Republicans Stall on Ratifying Reduction of Nuclear Warheads/Launchers

The Republican Party is stalling on ratification of the New Start treaty, seemingly in order to gain political credit themselves for a future treaty, and perhaps as a tactic looking ahead to the 2012 Presidential election. I hate to think that the Republicans in Congress would jeopardize the future of the nation (well maybe not) in order to gain a few political brownie points

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/weekinreview/21baker.html?src=twrhp

Russia and the United States will each be able to keep 1550 warheads and 1700 launchers. Thats enought to destroy most life on earth a few times over not including the cascading extra effects of such mass catastrophe. Besides running huge public debt up, the Republicans of Congress seems hell bent for keeping the use of large numbers of nuclear weapons alive.

Gambling with the future to keep domestic economic power to oppress the poor, destroy quality sports fishing in Alaska, and create a global evil corporate empire is the Republican party. The Democrats are simply the party of moral decay (with Republican help).

Nuclear weapons, global warming, pollution of the environment-the Republican Party should step up with the times a take a step back from nuclear brinksmanship as best as it can manage. The Obama administration does not need help in using bad political judgment in economics, morality or other impolitical factors the voters don't like.

Presidient Obama does need help with getting the reasonable nuclear reduction treaty signed. N.A.T.O. and Russia have agreed to build a new Star Wars Missile Defense together-so let us all move ahead a little. All that required is that the Republican Party stop viewing the Russians as a Boris Badanoff gang of radical unionists. Today the corporatist global evil empire is a danger equal to that of famous evil empires the world over.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11803931

Why Mediums of Exchange are Invariably Physical Elements

Everything is physical. One could trade in quantum bits and they would still be physical. The problem is accounting and the desire people have for particular things. Then its a matter of fairness and access. Electronic money replacing cash would create new ways of corrupting currency exchanges, and make accounting increasingly challenging, while advantages would implict flow to those operating the electronic exchange media.

Every bit of data, each piece of information, is associated with a real object. Vedral's 'Decoding the Universe' might help explain that. One can disagree about the Universe being simply information, or D.N.A. as a quantum computer in biological form, in fact there are numerous or an infinite number of ways to construct accounting and representational structures yet they are all associated with a temporal physical structure. Christians believe God donates a spiriutual element-perhaps of conduct-yet that is not an economic element.

Philosophically one may argue about what real objects are, and equally one may differ about the meaning of words and of course history too. I enjoy reading linguistic-analytic philosophy occassionally. I have Quine's Philosophy of Logic and Kripke's Naming and Neccessity as ongoing projects.

Concepts of causality and cash, or causality and war, and a classification system of human social conflicts in wars and non-wars such can be duplicitous. Sophism in conflict definitions such as a Vietnam Conflict, a War on Poverty, A War on Cancer, A War on Drugs, The Korean Conflict, The War in Iraq and so forth are linguistic things different than the things for-themselves. Philosophers of language and logic try to keep that awareness that language is one thing, and things in themselves quite another.

One might read Quine's Ontological Relativity' and discover a synopsis of how language has differnet sets or lexcions in various circumstances. Much language is about translating terms and meanings from one lexicon to another often without success, for many social lexical sets have inherent presumptions and constants that render the data value and words rather inflexably.

Some Christians may find it difficult to understand why everything in the Universal is physical. There are not two natures of substance, yet there may be a class of emergent characteristic that can be considered a qualitatively different genre of substance.

People commonly use water and ice as an example of qualitatively different materials made from same element. Of course because H2o is also partly made of the temperature of the Universe and the local temperature, it is rather disinegenuous to say that water or ice are made simply from water or ice.

Life is an emergent characteristic of inanimate matter. The complexity of the arrangement of the materials of life allow it to support the complex phenomenology of mind.Mind is fundamentally different than matter although each has the same fundamental base elements.

To declare that everything is physical, is just to offer an opinion of monism. Monism is a philosophical opinion that all things are of one basic substance in different configurations. Logic demands that sort of statement from living beings. Yet it is like saying that all things are A. It is saying that all things are of set A, and nothing that exists is not a member of set A.

So a Chriistian might say-whoah! what about the spiritual? God we stipulate is pure spirit and transcends the physical and all existing things. No scientific investigation or theory will ever comprehend God. People are physical, God is spiritual, yet people are created in the likeness of God-how so?

The emergent characteristic of mind in sentient life is how. Mind is a physically-based version of spirit, yet not spirit. If Christians of faith receive the Holy Spirit and God in dwells them, that is as close as humans get to the spiritual. God can transcend and inhabit any should willing to accept the atoning grace of Jesus Christ and His sacrifice on the cross as payment for his own original sin nature (of being physical and temporal).

What Would Abe Lincoln Do?

Abe Lincoln would get down in the pit and wrestle the crocodiles. He was a leader that like Reagan sought to enrich all ordinary Americans.

When General Meade defeated Robert E. Lee's Army of Virginia the tide had been turned in the civil war. The effort to make men free-in the United States, and to prevent southern state's officers from riding into Northern states to extradite escaped slaves had been reinforced and when Lincoln appointed Grant to lead the Army starting with the Wilderness campaign and to Cold Harbor a year of intensive war setting precidents for later wars was cast.

Lincoln as the first Republican President was not for lawlesness-he did after all order the largest mass hanging in U.S. history. I would imagine that wealthy drug using musicians would not have been people he admired.

Nevertheless Lincoln supported the pioneer ethic of hard work and self-help. Unfortunately in a spoilt society where networks and non-work are given disproportionate compensation, social position counts for far more than work. Sure there are still surgeons, soldiers and painters working honestly, yet unlike European Jews of yore scrimping to become petite burgeois and own their own small business and save capital, todays middle class have huge SUVs, houses and debt. They disregard the poor and kow tow to the rich and doom the poor and middle class in the process. They are trained to spend and consume and have no savings.

Lincoln was a nationalist rather than a globalist like all good U.S. President working for the people, and would not have approved tax cuts for the rich or the middle class in order to pay down the national debt directly. He would have secured our borders against illegal immigration so the U.S. poor could be more financially free to get jobs and better wages through negotiation and scarcity of labor.

Today some politicians even talk about ending the T.S.A. to let private security firms perhaps based in Dubai or Mecca guard the nation's security-you betcha, corporatism seeking to subvert Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Pat Buchanan again.

Money; Whence it Came From and Where it Went (J.K. Galbraith)

Its been a while since I read Galbraith's book. I will probably only make a brief mention of it's content. I believe it was published about 1975 or so. It will lack the history of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama era of Wall Street financial perfidy.

http://www.amazon.com/Money-Whence-Came-Where-Went/dp/0395198437

The history of money is quite interesting. Did you know there was a real John Law who worked for Louis the 16th (I believe it was the 16th)? He made all these land deals to prop up the monarchy that eventually collapsed and he was figuratively tarred and feathered.

Galbraith, who was in charge of U.S. economics for Roosevelt during the second world war, was a student of John Maynard Keynes, yet of course Galbraith wasn't an idiotic supply-sider.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith#Money_:_Whence_It_Came.2C_Where_It_Went_.281975.29

Galbraith explains Gresham's law-bad money follows good. Early in U.S. history when anyone could mint their own currency, and there were hundreds, some obviously weren't good. Yet Gresham's law is about imitation of successful economic strategies that are debased.

Galbraith explained that all the gold ever found would fit in one large supertanker ship. Much of it has been melted down and recast numerous times, and not too much lost.

Money was originally just a trade good, and when civilization developed a standard trade good of value became obvious; if the king of Mycenae had a gold coin of a particular weight then it would be worth the same as that of the King of Troy. Egoism of the day had the rulers image put on a coin, and greedy rulers would debase their currency putting dross weight inside a gold wrapped shell (does America have any real copper in pennies any more?).

Currency of money as an abstract items became a reflection of the complexity of an economy and of trade more than the thing itself. Nixon took America off the Gold Standard, and so today we see phenomena like quantitative easing or 'minting' of 600 billions of dollars by the Fed up ahead.

Monetary theory as contemplated by Von Mises and Freedman, seeks to determine what real capital value is. Money in some way is supposed to be associated with real capital value, so it obviously becomes more difficult to determine what value is when it is not plain and simple like wheat in a silo and no complications other that immediate supply and demand.

When a variety of global networks own various items, and fuel from OPEC nations is essential for transport as well as production of commodities and manufactured items, the effort to set a given value is difficult to isolate.

I believe it is important for citizens to have a material currency to trade for themselves freely, without being controlled by financial networks directly. It is also something of a reality check objectively upon the honesty of the advantaged currency traders and manipulators.

Value theory is a social element, perhaps a democratically elected element that is achieved via social momentum and limited citizen input determining social values. It is a philosophical activity with many points of view, and ecological economics of low entropy, low pollution, stable population are minority opinions today in the globalist expansive sprawl of power, avarice and control thoughtlessly reducing the health of the planet and its potential carrying capacity for human life.

--------------------------------------------------

post-script

Money hasn't much intrinsic value any longer. It is more about power and the desire to control properties that is the problem. A medium of social exchange is just one tool of economic activity.

Formerly and still, wars of conquest are fought to expropriate resources and social power.

Value theory may deem anything valuable. My books for instance, could become socially valued this Christmas, and I could sell millions. Then if a depression occurred, and no more could be printed existing copies could become more valuable than gold (invest now in several copies from www.lulu.com/garycgibson).

Seriously though, a theory of social conflict is not reasonably reducible to money. That may be a proximal cause of crime such as in 'Crime and Punishment', yet there are larger social structures and causes for crime besides money-even in Dostoyevsky's book.

An intermediate tool of social exchange reflecting value of what money is about. To ossify or institutionalize money in the hands of an elite would not eliminate the tool of social exchange,it would just eliminate economic activity in which individuals set their own values for which they would exchange money.

Electronic money already exists for the convenience of the advantaged. The poor haven't access to such things, and electronics aren't worth a damn in many circumstances of the outdoor life. Even rechargable batteries freeze at low temperature for instance.

Increasing rather than decreasing the mediums of social value would be a good way to go. Currency banks for Christians in a priesthood of believers for work, church attendance and participation in liturgy and readings from the Bible-that is a way to go.

There could be other social networks created to provide real social value for people-a sort oof turbo craigs list and exchange bank combine, that would allow a storing of work and exchange credits without money. Yet money is just a concept of an objective social exchange unit.

One wants and honest and impartial social exchange unit for work effort of course, yet people are disputacious and disagree about what is of value, and who should receive value units for various activities. A communitarian approach might create several alternative social value compilation structures so individuals would have more resources to draw upon in lean time.

Napolitano- "Next Generation of Security" Changes (Crotch Touchy Feely Searches)

In order to increase security in a 'next generation' ad campaign for personal body searches including breast and genital touch screening, Homeland Security Head Janet Napolitano has taken a step backward into history as a great leap forward.

http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20101115_6606.php?oref=rss

The Next Generation has a nice youthful sound to it--the old is always bad and new is better. High tech personal genital massages may be a sour grapes way to get a homosexual hold on things after the putsch to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell failed- for now.

Intelligent, innovative leaders discover new ways to improve service rather than to degrade it and just call it new. If the Obama Administration has dumb lawyers (there are far too many Democrat lawyer-politicians already) and expects innovative, creative leaders it has a lesson to learn at the polls again.

The either a full body imaging scan or the personal groin and anus fell as an innovation coincides with the Arnold's exit from His Governatorship. It was the 1989 movie 'Total Recall' that had the full body-imaging scene at a spaceport bound for Mars. This next generation of perverse and invasive government quankery substituting for clever innovation will not prevent aircraft demolition if the jihadists are really serious though.

Alexander Solzshenitsyn described a method that inmates used to smuggle items in and out of serious prisons (or perhaps it was a French author). A sealed tube called a plan was inserted up the ass of a convict. If a high quality plastic explosive and detonator were inserted in a plan of a boarding jihadist, no touchy feely inspection would discover the secreted bomb. A federal inspector would need to put on the rubber glove of security to be assured, and that goes double for women passengers.

Plainly an alternative, new next generation for assuring airplane security should be developed--and federal T.S.A. inspectors should not molest children.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-security-20101117,0,4648575.story

I disagree with the concept that a market oriented economy requires the reduction of individual human rights in order to process through-put of mass most efficiently. Airlines could not even be in business without public tax support for airports, air traffic controllers and security--it is an example of a corporatist-socialist subsidized transportation mode that displaces other competition.

The idea that the public should get used to strangers handling/processing their privates routinely may be fine for the Harvard globalists that view humanity as a commodity for most efficient allocation to concentrate wealth for an elite, yet some should dissent from this further expropriation of human privacy in a world moving toward a degraded condition economically, environmentally and sociologically.

Secret Government T.S.A. Inspection Plans A & B (political humor)

The U.S. Federal government airport security screening by the T.S.A. is heavily politically biased and costly for taxpayers. It is a service enabling the rich to fly without concern of becoming detonated and blasted to oblivion in mid-flight. Sikhs and some Muslims are exempt from becoming naked before federal inspectors for religious reasons, and other issues arise.

Our political advisor has obtained a secret N.S.A. contingency plan from the Main Government Planning Logic Computer on plans A and B for screening airport passengers such that everyone will be happy except for taxpayers.

Those passengers willing to pass trough the x-ray vision voyeur pleasuring device will receive complete privacy in the new system. They will just go to a room, strip and send their clothing out in a box on a conveyor belt to be rifled and poked through with only modest laughing and joking about the undergarments (not in the passenger’s presence). The passenger will then go alone into the special screening x-ray vision room, where he or she or gender neutral will be deloused and inspected from a distance by a reformed felon employed by the T.S.A. in Washington D.C. in the distance inspection room full of rehabilitated felons being paid for what they enjoy-watching images of naked people through a window. The Main Government Computer will also watch these people passing through the line. In effect these voyeurs will be acting as doctors viewing X-Rays or whatever noble thing it may be compared to rather than baser sorts of comparison. This federal procedure will trouble none. No T.S.A. employee will be smirking at the passengers as they pass through his or her screening machine on the spot.

The alternative T.S.A. method for those wishing to keep their personal privacy and dignity is the pat-down. The personal pat down is in four lines; two for heterosexuals, one for queers, and another for children.

Each pat down line will be designed to make each passenger comfortable with soft music and soft touches by attractive members of the appropriate gender or gender neutral. Unfortunately none could be found for the children's inspection line, so the government has again hired convicted felons rehabilitated for that task.

The U.S. Government is spending billions and billions of dollars to keep Americans safe and to stimulate the economy simultaneously. Instead of allowing plain Spenserian capitalist natural selection to determine which aircraft should become the nightly news, it is resorting to crunching personal privacy to assure security on common carriers.

A better policy than those suggested in plan A and plan B by the Main Government political computer would be to improve national transportation infrastructure and let airlines pay for their own security while banning anyone from entering the United States that is not willing to be stripped naked and hung by the heels for inspection. If the planes blow up leaving thee U.S.A., well, there are insurance corporations after all.

http://sikhism.about.com/od/culture/a/Culture.htm

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/cair-tsa-can-only-pat-down-muslim-women%E2%80%99s-head-neck/

Cohokia & The Albs; The Irish in Pre-Columbian America

In concluding the reading of Pauketat's excellent book on the first North American civilization; Cahokia, I got a few ideas useful for addition to my project of musing about possible pre-Columbian journeys of Irish voyagers named Albs by the author Farley Mowatt in his book ‘The Farfarers'. I definitely recommend reading ‘Cahokia’ by Timothy Pauketat. It is put together to unfold like a mystery evolving from just digging in the dirt to a verbal reconstruction of much of the civilization. It is a history of American archeology of the Midwest as well. Archeology is something of a small world perhaps.

There is virtually no evidence known of Irish journeys in America before Columbus I should hasten to add, or there is almost none beyond Mowatt's logical and possible induction of evidence of the Irish hotly pursued by Vikings over stations in the North Atlantic and on to New Foundland. The Cohokian history of an explosion of civilization growth and disappearance at St. Louis in a civilization of mound and pyramid builders that played a sport called chunky (I'll bet Bill Clinton in Hangover 2 would have been a star in Cohokia too) between 1050 and 1250 a.d. provides tantalizing ideas of a cultural contact by voyaging Albs with their currach skin boats down the St. Lawrence Sea way, over the great Lakes and through Wisconsin and the Gottshall Rock shelter area and along rivers finally allowing portage to the Mississippi and Cohokia. With interesting petroglyphs at Wrangell Alaska at 54 degrees North latitude identical to those of Newgrange Ireland at 54 degrees north latitude, each from the late Neolithic, I am a little motivated to discover possible traces of Irish journeys across America from New Foundland to Wrangell Alaska in the pre-Columbian era.

We know the at Viking settlements at Greenland flourished and then disappeared on the east side and continued a while later on the west perhaps until 1100 a.d. Within Mowatt's theory these settlements would have been earlier colonized by Albs who then moved further west in pursuit of better fishing and hunting of furs and to escape Viking predation. This time paradigm fits rather well with the arrival at Cohokia by a few Albs as early as 1050, for these were explorers and voyaging parties ahead of a more substantive population that at some point remained behind-possibly in New Foundland.

Pauketat in writing about the archeology of Cohokia made several points that could be taken up into support of the theory that Albs stimulated the rise of Cohokian civilization. A rival theory is that Cohokian cultural development and architecture, religion and games were stimulated by Meso-American ideas from civilizations in Mexico. There is virtually no physical evidence of Mexican civilization trade artifacts in the Mississippian civilization though. The evidence offered to support the influence of Olmecs, Toltecs or other Meso-American people is largely cultural, and those traces are scant although perhaps more substantial than those offered for the Albs/Irish. Since I don’t know of anyone beside myself looking in that direction, I will offer a couple more ideas that seem fairly obvious. Reinforcement of ideas supporting a search for Irish pre-Columbian presence in North America could be useful to others also investigating the topic in order to reduce redundancy of effort and to point out what information is available.

The ghost men at the Gottshall rock shelter look like white men. The figures were painted on the wall maybe in the 11th century, and could be pictures of well put together Irishmen without shirts today. Of course they are wearing leather skull helmets. Actually that reminds me of white guys in sado-masochistic gay bar apparel from what I have seen on TV. Well, the 11th century was a rough era. A pair of shirtless, muscular round eyed white guys with black leather skull helmets along a north south flowing river that could be a way to the Mississippi river drainage and the future Cohokia. It is known that Cohokia influenced the Ho-Chunk peoples living in Wisconsin heavily.

Perhaps the Albs had some cultural knowledge of Egyptian pyramids. Assuredly the Albs had knowledge of walled fortress and mass human warrior assaults with clubs, maces and such. The rapid rise of pyramids at Cohokia, and the use of clubs for mass human sacrifices (line up 130 people, club the and let them fall face down in a burial ditch-some of these people were not killed, and awoke to claw with their fingers at the dirt walls while buried alive-archeologist found their bony fingers in such array at Cohokia) are a pair of cultural concepts that seem starkly counter-cultural to the prior people of Cohokia.

Old Cohokia was in fact completely razed to make way for the New Cohokian civilization built upon the old village. Seldom do people agree for urban renewal of such scale voluntarily. A few Albs or possibly Aztecs entering to take over might have the political power to order such a destruction and reconstruction.

If one considers what a party of Albs would have encountered journeying over the great lakes, to Wisconsin and on to Cohokia, it is easy to imagine that they might have been regarded as ghosts or ghost goods from the underworld. If they were few in number at least they would have presented no military threat, and might instead have been a guaranteed promotion for anyone finding them and introducing the mysterious strangers to the community. If the Albs were few in number and were able to organize a new military tactical method to the Cohokians and eventually across the plains an explanation for the rise and fairly quick fall of Cohokia is created.

The Cohokians had a matrilineal culture and the Albs a patrilineal culture. That alone could have made for a cultural transition of a swift scale, although then matrilineal society did continue the effect for a takeover of military and religious leadership in the male role would have been quick. One could theorize that matrilineal societies occur when promiscuity obscures pale parentage and female parentage is more dependable.

At Crow Creek in Lakota territory in the late 20t century archeologist unearthed a village massacre of more than 800 people. The Lakota were offended by the discovery that such atrocity had ever occurred in their nation. Dating from the 14th century I believe, the story as retold in Pauketat’s book as best I recall (I haven’t a photographic memory), had a defense ditch and palisade being constructed and partly finished at the time of the attack. The attackers killed men women and children clubbing them efficiently with a stick and carved stone shaped something like a mace. This sort of infantry storm the wall and kill everything in the way tactic before burning the village is not found in America Indian archeology before Cohokia (outside perhaps Meso-America). That blood curdling battle method would not have been at all uncommon to Celtic-Alban-Brit-Jute melees in the British Isles and on the continent. Military tactics imported from Europe via the Albs and perhaps Vikings may have disseminated though North America.

Cohokian warriors had thick clothing used as armor for infantry battle storming and shields in addition to the vicious mace-clubs. This war uniform is uncharacteristic of prior North American tribal custom, yet mundane for European. Aztecs had a special mace made of obsidian with a cluster or flower of sharp blades meant for reducing a human skull or vulnerable body part, and obsidian was obtainable from Yellowstone, yet nothing like this is found in Cohokia. Such a war of the flowers club would not have been known to the Albs.

One might wonder where artifacts are of Alban or perhaps Viking tools of war in North America. Unfortunately I am not knowledgeable enough by half to compare possible Alban tools after they left an Iron and Bronze Age environment for the wilds of the west, New Foundland and America. It is interesting that flint was not used for arrowheads before Cohokia, and there were just a pair o sites where flint could be obtained readily. Flint arrowheads and larger chipped knife blades could have been suggested by Albs as well as by Meso-American travelers.

A mystery attending to the sudden fall of Cohokia in the 13th century is the abandonment of the Mississippi Valley of much of its population for the subsequent two hundred years. That is as interesting as the point that the supernova of 1054 a.d. that put a star in the daytime sky about as bright as Venus, nearly coincided with the rise of Cohokia. If albs voyaging in North America appeared in Cohokia as ghosts from the underworld along with the appearance of the supernova, they might have had a very powerful mojo for the construction of Cohokian civilization and the construction of the vast chunky field for sports competition in which the game was a metaphor for the male-female cycle of life. Perhaps genetic research may reveal something of traces of Albs in the future of Cohokian and plains archeology.