Personal Update

Just for the record, I've been quite busy with RL (real life). Lent has begun and I try to force myself to slow down and contemplate, but I have not yet carved out time to post here. I have been busy with work, writing, time with family, some entertainment, trying to make ends meet, & finally, I am now involved with my trade union negotiations as a committee member for the labor side. All those role playing games sessions and tiny stint in drama in high school are now paying off in my new attempts at psychology and human interpersonal communications as we face off against entrenched bureaucrats in a horrid economy. May God have mercy on me!

I have been compiling ideas for novels over on my Traveller RPG blog, but I can see that fun coming to an end soon. But I also see a season of careful introspection coming that will keep me from creating and the sin of thinking for myself.

Cheers,
Novo Visum,
Neue Ansicht.

Ephemera: Lego Serenity

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Browncoat fans are really intense; check out this picture:





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W: Reading about Writing

Here we have from John Gardner’s book, “The Art of Fiction”, an interesting point about fiction in the English language. He is explaining deconstruction, but he unwittingly makes a profound observation.

…At any rate, behind the deconstructionists’ dazzling cloud of language lie certain more or less indisputable facts: that language carries values with it, sometimes values we do not recognize as we speak and would not subscribe to if we noticed their presence in what we say; and that art (music, painting, literature, etc.) is language. That language carries values is obvious. Again and again this book speaks of the writer as “he,” though many of the best writers I have read or have taught in writing classes are female. English, like most languages, is covertly male chauvinist. It is also, as the novelist Harold Brodkey points out, covertly Christian. Nearly all our most resonant words and images carry a trace of Neoplatonic Christianity. Even so innocent a word as “friend” has overtones. In feudal times it meant one’s lord and protector; in Anglo-Saxon times it meant the opposite of “fiend.” We can of course read a book about friends without ever consciously invoking the undercurrents of the word; but where the friendship grows intense, in this story we’re reading, we are almost sure to encounter images of light or warmth, flower or garden imagery, hunger, sacrifice, blood, and so on. The very form of the story, its orderly beginning, middle, and end, is likely to hint at a Christian metaphysic.

A fable: Historia: Mythos: Recent History of Tyranny in the United States

Part 2a, Concerning the uses of the Cold War & international conflict in advancing the interests of the monkey collective.

Again we have the following from Tom Baugh’s book, “Starving the Monkeys: An Entrepreneurial Horror” (continuing from the quote in my 01/26/2010 entry):

Today, some modern economists claim that tornados[sic] are beneficial in that they stimulate jobs in the recovery. I disagree, as undoing the damage done merely represents the rollback of some previous -∆Q. But, if those same modern economists are to be believed, then their ideas would also argue that the recovery from a thermonuclear war would also be equally beneficial. Think of all the jobs that would be created if all those A Country cities and neighborhoods were rebuilt from scratch. After all, the ore and the aggregate and the limestone still lies there intact, untouched by the evil neutron. And by the time this rebuilding has been completed, the effects of the short-term fission products will have faded into meaninglessness.

But this line of reasoning requires boldness, and reliance upon the individual, and the relinquishing of fear. The monkey collective must not allow this sort of thought.

And so, the response of the collective throughout those early decades of the Cold War was to deride the thinkers, military and civilians, as war-mongers and naive. The best representation of this derision was in a cleverly spun film by Stanley Kubrick [“Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”].

This movie, which was required viewing at the Naval Academy, accurately reflects the ethic of the monkey collective. Fear and prejudice and weakness are lauded by the collective as virtuous. Individual effort and achievement are derided as naive and hopeless. Patriotism to the ideal of liberty is presented as outdated and foolish, while only compliance to the collective and weakness is considered strength. Films such as this don’t propagandize the collective any more than politicians deceive the collective as they rob us blind.

Instead, politician and film-maker and reporter alike merely respond to their respective markets. The collective demands that the politicians steal from the individual on its behalf. And so they do. Similarly, the collective demands that the film-maker and the reporter deride the individual, and make him more susceptible to the theft. And so they do. In all the many ways in our world that the collective steals from us and derides our most hallowed institutions, they do so at the command of the monkey electorate and market.

But a nuclear-tipped Cold War wasn’t enough to promote fear and compliance. After all, the Soviets might collapse some day, they reasoned. Or the LeMays or Pattons or Al Grays or Rickovers that hadn’t yet been ferreted out might just be too good at their work. Accordingly, Biff and Muffy, the suited representatives of the collective, needed a replacement or two waiting in the wings.

So, after it appeared that the Cold War was firing up to full heat, the monkey collective decided on the dick move of their time. To create another festering sore of resentment, in 1948, the worldwide monkey collective relocated a band of those hapless Jew survivors into Palestine. And created both the state of Israel and a myth of a destruction of the state of Palestine, a nation which never actually existed but fills the role of victim nicely. In this example, the collective managed to instantly create victims on both sides. If you oppose Israel, you must be a holocaust denier. Conversely, if you favor Israel, you must hate Allah and property rights. No one wins but the collective that feeds on the conflict. And which requires your sacrifice to feed it.

From the point of view of the Palestinian, you can see why they would be upset. Imagine if a whole bunch of homeless people were transported into my old drywall neighborhood in Forsyth County. In so doing, perhaps I and all my neighbors and our families were deported to, say, Utah. As a reaction to this injustice, we would imagine a sort of national unity that didn’t exist at all before the deportation. Maybe we would demand a Forsythian state and refuse to admit the legitimacy of the homeless community. We might even form the Forsythian Liberation Organization. I would also be highly motivated to go back to my old neighborhood and have it out with the homeless. They, in turn, would then be motivated to form some security organizations like the Hossad. Biff and Muffy, who started this mess because they thought it would be nice to help the homeless, would be equally happy to sell both sides weapons. Or collect our votes.

On the other hand, a group of our oil-rich relatives, perhaps in Texas, might decide to cash in, too. Now, assume that our relatives in Texas practice a religion with a central tenet of hospitality to the displaced. Following their own principles, our relatives might be inclined to promote a Forsythian state in the middle of the Texas desert. And then fund our business startups[sic], at zero interest, also in keeping with their religious tenets.

But, our Texas relatives might find their individual purpose served better to keep us riled up. And recruit us to go blow up their political enemies in the name of Forsyth, even if these enemies had absolutely nothing to do with the original conflict in question.

The victims on both sides of this conflict are being sold a bill of goods. It was easy enough to con a bunch of holocaust survivors into hopping a boat to the promised land. After starving in a death camp for a few years while my former neighbors turned a blind eye, I would understandably be a little wary of moving back in next door to them. I would also probably turn a blind eye to their understandable fear of defying the then-prevalent authority. If some slick marketing came my way about moving to the Biblically-assured Promised Land I might be inclined to go along.

From an outsider’s perspective I would be a little surprised that the boat was heading southeast instead of west, though, given that America is the Promised Land for all peoples. This is supposed to be the place that producers of all stripes come to make their way in the world. Had the forces of nice wanted to really give all those Jews a home, the answer to that question was almost obvious. Buy a goodly-sized farm in Kansas, and hand those craftsmen and merchants hammers and paper. And create New Jerusalem right here in the middle of the continent. Of course you would also have had to slap some sense into their Marxist elitists, but I don’t see that as a downside.

This reasonable approach would have left the Palestinians to run the hotels to host the New Jerusalemites on their lucrative pilgrimages to the Old Jerusalem historical sites. After all, Jew, Christians and Moslems lived in relative harmony in that area for centuries prior to 1948. So, in that climate, why wouldn’t the Palestinians welcome their long-ago brothers with open arms today? But then there wouldn’t be all that discontent, now would there? Instead, we have to ask some Kansas farmer kid to go fight a string of wars for reasons for which he is woefully unprepared to even comprehend.

While the earlier post-armistice duplicity stirred up dissent on only one side, this improved model creates dissatisfaction on both sides. This new model was so effective at manufacturing deep political compliance of the victims and their allies that it was worth repeating, but with one slight tweak. The problem here is that the forces of nice are too easy to identify as the source of the conflict itself. After all, those homeless people didn’t just swim the Chattahoochie and truck us away by themselves. They had some help, and the help doesn’t like getting blamed.

Enter the peace-keeping mission.

The beauty of the peace-keeping mission as a political compliance tool is that the guilty parties can remain comfortably out of sight. Conflict is a universal constant of human existence, usually between one party which has something and another that wants it without having earned it. With this natural force at play, this mission also doesn’t require any startup costs. Once conflict sprouts, tender care and rhetorical watering can ensure that it can blossom into a full scale crisis. At that point, the forces of niceness can spring into action to oppose whatever side seems to be winning at the moment. This approach is guaranteed to win the hearts of female voters of either gender, as it provokes their boo-boo kissing nature.

Unfortunately, the fact that this approach is unreliable in identifying the oppressing party is of no consequence for the purpose of eliciting political compliance. After all, the emerging victor may actually be applying the pipe to the knee of some jerk who deserved the treatment. All that is needed is a victim to aid, ethical considerations or judgment having no impact.

And so on--You get the idea.

A fable: Historia: Mythos: Recent History of Tyranny in the United States

Part 2a, Concerning the uses of the Cold War in advancing the interests of the monkey collective.

Again we have the following from Tom Baugh’s book, “Starving the Monkeys: An Entrepreneurial Horror” (continuing from the quote in my 01/21/2010 entry):

Each side in this war had their own stable of native nuclear physicists, such as the Americans Lawrence, Serber, Seaborg, and Oppenheimer. Likewise, the Soviets had Kurchatov and numerous names we will never know, who spent much of their energy studying stolen plans from the Manhattan Project. Alone, neither the Americans not the Soviets had the political will to pursue nuclear weapons without Hitler as a threat to both. Their mutual salvation came as a result of Hitler’s own racist policies.

The practice-war Germans had enjoyed the services of men such as Fritz Haber, the son of Lebanese Jews and the father of modern chemical warfare. Haber is also famous as the inventor of the Haber process, in which ammonia is created literally from thin air. Ammonia from any source can be used as a fertilizer directly. But, more typically Haber’s ammonia is converted into and combined with nitric acid from the German Ostwald process to make ammonium nitrate, the most important agricultural fertilizer of the modern world. The chemists of the early 1900s begat the physicists of the mid-1900s. While Germany enjoyed the former in the practice war, it would deny itself the latter in the main event. From across Europe, brilliant Jews fled Hitler, the vast majority heading west to Britain and America. This flight best documented by Richard Rhodes [in his book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”].

In this scholarly book, Rhodes details the history of the atomic bomb. Unwittingly, he also demonstrates the power of individual minds to starve an enemy of its produce. As researched by Rhodes, Hungary alone traded seven players to the Manhattan Project and related endeavors. Theodor von Karman became famous for his work with fluid dynamics. George de Hevesy invented new methods in radio-biochemistry. Michael Polanyi found correlations between knowledge, science, economics, and the subconscious mind. Hmmm.

Their fellow Hungarian Leo Szilard invented many concepts surrounding the use of fission for weapons and energy. Szilard’s patents would later become absorbed by the government as they were too important to allow mere profit. Eugene Wigner developed important theories of nuclear reactions. John von Neumann contributed a mathematical insight to the propagation of shock waves both inside and outside of atomic bombs. To implement the required calculations for these theories, he is credited with a great deal of the early work in computer science. The last of these seven Hungarians, Edward Teller, is widely known, along with the Polish Jew Stanislaw Ulam, as the father of the thermonuclear bomb.

Mussolini contributed Enrico Fermi, the scientist that would oversee construction of the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago, whose wife was a Jew. Germany would contribute Hans Bethe among others too numerous to list here.

Austria effectively discovered fission in absentia in Kungalv, Sweden, when Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, both Austrian Jews fleeing the Nazis, went for a Christmas walk in 1938. During this walk, Lise interpreted the experimental results of her former German chemist partner, Otto Hahn, who missed identifying fission by the barest of margins. Had he not been stripped of Lise’s help, Otto Hahn would have given the Nazis the first key to the atomic bomb. Had Germany not been stripped of the best minds of Europe, the rest might have contributed to making a more peaceful Hitler-free Germany the world’s first nuclear power.

The most famous of all of Hitler’s refugees was of course Albert Einstein. Despite his popularity in common understanding, his sole contribution to the atomic bomb was his famous letter to President Roosevelt. In that letter Einstein urged the President to fund a nuclear program before the Germans got there first. That letter, a copy of which is on display at the Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, would be contribution enough.

The development of the atomic bomb in America was then a direct effect of the racist policies of the Nazis. This development is also the clearest historical example of how a small group of people denied their enemy the produce of their minds. Had Hitler successfully placated the Jews, he could have used their talents to conquer or pacify the world under a single government.

As it turned out, for a time America was the sole nuclear superpower. This status had been handed to it in part by Hitler’s refugees and in part by a steamer-trunk-full of nuclear secrets brought by British scientists sent to America to protect them from the Nazis. Had this hole card been played correctly, the Cold War would have never happened.

Patton, and others, advised attacking the Soviets directly, and thus forcing them back into their own borders after the war. With the nuclear hole card, the threat of such an attack would have been sufficient. Limited to their own borders, the Soviets would have been forced to survive on their own meager resources rather than having the rich resources, intellectual and physical, of Eastern Europe to plunder. So weakened, the Soviets would have collapsed within a decade. And in their collapse, they would have spawned a more peaceful and prosperous Russian to continue the progress started by Peter the Great before being interrupted by the cancer of Communism.

However, the forces of nice, the monkey collective, needs conflict to feed it. And so, this collective chose to allow the Soviets to occupy half of Europe, damning generations of innocent Europeans, and Soviet citizens themselves, to their rule. The Soviet collectives, after all, more closely resembled the progressives in power in America at that time and at all times since. Progressives who were, and remain, supported by the American electorate.

More brutal than the Germans, the Soviets would eventually murder many times more people that the Nazis, most of them their own citizens. But at least Biff and Muffy would have a worthy adversary to frighten Americans into compliance and service. To help the Soviets, and to prevent their premature collapse, the Americans would continue the wartime policy of shipping grain to the Soviet Union throughout most of the Cold War. And thus ensuring that their enemy wouldn’t starve while enslaving their population to make all those bombs and missiles. And Hitler’s Panther and Tiger became the models for the Soviet tanks of the Cold War and the American M1 Abrahms [sic] of today. And his V-1 became the Tomahawk, and his V-2 became the Apollo and the Trident and the Minuteman.

By letting the Soviet sore fester, the collective fanned it to strength so that it might form a credible threat. For decades, as strategic experts warned of this threat and continued to warn of its growing menace, the collective stayed their hand. General Curtis LeMay, the Patton of strategic air forces, developed the means to win that war, and promoted the industrial base to fulfill his vision. Hyman Rickover, the driving force of the navel nuclear program, followed suit.

But the collective would fight them each step of the way. Even so, as late as 1960 the Soviets were still far enough behind that a first strike still seemed practical, as documented in the famous book by Herman Kahn [entitled “On Thermonuclear War”].

Kahn was a renowned military strategist and theorist employed by the RAND Corporation think-tank. The first third of this scholarly book is available as a teaser on the web, and clearly describes the tradeoffs that were still available in the early 1960s. As late as then, it still was not too late to destroy the threat that faced us, although the cost would be high. But not so high as the cost we now face from radical terrorists as we implicitly arm them, having groomed them from birth for the task.

Interestingly, Kahn placed his hopes for survival and recovery from nuclear war on the individual skill and spirit of the survivors. He drew a clear distinction between the collectivists of what he called A Country and the individualists of what he called the B Country.

In Kahn’s model, A Country consists of the urbanized areas, including the suburban areas that serve the cities. Meanwhile, B Country consists of the rural areas that remain. Today, we would refer to B Country as the “flyover.”

In Kahn’s day, roughly half of the productive capacity, human and material, resided in each of these areas. Both of these halves of the nation cooperated to mutual benefit like gigantic renditions of Og and Pok [Read earlier in Tom’s book to understand the context.]. In this trade, the rural areas supplied raw materials, such as food and ore and transportation while the urban areas supplied designs and finished goods. A Country ate the food supplied by B Country and smelted steel from the ore. Conversely, B Country used the tractors and mining equipment provided by A Country. Both benefitted.

Kahn also presented evidence of a doubling of the economic output of the nation roughly every ten years. He also ominously pointed out that, in a crisis, B Country could survive without A Country. But A Country could not survive without B Country. In other words, remove designs and the ideas and the newest models of tractor, and B Country can still limp along. Remove the food, and A Country dies. Unconditionally.

Now consider that a thermonuclear war, at the worst case envisioned by experts of the time, would completely destroy A Country in the form of damaged buildings and leveled factories. But, the only real effect on B Country would be the short-term poisoning of the land by short-lived fission products. And even these effects could be mitigated by simple prophylactic measures that blocked their effects on people. The implication of all of these assertions, backed by scientific fact, was clear.

A 1960 thermonuclear war, even if considered as a worst-case surprise attack on the United States by a fully effective Soviet Union, could be survived.

If the people of A Country had been evacuated first to B Country, all of their intellectual ability would survive intact, making recovery much more simple. And the decade-doubling of the economy would restore the nation to its pre-war status within ten years.

In the meantime, the half-destroyed United States of 1960 would still have been the most powerful economy on the planet. And with most of its population intact.

I'll finish the rest of this quote in tomorrow's entry in this blog.