Ghandi on Hitler's Invasion of Western Europe

A quote by Ghandi on 22 June 1940 in the newspaper 'Harijan' via Lukac's book on Churchill and Hitler in 1940 named 'The Duel' page 191...

"Germans of future generations will honor Herr Hitler as a genius, as a brave man, a matchless organizer and more."-Ghandi

Combined with other historical records of Ghandi serving as a recruiter for the Army in South Africa during war in the capacity of a sergeant (that I found mentioned in Best's book on the last day of the first world war) my perceptions of the remarkable political organizer have changed a little.

Periodic Table Gets Two New Elements

These would be elements 114 and 116. Each is ephemeral in duration upon creation existing for a second or less, yet nevertheless important milestones on the way to the construction of new elements that may last 'decades'.

Because of relativity and time, new elements may play important roles in relation to investigations into the nature of time and space (I made that up yet it seems possible). One might bind atoms of space-if they exist, to new structures of atoms yet to be synthesized (more fiction).

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20540-heaviest-elements-yet-join-periodic-table.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

President Obama & Debt Increase Negotiations

President Obama may have to agree to cut extended unemployment benefits in order to get agreement from Republicans to deepen the federal debt limit.

That concession would be a bitter for the President who gave Republicans two years of extended vast tax cuts in exchange for two more years of unemployment checks to those that had already got them two years.

President Obama seems especially inept at political budget negotiations and economic planning. The destitute working poor will neither find free medical care available during his administration. The President lacks any capacity for innovative economic reasoning going from his record.

If four years of unemployment benefits mollifies his supporters enough the President may be able to count on their votes in 2012. Yet without a prospect for another two years of more unemployment benefits to make it six years of unemployment benefits if the President were t be re-elected some of his loyalists may jump ship and swim to to another platform on the rising tide.

National Conservativism vs. Globalism

It is very challenging to interpret American economic conservativism today that supports global corporatism as conservative. One instead must regard it as a phenomenon of swollen egotists prosecuting an advantage to make cheap profits at the cost of national independence.

For now globalists may build up China, Red Army business ventures such as Lenovo, outsource U.S. telecommunications data stream analysis to foreign intelligence and security corporations and agitate against free medical care for the poor and veterans in the United States, for the role of false conservatives is simply to radically change the world in the effort to harvest cheap short-term profit.

In the future, after falsely labeled conservatives have their way organizing a world with decaying environmental resources and over-population, a world in which trans-national corporations avoid local taxation and concentrate wealth, exploit the environment and making human suffering increase at the bottom of the sky-hook to the clouds, the people too may overcome their own national boundaries and unite as a global polity to democratically vote a fair tax rate on 'conservatives'.

American conservatives in subverting nationalism will build the infrastructure for a one-world government reaction to the one world business environment exploiting nationalist 'locals' (those located somewhere). The U.N. may have security council resolutions to redistribute global capital to fully fund health care for the poor, invest on global environmental recovery and accelerate the pace of rational traditional living with economic liberty for all. That is the work that today's global conservatives are working for. That will be a world without much room for dissent nor any for national initiative such as might be valuable for space colonization.

Global conservatives today have political-economic philosophy expansion ideas reminiscent of Adolph Hitler's ideas about declarations of war. The historian John Lukacs in his book on the Churchill-Hitler contest of May-June 1940 reported that Hitler said of Mussolini's declaration of war "That will be the last declaration of war in the history of the world...Attack and March! That is the right and healthy way. I shall never sign a declaration of war. I shall act."

The United States today is effectively a one-party democracy of globalists. Nationalists and others opposed to illegal entry to the nation are in the power minority. Liberals and conservatives alike are cut of a globalist, swinging, raving telecommunications cloth as unreasoned as a blind wombat driving drunk at high speed during rush hour in the wrong direction. Democracy requires a foundation in real property and security boundaries to exist. Democracy also requires competition-a plethora of independent nation-states able to peacefully co-exist without being corrupted by trans-national corporate predators reducing locals to powerlessness politically with the worst case economic and health prospects personally.

President Obama throwing in the towel in December 2010 on letting Bush II tax cuts expire knew that he had already lost the House of Representatives to Republicans-it was the Democratic Party's last chance to recover a responsible U.S. economic footing for the next few years. He knew that no legislation would subsequently reach his desk for signature without Republican support, sohe v placed his party in a worst-case scenario for critical budget negotiations with little leverage on the Republican globalist position.

Republicans may actually have some support for leaving the federal borrowing and debt limit where it is and letting the chips fall where they may. If the cost for any further federal borrowing is higher after the appearance of default or delayed payment of federal debt, that could be an advantage to private sector borrowers that could find better terms from lenders than the U.S. Government.

If U.S. economic development can be stimulated by an increase of loans to private sector business after the U.S. Government's 800 pound guerrilla stops soaking up all the extra cash, there may arise a fiscal discipline in federal management of its budget resources. Means tests for social security, Medicaid and Medicare may become more realistic, illegal entry to the nation may be stopped with a comprehensive ecologically enhancing border control zone, full employment programs might be designed to keep people off federal subsistence programs and free public health care for the nation's poor may allow the poor to keep their sporadic dolops of capital for buying real estate, consumer goods or investing in small business (such as starting up a national D.N.A. bank so in the distant future one may be able to have one's body regrown-perhaps on another planet. Such a business charging a $500 fee for the service in some sort of 3 by 5 metal, holograph image bearing card with an adequate encapsulated D.N.A. sample in an underground, secure facility might be a good business plan).

Lukacs writes in his book 'The Duel' (page 145) of imprecise or unspecified terms in the Secret Protocols between Stalin and Hitler as well as in the Yalta Accords that allowed vagueness to expand later into the basis for conflict-possibly operation Barbarossa in addition to the cold war.

Mission creep in undeclared wars for the United States has become an issue since the Vietnam Conflict. Undefined economic-political creepis also a problem today in global corporatism and its reciprocal affect upon U.S. elections as well as military ventures abroad.

Asphalt Poisoning, Cell Phone Microwave Brain Frying; Arctic Permafrost Melting Next?

Scientists are researching poisoning of ancient Americans that paved their localities with bitumen-an asphalt like substance that may have poisoned them.

Americans use a lot of toxic substances and blow it off-fundamentally because they are stupid and don't really give a hoot about those non-immediate problems. Maybe humanity is more wired to respond to immediate threats and actual injuries much faster than invisible empire threats like cell phones, toxic asphalt highways, air pollutants, ground water contamination, global warming and so forth. Perhaps that's why the nation spends 4 trillion dollars more or less to track down the box cutter hijacker-crashers-a disproportionate response that may beditto'd in the trust in Wall Street gadgets and frauds that are too abstract to consider dangers.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028154.300-asphalt-may-have-poisoned-ancient-americans.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Americans are over-specialized and collectively stupid perhaps, and that may be hazardous to our health. What if a generation cooks their challenged brains with cell phones glued to their ears? I was generally too poor to afford a phone and have used them for only aboput 500 hours total. I recall watching raw shrimp cook on the seat of a skiff in some water in a baggy. I believe that the tight microwave beam emitted from cells phones could explain the stupidity of the U.S. Congress and the national debt as well as a host of other idiotic policies. Well, the best reply is denial, so they shall rave about that until its annihilated.

For the rest of this essay I shall put my phone on speaker phone aqnd keep that little brain cooker away from my head! You should do the same-or put some tin foil over your head as you walk around the city streets to keep all those stray microwave beams from frying your circuits. Wait-psychologists have already said that won't work-it makes sparks fly in the microwave oven or something.

A Thought to Consider On What A Thawed Arctic Would Be Like

With global warming increasing and U.S. Government plans to add to it by supporting high Arctic development of ports and other facilities in Northern Alaska and offshore in the Beaufort Sea-optimal locations to emit carbon monoxide and other warm gases to increase anthropogenic climate change- I wonder what the future Arctic coastal environment will be like.

Coastal plains with much permafrost-sometimes frozen year around to one thousand feet or more below the surface-may thaw and melt.

Ice expands when it freezes, so if the permafrost melts the ground may shrink and subside. The question is how much will frozen permafrost subside as it thaws out per ten feet or per one thousand feet?

A rise in sea level added to a subsidence of the ground level above sea level might move the Arctic ocean shore a good distance south onto the coastal plain.

The Legislation of Pigs With Wings ©2011GaryCGibson (poem)

Motivated to liberate the world
with disposable wrappers, boundaries and security diapers
forests for Boothia Felix
and democracy for Adolph's enthusiasts
grown so much bigger than thee
outsourced with the innocence of greed

Raved on politics of insiders
tattooed temporal recombinant headlines
ranted gems across the Marquee de Sade

Pigs with wings
beaming microwaves to brains
flinging foreign policy boogers
through crenalleted derivative chicanes

Lyrics of wiggle sloppers
driving dust clouds compiling work
networking mobs of border hoppers
small worlds networks clumping snirked

Enviro-flies buzz baft blippers bout
whip froth filters for each single snout
in sleepy wallows of that princely domain
ruled over by powerful winged pigs
in marmalade skies acid rain.

Patriotism vs. Nationalism?

The historian John Lukacs wrote on interesting history book on the subject of 80 days of intellectual, tactical military leadership dueling between Churchill and Hitler in 1940 that fundamentally decided the future of the world. In his particular history investigations Mr. Lukacs is quite a good author.

I wish to examine two or three philosophical topics Mr. Lukacs raised that I take exception to. It is almost always useful when someone writes well enough to suggest a topic of philosophical interest, even if the topic is within the philosophy of history.

Mr. Lukacs seems to have felt that nationalism is a bad thing. Perhaps that is a consequence of his generation of scholars and their bad experience with one or two particularly bad and aggressive nations that prosecuted world wars. Nations are simply political districts though-even if one nation were to encompass the entire world. If a nation works badly it is because of the people in them-not the nation paradigm of political boundaries intrinsically.

I disagree that nationalism is a bad thing. A nation is just a particular polity that is ‘owned’ by its citizens. Nations are necessary for the existence of democracy. A democracy without a nation is like a subject without a predicate; meaningless for conveying meaning.

Winston Churchill was half American. Winston Churchill was also simultaneously 100% British and we Americans wouldn't have wanted a half-American in the White House to implement policy entirely of advantage to the Brits even during the war lest we be required to genuflect on her majesty (even if the present queen of England is quite a nice individual). That sort of thing is for the beknighted Elton Johns of teh world.

Citizens must have some land to control; not just their own, but the public lands too. Human beings all require air and land space to travel through and would be unhappy with a lifetime of house arrest. For the public democracy to have any meaning it requires a specific, real land or ocean to live within that it controls through its elections and representatives-and through laws the public supports.

Patriotism may be a kind of male shepherding of a people that may also be a nation. Mr. Lukacs interpreted Dr. Johnson’s famous phrase as ‘patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel’ as instead applying to nationalism. Though historical times change and meanings and concepts do change it is difficult to imagine that citizens of a representative democracy advocating for their well being through elections are scoundrels.

Nations do not require aggression or injustice to survive. Maybe the alternative though is a kind of imperialism and globalism over democratic, national particularism.

In some small nations with unsustainable economic methods it is easy to understand that some political leaders have sought to invade other nations to gain economic resources. Human leaders also have invaded simple to gain more power. Napoleon invaded Europe and Africa to expand France’s political power as the new Imperial Realm in contest with the Russian, Hapsburg and British Imperial powers.

Mr. Lukacs also wrote that parliamentary democracy was in decline and unpopular in the 20 years after the end of the first world war, yet I felt he misunderstood the reasons why the Balkan countries, Greece, Albania and Turkey were less than democratic Utopias; it is difficult to imagine the Sublime Porte as having set a stage for peaceful democracy in the region, and neither was China’s Imperial Empire, the Nationalist Leadership and organized crime in Shanghai supporters of traditional civil rights based democracy. Nationalism was not the essential agent for military and political conflict in the 20th century; instead it was as Ortega y Gasset wrote ‘The Revolt of the Masses’ prevalently against imperial rule, and of rule by aristocracy.

World War Two was the last battle of the Second World War. Hitler was a new proxy for the defeated aristocrats of Germany that had to give up power to the Weimar Republic. Germany narrowly avoided becoming socialist at the close of the First World War and the military leadership appointed Hitler to infiltrate and lead the way through the German National Socialist Worker’s Party to a new synthetic state corporatism in which aristocrats with capital might unify with the Nazi authority thus protecting their assets against the Bolsheviks in Russia and Germany. Because Henry Ford, Prescott Bush and others took that as better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick for trade, Germany advanced under Hitler to the inexorable drive to dominate Europe.

Of course there is more to it than that. Yet the contest between imperialism in various forms and democracy with strong individual rights based in a real nation is fundamental in western civilization. Nationalism does not require aggression at all-it requires good ecological economic leadership, full employment, justice, security from illegal entry and mutually beneficial trade relationships. The United States can be a strong, independent nation and have a sustainable, self-reliant economy and ecology or it can become part of some global imperialism in which elections nationally are basically sham votes for items from a one party ruling class.

The last point I wanted to mention was Mr. Lukac’s statement that it isn’t idealism and realism that are antithetical, but idealism and materialism that are. That is quite a useful point to make.

Realism has a couple of meanings philosophically speaking (or more) as does idealism. Today we might be more accustomed to talking about realism vs. nominalism than idealism. I believe that Prof. Lukac’s meanings are of that of history and common sense, although he does mention Hegel, German idealism and determinism.

Realism has historically been a descendent of Plato’s realm of forms. Philosophically realism was a belief in the reality of perfect archetypes in a transcending realm of which all things in this world are replicas albeit imperfect forms.

Common sense is the other meaning of realism we may consider now. Realism in politics is the pragmatic, the functional and the actual-the way things are. Realism tends to thus be associated with materialism and it is simple to clarify matters and pose materialism as the fundamental antithesis to idealism.

There is a funny thing about idealism that makes its meaning somewhat equivalent to the amount and quality of ideas that one has. It is easy to ossify idealism and say that it is Hegel’s world spirit evolving to actualize itself. We can even throw Darwin’s evolution theory along with Telhard Desjardin’s noosphere into such an evolution of idealism comprehensive of materialism, quarks, space-time and all-potential universes. That is, one may place that sort of idealist paradigm within the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus’ criterion of the non-static manifestation of temporality through various emanations from The One and transcend or bridge the gap between idealism and realism, so it is useful to allow realism and materialism to be equivalents and substitute the one for the other in our linguistic thesis vs. anti-thesis comparison.

Idealism has another meaning besides that of Hegel that I ought to mention. Bishop Berkeley developed a philosophy of idealism-or pure idealism that let the world of perceptions be a phenomenon of mind acceptable in a sense to Jean Paul Sartre’s approach to rationalism named existentialism. Basically Berkeley let the world of experience have no foundation objectively that could be greater than any world that could be created directly for our minds to experience.

If the world and Universe could be a kind of Matrix or virtual reality-an idea for Berkeley, Lukacs wrote that Hitler had the other sort of Hegelian idealism in mind. If one remembers reading Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ one recalls that G.W.F. Hegel believed the German state was the highest form that the world spirit had yet evolved mankind to. Thus Hitler might have had a similar historical misunderstanding and belief in determinism equal to that of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin. I was unaware of that, and am a little skeptical that Hitler had much depth in reading philosophy. It is more credible to believe he had read Nietzsche.

At any rate, Mr. Lukac’s interesting point does stimulate one to consider a little how materialism might be the antithesis of idealism. I suppose I must upgrade a little the meaning of idealism and also that of materialism.

Idealism will mean that thought and design in a world-a kind of anthropic idealism, leads one’s way. Materialism shall mean that matter prevails over thought, and irrationalism is acceptable as it conforms to given material mass, energy and space-time.

With that clarification it is easy to see that idealism and materialism are antithetical. Because the only realms where anyone much cares about such a contest are philosophy and the philosophy of economics we must consider the salient point in the business environment in the ecosystem today; does capitalism work best to manage the world’s environment with faith in Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’?

We might wonder if blind faith in material irrational evolution of parallel environmental reconstruction that may encapsulate the prevailing Wall Street approach to the world ecosphere that regards the ecosphere as n externality is opposed to an idealism that takes responsibility for human interaction within the world ecosphere. I believe the answer is yes.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand was a mechanism for economic determinism. It meant no more than let free enterprisers run their affairs without royalty (or large corporations) oppressing us. It was not in anthropomorphic sink for all social responsibility regarding the environment.

In building designs people think before building if they can. Usually the results turn out better than letting the blind forces of nature evolve an office tower. Materialism must be helped along by idealism if it is to work-yet the ideal world; a world of pure mind in which human beings construct any reality they like is equally absurd. Real limits exist in any era to what human beings may do to change the environment and world or even universe. Politically the challenge is to understand those limits and make of them not points of crisis and conflict, chaos and catastrophe but opportunities for progress, construction of new worlds, restoration of healthy ecosystems, sustainable habitations for all life forms.

God got all of that better of course. The Universe is a kind of tree of life sprung from a mustard seed of infinitesimally small size (or perhaps it is that small anyway comparatively). I appreciated the concept of materialism being the antithesis that Mr. Lukacs raised in his book about Hitler versus Churchill. Materialism without thought and vice versa tends to be incomplete, ineffective political philosophies.