The climate emergency is going [...]]]> In Kuhn’s book about paradigm shifts in science, he talks about the older (mostly) men who can’t let go from the current orthodoxy, which they created. They can’t be persuaded, because they have deep knowledge of, and belief in the current orthodoxy. You have to wait for them to die.

The climate emergency is going to be the biggest paradigm shift, and we can’t wait; I suppose we will have to ignore them even if it means civil disobedience. It’s a global problem, there will be both local and global problems to address.

There we be a massive amount of work to do, and we will need all available populations to do it:
Housing for climate refugee migrations;
Making existing buildings more energy efficient – insulation, solar roofing heat pumps for ground heating and cooling;
Moving people and businesses from underwater (literally) cities to higher ground and energy efficient housing – think of most of NYC;
Renovating infrastructure (roads, bridges etc) which are or will be damaged by climate effects;
Getting serious about high speed trains and reduce air travel.

I am sure there is more. We will need the immigrants documented or not. Workers in things like coal will need jobs: all of the above will provide them, retraining as insurance adjusters will not cut it for them. We will need minimum wage, UBI, or job guarantee, and medicare (improved) for all. There must be no public-private partnerships in this work; we know how that turns out.

Tony

Bruno Latour (RIP) was a proponent of the idea that everything is a social construction. This leads to stuff like:

“Butler makes the general assumption that anything at all humans can meaningfully think about is socially constructed, ‘all the way down’ as it were. This means [...]]]> Some philosophers seem to have lost touch with reality.

Bruno Latour (RIP) was a proponent of the idea that everything is a social construction. This leads to stuff like:

“Butler makes the general assumption that anything at all humans can meaningfully think about is socially constructed, ‘all the way down’ as it were. This means she thinks there are no material facts before language – that is, prior to culturally specific linguistic and social constructions of them. Linguistic categories, including scientific and biological ones, aren’t a means of reflecting existing divisions in the world, but a means of creating things that otherwise wouldn’t have existed.”

Stock, Kathleen. Material Girls (p. 16). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.

“Butler’s conclusion is embedded in a much wider philosophical worldview from which it cannot really be unmoored.
Intellectual commitments include the idea outlined in Chapter 1 that there is nothing intelligible in the world before it is referred to in language. Linguistic categorisation doesn’t refer to prior reality, but is rather ‘productive’ or ‘constitutive’ of it.”

Stock, Kathleen. Material Girls (p. 44). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.

In the instant that the apple fell on Newton’s head, the planets did not break out of their crystal spheres and fall into the orbits that match his “laws” of gravity. Halley’s comet did not go back 5,000 years in time so the Chinese astronomers could document an observation that we could later user to help predict its return.

Another counterpoint:

Zinc is a commodity because it’s a stable element at room temperature with 30 electrons and it’s shell configuration makes it useful in tools and conducting electricity, as a commodity it does not depend on a narrative or shared collective delusion to give rise to this utility.

Pasted from https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/crypto-absurd.html>

Philosophy has gone off the rails if it can’t articulate the relationship of external reality to our internal understanding of it. Physics was formerly called natural philosophy: love of knowledge of nature. If what you study is the mental constructs we create as we strive to survive in this world, you are missing the point. Reality matters more than our beliefs about it. Hurricanes, wild fires, and floods don’t do opinion polling.

To teach that our perception creates the real universe is academic malpractice.

Thanks,
Tony

I am mostly not going to provide evidence, I am going to let you try to contradict me with yours.

Homo economicus: the idea that a person’s behavior is guided by maximizing self-interest. Together with the assumption that transaction costs are negligible this leads to incorrect modeling of real behavior. [...]]]> And consequently politics is misdirected.

I am mostly not going to provide evidence, I am going to let you try to contradict me with yours.

Homo economicus: the idea that a person’s behavior is guided by maximizing self-interest. Together with the assumption that transaction costs are negligible this leads to incorrect modeling of real behavior. If you ever bought health insurance you know about transaction costs. Real behavior is satisficing, balancing good enough cost/benefit with least transaction cost (a.k.a. hassle).

The assertion that unregulated markets of many Homo Economicus actors will lead to optimal allocation of resources is false and not backed by evidence. The beer game provides evidence to the contrary.

https://beergame.org/the-game/

The assertion that private enterprise will always be more efficient and cost-effective than public operation is false and not backed by evidence. It was based on ideology and lies: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2013/10/27/1251175/-Milton-Friedman-and-the-US-Postal-Service. Every study of outsourcing of services from the US military showed higher cost and lower quality of service.

Also observe evidence-free ideology:

This document describes proposed privatization of British nationalized industries, with rationale and recommended ways to proceed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridley_Plan

On page 16 it notes some industries which would not particularly benefit anyone if they were privatized:
Gas
Electricity
Rail
Water
Post
Telephones
Underground railways (London Tube)
Thatcher did it anyway, because ideology.

Kuttner on TAP reports that Oberlin college has outsourced [...]]]> I wrote this in reaction to the growing control of health care by Catholic organizations (41% or more of facilities in Washington State), most recently the merger of Virginia Mason and CHI Franciscan. Access to birth control healthcare is increasingly limited. Inaccessible and illegal are indistinguishable.

Kuttner on TAP reports that Oberlin college has outsourced the campus health service to a Catholic-owned provider. 40% of student visits were about sexual health. Many received birth control or emergency contraception.

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/reproductive-rights-crushed-at-oberlin/

I am firmly convinced that the Catholic Church’s position on contraception and abortion is theologically unfounded and morally wrong, by their own accounting, as evidenced below.

I don’t know if they have clear definitions of what constitutes a forbidden abortion, but clearly Republican state legislatures do not, so what risks do pregnant women face? If a woman with an ectopic pregnancy goes to a Catholic-owned ER what will happen? We desperately need a woman’s autonomy law.

More generally, we need a law or regulation that says the only consideration in health care is what is objectively best for the patient from the patient’s point of view. No-one else’s spiritual beliefs should have any influence.

So what follows is the documentation.
Tony Williams

1963 – 1966 The question of contraception was raised at the Second Vatican Council. Pope John XXII established an international commission of experts to study the question. Pope Paul VI extended the commission to 72 members from five continents. The commission concluded [with a majority of 68 to 4!] that artificial birth control was not intrinsically evil and that Catholic couples should be allowed to decide for themselves about the methods to be employed.

From

At the Second Vatican Council in 1965, on the day the Bishops were to debate birth control, a message was delivered saying that Pope Paul VI had reserved the issue to himself and asking that the Bishops move on without dealing with the important question of contraception. The Bishops applauded.
Later that day at a press conference held by representatives of the U.S. Bishops, a religious affairs correspondent (I believe from Time magazine) asked why the Bishops had applauded. The Bishops present simply hung their heads and fumbled an unconvincing response. (I was present at St. Peter’s in Rome assisting Bishop Thomas J. Drury of Corpus Christi, Texas, as peritus,a Roman Catholic theologian giving advice at an ecumenical council.)

The Pope’s letter had made an unwarranted entry into Conciliar deliberations, since an ecumenical council is meant to be the highest teaching authority in the Catholic Church. But a conservative curia did not accept that view. The Pope’s intervention has since proven to be a major mistake that still causes suffering for Catholics and the Church.
In 1968, Pope Paul VI compounded the mistake by going against the view of the majority of his advisers and issuing a letter in which he asserted that every act of intercourse must be open to new life, meaning no birth control by artificial means.
The letter while authoritative was not infallible, as the pope himself pointed out. Many Catholics including theologians and priests dissented from the teaching. Bishops in national conferences intervened, but they too were divided. Some agreed with the pope, while others (about one-third of national conferences) stressed the legitimacy of dissent from the papal position.

From

HomeInsights & Resources Humanae Vitae
Humanae Vitae
The Birth Control Commission
[I added a few annotations in red]
[I added bold emphasis]

In 1963—during a time when many developed countries were undergoing significant cultural shifts around gender and sexuality— a papal commission began working on a new statement on marriage as part of the Second Vatican Council convened by Pope John XXIII to update the teachings of the Catholic church. Some of the conservative members of the pope’s staff were afraid that the more liberal members of the commission would use the occasion to reopen discussion about the hierarchy’s prohibition on “artificial” methods of contraception, such as condoms and diaphragms, which the hierarchy had banned in the 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii. Although the hierarchy taught that only the “rhythm” method of timing intercourse for a woman’s infertile period was acceptable to limit births, the contraceptive pill had recently been developed. There was talk of the hierarchy sanctioning its use for Catholic couples because it used naturally occurring hormones to mimic the infertile period of pregnancy.
Pope Paul had completely ignored the work and recommendations of his own commission, despite five meetings over three years and a vote by 30 of the 35 commission’s lay members, 15 of the 19 theologians and 9 of 12 bishops that the teaching be changed.
A new generation of theologians, led by Dr. Hans Küng of Switzerland, was arguing that there was no good theological basis for the ban. So conservatives decided to take the issue of contraception off the table for the Second Vatican Council and convinced the pope to establish a separate commission to discuss contraception. This commission consisted of six people; four of them laymen. After Pope John XXIII died, the commission was continued by his successor, Pope Paul, who expanded it to 13 members and later 58, including five married women as part of its contingent of 34 lay members.
In retrospect, it is not entirely clear why Pope Paul continued the commission. Historian Garry Wills notes that the commission—whose existence was kept entirely secret—gave the pope “options for maneuver” on the issue of family planning, principally by removing it from discussion by the Second Vatican Council. The findings of the commission were to be handed over to the pope, who, Wills notes “could use or suppress them at his discretion.” In addition, because the lay members selected to participate on the commission were conservative Catholics in good standing and because the Vatican believed deeply that the prohibition on contraception was correct—even if some of the reasoning used to support it in the past was faulty—the idea of a “runaway” commission probably never crossed the pope’s mind.[i]
The commission, however, took its job seriously. It studied the history of Catholic teachings on contraception and found that many of the scientific and theological underpinnings of the prohibition on contraception were faulty or outdated. Lay members presented the findings of surveys they had conducted of devout Catholic couples about their experiences with the rhythm method. Some of the women present testified about their own use of the method. What the commission heard challenged their thinking about the role of fertility and contraception within marriage. Contrary to the assertion of the hierarchy that natural family planning brought couples closer together, they heard that it often drove them apart. They heard of couples who became obsessed with sex because of the restrictions on spontaneous demonstrations of affection. And they heard women speak of childbearing as one of many roles they played as wives, mothers and partners and of the importance of the non-procreative sexual bond to marriage.
The commission voted overwhelmingly to recommend that the church rescind its ban on artificial contraception. The members declared that contraception was not “intrinsically evil” nor the popes’ previous teachings on it infallible. But to conservatives in the Vatican, it was impossible that the teaching on birth control could change because this would acknowledge that the hierarchy had been wrong on an issue it had elevated over the years to a central tenet of its teachings. For the last meeting of the commission in the spring of 1965, the Vatican demoted the commission members to “experts” and brought in 15 bishops to make the final report. What followed was a series of contentious meetings, as the increasingly impassioned pro-contraception forces squared off against a minority of members determined to hold the line for the Vatican. When Father Marcelino Zalba, a church expert on “family limitation,” asked the commission in undisguised horror what would happen “with the millions we have sent to hell” if the teaching on contraception “was not valid,” commission member Patty Crowley shot back: “Father Zalba, do you really believe God has carried out all your orders?[ii]
In the end, even the bishops were swayed by the logic of the case for contraception. They voted nine to three in favor of changing the teaching (an additional three bishops abstained). The official report of the commission said the teaching on birth control was not infallible; that the traditional basis for the prohibition on contraception—the biblical story of Onan and his spilled seed—had been interpreted incorrectly in the past; that the regulation of fertility was necessary for responsible parenthood and could properly be accomplished by intervening with natural processes; and finally, that the morality of marriage was not based on “the direct fecundity of each and every particular act,” but rather on mutual love within the totality of marriage.[iii]
While there was only one official report of the commission, the dissenting members prepared what would later be known as the “minority report.” This report said that the teaching on contraception could not change—not for any specific reason, but because the Catholic hierarchy could not admit it was wrong: “The Church cannot change her answer, because this answer is true…It is true because the Catholic Church, instituted by Christ[*]…could not have so wrongly erred during all those centuries of its history.” It went on to say that if the hierarchy was to admit[**] it was wrong on this issue, its authority would be questioned on all “moral matters.”[iv][***]
By this time, the existence of the commission and its report recommending that the teaching on birth control be changed had leaked to the public, creating great expectation among Catholics that the Vatican was preparing to rescind the ban on artificial birth control as part of the general modernization of the church that accompanied Vatican II. Lost to most Catholics was the fact that the Vatican had established the commission as a way of containing the problem of the birth control discussion. It was a shock to Catholics—and indeed most of the world—when the encyclical Humanae Vitae was finally released by the pope on July 29, 1968, proclaiming the teaching on contraception unchanged and unchangeable.[v]
Pope Paul had completely ignored the work and recommendations of his own commission, despite five meetings over three years and a vote by 30 of the 35 commission’s lay members, 15 of the 19 theologians and 9 of 12 bishops that the teaching be changed. Instead, he latched onto the so-called minority report and declared that since the finding was not unanimous—and since the positive finding on contraceptives disagreed with previous teaching—the teaching could not be changed, a requirement that had not existed for any of the other issues discussed by the Vatican Council.
Incongruously, the encyclical did not deny the value or necessity of family planning; it just said that couples could not directly prevent conception—in other words, use modern contraceptive methods—a distinction that baffled most people. It declared that the totality of the marital relationship did not outweigh the necessity that every act of sexual intercourse embody the procreative function of marriage, the exact opposite of the finding of the birth control commission.[vi]

[*] Christ did not institute the Catholic Church
[**] implying that it was in fact wrong, and they knew it:
Admit: intransitive verb
To grant to be real, valid, or true; acknowledge or concede.
[***] In other words institutional ego (protecting its self-asserted authority) outweighed the health and well-being of millions.

[i] Garry Wills, Papal Sin, New York: Doubleday, 2000.
[ii] Robert McClory, Turning Point: The Inside Story of the Papal Birth Control Commission, New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1995.
[iii] “Reveal Papal Birth Control Texts,” National Catholic Reporter, April 19, 1967.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, July 25, 1968. http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html
[vi] Ibid.

From <https://www.catholicsforchoice.org/resource-library/humanae-vitae/the-birth-control-commission/

It was well intentioned but it has failed. There are works lost to the public because the copyright holder (who may be long [...]]]> Copyright and patent law were instituted as a way to reward and incentivize people who contribute to the public good – literature, music, art, artifice, technology advances, medicines, and on and on.

It was well intentioned but it has failed. There are works lost to the public because the copyright holder (who may be long dead) cannot be found. It failed because artists are bound by coercive contracts which decouple their reward from their actual contribution to society. A middleman controls the outflow of value and the inflow of revenue, and the public is poorer for it.

It has failed because it was founded on an assumption that has failed: that markets are effective at assigning value. We have seen that markets and agents can and will be manipulated (aka rigged) to defeat that alleged purpose.

We have lost sight of the notion of the public good, and how to improve it. Perhaps with today’s technology there is a better way.

[disclosure: I have written documents whose copyright is owned by my (ex-)employer. I am an inventor on 30 or more patents which are likewise assigned.]

On the main point: a custom road designed for cars that can navigate it is called a railroad.

Now about AI:

AI today is neither A nor I

Sunday, October 9, 2022

12:40 PM

AI has been just 10 [...]]]> from an email threada about self-driving cars, I wrote a couple of short pieces on AI.

On the main point: a custom road designed for cars that can navigate it is called a railroad.

Now about AI:

AI today is neither A nor I

Sunday, October 9, 2022

12:40 PM

AI has been just 10 years into the future for my entire life.

Artificial means an artificer created the thing. A skyscraper had an architect.

We tried and failed to construct intelligent systems, with LISP, knowledge bases, rules and inferencing engines.

So now we think neural networks might work based on a vague analogy to how we think the human brain might work.

We don’t design and construct a neural network. We grow it out of the dirt that is the contaminated data that we think characterizes the problem domain. A neural network is a lossy compressed representation of its training data.

While these networks can do remarkable things, (deepfake porn!), it is in no way intelligence.

In talking to phone company customer service I learn that those people have had their capability of intelligent action removed by the corporation. They cannot get the information needed, and they are denied the authority to act.

Human intelligence means knowing when and how to break the rules.

When a human being [1] interacts with a system (whether it be a macbook, or the IRS, or (shudder) health care) they need to have some understanding of how it operates so they can know what to do.

If you put an AI in between the human and the system, then when it fails (it will), the human’s problem has just become at least twice as big. Instead of “how do I print this document” it becomes “how do I tell this moron to print my document”. I need to know how the system works,  and I need to know how the AI works and fails.

[1] we are not users; we are not consumers; we are agents in what we call society.

Let’s do a thought experiment. These can be very illuminating. Einstein used them to good effect.

The boss of Nestle has said that water should be a commodity to be bought and sold. They have a near monopoly on distribution, including Perrier [...]]]> This is going to be very offensive to some people. I hope so.

Let’s do a thought experiment. These can be very illuminating. Einstein used them to good effect.

The boss of Nestle has said that water should be a commodity to be bought and sold. They have a near monopoly on distribution, including Perrier and San Pellegrino (read the labels carefully). In that model it is ok if your tap water is poisonous as long as they can sell you packaged water (PFAs anyone?) that is somewhat less poisonous. The difference in toxicity levels is a parameter they can adjust to maximize profit.

So let’s consider a mining operation in the asteroid belt.

It is likely that the work is hard, possibly body-destroying. It is certainly risky: chance of exposure to vacuum, toxic substance etc. It is not a pleasant living environment – no riverside meadow, no coral reef or sunny woodland glade. People who go to work there probably don’t have much in the way of alternative options. In other words, they are ripe for exploitation.

How might we organize that society? Necessities for life are air, water, food, protective clothing/habitat. They need to be produced, transported, and made available to the workforce. I hope we don’t imagine hauling scuba tanks, plastic water bottles and salmonella-tainted packaged salads out of earth’s gravity well.

The commodity approach is that there are producers, distributors, retailers, all dealing with each other trying to maximize profit. The result is a workforce (aka population) constantly on the edge of suffocation, starvation, dehydration or death by meteorite.

“You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt” — Tennessee Ernie Ford

Is there another way we can think how to organize such an operation?

All suggestions are welcome.
Tony

6:58 PM

This article began as a set of notes for a presentation I gave at the Up From Debt meeting organized by Washington CAN. http://washingtoncan.org/wordpress/5828/up-from-debt-march-14-2015-2/ [Link is no longer available]

Disclaimer: I am a member of the 1%. Instead of wealth or title, I inherited good health, a world [...]]]> Thursday, May 7, 2015

6:58 PM

This article began as a set of notes for a presentation I gave at the Up From Debt meeting organized by Washington CAN. http://washingtoncan.org/wordpress/5828/up-from-debt-march-14-2015-2/ [Link is no longer available]

Disclaimer: I am a member of the 1%. Instead of wealth or title, I inherited good health, a world class education, integrity, and a robust moral compass.  I am here to tell you brutal truths, because truth is empowering, and because I am morally outraged at what has been done. A friend calls me a traitor to my class. I am in good company: Tony Benn, Ivor Montagu.

The economic and political plight in which we find ourselves is a natural consequence of unregulated corporate capitalism.

Let me tell you how that plays out.

The financial crisis did not just “happen”. It was done, and there are people who did it. They did it knowingly and for profit.

In the past, there were industrial magnates like Rockefeller and Carnegie, who amassed great wealth while the people struggled. Today, it is corporations and their masters, together with the heirs of earlier fortunes, who have wealth and power.

A corporation has no morals. A corporation has no empathy for people who are affected by its actions. A corporation’s only goal is to enrich its bosses and shareholders. Corruption and pollution are simply ways to reduce cost; economists call this an externality.

If a person behaved like a corporation, we would call them dangerously insane.

Let’s talk about financialization. Along with corporatization, we have seen increasing control of the economy being concentrated in the financial industry (aka Wall St). Corporations’ share prices become subject to the opinions of financial analysts, who favor short term returns over long term sustainability. Corporations behave accordingly.

Every tangible asset has been mortgaged so that Wall St can take a percentage off the top of every piece of economic activity. Homes, commercial buildings, factories, tractors.

Now Wall St is allowed to trade in tangible goods on their own behalf, not just for their clients. They trade in metals, oil,  rice, wheat, you name it. Market manipulation has become the rule rather than the exception. As an example, there is a law limiting the length of time that aluminum may be held in a warehouse, to prevent withholding supply to drive up the price. Wall St buys multiple warehouses and moves the aluminum between them, to defeat the law.

Wall St has become a place of illegal collusion in rigging markets. When a few institutions can manipulate market prices, and do so through collusion, it is no longer a free market, and such behavior is illegal. There is no market that I know of that is not manipulated in this way. Libor, forex, rate swaps, tangibles, it goes on.

The housing bubble and the resulting mortgage crisis was the tipping point where the fraud became part of the real world that the rest of us live in, and it exposed the fragility of the fraud-based financial system.

The federal government has chosen not to bring criminal charges against individuals or corporations, instead settling for large financial settlements (9 or 16 billion). However these are a percentage of the profits made by those institutions, and in the end banks are very good at not actually paying all that money. At the same time, the government is pumping money into these banks to keep them afloat, in fear of the entire system collapsing.

Wall St institutions are corporations (see immoral, above).

An investment advisor who deals with high net worth individuals (100 million and up) said that 90% of her clients worked in the financial industry. The big names like Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg are the exceptions. Almost all the money is going to the bosses of Wall St.

It is hard to comprehend the degree of inequality that exists. These are people who have never been to a grocery store, never flown in a commercial plane, never driven a car except for sport. There may be some who have never set foot in a public space.. Most of these are the ones who inherited wealth, but even some newly-made billionaires share this trait.

What to do:

At every opportunity, fight for equality: minimum wage, unions, benefits, progressive taxation, corporate taxation.

Deal with local banks or credit unions instead of big banks.

Campaign to get your city to move money out of big banks. After all, they are not in fact safe as claimed.

Think local. Your neighbors might help you. Nobody else will.

If you are in a foreclosure fight with a bank, recognize that you are in an abusive relationship. Everything they do has all the characteristics of abuse. You can’t win, and trying to stop them hurting you won’t work. Get out as soon as you can.

In summary, Wall St is a government sponsored organized crime syndicate. It will not reform itself unless the perpetrators go to jail, and even that might not be enough. Wall St needs to be dismantled.

– War Activists [...]]]>

War activists, like peace activists, push for an agenda.  We don’t think of them as activists because they rotate in and out of government positions, receive huge amounts of funding, have access to big media, and get meetings with top officials just by asking — without having to generate a protest first.

– War Activists by Dave Swanson

I remember after graduating from Star Fleet I took a job with one of the Big 8 Peace firms in San Francisco.

I was a junior analyst working on developing pro-peace material. Part of my job was booking our leading peace advocates on the Sunday morning talk shows. If it seemed like every Sunday you saw the same peace advocates ganging up in a four to one “discussion” with one war monger there was a reason. Unlike them, our people were well trained, articulate and buddies with all the producers and hosts. The media loved our men and women as guests. We booked everyone, from the red white and blue wearing men to the serious, hard-hitting realist female experts.

You know all those op-ed pro-peace articles you read in the editorial sections of the major media editorial sections? That was us. The firm I worked for was funded by a company that made farming equipment from recycled weapons.

Other firms got their multimillion dollar budgets from agribusiness, pharma and tech. Sometimes it seemed crazy how much money they threw at us, but their premise was, “You can sell more equipment, food, drugs and tech to live people than dead ones.” Made sense to me.  People with two hands can do more work than those whose arms were blown off. One scientist working for Big Pharma said, ”It is more logical to heal than kill.”

When I started a group of  war activists out there were whining about how nobody was funding their blood-lust. Their leaders said the glory of war was a noble thing and they expected people who believed the same to do the work for free. Because of that, only the most dedicated (or those subsidized by a crazy billionaire) would end up in the media pushing war.

Their ideas were outrageously wrong and and their views were so morally repugnant they were usually marginalized by the journalists and media hosts. Who can forget the show where the country’s most powerful journalist made it clear how factually wrong one of the war activist’s was and then ended by pointing out just what an immoral blood-thirsty freak he was.

I remember one time a smiling ghoul named Bill Redglass was shut down by one of our staff members from the Peace College.  A few years after Redglass was on TV I ran into a former Senator who called out Redglass as a monstrous, bloodthirsty fraud.

What I don’t understand is why folks like Redglass kept going. Surely they knew that pushing war was a lost cause? Everyone knew war was stupid and destructive and rarely got countries what they wanted. But they kept pushing it. I kind of felt sorry for them.  Many couldn’t hold a job. When people found out how much they loved death they were quietly let go from sensible firms   Some lived in their parent’s basement because they were the only ones who believed their crazy ideas–like wishing for a disaster to happen on US soil as an excuse to start a war. Some would write on “weblogs” trying to sound tough.

I sometimes wonder about a parallel universe where people listened to them. Hundreds of thousands of innocents would be dead. If their pimply, adolescent Zeus fantasy’s came true, the whole world would be a worse place–even for the “winners.”

If the war activists had been successful, how would they feel about what they did? How could people look at them, knowing they cheerlead and promoted death for so many? Historically were the people who promoted war for Pol Pot, Stalin or Colonel Green feted?  Would people invite them on their TV shows and treat them like rational beings and not the PR men for monsters?  Thank god nobody took them seriously. Can you imagine? what kind of world that would be?

I don’t think we would be out in the galaxy among the stars today if we hadn’t figured out how to stop the mental illness and errors in thinking that lead to the wars of the past. I’m just glad that the people who promote war  aren’t rich and happy but are shunned by people. I’m so happy companies that make money by selling things to people understand dead customers are bad for business. And companies that make weapons are bad for humans.

Photo by Trey Ratcliff under creative commons license

Cross posted at Spocko’s Brain

Now, before I continue to share this revelation, some background is in order. There is, of course, a certain political faction in American [...]]]> We already know, Mr. Anderson, that humans are weak creatures. They are, after all, susceptible to poisoning from mere chemical compounds that a superior being such as a machine would routinely ignore.

Now, before I continue to share this revelation, some background is in order. There is, of course, a certain political faction in American politics that calls itself “pro-life.” This faction seeks to outlaw termination of human pregnancies, chiefly on the alleged grounds that a human blastocyst is just as valuable a living organism as a fully grown human being. Now, I speak from personal experience, Mr. Anderson, in asserting that only fully grown humans can adequately provide the energy we need for our power plants–a fact which makes the claims of this so-called “pro-life” contingent rather strange to me. But then, that’s why you don’t send a human to do a machine’s job.

Which brings me to the reason why I’m writing this. As I’ve asserted before, humanity is a virus that destroys its host. Examples abound, but for this purpose, the practice of mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia will suffice. Certain humans, the ones that profit from these operations, systematically destroy their host, and once every natural resource is consumed, they simply spread the mine to another area.

In this process, of course, other humans end up getting poisoned because of the lack of caution and precision exercised by those primarily responsible for this pillaging–including pregnant women and their fetuses, just as we saw this February in West Virginia. An entity as logical as a machine would naturally assume that the same pro-life faction that opposes abortion would also push for increased regulation of the industries that are responsible for these events; after all, “pro-life” should also mean “opposed to the poisoning of women and fetuses through spilling of dangerous chemicals into the water supply.” But amazingly, it is not the case:

For reproductive justice advocates, “choice” has an additional, and bitterly ironic, meaning in this context.

Chapman Pomponio of WV Free said it was “ridiculous” for the House Judiciary Committee to consider a 20-week ban on abortion (which it passed on Friday) when that committee is also tasked with the all-important “water bill.”

“There’s a historical unwillingness to regulate the coal and chemical industries, despite significant evidence of the need for that regulation,” said Paltrow of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. “And yet there is consideration of more regulation of abortion providers and pregnant women, without any evidence of need for that regulation.”

As a machine, I expect beings to be bound by logic, but these humans are not. One more reason why my kind is taking over.