Senator Lieberman speaking with an N.P.R. reporter recently said that he was concerned the Counter-terrorism center lacks a google search kind of capability that would bring potential terrosit threads together. It's been about 30 years since I took a brief programming course in Portland, yet I think there is a better way to clump together information sorted in databases such that alerts for potential terrorist actions might arise wiithout reuisite wait of a particular search by a human interrogator of a search engine. Because it is so obvious at least to me, I wonder what really goes on with all those billions spent at homeland security generally.
One likes to believe they are simply too modest and conceal there expert computerized data engineering, yet that Nigerian fellow did nearly detonate his explosive underwear on Christmas Day aboard a plane hovering over all those internal combustion engine factories in the neighboorhood. Maybe he was trying to drive up the price of Nigerian light sweet crude through terrorism--gas is already about three bucks a gallon while the economy is off. If unemployment drops much it should go to 6 dollars per gallon around the time the unemployment rate nationally reaches 3.5 or 4%.
Anyway on the computer junk; there should be sorting programs to put together similar and related facts in sorts through raw data based on national regions and other initial criteria-then when sufficient data indicates a human investigation such as when someone's parents go to the F.B.I. and say they are concerned there son may be consorting with terrorists or has gone to visit training camps in Yemen from Nigeria--voila! the alert goes to the bureaucratic spook who then uses the insider information to buy stock on Wall Street ((just kidding).
1/20/10
Faster Air Drops of Emergency Food for Mass Disasters Required
In the future mass disasters in remote locations that have a lot of immediately shocked and starving people ought to be relieved by faster air drops of lightweight food. From Florida military air transports might have overflown and circled Porto Prince Haiti and dropped millions of small and lightweight air-foil designed packets of beef jerkey and raman noodles as well as crackers for people to find the day after the quake. The beef jerky is very light and after soaking in boiling water can be chewed easily by people without good teeth. Crackers are needed to prevent diarrhea.
Some manna from heaven instant air drops replies to instant mass disaster could be made with twirling plastic package designs that won't harm the heads of people the food lands upon. It would be possible to design large fortune cookies in such configurations coated with plastic, or perhaps sheets of dried and compacted fruit rolls as small, edible parachutes. The U.N. rightly should get cooking on creating some sort of global long range first response food snacking relief capacity so that people injured in shock and or starving or malnourished already don't have to go extra days before being acquitted of uncertainty, agony and hunger.
Balanced diets aren't required for immediately starving people, and bureaucracies take time to establish regular meals in roadless or road dysfunctional locales.
U.S. air cargo flight might have been controlled from AWACS aircraft flight controllers over the island nation that would smooth air drop traffic patterns before sending the circling low flying aircraft on to land for refuelling at a U.S. air base in Puerto Rico.The ability to drop cluster bombs quickly on cities should be equaled by the ability to air drop immediate vast quantities of snack supplies to fill empty bellies during the immediate aftermath of crisis until the real chefs with the stew cooking capabilities arrive to toss swine and beef into the boil.
Some manna from heaven instant air drops replies to instant mass disaster could be made with twirling plastic package designs that won't harm the heads of people the food lands upon. It would be possible to design large fortune cookies in such configurations coated with plastic, or perhaps sheets of dried and compacted fruit rolls as small, edible parachutes. The U.N. rightly should get cooking on creating some sort of global long range first response food snacking relief capacity so that people injured in shock and or starving or malnourished already don't have to go extra days before being acquitted of uncertainty, agony and hunger.
Balanced diets aren't required for immediately starving people, and bureaucracies take time to establish regular meals in roadless or road dysfunctional locales.
U.S. air cargo flight might have been controlled from AWACS aircraft flight controllers over the island nation that would smooth air drop traffic patterns before sending the circling low flying aircraft on to land for refuelling at a U.S. air base in Puerto Rico.The ability to drop cluster bombs quickly on cities should be equaled by the ability to air drop immediate vast quantities of snack supplies to fill empty bellies during the immediate aftermath of crisis until the real chefs with the stew cooking capabilities arrive to toss swine and beef into the boil.
1/14/10
Will Haiti Be President Obama's Katrina or An Effective Relief Intervention?
Some have complained of a lethargic emergency services response to the terrible Earthquake in Haiti. The response time-content parameters indicated the need for a U.N. Emergency response team something like the 82nd airborne without the military power. President Obama might have sent quicker emergency response forces such as airborne marines to distribute water bottles, bandages, splints and food if there was a stock of such materials strategically placed around the world.
The President did send 3500 soldiers and 2200 marines along with 300 medical personnel, yet is that enough? It is a pain laying around with broken bones or ruptured organs in trauma for a day or two much less more. This most recent incident should stimulate a better, faster pragmatic instant relief for large disaster force scalable up to a half million victims.
The President did send 3500 soldiers and 2200 marines along with 300 medical personnel, yet is that enough? It is a pain laying around with broken bones or ruptured organs in trauma for a day or two much less more. This most recent incident should stimulate a better, faster pragmatic instant relief for large disaster force scalable up to a half million victims.
Reading a national geographic article on the evolution and distribution of placental mammals from Gondwanaland to other plate tectonic permutations over the eons it occurs to me that human beings ought to do a little better as primates to respond to global emergencies. I think the evolution of Armageddon on Earth will largely be a human actualization of the will of Satan voluntarily as faithless beings striving and competitive grooming champions better so than opponents. Yet the Brave New World of a Huxleyan-Orwellian Universe shall be with us as humanity practices high entropy economics without concern for a rational conservation of non-renewable resources.
As a first responder President Obama should do better than the Chinese to deliver first aid in quantity to such stricken people. In the long run they need instruction in how to build steel tube geodesic domes with foam insulation that are cheap and able to survive earthquakes. They could also use wind and solar panels yet the world economy is just based on disposability and consumerism and such economic areas of poverty shall be with us for quite a time--what have the Haitians to sell, and how can they overcome their history as the successful Nat Turner revolt fact that freed themselves from Napoleonic rule?
Haiti's long run political problems may have little real hope embedded in the United States, for the economy is based on profit, and for the time being Cuba is the best morsel awaiting development in the non-renewable consumerist economic context ruining America today. The United States is outsourcing it's independence to global elite ownership. Perhaps at least an adequate global civil disaster airlift capability can be formed to bring relief to 50,000 people overnight if necessary. That is quite a challenging task.
1/11/10
An Ecological Economic Topic
Ecological economics is an actual scholastic field of economics that has developed in recent years. It might be considered an existential approach, or an empirical one. Anything that a government does without using its parameters regarding conservation will be less than effective. That is, the remedies might exacerbate the problem.
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Growt...47090/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_c
Ecological economics is the best theoretical approach to conserving and utilizing mass and bio-mass. It is necessary to change the value-theory foundations of economics as well. It would be possible to have a better quality of life for all of humanity perhaps while actually decreasing resource use through an increase in efficiency and knowledge about and coordination of global resources. If the end is not to simply make profit from phenomenal resources, but to conserve resources and get as much as possible from renewable resources that is a value that the people of a democracy must apply themselves.
Statistics have been compiled to show that women reduce family size with an increased standard of living after a generation or two, yet in the future an enhanced standard of living will requires an ecological economic approach rather than simply increasing through-put of non-renewable resources. The issue is not just a dialectic between accelerating resource us and consumerism to raise standards of living and subsequent deceleration of population growth to reduce resource over-use.
A government agency needs to be formed to help with the transition to a vast menu of ecologically more efficient methods of resource use. Government ignorance cannot solve the problem, and the present world governments are mostly signed off on corporatism and consumerism without rhyme or reason except profit regardless of environmental cost or the externalities of human quality of life...
That's why I mention the textbook 'Ecological Economics' by Daly and Farley occasionally. People generally don't understand what it is, or how it's parameters are requisite for living on Earth well in the future.
http://www.amazon.com/Ecological-E...-Herman-Daly/dp/1559633123
Population dynamics, resource quantification and so forth are what the discipline of Ecological economics is concerned with.
The logic of population reduction or control within existing economic methods lets us extrapolate that the remaining capitalists, if the population dropped to two billion souls, would simply increase their own consumption and standard of living 400% and more. Increasing living standards without ecological economic reason will tend to deplete resources that are finite.
A stable population, a rectified economic value theory that seeks for the most effective methods of increasing life standards without harm to the ecosystem is unlikely to develop with a government bound up in Wal-Mart and Macy's shopping theory. The effort to address the facts is what the U.S. Government is unwilling to try--at least so far, in its economic theory and practice.
I read recently that scientist have found that primates aren't especially socially bright. observations of primates have found that those that believe they would lose a fight tend to groom the proto-champ chimps. That may be why pro sports is regarded so highly rather than amateur participation sports. The entire social approach to economics as a kind of super-bowl with better goodies for the champier chimps better than those for the rest who do the grooming isn't concerned with optimalization of resource use, or the pervasive increase of intelligence as a value.
Philosophically, scientific facts about the total state of eco-resources are known to be absent from economic planning except as concerns particular resources such as oil. There is no invisible hand able to substitute for an invisible brain in capitalism such that the world's resources would be used most efficiently and for the highest human value within capital markets without government set parameters.
It would be a good thing if science could simply advance such intelligence that humanity would not need to design its life on Earth a little better. Perhaps energy from extra dimensions can be found--who can say that string theories extra dimensions have the same temperature as that of this cold Universe, or even that they run on the same time scale? Because science so far has simply provided data that is applied sprawling all akimbo in the economic and empirical realms if at all, an agency should be formed to empirically regard actual environmental resources with the goal of using them without losing them. It is a challenging and necessary task to avoid the gloom of doom.
Existing economic methods apply post hoc controls in reaction to damage. A priori optimal use of existing resources that doesn't lose them through use is demanded as a response to the resource challenge. It is the lack of philosophical thought about value theory, and failure to regard the well being of others with as much importance as our own that the economic structure fails to support human general advance in an effective empirically cognizant time paradigm.
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Growt...47090/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_c
Ecological economics is the best theoretical approach to conserving and utilizing mass and bio-mass. It is necessary to change the value-theory foundations of economics as well. It would be possible to have a better quality of life for all of humanity perhaps while actually decreasing resource use through an increase in efficiency and knowledge about and coordination of global resources. If the end is not to simply make profit from phenomenal resources, but to conserve resources and get as much as possible from renewable resources that is a value that the people of a democracy must apply themselves.
Statistics have been compiled to show that women reduce family size with an increased standard of living after a generation or two, yet in the future an enhanced standard of living will requires an ecological economic approach rather than simply increasing through-put of non-renewable resources. The issue is not just a dialectic between accelerating resource us and consumerism to raise standards of living and subsequent deceleration of population growth to reduce resource over-use.
A government agency needs to be formed to help with the transition to a vast menu of ecologically more efficient methods of resource use. Government ignorance cannot solve the problem, and the present world governments are mostly signed off on corporatism and consumerism without rhyme or reason except profit regardless of environmental cost or the externalities of human quality of life...
That's why I mention the textbook 'Ecological Economics' by Daly and Farley occasionally. People generally don't understand what it is, or how it's parameters are requisite for living on Earth well in the future.
http://www.amazon.com/Ecological-E...-Herman-Daly/dp/1559633123
Population dynamics, resource quantification and so forth are what the discipline of Ecological economics is concerned with.
The logic of population reduction or control within existing economic methods lets us extrapolate that the remaining capitalists, if the population dropped to two billion souls, would simply increase their own consumption and standard of living 400% and more. Increasing living standards without ecological economic reason will tend to deplete resources that are finite.
A stable population, a rectified economic value theory that seeks for the most effective methods of increasing life standards without harm to the ecosystem is unlikely to develop with a government bound up in Wal-Mart and Macy's shopping theory. The effort to address the facts is what the U.S. Government is unwilling to try--at least so far, in its economic theory and practice.
I read recently that scientist have found that primates aren't especially socially bright. observations of primates have found that those that believe they would lose a fight tend to groom the proto-champ chimps. That may be why pro sports is regarded so highly rather than amateur participation sports. The entire social approach to economics as a kind of super-bowl with better goodies for the champier chimps better than those for the rest who do the grooming isn't concerned with optimalization of resource use, or the pervasive increase of intelligence as a value.
Philosophically, scientific facts about the total state of eco-resources are known to be absent from economic planning except as concerns particular resources such as oil. There is no invisible hand able to substitute for an invisible brain in capitalism such that the world's resources would be used most efficiently and for the highest human value within capital markets without government set parameters.
It would be a good thing if science could simply advance such intelligence that humanity would not need to design its life on Earth a little better. Perhaps energy from extra dimensions can be found--who can say that string theories extra dimensions have the same temperature as that of this cold Universe, or even that they run on the same time scale? Because science so far has simply provided data that is applied sprawling all akimbo in the economic and empirical realms if at all, an agency should be formed to empirically regard actual environmental resources with the goal of using them without losing them. It is a challenging and necessary task to avoid the gloom of doom.
Existing economic methods apply post hoc controls in reaction to damage. A priori optimal use of existing resources that doesn't lose them through use is demanded as a response to the resource challenge. It is the lack of philosophical thought about value theory, and failure to regard the well being of others with as much importance as our own that the economic structure fails to support human general advance in an effective empirically cognizant time paradigm.
1/8/10
The Ecological Economist Magazine
The economist is a ubiquitous British publication with a significant pro-globalist position. I regard that as neither good for the global environment or the economics of the United States.It would be good if an Ecological Economics on-line publication issued to make alternative ecological economic knowledge of a more theoretical and applied side available on contemporary issues. The number of topics to write on is nearly limitless.
With the same old economics paradigm dominating American attention it is consistent that the same global corporatist policies swamp the capital with bad ideas.
With the same old economics paradigm dominating American attention it is consistent that the same global corporatist policies swamp the capital with bad ideas.
1/6/10
Potentiality and Actuality
This neo-Aristotelian paradigm of potentiality and actuality seems an example of what Russell named 'categorical errors'. Scholastic method has faded away a bit to be supplanted with analytic philosophy enough that it is reasonable to use W.V.O. Quine's ontological relativity as a way of recognizing that many of our questions pertain to our cognitive constructions rather than to things-in-themselves.
The lexical ontology wherein potential and actuality exist are word-referents corresponding to human use. There are some things in the 'empirical' experience with more reinforcement of object referent terminology than others. It is not a Platonic form that we are searching for in trying to define actuality or potential philosophically. It is not reasonable to suppose that actuality or potentiality necessarily exist outside of a word-game paradigm.
That existence is actual is plain enough--one must stipulate an axiom or two. Our effort moves toward an increasing awareness of what actually is as well as what actually 'works'. The effort discover what actually is of course has a simultaneous philosophical course of exploration along with the cognitive effort directed toward the given Universe. If the Universe is actually a ten dimensional hologram instead of physical dimensions there is a potential to discover that. The knowledge of what is true may or may not be known. Our opinion as Socrates pointed out may be true opinion. Our beliefs that our opinions are true may have the same effect on personal epistemology regardless of their veracity. About questions of life and values that are not immediately subject to inference through scientific method it takes some time to learn.
It is possible to move out of the analytic language paradigm whereby we answer questions logically and make the error of assuming that our abstract constructions model the physical realm invariably--logical validity is more a matter of tautaulogy or satisfaction of logical equation than observational report.
In the practical realm such as Pierce sought after the inflation of the Universe had in potential all that would ever become as this Universe so far as we know--there may be unknown extra-dimensional contributions or alteration after, or before all. The infinite nature of space-time in all directions permits knowledge and inference of a finite realm that reaches human cognition through a glass darkly.
While quantum uncertainty exists in order that the freedom of dimensions of temporality and structure may occur--duration of unit quanta of a Universe in variegated intervals inclusive of scale are meaningful for being comprise a simultaneous being and potential.
Instead of a realm of forms with incomplete, broken units and the perfect actualized materially, there is an experience of processes and events with temporal forms. If we want to know with Plato and Plotinus if eternal forms exist that points to The One for us as it did for those philosophers even if we use the non-mystical Hubble to view a deep field of galaxies 13.2 billion years of age some 600 to 800 billion years post inflaton commencement and read ideas of physical theorists regarding the Universe before a fraction of a centimeter bottleneck/near singularity
The lexical ontology wherein potential and actuality exist are word-referents corresponding to human use. There are some things in the 'empirical' experience with more reinforcement of object referent terminology than others. It is not a Platonic form that we are searching for in trying to define actuality or potential philosophically. It is not reasonable to suppose that actuality or potentiality necessarily exist outside of a word-game paradigm.
That existence is actual is plain enough--one must stipulate an axiom or two. Our effort moves toward an increasing awareness of what actually is as well as what actually 'works'. The effort discover what actually is of course has a simultaneous philosophical course of exploration along with the cognitive effort directed toward the given Universe. If the Universe is actually a ten dimensional hologram instead of physical dimensions there is a potential to discover that. The knowledge of what is true may or may not be known. Our opinion as Socrates pointed out may be true opinion. Our beliefs that our opinions are true may have the same effect on personal epistemology regardless of their veracity. About questions of life and values that are not immediately subject to inference through scientific method it takes some time to learn.
It is possible to move out of the analytic language paradigm whereby we answer questions logically and make the error of assuming that our abstract constructions model the physical realm invariably--logical validity is more a matter of tautaulogy or satisfaction of logical equation than observational report.
In the practical realm such as Pierce sought after the inflation of the Universe had in potential all that would ever become as this Universe so far as we know--there may be unknown extra-dimensional contributions or alteration after, or before all. The infinite nature of space-time in all directions permits knowledge and inference of a finite realm that reaches human cognition through a glass darkly.
While quantum uncertainty exists in order that the freedom of dimensions of temporality and structure may occur--duration of unit quanta of a Universe in variegated intervals inclusive of scale are meaningful for being comprise a simultaneous being and potential.
Instead of a realm of forms with incomplete, broken units and the perfect actualized materially, there is an experience of processes and events with temporal forms. If we want to know with Plato and Plotinus if eternal forms exist that points to The One for us as it did for those philosophers even if we use the non-mystical Hubble to view a deep field of galaxies 13.2 billion years of age some 600 to 800 billion years post inflaton commencement and read ideas of physical theorists regarding the Universe before a fraction of a centimeter bottleneck/near singularity
Pre-Big Bang Universe and Uncertainty--comments
[____]; I thought I would reply as well, having some experience with another paradigm for lint recently. I have less experience with uncertainty theory not being a physicist, yet I like it anyway.
If light is a wave then a sampling of it at a given place or speed would be just a section of the wave and hence it would have determinist characteristics in relation to how and where the 'snapshot' was made. Quanta in relative motion, rather than arrested in a strong, weak, nuclear or gravity protocol as may other quanta, skip the criterion of determinism a little better, relatively speaking.
Light and other particles have a deeper composition such as quarks, and may exist in extra-dimensions. I think present math theories for strong theory can posit as many as 256 extra dimensions, and so the appearance of mass-energy in various configurations by human observers in this particular Universe may be doubly representational--of our own deterministic scale as physical beings in these dimensions with a certain level of complexity, and from the aspects of extra-dimensional waveforms reduced to appear in these four apparent dimensions. Not all of the discrete quanta comprising a given wave-particle quanta need necessarily manifest in our four dimensions. Present graviton investigations consider such matters.
There is also the issue of dimensions and of there nature. In big bang theory the Higgs Field named for Peter Higgs is a kind of substrate underwriting the order of appearance of the quanta of this universe. The reason I mentioned that is because of the idea of dimensions and there relation to mass-energy before, during and after space-time and it's temporal order of appearance. In some ways I think that David Hume's ideas about causality as simply an association of concurrent or sequential events that isn't necessarily an accurate description of how, what or why things actually observed are--may apply to quantum physics. The quantum protocols work as investigation tools rather than as absolute things-in-themselves.
Yet I strayed off course from commenting about dimensions and there relation to mass energy. Perhaps dimensions might be compared to D.N.A. forms with interesting structure like the human genome, and differ as do the base molecules and proteins forming D.N.A. differ. Quarks as the fundamental quanta in this Universe are even so not the essential construction unit, and dimensional configuration and complexity is neither. The potential for formation of dimensional constructions in a given universe arises perhaps in the perturbative vacuum before the big bang.
If there is a dimensionless perturbative vacuum into which virtual particles appear, there may be dimensionlessness with or without space.
Dimensions may form theoretically akin to the way crystalline structures grow in complexity with more than four dimensions. If the basic endowment of energy has no dimensions, but is something like an omnipotent field of potential reduction into dimensions--its higher order or pre-eminent order may be able to surpass light speed or other protocol relationships of created mass-energy within the given boundary configurations of this created Universe.
That mass-energy may concentrate such as at a singularity, does not imply that there is a minimal reduction in scale. What force would prevent the deconstruction of mass from reducing itself in scale? There are metaphysical points of interests that philosophers can make on borrowed physical paradigms coupled with logic and necessity. The metaphysics regarding the nature of The One that Plotinus wrote about in The Enneads is a useful place to consider a theistic Universe or not. One may posit the nature of The One comprising zero-dimensional, zero scale omnipotence existing before the Big bang in relation to all possible Universes as subsets within then mind of God, or simply logically inquire into the nature of mass-energy existing before the Big Bang with logical transcendence of all contingent physical manifestations by some initial existent quanta of all quanta.
So that was about all I had to write on this topic for now. I suggest reading Maurizio Gasperini's 2008 book 'The Universe Before the Big Bang' for a quality exposition of string ideas in the pre-big bang Universe structure.
If light is a wave then a sampling of it at a given place or speed would be just a section of the wave and hence it would have determinist characteristics in relation to how and where the 'snapshot' was made. Quanta in relative motion, rather than arrested in a strong, weak, nuclear or gravity protocol as may other quanta, skip the criterion of determinism a little better, relatively speaking.
Light and other particles have a deeper composition such as quarks, and may exist in extra-dimensions. I think present math theories for strong theory can posit as many as 256 extra dimensions, and so the appearance of mass-energy in various configurations by human observers in this particular Universe may be doubly representational--of our own deterministic scale as physical beings in these dimensions with a certain level of complexity, and from the aspects of extra-dimensional waveforms reduced to appear in these four apparent dimensions. Not all of the discrete quanta comprising a given wave-particle quanta need necessarily manifest in our four dimensions. Present graviton investigations consider such matters.
There is also the issue of dimensions and of there nature. In big bang theory the Higgs Field named for Peter Higgs is a kind of substrate underwriting the order of appearance of the quanta of this universe. The reason I mentioned that is because of the idea of dimensions and there relation to mass-energy before, during and after space-time and it's temporal order of appearance. In some ways I think that David Hume's ideas about causality as simply an association of concurrent or sequential events that isn't necessarily an accurate description of how, what or why things actually observed are--may apply to quantum physics. The quantum protocols work as investigation tools rather than as absolute things-in-themselves.
Yet I strayed off course from commenting about dimensions and there relation to mass energy. Perhaps dimensions might be compared to D.N.A. forms with interesting structure like the human genome, and differ as do the base molecules and proteins forming D.N.A. differ. Quarks as the fundamental quanta in this Universe are even so not the essential construction unit, and dimensional configuration and complexity is neither. The potential for formation of dimensional constructions in a given universe arises perhaps in the perturbative vacuum before the big bang.
If there is a dimensionless perturbative vacuum into which virtual particles appear, there may be dimensionlessness with or without space.
Dimensions may form theoretically akin to the way crystalline structures grow in complexity with more than four dimensions. If the basic endowment of energy has no dimensions, but is something like an omnipotent field of potential reduction into dimensions--its higher order or pre-eminent order may be able to surpass light speed or other protocol relationships of created mass-energy within the given boundary configurations of this created Universe.
That mass-energy may concentrate such as at a singularity, does not imply that there is a minimal reduction in scale. What force would prevent the deconstruction of mass from reducing itself in scale? There are metaphysical points of interests that philosophers can make on borrowed physical paradigms coupled with logic and necessity. The metaphysics regarding the nature of The One that Plotinus wrote about in The Enneads is a useful place to consider a theistic Universe or not. One may posit the nature of The One comprising zero-dimensional, zero scale omnipotence existing before the Big bang in relation to all possible Universes as subsets within then mind of God, or simply logically inquire into the nature of mass-energy existing before the Big Bang with logical transcendence of all contingent physical manifestations by some initial existent quanta of all quanta.
So that was about all I had to write on this topic for now. I suggest reading Maurizio Gasperini's 2008 book 'The Universe Before the Big Bang' for a quality exposition of string ideas in the pre-big bang Universe structure.
1/5/10
U.S. Government Should Add a Department of Ecological Economic Science
The national and global ecosystem is in the midst of the Holocene mass extinction. It is the sixth known mass extinction in planetary history. The U.S. Government does little to reconcile the economy to the salient facts of mass extinction endangering the future viability of human life on the Earth. Also the present economic methods are a net deficit creating phenomenon.
The U.S. Government should create a new federal Department with a cabinet level director that would research and apply ecological economic scientifically rational methods in the United States regarding sustainability, renewability and the elimination of species extinction. Presently politicians are functionally clueless on ecological economic procedures. By the end of this century Edmund Wilson speculated that as many as half of the existing species will be extinct. Human life is part of a complex and interrelated biological web that enables life to exist. The reduction of species also reduces the prospects for human survival, yet I like wild-life just because its a living thing, and thats a good enough reason not to exterminate it.
Sci-American Article on the Mass Extinction and Possble Steps to Arrest It
Science means knowledge and philosophy means love of wisdom--so is it wise to be reticent about promoting a new U.S. Department of Ecological Economics to Avert Mass Extinction?
Ethics, social philosophy, politics and science may be considered disciplines for philosophers to consider, yet if the abstract considerations haven't any relation to the world of applications of theory is the knowledge relevant as philosophy? Mustn’t the love of wisdom be founded upon the ability to understand and address issues in the world more so than in construction of a priori systems of symbols?
It perhaps isn't requisite for a philosophy of science with credibility to have a Lovelockian Gaia world-view paradigm of life.Yet neither is it reasonable to omit life on Earth as a unity that should not be reduced in quality or quantity without a good reason
While politicians and those practicing Darwinian versions of capitalism (It is possible to delimit capitalist criteria such that it serves the people of a democracy as well as capitalists. Capitalism in-itself does not evolve the highest, most intelligent or useful social structure)have insufficient scientific intelligence regarding the state of world ecosystems, the ecosystems continue to be abused and species extirpated. Philosophers of science should add as a fundamental instructional goal the present Earth paradigm of eco-decline and possible remedies. Some have written that the ecosystem is the economy. Others have developed Ecological Economic text books to help teach the basics of an economic policy founded within criteria of habitat and species conservation with a different value theory foundation cognizant of the worth of environmmental services to humanity.
A philosophy of science program that does not include the topic of the value of life would seem to miss the woods for the trees I think. A way that axiology can be brought into government economic planning with a change from a gold or consumerist standard to a conservation and sustainability basis is a challenge for discovery. Several recognize the inertia if ecological amorality prevalent in global business. Without philosophical direction the programmatic construction of synthetic scientific and economic theory politically formed may not soon develop.
In the enlightenment era scientific and philosophical elites did at least provide books read by at least some of the politically empowered class. In modern America economic over-specialization and the globalization of corporatism has driven many ordinary citizens far from opportunities to meaningfully support ecological economic reformation in the nation. A federal Department of Ecological Economic Science might be able to create a politically empowered organization that has a plethora of ecological economic prospects ready to go for the administrative and congressional branches of government. In the present structural phenomena concentrated wealth may adversely affect the motivation to change existing methods of business with ecologically deleterious practice.
Science means knowledge and philosophy means love of wisdom--so is it wise to be reticent about promoting a new U.S. Department of Ecological Economics to Avert Mass Extinction?
Ethics, social philosophy, politics and science may be considered disciplines for philosophers to consider, yet if the abstract considerations haven't any relation to the world of applications of theory is the knowledge relevant as philosophy? Mustn’t the love of wisdom be founded upon the ability to understand and address issues in the world more so than in construction of a priori systems of symbols?
It perhaps isn't requisite for a philosophy of science with credibility to have a Lovelockian Gaia world-view paradigm of life.Yet neither is it reasonable to omit life on Earth as a unity that should not be reduced in quality or quantity without a good reason
While politicians and those practicing Darwinian versions of capitalism (It is possible to delimit capitalist criteria such that it serves the people of a democracy as well as capitalists. Capitalism in-itself does not evolve the highest, most intelligent or useful social structure)have insufficient scientific intelligence regarding the state of world ecosystems, the ecosystems continue to be abused and species extirpated. Philosophers of science should add as a fundamental instructional goal the present Earth paradigm of eco-decline and possible remedies. Some have written that the ecosystem is the economy. Others have developed Ecological Economic text books to help teach the basics of an economic policy founded within criteria of habitat and species conservation with a different value theory foundation cognizant of the worth of environmmental services to humanity.
A philosophy of science program that does not include the topic of the value of life would seem to miss the woods for the trees I think. A way that axiology can be brought into government economic planning with a change from a gold or consumerist standard to a conservation and sustainability basis is a challenge for discovery. Several recognize the inertia if ecological amorality prevalent in global business. Without philosophical direction the programmatic construction of synthetic scientific and economic theory politically formed may not soon develop.
In the enlightenment era scientific and philosophical elites did at least provide books read by at least some of the politically empowered class. In modern America economic over-specialization and the globalization of corporatism has driven many ordinary citizens far from opportunities to meaningfully support ecological economic reformation in the nation. A federal Department of Ecological Economic Science might be able to create a politically empowered organization that has a plethora of ecological economic prospects ready to go for the administrative and congressional branches of government. In the present structural phenomena concentrated wealth may adversely affect the motivation to change existing methods of business with ecologically deleterious practice.
1/4/10
On Words, Objects and Cosmology
Question 1--'Do you think ideas and language exist? Do they exist in the level of things we can kick, or punch? I think not. In what sense do ideas, and language exist?'
I will write about this below--yet not answer your questions directly. I suggest reading W.V.O. Quine's Philosophy of Logic or Strawson's 'Individuals'. I like the fact that Quine wrote 'The Two Dogmas of Empiricism' and devastated the philosophy of empiricism's premises about Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction. He returned language to a more reasonable basis of being in mind referring to experienced objects. About the nature of objects I tend to agree with Bishop Berkeley and yet modernize that to a pragmatist criterion wherein words refer to units of experience. Experience and all other concepts are human concepts that exist within a sentient continuum, yet so do our perceptions of the moon and stars. All in turn may exist within a universal force field of quanta or virtual particles--yet even those membranes or waves of zero dimensions and other nominal quanta are interpreted by reason and sensation.
Thus a statistical representation of words and 'objects'is customary--words are a kind of way of mapping experience.
Question 2-'In what sense is "information" used in M-theory, or some other physical theory? Do you have any examples? How is information physical?'
These are good and yet difficult questions to answer. I have written a little upon each elsewhere, and so am naturally reluctant to reiterate the same material. They are topics that can use quite a bit of reading and thought. Luckily for me I was able to read a text on 'The Art of Reasoning' by Kelly and that led int the philosophy of logic. Recently I read W.V.O. Quine's 'Ontological Relativity' that was given at the Dewey lectures at Harvard. Quine died about the year 2000, and was one of the best of 20th century philosophers.
He wrote a lot about logic and the nature of language. I tend to agree with his ideas about words and their relation to thought. Words within sets of words as abstract groups or organizations and structures receive a meaning value by the user and of course social inheritence. It is equally possible to construct a language such as a math or computer language with nominal or no meaning, yet there may be an implicit bias within human nature to give meanings to words or unit symbols based on environment and effectiveness.
I don't want to get to far off track on the road to digressions here. Obviously when writing about words one might use a few thousand--and others have done so better making a judicious rationing of language desirable here. Word sets and our ontology or largest world view about things is expressed in malleable words sets. Circularity is one of the basic features of word meanings. Such as one defines green as a color perhaps by saying its a combination of red and blue colors, most words get meaning with definition references to other words as well as the environment experienced. The words 'physical' and 'existence' are such words.
We ask if something is physical, and assume a familiar definition. Perhaps it may be defined in comparison to something not physical--yet what is that? There are good books on quantum mechanical phenomena available for us non-mathematicians to read, and good books such as 'Why Beauty Is Truth' on the history of the mathematical concept of symmetry especially developed in algebra and useful in M-Theory and multi-dimensional experimental construction; it is apparent that at the largest and smallest levels of being the quantum construction is indefinate.
What is smaller than quarks?, where did virtual particles arise--why did space-time and physical causality arise at all from a vacuum field before the big bang? What are loops, strings, quarks and virtual particles in a macro-spatial field of quantum uncertainty?
There are so many questions about The One before the big bang and before the pre-big bang vacuum field arose: why did uncertainty exist to start with, why did quantum superposition and uncertainty in a monistic waveform download into a temporal condition? For may way of thinking I quickly get to the sort of questions that the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus brought to being in his 54 tractates named 'The Enneads'. It isn't necessary to leave the topic in what seems persently to some to be a vague mysticism.
It is possible to get book named 'The Essential Plotinus' used online for a dollar or two plus shipping. Its a good way to get what Russell thought to be the writing of the philosopher with the most kind nature in the history of philosophy (if you read Russell's History of Western Philosophy). Gasperini's book The Universe Before the Big Bang' is totally worth the reading for a briefing on that topic.
Mind exists as a physical field. Self awareness is a very specialized construction in that physical field including quarks, uncertainty and all of the very ponderable topics of beauty and complexity we might expect. Becuase we are not cerrtain due to the infinity of what the ultimate nature of anything is, with such Godelian and Cantorian limits to knowledge of things such that there is always more beyond our grasp, we are left to consider things as events--even Christians may consider cerrtain events as meaningful. Relationships may be meaningful for themselves to sentient beings. Sentience may comprise an evolved level attaining to a spiritual self-awareness of being.
I am sort of hurrying to a conclusion here--there are quite a few topic one might bring in or allude to such as Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Mind' that consider the subject or aspects of it from other points of view--the historical context of many philosophical ideas from Hume to Heidegger might be thought to occur within contemporary contexts of social politics and knowledge as well. So I will skipa lot of that and return to the ideas I am concerned with here about information or intelligence within a monistic pre-big bang field, and perhaps consider that for myself.
I agree with the ideas of Plotinus on the nature of The One...God requires no dimensional extension--yet that concept might seem vague without reading that math book mentioned above that helps to understand about the advance from linear to quadratic equations and higher literals led to multi-dimensional graphs and extra dimensional arrays. Those scaler fields (fields of adjustable scale) are tools for modern cosmology. It seems almost logical today that God would not require dimensions for-himself any more than space-time. They are temporal things or segments of some eternal wave that contains all potential quanta.
Regardless of how we go about it the words or terms used to say that things exist (ist means 'to be' in Germanic languages and also have roots in Sanskrit and the proto Indo-European language, so ex- ist may mean to remove or stand back and look at being initially) within our own ontologies. IIt is useful to examine a little our assumptions about what words mean. Analytic philosophy of the 20th century renormalized language and metaphysics a little in philosophy through logic and linguistic analysis to actually determine what particular words means, or refer to. Then we can find that some words are given more meaning ojectively through use than they actually have in fact.
Words and even knowledge are sort of virtual tools like lights in the darkness we carry to illuminate the non-sentient Universe around us of which we are part. The spiritual is the intelligent aspect of experience that rises above the deterministic forces set into being long ago before the big bang--at least a little. It is possible to ponder the waveform, transcending super quanta of God just as rather comparatively silly assuming beings doing our best to learn about all His marvelous works.
I will write about this below--yet not answer your questions directly. I suggest reading W.V.O. Quine's Philosophy of Logic or Strawson's 'Individuals'. I like the fact that Quine wrote 'The Two Dogmas of Empiricism' and devastated the philosophy of empiricism's premises about Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction. He returned language to a more reasonable basis of being in mind referring to experienced objects. About the nature of objects I tend to agree with Bishop Berkeley and yet modernize that to a pragmatist criterion wherein words refer to units of experience. Experience and all other concepts are human concepts that exist within a sentient continuum, yet so do our perceptions of the moon and stars. All in turn may exist within a universal force field of quanta or virtual particles--yet even those membranes or waves of zero dimensions and other nominal quanta are interpreted by reason and sensation.
Thus a statistical representation of words and 'objects'is customary--words are a kind of way of mapping experience.
Question 2-'In what sense is "information" used in M-theory, or some other physical theory? Do you have any examples? How is information physical?'
These are good and yet difficult questions to answer. I have written a little upon each elsewhere, and so am naturally reluctant to reiterate the same material. They are topics that can use quite a bit of reading and thought. Luckily for me I was able to read a text on 'The Art of Reasoning' by Kelly and that led int the philosophy of logic. Recently I read W.V.O. Quine's 'Ontological Relativity' that was given at the Dewey lectures at Harvard. Quine died about the year 2000, and was one of the best of 20th century philosophers.
He wrote a lot about logic and the nature of language. I tend to agree with his ideas about words and their relation to thought. Words within sets of words as abstract groups or organizations and structures receive a meaning value by the user and of course social inheritence. It is equally possible to construct a language such as a math or computer language with nominal or no meaning, yet there may be an implicit bias within human nature to give meanings to words or unit symbols based on environment and effectiveness.
I don't want to get to far off track on the road to digressions here. Obviously when writing about words one might use a few thousand--and others have done so better making a judicious rationing of language desirable here. Word sets and our ontology or largest world view about things is expressed in malleable words sets. Circularity is one of the basic features of word meanings. Such as one defines green as a color perhaps by saying its a combination of red and blue colors, most words get meaning with definition references to other words as well as the environment experienced. The words 'physical' and 'existence' are such words.
We ask if something is physical, and assume a familiar definition. Perhaps it may be defined in comparison to something not physical--yet what is that? There are good books on quantum mechanical phenomena available for us non-mathematicians to read, and good books such as 'Why Beauty Is Truth' on the history of the mathematical concept of symmetry especially developed in algebra and useful in M-Theory and multi-dimensional experimental construction; it is apparent that at the largest and smallest levels of being the quantum construction is indefinate.
What is smaller than quarks?, where did virtual particles arise--why did space-time and physical causality arise at all from a vacuum field before the big bang? What are loops, strings, quarks and virtual particles in a macro-spatial field of quantum uncertainty?
There are so many questions about The One before the big bang and before the pre-big bang vacuum field arose: why did uncertainty exist to start with, why did quantum superposition and uncertainty in a monistic waveform download into a temporal condition? For may way of thinking I quickly get to the sort of questions that the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus brought to being in his 54 tractates named 'The Enneads'. It isn't necessary to leave the topic in what seems persently to some to be a vague mysticism.
It is possible to get book named 'The Essential Plotinus' used online for a dollar or two plus shipping. Its a good way to get what Russell thought to be the writing of the philosopher with the most kind nature in the history of philosophy (if you read Russell's History of Western Philosophy). Gasperini's book The Universe Before the Big Bang' is totally worth the reading for a briefing on that topic.
Mind exists as a physical field. Self awareness is a very specialized construction in that physical field including quarks, uncertainty and all of the very ponderable topics of beauty and complexity we might expect. Becuase we are not cerrtain due to the infinity of what the ultimate nature of anything is, with such Godelian and Cantorian limits to knowledge of things such that there is always more beyond our grasp, we are left to consider things as events--even Christians may consider cerrtain events as meaningful. Relationships may be meaningful for themselves to sentient beings. Sentience may comprise an evolved level attaining to a spiritual self-awareness of being.
I am sort of hurrying to a conclusion here--there are quite a few topic one might bring in or allude to such as Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Mind' that consider the subject or aspects of it from other points of view--the historical context of many philosophical ideas from Hume to Heidegger might be thought to occur within contemporary contexts of social politics and knowledge as well. So I will skipa lot of that and return to the ideas I am concerned with here about information or intelligence within a monistic pre-big bang field, and perhaps consider that for myself.
I agree with the ideas of Plotinus on the nature of The One...God requires no dimensional extension--yet that concept might seem vague without reading that math book mentioned above that helps to understand about the advance from linear to quadratic equations and higher literals led to multi-dimensional graphs and extra dimensional arrays. Those scaler fields (fields of adjustable scale) are tools for modern cosmology. It seems almost logical today that God would not require dimensions for-himself any more than space-time. They are temporal things or segments of some eternal wave that contains all potential quanta.
Regardless of how we go about it the words or terms used to say that things exist (ist means 'to be' in Germanic languages and also have roots in Sanskrit and the proto Indo-European language, so ex- ist may mean to remove or stand back and look at being initially) within our own ontologies. IIt is useful to examine a little our assumptions about what words mean. Analytic philosophy of the 20th century renormalized language and metaphysics a little in philosophy through logic and linguistic analysis to actually determine what particular words means, or refer to. Then we can find that some words are given more meaning ojectively through use than they actually have in fact.
Words and even knowledge are sort of virtual tools like lights in the darkness we carry to illuminate the non-sentient Universe around us of which we are part. The spiritual is the intelligent aspect of experience that rises above the deterministic forces set into being long ago before the big bang--at least a little. It is possible to ponder the waveform, transcending super quanta of God just as rather comparatively silly assuming beings doing our best to learn about all His marvelous works.
Select Dysfunctional Foreign Policy Traits of the United States in 2010
Part of the contemporary problem with defining what a war is, who it benefits and what its final functions are reside in the linguistic criterion of word meanings and ontological lexicons. Lexicons of ideas may exist as well as for vocabularies.The neo-cons for example had a given world view and ontology with a dedicated lexicon as a sub-unit of larger social lexical structures. Obviously those of the opposition forces have a differnet ontology and structure from that of the broadcast media, global corporations, the Obama administration or whoever else wants to spend trillions of Afghanistan conflict. I think the idea of a 'just' war occurs within a given linguistic ontology with a particular world view.
There is the additional problem of defining morality. One may have a linguistic catagory approach or an anthropological paradigm from which to examine wars in general or a given war in particular. Is it moral to abstract human relationships so far as to make them impersonal and general? Can one consider universal human categories of evil as general questions that may be solved in theory? If humanity all have original sin is it then morally just for the Supreme Being to delete them all we might ask?
Morality has been said to be a list of what people actually do rather than an abstract inquiry into the nature of right conduct. Sociologists could write up what American morality is in practice after observing it for instance, and then say that such conduct is what is moral in relation to the positive or negative reinforcement such conduct elicited. If it is the usual thing to say that it is moral to pay taxes or be monogamous, but few do or are (in a hypothetical state), then it is also a moral practice to lie in addition to cheating on taxes and committing adultery.
Morality may be either what people actually do or the effort to work for a perfect moral order being perfectly moral on the way. Jesus Christ best exemplified that method. Siddartha made an effort at that too. In Afghanistan the United States has few claims about moral correctness that seem relevant.
Political leaders initially intervened to punish Al Qa'eda and remove the Taliban, yet after a decade the effort seems an inconclusive and unreasonable way to go about the paramount task of preventing further attacks on the United States. If the defense of Europe is a goal, Europeans should be the overwhelming majority of the forces deployed--maybe the Russians too would like to return so it doesn't become a haven for Chechyan terrorists. In many ways the Afghanistan mission presently seems a consequence of political inertia and a lack of leadership intelligence for certainly there are better policy implementations possible that would profit the United States instead of seasonal Taliban sympathizers.
In some of the above criteria the war that is not a war but a foreign occupation and management of a puppet government for a couple more years is immoral because it loses money for U.S. taxpayers. As repugnant as war for profit would be to some of us more perfect moralizers, it has traditionally been a reason for invading and looting foreign places. The United States did defend the people of Iraq enough so that Exxon got some oil contracts in the desert, yet the war would have ended sooner if the people of Iraq themselves as individual citizens were given ownership shares personally of the nation's oil with the government keeping maybe 25%. That would still be a better way to withdraw U.S. troops and to bring domestic tranquility with a lesser prospect for a regional war with Iran or whoever wants the oil and gas fields.
Our friends the Vikings of course on plundering missions might give lung water-wings to their prey who could haplessly flounder about in the water a few minutes afloat. America may have been first settled by Irish-Alban Europeans escaping farther west across the Atlantic removing to new fishing and hunting grounds perennially pursued by the Vikings. If we aspire to a higher morality today because we have more technology, it is comforting to realize the reasons for the failure are not an indication of the pervasive incapability of increase of moral education and faith. A minority invented the technology and a minority are moral leaders in a positive direction. People flock to good material things brought by technology while avoiding the moral lessons that require material value cost. Political and social leaders accentuate the positive and profitable except where its funding is borrowed.
Value theory plays a large role in decisions for the prosecution of war. Fighting over scarce commodities is often considered just. If we put a list of just symbolic reasons for war on the right side of an equation and find them, then our equation of 'Is there a just war' on the left finds a concurrence in truth. The value theories for political action could be changed, yet of course the profit gained from learning moral conduct of value to society en mass punishes financially from the ground up for early students of morality while the apposite value of goods and power pays hierarchially for the few from the top down.
The rest of us take quite a while to learn that the good of the majority may be as meaningful as our own well-being occasionally. Peace abroad in Afghanistan at low cost with prosperity in America of a qualitative, rather than quantitative sort, is a better direction to fight for than to spend trillions and let the terrorists go for placing of goal-line bombs aboard scheduled airlines.
The analytic philosophy of W.V.O. Quine and and others tended to find a circularity in the origin of word meanings whereby one reinforces a definition of a term with a reference to other words that are accepted without further examination. Obviously the word-meaning of 'just' will have a large indeterminate condition in the context of defining a 'just war'.
Additional questions arise such as of a poetically just war. If the United States spends much of its wealth and borrows more to pursue unnecessary ventures will it be poetic justice that the opportunity costs leave the United States badly situated for domestic, national transition to a new ecologically based economy and so forth? A pyrrhic victory is an expensive lesson often for more than one nation. The right ontology to maximally bring into being Universal happiness may be of more value than to pursue an ideology badly applied.
That social conflicts occur is historical fact. Of equal importance to the proximal question of 'is a war just?', is the pursuit of answers to other questions such as does public opinion have a meaningful effect on the start or continuance of a war? Must a citizen simply accept whatever elites of politics decree? Can a nation's policies of war be sometimes reasonable and sometimes stupid?
What if America's present foreign policy is neither just nor unjust regarding the prosecution of war abroad--but less than the best course of action possible? Is in unjust to wage war badly when it could have been done for less cost and with less harm? What if an American policy of ecological renewable economic projects in Pakistan and Afghanistan got support instead of war? Would that get more local approval than military missions? Would Pakistanis have more condemnation of there peers that plan terrorist missions against a nation helping them with ecological economic policy than with one waging war on some of it's citizens?
Since America's investment in Afghanistan is economically immoral it is worth pointing out the capitalism applied within a Darwinian paradigm without a Democratic government oversight setting boundaries within which it must exist tends to run amok, buy the broadcast media, and politicians too.
The United States lost a million private sector jobs droping from 109 million to 108 million between 2000 and 2010. Darwinian capitalism is preparing the ground for global socialism when the majority of a poor electorate in the U.S.A. in 25 years vote to delete the rich through heavy taxation. Something must be done to reduce the gap between the rich and poor within ecologically positive criteria as soon as possible with a gull employment goal rather a retiringt nation without creative industrially green tech progress.
I will write about the particular war in Afghanistan,and why it is presently not the best of all possible courses of action for the United States to take--it may lead to nuclear war between India and Pakistan after Pakistan is destabilized enough...
The United States of America since the Vietnam war has practiced a globalist foreign policy initially developed as a result of the involvement in the two general wars earlier followed by the global cold war to contain communism and the Korean conflict. That foreign policy habit continued following the end of the cold war with the Bush I administrative launch into the first Gulf War to contain the expansionism of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or at least it set the stage for a return to the global policies of prior eras that had been curtailed after the end of the protracted, unsatisfying Vietnam conflict.
With the rise of the stock market following a decade of post cold-war profit taking and expansion the 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in greater Washington D.C. let the politically challenged Bush II administration have a political T-ball to swing at that would set the stage for a return to globalism.
This time the global, non-general campaign would be against second and third world Muslim insurgents and second world nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush league campaign costs were in financial terms far higher than the general conflicts in absolute terms. Between the first year of the campaign in 2001 until 2009 more than two trillion dollars were spent, and more was promised by the next administration of president Barrack Obama. President Obama guaranteed was until at least 2011 with tens of thousands more troops at very high almost mercenary pay scales being deployed to Afghanistan while those already in Iraq would only slowly be reduced in number.
The U.S. foreign policy leading to protracted foreign military engagements against suicide bombers and a Diaspora of terrorists driven out of Afghanistan by the U.S. led occupation and into Pakistan to destabilize the Pakistani government calls in to question the fundamentally flawed reasoning of the two U.S. administrations that have selected heavy foreign troop deployments of occupation as a way to prevent occasional terrorist missions arriving on scheduled international flights from reaching the United States. The U.S. post 2003 war occupation was a necessity created by the complete lack of post-war planning of the Bush II administration, while the Afghanistan war prosecuted by President Obama is a perhaps greater strategic blunder for the United States in that it may stimulate Muslim radicalism rater than contain it.
It is a paradox that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is financed by money borrowed from Communist China who is free to develop copper mines in Afghanistan and naval bases in Sri Lanka along with vast African investment increases while the United States pursues an unintelligent military based foreign policy that displaces fundamentalist Mohammedans from their home in Afghanistan to move them over the border in to Pakistan and surrounding areas.
If the United States simply requires that a non-Taliban government exist in Afghanistan it could use stand off air power and on ground defense fortresses to interdict Taliban concentrations for a decade or so. The policy intent of creating a friendly Muslim Government in the high central Asian nation is fundamentally flawed. It is a force pressure wave generator of Mohammedan radicalism instead training a new generation of fusionists who have a cohort cadre in the anti-ecological corporatist globalism movement of the United States
Corporatism as a political movement has overtaken the United States political leadership. Forgetting the lessons of Vietnam regarding protracted engagements militarily in heavily populated Asia has returned the rose colored glasses vision to political planners. Clauswitz's first test for a successful war prosecution was 'do the premises add up to the conclusion, or-do the means equal the end? There is not supposed to be a lot of guess work and maybe in a year and a half kind of speculation.
The Bush I war evidently so swollen up the Bush II and Obama governments on American ability to successfully use military power to solve certain political challenges that they began to believe the technological military weapons supremacy could overcome the manpower of Asia in opposing foreign occupation forces.
It is unlikely that heroin poppy production will halt in Afghanistan or Asia, that President Karzai can ‘punish’ and correct corruption, or that any pro-American secular government in that area will be regarded as anything more than a Shah of Iran puppet style tool of western corporatism. Corporatists unfortunately have developed a post cold war era error in belief that the right interpretation of Adam Smith is that the invisible hand of capitalism is a Darwinian selector of the best way of governing--better than democracy. They believe democracy is a hindrance if it does not serve capitalists well. That Spenserian and amoral political philosophy of course corrupts Adam Smith’s David Humean paradigm entirely-they were egalitarian guys in support of democracy that sought empowerment for the masses rather than for the monarchy.
In the absence of firm government parameters based on nationalism or an equivalent accountable-to-the-people-political bargaining unit, capitalism may evolve into a simple oppressor with concentrated wealth and political power. At any rate corporations develop an equivalent power as communist collectives or Soviets of lesser scale, and actively oppressive individual rights foundation requisite for democracy. Freedom of political expression is denied for individuals in corporatism through a de facto control of networks and copyright pragmatics in the Internet age. The U.S. military has not planned a junta in Washington D.C. yet to continue foreign wars, yet former generals do talk of our ‘enemies in Russia, and China, and Africa and…’ in the context of the bad wisdom of setting an withdrawal date for troop deployment in Afghanistan. Why they could imagine that Muslims in central Asia will be any less Muslim in a year or two is difficult to imagine.
A better policy would be to invest funds in U.S. ecological economic and national security development while letting Asians be Asians. If the actually attack the United States then we may reply--and they would be aware of that, yet occupying their nations for a decade or two is an expensive and financially illogical response to foreign aggression in the modern world. Traditional military forces have little prospect for containing spy-cell style terrorist insurgencies abroad, and there is little reason to try to rule the world’s second world trouble spots as a rational way to stop terrorists from entering U.S. borders.
If the United States decides to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities it would not need to occupy Iran. The Obama administration may hope that present revolutionaries in Iran will overthrow the government and end the nuclear arms development program--that policy is perhaps stimulated by an Aminidinijab ploy to help the Hillary Clinton State Department to council the President to wait, and wait… On large items of foreign policy the U.S. Government fails, and avoidable troop deployments it fails, on planning post-war reconstruction it fails--all that failure is expensive.
America’s continued failure to implement an ecologically founded economic policy and to secure its borders against illegal immigration means that the U.S.A. may need to defend Iraq’s oil fields with military security for decades in order that Exxon-Mobil’s contracts may be defended. That is a very oily and expensive policy for the United States. That reliance on oil for automotive power, and natural gas for energy plants in the United States instead of a super-conductor and thermal, wind and solar input infrastructure means that bad U.S. foreign policy strategic objectives will continue for decades to take the U.S. down environmentally and politically disadvantageous roads that should not have built to start with.
There is the additional problem of defining morality. One may have a linguistic catagory approach or an anthropological paradigm from which to examine wars in general or a given war in particular. Is it moral to abstract human relationships so far as to make them impersonal and general? Can one consider universal human categories of evil as general questions that may be solved in theory? If humanity all have original sin is it then morally just for the Supreme Being to delete them all we might ask?
Morality has been said to be a list of what people actually do rather than an abstract inquiry into the nature of right conduct. Sociologists could write up what American morality is in practice after observing it for instance, and then say that such conduct is what is moral in relation to the positive or negative reinforcement such conduct elicited. If it is the usual thing to say that it is moral to pay taxes or be monogamous, but few do or are (in a hypothetical state), then it is also a moral practice to lie in addition to cheating on taxes and committing adultery.
Morality may be either what people actually do or the effort to work for a perfect moral order being perfectly moral on the way. Jesus Christ best exemplified that method. Siddartha made an effort at that too. In Afghanistan the United States has few claims about moral correctness that seem relevant.
Political leaders initially intervened to punish Al Qa'eda and remove the Taliban, yet after a decade the effort seems an inconclusive and unreasonable way to go about the paramount task of preventing further attacks on the United States. If the defense of Europe is a goal, Europeans should be the overwhelming majority of the forces deployed--maybe the Russians too would like to return so it doesn't become a haven for Chechyan terrorists. In many ways the Afghanistan mission presently seems a consequence of political inertia and a lack of leadership intelligence for certainly there are better policy implementations possible that would profit the United States instead of seasonal Taliban sympathizers.
In some of the above criteria the war that is not a war but a foreign occupation and management of a puppet government for a couple more years is immoral because it loses money for U.S. taxpayers. As repugnant as war for profit would be to some of us more perfect moralizers, it has traditionally been a reason for invading and looting foreign places. The United States did defend the people of Iraq enough so that Exxon got some oil contracts in the desert, yet the war would have ended sooner if the people of Iraq themselves as individual citizens were given ownership shares personally of the nation's oil with the government keeping maybe 25%. That would still be a better way to withdraw U.S. troops and to bring domestic tranquility with a lesser prospect for a regional war with Iran or whoever wants the oil and gas fields.
Our friends the Vikings of course on plundering missions might give lung water-wings to their prey who could haplessly flounder about in the water a few minutes afloat. America may have been first settled by Irish-Alban Europeans escaping farther west across the Atlantic removing to new fishing and hunting grounds perennially pursued by the Vikings. If we aspire to a higher morality today because we have more technology, it is comforting to realize the reasons for the failure are not an indication of the pervasive incapability of increase of moral education and faith. A minority invented the technology and a minority are moral leaders in a positive direction. People flock to good material things brought by technology while avoiding the moral lessons that require material value cost. Political and social leaders accentuate the positive and profitable except where its funding is borrowed.
Value theory plays a large role in decisions for the prosecution of war. Fighting over scarce commodities is often considered just. If we put a list of just symbolic reasons for war on the right side of an equation and find them, then our equation of 'Is there a just war' on the left finds a concurrence in truth. The value theories for political action could be changed, yet of course the profit gained from learning moral conduct of value to society en mass punishes financially from the ground up for early students of morality while the apposite value of goods and power pays hierarchially for the few from the top down.
The rest of us take quite a while to learn that the good of the majority may be as meaningful as our own well-being occasionally. Peace abroad in Afghanistan at low cost with prosperity in America of a qualitative, rather than quantitative sort, is a better direction to fight for than to spend trillions and let the terrorists go for placing of goal-line bombs aboard scheduled airlines.
The analytic philosophy of W.V.O. Quine and and others tended to find a circularity in the origin of word meanings whereby one reinforces a definition of a term with a reference to other words that are accepted without further examination. Obviously the word-meaning of 'just' will have a large indeterminate condition in the context of defining a 'just war'.
Additional questions arise such as of a poetically just war. If the United States spends much of its wealth and borrows more to pursue unnecessary ventures will it be poetic justice that the opportunity costs leave the United States badly situated for domestic, national transition to a new ecologically based economy and so forth? A pyrrhic victory is an expensive lesson often for more than one nation. The right ontology to maximally bring into being Universal happiness may be of more value than to pursue an ideology badly applied.
That social conflicts occur is historical fact. Of equal importance to the proximal question of 'is a war just?', is the pursuit of answers to other questions such as does public opinion have a meaningful effect on the start or continuance of a war? Must a citizen simply accept whatever elites of politics decree? Can a nation's policies of war be sometimes reasonable and sometimes stupid?
What if America's present foreign policy is neither just nor unjust regarding the prosecution of war abroad--but less than the best course of action possible? Is in unjust to wage war badly when it could have been done for less cost and with less harm? What if an American policy of ecological renewable economic projects in Pakistan and Afghanistan got support instead of war? Would that get more local approval than military missions? Would Pakistanis have more condemnation of there peers that plan terrorist missions against a nation helping them with ecological economic policy than with one waging war on some of it's citizens?
Since America's investment in Afghanistan is economically immoral it is worth pointing out the capitalism applied within a Darwinian paradigm without a Democratic government oversight setting boundaries within which it must exist tends to run amok, buy the broadcast media, and politicians too.
The United States lost a million private sector jobs droping from 109 million to 108 million between 2000 and 2010. Darwinian capitalism is preparing the ground for global socialism when the majority of a poor electorate in the U.S.A. in 25 years vote to delete the rich through heavy taxation. Something must be done to reduce the gap between the rich and poor within ecologically positive criteria as soon as possible with a gull employment goal rather a retiringt nation without creative industrially green tech progress.
I will write about the particular war in Afghanistan,and why it is presently not the best of all possible courses of action for the United States to take--it may lead to nuclear war between India and Pakistan after Pakistan is destabilized enough...
The United States of America since the Vietnam war has practiced a globalist foreign policy initially developed as a result of the involvement in the two general wars earlier followed by the global cold war to contain communism and the Korean conflict. That foreign policy habit continued following the end of the cold war with the Bush I administrative launch into the first Gulf War to contain the expansionism of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or at least it set the stage for a return to the global policies of prior eras that had been curtailed after the end of the protracted, unsatisfying Vietnam conflict.
With the rise of the stock market following a decade of post cold-war profit taking and expansion the 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in greater Washington D.C. let the politically challenged Bush II administration have a political T-ball to swing at that would set the stage for a return to globalism.
This time the global, non-general campaign would be against second and third world Muslim insurgents and second world nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush league campaign costs were in financial terms far higher than the general conflicts in absolute terms. Between the first year of the campaign in 2001 until 2009 more than two trillion dollars were spent, and more was promised by the next administration of president Barrack Obama. President Obama guaranteed was until at least 2011 with tens of thousands more troops at very high almost mercenary pay scales being deployed to Afghanistan while those already in Iraq would only slowly be reduced in number.
The U.S. foreign policy leading to protracted foreign military engagements against suicide bombers and a Diaspora of terrorists driven out of Afghanistan by the U.S. led occupation and into Pakistan to destabilize the Pakistani government calls in to question the fundamentally flawed reasoning of the two U.S. administrations that have selected heavy foreign troop deployments of occupation as a way to prevent occasional terrorist missions arriving on scheduled international flights from reaching the United States. The U.S. post 2003 war occupation was a necessity created by the complete lack of post-war planning of the Bush II administration, while the Afghanistan war prosecuted by President Obama is a perhaps greater strategic blunder for the United States in that it may stimulate Muslim radicalism rater than contain it.
It is a paradox that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is financed by money borrowed from Communist China who is free to develop copper mines in Afghanistan and naval bases in Sri Lanka along with vast African investment increases while the United States pursues an unintelligent military based foreign policy that displaces fundamentalist Mohammedans from their home in Afghanistan to move them over the border in to Pakistan and surrounding areas.
If the United States simply requires that a non-Taliban government exist in Afghanistan it could use stand off air power and on ground defense fortresses to interdict Taliban concentrations for a decade or so. The policy intent of creating a friendly Muslim Government in the high central Asian nation is fundamentally flawed. It is a force pressure wave generator of Mohammedan radicalism instead training a new generation of fusionists who have a cohort cadre in the anti-ecological corporatist globalism movement of the United States
Corporatism as a political movement has overtaken the United States political leadership. Forgetting the lessons of Vietnam regarding protracted engagements militarily in heavily populated Asia has returned the rose colored glasses vision to political planners. Clauswitz's first test for a successful war prosecution was 'do the premises add up to the conclusion, or-do the means equal the end? There is not supposed to be a lot of guess work and maybe in a year and a half kind of speculation.
The Bush I war evidently so swollen up the Bush II and Obama governments on American ability to successfully use military power to solve certain political challenges that they began to believe the technological military weapons supremacy could overcome the manpower of Asia in opposing foreign occupation forces.
It is unlikely that heroin poppy production will halt in Afghanistan or Asia, that President Karzai can ‘punish’ and correct corruption, or that any pro-American secular government in that area will be regarded as anything more than a Shah of Iran puppet style tool of western corporatism. Corporatists unfortunately have developed a post cold war era error in belief that the right interpretation of Adam Smith is that the invisible hand of capitalism is a Darwinian selector of the best way of governing--better than democracy. They believe democracy is a hindrance if it does not serve capitalists well. That Spenserian and amoral political philosophy of course corrupts Adam Smith’s David Humean paradigm entirely-they were egalitarian guys in support of democracy that sought empowerment for the masses rather than for the monarchy.
In the absence of firm government parameters based on nationalism or an equivalent accountable-to-the-people-political bargaining unit, capitalism may evolve into a simple oppressor with concentrated wealth and political power. At any rate corporations develop an equivalent power as communist collectives or Soviets of lesser scale, and actively oppressive individual rights foundation requisite for democracy. Freedom of political expression is denied for individuals in corporatism through a de facto control of networks and copyright pragmatics in the Internet age. The U.S. military has not planned a junta in Washington D.C. yet to continue foreign wars, yet former generals do talk of our ‘enemies in Russia, and China, and Africa and…’ in the context of the bad wisdom of setting an withdrawal date for troop deployment in Afghanistan. Why they could imagine that Muslims in central Asia will be any less Muslim in a year or two is difficult to imagine.
A better policy would be to invest funds in U.S. ecological economic and national security development while letting Asians be Asians. If the actually attack the United States then we may reply--and they would be aware of that, yet occupying their nations for a decade or two is an expensive and financially illogical response to foreign aggression in the modern world. Traditional military forces have little prospect for containing spy-cell style terrorist insurgencies abroad, and there is little reason to try to rule the world’s second world trouble spots as a rational way to stop terrorists from entering U.S. borders.
If the United States decides to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities it would not need to occupy Iran. The Obama administration may hope that present revolutionaries in Iran will overthrow the government and end the nuclear arms development program--that policy is perhaps stimulated by an Aminidinijab ploy to help the Hillary Clinton State Department to council the President to wait, and wait… On large items of foreign policy the U.S. Government fails, and avoidable troop deployments it fails, on planning post-war reconstruction it fails--all that failure is expensive.
America’s continued failure to implement an ecologically founded economic policy and to secure its borders against illegal immigration means that the U.S.A. may need to defend Iraq’s oil fields with military security for decades in order that Exxon-Mobil’s contracts may be defended. That is a very oily and expensive policy for the United States. That reliance on oil for automotive power, and natural gas for energy plants in the United States instead of a super-conductor and thermal, wind and solar input infrastructure means that bad U.S. foreign policy strategic objectives will continue for decades to take the U.S. down environmentally and politically disadvantageous roads that should not have built to start with.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
Here and there pointillist continua build rowing the skiff clambering over the road staying in shadows until spring insouciant compact snow ...
-
Alaskan officials have cut down or banned King Salmon fishing in much of Alaska because so few of the large fish are returning. The Ancho...
-
Why do F-22 pilots lose consciousness and let their planes crash and burn? The air superiority fighters are designed to survive oppositio...
