Writing in the midst of the Great War (World War I), Bertrand Russell observes...
It is impossible that the peace of the
world should be preserved while nations are
liable to the mood in which Germany entered
upon the war unless, indeed, one nation were
so obviously stronger than all others combined
as to make war unnecessary for that one and
hopeless for all the others.
Principles of Social Reconstruction. 1916, Chapter III, "War as an Institution," Pg. 98.
What he describes here is what the American military would become, dwarfing all others in the post-Cold War era. This state of affairs however has proven hardly conducive towards achieving a lasting peace. Russell suspected as much, and so he suggests another solution...
Assuming that war is not ended by one State
conquering all the others, the only way in
which it can be permanently ended is by a
world-federation. So long as there are many
sovereign States, each with its own Army, there
can be no security that there will not be war.
There will have to be in the world only one
Army and one Navy before there will be any
reason to think that wars have ceased. This
means that, so far as the military functions
of the State are concerned, there will be only
one State, which will be world -wide.
Ibid, Pg. 101.
How might this be brought about? Not by a global Army or Navy, but by a global Air Force, or more specifically, a global drone program. Today a message was published on the blog "Ulsterman" by one "Wall Street Insider" whose identity (and whose authenticity) is unknown. This message regardless strikes as quite perceptive of the direction towards which globalist policy appears to be perilously heading...
There is apparently a program either being prepared, or already ready for full implementation, that will have the use of drones as part of some form of globalized agreement between nations. It is my understanding the use of these drones for border patrol purposes is actually a test lab for the program. An American company has just completed a long range drone product that will allow these devices to run for weeks at a time covering vast distances. This product is being shopped now. It is no accident this situation has evolved under this particular president. Place the events surrounding the use of drones by this administration with the president’s repeated overtures to the Russian government. While -name deleted- provided you a shocking assessment of Obama’s personal obsession with drones, it is this technology’s critical use as part of a far wider globalization plan that is the true and overriding threat here. The military continues to grapple with the moral implications of what this administration is pushing them to do, and so as the administration grows impatient with the military component of the plan, it now proceeds in haste to utilize these drones as part of a nationwide law enforcement program. That program though will, if they succeed, extend far beyond the borders of the United States, and in that process, their globalization plan will be greatly enhanced. While this description I give you now sounds perhaps far fetched, I assure you it is not. This plan, this “enhancement”, has been moving forward for decades. It is now being accelerated...
Can we expect a lasting peace should this scheme come to full fruition? Hardly. It will only bring into implementation a state of affairs that Russell's chapter title describes: War as an Institution. Not as the exception, as the last resort of "politics by other means," but as the rule - a permanent return to Hobbes' bellum omnium contra omnes, or perhaps to say it more accurately, bellum imperium contra omnes.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Government Computer News: A space-time cloak?...
“We here show how the magic of editing history can be achieved by introducing the concept of the space-time cloak.”
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Archive Plumbers
Using data mining techniques such as the NSA likely deploys upon current communications, a new approach in the social sciences is taking root...
Science: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books
Jean-Baptiste Michel et al
Abstract
We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.
An in depth plumbing exercise...
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey
Science: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books
Jean-Baptiste Michel et al
Abstract
We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.
An in depth plumbing exercise...
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
To the shores of Tripoli...
From President Thomas Jefferson,
To the Congress of the United States of America
The State of the Nation
December 8, 1801
...To this state of general peace with which we have been blessed, one only exception exists. Tripoli, the least considerable of the Barbary States, had come forward with demands unfounded either in right or in compact, and had permitted itself to denounce war on our failure to comply before a given day. The style of the demand admitted but one answer.
I sent a small squadron of frigates into the Mediterranean, with assurances to that power of our sincere desire to remain in peace, but with orders to protect our commerce against the threatened attack. The measure was seasonable and salutary. The Bey had already declared war. His cruisers were out. Two had arrived at Gibraltar. Our commerce in the Mediterranean was blockaded and that of the Atlantic in peril.
The arrival of our squadron dispelled the danger. One of the Tripolitan cruisers having fallen in with and engaged the small schooner Enterprise, commanded by Lieutenant Sterret, which had gone as a tender to our larger vessels, was captured, after a heavy slaughter of her men, without the loss of a single 1 on our part. The bravery exhibited by our citizens on that element will, I trust, be a testimony to the world that it is not the want of that virtue which makes us seek their peace, but a conscientious desire to direct the energies of our nation to the multiplication of the human race, and not to its destruction. Unauthorized by the Constitution, without the sanction of Congress, to go beyond the line of defense, the vessel, being disabled from committing further hostilities, was liberated with its crew.
The Legislature will doubtless consider whether, by authorizing measures of offense also, they will place our force on an equal footing with that of its adversaries. I communicate all material information on this subject, that in the exercise of this important function confided by the Constitution to the Legislature exclusively their judgment may form itself on a knowledge and consideration of every circumstances of weight.
I wish I could say that our situation with all the other Barbary States was entirely satisfactory. Discovering that some delays had taken place in the performance of certain articles stipulated by us, I thought it my duty, by immediate measures for fulfilling them, to vindicate to ourselves the right of considering the effect of departure from stipulation on their side. From the papers which will be laid before you you will be enabled to judge whether our treaties are regarded by them as fixing at all the measure of their demands or as guarding from the exercise of force our vessels within their power, and to consider how far it will be safe and expedient to leave our affairs with them in their present posture...
+
Some two hundred and ten years later...
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett Says President Obama’s Unilateral Choice to Order U.S. Military Force Against Qadhafi is an Affront to Our Constitution
To the Congress of the United States of America
The State of the Nation
December 8, 1801
...To this state of general peace with which we have been blessed, one only exception exists. Tripoli, the least considerable of the Barbary States, had come forward with demands unfounded either in right or in compact, and had permitted itself to denounce war on our failure to comply before a given day. The style of the demand admitted but one answer.
I sent a small squadron of frigates into the Mediterranean, with assurances to that power of our sincere desire to remain in peace, but with orders to protect our commerce against the threatened attack. The measure was seasonable and salutary. The Bey had already declared war. His cruisers were out. Two had arrived at Gibraltar. Our commerce in the Mediterranean was blockaded and that of the Atlantic in peril.
The arrival of our squadron dispelled the danger. One of the Tripolitan cruisers having fallen in with and engaged the small schooner Enterprise, commanded by Lieutenant Sterret, which had gone as a tender to our larger vessels, was captured, after a heavy slaughter of her men, without the loss of a single 1 on our part. The bravery exhibited by our citizens on that element will, I trust, be a testimony to the world that it is not the want of that virtue which makes us seek their peace, but a conscientious desire to direct the energies of our nation to the multiplication of the human race, and not to its destruction. Unauthorized by the Constitution, without the sanction of Congress, to go beyond the line of defense, the vessel, being disabled from committing further hostilities, was liberated with its crew.
The Legislature will doubtless consider whether, by authorizing measures of offense also, they will place our force on an equal footing with that of its adversaries. I communicate all material information on this subject, that in the exercise of this important function confided by the Constitution to the Legislature exclusively their judgment may form itself on a knowledge and consideration of every circumstances of weight.
I wish I could say that our situation with all the other Barbary States was entirely satisfactory. Discovering that some delays had taken place in the performance of certain articles stipulated by us, I thought it my duty, by immediate measures for fulfilling them, to vindicate to ourselves the right of considering the effect of departure from stipulation on their side. From the papers which will be laid before you you will be enabled to judge whether our treaties are regarded by them as fixing at all the measure of their demands or as guarding from the exercise of force our vessels within their power, and to consider how far it will be safe and expedient to leave our affairs with them in their present posture...
+
Some two hundred and ten years later...
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett Says President Obama’s Unilateral Choice to Order U.S. Military Force Against Qadhafi is an Affront to Our Constitution
Saturday, December 25, 2010
The Neo-liberal method, circa 1585
The King's brother is evidentally Grangino, brother of Wingina.
The principal navigations, voyages, traffiques & discoveries of the English ... By Richard Hakluyt
The Kings brother had great liking of our armour, a sword, and diverse other things which we had: and offered to lay a great boxe of pearle in gage for them: but we refused it for this time, because we would not make them knowe, that we esteemed thereof, untill we had understood in what places of the countrey the pearle grew: which now your Worshippe doeth very well understand.
A lengthy paper by Fred Willard on lost-colony.com suggests other commodities that may have inspired this early neo-liberal adventure...
Raleigh’s 1587 Lost Colony:
Conspiracy, Spies, Secrets & Lies
The principal navigations, voyages, traffiques & discoveries of the English ... By Richard Hakluyt
The Kings brother had great liking of our armour, a sword, and diverse other things which we had: and offered to lay a great boxe of pearle in gage for them: but we refused it for this time, because we would not make them knowe, that we esteemed thereof, untill we had understood in what places of the countrey the pearle grew: which now your Worshippe doeth very well understand.
A lengthy paper by Fred Willard on lost-colony.com suggests other commodities that may have inspired this early neo-liberal adventure...
Raleigh’s 1587 Lost Colony:
Conspiracy, Spies, Secrets & Lies
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
There is a vast lacuna in the Apollo 11 Transcipts.
Woefully missing from the Onboard Voice Transcription-Command Module transcription is the on board conversation that takes place before a curious question is posed to Houston, which we find in the Technical Air-to-Ground Voice transcription, on pg. 190 (of pdf) at time stamp (day/hour/minute/second) 02 12 45 46:
"Do you have any idea where the S-IVB is with respect to us?"
Houston answers that the S-IVB (final stage of rocket) is 6000 miles away. But outside the capsule the astronauts were seeing something much closer, as Buzz Aldrin describes in Apollo 11- The Untold Story (beginning at around 4:00).
Three days of transcripts of the onboard conversations are missing; these were apparently not included in the original confidential document, as the page numbering indicates: page 51 ends with 00 03 29 21 and page 52 begins with 03 03 39 38.
Woefully missing from the Onboard Voice Transcription-Command Module transcription is the on board conversation that takes place before a curious question is posed to Houston, which we find in the Technical Air-to-Ground Voice transcription, on pg. 190 (of pdf) at time stamp (day/hour/minute/second) 02 12 45 46:
"Do you have any idea where the S-IVB is with respect to us?"
Houston answers that the S-IVB (final stage of rocket) is 6000 miles away. But outside the capsule the astronauts were seeing something much closer, as Buzz Aldrin describes in Apollo 11- The Untold Story (beginning at around 4:00).
Three days of transcripts of the onboard conversations are missing; these were apparently not included in the original confidential document, as the page numbering indicates: page 51 ends with 00 03 29 21 and page 52 begins with 03 03 39 38.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The Tapeworm
The tapeworm is a rather disgusting metaphor that Catherine Austin Fitts has employed in characterizing the prevailing economic racket of recent decades. As she defines "tapeworm economy," or "negative return on investment economy" in an interview for Karavans...
That's an economy with two classes of players, the insiders & the outsiders. The insiders are constantly subsidized at the expense of the outsiders, like a tapeworm, a parasite that eats through the body. The parasites engineer the economy to drain it for their benefit, consolidating wealth & economic power by liquidating wealth, people, environment, & economic productivity, all to fatten the Tapeworm.
Just as a tapeworm, lodged within the intestines, is able to produce and pump neurotransmitters through the blood-brain barrier that make its host crave the very nutrients that it requires at the expense of the host's nourishment, so does the economically parasitical "insider" utilize a broad variety of tools, anything from the mass media to high fructose corn syrup, for making "outsider" host consumers desire self-impoverishing things that concomitantly enrich the insider.
Dr. David Kessler, a former FDA commissioner, explains this dynamic as it applies to the fast-food industry, in an interview on the NewsHour:
The food industry has been able to figure out the bliss point, the optimal combinations of fat and salt, fat and sugar, fat, sugar and salt that you think tastes good, but when you look at the science, we now know that those ingredients stimulate, they activate the brain's circuitry. They stimulate our intake. They condition us. They drive us to want more. They affect the neural circuits. For decades, the food industry has said, "We're just giving consumers what they want." But, in fact, now we know that what they're doing is excessively activating the brains of millions of Americans.
Such a dynamic is thus a foil to the classic law of supply and demand where, on the one end of economic transaction, a population of consumers by their own interest desire a product, to which desire producers respond by supplying that product in quantities proportionate to the demand. With tapeworm economics, the producers can modulate the desire of consumers.
Such a foil is really nothing new however. Thorstein Veblen perhaps described it in the "wasteful expenditure" of a leisure class which adopts behaviors (such as in the near religious following of sport franchises, for instance) having little intrinsic economic value.
Veblen is most famous for the term "conspicuous consumption." But, some 90 years before Fitts, we find Veblen employing the tapeworm analogy in an entirely different context, though utilized somewhat in the same sense. In his Imperial Germany and The Industrial Revolution (1915), we read on page 169 (of the 1939 edition):
...the uses of the dynastic establishment are seen to be of the same nature as the uses of a tapeworm; and the tapeworm's relation to his host is something not easy to beautify in words, or even to authenticate in such convincing fashion as will insure his affectionate retention on grounds of decorous use and want.
As Veblen employs the term, however, the tapeworm operates upon a body politic. Thus, from the late XIXth through the early XXth century, Prussian dynastic militarism reinforces itself through pan-Germanic engagement of industrial infrastructure, vocation, and all human capitol rendered available for recruitment through familiar habits of allegiance.
The bias of solidarity...is a solidarity subservient to an extraneous initiative; an initiative not necessarily alien to the spontaneous consensus of the group, but also not necessarily coincident with or germane to the ends of life comprised in the consensus of the community... Where the popular consensus so comes to coincide with the line of the State's initiative and unfolding power, as in the Prussian case, it will commonly happen that this happy consummation is reached through the community's accepting the State's ends as its own, and also commonly without such knowledge of the State's ends in the case as would enable the community to take stock of them and appreciate what has been accepted or assented to... (Pg. 164/5)
That's an economy with two classes of players, the insiders & the outsiders. The insiders are constantly subsidized at the expense of the outsiders, like a tapeworm, a parasite that eats through the body. The parasites engineer the economy to drain it for their benefit, consolidating wealth & economic power by liquidating wealth, people, environment, & economic productivity, all to fatten the Tapeworm.
Just as a tapeworm, lodged within the intestines, is able to produce and pump neurotransmitters through the blood-brain barrier that make its host crave the very nutrients that it requires at the expense of the host's nourishment, so does the economically parasitical "insider" utilize a broad variety of tools, anything from the mass media to high fructose corn syrup, for making "outsider" host consumers desire self-impoverishing things that concomitantly enrich the insider.
Dr. David Kessler, a former FDA commissioner, explains this dynamic as it applies to the fast-food industry, in an interview on the NewsHour:
The food industry has been able to figure out the bliss point, the optimal combinations of fat and salt, fat and sugar, fat, sugar and salt that you think tastes good, but when you look at the science, we now know that those ingredients stimulate, they activate the brain's circuitry. They stimulate our intake. They condition us. They drive us to want more. They affect the neural circuits. For decades, the food industry has said, "We're just giving consumers what they want." But, in fact, now we know that what they're doing is excessively activating the brains of millions of Americans.
Such a dynamic is thus a foil to the classic law of supply and demand where, on the one end of economic transaction, a population of consumers by their own interest desire a product, to which desire producers respond by supplying that product in quantities proportionate to the demand. With tapeworm economics, the producers can modulate the desire of consumers.
Such a foil is really nothing new however. Thorstein Veblen perhaps described it in the "wasteful expenditure" of a leisure class which adopts behaviors (such as in the near religious following of sport franchises, for instance) having little intrinsic economic value.
Veblen is most famous for the term "conspicuous consumption." But, some 90 years before Fitts, we find Veblen employing the tapeworm analogy in an entirely different context, though utilized somewhat in the same sense. In his Imperial Germany and The Industrial Revolution (1915), we read on page 169 (of the 1939 edition):
...the uses of the dynastic establishment are seen to be of the same nature as the uses of a tapeworm; and the tapeworm's relation to his host is something not easy to beautify in words, or even to authenticate in such convincing fashion as will insure his affectionate retention on grounds of decorous use and want.
As Veblen employs the term, however, the tapeworm operates upon a body politic. Thus, from the late XIXth through the early XXth century, Prussian dynastic militarism reinforces itself through pan-Germanic engagement of industrial infrastructure, vocation, and all human capitol rendered available for recruitment through familiar habits of allegiance.
The bias of solidarity...is a solidarity subservient to an extraneous initiative; an initiative not necessarily alien to the spontaneous consensus of the group, but also not necessarily coincident with or germane to the ends of life comprised in the consensus of the community... Where the popular consensus so comes to coincide with the line of the State's initiative and unfolding power, as in the Prussian case, it will commonly happen that this happy consummation is reached through the community's accepting the State's ends as its own, and also commonly without such knowledge of the State's ends in the case as would enable the community to take stock of them and appreciate what has been accepted or assented to... (Pg. 164/5)
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