September 18, 2007 archive

Routing Around Damage and Centralization

My views on rules for blogs have changed to, essentially, “I no longer care really”, except that I do still like them to be stated. But in reality, my views have not changed, because my views, such as they are, are a superset of ideas, various different and contradictory actions, only a few of which will be my position based on a particular context, based on whats going on at the time. The views some on this site remember me for were based on the Peer to Peer Phenomenon of Amazingness Roll through Politics like a Tornado leaving the blogosphere. It’s like a tornado from the twighlight zone, instead of turning trailer parks and suburbs into wreckage and waste it took the wreckage and waste of politics and turns it into trailer parks and suburbs.

Yotta Joules Is A Lotta Joules

You can’t really blame George Bush.  There are more zeroes in a yotta than George Bush or even Al Gore has fingers and toes. There might be many in Gore’s Tennessee that have sufficient fingers and toes, according to unverified reports, but evem those so blessed have perhaps gotten to wearing shoes which would greatly hamper their math abilities.

You see yotta is the number of joules of dependable, steady electric power that might theoretically be produced from Mother Earth’s own nuclear power plant in the crust of the earth. That is according to the calculations of MIT’s Professor Jon Tester and his panel of experts. Mother’s own heat might be mined without pollution of the atmosphere and poisoning of the earth for eons or a boon to nuclear bombers.

The Morning News

First, a public service announcement-

The Pastafarian Service Council wants to remind you that today,
September 19th, be Talk Like A Pirate Day.

As Slushy the Polar Bear says-
“Only you can prevent Global Warming.  Arrgh.”

The Morning News is an Open Thread.  Any resemblence to any other essays at any other sites is due to my inherent laziness and outstanding unoriginality.

The Morning News

The Morning News is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News THE TOP STORY

1 Iraq expels American security firm
By ROBERT H. REID, Associated Press Writer
13 minutes ago

BAGHDAD – The Iraqi government announced Monday it was ordering Blackwater USA, the security firm that protects U.S. diplomats, to leave the country after what it said was the fatal shooting of eight Iraqi civilians following a car bomb attack against a State Department convoy.

The order by the Interior Ministry, if carried out, would deal a severe blow to U.S. government operations in Iraq by stripping diplomats, engineers, reconstruction officials and others of their security protection.

The presence of so many visible, aggressive Western security contractors has angered many Iraqis, who consider them a mercenary force that runs roughshod over people in their own country.

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

The Big Blow, forty-five years ago

I was outside, here in Seattle, in the gentle drizzle late last night. Rain draped down like sheers against the foggy night sky. The sound of rain is not just one sound, but a muted march of percussionists – the rum pum pum of water across the overhang; the steady tingtingting of the drops landing on the skin of the earth; the beat beat beat heading south in a gutter. It’s possible the first drummer mimicked sounds he heard in his own beating heart. I’m sure he heard the drums of rain.

It’s chilly. Did I mark the onset of Autumn last year? I returned to a diary written on September 14, 2006…Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men

September and it’s raining again in the Northwest. Blessed rain. We haven’t had much of it here this season, believe it or not.  Watching the weather is one of my obsessions and my way of marking time perhaps.
Saving old messages on my cell phone that I rarely track back through – it’s another peculiar habit I have. Sure, I get prompted every few weeks to save or delete. My oldest message on my cell dates to September 2005. The message is from my son-in-law on the evening he left for Iraq last year for his first tour.

A Discussion of Class

Class analysis is most commonly practiced by the political left.  In fact, many consider class analysis a Marxist practice to this day.  I personally never found Marxist class analysis very satisfying because I could think of so many examples that did not fit into his scheme.  That did not, however, stop my interest in the subject.

So when I discovered in my early 30s that my favorite political economist, Thorstein Veblen, had postulated a VERY non-Marxist class analysis that described social reality much better than Marx ever did, I was quite excited.  Veblen’s class analysis was several orders of magnitude more complex and nuanced and came buried in an even more complicated intellectual strategy called Institutional Analysis, so it is sometimes difficult to separate out.

What follows is my best estimate of Veblen’s ideas–described with modern examples.  For example, the Business / Industry dichotomy is Veblen’s.  Calling it an example of a rivalry between Predators and Producers is mine–with a hat tip to Ignatius Donnelley.

Docudharma Privacy/Outing Policy

Don’t.

Period.

If you have to ask “is this outting?”

It is.

Don’t do it.

Period.

.

Are Freemasons Evil?

There are a lot of people who think so.  Whenever I hear Masons mentioned, it is always as a put-down; brought up as an example of nutty people, or conspiracy people believing Freemasons run the world.  As everyone knows a lot of influential people in the past of America, and the world, were Masons.  And a few bad ones, too.  George Washington was a Mason: Benedict Arnold was a Mason.  In any group of this size there are bound to be a few bad apples.

So, are Freemasons evil?

I don’t believe they are.  You see–I am a Freemason.

Follow below for my story and a discussion.

Midnight Cowboying – Where does your soul go when you sleep?

When you close your eyes and become a viking, do you actually become a viking in a realm far, far away?  I have often wondered about this, does your soul go on holiday when the sand man comes? Does your essence travel the universe leaving just your body here while you sleep?

I have long believed that our entire universe is just an quantum reaction to a system above us. And that our own atomic reactions are entire big bangs to implosions of universes below us. In a mobius strip structure, the loop of bigger to smaller is infinitely looping. To where the system above us is actually infinitely big, but going down the other direction of the mobius strip it is infinitely small. Vice versa for the one below us.

There are also infinite dimensions that have branched off in what we consider to our universe-centric spot on the mobius strip. In another dimension on this same spot, you never read this, and a whole new universe was created. Not only are the chains infinitely big and small below us, each level is also infinitely dense.

Out On the Edge of Darkness

In the summer of 1970 an English singer/songwriter by the name of Steven Demetre Georgiou wrote a song about peace. 

The world needed to hear one.  Two million men, women, and children had been killed in Vietnam.  50,000 young American soldiers were also dead.  Despite Pentagon reports of progress; years of bombing villages, shelling villages, and burning villages from the Mekong Delta to the DMZ had somehow failed to win the hearts and minds of the traumatized survivors.  Concerned that America’s honor and resolve had not been sufficiently displayed yet, Richard Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia, and the consequences were horrific as two million more human beings died in the killing fields of the Khymer Rouge. 

Shock Doctrine: Bush’s M.O.

In Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism she lays bare the truth behind George Bush’s Modus operandi in pushing through radical free-market reforms. The entire Bush Presidency has been about economics and the playbook was written by Milton Friedman.

Friedman believed in a radical vision of society in which profit and the market drive every aspect of life, from schools to healthcare, even the army. He called for abolishing all trade protections, deregulating all prices and eviscerating government services.

These ideas have always been tremendously unpopular, and understandably so. They cause waves of unemployment, send prices soaring, and make life more precarious for millions. Unable to advance their agenda democratically, Friedman and his disciples were drawn to the power of shock.

Shock and Awe was not just a clever turn of phrase. It was a peak inside their playbook!

Load more