Reading this biography published in 1992 on the charismatic president who brought America out of the depression, allowed it to slip into recession perhaps when capitalists went on an informal strike in protest of Roosevelt’s policies of liberalization, is to revisit one of the most trying and formative times in U.S. history and of the three term leader who guided the nation through it with his irrepressible optimism and innovative adaptability. I recommend this fine book for general reading.
F.D.R. destroyed isolationism as a political force during W.W. II with extraordinary leverage including smears, F.B.I. harassment and putting out the idea that isolationists were Nazi symps-an inherently false idea later balanced by the smears on Roosevelt’s New Deal populist liberalism as commie symps. Maney points out that some of Richard Nixon’s methods of attacking political opponents might have been inspired by the executive privilege methodologies of F.D.R. Today, globalists have run amok with U.S. economic power and isolationism is a dirty word making rational nationalism and ecospheric integrity, full employment and national focus on economic innovation difficult to sell to voters through bought and paid for politicians in the pockets of global corporatists.
President Roosevelt had several insights enabling the U.S.A. to move toward good historical footings to build upon, yet he did not bring all to become reality. Political positioning and uncertainties negated several initiatives. In 1944 Roosevelt perceived that European colonialism was dying and he worked-not hard enough though, to bring France to give up Indochina (Vietnam) and Britain to provide independence to India. Neither initiative worked of course and the tragedy of the Vietnam conflict was not avoided.
President Roosevelt never was awarded a Nobel prize, yet in some respects he earned one no less than President Obama. President Obama has encouraged revolutions and regime changes in North Africa and Syria; President Roosevelt sent Dwight Eisenhower and the Army to evict General Rommel and the Afrika Korps from the same region-people known to oppose upward mobility for the poor using harsh, repressive means. President Obama has allowed extraordinary rendition and kept offshore Interrogation facilities open at Guantanamo Bay and possibly elsewhere while continuing President Bush II’s war effort in Afghanistan and helped the Chinese Communist to extract Afghan copper from a large, new mine. President Roosevelt did not have such close relationships with Chinese Communists yet he did help China to develop peace and prosperity by encouraging the Japanese Imperial Army to exit Manchuria etc.
With America’s present high unemployment rate and borderline recovery from recession and stock market crash Roosevelt’s management of the nation between 1932 and 1945 is page-turning reading. One discovers so many similarities in the ways of thinking-even economically between the players of that day in politic and economics with those of contemporary America.
The unemployed at least may be interested in the phenomena of downward redistribution of wealth-modestly-that occurred during the war. The author points out that war spending was a government stimulus that was paid for with increased taxes on the rich largely.
With 50 million Americans out of work today and only half of working age American employed it is interesting to consider a little some of the effects of a downward redistribution of wealth.
1) When full employment occurs government welfare payments drop
2) With full employment the poor may save capital and have capital to invent in business development
3) With a concentration of wealth innovation and stagnation may set in, while with no class of poor people and all with basic goods for healthy living millions more are freed to be competitive, have good tools for progress, develop intellectual capital and so forth.
President Roosevelt developed only a few of the most significant ideas that became legislation creating the New Deal, and he also invented Lend-Lease to The British and Soviet governments, however Roosevelt as an unspoiled rich kid who grew up with everything including a desire for public service, also had the resolve to veto the military plans of about all his war leaders to open the U.S. entry into the European war with
A beach invasion of France and instead go with Churchill’s desire to capture North African areas held by Nazi Germany and its allies before attacking Europe-and of course the plan worked brilliantly allowing a multi-front invasion of Europe.
Roosevelt was quite liberal in allowing is military leaders to execute the war unlike Hitler and Stalin. He was far from being a perfect politician and made many wrong turns yet fewer than right turns, and the nation moved on to a few great post-war decades of economic and scientific achievement perhaps because of Roosevelt’s opening of doors to millions of Americans to experience a modern, technical, scientific world accessible to all citizens that they could help manufacture.
F.D.R. contracted polio at age 39 and did not let the fact keep him from taking the Presidency and accomplishing a better than average job.
As the day for his first inauguration approached Mr. Roosevelt returned from a cruise and got in a car (a convertible) in Miami. An assassin appeared and took shots from 35 feet away hitting five people, some critically and the secret service drove off. President-elect Roosevelt looked back and saw the Chicago Mayor lying wounded on the ground and ordered his driver to turn back so he could help. Mayor Cermak was loaded into the car and the President elect held Mayor Cermak who was critically injured on the way to hospital.
President Roosevelt also flew to Casablanca to meet with Churchill on something of an adventure. Churchill himself had previously met with French leaders while the Germans were just a hundred or so miles away. Churchill was a hard one to be outdone for calm and casualness in challenging circumstances. In some respects Roosevelt’s presidency was as stressful domestically with class and party economic differences of opinion to deal with as the technical complexities of managing foreign war. When the Japanese de facto declared war attacked Pearl Harbor December 7th 1941 followed by Germany and Italy declaring war on the U.S.A. December 11th 1941 it made for three piece of perturbing news that the President was readily able to overcome. He had faith in the future and reasonable tools to meet it, living in the present sometimes too much to make today’s actions consequential building members of a planned future. Much of today’s popular business philosophy relying upon an unplanned used of natural resource by special interests may generate a predictable non-chaotic filling in of the geography f the world. Even recurrent chaotic systems generate predictable outcome within given, known parameters. We may learn much today from reading of the Roosevelt presence.
American issues of Christianity, cosmology, politics, ecosphere, philosophy, contemporary history etc
9/19/11
9/16/11
Poverty in U.S.A. Rises/U.S.B. Trader Charged With Financial Fraud
Nearly 2.6 million Americans have joined the ranks of living below the U.S. poverty line since 2009. Forty six million Americans are now living below the poverty line that is steadily creeping upward. Downward social mobility is becoming a structural feature of a misguided U.S. economic transformation under too comfortable political and economic leadership.
Market economics occassionally require reform. Many of the present crop of Republican Presidential candidates offer the same sort of political logic that President Herbert Hoover set forth in his 1932 re-election campaign. The similarities are rather remarkable.
http://www.kansascity.com/2011/09/13/3139293/real-household-income-fell-23.html
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/police-charge-ubs-trader-with-fraud/
Market economics occassionally require reform. Many of the present crop of Republican Presidential candidates offer the same sort of political logic that President Herbert Hoover set forth in his 1932 re-election campaign. The similarities are rather remarkable.
http://www.kansascity.com/2011/09/13/3139293/real-household-income-fell-23.html
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/police-charge-ubs-trader-with-fraud/
9/15/11
Alaska Governor Tries to Build Road Along WIlderness Fiord-an opinion
A road from Juneau outside will destroy the quality of life, the health of the environment, the peace of whales and make the city an extended garbage strewn boom box special last resort destination of junker cars. The road will provide access from the Canadian interior for cocaine importers to the U.S.A., terrorists from Eurasia and unlimited poaching scouring out the last valuable pelts in the coastal mountains.
http://www.adn.com/2011/09/14/2068679/state-back-to-planning-on-juneau.html
The road could increase global warming and dumping of pollutants in pristine saltwater and allow destruction of many salmon streams between Juneau and Skagway.
It is quite illogical to drive an automobile from Anchorage or even Fairbanks to visit the state capital on business when one can fly for less money. The road project is a tired, destructive, corrupt assault on common sense and the idea of good government brought by bankrupt politicians in the pocket of extraction businesses and for builders that believe they can get a good view for building from of the pristine wilderness being destroyed by others.
Reasonable Alaskans would advocate moving a state capitol to Fairbanks and building a high-speed air pressure powered subway line in a pipeline to it from Anchorage for cheap-easy access, Driving vehicles to Juneau on a road allowing criminals to take over the town for partying and general hell raising seems unneeded except for those that would rather be partying in the wilderness city of Vancouver. If this was the 19th century it might be a good idea to save on dog food costs for sled dogs. In the 21st century the idea is jejune.
http://www.adn.com/2011/09/14/2068679/state-back-to-planning-on-juneau.html
The road could increase global warming and dumping of pollutants in pristine saltwater and allow destruction of many salmon streams between Juneau and Skagway.
It is quite illogical to drive an automobile from Anchorage or even Fairbanks to visit the state capital on business when one can fly for less money. The road project is a tired, destructive, corrupt assault on common sense and the idea of good government brought by bankrupt politicians in the pocket of extraction businesses and for builders that believe they can get a good view for building from of the pristine wilderness being destroyed by others.
Reasonable Alaskans would advocate moving a state capitol to Fairbanks and building a high-speed air pressure powered subway line in a pipeline to it from Anchorage for cheap-easy access, Driving vehicles to Juneau on a road allowing criminals to take over the town for partying and general hell raising seems unneeded except for those that would rather be partying in the wilderness city of Vancouver. If this was the 19th century it might be a good idea to save on dog food costs for sled dogs. In the 21st century the idea is jejune.
F.D.R. & Global Warming Economic Politics
This is the time of year when the melting of the Arctic polar ice cap reduces it to its minimum size. The minimal ice extent should be about September the 21st. Some scientists already believe that it is the smallest ice cap since satellite records started being kept. They also note that the last time the Arctic ice cap disappeared entirely was about 125,000 years B.C.E. They anticipate that at the present rate of global atmospheric heating the ice may be gone entirely in twenty to thirty years. That will bring many changes to American society.
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/visualization
During the progressive era of political liberalization of worker conditions early in the 20th century theoretical methods of working for the good of mankind developed as a role for government. I will quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the subject: “It is clear to me that it is the duty of those who have benefited by our industrial and economic system to come to the front in such a grave emergency and assist in relieving those who, under the same industrial and economic order, are the losers and sufferers. I believe their contribution should be in proportion to the benefits they receive and the prosperity they enjoy.”
F.D.R. as present starting in 1932 with his boundless optimism and genius at creatively solving domestic and international challenges alike led the United States out of the great depression and pinned the tax rate for the rich at 90% The United States prospered without inability to recover from temporary public war debts readily until the excessive Reagan era tax cuts reinforced by Presidents Bush II and Obama.
Fundamental economic changes in the United States brought on by several political challenges from globalist economics; global heating and global population increase simultaneously- within a category of finite planetary resources require exceptionally intelligent and innovative leadership to solve such challenges. F.D.R. brought to the United States presidency the most capable since Lincoln and Washington.
Our neighbor and friend nation Mexico presents many challenges to American economic and employment stability. For some decades they have sent millions north to the U.S.A. to take jobs and drive down wages. Desperate poverty in Mexico and corrupt Mexican and U.S. government policies failing to protect the Mexican environment and worker have motivated Mexicans to search for the Utopia of employment in Houston or Chicago, Newark and Los Angeles. Millions of Americans are unhappy with the present policy and would prefer to see a no illegal immigration policy develop, yet the problems of demographics and global warming will not go away, and in fact are expected to become worse in the decades ahead as the entire Mexican nation begins receive up to 40% less rainfall each year as the global arid zones shift to above 30 degree latitude in north and south hemispheres respectively.
Democratic governments need legislation and execution not only in monetary and fiscal policy; good political legislation to forumlate economic criteria reactive to existential economic and social challenges is requisite as well.
Without a forward thing radical environmental economic development for Mexico with desalinization and irrigation programs Mexico may experience devastating future agriculture challenges along with a desertified Texas and Rocky Mountain States region that will increase the number of annual illegal migrants north even as U.S. food production declines because of environmental changes as well as inefficient agriculture development policies. Few futurists anticipated that the challenges of Malthus would be simultaneously accelerated or exacerbated with global climate change reducing agriculture range.
Much of Africa too is anticipated to experience decreased rainfall in the decades ahead-except notably for Egypt that seems to be scheduled to receive significant increases of precipitation one day in some sort of an almost Biblical change for the good. N.O.A.A. has produced geographic maps of possible changes to rainfall globally in the decades ahead.
The U.S.A. would certainly allow climate refugees from Mexico to migrate north out of the southern wastelands as carbon dioxide hell on Earth increases its range, yet 70 million immigrants would stress the agriculture and economic infrastructure of the United States and Mexico would replace its lost population at any rate.
Besides reducing greenhouse gases and the extent of the existing biosphere with concrete, asphalt and inorganic areas, U.S. and Mexican political leaders rightly should design vast new desalinization and irrigation technologies and applications even though the present global greed political policy of Washington work against it. The effort to stabilize population growth to near zero, create full employment and full social medical coverage while keeping the ecosphere fully alive replete with stop loss of species extermination will be challenging.
Well financed powers of marketing and consumption without rational regard for ecospheric and demographic reality have developed significant opposition even to the concept of national sovereignty, individual rights and the right of a demographic government to develop tax and political policies that reinforce the security of the polis and the well being of the demos.
President Reagan did enact changes that brought domestic economic growth in the short term, yet his policy of excess tax cuts and public deficit spending were unsustainable beyond his administration. President Roosevelt’s policies worked effectively for more than a half century and if renewed with reform and intelligent contemporization could restore the nation’s economy and lead it toward a stop loss of ecosphere decline directly. Implementing such policy would require another President as gifted with political effectiveness as F.D.R. and many bright, skillful legislators. If the United States is lucky it may experience such a political renaissance some day before the even worse disasters of economic and ecospheric decline are upon us.
Some Americans do not like Roosevelt political-economic theory and practice of government. Some Americans now and then did not even support his choice to engage both Germany and Japan in war. Yet if President Roosevelt had kept America neutral or just in support of an independent England and otherwise made peace with Germany allowing communism to be annihilated in the Soviet Union, and also allowed Japan to conquer China and annihilate Mao Tse Tung and the communist party we might ask what the world would be like today?
With most of Eurasia under fascist or imperial power and armed with nuclear weapons it might be a more volatile planet with the U.S.A. and Britain perhaps being a trilateral partner in atomic brinkmanship. It is hard to imagine that the Japanese and German nuclear states would have coexisted as lambs instead of eventually fighting to eliminate the other’s power. The United States might have observed as an interested spectator and enjoyed a nuclear winter following a rapidly expanding nuclear war between Hitler and the forces of the Emperor.
The world has things politically the way they are though. In some regards this is still Roosevelt’s world or it’s descendent from the choices he made in 1940-1944. A world of irrational exuberism in hedonist consumerism is a politically dumb world fit more for political pigs than for intelligent politicians from a line of a great society with heroic efforts struggling to pursue the right and good for mankind. Maybe economic and ecospheric recovery is not too far distant.
F.D.R. before being elected President was the Governor of N.Y. His ideas on liberalization coincided with the center of effort to bring economic liberty and equal social opportunity for all citizens. In his day economic liberty and liberalism were not defined by support for the politics of same sex perversions and corrupt marriage movement as solutions for the liberal challenges of the era.
The idea that a spoilt society of middle and lower classes beguiled by billion dollar babies would become so politically stupid as to allow their nation and class economic parity to decline under the assault of wrong supply side and anti-ecospheric political policies would have been unthinkable to the Great Reformer of U.S. political economy.
Liberalism is not some form of advancing skin disease that must go farther and farther to be effective. Liberalism is a policy of maintaining the well being of individual citizens in a social environment. It is a logic of civic responsibility, defense of individual liberty, property and enterprise.
Meaningful liberalism reinforces public sector governing of the general interests of all citizens ecospherically. The nation and its biosphere are essential, valuable assets that all citizens have an implicit interest in conserving.
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/visualization
During the progressive era of political liberalization of worker conditions early in the 20th century theoretical methods of working for the good of mankind developed as a role for government. I will quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the subject: “It is clear to me that it is the duty of those who have benefited by our industrial and economic system to come to the front in such a grave emergency and assist in relieving those who, under the same industrial and economic order, are the losers and sufferers. I believe their contribution should be in proportion to the benefits they receive and the prosperity they enjoy.”
F.D.R. as present starting in 1932 with his boundless optimism and genius at creatively solving domestic and international challenges alike led the United States out of the great depression and pinned the tax rate for the rich at 90% The United States prospered without inability to recover from temporary public war debts readily until the excessive Reagan era tax cuts reinforced by Presidents Bush II and Obama.
Fundamental economic changes in the United States brought on by several political challenges from globalist economics; global heating and global population increase simultaneously- within a category of finite planetary resources require exceptionally intelligent and innovative leadership to solve such challenges. F.D.R. brought to the United States presidency the most capable since Lincoln and Washington.
Our neighbor and friend nation Mexico presents many challenges to American economic and employment stability. For some decades they have sent millions north to the U.S.A. to take jobs and drive down wages. Desperate poverty in Mexico and corrupt Mexican and U.S. government policies failing to protect the Mexican environment and worker have motivated Mexicans to search for the Utopia of employment in Houston or Chicago, Newark and Los Angeles. Millions of Americans are unhappy with the present policy and would prefer to see a no illegal immigration policy develop, yet the problems of demographics and global warming will not go away, and in fact are expected to become worse in the decades ahead as the entire Mexican nation begins receive up to 40% less rainfall each year as the global arid zones shift to above 30 degree latitude in north and south hemispheres respectively.
Democratic governments need legislation and execution not only in monetary and fiscal policy; good political legislation to forumlate economic criteria reactive to existential economic and social challenges is requisite as well.
Without a forward thing radical environmental economic development for Mexico with desalinization and irrigation programs Mexico may experience devastating future agriculture challenges along with a desertified Texas and Rocky Mountain States region that will increase the number of annual illegal migrants north even as U.S. food production declines because of environmental changes as well as inefficient agriculture development policies. Few futurists anticipated that the challenges of Malthus would be simultaneously accelerated or exacerbated with global climate change reducing agriculture range.
Much of Africa too is anticipated to experience decreased rainfall in the decades ahead-except notably for Egypt that seems to be scheduled to receive significant increases of precipitation one day in some sort of an almost Biblical change for the good. N.O.A.A. has produced geographic maps of possible changes to rainfall globally in the decades ahead.
The U.S.A. would certainly allow climate refugees from Mexico to migrate north out of the southern wastelands as carbon dioxide hell on Earth increases its range, yet 70 million immigrants would stress the agriculture and economic infrastructure of the United States and Mexico would replace its lost population at any rate.
Besides reducing greenhouse gases and the extent of the existing biosphere with concrete, asphalt and inorganic areas, U.S. and Mexican political leaders rightly should design vast new desalinization and irrigation technologies and applications even though the present global greed political policy of Washington work against it. The effort to stabilize population growth to near zero, create full employment and full social medical coverage while keeping the ecosphere fully alive replete with stop loss of species extermination will be challenging.
Well financed powers of marketing and consumption without rational regard for ecospheric and demographic reality have developed significant opposition even to the concept of national sovereignty, individual rights and the right of a demographic government to develop tax and political policies that reinforce the security of the polis and the well being of the demos.
President Reagan did enact changes that brought domestic economic growth in the short term, yet his policy of excess tax cuts and public deficit spending were unsustainable beyond his administration. President Roosevelt’s policies worked effectively for more than a half century and if renewed with reform and intelligent contemporization could restore the nation’s economy and lead it toward a stop loss of ecosphere decline directly. Implementing such policy would require another President as gifted with political effectiveness as F.D.R. and many bright, skillful legislators. If the United States is lucky it may experience such a political renaissance some day before the even worse disasters of economic and ecospheric decline are upon us.
Some Americans do not like Roosevelt political-economic theory and practice of government. Some Americans now and then did not even support his choice to engage both Germany and Japan in war. Yet if President Roosevelt had kept America neutral or just in support of an independent England and otherwise made peace with Germany allowing communism to be annihilated in the Soviet Union, and also allowed Japan to conquer China and annihilate Mao Tse Tung and the communist party we might ask what the world would be like today?
With most of Eurasia under fascist or imperial power and armed with nuclear weapons it might be a more volatile planet with the U.S.A. and Britain perhaps being a trilateral partner in atomic brinkmanship. It is hard to imagine that the Japanese and German nuclear states would have coexisted as lambs instead of eventually fighting to eliminate the other’s power. The United States might have observed as an interested spectator and enjoyed a nuclear winter following a rapidly expanding nuclear war between Hitler and the forces of the Emperor.
The world has things politically the way they are though. In some regards this is still Roosevelt’s world or it’s descendent from the choices he made in 1940-1944. A world of irrational exuberism in hedonist consumerism is a politically dumb world fit more for political pigs than for intelligent politicians from a line of a great society with heroic efforts struggling to pursue the right and good for mankind. Maybe economic and ecospheric recovery is not too far distant.
F.D.R. before being elected President was the Governor of N.Y. His ideas on liberalization coincided with the center of effort to bring economic liberty and equal social opportunity for all citizens. In his day economic liberty and liberalism were not defined by support for the politics of same sex perversions and corrupt marriage movement as solutions for the liberal challenges of the era.
The idea that a spoilt society of middle and lower classes beguiled by billion dollar babies would become so politically stupid as to allow their nation and class economic parity to decline under the assault of wrong supply side and anti-ecospheric political policies would have been unthinkable to the Great Reformer of U.S. political economy.
Liberalism is not some form of advancing skin disease that must go farther and farther to be effective. Liberalism is a policy of maintaining the well being of individual citizens in a social environment. It is a logic of civic responsibility, defense of individual liberty, property and enterprise.
Meaningful liberalism reinforces public sector governing of the general interests of all citizens ecospherically. The nation and its biosphere are essential, valuable assets that all citizens have an implicit interest in conserving.
9/13/11
John Dewey and Consequentialism-Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
John Dewey wrote that “To name causes for a state of affairs is not to excuse it. Things are justified or condemned by their consequences, not by their antecedents.”
Dewey’s concept of justification by consequents exemplifies a philosophical point of view on ethics named consequentialism. It may perhaps work best within a philosophy of utilitarianism, for if one is going to make a sort of ethical philosophical equivalent of a particular system of non-Riemannian geometry, of which there are a potential infinite number, and each requires that it merely be self consistent for validity as well as cohering to a given description of what a geometry system is, then the circumstances subject to ethical decisions should be regarded a priori as of equal unit value. That is, if pre-existing moral criteria make particular resolutions more valuable than others, or if select circumstances are deemed implicitly more valuable than others, it becomes absurd to attempt to justify a moral action by its consequence, as the moral action’s value is in maintaining the status quo of the antecedent. In which case the value of the consequent is determined by the antecedent regardless of the success or failure of the decision in producing a consequent valued highest by the antecedent state.
Consequentialism as a method of evaluating antecedent moral actions by their ability to produce a good result would value most highly victory over failure in a winning is everything approach to moral decisions. A moral decision becomes equivalent to a football game plan and particular play choices determined as good or bad or even morally correct upon the basis of their contribution to winning.
For some, morality is more than that; doing the right thing is good for-itself. An aretaic ethics motivated Socrates to have the opinion that the only thing to fear in life is doing the morally wrong things. That isn’t a philosophy of winning is everything and any means is justified by a good end or consequent. The pursuit of the morally good for Socrates was more like the saying of Jesus that those who save their lives will lose them (within a secular context of choosing to follow the ways of the world and corrupt secular politics instead of Jesus Christ as the personification of the Truth of God and the ultimate good in-itself).
There are ethical systems of rule based utilitarianism instead of Dewey’s act-based utilitarianism where antecedent ethical choices bring one to have prefabbed moral criteria for making moral decisions in emergent situations. The greatest good for the greatest number might be determined a priori in some circumstances such that the consequences of a moral rule enacted invariably produce good results. The rule itself might produce a statistically prevalent product of good justifying its use even though some failures results.
Act based utilitarianism determining moral values by the effect of the action or not action’s consequences does seem to require an arbitrary break-up of the continuum of past, present and future of circumstances in which the moral act is made in order to set moral values in the future. One might say that an act is never moral, and only becomes so a fortiori by the amount of good or bad to human beings, animals or the world retroactively applied the past… It seems a linguistic transformation of moral philosophy and moral philosophy away from the present to past individuals judged today upon the basis of their actions in the past. Morality becomes separated from individuals and becomes sociologist-historian-philosopher’s device for painting history’s players as moral or immoral souls.
It isn’t necessary to take up an extreme act or rule base utilitarianism or exclusive select antecedent or consequents circumstances as logical premises upon which to determine the moral good or evil of a particular moral act. One may use antecedent circumstance and consequent effects together in a synthetic effort to attempt to affect a circumstance intentionally. The moral act is determined by prevailing, anteceding moral value selection, through intention to act to preserve those moral value criteria and in the consequences of intervention. Obviously unintended consequences may arise reducing the utility of making a moral intervention, yet that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Moral awareness of right and wrong in a tranching (comparative, variegated values and circumstances) of sometimes conflicting value prioritization is a phenomenon in-itself. Anthropogenic global atmospheric heating is said by a few scientists to have the potential of ending life on Earth, or reducing the population by 95% in a couple of centuries. Moral decisions made upon belief or disbelief in global heating caused by industry or in mass extinction of biological species through human causation can have a vast range of responses and adaptations of public policy. Consequentialism would confer a moral judgment upon today’s global heating deniers on the basis of the future well being of civilization on Earth. If humanity mostly perishes because of climate change and crashed food and energy supply then fossil fuel producers and global heating deniers will be judged post hoc as immoral. Yet in making moral decisions contingent upon consequents exclusively, tremendous moral risk is taken implicitly today when no moral decision need be or can be made. Failure to make a moral decision today based on best available knowledge is effectively a moral judgment for-itself; a bad one permitting needless risk today.
Determining moral values exclusively through consequentialism is a license for moral unaccountability of deleterious externalities of industrial culture and resource use. Consequentialism seemingly can only be applied without harm if the risks of failing to act immediately are acceptable. The philosopher William James called that sort of situation a forced option; failing to act presently determines a future consequences.
Generally for James the consequence would be apparent at the time of the moral choice, yet it needn’t be, and that is an essential reason why consequentialism might be considered morally acceptable only if the possible failure to make a right, interventionist moral choice today has proportionately unacceptable future consequences as is the case in failure to defend against global warming, resource and biodiversity depletion etc.
Dewey’s concept of justification by consequents exemplifies a philosophical point of view on ethics named consequentialism. It may perhaps work best within a philosophy of utilitarianism, for if one is going to make a sort of ethical philosophical equivalent of a particular system of non-Riemannian geometry, of which there are a potential infinite number, and each requires that it merely be self consistent for validity as well as cohering to a given description of what a geometry system is, then the circumstances subject to ethical decisions should be regarded a priori as of equal unit value. That is, if pre-existing moral criteria make particular resolutions more valuable than others, or if select circumstances are deemed implicitly more valuable than others, it becomes absurd to attempt to justify a moral action by its consequence, as the moral action’s value is in maintaining the status quo of the antecedent. In which case the value of the consequent is determined by the antecedent regardless of the success or failure of the decision in producing a consequent valued highest by the antecedent state.
Consequentialism as a method of evaluating antecedent moral actions by their ability to produce a good result would value most highly victory over failure in a winning is everything approach to moral decisions. A moral decision becomes equivalent to a football game plan and particular play choices determined as good or bad or even morally correct upon the basis of their contribution to winning.
For some, morality is more than that; doing the right thing is good for-itself. An aretaic ethics motivated Socrates to have the opinion that the only thing to fear in life is doing the morally wrong things. That isn’t a philosophy of winning is everything and any means is justified by a good end or consequent. The pursuit of the morally good for Socrates was more like the saying of Jesus that those who save their lives will lose them (within a secular context of choosing to follow the ways of the world and corrupt secular politics instead of Jesus Christ as the personification of the Truth of God and the ultimate good in-itself).
There are ethical systems of rule based utilitarianism instead of Dewey’s act-based utilitarianism where antecedent ethical choices bring one to have prefabbed moral criteria for making moral decisions in emergent situations. The greatest good for the greatest number might be determined a priori in some circumstances such that the consequences of a moral rule enacted invariably produce good results. The rule itself might produce a statistically prevalent product of good justifying its use even though some failures results.
Act based utilitarianism determining moral values by the effect of the action or not action’s consequences does seem to require an arbitrary break-up of the continuum of past, present and future of circumstances in which the moral act is made in order to set moral values in the future. One might say that an act is never moral, and only becomes so a fortiori by the amount of good or bad to human beings, animals or the world retroactively applied the past… It seems a linguistic transformation of moral philosophy and moral philosophy away from the present to past individuals judged today upon the basis of their actions in the past. Morality becomes separated from individuals and becomes sociologist-historian-philosopher’s device for painting history’s players as moral or immoral souls.
It isn’t necessary to take up an extreme act or rule base utilitarianism or exclusive select antecedent or consequents circumstances as logical premises upon which to determine the moral good or evil of a particular moral act. One may use antecedent circumstance and consequent effects together in a synthetic effort to attempt to affect a circumstance intentionally. The moral act is determined by prevailing, anteceding moral value selection, through intention to act to preserve those moral value criteria and in the consequences of intervention. Obviously unintended consequences may arise reducing the utility of making a moral intervention, yet that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Moral awareness of right and wrong in a tranching (comparative, variegated values and circumstances) of sometimes conflicting value prioritization is a phenomenon in-itself. Anthropogenic global atmospheric heating is said by a few scientists to have the potential of ending life on Earth, or reducing the population by 95% in a couple of centuries. Moral decisions made upon belief or disbelief in global heating caused by industry or in mass extinction of biological species through human causation can have a vast range of responses and adaptations of public policy. Consequentialism would confer a moral judgment upon today’s global heating deniers on the basis of the future well being of civilization on Earth. If humanity mostly perishes because of climate change and crashed food and energy supply then fossil fuel producers and global heating deniers will be judged post hoc as immoral. Yet in making moral decisions contingent upon consequents exclusively, tremendous moral risk is taken implicitly today when no moral decision need be or can be made. Failure to make a moral decision today based on best available knowledge is effectively a moral judgment for-itself; a bad one permitting needless risk today.
Determining moral values exclusively through consequentialism is a license for moral unaccountability of deleterious externalities of industrial culture and resource use. Consequentialism seemingly can only be applied without harm if the risks of failing to act immediately are acceptable. The philosopher William James called that sort of situation a forced option; failing to act presently determines a future consequences.
Generally for James the consequence would be apparent at the time of the moral choice, yet it needn’t be, and that is an essential reason why consequentialism might be considered morally acceptable only if the possible failure to make a right, interventionist moral choice today has proportionately unacceptable future consequences as is the case in failure to defend against global warming, resource and biodiversity depletion etc.
On Iran, the Nuclear Bomb, Majd's Book 'The Ayatollah Begs to Differ' etc.
On Iran, the Nuclear Bomb, Majd’s Book ‘The Ayatollah Begs to Differ’ etc.
Reading an excellent book on the Islamic Republic (of Iran) by Hooman Majd I have begun to wonder about the post-Nuclear weaponized balance of power in the Middle East.
Majd’s book is quite a good cultural history of Iran circa 2007. I read a couple of other, more technical history books on Iran this past year that provide quite a different point of view. The comparison and contrast is quite interesting. I recommend Majd’s book for reading because of his first person interaction with the people and places he writes about. Majd is basically an American and yet Iranian too. He has translated for the past Iranian President Khatami, attended Ashura (it means the 10th in Arabic) and described how and why those Shiite dudes with themselves with chains to express grief for the death of Hossain about 1400 years ago.
Iran’s was a popular revolution against the Shah it seems. 2500 years of imperial rule because over-bearing. The communists too supported the fundamentalist revolution because it was the only one available-too bad for them; the Khomeinists liquidated them later.
One may develop many ideas about Iran reading these histories. In another book I read about the paradise (means walled garden in Farsi-Farsi is from the word Pars) a Zoroastrian was shown to and stepping through the doors he saw an orchard of legs sticking up from the ground before his host planted him too. Today Zoroastrians are one of four religions recognized in Iran.
Iran means Aryan. American views are biased toward the word Aryan because of Hitler who preferred to believe that Germans evolved from Aryans (aka Persians-a French term) as if being German wasn’t good enough.
Aryans as an originating hill tribe of all whit people isn’t a very good idea. The Aryans were/are just one named collection of white folks that emerged in Eurasia from proto-Caucasoid tribes maybe 60-70 thousand years B.C.E. The Australian aborigines are a proto-Caucasoid tribe. By 25,000 years B.C.E.
People were living in the far north even near Moscow. White people were disbursed across Eurasia and the pass into India through Afghanistan and Iran was just one trafficked location were some gathered and late in pre-history got the name Aryan. I have no idea what that means in Sanskrit if anything.
Because of thousands of years of foreign invasions and impregnation of the women including by Semitic Arabs of the other brand of Islam affiliated loosely with the descendents of Abraham through Ishmael (his first born son) by everyone from Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Greeks to Mongols and etc instead of pervasive Aryanism the Iranians are mostly mixed breeds. Yet Americans don’t really care much about race anyway instead caring about personal wealth and if they are intelligent national security, environmental health and God as well, so one need not make anything out of any genetic inheritance of the Iranians.
I did get the idea though that geography can determine political formation. England as an island nation with a stable population evolved a democracy or parliamentary representation through a balance of power of regional peer nobles vs. the king. Magna Charta would have been unlikely to develop in unstable Iran with hordes of warriors rampaging through now and then. Various forms of strong men or kings tend to emerge instead and the populace becomes docile under the ruling power.
One notable social evolution is that of serfdom, slavery, peonhood or vassal to the emperor of a large population that develops when a nation is moderately isolated and ruled over by not only royals but a large number of relatives/aristocrats. The black turbaned clerics of Iran are in theory all related as descendents from Mohammed-not relatives where other colors.
Russia had its tsar a thousand years, Chinese had its imperial rulers until 1911 when the Qing dynasty ended a 4500 years history of royal rulers, and the Saudis established a royal ruling tradition and numerous other historical examples exist of national developments in other than democratic directions.
One might wonder if the British conquest of India evicting the Mughal dynasty was the main reason democracy transferred to India grew readily as the transitional super-structure toward independent democratic geo-polity was created by the British in an era before suicide bombers were common. The United States in Iraq and Afghanistan has experienced much of the latter.
The Taliban (Sunni religious students) versus the Shia northern alliance (haq means rights as in individual rights in Farsi) in Afghanistan presented a religious as well as a cultural schism for conflict. The approach to political populism and individual rights differs in some Middle Eastern and central Asian countries.
The United States may experience several interesting intellectual challenges in the years ahead in attempting to pacify the restive political populace with numerous divergent political points of view in nations it feels obligated to politically dabble in with billions and billions of dollars. It might be a good idea for U.S. voters to hire a sniffer dog to give the Biden smell test to U.S. Presidential candidates for 2012 in order to weed out those that do not have a salutary, politically correct odor whatever that is in the Congress of the United States if that will help improve the quality of U.S. foreign policy on the road ahead.
So if Iran develops nuclear explosives to place atop its missiles capable of reaching Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq, Israel and elsewhere won’t it stimulate a possible infra-Moslem nuclear arms race to defend against possible extremist fundamentalist sectarian antipathy? Would Iran count on the United States to assure that the Middle East and Central Asian nations live with equality, fraternity, sorority and oil prosperity?
The Syrian troubles and recent revolutions during the ‘Moslem’ spring-summer revolutions alone seem good enough evidence that the United States might experience difficulty in halting the development or purchase of nuclear weapons from more nations in the Moslem world. Russia and other European nations as well as China may increase their own intermediate range cruise missile and ballistic missiles quick launch stocks and capabilities as well as anti-missile systems to defend against exoteric Moslem missile programs.
It is interesting that China developed an inshore canal network for trade goods and national shipping that made a coastal navy unnecessary. Chinese dynastic rulers back in the day crippled their blue water naval development and divided and conquered their own coastal defense fleets in order to pre-empt its possible use for revolting against the regime. The clever British were eventually able to develop flat bottomed boats that were ironclads with big guns as early as 1840 able to enter the shallow water of the Chinese river and canal network and the regime’s government trade monopoly and lead to the end of the imperial rule indirectly about 70 years later. Moslem powers of imperial and/or theocratic rule and communist powers too may experience similar challenges to containing concentrated political power in a global context placing governing hobbles upon shipping size and citizens travelling beyond the boundaries of the oppressive ruling authority-even it is simply that of concentrated wealth and very large shipping with minimal operating personnel.
With Iran’s history it is easy to understand why they might be interested in developing a nuclear capability for war, yet alternatively, that is a better reason to try to develop better relations with N.A.T.O. in order to share that nuclear umbrella.
Deleterious consequences of nuclear war for Iran far outweigh the potential benefits. Iranian development of nuclear weapons is a little like building a campfire in a dry barn full of hay-it isn’t a good idea.
Iranians have good reason to distrust the upper classes and the global rich in virtue of their history. Global history has instructed that concentrated power and wealth eventually runs amok oppressing the comparatively powerless. Authoritarian dictatorships in any form undermine individual liberty and transform human society into unphilosophical maggoty organisms coexisting under a reign of terror.
Iran as an Islamic Republic has a real principle of egalitarianism though tainted with civil economic and political oppression of women. Iranians politically tend to fear the economic segregation and opportunity apartheid what upper classes traditional force upon mankind everywhere and seem reluctant to let global corporations including those from America have carte blanche to run amok in their nation treating disadvantaged locals as cheap, disposable labor or stupid, moronic peons.
A majority of Americans too are downwardly mobile economically speaking in their own nation these days as wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated in the upper five or ten percent of the populace.
The U.S.A. prospered when it redistributed the land wealth following a revolution against King George the Third and the British aristocrats what owned the land. The U.S.A. falling into a depression in the first part of the 20th century after wealth became concentrated and taxes were too low fought its way out of it though a war got in the way (the Second World War) by F.D.R. raising taxes on the rich to 90%. Until recently following the Reagan-Bush-Obama tax cuts the United States was a prosperous, egalitarian rather than elitist nation. Because of the global war against communism though, President Eisenhower thought it best to keep a Shah in power rather than to let a potential communist power take over the Majlis or Iranian parliament even if improbable. The 1979 Iranian revolution ended the reign of the Shah.
Americans might have sympathized more with the revolution except they hate having their embassies made hostages and hold a grudge a long, long time. When little is happening in Smallville (a town Lot asked God to let him flee from the doomed city of Sodom) the intellectual content follows along after the rich demi-urge business leading on the summit of the shining ziggurat of a hill. It’s a fairly unintelligent, non-democratic discourse on political logic settling upon the mud phenomenalities below.
Well then, maybe nuclear war in the years ahead along with excessive global heating through anthropogenic climate change will become likely helping to let eschatological prophecy business get increased cash flow for bigger revenue streaming and political power acquisition. If one could live 300 years the future would be interesting to observe.
It’s unfortunate that it is so difficult getting things socially, ecologically, economically and politically to change positively for the good globally, and easier to blame people for going wrong as if a few bright leaders should have produced a sustainable, moral, egalitarian democracy in a recovering ecosphere for the people instead of the people themselves.
Reading an excellent book on the Islamic Republic (of Iran) by Hooman Majd I have begun to wonder about the post-Nuclear weaponized balance of power in the Middle East.
Majd’s book is quite a good cultural history of Iran circa 2007. I read a couple of other, more technical history books on Iran this past year that provide quite a different point of view. The comparison and contrast is quite interesting. I recommend Majd’s book for reading because of his first person interaction with the people and places he writes about. Majd is basically an American and yet Iranian too. He has translated for the past Iranian President Khatami, attended Ashura (it means the 10th in Arabic) and described how and why those Shiite dudes with themselves with chains to express grief for the death of Hossain about 1400 years ago.
Iran’s was a popular revolution against the Shah it seems. 2500 years of imperial rule because over-bearing. The communists too supported the fundamentalist revolution because it was the only one available-too bad for them; the Khomeinists liquidated them later.
One may develop many ideas about Iran reading these histories. In another book I read about the paradise (means walled garden in Farsi-Farsi is from the word Pars) a Zoroastrian was shown to and stepping through the doors he saw an orchard of legs sticking up from the ground before his host planted him too. Today Zoroastrians are one of four religions recognized in Iran.
Iran means Aryan. American views are biased toward the word Aryan because of Hitler who preferred to believe that Germans evolved from Aryans (aka Persians-a French term) as if being German wasn’t good enough.
Aryans as an originating hill tribe of all whit people isn’t a very good idea. The Aryans were/are just one named collection of white folks that emerged in Eurasia from proto-Caucasoid tribes maybe 60-70 thousand years B.C.E. The Australian aborigines are a proto-Caucasoid tribe. By 25,000 years B.C.E.
People were living in the far north even near Moscow. White people were disbursed across Eurasia and the pass into India through Afghanistan and Iran was just one trafficked location were some gathered and late in pre-history got the name Aryan. I have no idea what that means in Sanskrit if anything.
Because of thousands of years of foreign invasions and impregnation of the women including by Semitic Arabs of the other brand of Islam affiliated loosely with the descendents of Abraham through Ishmael (his first born son) by everyone from Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Greeks to Mongols and etc instead of pervasive Aryanism the Iranians are mostly mixed breeds. Yet Americans don’t really care much about race anyway instead caring about personal wealth and if they are intelligent national security, environmental health and God as well, so one need not make anything out of any genetic inheritance of the Iranians.
I did get the idea though that geography can determine political formation. England as an island nation with a stable population evolved a democracy or parliamentary representation through a balance of power of regional peer nobles vs. the king. Magna Charta would have been unlikely to develop in unstable Iran with hordes of warriors rampaging through now and then. Various forms of strong men or kings tend to emerge instead and the populace becomes docile under the ruling power.
One notable social evolution is that of serfdom, slavery, peonhood or vassal to the emperor of a large population that develops when a nation is moderately isolated and ruled over by not only royals but a large number of relatives/aristocrats. The black turbaned clerics of Iran are in theory all related as descendents from Mohammed-not relatives where other colors.
Russia had its tsar a thousand years, Chinese had its imperial rulers until 1911 when the Qing dynasty ended a 4500 years history of royal rulers, and the Saudis established a royal ruling tradition and numerous other historical examples exist of national developments in other than democratic directions.
One might wonder if the British conquest of India evicting the Mughal dynasty was the main reason democracy transferred to India grew readily as the transitional super-structure toward independent democratic geo-polity was created by the British in an era before suicide bombers were common. The United States in Iraq and Afghanistan has experienced much of the latter.
The Taliban (Sunni religious students) versus the Shia northern alliance (haq means rights as in individual rights in Farsi) in Afghanistan presented a religious as well as a cultural schism for conflict. The approach to political populism and individual rights differs in some Middle Eastern and central Asian countries.
The United States may experience several interesting intellectual challenges in the years ahead in attempting to pacify the restive political populace with numerous divergent political points of view in nations it feels obligated to politically dabble in with billions and billions of dollars. It might be a good idea for U.S. voters to hire a sniffer dog to give the Biden smell test to U.S. Presidential candidates for 2012 in order to weed out those that do not have a salutary, politically correct odor whatever that is in the Congress of the United States if that will help improve the quality of U.S. foreign policy on the road ahead.
So if Iran develops nuclear explosives to place atop its missiles capable of reaching Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq, Israel and elsewhere won’t it stimulate a possible infra-Moslem nuclear arms race to defend against possible extremist fundamentalist sectarian antipathy? Would Iran count on the United States to assure that the Middle East and Central Asian nations live with equality, fraternity, sorority and oil prosperity?
The Syrian troubles and recent revolutions during the ‘Moslem’ spring-summer revolutions alone seem good enough evidence that the United States might experience difficulty in halting the development or purchase of nuclear weapons from more nations in the Moslem world. Russia and other European nations as well as China may increase their own intermediate range cruise missile and ballistic missiles quick launch stocks and capabilities as well as anti-missile systems to defend against exoteric Moslem missile programs.
It is interesting that China developed an inshore canal network for trade goods and national shipping that made a coastal navy unnecessary. Chinese dynastic rulers back in the day crippled their blue water naval development and divided and conquered their own coastal defense fleets in order to pre-empt its possible use for revolting against the regime. The clever British were eventually able to develop flat bottomed boats that were ironclads with big guns as early as 1840 able to enter the shallow water of the Chinese river and canal network and the regime’s government trade monopoly and lead to the end of the imperial rule indirectly about 70 years later. Moslem powers of imperial and/or theocratic rule and communist powers too may experience similar challenges to containing concentrated political power in a global context placing governing hobbles upon shipping size and citizens travelling beyond the boundaries of the oppressive ruling authority-even it is simply that of concentrated wealth and very large shipping with minimal operating personnel.
With Iran’s history it is easy to understand why they might be interested in developing a nuclear capability for war, yet alternatively, that is a better reason to try to develop better relations with N.A.T.O. in order to share that nuclear umbrella.
Deleterious consequences of nuclear war for Iran far outweigh the potential benefits. Iranian development of nuclear weapons is a little like building a campfire in a dry barn full of hay-it isn’t a good idea.
Iranians have good reason to distrust the upper classes and the global rich in virtue of their history. Global history has instructed that concentrated power and wealth eventually runs amok oppressing the comparatively powerless. Authoritarian dictatorships in any form undermine individual liberty and transform human society into unphilosophical maggoty organisms coexisting under a reign of terror.
Iran as an Islamic Republic has a real principle of egalitarianism though tainted with civil economic and political oppression of women. Iranians politically tend to fear the economic segregation and opportunity apartheid what upper classes traditional force upon mankind everywhere and seem reluctant to let global corporations including those from America have carte blanche to run amok in their nation treating disadvantaged locals as cheap, disposable labor or stupid, moronic peons.
A majority of Americans too are downwardly mobile economically speaking in their own nation these days as wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated in the upper five or ten percent of the populace.
The U.S.A. prospered when it redistributed the land wealth following a revolution against King George the Third and the British aristocrats what owned the land. The U.S.A. falling into a depression in the first part of the 20th century after wealth became concentrated and taxes were too low fought its way out of it though a war got in the way (the Second World War) by F.D.R. raising taxes on the rich to 90%. Until recently following the Reagan-Bush-Obama tax cuts the United States was a prosperous, egalitarian rather than elitist nation. Because of the global war against communism though, President Eisenhower thought it best to keep a Shah in power rather than to let a potential communist power take over the Majlis or Iranian parliament even if improbable. The 1979 Iranian revolution ended the reign of the Shah.
Americans might have sympathized more with the revolution except they hate having their embassies made hostages and hold a grudge a long, long time. When little is happening in Smallville (a town Lot asked God to let him flee from the doomed city of Sodom) the intellectual content follows along after the rich demi-urge business leading on the summit of the shining ziggurat of a hill. It’s a fairly unintelligent, non-democratic discourse on political logic settling upon the mud phenomenalities below.
Well then, maybe nuclear war in the years ahead along with excessive global heating through anthropogenic climate change will become likely helping to let eschatological prophecy business get increased cash flow for bigger revenue streaming and political power acquisition. If one could live 300 years the future would be interesting to observe.
It’s unfortunate that it is so difficult getting things socially, ecologically, economically and politically to change positively for the good globally, and easier to blame people for going wrong as if a few bright leaders should have produced a sustainable, moral, egalitarian democracy in a recovering ecosphere for the people instead of the people themselves.
9/10/11
President Amadinijab and Texas Gov. Rick Perry
A President Rick Perry and a President Amadinijab would have obvious similarities as presiders over the U.S.A. and Iraq. Each politician emerges from a fundamentalist religious/political interface of style and substance. Both men exude fundamentalist down to Earthism amidst their brethren and religious supporters. As fundamentalist quasi-clerical politicians fusing religion into politicis and politicis into religion these men are fire breathing dragons of conservatism as cult, with President Amadinijab being the more liberal of the pair.
President Amadinijab believes in the reurn of the savior hidden twelth Imam from a well in the Iranian city of Qom. Governor Perry believes in fundamentalist mega-church eclesiastics mentioning Jesus Christ as a spiritual savior. One is led to believe that the Savior is manifested through the communion of Republican politics with the will of god that Americans support wars for Exxon oil fields, military manufacturing in Texas and an SUV in every driveway.
President Amadinijab of Iran is in a less secure position that a potential President Perry in relation to his political overlords. A President Perry can satisfy religious leaders in the U.S.A. simply by transferring some financial resources to church clercial control, while President Amadinijab must try to wangle a better life style for his poor constituents while the Supreme Leader and a few Grand Ayatollahs criticize his actions that stray at all from a direct theocratic control over all things political.
President Amadinijab may be moving toward liberalism and the freedom of nuclear weapons production and Governor Perry toward conservativism that would roll back abortion, a ban on school prayers to Zoroaster or Summerian dieties and probably to God too, yet a President Perry would have not much chance of stemming the cells of change that global corporations pupeteering American voters desire to have a fully impoverished, vassalized American polity with a homosexual takeover of traditional marital arrangements. I wish him luck in that last effort should he in some way get elected in 2012 instead of the better candidate Mitt ROmney.
Gov. Rick Perry has no interest at all in global warming. Burning natural gas releases, I believe it is, methane, a potent green house gas.
The scalar field problem of demographics and geography may much of the issue of what 'green technology' to use to produce energy dubiously effective at any rate. james Lovelock seems to think humanity is doomed to global warming and that the temperature should stabilize about ten degrees warmer globally with maybe 200 million survivors living in far northern locals (and Greenland too I would imagine)as well as a few other places.
Then, if humanity renews its fossil fuel and greenhouse gas history the temperature may go up another notch and no human life would survive.
The challenge might be to use ecological systainable principles in economics-very difficult with 7 billion souls and going up steadily on Earth. Just tweaking economics with some 'green jobs' won't make the finite resources last much longer.
President Amadinijab believes in the reurn of the savior hidden twelth Imam from a well in the Iranian city of Qom. Governor Perry believes in fundamentalist mega-church eclesiastics mentioning Jesus Christ as a spiritual savior. One is led to believe that the Savior is manifested through the communion of Republican politics with the will of god that Americans support wars for Exxon oil fields, military manufacturing in Texas and an SUV in every driveway.
President Amadinijab of Iran is in a less secure position that a potential President Perry in relation to his political overlords. A President Perry can satisfy religious leaders in the U.S.A. simply by transferring some financial resources to church clercial control, while President Amadinijab must try to wangle a better life style for his poor constituents while the Supreme Leader and a few Grand Ayatollahs criticize his actions that stray at all from a direct theocratic control over all things political.
President Amadinijab may be moving toward liberalism and the freedom of nuclear weapons production and Governor Perry toward conservativism that would roll back abortion, a ban on school prayers to Zoroaster or Summerian dieties and probably to God too, yet a President Perry would have not much chance of stemming the cells of change that global corporations pupeteering American voters desire to have a fully impoverished, vassalized American polity with a homosexual takeover of traditional marital arrangements. I wish him luck in that last effort should he in some way get elected in 2012 instead of the better candidate Mitt ROmney.
Gov. Rick Perry has no interest at all in global warming. Burning natural gas releases, I believe it is, methane, a potent green house gas.
The scalar field problem of demographics and geography may much of the issue of what 'green technology' to use to produce energy dubiously effective at any rate. james Lovelock seems to think humanity is doomed to global warming and that the temperature should stabilize about ten degrees warmer globally with maybe 200 million survivors living in far northern locals (and Greenland too I would imagine)as well as a few other places.
Then, if humanity renews its fossil fuel and greenhouse gas history the temperature may go up another notch and no human life would survive.
The challenge might be to use ecological systainable principles in economics-very difficult with 7 billion souls and going up steadily on Earth. Just tweaking economics with some 'green jobs' won't make the finite resources last much longer.
9/9/11
S.A. Reports Natural Gas (Instead of Coal) Use May Not Halt Global Warming
The idea that using natural gas instead of coal prevalently might slow or halt global warming is being attacked by some on valid scientific principles. It is better to go to entirely green technologies (or just stop using so much energy and insulate better) rather than use fossil fuels apparently.
In 1960 when I was a lad the U.S. population was only half what it is now (approximately). The people of tomorrow deserve to have a U.S.A. with just 160 million-its a better nation then, yet they can't, however it should be possible to just stabilize the population at the present levels with an end to illegal immigration perhaps.
A hburgeoning U.S. population is no good example to resource conservation. Even in Alaska one day there won't be room left to just build more roads to create jobs. The fisheries are declining here, the governor wants to dam the Susitna River and a giant mine for open pit copper is a possibility that may leach minerals and other toxic effluence into the Bristol Bay watershed. Even the inventor of the Gaia hypothesis believes global warming is going to happen to such an extent that the far noth will be about the only underst areas in the U.S.A. outside of a few small spots.
At some point intelligence should return to U.S. political leadership, yet its unlikely obviously. Voters have little choice about selecting candidates that don't support the new world order of economic concentration of wealth and population growth to accellerate consumption.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=switching-to-natural-gas-power
In 1960 when I was a lad the U.S. population was only half what it is now (approximately). The people of tomorrow deserve to have a U.S.A. with just 160 million-its a better nation then, yet they can't, however it should be possible to just stabilize the population at the present levels with an end to illegal immigration perhaps.
A hburgeoning U.S. population is no good example to resource conservation. Even in Alaska one day there won't be room left to just build more roads to create jobs. The fisheries are declining here, the governor wants to dam the Susitna River and a giant mine for open pit copper is a possibility that may leach minerals and other toxic effluence into the Bristol Bay watershed. Even the inventor of the Gaia hypothesis believes global warming is going to happen to such an extent that the far noth will be about the only underst areas in the U.S.A. outside of a few small spots.
At some point intelligence should return to U.S. political leadership, yet its unlikely obviously. Voters have little choice about selecting candidates that don't support the new world order of economic concentration of wealth and population growth to accellerate consumption.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=switching-to-natural-gas-power
Dry Leave's Fall (poem)
Leaves drifting on the water
something better to write with
deeper cold currents swirling eddies
rippling through translucence
ponderous surfaces of meaning
Potential reflecting clouds
momentary mirrors of time
sunrises, sunsets and passing aircraft
supporting boaters gone over the wake
From rain gather limitless drops united
leaves mark microcurrents
spinning branch membranes around
water trails to frontiers present
summer has enveloped a cyclical past
opaque plankton bloom faded
bear ready for months of rest
beyond the hard rock that delimits
waters work eroding destiny
with deteminism's changes
while world tilts farther from the sun
Bringing minerals down to the opulent ocean
leaves fall with colors
like bleached out chlorofil papers
from branches crowded by evergreen dominion
into wind carrying raven's catlike plaintive cries
myriad morphemes echo a joy of living
though red colors surpass the green season
washing over forests
new frosts settle like tides of age
Far away where the land is dry
parched dust of social wars decimating dreams
with a brown shrouded thoughtless sky
sharp forces of pressure glittering
schemes in disarmed environments
rectilinear reason reduction's square circles
dull tones of repressive waves
plats, pipes, brickwork towards wheat and rice
transcended by ontologies of faith
moderated by political powers
patrolling streets
removing garbage in efficient dumps
sanitary landfills for new urban parks
where speakers on soapboxes fugue
challenges to destruction
of an ecosphere that is life
structured with complex integrity
grown over cold crust convected
Upward continents receive spirit
as experience encompasses
in field phenomenality
last leaves falling to concrete
moving with rivulets
drifting to shadowed gutters.
something better to write with
deeper cold currents swirling eddies
rippling through translucence
ponderous surfaces of meaning
Potential reflecting clouds
momentary mirrors of time
sunrises, sunsets and passing aircraft
supporting boaters gone over the wake
From rain gather limitless drops united
leaves mark microcurrents
spinning branch membranes around
water trails to frontiers present
summer has enveloped a cyclical past
opaque plankton bloom faded
bear ready for months of rest
beyond the hard rock that delimits
waters work eroding destiny
with deteminism's changes
while world tilts farther from the sun
Bringing minerals down to the opulent ocean
leaves fall with colors
like bleached out chlorofil papers
from branches crowded by evergreen dominion
into wind carrying raven's catlike plaintive cries
myriad morphemes echo a joy of living
though red colors surpass the green season
washing over forests
new frosts settle like tides of age
Far away where the land is dry
parched dust of social wars decimating dreams
with a brown shrouded thoughtless sky
sharp forces of pressure glittering
schemes in disarmed environments
rectilinear reason reduction's square circles
dull tones of repressive waves
plats, pipes, brickwork towards wheat and rice
transcended by ontologies of faith
moderated by political powers
patrolling streets
removing garbage in efficient dumps
sanitary landfills for new urban parks
where speakers on soapboxes fugue
challenges to destruction
of an ecosphere that is life
structured with complex integrity
grown over cold crust convected
Upward continents receive spirit
as experience encompasses
in field phenomenality
last leaves falling to concrete
moving with rivulets
drifting to shadowed gutters.
9/7/11
A Comment on U.S. Post Cold War Tax Policy on the Rich
America still has some manufacturing of course. One of the troubles is that when it reaches a certain size it can be outsourced to cheaper areas of production. Manufacturers listed on Wall Street may be purchased and stripped down for profit then outsourced.
The tax rate on the rich during the second war dropped some when the war was over-yet it remained at 70% right unto Reagan when the deficit radically began deepening to make up for tax cuts.
In some regards the taxation for a war economy never ended after the second world war because America was in a continuous state of near war until the ending of the cold war by Reagan, Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The challenges faced by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter until the Reagan era were that of a global arms race with numerous collateral social liberation wars. That was all quite expensive.
The failure of the post-Reagan governments to adapt to a post cold war era budget was increased by the poor Bush administration approach to the global war against terrorism. President Clinton had a reasonable tax policy yet he fully supported the globalization of the economy to the detriment of American workers. The Obama administration to is remarkably apposite to Republican global if not oligharchic policy without concern for U.S. democracy.
The unelected Presidency of Gerald Ford seemed to put together the first team assembly of the future advocates of the New World Order paradigm of the G.H.W. Bush administration. Gerald Ford appointed G.H.W. Bush as his C.I.A. Chief following a stint as Ambassador to China, and appointed his Chief of Staff, former Congressman Donald Rumsfeld to be his Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld had visited Cam Rahn Bay Vietnam early in the Johnson administration and learned of the Brown-Root contractor axis building U.S. Bases as part of a larger team of contractors.
The book 'Haliburton's Army' details how Brown grew from getting a contradct with L.B.J.'s help as a Congressman to build a dam on Lake Travis, Texas to join with Root and Halliburton later to become a defense contractor building and supply U.S. bases from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. The New World Order in some respects seems to be a point of view of select Texas politicians and corporations on defense contracts and oil fields foreign and domestic as well as post-communist-cold war realignment.
The tax rate on the rich during the second war dropped some when the war was over-yet it remained at 70% right unto Reagan when the deficit radically began deepening to make up for tax cuts.
In some regards the taxation for a war economy never ended after the second world war because America was in a continuous state of near war until the ending of the cold war by Reagan, Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The challenges faced by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter until the Reagan era were that of a global arms race with numerous collateral social liberation wars. That was all quite expensive.
The failure of the post-Reagan governments to adapt to a post cold war era budget was increased by the poor Bush administration approach to the global war against terrorism. President Clinton had a reasonable tax policy yet he fully supported the globalization of the economy to the detriment of American workers. The Obama administration to is remarkably apposite to Republican global if not oligharchic policy without concern for U.S. democracy.
The unelected Presidency of Gerald Ford seemed to put together the first team assembly of the future advocates of the New World Order paradigm of the G.H.W. Bush administration. Gerald Ford appointed G.H.W. Bush as his C.I.A. Chief following a stint as Ambassador to China, and appointed his Chief of Staff, former Congressman Donald Rumsfeld to be his Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld had visited Cam Rahn Bay Vietnam early in the Johnson administration and learned of the Brown-Root contractor axis building U.S. Bases as part of a larger team of contractors.
The book 'Haliburton's Army' details how Brown grew from getting a contradct with L.B.J.'s help as a Congressman to build a dam on Lake Travis, Texas to join with Root and Halliburton later to become a defense contractor building and supply U.S. bases from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. The New World Order in some respects seems to be a point of view of select Texas politicians and corporations on defense contracts and oil fields foreign and domestic as well as post-communist-cold war realignment.
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Imperfect Character is Universal
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