Robert E. Lee is an interesting historical figure, and your comments are somewhat paradoxical at least for me, an perhaps a bit biased too in a way that misses the salient features of what most people believe the American Civil war 'was about' regardless of if my 'concept' of what the causes of the civil war were 'qualify as such'.
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Character references for Robert E. Lee perhaps could not be made to support the thesis that he was a loyal federalist and was a fervant Virginian patriot that also felt more in common with any state that supported slavery as a matter of coincidence, yet it would be disingenuous to advance the notion that in the absence of slavery in the southern states the confederacy would have been formed in order to have the opportunity to war upon the northern states.
***
Alternatively Robert E. Lee, in spite of being 'just' a Virginian patriot perhaps with a strong admiration for George Washington, might have felt that by falsely leading, or rather misleading the south into a series of nominal defeats he could keep the union together. Mr. Lee perhaps was aware or believed that some die-hard supremists, firmly established would not yield ground without a fight.
***
In considering these people, it is interesting to compare them with the present generation that outsources, globalizes, decays national infrastructure and loses comparative advantages in education, transport, fuel technologies and so forth while building a vast budget deficit. That generation seems to have little regard for national energy indendence, nor for the U.S. environment, it's borders and etc. in their willy nilly abandonment of democratic conservatism for a pure liberal economic globalism that jettions any sort of meaningful patriotism at all-Adam Smith did not feel it very necessary to state that national interests are to be served by capitalism instead of displaced by capitalism.
*****
I appreciate your taking the time to respond to this point about history however; many would have no interest at all. In my recent bike journey through Virginia I crossed a place of a battle between Grant and Lee at a railroad junction north of Richmond that Lee sought to hold, and that Grant wished to take returning from the 'wilderness campaign' in order to facilitate logistics and personnel supply objectives. Encountering extensive defensive earthworks/bunkers manned by Lee's forces, Grant quit the battle after a couple of assaults and moved on to ward the Chesapeake some dozens of miles distant for maritime resupply I believe.
****
While General Lee may have learned from his mission as a member of Scott's march to Mexico City during the Mexican War (?), the earthworks use and value for defender's advantages were not lost on Grant. In recent reading of the third battle at Ypres during 1919, the author-a Mr. Wolfe, made the valid point that the planners of the First World War campaigns failed to learn from the past about how to deal with the new weapons that plagued the infantry and slaughtered cavalry from defensive position that even artillery had difficulty penetrating. The trench warfare went on 4 years of course, and countless lives were lost by the millions as offensives could not pass defensive earthworks.
****
Eventually it was discovered that tanks on dry ground might break through the lines of machine guns and pill boxes, but General Haig nearly to the last believed the right method was human wave assaults following days of artillery bombardment, gas attack etc to gain some ground and eventually horse cavalry could plunge through and flank the enemy wreaking havoc. Fifty years after the American civil war the best Generals of the non-American participants of world war one could not learn the simple lesson that Ulysses Grant learned quite swiftly in a couple of days. I think he was a much better general than General Lee, who had no reasonable plan to stop the northern industrial or manpower capacity, and instead relied on domination of poor whites and enslaved blacks to prop up an elitist ruling class that sought to retreat not only from the union but from the global war on human slavery and serfdom, which had each become fully eclipsed by industrialization, communications, transport and political advances that could not allow subjugated humanity to be a drag on people better off attempting to win their rights civilly against wealthy corrupters of capitalism that sought to transform it into an anti-democratic monopoly as conservative as monarchy if it were possible.
****
If I recollect Robert E. Lee attended West point, which was an American institution, and hence he might have had a bit of loyalty toward the union sufficient to overwhelm his tendency toward treason or sedition rather if he had been a bit more inclined toward humanitarianism.
Today the Department of Defense has a British HQ'd company building the Bradlye Fighting vehicle, and elements of the joint strike fighter and much more. The DOD has a major premise that defense implements should be built in America, and in a global environment in which Boeing sells jets to Asia instead of to Europe by a factor of 4 to 1, and cell phones are global and cheap, the natural self-interest of liberal capitalists is to invest abroad and create a global sales and production market minimizing the U.S.A. to one puny element albeit with a lot of history and fairly well of people flooded by immigrants. The government unfortunately doesn't invest or encourage sufficient investment in national infrastructure and technologies that liberate America from foreign debt. The role of the government is to keep the nation from freign indebtedness and corrupting permanent foregin alliances that negatively impact sovereignty. Perhaps Mr. Lee's sort of sedition is obsolete in the modern global social structure moving toward one dictatorship of Satan (a Christian point of view), or at least of a proletariat with an elite cadre of corporatist leadership in a warming world-who can say--yet at least Robert E. Lee was aware of his sedition I should think, and of the implicit pimping of human life that ownership of others entails.
****
One might find legal arguments about the causes of the civil war not coincident with the actual causes, and then argue that some abstract desire for secession by an American state was going to be tested in the laboratory of war and death as id Mr. lee were some sort of satanic lunatic, instead of a strong supporter of slavery and a ancient southern oligarchy that sought to retain it's traditional domination of black slaves through terror. Of course I am not an authority by any means on the civil war, and just clep exam'd American history I without studying for it, having received the general American education and occasional forays into that subject.
****
As a citizen of the far west the civil war was of course far removed, and more recent history in addition to that of the Nez Pierce and other native groups, George Vancouver, Yamamoto, Jedediah Smith, the Boeings and other individuals of note were of more historical interest as far as they had been prominent in local history instead of the Lee's and others of the failed confederacy. In the state of Washington though, cherry pie was highly valued on Washington's Birthday.
12/30/05
Intelligent Design is Smarter than Dumb or No Design
Intelligent Design is Smarter than Dumb or No Design Complexity such as might be found in quantum mechanics, and human lack of understanding of it entails no necessary correlation to God’s construction of the universe, nor does it especially provide necessary certainty about the actual order of assembly and composition that the universe has for-itself.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle seems a needed premise for freedom of range of motion, and uncertainty seems a needed element as far as human consciousness goes, or rather subjective epistemology of the species, if they aren’t to be omniscient themselves. Absolute certainty tends to be an attribute of omniscience, and the entire epistemological subject harkens back to the monism/pluralism researches existing from the era of pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides to the more modern metaphysician F.H. Bradley.
In reading more of a book by the philosopher Dembski on complexity and specialization in design, or intelligent design, I have gained a better idea of what intelligent design means from the point of view of the contemporary philosophical researchers in that area. For one thing I believe that Intelligent Design is a definite scientific hypothesis. The search for intelligent designs in nature can be approached scientifically an on an empirical basis. Determining if the hypothesis has valid observational evidence correlations is another matter for scientific investigation.
Dembski rightly pointed out the criteria used by SETI or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence as an example of a search for intelligent design. If intelligent design does exist anywhere in nature that is observable, then it would be rash and ignorant to disqualify a priori any possibility that it could exist. Intelligent design may exist not only as a consequence of one cause within the logic of necessity or modal logical of course, but might instead have been caused by extra-terrestrials or even human beings from the future or past I suppose. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to conceive of nanoparticle manipulation of material structures of the Universe on a large scale for purposes of war or peace. Even now a wave of nano-particles from another galaxy could be enroute to the Milky Way to attack and convert it like yeast into alcohol into some form that would have profit potential for intergalactic holiday shoppers.
Intelligent design as a philosophical criterion can be researched from a number of perspectives, including that of the anthropic principle and the fine-structure constants of the Universe. M-Theory provides a many universes natural selection alternative to the unique phenomenality of this one Universe of course, yet natural selection is difficult to demonstrate in biology as the causative agent for evolution if one tries to pin it just onto d.n.a. or cellular membranes perhaps...that is, so far as I know as a non-biologist, it is still possible that natural selection hasn't a proven technical history in biology that plainly accounts for the development of all life and it's permutation. Instead it may be that natural selection and neo-Darwinism has an historical inertia that isn't adequately filled in by scientific facts, and alternatively people provide straw man arguments about creation and a short-lived 10,000 year old universe as the alternative giving the preponderance of evidence decision to the neo-Darwinians.
Cosmology though is a fascinating subject for research, and I think one must be careful about making extrapolations for intelligent design on the basis of selected physical facts, and also not to use selected facts as evidence for a dumb design of the Universe.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle seems a needed premise for freedom of range of motion, and uncertainty seems a needed element as far as human consciousness goes, or rather subjective epistemology of the species, if they aren’t to be omniscient themselves. Absolute certainty tends to be an attribute of omniscience, and the entire epistemological subject harkens back to the monism/pluralism researches existing from the era of pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides to the more modern metaphysician F.H. Bradley.
In reading more of a book by the philosopher Dembski on complexity and specialization in design, or intelligent design, I have gained a better idea of what intelligent design means from the point of view of the contemporary philosophical researchers in that area. For one thing I believe that Intelligent Design is a definite scientific hypothesis. The search for intelligent designs in nature can be approached scientifically an on an empirical basis. Determining if the hypothesis has valid observational evidence correlations is another matter for scientific investigation.
Dembski rightly pointed out the criteria used by SETI or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence as an example of a search for intelligent design. If intelligent design does exist anywhere in nature that is observable, then it would be rash and ignorant to disqualify a priori any possibility that it could exist. Intelligent design may exist not only as a consequence of one cause within the logic of necessity or modal logical of course, but might instead have been caused by extra-terrestrials or even human beings from the future or past I suppose. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to conceive of nanoparticle manipulation of material structures of the Universe on a large scale for purposes of war or peace. Even now a wave of nano-particles from another galaxy could be enroute to the Milky Way to attack and convert it like yeast into alcohol into some form that would have profit potential for intergalactic holiday shoppers.
Intelligent design as a philosophical criterion can be researched from a number of perspectives, including that of the anthropic principle and the fine-structure constants of the Universe. M-Theory provides a many universes natural selection alternative to the unique phenomenality of this one Universe of course, yet natural selection is difficult to demonstrate in biology as the causative agent for evolution if one tries to pin it just onto d.n.a. or cellular membranes perhaps...that is, so far as I know as a non-biologist, it is still possible that natural selection hasn't a proven technical history in biology that plainly accounts for the development of all life and it's permutation. Instead it may be that natural selection and neo-Darwinism has an historical inertia that isn't adequately filled in by scientific facts, and alternatively people provide straw man arguments about creation and a short-lived 10,000 year old universe as the alternative giving the preponderance of evidence decision to the neo-Darwinians.
Cosmology though is a fascinating subject for research, and I think one must be careful about making extrapolations for intelligent design on the basis of selected physical facts, and also not to use selected facts as evidence for a dumb design of the Universe.
Free Will and Determinism are Compatible
One can write about innumerable degrees and meanings of freedom as well as of will. Obviously will seems to indicate for-itself a sort of implicit determinism to enact beliefs or ideas exclusive of random chaotic subjective experience, so in that regard free will is reliant upon a self-determinism that may or may not be contingent upon anything else.
Having read the Tractatus logico philosophicus long ago and moved on to other works in logic and language including Witt's Blue and Brown Books, and works of Strawson and Quine, I appreciate the notions of words and means and their relations to forming expressions that convey ideas about what people mean in words. That is I intend to say I don't want to get too technical and hung up on Kantian noumenon, or empiricist dichotomies with analytic philosophy and the relation of words to objects. Instead I am content for now to just let a sort of perennial philosophical naive realism serve as the context in which I will discuss will and determinism. In fact I don't intend to go too far into the subject here because of time limitations in a public library.
Free will perhaps might be added to the entire notion of what freedom is, and one might fairly include biblical references from the new testament on that subject, yet of course there are those with inherent bias against 'religion' or 'theology' and on the premise that the logos or word of God is Jesus Christ, they would 'a priori' exclude discussion of the Truth...oh well...to return to a plain naive empirical ground for discussion of what freedom means in order to determine if it's addition to the word 'will' in a phrase has any meaning.
Will is an aspect of consciousness or sentience rather than attribute of inanimate objects. When one posits 'does one have free will' it must needs be a relational concept...'does one' have free will in relation to some choice a or b, some non-choice, some activity or inactivity, or is one the prime mover of oneself in relation to the subjective being that one is as a Universally contingent being (one could not after all exist before the Universe (only Jesus claimed that, sort of, when he said before Abraham was, I am') and instead must exist contingently grounded within the existing non-self universe.
Does one have 'free will' in relation to other social persons, or in relation to the Universe and inanimate objects, or in relation to a pre-determinism within a theophysical or teleogical context? These are some of the possible relational contexts of free will...including the obvious 'Can one travel to Mars next week, or travel to the past of far into the future right now?
In reading a science news article December 17, 2005 I was impressed by an article on infinite minimal surfaces that mathematicians have modeled. A two-sided helix is one such.
http://www.msri.org/about/sgp/jim/geom/minimal/library/helicoidg1p/index.html
These helixes have an obvious resemblance to d.n.a. models and thus the minimal structures and perhaps evolution that they might take, yet they also comprise as minimal structures some of the forms such as a saddle shaped universe that cosmology might present. Interestingly cosmological shapes and minimal structures might fit in a paradigm with d.n.a. structures, yet biological evolution, dimensions represented in math and so forth offer a sort of deterministic paradigm based on boundary "conditions' perhaps?
Boundary conditions or parameters of being seem to implicitly entail set values that pre-determine possible ranges of 'will', conditions of being and such for both sentient and non-sentient existents.
The Higgs Field that is posited to have pre-existed the big bang or inflaton as an infinitesimally small field in perfect balance that became out of balance through quantum uncertainty and expanded at superluminal speed for 10-35th second is posited to have set the initial boundary conditions for the later locations of clumps of matter that became the galaxies of the Universe and I suppose the minimal surface shape segments cut out of infinite surfaces metaphorically speaking that phnomenalize as d.n.a. helixes.
I suppose it might seem that free will or life is supported by determinism, yet one still has all these unsolved initial boundary conditions that Christians such as myself like to attribute to God based on the scriptures such as one finds in Genesis and 'let there be light'. In the initial Higgs field what set of boundary parameters allowed that quantum uncertainty to exist as a facet of the uninflated 'universe'?
Uncertainty is a necessary aspect of free will, and perhaps of determinism too, if one takes Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness' as necessary reciprocals of one another. The uncertainty principle appears as well to be an unavoidable compliment of quantum mechanical forms for the location of minimal forms of mass 'existing' or seeming to exist for observers in-the-Universe.
A particle or string seems to collapse upon observation to a speed or location yet not each from an infinite number of possible unobserved locations. Each particle seems to have a property of being quantum entangled with another poarticle at a distance in a spooky way allowing 'information' to be transferred faster than light. The grounding of particles seems ultimately to be beyond Planck length sizes on the smaller, unobservable side and so the infinities in relativity theory and quantum mechanics that are eliminated when they are formed together into a functioning 'string' super-theory transfer the mechanics mathematically into an observable range of smaller alternative 'dimensions relying on theory, or eliminate a dimension or two and posit the world as information in fewer dimensions that seem like more. The infinite minimal surface conditions or analogues of D.N.A. helixes and perhaps curved space-time in an Einstein Desitter universe of a saddle shaped seem deontologically selected for temporal use by sentient human beings (oopps! sorry about that anthropic principle interpolation here) to usefully ponder while in existance and thinking about cosmological and philosophical topics.
Ranges of freedom are of course contingent, or within the problem of the criterion as Roderick Chisholm put it, in fields of motion and perhaps will. The relation of human will or conscious thought to various inhibiting or influencing factors are obviously useful to consider. In the range of logic or math one may strike similar elements from lateral sides in order to simplify, and one may in a sense strike the Universal criterion of determinism/indeterminism for humanity from social and subjective or individual relations without damage at that level...inately all human beings have either natural determinism or indeterminism regarding free will (Jesus offers salvation from that 'original sin' and allows one to overcome the natural determinism of a fallen universal criterion beseting humanity with temporality and such). Social freedom and the freedom to overcome natural challenges in the environment are proximal concerns regarding human free will(the Republican leadership seems to fail environmental intelligence presently-Science News reports the Greenland glaciers are doubling their melting rates over a few years, and of course polluting the oceans can be much more difficult to clean up than air pollution--the oceans can stay polluted hundreds of thousands of years perhaps).
One can consider if one has free will if someone has one in 'chains', or if the media target one as an individual and persecute making a mockery of the constitution and the 'quaint' notion of a society living by laws equally applied to all. Speaking of which, is the Presidents advocay of torture, torture prisons abroad, and wiretaps on Americans without substantive congressional and judicial oversight a good way to promote U.S. constitutional and democratic values? Even if their is a terrorist dangers a good communicater ought to be explaining that but equally and convincingly expressing the vital need for a free and just democratic society and not some sort of intimidating corporatist entity. Japan's stock market is 70% owned by corporations, and individuals have very little to say about the real directions of what is in some senses a neo-corporatist state that the U.S. administration seems to want to emulate in several ways as ift has a sharing and caring economic relationship with socialist neo-authoritarians in China.To finish this up, determinism is contingent and yet necessary in several different relationship protocols of being, yet at every infinite level of micro and macro cosmology there seems to be an essential reliance on uncertainty, with being starkly accompanied by non-being, and of course non-being, non-space, and such difficult concepts can't be actualized within the criterion of being.Determinism and indeterminism coexist like being and nothingness, the temporal and the eternal, and perhaps anisotropic directions of time with physically reverseable or isotropic field theories as imaginable yet unrealizable possible circumstances.
Having read the Tractatus logico philosophicus long ago and moved on to other works in logic and language including Witt's Blue and Brown Books, and works of Strawson and Quine, I appreciate the notions of words and means and their relations to forming expressions that convey ideas about what people mean in words. That is I intend to say I don't want to get too technical and hung up on Kantian noumenon, or empiricist dichotomies with analytic philosophy and the relation of words to objects. Instead I am content for now to just let a sort of perennial philosophical naive realism serve as the context in which I will discuss will and determinism. In fact I don't intend to go too far into the subject here because of time limitations in a public library.
Free will perhaps might be added to the entire notion of what freedom is, and one might fairly include biblical references from the new testament on that subject, yet of course there are those with inherent bias against 'religion' or 'theology' and on the premise that the logos or word of God is Jesus Christ, they would 'a priori' exclude discussion of the Truth...oh well...to return to a plain naive empirical ground for discussion of what freedom means in order to determine if it's addition to the word 'will' in a phrase has any meaning.
Will is an aspect of consciousness or sentience rather than attribute of inanimate objects. When one posits 'does one have free will' it must needs be a relational concept...'does one' have free will in relation to some choice a or b, some non-choice, some activity or inactivity, or is one the prime mover of oneself in relation to the subjective being that one is as a Universally contingent being (one could not after all exist before the Universe (only Jesus claimed that, sort of, when he said before Abraham was, I am') and instead must exist contingently grounded within the existing non-self universe.
Does one have 'free will' in relation to other social persons, or in relation to the Universe and inanimate objects, or in relation to a pre-determinism within a theophysical or teleogical context? These are some of the possible relational contexts of free will...including the obvious 'Can one travel to Mars next week, or travel to the past of far into the future right now?
In reading a science news article December 17, 2005 I was impressed by an article on infinite minimal surfaces that mathematicians have modeled. A two-sided helix is one such.
http://www.msri.org/about/sgp/jim/geom/minimal/library/helicoidg1p/index.html
These helixes have an obvious resemblance to d.n.a. models and thus the minimal structures and perhaps evolution that they might take, yet they also comprise as minimal structures some of the forms such as a saddle shaped universe that cosmology might present. Interestingly cosmological shapes and minimal structures might fit in a paradigm with d.n.a. structures, yet biological evolution, dimensions represented in math and so forth offer a sort of deterministic paradigm based on boundary "conditions' perhaps?
Boundary conditions or parameters of being seem to implicitly entail set values that pre-determine possible ranges of 'will', conditions of being and such for both sentient and non-sentient existents.
The Higgs Field that is posited to have pre-existed the big bang or inflaton as an infinitesimally small field in perfect balance that became out of balance through quantum uncertainty and expanded at superluminal speed for 10-35th second is posited to have set the initial boundary conditions for the later locations of clumps of matter that became the galaxies of the Universe and I suppose the minimal surface shape segments cut out of infinite surfaces metaphorically speaking that phnomenalize as d.n.a. helixes.
I suppose it might seem that free will or life is supported by determinism, yet one still has all these unsolved initial boundary conditions that Christians such as myself like to attribute to God based on the scriptures such as one finds in Genesis and 'let there be light'. In the initial Higgs field what set of boundary parameters allowed that quantum uncertainty to exist as a facet of the uninflated 'universe'?
Uncertainty is a necessary aspect of free will, and perhaps of determinism too, if one takes Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness' as necessary reciprocals of one another. The uncertainty principle appears as well to be an unavoidable compliment of quantum mechanical forms for the location of minimal forms of mass 'existing' or seeming to exist for observers in-the-Universe.
A particle or string seems to collapse upon observation to a speed or location yet not each from an infinite number of possible unobserved locations. Each particle seems to have a property of being quantum entangled with another poarticle at a distance in a spooky way allowing 'information' to be transferred faster than light. The grounding of particles seems ultimately to be beyond Planck length sizes on the smaller, unobservable side and so the infinities in relativity theory and quantum mechanics that are eliminated when they are formed together into a functioning 'string' super-theory transfer the mechanics mathematically into an observable range of smaller alternative 'dimensions relying on theory, or eliminate a dimension or two and posit the world as information in fewer dimensions that seem like more. The infinite minimal surface conditions or analogues of D.N.A. helixes and perhaps curved space-time in an Einstein Desitter universe of a saddle shaped seem deontologically selected for temporal use by sentient human beings (oopps! sorry about that anthropic principle interpolation here) to usefully ponder while in existance and thinking about cosmological and philosophical topics.
Ranges of freedom are of course contingent, or within the problem of the criterion as Roderick Chisholm put it, in fields of motion and perhaps will. The relation of human will or conscious thought to various inhibiting or influencing factors are obviously useful to consider. In the range of logic or math one may strike similar elements from lateral sides in order to simplify, and one may in a sense strike the Universal criterion of determinism/indeterminism for humanity from social and subjective or individual relations without damage at that level...inately all human beings have either natural determinism or indeterminism regarding free will (Jesus offers salvation from that 'original sin' and allows one to overcome the natural determinism of a fallen universal criterion beseting humanity with temporality and such). Social freedom and the freedom to overcome natural challenges in the environment are proximal concerns regarding human free will(the Republican leadership seems to fail environmental intelligence presently-Science News reports the Greenland glaciers are doubling their melting rates over a few years, and of course polluting the oceans can be much more difficult to clean up than air pollution--the oceans can stay polluted hundreds of thousands of years perhaps).
One can consider if one has free will if someone has one in 'chains', or if the media target one as an individual and persecute making a mockery of the constitution and the 'quaint' notion of a society living by laws equally applied to all. Speaking of which, is the Presidents advocay of torture, torture prisons abroad, and wiretaps on Americans without substantive congressional and judicial oversight a good way to promote U.S. constitutional and democratic values? Even if their is a terrorist dangers a good communicater ought to be explaining that but equally and convincingly expressing the vital need for a free and just democratic society and not some sort of intimidating corporatist entity. Japan's stock market is 70% owned by corporations, and individuals have very little to say about the real directions of what is in some senses a neo-corporatist state that the U.S. administration seems to want to emulate in several ways as ift has a sharing and caring economic relationship with socialist neo-authoritarians in China.To finish this up, determinism is contingent and yet necessary in several different relationship protocols of being, yet at every infinite level of micro and macro cosmology there seems to be an essential reliance on uncertainty, with being starkly accompanied by non-being, and of course non-being, non-space, and such difficult concepts can't be actualized within the criterion of being.Determinism and indeterminism coexist like being and nothingness, the temporal and the eternal, and perhaps anisotropic directions of time with physically reverseable or isotropic field theories as imaginable yet unrealizable possible circumstances.
Sartre's Philosophical 'Labels' and Dostoyevsky's Method
Sartre disavowed the term 'existentialism; as a description for his philosophical activity. Instead Sartre seemed to describe his philosophical activity as continuing the tradition of French rationalism such as that of Rene Descartes. It is logical if one stops to think about it. When one has a purely subjective frame of reference for experience ultimately, inclusive of all scientific or 'empirical' paradigms that purport to be more objective, rational examination, rational deliberations about experience, rational deliberations about what one experiences even seem the reasonable thing to do philosophically speaking.
****
It is possible perhaps to classify areas of experience and thought into various regions such as epistemology, and also to classify philosophical realms of experiences and thought about the extended phenomenon of experience as physical cosmology or even metaphysics, yet obviously all experience even of astrophysics and speculations about M-Theory are personally, subjectively experienced if at all.
****
Instead of debating about the reality of other minds, or conjecturing about the ultimate nature of matter and experience such as in realist schools of thought versus idealist Sartre simply described what is was actually experienced phenomenally for-himself.
*****
Later of course Sartre went beyond his tome 'Being and Nothingness’ and 15 years later published the 1000 page approx. "Critique of Dialectical Reason'. Whereas the first, rather revolutionary philosophical work reaching popular scales of the 20th century (I'm excluding technical philosophical works or even 'philosophical' works such as Einstein's pieces on special and general relativity) essentially examined personal subjective experience and the words or terms used to describe the subjective phenomenology of mind were elaborated, in the second work Sartre described social levels of individual experience within a collective setting. The book is not a socialist polemic of course; rather it describes how subjective minds interact in settings such as an automobile factory. As far as sequels to brilliant works go, it is not a disappointing effort at all.
****
Sartre's fiction works such as the freedom novels are quite good too. One should not underestimate the quality of J.P. Sartre's fiction...it's quite brilliant. Yet if one wants to discover a period novel equal to Dostoyevsky's 'Brothers Karamazov' or perhaps 'The Idiot' (especially useful with recent U.S. administration tendencies toward neo-corporatism) I recommend Stendhal’s book 'The Red and the Black'. The 'Red and the Black' is perhaps like 'Crime and Punishment' with a more sensational ending...it should be recollected that 'Crime and Punishment', while an excellent psychological novel, is more of an incitement of Tsarist structured poverty and conditions that led poor would-be college graduates to perpetrate senseless crimes for profit than it is about Russian criminal phenomena and the corrections system of the era. One might expect 'Crime and Punishment' to be something like Solzhenitsyn’s 'Gulag Archipelago' but of course it isn't. I believe that Dostoyevsky's major contribution isn’t to a philosophical movement of existentialism but to the art of literature and omniscient narrative.
****
It is possible perhaps to classify areas of experience and thought into various regions such as epistemology, and also to classify philosophical realms of experiences and thought about the extended phenomenon of experience as physical cosmology or even metaphysics, yet obviously all experience even of astrophysics and speculations about M-Theory are personally, subjectively experienced if at all.
****
Instead of debating about the reality of other minds, or conjecturing about the ultimate nature of matter and experience such as in realist schools of thought versus idealist Sartre simply described what is was actually experienced phenomenally for-himself.
*****
Later of course Sartre went beyond his tome 'Being and Nothingness’ and 15 years later published the 1000 page approx. "Critique of Dialectical Reason'. Whereas the first, rather revolutionary philosophical work reaching popular scales of the 20th century (I'm excluding technical philosophical works or even 'philosophical' works such as Einstein's pieces on special and general relativity) essentially examined personal subjective experience and the words or terms used to describe the subjective phenomenology of mind were elaborated, in the second work Sartre described social levels of individual experience within a collective setting. The book is not a socialist polemic of course; rather it describes how subjective minds interact in settings such as an automobile factory. As far as sequels to brilliant works go, it is not a disappointing effort at all.
****
Sartre's fiction works such as the freedom novels are quite good too. One should not underestimate the quality of J.P. Sartre's fiction...it's quite brilliant. Yet if one wants to discover a period novel equal to Dostoyevsky's 'Brothers Karamazov' or perhaps 'The Idiot' (especially useful with recent U.S. administration tendencies toward neo-corporatism) I recommend Stendhal’s book 'The Red and the Black'. The 'Red and the Black' is perhaps like 'Crime and Punishment' with a more sensational ending...it should be recollected that 'Crime and Punishment', while an excellent psychological novel, is more of an incitement of Tsarist structured poverty and conditions that led poor would-be college graduates to perpetrate senseless crimes for profit than it is about Russian criminal phenomena and the corrections system of the era. One might expect 'Crime and Punishment' to be something like Solzhenitsyn’s 'Gulag Archipelago' but of course it isn't. I believe that Dostoyevsky's major contribution isn’t to a philosophical movement of existentialism but to the art of literature and omniscient narrative.
Dostoyevsky after writing 'Notes from the Underground', a sparse first novel, may have named his second work 'Crime and Punishment'; a ponderous and official sounding title, in order to avoid the state censor and to allow a certain liberal approach to sympathy with urban Petersburg living and social structures, exposing the meanness, rudeness and social conditions of the time. His later 'Brothers Karamazov' has the full-fledged writer's brilliance that 'Crime and Punishment' eclipses 'Crime and Punishment', while Stendhal’s book mentioned above has an ending advantaged by going Dostoyevsky one better.
12/22/05
Republicans in Congress Trying to Drive U.S. Oil Consumption Higher?
Though the battle to conserve ANWR has salutarily been decided on the side of the right for the time being, inevitably Republicans in Congress will at some time in the future renew their effort to break the piñata of public resources for their global oil company sponsors...one of which-Exxon has yet to pay judgments against it for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 and instead continues to litigate. This raises the question 'Are Republicans in Congress trying to increase U.S. oil consumption, keep oil per barrel prices high, and plunder the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge simply as an aspect of long-term easy money and kickbacks for oil people and political affiliates?
Reason would seem to indicate that congressional support for minimum miles per gallon at a higher level than present would decrease oil/gas use in the American auto 'fleet'. 30 m.p.g would be a good mandatory level for new cars without paying an alternative tax per m.p.g. failure that would support federal construction of a power-line in interstates initiative to allow auto's to draw direct electric power for electric vehicles--metered of course and reported with wi-fi.
The Congress should support energy policy that would maximize individual unit production of energy and decrease centralization and reliance upon trans-national energy sources. At one time in American history individualism was the fact instead of the memory regarding the plurality of business in the U.S.A. The Federal Government should put intention upon support for energy and infrastructure initiatives that simultaneously increase environmental quality and individual independence from transnational corporate production without decreasing quality of life or violating international economic relationships founded upon the principle of free trade.
The recent mass transport strike in New York illustrates the implicit vulnerability of mass system to disruption by social forces. The public government of New York City was subverted in policy by a union of individuals that choose to illegally eclipse the policy of the electorate of New York City. Unions in government have the potential to subvert the process of democracy and to extort monetary benefits for themselves when they violate the public trust such as recently occurred in N.Y.C. because of the potential for public union corruption mass transit systems when financed by the taxpayers would perhaps be broken up into a few management or ownership units with a better chance of avoiding the wrath of collectives breaking the law at vital moments such as the week before Christmas. Reliance on oil for transportation in the U.S.A. not only creates synergetic global warming effects, it sends billions of hard-earned money overseas annually that is not invested in U.S. savings, infrastructure or business investment.
I should point out that the M.T.A. union that struck had an immigrant Haitian, judging from the accent, as its radical leader that maladroitly choose to veto New York City’s Christmas planning in order to advance a personal agenda that he considered to be like the individualist Rosa Park’s single-woman stand sitting on a bus in front of a disgruntled white dude in the 1950’s; t is difficult to see the similarity of that to a vast union of more than just black and mechanics drivers holding the people of New York’s Christmas hostage for some ‘unborn’ worker’s medical benefits. They could have struck anytime after Christmas without so much harm to union interests. Does the immigrant’s cultural status affect his political reasoning? Did he know that black union membership in the U.S.A. has decreased since the 1970’s from 25% to just 4% presently? Does he now that this isn’t a 1950’s Marxist-Capitalist era in world economics, and that jobs are being outsourced by the millions from the U.S.A. while congress has allowed millions and millions of cheap illegal workers from abroad to subvert wages for remaining non-tradable jobs?
Unions in America must needs develop new concepts in a new environment and not just serve as bete noirs for global Corporatists unless in fact American unions wish to help advance the global economy toward the likely communist-Corporatist hegemony in 50 years of a planetary proletariat with a minority ruling elite in control of propaganda organs declaring the ruling class as perfect leaders of social justice.
National Public Radio is probably unionized too, and it may also be capable of subverted the public constitutional will and unequally addressing citizens in the United States of America...targeting some now and then for special unwanted 'attention. Individuals can rarely withstand adverse economic effects brought on by being 'painted' by broadcast collectives. One wants plain raw government actualization of constitutional parameters rather than union mooning or malfiltration of lawful constitutional rights such as inherently exists in the power of mass communications.
Corporatism and communism each minimize individual rights civilly and economically in that all are encouraged to become supervised by inimical elites. The long-range energy and environmental policies of the U.S. Congress seem perhaps to be mushrooming in the shadow of an offshore investment moon into fungal-like stagnant truffles profitable for a minority.
Reason would seem to indicate that congressional support for minimum miles per gallon at a higher level than present would decrease oil/gas use in the American auto 'fleet'. 30 m.p.g would be a good mandatory level for new cars without paying an alternative tax per m.p.g. failure that would support federal construction of a power-line in interstates initiative to allow auto's to draw direct electric power for electric vehicles--metered of course and reported with wi-fi.
The Congress should support energy policy that would maximize individual unit production of energy and decrease centralization and reliance upon trans-national energy sources. At one time in American history individualism was the fact instead of the memory regarding the plurality of business in the U.S.A. The Federal Government should put intention upon support for energy and infrastructure initiatives that simultaneously increase environmental quality and individual independence from transnational corporate production without decreasing quality of life or violating international economic relationships founded upon the principle of free trade.
The recent mass transport strike in New York illustrates the implicit vulnerability of mass system to disruption by social forces. The public government of New York City was subverted in policy by a union of individuals that choose to illegally eclipse the policy of the electorate of New York City. Unions in government have the potential to subvert the process of democracy and to extort monetary benefits for themselves when they violate the public trust such as recently occurred in N.Y.C. because of the potential for public union corruption mass transit systems when financed by the taxpayers would perhaps be broken up into a few management or ownership units with a better chance of avoiding the wrath of collectives breaking the law at vital moments such as the week before Christmas. Reliance on oil for transportation in the U.S.A. not only creates synergetic global warming effects, it sends billions of hard-earned money overseas annually that is not invested in U.S. savings, infrastructure or business investment.
I should point out that the M.T.A. union that struck had an immigrant Haitian, judging from the accent, as its radical leader that maladroitly choose to veto New York City’s Christmas planning in order to advance a personal agenda that he considered to be like the individualist Rosa Park’s single-woman stand sitting on a bus in front of a disgruntled white dude in the 1950’s; t is difficult to see the similarity of that to a vast union of more than just black and mechanics drivers holding the people of New York’s Christmas hostage for some ‘unborn’ worker’s medical benefits. They could have struck anytime after Christmas without so much harm to union interests. Does the immigrant’s cultural status affect his political reasoning? Did he know that black union membership in the U.S.A. has decreased since the 1970’s from 25% to just 4% presently? Does he now that this isn’t a 1950’s Marxist-Capitalist era in world economics, and that jobs are being outsourced by the millions from the U.S.A. while congress has allowed millions and millions of cheap illegal workers from abroad to subvert wages for remaining non-tradable jobs?
Unions in America must needs develop new concepts in a new environment and not just serve as bete noirs for global Corporatists unless in fact American unions wish to help advance the global economy toward the likely communist-Corporatist hegemony in 50 years of a planetary proletariat with a minority ruling elite in control of propaganda organs declaring the ruling class as perfect leaders of social justice.
National Public Radio is probably unionized too, and it may also be capable of subverted the public constitutional will and unequally addressing citizens in the United States of America...targeting some now and then for special unwanted 'attention. Individuals can rarely withstand adverse economic effects brought on by being 'painted' by broadcast collectives. One wants plain raw government actualization of constitutional parameters rather than union mooning or malfiltration of lawful constitutional rights such as inherently exists in the power of mass communications.
Corporatism and communism each minimize individual rights civilly and economically in that all are encouraged to become supervised by inimical elites. The long-range energy and environmental policies of the U.S. Congress seem perhaps to be mushrooming in the shadow of an offshore investment moon into fungal-like stagnant truffles profitable for a minority.
12/21/05
The President's ANWR Retirement Booty
Plundering ANWR is the President's retirement policy to assure that his Texas oil buddies have unlimited income after he gets out of office...it won't do much good for the nation now anyway--and should be saved for future use as the final large U.S. oil field able to supply domestic manufacturing needs should a serious international crisis ever arise. Reasonable alternative fuel planning synergetically combining fuel cells in homes and cars, power lines in many regional highways, a variety of solar and wind products could replace a substantive portion of oil requirements for the nation and free-up capital for domestic investment.
One hopes that the time will never arrive when economic responsibility for public debt is required of the Republican congress, whom will probably be offshore working for global corporations if it does, because the apparent lack of imagination and ingentuity in defense appropriations, willingness to just borrow from the Chinese and Indians, Japanese and Saudi's (which makes even al jezera's headlines occassionally) and the requirement for the public to pay a half trillion annual interest payments will interfere with reasonable alternative public allocations of their resources for vital urban infrastructure and economic and ecological management.
India and China together graduate more engineers than the U.S.A. by a factor of nearly 20 to 1 and in time that numerical superiority will lgically move ownership of corporate startups abroad. Even though a majority of women graduates flood through U.S. colleges and universities to happily work for foreign and transnational corporations they will not be able to insinuate an independent national energy infrastructure not requiring oil for personal and mass transport into the U.S.A.
The administration in seeking to hog-tie the nations infrastructure to a dumbed down and dependent oil infrastructure, support global warming, pollution of the high arctic, and globally invested profits for it's favorites oil execs has done the nation a serious disservice by allowing ANWR development to be placed into the defense appropriations bill along with other pork.
The Defense Bill's Actual Military Content Has Pork Too
Should a defense bill be full of funding for obsolete technologies that are state of the art only in providing jobs for local resident's? The answer is assuredly not. Even so within the usual political structure of federal largesse with other people's money whenever possible jobs lost in a community should be directly replaced with jobs gained when equal upgrade value of weapons procurement are legislated.
Consider the five Naval Aircraft carriers with their vast cold war era maint. budgets each with a flotilla of defense ships in this era of global satellites, electronics, communications, cell phones with g.p.s.'s, terrorists with lethal inflatable boats with semtex explosives, improvised explosive device delivery vehicles made of personal watercraft with guidance systems, cruse missiles, thousand mile per hour torpedo's deliverable from fishing boats or latent mine locations when the Russian developers sell the plans on the black market, silent electric submarines running deep lying in wait for a shot at one of the globally stalkable behemouths at a likely approach locations or a plethora of other post-cold war era sinking technologies.
The Kennedy, a carrier homeported in Norfolk, VA should be allowed to retire to the boneyard and be replaced with some of the smaller, faster, cheaper stealth ships designed for a trecherous modern combat environment that implicitly interfaces onshore and offshore weapons interaction. A battleship could be kept activated an homeported in the interim while the new ships are being constructed to provide jobs and cheap delivery of ordinance in quantity onshore when needed asd additionally given an electro-magnetic cannon or two.
Aircraft carriers with their very high radar profile are fairly easy to stalk around the modern world or even sabotage in port. The ships might be converted into some sort of alternative mobile command or housing posts for the marines or army, but modern vtol aircraft like the F-22 and perhaps the joint strike fighter haven't the need of a conventional aircraft transporter. The forces resisting a defense budget with modernizing tech infrastructure, like the Bush administration's resistance to a post-fossil fuel era national transport infrastructure, should be resisted vigorously in congress.
The President's plundering of ANWR provisions reminds me somewhat humourously of a request by a former Commander of the Pacific Fleet Sanchez's request of a Governor of Alaska for 50,000 free barrels of oil and was turned town a bit before the Exxon Valdez oil spill. If the President's wish to plunder the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is denied I hope he won't add environmentalists to his probably illegal wiretaps list...are their many or any democrats or libertarians on it?
Without congresssional ovcersight of his illegal wiretaps the President must himself designate who or what the enemy is that has no meaninful constitutional rights in the United States...that same dillema may be encounter by future computer programmers working with robotic attack vehicles that will shoot the enemy in accord with programming...watch out style imitators!
Intelligent Design is a Scientific Hypothesis
Intelligent Design theory is a scientific hypothesis making testible, observable assertions about construction(s)of physical forms in the Universe. Logic does require that if structures of primordially created intelligent design exist in the Universe a Designer and Creator existed to form them. Rational public education could not exclude that truth (if found to be so) from scientific curriculum because it would upset believers in an atheistic construction of a dumb random universe of chance (DRUNC). If the Universe actually does have elements of intelligent design in it, an ostrich-like ignorance of it would ill-support compulsory public education in the United Sartres of America.
The separation of church and state of the U.S. Constitution wasn't intended to separate valid scientific inquiry from public education. If there is intelligent design in the Universe the search the consequences for humanity of ignorant destruction or disrespect of those 'semantic' 'artifacts' of design in physical structures could be significant. A valid scientific theory arsenal should include the possibility of intelligent design.
Evolution theory itself is not the champion for which intelligent design theory is the number one contender; evolution theory is perhaps implicitly an element of the Biblical book of Genesis in which God 'evolves' the Universe over a period of 'days' from a stirring of the quiet 'waters' (perhaps akin to a Higgs Field exploding at superluminal speed into an inflation of space-time)...natural selection as the sole 'mechanism' of evolution is what intelligent design theory is pummelling presently. Natural selection theory has been a subject of rival theories since it's conception and synthesis with evolution by Charles Darwin.
What time values regarding the Age of the Universe Does Intelligent Design Postulate?
So far as I know intelligent design theorists are ambivalent about the time scale or age of creation of the universe unlike strict Biblical 'fundamentalist creationists' whom generally set the age of the Earth and Universe somewhere between 6000 and 25,000 years before present. Intelligent Design theorists simply look for artifacts or evidence of intelligently designed structures in the universe that could not be explained by any natural process of evolution. Thus intelligent design theorists are happy enough to examine the explosion of multi-cellular life forms in the Cambrian era some 540 million years ago and postulate in some detail why that could not have been a naturally occurring development explicable within parameters of natural selection...that is, they postulate and demonstrate why natural selection could not have developed and sustained to the present era 37 of those 50 life-forms or phyla. The contribution of intelligent design theory is thus a useful analytical tool providing discussion input on the processes that selected life on Earth. Criticism of theories should not be banned from public education.
How the 'Anthropic Principle' differs from 'Intelligent Design' Theory
The anthropic principle does not seek to find artifacts of intelligent design as 'substructures' in the overall structure of the cosmos or of life as might the biolgist Mr.Behe in considering how certain cilia of microganisms developed. The anthropic principle instead is simply an aesthetic appreciation of the overall 'beauty' of the Universe in numerous ways from mathematical relations and it's rationality and coherence to the phenomenal coincidence of physical constant values that allow radiation to be at the right degree to allow life to exist, for atoms to exist in the right ratio's, and for physical values of constants to be set to such a level as to allow the universe to exist as it is fit for human life on Earth.
Some of these values are alpha-G (gravity fine structure constant), alpha-w (fine structure constant of the weak interaction), alpha-s (fine structure constant of the strong interaction), alpha-e (electromagnetic fine structure constant). An article titled 'The Just So Universe' by Walter Bradley in 'Signs of Intelligence' goes over these values that are remarkable. 'The Cosmic Blueprint' by Paul Davies as well covers points of the anthropic principle.
The anthropic principle is more of a philosophical point with dead-reckoning comments about the cosmos and its physical values, yet it is useful nonetheless for both multiverse theorists and intelligent design theorists of a theological or natural disposition (there is the possibility that super-intelligent beings created this universe designing it from another universe and setting it rolling with the right values-in which case finding evidence for the ultimate designer of all-possible-universes would be a step removed.
'Cosmos and Creation; The Literal Values of Genesis'
This universe or multiverse is the subject of observation and conjecture, testing and hypothesizing in a disciplined way. Non-scientists such as myself with a background in the social sciences and humanities also may look over the shoulder of the scientific community and contemplate their findings usefully comparing that body of knowledge to what the Bible book of Genesis has regarding cosmological structures and the history of the Universe.
Humanity has always needed to interpret the book of Genesis within it's own learning paradigm that until recently was quite minimal in substnative cosmology. It is a mistake of a significant nature in discovering new scientific knowledge and abandoning the old to also throw out the book of Genesis for-itself that was linked through human intepretation with the old secular cosmology--it is the case that the faulty data is in humanity and not in the Bible, yet the centuries old association of secular learning with literal Biblical values is difficult to detach. It is difficult to read the Bible with unbiased, socially unconditioned learning yet the importance of the truth of the message of the Bible demands that it be done.
I will here republish a brief intro to my book of brief essays on interpreting some cosmological points from the Bible, as time does not permit further writing here presently..
How is Biblical Scripture 'cosmology' like modern physical cosmology? Luke13-18"Then said he, Unto what is the kingdom of God like? and whereunto shall I resemble it?" 19"It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it."
Do the 'days' of Genesis represent time periods of uncertain extent in the form of literals as do algebraic literals represent variable numerical content?
Does Second Peter Chapter 3 exemplify the uncertainty? "8But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." The age of the antediluvian Patriarchs given this conversion value is 2,453,235,000 years. Paleontologists suggest that multicellular life on Earth started about 2,600,000,000 years before present.
12/17/05
Maximum Invention/Production...Minimum Consumption Ideal
Space colonization requires an efficiency principle of maximum invention and production and minimum consumption
With limited mass the planet Earth's conversion into consumable forms for human beings requires moderation or depletion to abnegation of existence. Efficiency within a limited set of parameters requires the maximization of ingenuity for maximization of creativity and production of material forms of new contexts and possibilities for production and comprehension. The principle of maximum production and minimum consumption also requires a derivative of conservation of the given environment from depletion by thoughtless allocation of production to inappropriate regions.
While mankind has a need to develop new frontiers in space, and should terraform habitable regions in space as soon as possible, social training pre-flight should include a principle for conservation of consumption lest some thoughtless blithering idiots simply consume the whole solar system and every available star system and galaxy they can get too. With intelligent nano-machines conversion of atomic structure wholesale in a sort of yeast into beer material analogue is hypothetically possible...as human brain diminish in evolution towards pleasure principle use and drift away from stimulating environmental sensory challenge, as human reason is applied toward televised channel surfing and choices of pleasure, let some non-consumerist, public good democratic values remain to dampen wild corporatist supported consumerism.
To reiterate basic concepts of democracy versus authoritarianisms many forms from corporatism to socialism it is useful to mention the relation of democracy to free enterprise and capitalism as a rational governor of business activity to severe vital social purposes. Adam Smith did not intend that business and free enterprise would be anarchistic free agents each pursuing maximal profits for selfish purposes entirely with regard for the social good; instead he implicitly believed that free enterprise activities and capital acquisition occurred within a rational democratic society that was aware of its environmental, social and security needs. Adam Smith, author of Capital and the Wealth of Nations also posited a scenario for optimal inventiveness and provisioning of positive material or economic change within a criterion in which individual liberty and opportunity for creativity and profit were maximized. Authoritarianism in its many forms of collective subjugation with an elite ruling cadre from corporatism to communism repress and extirpate individual freedom for social self-determination so far as is needed to eliminate real political dissent.
With limited mass the planet Earth's conversion into consumable forms for human beings requires moderation or depletion to abnegation of existence. Efficiency within a limited set of parameters requires the maximization of ingenuity for maximization of creativity and production of material forms of new contexts and possibilities for production and comprehension. The principle of maximum production and minimum consumption also requires a derivative of conservation of the given environment from depletion by thoughtless allocation of production to inappropriate regions.
While mankind has a need to develop new frontiers in space, and should terraform habitable regions in space as soon as possible, social training pre-flight should include a principle for conservation of consumption lest some thoughtless blithering idiots simply consume the whole solar system and every available star system and galaxy they can get too. With intelligent nano-machines conversion of atomic structure wholesale in a sort of yeast into beer material analogue is hypothetically possible...as human brain diminish in evolution towards pleasure principle use and drift away from stimulating environmental sensory challenge, as human reason is applied toward televised channel surfing and choices of pleasure, let some non-consumerist, public good democratic values remain to dampen wild corporatist supported consumerism.
To reiterate basic concepts of democracy versus authoritarianisms many forms from corporatism to socialism it is useful to mention the relation of democracy to free enterprise and capitalism as a rational governor of business activity to severe vital social purposes. Adam Smith did not intend that business and free enterprise would be anarchistic free agents each pursuing maximal profits for selfish purposes entirely with regard for the social good; instead he implicitly believed that free enterprise activities and capital acquisition occurred within a rational democratic society that was aware of its environmental, social and security needs. Adam Smith, author of Capital and the Wealth of Nations also posited a scenario for optimal inventiveness and provisioning of positive material or economic change within a criterion in which individual liberty and opportunity for creativity and profit were maximized. Authoritarianism in its many forms of collective subjugation with an elite ruling cadre from corporatism to communism repress and extirpate individual freedom for social self-determination so far as is needed to eliminate real political dissent.
Corporatism as Collectivism Attacks A.N.W.R./Democracy
Corporatism vs. Democracy, Individualism States’ Rights and the U.S.A.
In the post-cold war era’s absence of a monolithic communist foe to free enterprise worthy of all the resources of the united governments of the west to resist, rhetoric for a de facto corporatist, authoritarian hegemony over western democracies have still sought to utilize authoritarian collectivism as a straw man lever upon public resources. Conservation of public natural resources is not some sort of shame that must be exploited by a few particularly financially well-endowed transnational oil corporations. Corporations are a form of collectivism too in some instances; organizations with definite hierarchies and a limited set of citizens that enact collective actions to exploit the environment comprising the common heritage of mankind and the necessary minima, proximal basis for material support of human life on the planet.
Corporate collectivism is a result of Mussolini’s socialist background combined with the Reich’s fascist propensity for assuming direct power and political control of business, enterprise and the state. In Corporatism the state works with a few dominant corporations to dictate the lives and political destiny of the citizens. Individuals in a corporatist state discover their political liberties to create competitive business or political infrastructures and free expression reduced over time into existential non-sequiters silenced with the quiet of falling snow. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and it’s possible oil reserves are still a target of ongoing corporatist rhetoric seeking to politically lever the plundering of the U.S.A.’s final significant world-class oil field in order to dump more billions of corporate profits globally while eliminating the nation’s security from absolute reliance on foreign oil after ANWR is exhausted in a fleet of low mileage SUV’s.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if exploited would subject the high Arctic’s decreasingly rarified air from direct assault by thermal and chemically pollution. Injecting polluting elements into the high arctic is an accelerant upon a world environment’s decay simultaneously with a decay of world oil reserves over the next decades with an ongoing over reliance on fossil fuels that may produce several concurrent social and environmental problems if not catastrophes for the next generations. There isn’t really a rational basis to suggest that conservation of vital national and world resources already owned by the public sector is collectivist, while vast taxpayer spending on a national highway grid to provide a place for fossil fuel powered vehicles to drive and burn gasoline in low mileage SUVs imported from global distributors is in someway an example of rugged individualism or otherwise not collectivist. Corporatism is simply inclined to dominate mass media communications and propagandize the public until bulling its favorite legislative licenses to plunder through the U.S Congress.
Corporatists fundamentally misunderstand what democracy is, and instead believe that de facto censorship of political opinions by non-corporatists should be firmly developed, and that a republic means that transnational corporations should dictate what political actions the public should get as the oligarchic elements of corporate collectivism have the only real capitalist opinion and the alternative is godless atheism such as Fidel Castro or Kim Il direct; of course no opinion could be further from the truth.
Democratic societies of such as a size as to preclude direct electoral decision of individual issues elect representatives to legislate what political actions the public desires. Some occasions have a majority opinion formed and given to the elected representative, as a basis for what decisions should be made. The rights of all citizens have a core value that is respected and protected in all circumstances, and of course free expression and individual rights are inviolate.
In a republic a certain greater license is given to the representatives to make decisions for the democratic public on the basis that their beneficial opinion may be better informed than that of the masses because of political and historical circumstances. While the public elects the representatives of a republic, and still is free to express their own ideas publicly including those of conserving environmental resources, allocating government expenses, protecting the nations borders, or redirecting investment strategies in national public infrastructures and investment or tax incentives for individual business and national corporations, the representatives may act on their own to select what courses of public policy are in the best interests of the democracy for-themselves, with the major limitation on that liberty being the public electoral right to recall and replace the representatives with those more amenable to the will of the public majority from time to time should the representatives corrupt or disregard the public interest.
In a corporatist states the republican representatives are beholden to a global corporate elite and seek to give them whatever they desire with the opinion that transnational corporate profits are the ultimate good, and necessary as well for a healthy Christian society. Corporatist hegemony over democracy and a republican democracy is an essential corruption of democracy and is instead a transition into an elitist collectivism with central board committees deciding behind close doors the future of all in the ‘republic’. When they ignore plain environmental evidence such as the pollution of Puget Sound, Hood Canal, Love Canal, the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay and numerous waterways from coast to coast only slowly cleaned up at tremendous cost over the decades, the estrogens in the Arctic ocean that have produced hermaphroditic polar bears and in the Saint Lawrence seaway and Puget Sound p.c.b.s have decimated beluga whales and orca whales respectively, and with volumes of environmental evidence of the decline and extermination of numerous species the disingenuous ignorance that seeks the exploitation of valuable public resources such as ANWR that invariably produce environmental externalities or even superfund sites is irresponsible. I hope congress swiftly moves pass its most recent effort to stuff global oil corporations with ANWR oil and surrender the people of the United States to a future without a significant major oil reserve that will perhaps be need in 2050 or 2150 for plastics, food production with fuel for farm equipment, or a host of other vital national interests that could require use of that particular non-renewable resource. Like the engineers stone at the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, ANWR should not be turned over until the end of the era, or when the republic is in vital and true need of that resource. Alternate energies and transport forms are a vital interest for the nation that the next president may address intelligently.
Nebraska's recent judicial beating that decide anti-corporate farming laws to be unlawful impediments to interstate commerce may be another anti-sovereignty, anti state's rights action subverting state's rights to legislate and rule for themselves so long as individuals are treated equally and with equal justice. Is it also an assualt on interstate commerce for state police to issue traffic tickets to truck drivers for speeding or driving drunk? Have states no right to provide zoning and ownership criteria for themselves as well as regulatory measures within the criterion of true equality for individuals? Must U.S. states be prostrate before the wishes of global corporations that would just make obsolete U.S. family farming?
In a corporatist or authoritarian state modeled on the principle of a benevolent dictatorship in which the leader knows best, could the present plundering crew of corporatists make a serious argument that President G.W. Bush is actually that brilliant leader with the best interests of the nation founding his ‘vision’?
In the post-cold war era’s absence of a monolithic communist foe to free enterprise worthy of all the resources of the united governments of the west to resist, rhetoric for a de facto corporatist, authoritarian hegemony over western democracies have still sought to utilize authoritarian collectivism as a straw man lever upon public resources. Conservation of public natural resources is not some sort of shame that must be exploited by a few particularly financially well-endowed transnational oil corporations. Corporations are a form of collectivism too in some instances; organizations with definite hierarchies and a limited set of citizens that enact collective actions to exploit the environment comprising the common heritage of mankind and the necessary minima, proximal basis for material support of human life on the planet.
Corporate collectivism is a result of Mussolini’s socialist background combined with the Reich’s fascist propensity for assuming direct power and political control of business, enterprise and the state. In Corporatism the state works with a few dominant corporations to dictate the lives and political destiny of the citizens. Individuals in a corporatist state discover their political liberties to create competitive business or political infrastructures and free expression reduced over time into existential non-sequiters silenced with the quiet of falling snow. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and it’s possible oil reserves are still a target of ongoing corporatist rhetoric seeking to politically lever the plundering of the U.S.A.’s final significant world-class oil field in order to dump more billions of corporate profits globally while eliminating the nation’s security from absolute reliance on foreign oil after ANWR is exhausted in a fleet of low mileage SUV’s.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if exploited would subject the high Arctic’s decreasingly rarified air from direct assault by thermal and chemically pollution. Injecting polluting elements into the high arctic is an accelerant upon a world environment’s decay simultaneously with a decay of world oil reserves over the next decades with an ongoing over reliance on fossil fuels that may produce several concurrent social and environmental problems if not catastrophes for the next generations. There isn’t really a rational basis to suggest that conservation of vital national and world resources already owned by the public sector is collectivist, while vast taxpayer spending on a national highway grid to provide a place for fossil fuel powered vehicles to drive and burn gasoline in low mileage SUVs imported from global distributors is in someway an example of rugged individualism or otherwise not collectivist. Corporatism is simply inclined to dominate mass media communications and propagandize the public until bulling its favorite legislative licenses to plunder through the U.S Congress.
Corporatists fundamentally misunderstand what democracy is, and instead believe that de facto censorship of political opinions by non-corporatists should be firmly developed, and that a republic means that transnational corporations should dictate what political actions the public should get as the oligarchic elements of corporate collectivism have the only real capitalist opinion and the alternative is godless atheism such as Fidel Castro or Kim Il direct; of course no opinion could be further from the truth.
Democratic societies of such as a size as to preclude direct electoral decision of individual issues elect representatives to legislate what political actions the public desires. Some occasions have a majority opinion formed and given to the elected representative, as a basis for what decisions should be made. The rights of all citizens have a core value that is respected and protected in all circumstances, and of course free expression and individual rights are inviolate.
In a republic a certain greater license is given to the representatives to make decisions for the democratic public on the basis that their beneficial opinion may be better informed than that of the masses because of political and historical circumstances. While the public elects the representatives of a republic, and still is free to express their own ideas publicly including those of conserving environmental resources, allocating government expenses, protecting the nations borders, or redirecting investment strategies in national public infrastructures and investment or tax incentives for individual business and national corporations, the representatives may act on their own to select what courses of public policy are in the best interests of the democracy for-themselves, with the major limitation on that liberty being the public electoral right to recall and replace the representatives with those more amenable to the will of the public majority from time to time should the representatives corrupt or disregard the public interest.
In a corporatist states the republican representatives are beholden to a global corporate elite and seek to give them whatever they desire with the opinion that transnational corporate profits are the ultimate good, and necessary as well for a healthy Christian society. Corporatist hegemony over democracy and a republican democracy is an essential corruption of democracy and is instead a transition into an elitist collectivism with central board committees deciding behind close doors the future of all in the ‘republic’. When they ignore plain environmental evidence such as the pollution of Puget Sound, Hood Canal, Love Canal, the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay and numerous waterways from coast to coast only slowly cleaned up at tremendous cost over the decades, the estrogens in the Arctic ocean that have produced hermaphroditic polar bears and in the Saint Lawrence seaway and Puget Sound p.c.b.s have decimated beluga whales and orca whales respectively, and with volumes of environmental evidence of the decline and extermination of numerous species the disingenuous ignorance that seeks the exploitation of valuable public resources such as ANWR that invariably produce environmental externalities or even superfund sites is irresponsible. I hope congress swiftly moves pass its most recent effort to stuff global oil corporations with ANWR oil and surrender the people of the United States to a future without a significant major oil reserve that will perhaps be need in 2050 or 2150 for plastics, food production with fuel for farm equipment, or a host of other vital national interests that could require use of that particular non-renewable resource. Like the engineers stone at the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, ANWR should not be turned over until the end of the era, or when the republic is in vital and true need of that resource. Alternate energies and transport forms are a vital interest for the nation that the next president may address intelligently.
Nebraska's recent judicial beating that decide anti-corporate farming laws to be unlawful impediments to interstate commerce may be another anti-sovereignty, anti state's rights action subverting state's rights to legislate and rule for themselves so long as individuals are treated equally and with equal justice. Is it also an assualt on interstate commerce for state police to issue traffic tickets to truck drivers for speeding or driving drunk? Have states no right to provide zoning and ownership criteria for themselves as well as regulatory measures within the criterion of true equality for individuals? Must U.S. states be prostrate before the wishes of global corporations that would just make obsolete U.S. family farming?
In a corporatist or authoritarian state modeled on the principle of a benevolent dictatorship in which the leader knows best, could the present plundering crew of corporatists make a serious argument that President G.W. Bush is actually that brilliant leader with the best interests of the nation founding his ‘vision’?
Was Robert E. Lee a Northern 5th Columnist?
This conjecture about General Robert Lee may seem preposterous, yet stranger events have occurred in history that a Procopius might enfilade from the standard historical accounts, and none other perhaps.
This is only a theory, it could use substantial research perhaps, or perhaps not, in order to validate or invalidate it's veracity.
Riding a bike through Delaware, Maryland and Virginia in 2005 and crossing through many of the historical battlefield regions of the American Civil war, a thought regarding the nature of General Lee's amazing historical paradoxes or coincidences arose such as to create a certain skepticism that he was a true son of the confederate south's principals of enslaving human beings and shamelessly exploiting their cheap labor and reproductive utility for recreational purposes in some instances. Could General Lee have been a secret agent by design filtered into southern leadership in order to misdirect and sabotage rational southern plans to seceede from the Union if souch could be made to exist considering the place in history of the slave labor versus machine labor economy?
First, General Lee's birthplace just ten miles from that of George Washington in Virginia and a natural selection rather than one of conviction...a selection ready made to lend credibility to the idea of a new leader for the southern half of the United States.Second; the time of nearly a hundred years of nationhood and the ripening of the issue of slavery toward decision by combat...the north had time to groom a leader to coopt the rebellion and it might have been General Lee.Thirdly is the name Lee, as in the leeward side or the weak side...a name well chosen for a future deated enemy leader and representative of the pre-determined effort to have the slavers swiftly or decisevly defeated a priori.
Fourth is the impossibly silly selection of battle strategy that Lee choose to lose the war with...attack Pennsylvania, Maryland and the north enough to stir up a hornet's nest, retreat to Virginia and try to hold a rough Pattomick or Rappahannock River or North Ana River line generally until whenever while the north with vastly superior tech infrastructure need only build up forces and war machinery, counter attack and eventually flank Lee's lines until sending breakaway Sherman to march to Atlanta and Savannah at an optimal time of year.
One would think that Lee chooseto make a hamburger hill for the south in perfect for war Virginia fields, on the east of the Appalachinan trail, while Lincoln was free to send raiders by sea to Mississipi and other deep southern locations to fight. lee's strategy was so inadequate in historical hindsight that one wonders if he choose to fight just enough to let southerners believe ity was a real war for the trophy of trying to exploit an obsolete labor force while the north could send war equipment and raiders to support insurrections for dozens of years ahead and actually moving to spend confederate war powers in such a way as would assure defeat.The fifth point I'll mention here, is Lee's choice to appropriate plot the edning of his war as a northern agent at Appomatox on the Appomatox River, and apposite site for surrender obviously., so much so that one wonders when Lincoln or Lee planned that end to the pre-determined conclusion of the southern war epic. The vehicular homocidally inclined truck drivers (seemingly) of Virginia's highway 460 seem no less determined a priori to reach their destinations at Richmond than Lee and the confederates were to reach Appomatox, or was it teleologically planned by God so everyone would have no trouble in deciphering the players in the horrendous conflict and how they stood in U.S. history?
This is only a theory, it could use substantial research perhaps, or perhaps not, in order to validate or invalidate it's veracity.
Riding a bike through Delaware, Maryland and Virginia in 2005 and crossing through many of the historical battlefield regions of the American Civil war, a thought regarding the nature of General Lee's amazing historical paradoxes or coincidences arose such as to create a certain skepticism that he was a true son of the confederate south's principals of enslaving human beings and shamelessly exploiting their cheap labor and reproductive utility for recreational purposes in some instances. Could General Lee have been a secret agent by design filtered into southern leadership in order to misdirect and sabotage rational southern plans to seceede from the Union if souch could be made to exist considering the place in history of the slave labor versus machine labor economy?
First, General Lee's birthplace just ten miles from that of George Washington in Virginia and a natural selection rather than one of conviction...a selection ready made to lend credibility to the idea of a new leader for the southern half of the United States.Second; the time of nearly a hundred years of nationhood and the ripening of the issue of slavery toward decision by combat...the north had time to groom a leader to coopt the rebellion and it might have been General Lee.Thirdly is the name Lee, as in the leeward side or the weak side...a name well chosen for a future deated enemy leader and representative of the pre-determined effort to have the slavers swiftly or decisevly defeated a priori.
Fourth is the impossibly silly selection of battle strategy that Lee choose to lose the war with...attack Pennsylvania, Maryland and the north enough to stir up a hornet's nest, retreat to Virginia and try to hold a rough Pattomick or Rappahannock River or North Ana River line generally until whenever while the north with vastly superior tech infrastructure need only build up forces and war machinery, counter attack and eventually flank Lee's lines until sending breakaway Sherman to march to Atlanta and Savannah at an optimal time of year.
One would think that Lee chooseto make a hamburger hill for the south in perfect for war Virginia fields, on the east of the Appalachinan trail, while Lincoln was free to send raiders by sea to Mississipi and other deep southern locations to fight. lee's strategy was so inadequate in historical hindsight that one wonders if he choose to fight just enough to let southerners believe ity was a real war for the trophy of trying to exploit an obsolete labor force while the north could send war equipment and raiders to support insurrections for dozens of years ahead and actually moving to spend confederate war powers in such a way as would assure defeat.The fifth point I'll mention here, is Lee's choice to appropriate plot the edning of his war as a northern agent at Appomatox on the Appomatox River, and apposite site for surrender obviously., so much so that one wonders when Lincoln or Lee planned that end to the pre-determined conclusion of the southern war epic. The vehicular homocidally inclined truck drivers (seemingly) of Virginia's highway 460 seem no less determined a priori to reach their destinations at Richmond than Lee and the confederates were to reach Appomatox, or was it teleologically planned by God so everyone would have no trouble in deciphering the players in the horrendous conflict and how they stood in U.S. history?
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