of the cost-conscious Al Qa'eda, while in the Libyan revolution the expenses of the revolutionaries was far less than the historical defense spending budget of the Khaddafi administration.

Al Qa'eda may be a foreign terrorist organization-in translation it simply means 'the base'. So if a domestic terrorist militia does not affiliate with a foreign terrorist militia or lashkar then they are free from arrest by covert operators with HK's, night vision optics, niitrogen grenades for flash-freezing and so on?

Reason does allow U.S. military forces to help bag really tough clumps of terrorists in the U.S.A. if need be, as they could be called in to fight a Godzilla after the monster slaughtered L.A. Sheriff Department warriors. In regard to military arrests of American citizens thought to comprise a threat to the class interests of the rich through whatever means really threaten the rich (raising their taxes to 90%?), that should just never happen. If they are American citizens it just has to be good enough to give them a regular trial and then let them go to plan their next nativist uprising against the occupation forces of evil repressing the masses.

The Senate should pass a defense of civil rights act that clarifies the point that none of the rights in the constitution can be abridged and transmogrified into neat little pieces of paper airplanes like meaningless zen koans that float through space without leaving taxable footprints. American citizens should never be removed from the United States involuntarily for any reason unless to help former congressmen plan how to create more funding for defense contractors while cutting taxes for defense contractors.

The magic world of military torturers that Senator Graham seems to believe is supervised by a more dependable kind of citizen or foreign guest soldier/proxy (though none dare call it torture) is an inappropriate location for American citizens to have their legal questions examined. It is easy to understand that empowered government apes of righteousness beleive they can do no wrong and should not be summarily executed for abrogating the rights of U.S. citizens, and I would probably feel the same way too if I used steroids or was all juiced up to have no respect for the U.S. legal system. Recursion of righteousness inquisitors and degrees of torture appropriate for those thought to be threatening to the rich are tough questions for the government to secretly answer and to leave vague.

I might suggest that if the incompetent border security against illegal immigrants was corrected, and if more stringent standards were used for awarding citizenship to a constellation of five passport holding Americans such that they could have just one if naturalized, it would reduce the number of technical citizens lusting to drop a nuclear bomb on Washington D.C. more than regular politicians of a few foreign countries.

The U.S. legal system should leave no ambiguity about the rights of U.S. citizens to have due process of law in a public court by a jury of their peers. The needless and corrupting drift into the dark side of the force is an infarction to justice and a corruption of the spirit of freedom that was the purpose of the American experiment in democracy. It is quite reasonable and desirable that military powers to arrest and exfiltrate U.S. citizens beyond the jurisdiction of the state and federal laws within the territorial boundaries of the United States be defended against rather than supported. Supporters of such insidious evils are more of a 'them' caliber that raised the rebel flag at Ft. Sumpter than defenders of the American way.

Much Anticpated Higgs Particle Announcement Mañana

The CERN announcement tomorrow that people speculate will announce better evidence of the existence of a Higgs Boson particle of between 90 and 40 GeV yet possibly as much as 140 GeV will not herald the discovery of a 'god' particle embedded in solid state physics as a concatenated probability association of quantum uncertatinty. It would indicate that particle accelerators and theoretical physicists have taken one more step to fill in the sketch of the ways and forms that quantum energy takes in the Universe.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-does-the-higgs-boson

The Higgs field and its particle the Higgs boson are described by some as a new kind of mass, yet it has existed since the inception of the Universe within a given cosmological paradigm. Those cosmological theories change from time to time providing deeper knowledge yet not necessarily evolving in some linear, hierarchical order of consistency.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle

A Higgs field is in some ways comparable to an electromagnetic field. The standard model of physics differs from string theory, which offers a deeper explanation for the values of quantum particles. The Higgs boson should have certain values in order to fit logically into the paradigm of values of other quantum particles. The Higgs field is believed to be more fundamental than the other particles, masses and fields and in fact to give them their mass. In other words the particles of the standard model are regarded as localized expressions of the Higgs Field. The Higgs boson too get's its mass from the field.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Theoretical_overview

I have no idea how physicists extrapolate the existence of uncertainty within a primordial Higgs field. Perhaps uncertainty is local within the universal non-locality of the field.

The Higgs field was early in cosmological inflation theory regarded as a possible source of the energy in Guth's theory. Now the Higgs field isn't now considered a cause of the initial or present expansion of space-time. Knowledge of dark energy-the lamda force- and its relation to a Higgs field (if either exist) are full of uncertainty.