U.S. Options for Afghanistan After the Massacre

The recent tragic massacre of many Afghan civilians by an American Army Staff Sergeant on his 4th combat tour in several years provides an opportunity for the United States to review its options in disposing of the problem nation hell-bent on terrorism at home and abroad.

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/US-Officials-Worry-Afghan-Killings-Will-Fuel-Anti-American-Sentiment-142305395.html

We may commiserate with the terror of war-the Afghans experienced slaughtered at three in the morning. Certainly some Americans experienced that in 2001 when Taliban supported terror forces attacked the U.S.A. It is a consequence of Afghanistan’s former political leadership and present failure to adjust to social reality. In protracted conflict war crimes-often crimes of passion or madness, occur. The better way to avoid that sort of thing is to avoid promoting conflict to start with. In the future Afghanistan may experience more of that rather than none. They are not a sovereign power, rather they are an occupied foe that the United States must dispose of in as compassionate and merciful a way as is consistent with Christian principles of charity, mercy and goodness.

The United States in the 1980s built up the Afghan resistance force with arms and advising support in their war against the Soviets then abandoned the country after the Soviets left. Of course in the vacuum of power chaos and civil war developed and the Taliban that had formed during the exile in Pakistan took over with the help of their Saudi and foreign support that remained such as Osama Bin Ladin. The United States should have got involved then as well.
By the time of the World Trade Center attack the Afghanistan civil war was not yet over. The Northern Alliance held a valley in the extreme Northeast of the country. The C.I.A. with Gary Berntsen formed an alliance with those people and began rolling up the Taliban with sometimes with the use of BLU-72 very large conventional bombs (except for the dud that might have killed Osama Bin Ladin at Torah Bora that let him escape to Pakistan.

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

Reasonably one might expect a new civil war to resume in Afghanistan after the U.S.A. exits in 2014. This time the U.S.A. should create defensible enclaves in a federalized Afghanistan that would allow the Northern alliance to survive in protracted civil war against the Taliban should the Taliban take over much of the rest of that nation.

The fact that several Afghanistan 'partners' have called for the trial of the Staff Sergeant in Afghan courts demonstrates the incomprehension of the Afghan people of their lack of any right to try members of the occupation force in their nation. The U.S.A. is in Afghanistan under the articles of war upon a foe and would not yield any legal jurisdiction to the occupied power. With such ignorant expectations in Afghanistan it is easy to anticipate that after the U.S. forces leave the country will swiftly resume civil war and if then Taliban emerges to win and then supports new terrorist activities a second U.S. intervention under new management may return to experiment with anti-terrorist interdiction.

One might like the U.S.A. to better understand the way that moral and social structures form in relation to economic structure. That failure is a general social failure common in the era. It is worth recollecting that social sciences developed later than hard sciences and are an ongoing project.

Afghanistan is not an unimportant player in the historical evolution of Eurasia. It is close enough to China's Xinjiang province that is itself at the top of an upward sloping funnel from the broad Chinese lowlands. Numerous ethnic minorities live at the top of the world finding a harsh living amidst deserts and great mountain ranges and passes. It is not impossible that Chinese military forces may travel that way some day to meet with destiny at the battle of Armageddon. Well, even so, for the present future terrorism, resistance to the Chinese authority, ethnic aspirations for independence and Moslem religious conflicts with godless atheists may form along with controversies about developing mining interests are possibilities that accentuate the perennial problems of political instability in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan-a poor nation that aspires to become a Taliban led exporter of terrorists to points all over the globe, has a challenging historical evolution cycle ahead of it. Certainly Americans are unwilling to invest more cash into developing that nation toward peaceful prosperity. It is of course unreasonable to expect Afghanistan to become like the United States-they can't afford it and the United States emits half of the greenhouse gases from cars and is the source of much of the perverse aspects of modern 'liberalism'.

The U.S. administration should quit being a pusillanimous power and recognize the facts of life in Afghanistan as if they really are in control of their own destiny their generally. They cannot rely on Kofi Annan to arrive and organize the resistance, as he seems to be trying to do in Syria, into one fighting force unified in order to negotiate with the government. Mohammed Karzai may be expected to become a dictatorial warlord after the United States exits who will become locked in battle with the Taliban while the Northern Alliance gradually shifts back to more defensible grounds outside of Sunni power and distrust.

One Formula for Bringing the Heat Death of Human Life on Earth

Of all of the chemical formulas that have been created to destroy human life, the most commonly used by that of burning ethane in fossil fuel burning automobiles to produce carbon dioxide and water.

CH3CH2OH + 3O2 ---> 2CO2 + 3H2O

Two average cars emit about 9 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air annually. Global warming deniers must do so in order to stick their heads in the sand and rely on gasoline and automobiles for economic power.

Vested interests are unwilling to adapt to the increasing prospects for the heat death of a world climate suitable for human life on Earth.

About the Philosophy of American Meatheads

The post-modern philosophy of atheist meatheads for-themselves is a product of post-Darwinist educational developments and John Deweyianism plus a little B.F. Skinner behavorialism thrown in to the mix that renders virtually any though fundamentally meaningless and phenomenal.

When meaning is reduced to 'just the transmission of the genes' (that requires heterosexual 'marriage' of sperm and egg) and life experience is an abstract drive of deterministic biological requisites the mind and its contents are largely considered superfluous. Meathead theorists of politics believe that liberalism means the complete waveform collapse of rationalism into meaninglessness.

Liberalism of course did not advance by meathead philosophers seeking after nothingness but control by behavioral scientist-politicians. The Prophet Isaiah wrote of liberals in chapter 32 of Isaiah and the founders of numerous societies have sought after liberty. Their work and thought was actualized in the social dialectical realm that one might term 'the real world' even if it is a contingent construction of numerous points of view of personal experience.

The metaphysics of reality for-itself are rather complex. People have thought about it for several millennia, From Zhu Xi in 12th century China to Parmenides, Heraclitus and on to the 18h and 19th century German idealists the investigation of mind and its place in nature was subject to intense intro and extrospective thought. And yes, I cannot reasonably fail to mention Rene Descartes.

The modern foundation of analytic philosophy might be traced to Immanuel Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason and condensed version Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that was summarized, synthesized and improved later by Arthur Schopenhauer in his 'Fourfold Roots of Reason'. That work is something like a great first half of a movie that one realizes is followed by a second half that is anti-climactic.

Bertrand Russell believed that atheists could live with strong moral principles even with the absence of faith in God. Russell seems something of an idealist innocent in retrospective comparison to post-modern American meatheads. The post-modern meat-heads have collapsed the idea of the possible value of moral principles too in their general stampede toward meaninglessness. What value might any natural laws or social morality present in language or logic flowing from human thought that could possess intrinsic extensional value?

This one natural regards Frederic Nietzsche-a kind of hero of the meathead movement, and his magnum opus 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'. If I had a tablet computer it would be convenient to abstract his book in a sketch with some logic symbolic notations added. A man that believes in the eternal recurrence of the Universe is recursively aware of the recurrence. Viewing a city from a lofty hill he disdains the moral structure of the city-civilization as meaningless. If one can view any society from a scientific detachment it is simple enough to regard the morality as phenomenal. Within the society however the moral order is simple a description of what people actual find acceptable in their social interaction, and they must have some interactive protocols by default.

Nietzsche believed that with the mystical insight of the eternal recurrence morality was superfluous and that the superior man would be completely without morality. Therein one finds the attraction by the post-modern meatheads in the common realm of the meaninglessness of morality.

Nazi Germany is sometimes held to have been a consequence of Aryan racial supremacy, yet in the true Neitzschian hierarchy of the amoral superman the Aryan herd appeal was simple a method to gain popular support by the truly amoral leadership running along in what amounts to a de facto ethic of personal egoism. Not even the Neitzschian eternally recurrent superman could appeal to popular support by saying that "I am far better than you cattle as a completely immoral individual, and I deserve your political support so I can ruthlessly exploit you to fulfill my will to power'.

Analytic philosophy developing from Kant through philosophers of logic and language did carefully research the relationships between words and objects and essentially anything that might be said about anything. They did not make words meaningless or purely phenomenal even if they did remove both empiricism and Platonic realism as inevitable parameters of lexicons and word ontology. Self-standing inter-referent lexical sets with meanings deriving from their own parameters, definitions and relations to internal and external referents were elaborated at the high point of 20th century linguistic philosophy by W.V.O. Quine.

One does not reach a meathead dead end with analytic and linguistic philosophy, and even metaphysical speculations are a kind of implicit aspect of cosmological thought today as one contrasts super-string theory, quantum mechanics, and the holographic principle. One might regard the many possible criteria of a transcendent God as the operator of monism yielding an occasional or perhaps infinite number of universes, or consider the phenomenal universe as a solid state physics phenomena generated epistemologically within a purely idealist context in modern terms upgraded from the Three Dialogues of Bishop Berkley.

Isaiah's Use of the Word 'Liberal'

The King James version was translated from the Greek Septuagint about 400 years ago, and the Septuagint was translated from Hebrew by 132 B.C. Isaiah was a prophet of the 8th century, yet some additional writing in the book was probably added as late as the 6th century.

The English translators of the Greek used the word 'liberal' intentionally. It best represented the word in Greek translated by Jewish writers of the Septuagint from their own language.

The word is used in Chapter 32, and I will quote verses 1 through 8 as well as a passage from the New Testament book John 8: 36-45 in order to show the consistency between what Isaiah wrote and what Jesus said close to a millenium later.

Isaiah 32

"1Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment.

2And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

3And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall hearken.

4The heart also of the rash shall understand knowledge, and the tongue of the stammerers shall be ready to speak plainly.

5The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful.

6For the vile person will speak villany, and his heart will work iniquity, to practise hypocrisy, and to utter error against the LORD, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail.

7The instruments also of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh right.

8But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand."

John 8:32-38

"36If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.

37I know that ye are Abraham's seed; but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you.

38I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father.

39They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus saith unto them, If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works of Abraham.

40But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham.

41Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.

42Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.

43Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word.

44Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

45And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not."

Faith That Rush Limbaugh's Language Evolution Will Become More Conservative

I saw a rather funny political cartoon in a newspaper that had President Obama pushing a wheel barrow of contraceptives up to Ms. Fluke from one side, and on the other stood Rush Limbaugh calling her a slut for taking them. Ms.Fluke stood in the middle looking confused.

Limbaugh often accurately summarizes the broadcast media positions on the left-the recent interpretations of the February employment statistics are a good example with Reuters, CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post painting it quite differently than the Gallup Poll the day before looking at non-seasonally adjusted numbers of the unemployed actually rising to 9.1% while the administration just says it stayed the same at 8.3% out of work.

Where Rush Limbaugh does the Republican Party substantial harm is in his environmental opinions that some therefore associate with all Republicans as a pervasive opinion.

Limbaugh did use inappropriate language though, and some conservatives would probably like to roll back language use to something before Lenny Bruce hit the stage and commercial television changed beyond the standards of 'I Love Lucy'.

Zhu Xi (1130-1200).. Indeterminism and Energy

Zhu Xi was one of the better Chinese philosophers of his age, and one of the twelve classic Chinese philosphers of Chinese history. He rightly disdained fractious public service though he passed the highest Confucian civil service examine at the age of 18.

I wanted to point out a few of his ideas that seem relevant today.

He has a metaphysics with Li or nature and its indeterminate status and also energy that is called Chi in Chinese I believe. Zhu Xi also thought that the character of the leader determined the well being of the nation. With four bad Presidents in a row and bad energy policy it is easy to share an opinion that America's Li and Chi are out of phase.

Nature of course has an indeterminate quantum status from a human perspective, although in-itself it is probably part of a monistic field of some sort, and homosexual marriages aren't natural. A national policy with unnatural Li and a fossil fuel Chi or energy policy is one moving toward global warming and perhaps the heat death of humanity except for the 1% that will fly to the moon on special space ships to places with a view built by robots (probably just science fiction thought there).

Zhu Xi was an investigator of things, and would certainly have appreciated Democritus and maybe even Plato if he had known about them. Aristarchus too might have been worth reading for the neo-Confucians of the time.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/116573/Zhu-Xi

The Apostle Paul elaborated upon the metaphysics of Jesus Christ, the spirit of God and man's relationship to a transcendent social realm that shares the parameter of applying transcending values to politics and social construction. Zhu Xi of course finds the metaphysical imperative in Li or the quantum mechanical nature of reality, while the Apostle Paul looked toward the Author of the Universal phenomena for-itself.

In either case, regardless of the political criterion we look at of the Song Dynasty or of Imperial Rome and 1st century Jerusalem, human leadership fails to embody the Li or Spirit principle in relating to the transcendent within the secular, empirical world even so far as to select a social environment with a best case energy policy reinforcing the continuum of life on Earth. Without respect for nature and the quantum uncertainty constructed within flowing righteous parameters the Spiritual nature of human society tends to lead toward crashes instead of passing silently through the Berlin Walls of industry,politics and mass extinction through intelligent redesign.

U.S. Unemployment Rate (Non-Seasonally Adjusted) Up to 9.1%

Non-seasonally adjusted unemployment in the United States reached 9.1 % in February the Gallup Poll reported.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/153161/Unemployment-February.aspx

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

Underemployment is up to 19.1% in February across America.

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-money-minute-20120309,0,2599645.story

While something like 220,000 jobs were created, about 367,000 jobs were lost in the month indicating a continuation of the long term trend of down-sizing and outsourcing to China, India and elsewhere. A fundamental readjustment to capitalism that would cap the number of corporations an individual could invest in at three that might accentuate the advantage toward free enterprise and individuals instead of consolidated concentrated networked wealth for select corporations and individuals probably is recovered for substantial correction. Otherwise the best opportunity might be to get homeland security to import thousand of camels, die them black and patrol the American southwest.

Russia Could Learn From Alaska's Permanent Fund

Russia's Vladimir Putin could take a page from Alaska’s Permanent Fund and establish a multibillion-dollar clump of money to make small annual payments to Russians to assure a measure of political servility. Alaska's Department of Administration invests royalty payments from global natural resource extraction corporations in the market sometimes leaning heavily toward investing in the same global extraction businesses such as oil that in turn assures the state of Alaska will kick back its policies to those businesses. While Russia would need more than the 38.6 billion dollars the Alaska Permanent Fund has, even a trillion dollar fund to make a payment to its citizens once a year could grease compliant political fealty from the Kremlin's subjects.

In the long run it is useful to develop a public government that is paid for largely by global corporations in order to fundamentally be immune from political control by the electorate. The voters instead, being paid off a little go along with the mafia like administration that prefers its own proprietary policies for its preferred employees decade after decade. Such modern corporatism could be helpful for Russian political stability although it is counter-productive to global environmental and alternative to fossil fuel energy interests of the public.

The state of Alaska has no income tax, and that keeps the public and corporations happy enough though it although the government to be largely unaccountable to public will such as might exist if the public had to pay income tax and demanded a more diversified and effective government.Politicians can be elected to serve corporate interests and that of the state. Their political ideologies much be consistent with the continuity of the bureaucratic entity, oil, gas and mining development. Russia to might be able to adapt to corporatist servility and slowly develop and evil extraction industry empire bent toward destroying life on Earth through global warming.

It is a hard fact of life that voters that pay for their government themselves, and who pay for welfare benefits to their non-working fellow citizens would rather have a healthy economy with full employment and civil equal justice, and that voters that do not have little concern if their government is corrupted, decadent or an evil empire with chronically unemployed and a declining economy. Corrupt governments first seek ideological servility from their citizens before income streams are allowed to occur. Even higher educational opportunities may be finessed to extinction.

Mitt Romney Gets Endorsement from Mississippi's Governor

Mitt Romney can use the support of the first term Republican Governor of Mississippi facing a tough election challenge essentially against the tough and determined former Senator Rick Santorum. If Romney can take the conservative southern state it may mean the end of the Rush Limbaugh News Hour (only joking-Rush Limbaugh is gaining sponsors rather than losing them, and he is getting back on track after misspeaking to call a college student testifying before a superfluous congressional committee a 'slut' last weak).

I should point out that Mr. Limbaugh is not uncommonly wrong on environmental issues. Today for instance he called Greenpeace a leftist organization. On that point he is wrong. Rush assumes in error that any organization that does not support erroneous energy and economic supply prioritization (e.g. oil) is leftist. Greenpeace like many scientific organizations is simply objective about a particular range of empirical resource use issues, and would I suppose find any sort of across the world upgrade of human use of resource within any kind of free economic system o.k.

I wondered what it might have been like to visit Europe and see the Mediterrainian basin when it was dry and the strait of Gibraltar closed a few million years ago. It would have been a few hundred degrees at the bottom and in Europe a number of odd creatures not alive today would have trod the odd forests where no humans lived-simply some primates with gleeming eyes indicating a little too much intellect sometime like the way my chess opponent program occassionally plays. Rush Limbaugh and a host of fossil fuel corporations would have been riight at home in that ecosystem advocating with Lenin's fervor for pure materialism and disregard of spirit, intelligence and wise use of resources.

Today the world hasn't so much opportunity to disregard human environmental impact as then. In the Arctic male polar bear are becoming cannibalistic because of a lack of ice and trouble capturing seals now and then eating younger males. Arctic records of the range of ice flow in the Bering, Chuckchi and Barents Sea from whaling records going back to 1850 show a steady shrinking commensurate with space satellite records in recent decades indicating the global warming trend of the ice pack. Far too many political leaders are simply dumb on the issue of human environmental impact and want to ignore the potential hell ahead they are creating for the generations of American youth a century ahead.

American ingenuity and free enterprise can be stifled by large networks of corporate power in a controlled limited access 'marketplace' ranging through numerous time zones. The President has been far too recalcitrant to lead into a reform of capitalism that would liberate free enterprise in the way that Adam Smith liberated free enterprise from aristocratic control. Concentrated wealth and power can stifle free enterprise by the intelligent masses such as exist and stop them from developing ecologically rational economic practices.

Mitt Romney may be the better of conventional politicians able to reform government and make it more effective and less costly. It will probably take a new ecological economic reformer in the post-Romney years (its difficult to say what Rick Santorum would do on government reform-perhaps take a Libertarian approach and cut everything except oil depletion allowances and defense contractor spending?).

Mississippi, Alabama, Hawaii and American Samoa vote on the 13th of March, 2012.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ap-newsbreak-miss-gov-bryant-endorses-romney-days-before-states-presidential-primary/2012/03/08/gIQASrArzR_story.html

Science of Unethical Upper Classes

Even in politics the upper classes are more unethical than normal individuals. In Alaska both Senators argue for oil development universally while global warming and water pollution develop. Senator Murkowski after losing her Republican primary ran as an independent to get Democratic female voters to put her in then switched back to the Republican Party after winning. Two Democratic Senators ought ton have some ethical awareness of global warming and the loss of wildlife habitat. They are going to resume shooting grizzly and black bear from aircraft near Fairbanks to let more moose grow for human predation.

The Wall Street scams, low low taxes on the rich, globalization; these are unethical policies of the upper classes primarily dooming poor Americans to poverty and the world to mass extinction.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120307145432.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher