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".. because those quacks peddling death in a pill ARE using coercion and violence. It's called "Take my pill or you are going to die. I guarantee this pill will let you live. Nothing else can save you." And that's what their sales pitches boil down to."

Are you talking about the conventional practicioners or the alternative ones?

"The Triumph of New-Age Medicine"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-triumph-of-new-age-medicine/8554/
"Medicine has long decried acupuncture, homeopathy, and the like as dangerous nonsense that preys on the gullible. Again and again, carefully controlled studies have shown alternative medicine to work no better than a placebo. But now many doctors admit that alternative medicine often seems to do a better job of making patients well, and at a much lower cost, than mainstream care -- and they're trying to learn from it. ... The list of much-hyped and in some cases heavily prescribed drugs that have failed to do much to combat complex diseases, while presenting a real risk of horrific side effects, is a long one, including Avastin for cancer (blood clots, heart failure, and bowel perforation), Avandia for diabetes (heart attacks), and torcetrapib for heart disease (death). In many cases, the drugs used to treat the most-serious cancers add mere months to patients' lives, often at significant cost to quality of life. ... "

And quoting Marcia Angell:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. [Marcia Angell]"

Vitamin D, periodic fasting, and eating a lot more vegetables, fruits, and beans can help prevent cancer, but it is harder to deal with cancer in those ways when you already have it (though they can sometimes still help). See Dr. Joel Fuhrman and Dr. John Cannell for more information with references.

But it also seems like, as above, some (not all) mainstream practices for cancer really are pointless (but profitable).

My mother died of colon cancer (as part of her situation where she also had dementia). A surgeon pushed us into doing an operation for her cancer that I really regret as the testing, hospitalization and recovery process put her through a lot of trauma and did her no real good. A good thing to do with my anger, both at that surgeon and at myself for being persuaded by him, is to tell others how to have a good chance of preventing cancer, and a very much smaller chance at treating it with good nutrition, vitamin D, and sometimes fasting. I even just twittered something on that @ Hugo Chavez (with links to those references for Fuhrman and Cannell):
    http://twitter.com/#!/pdfernhout/status/95159429871321090

Cancer is a horrible disease, and anger about it is common. Like Mr. Fred Rogers might say, all feelings are legitimate, it's what we do with them that matters. I hope you can find something positive and constructive to do with your anger about cancer and those who take advantage of people suffering from it, whoever those people are.

"Hopefully though, they're NOTHING LIKE US (or rather, the bogus side of us that is), & can teach us a thing or two about how to co-exist with others like ourselves, in peaceful cooperation, instead of wars & such! I think the "real answers" for us, as humanity, won't come from us here, or they would have by now!"

Considering much of industrialized US-centered humanity has been busy wiping out extra-terrestrial ocean-based alien intelligences like octopods and whales, and terrestrial ones like trumpeting elephants, and Islamic-banking-interest-free Muslims, I have to wonder if we in the USA could learn any lesson from any "alien"?

One answer is to laugh. :-) See my essay on intrinsic/mutual security: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Villages full of laughing children is a fundamanetal truth of humanity that we ignore at our own peril... It's too bad we use compulsory schooling and/or napalm to destroy them so often.

http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "

"Naturally someone will respond that this is a different fight and how dare I compare freedom of information to the civil rights movement etc."

I got slapped down a decade ago for comparing issues related to copyright to slavery, but I still feel it is a problem that is becoming related to slavery, as a system of control and now justification for imprisonment (copyright infringement used to be mostly only a civil, not a criminal, offense a couple decades ago).
"License management tools: good, bad, or ugly?"
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.misc.discuss/browse_thread/thread/df4b4363d544f766/1e499c6db59117a2?hl=en#1e499c6db59117a2

A deep issue that no one seems to be talking about is that ultimately, how can you "prove" you have legal access to any digital pattern at all, or "prove" that you do not have patterns you should not -- without a complete review of every financial and informational transaction you have ever made? Like to see if you gave the original away and so forth? How can you prove you have a right to read some book you purchased and format shifted to digital media? And so on. This is a big issue when there are reward-offered "tip lines" for people to rat on their employers or coworkers. Ultimately, the only way copyright can be enforced in the age to come, where you can store the library of congress on your cell phone in twenty years plus all the music ever recorded, is to have an unbelievably intrusive police state...

Is an all pervasive police state what we want in the USA in order to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" which is the constitutional intent of copyright? Or is a police state likely to shut down a lot of creativity in a society?

A decade ago I suggested that in the same way people in the 1960s would have laughed at the idea of a million people in prison in the USA for non-violent drug offenses, which is what we have now, so too we may see the same with copyright soon enough, unless our ideology changes. Hard to believe it was possible then, but we still seem to be going that way. Where do we want to be in ten more years?

A related satire I sent to the US DOJ years ago when they asked for comments:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html

Lawrence Lessig made a similar point in his book "Code" in the first chapter, "Code Is Law".

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

Spam is ironic too in this way, with some few destroying email in order to make some small (relative to global scale) profit on it, and meanwhile making it harder to use email to bring abundance to everyone.

There needs to be a general term for this. Selfishness disease? Or is is better to just call it a "Racket"?
    http://warisaracket.org/racket.html

The biggest crime is not even in the theft -- it is in forcing everyone to spend a lot of time worrying about theft,.

We could build much more secure systems, especially based on free and open systems like GNU/Linux, and we had the opportunity, but the US Congress made it hard twenty years ago to build good encryption into everything and bad standards stuck, and now with effectively infinite copyrights and overly broad patents, cooperation has been made harder to make good systems for everyone. Richard Stallman's points on freedom are making more and more sense every day.
    http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society-2/

So we see another arms race sucking up so much time and energy and the lives of smart people to produce what? Meanwhile the singularity (if it is to happen) draws nearer every day.

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

Sorry to keep sounding like a broken record.

Here is a hypothetical parody remix of the Hitler "Downfall" scene:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/32e8fc32c89c96bd

Dialog of alternatively a military officer and Hitler:
"It looks like there are now local digital fabrication facilities here,
here, and here."
"But we still have the rockets we need to take them out?"
"The rockets have all been used to launch seed automated machine shops for
self-replicating space habitats for more living space in space."
"What about the nuclear bombs?"
"All turned into battery-style nuclear power plants for island cities in the
oceans."
"What about the tanks?"
"The diesel engines have been remade to run biodiesel and are powering the
internet hubs supplying technical education to the rest of the world."
"I can't believe this. What about the weaponized plagues?"
"The gene engineers turned them into antidotes for most major diseases like
malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and river blindness."
"Well, send in the Daleks."
"The Daleks have been re-outfitted to terraform Mars. There all gone with
the rockets."
"Well, use the 3D printers to print out some more grenades."
"We tried that, but they only are printing toys, food, clothes, shelters,
solar panels, and more 3D printers, for some reason."
"But what about the Samsung automated machine guns?"
"They were all reprogrammed into automated bird watching platforms. The guns
were taken out and melted down into parts for agricultural robots."
"I just can't believe this. We've developed the most amazing technology the
world has ever known in order to create artificial scarcity so we could rule
the world through managing scarcity. Where is the scarcity?"
"Gone, Mein Fuhrer, all gone. All the technologies we developed for weapons
to enforce scarcity have all been used to make abundance."
"How can we rule without scarcity? Where did it all go so wrong? ...
Everyone with an engineering degree leave the room ... now!"
[Cue long tirade on the general incompetence of enginee

Thanks for mentioning James P. Hogan. I like his books (including the one you mentioned). I met him once in person and corresponded a bit with him (I was sad to hear about his death a while back). I especially like his "Voyage from Yesteryear" novel, which really gets at the heart of scarcity vs. abundance world views, linked to our view of the universe and thoughts on the availability of energy and matter. This Brown Dwarf issue is related -- that there may be a lot more matter out there in the "void" of space than we may often assume.

I mention Hogan's book you referenec here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html
"Should we not think or talk about the socioeconomics of a world of cheap energy in advance of it being discovered? But, would that not be discussing the "paranormal" in a way, or even encouraging it? Anyway, one may rightly point out that mainstream economist have deluded themselves for decades, as was said in the NYTimes article. I'd agree. But, why should that be entirely less true about supposedly "rational" mainstream physical scientists in some specific other ways, like denigrating Halton Arp's Electric Universe model (mentioned on the supressedscience site)? Or ignoring the possibility of cold fusion? Or dismissing the possibility that the mind could sometimes interface with deeper not-well-understood-conventionally aspects of a simulated universe? I'm not saying any of these are true, just that it's hard for them to get a fair hearing. Where do we draw the line? James P. Hogan wrote a non-fiction book about this: ..."

By the way, GE's head of research is predicting solar PV energy will be cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear by around 2015 (without subsidies and, of course, without considering the negative externalities of pollution, disease, war, and risk that come from fossil fuels and conventional nuclear). Yet, how much of US politics is still centered around whether to drill for more oil, or build more conventional nuclear plants, or whether to destroy ground water through "fracking" for natural gas, or whether to spend trillions for a military to defend middle east oil supplies?

Another point James P. Hogan made, and your comments reflect, is that there is a big difference between science and engineering, even as they are interwoven. And so often "science" takes the credit for what "engineering" does.

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land? "

Maybe ironic humor is our last, best hope against the war machines?

Thanks for the feedback. Here is a link to the text as a pdf file:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

More details are on my site:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/

Thanks for the feedback. Here is a link to the text as a pdf file:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

More details are on my site:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/

"They hated us for our way of life"

Well, technically, even though people tend to say:
      "They hated us because we were free",
the truth seems to be closer to:
      "They hated us because we supported their oppressors",
so, ironically, just the reverse of what many people try suggest about what has been going on.

If by "way of life" you meant "democracy at home, imperialism abroad", then, yes, I guess there would be a lot of truth to that.

According to a long ago New Yorker article, almost all the hijackers were Saudi males who were disenchanted with the Saudi regime the USA helps keep in power (to keep oil profits flowing to the right people).

Related:
    "Bush Admits 'Majority' of 9/11 Hijackers Were Saudis"
    http://www.pensitoreview.com/2008/01/16/bush-admits-majority-of-911-hijackers-were-saudis/
"The breakdown was 15 Saudis, one Egyptian, one Lebanese and two from the Union of Arab Emirates (UAE).
None were from Iraq. Despite this fact -- and the fact that Saddam Hussein was a secular despot who was despised by Osama bin Laden, a right-wing religious fanatic -- a poll two years after the attacks, and six months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 70 percent of Americans believed Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks."

See also:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Center_for_Democracy_and_Human_Rights_in_Saudi_Arabia
"The Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia (CDHR) is a (501)(c)3 non-profit organization established to promote timely and irreversible transformation of the existing Saudi autocratic institutions to a system whereby all Saudi citizens are empowered to chart a peaceful, prosperous, tolerant and safe future for themselves and for their religiously and economically influential country. CDHR was founded by Dr. Ali Alyami, executive director, in May 2004.[1] [2]"

I'm not saying the hijackers were for democracy; I'm just saying they were unhappy about their prospects in that society. You can ask how people like that get radicalized, and an oppressive environment (one the USA helped sustain) contributes to that.

See also:
    "Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire"
    http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Second-Consequences-American-Empire/dp/0805075593

And:
    "War is a Racket" by by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient, Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, Retired
    http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

I agree what is going on in airports is degrading security theater. Here is how we can create real security:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). "

Thanks for the kind words. Here is a PDF file with the presentation on "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft".
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

I hope you can build further on those ideas in your own way, like I built on the ideas of many others. I have a long (but still incomplete) list of inspirations (as well as more text related to that presentation) on my site here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/
"The following is informed by insights from people like Marshall Brain, James Albus, Martin Ford, Jane Jacobs, Charles Fourier, Richard Wolff, Richard Stallman, Albert Einstein, Morton Deutsch, Alfie Kohn, John Holt, Joan Roeloffs, John Taylor Gatto, Steven Slaby, Ursula K. Le Guin, James P. Hogan, Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Tyagi, Ivan Illich, Michael Mahoney, Freeman Dyson, Ted Taylor, Douglas Lisle, David Goodstein, Michel Bauwens, Eric Hunting, Kevin Carson, P.M. Lawrence, Iain Banks, Harvey Cox, G. William Domhoff, E.F. Schumacher, Jacque Fresco, Stewart Brand, Buckminster Fuller, Dee Hock, Michael Phillips, Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins, John Todd, Nancy Jack Todd, Manuel De Landa, Kenneth Rogoff, Carmen Reinhart, Gerard K. O'Neill, Frances Moore Lappe, David Brin, K. Eric Drexler, Hans Moravec, Victor Serebriakoff, Noam Chomsky, Herbert Simon, Robert Steele, Julian Simon, Larry Slobodkin, Patrick Grim, Philip Zimbardo, Slavoj Zizek, Dan Pink, Alan Kay, George A. Miller, Lev R. Ginzburg, Norman Spinrad, Gene Roddenberry, Alvin Toffler, James R. Beniger, James T. Liu, Alain Kornhauser, Jennifer Morgan, Juliet B. Schor, Marshall Sahlins, Suniya S. Luthar, as well as all the authors of the 1964 Triple Revolution Memorandum, and many, many others. If I can see so far, it is from "standing on the shoulders of giants", none of whom should be blamed for any errors in the following that are solely my own."

I just found some new interesting reading, including by economist Brad DeLong, by googling on: "slouching towards post-scarcity".

Thanks for the kind words. Here is a PDF file with the presentation on "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft".
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

I hope you can build further on those ideas in your own way, like I built on the ideas of many others. I have a long (but still incomplete) list of inspirations (as well as more text related to that presentation) on my site here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/
"The following is informed by insights from people like Marshall Brain, James Albus, Martin Ford, Jane Jacobs, Charles Fourier, Richard Wolff, Richard Stallman, Albert Einstein, Morton Deutsch, Alfie Kohn, John Holt, Joan Roeloffs, John Taylor Gatto, Steven Slaby, Ursula K. Le Guin, James P. Hogan, Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Tyagi, Ivan Illich, Michael Mahoney, Freeman Dyson, Ted Taylor, Douglas Lisle, David Goodstein, Michel Bauwens, Eric Hunting, Kevin Carson, P.M. Lawrence, Iain Banks, Harvey Cox, G. William Domhoff, E.F. Schumacher, Jacque Fresco, Stewart Brand, Buckminster Fuller, Dee Hock, Michael Phillips, Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins, John Todd, Nancy Jack Todd, Manuel De Landa, Kenneth Rogoff, Carmen Reinhart, Gerard K. O'Neill, Frances Moore Lappe, David Brin, K. Eric Drexler, Hans Moravec, Victor Serebriakoff, Noam Chomsky, Herbert Simon, Robert Steele, Julian Simon, Larry Slobodkin, Patrick Grim, Philip Zimbardo, Slavoj Zizek, Dan Pink, Alan Kay, George A. Miller, Lev R. Ginzburg, Norman Spinrad, Gene Roddenberry, Alvin Toffler, James R. Beniger, James T. Liu, Alain Kornhauser, Jennifer Morgan, Juliet B. Schor, Marshall Sahlins, Suniya S. Luthar, as well as all the authors of the 1964 Triple Revolution Memorandum, and many, many others. If I can see so far, it is from "standing on the shoulders of giants", none of whom should be blamed for any errors in the following that are solely my own."

I just found some new interesting reading, including by economist Brad DeLong, by googling on: "slouching towards post-scarcity".

Thanks, quite an interesting rant, even if I only half-understand it so far. :-)

Your first point on assuming fidelity in surveillance reflects a major plot point in Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".

As for middle part, I can only strain my limited brain cells to think maybe in other words, perhaps what you said boils down to "people who live in fun house palaces made of glass mirrors should not throw stones because they have no idea what they would really be aiming at"?

Or "analysis paralysis"?

Unless of course the point was to bring down all the mirrors? Still, obviously, mirrors are useful for lots of things.

As to the last point, it would seem yes, that seems likely. People have trouble designing systems to deal with issues that would change the designers if they understood them, such as I mention here:
    "The Lion Memo (with apologies to C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters)"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-lion-memo.html
"Regarding your recent inquiries, it is true we have not yet been able to determine why the Butterfly can be so successful using so few resources, since the means the Butterfly employs are incomprehensible to us. While easy to watch and catalog, the Butterfly's means are completely unexpected in the effects they cause and this continues to puzzle us greatly. Those who champion non-violence by definition must be weaker than those who champion violence. By all Deep Magic, the means employed by the Butterfly should never work! But nonetheless, the Research & Destruction department continues to explore this conundrum, and I do hope one day we will understand the processes by which the Butterfly operates sufficiently to lead to the Butterfly's universal defeat. It is possible that the symbol on the Butterfly's wings you reported may have something to do with its unexpected success; if this so called "Peace" symbol can be properly analyzed, the labs may be able to determine a way to destroy "Peace" entirely or at least turn it to our ends (although my mind recoils at that thought so deeply I know that to be impossible). The latest report from the labs is that the Butterfly's unexpected success has something to do with "playing to play" as opposed to "playing to win" -- but we all know that is obviously nonsense, since the only reason to play must be to win! And regardless of what you may have heard through the rumor mill, we have not yet lost a single soul through exposure to Butterfly inspired writings, because there is no power in the pen, only in the sword -- but stay away from such writings nonetheless -- is that clear? Our best minds think they could be contaminated with some sort of toxin. We have started analyzing them word by word, with each word handled by a different lab group, and lab groups never meeting, in order to reduce potential exposure to any potential toxic residue or chain reaction effects. And to answer your implied question, the high turnover in the R&D center before we instituted such procedures has been purely due to an unexpectedly high rate of promotions among the junior staff."

In any case, succinctness is a rare thing for me, except for my perennial sig, so thanks for noticing. :-)

http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously. :-)
        And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends. :-)
        And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves. :-)"
        Let's hope those advantages all hold true for a long time. :-) "

Quoting Marcia Angell:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."

For example:
http://www.news-medical.net/news/20110701/Bone-fusion-drug-comes-under-scrutiny-due-to-researcherse28099-vested-interests.aspx
"The Spine Journal has dedicated its June issue to a series of papers that carefully reject previous research supporting the use of Infuse, a controversial, but popular bone growth product commonly used in spinal fusion surgeries.
    Infuse is used in a quarter of the estimated 432,000 spinal fusions performed in the U.S. each year. In a new study in The Spine Journal experts assert that the data backing Infuse's widespread use were published by researchers who received large sums of money from its maker, Medtronic, and who exaggerated the product's benefits while concealing its risks. Fifteen of the surgeons got at least $62 million from the company over the past decade, the paper said, citing an analysis of Medtronic documents and disclosures on the company's website.
    The purported side effects, they said, include male sterility, infection, bone loss and unwanted bone growth. A stronger version of Infuse, called Amplify, was recently rejected for approval by the FDA because of concerns about possible cancer risks"

If you eat well, and you take the right amount of vitamin D (typically, from a pill), and you do some other good things, then your risk of most cancers drops way, way down. And you also reduce your risk of diabetes, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and dementia. What is not to like?

From what I read, it seems a lot of the cancer treatments you can get at an onocologist don't really statistically promote survival all that much (although some are indeed better than others). The problem is, once you have cancer, stuff like vitamin D and vegetables is not going to work so well. So, you really want to prevent cancer as much as possible. If there was a drug that a doctor, based on research, could say take this drug every day and your risk of all cancers on average goes down by, say, 50% or more, what would you pay for it? Well, take your vitamin D and eat well (lots of vegetables as Dr. Fuhrman suggests) and that is what you will probably find (maybe not that exact percent, and it depends on the cancer). And at no extra charge, you will reverse heart disease and get other good benefits.

Instead, people seek for the magic bullets and kids grow up eating junk. Very sad. But we've built a sick care system where the profit is in palliation not prevention, in treatment but not cure. We need to build a true health care system someday that promotes wellness.

From:
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART03076/A-Health-Care-Call-to-Action-by-Andrew-Weil-MD.html
"We currently have an expensive system that is not making people well. While there has been tremendous debate over access and payment, there has been less focus on the content of health care. Without a change in that content, we will never have a sustainable system; all attempts at reform will be taken down by unmanageable costs."

http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html

There I outline a case for why, in an industrialized information age 21st century society, rich people should support systematic wealth distribution (like a "basic income") as in their own best interests.

Also applies to commecialism: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and "commercial productive"] agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

We can do better than allowing patents about gift giving.

Still, there is historic precendentfor this, sadly:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch
"A potlatch is a gift-giving festival and primary economic system practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. ... At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of wealth. ... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to "civilized" values."

See also, by a Native American:
    http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."

Here is a PDF file with a presentation I put together on "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft".
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

Here is a 12 minute YouTube video of that presentation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

We can do better than this...

Also applies to commecialism: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and "commercial productive"] agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

We can do better than allowing patents about gift giving.

Still, there is historic precendentfor this, sadly:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch
"A potlatch is a gift-giving festival and primary economic system practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. ... At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of wealth. ... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to "civilized" values."

See also, by a Native American:
    http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."

Here is a PDF file with a presentation I put together on "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft".
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

Here is a 12 minute YouTube video of that presentation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

We can do better than this...

And conveniently I just made a 12 minute YouTube video with some answers (or at least good questions) about that, talking about a balance between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and technological change:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

A PDF file of the presentation is here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

More related stuff:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
    http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
  http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

Still, in general, you raise good questions. Ones that are ultimately political, even as many mainstream economists might imply they are just technical issues...

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.

(I know, I'm like a broken record on this -- for those who remember broken scratched records...)

"We need to get out of these countries. It costs too much!"

I agree, but the problem is, in general, the people paying the costs are not the same people getting the benefits from the wars...
    http://warisaracket.org/
    http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

We won't move beyond war until we acknowledge modern warfare (like with drones) is mostly ironic.
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

We need to move beyond irony in our global defense community: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). "

There are other ways to deal with universal surveillance. I mention some here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends. :-) "

http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not. "

See also:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Guarantee
"A basic income guarantee (or basic income) is a proposed system[1] of social security, that regularly provides each citizen with a sum of money. In contrast to income redistribution between nations themselves, the phrase basic income defines payments to individuals rather than households[2], groups, or nations, in order to provide for individual basic human needs. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it. The U.S. Basic Income Network[3] emphasizes this absence of means testing in its precise definition, "The Basic Income Guarantee is an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs.""

What good is education as far as economic advancement when the robots and AIs and voluntary social networks are going to do most of the jobs inthe future?
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/

http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society ... Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "

http://thewaronkids.com/

Compulsory school already is essentially a day prison, or, as this superintendent points out, in some ways worse.

Homschooling is becoming an option for more and more... But ultimately, we need a change like giving the funds directly to parents instead of the schools so the free market can supply the educational services (or the family), as I outline here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

Or a more general basic income...
    http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html

See also:
    http://the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
        http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness):
        http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there. :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( "

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ...
    There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

From there:

There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...

The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.

We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety")
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

There are lots of alternatives I helped organize here for helping transcend an economy based around militarism and artificial scarcity:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

===

Anyway, so expanding "the war on the different" and the "war on the unexpected" is just more of the same...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_the.html
"We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats."

Of course, that link is from one person on the list in the article about people publishing things being asked to be censored... Even if just "self-censored". In the end, most censorship only works by creating a climate of self-censorship.

From Noam Chomsky on "What makes the mainstream media mainstream":
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
"The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it's generally true of

http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"From an article about a sociologist and anthropologist who studies science and technology, Bruno Latour:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour
        "In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy." "

and all that implies about their technological capacity to use cheap computing to create endless new resources, than what are they worried about fight over? Naturally, I could, and have, said much the same about the USA:
  http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
    There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

and all that implies about their technological capacity to use cheap computing to create endless new resources, than what are they worried about fight over? Naturally, I could, and have, said much the same about the USA:
  http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
    There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

AC wrote: "Exactly, the best excuse to refuse to honor treasuries while saving face is warfare and the Chinese know it. That's why they are investing in supersonic cruise missiles, generation 5 fighters, submarines, uavs, and anti-satelite warfare. If push comes to shove, they will need to neutralize our GPS, artillery, & air superiority. This is also why the US is working on SCRAM-jets & rail guns. You can bet we've spent most of the past 10 years surveying the ocean floor in the region so we can cut the fiber backbone & have an advantage with sonar. There will be nuclear subs parked off the coasts of both countries ready to launch a nuclear bombardment if the other side flinches. Glad I don't live in DC."

The concern about honoring treasuries is a non-issue, since as long as they are denominated in dollars the USA can just print the money. Still, "war is a racket", so you may well be right in the end, AC, but if so, it is too bad both the Chinese and the US Americans are both caught up in a deep irony. As I talk about here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
  Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
    Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere? ..."

More evidence:
    http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."

Of course, science has become so corrupt in many ways, it has done itself in...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"Here are some related broad quotes on social problems in science, some of which relate to competition for funding. "

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? "

Around 1987 I simulated cannibalistic robot by accident on a Symbolics 3600 in ZetaLisp+Flavors. It was perhaps one of the first simulations of self-replicating robots in a 2D sea of spare parts. The parts were something like a computer, a welder, a gripper, a battery, a radar, and another rock-like item. The first robot was programmed to collect parts to attach to itself to duplicate itself as two similar halves as a sort of repair process back towards and ideal, and then cut itself in two, and then each separate piece was supposed to go off and do the same. But I did not think it through all the way, and the first thing the original robot did as the copy started up was to start to cut the copy in two to reuse the parts because they were the closest available that were not in itself. So, the robot was both cannibalistic and killing its own offspring.

It goes to show how easy it is to make a mistake designing artificial life. I had to add a sense of "smell" to prevent that from happening, where the robots would set a smell on each item they used and would leave similar smelling items (in offspring) alone.

I gave a talk about the simulation around 1988 at a workshop on AI and Simulation at CHI+GI in Minnesota, and talked about how easy it was to make robots that were destructive and how much harder it would be to make them cooperative. Afterwards someone from the Army working with DARPA literally patted me on the back and told me to keep up the good work. And that was one reason I stopped working on it. :-)

And since then we have sadly seen the rise or an ironic use of military robots when robotics could otherwise bring us abundance (like President Obama authorizing a drone strike within days of taking office that allegedly lead to the deaths of three Pakistani children).
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece

But, to the army officer's credit back then, I don't know if he was more interested in the destructive or constructive aspects of what I had to say. And in truth, both construction and destruction are both related in this plane of existence. And we all need some security, the issue is how we go about getting it. An essay I wrote on that:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

I do believe robots will learn cooperation. The issue is more if humanity will be wiped out first and then later any robots (if they too survive) might be regretful, or whether we will co-evolve together somehow. As long as much of our R&D is mostly driven by short-term profit maximization and the push to privatize profits and to socialize risks and costs, I don't know...

I tend to agree the money could be better allocated, as could the time of many of the students. I wrote a related essay about Pricneton University a couple years ago, and most of it could probably also apply to MIT:
    "Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease "
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once? :-) "

That said, MIT has done a lot of amazing stuff, and I'm glad for the free software that has come out of there, as well as ideas like FabLabs fostered by the Center for Bits and Atoms. Some really great stuff does go on at MIT -- it's an issue of cost-effectiveness and institutional outlook and a law of diminishing returns weighed against the value of centralization through the MIT brand. It's hard to invest money well; MIT is a "safe" choice in that sense, even if there might be lots of better options out there. In general though, the whole idea of college is more and more problematical these days. See my comments with further links here:
    "[p2p-research] Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
   

http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
"Upon publication of Disciplined Minds, the American Institute of Physics fired author Jeff Schmidt. He had been on the editorial staff of Physics Today magazine for 19 years. ...
    Who are you going to be? That is the question.
    In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict âoeideological discipline.â
    The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professionalâ(TM)s lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
    Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue oneâ(TM)s own social vision in todayâ(TM)s corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Also by a physicist:
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

More links collected by me:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
  http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States. ..."

But, see also on money as a bad motivator for creative work:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Some deeper issues:
    http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

My own saga: :-)
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States. ..."

But, see also on money as a bad motivator for creative work:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Some deeper issues:
    http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

My own saga: :-)
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

Yes, Bravo from me as well. I now see the light. :-)

BTW, something else satirical on this theme (by me):
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
"My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law. ..."

Your sig: "Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure."

Rewritten for the topic: :-) "Robotic warfare may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea, elevated blood pressure, or massive casualties of all sorts."

See also my essay:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? "

I read somewhere, around the 1980s, probably by Amory Lovins, that if we spent a year or so of the cost of maintaining the US Persian Gulf deployment force on insulating US homes and other energy efficiency improvements, that we would not need any imported oil. Related:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
    http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en

All this robotic warfare is just ironic, as are, ultimately, all arms races that lead to the destruction of all parties (except maybe the robots). See also:
    http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Minosian
"The Minosians were a thriving, technologically-advanced humanoid civilization from the planet Minos. The Minosians gained notoriety as arms merchants during the Erselrope Wars, providing advanced weaponry such as the Echo Papa 607 which were sold under the banner "Peace through superior firepower." It was discovered in 2364 that the Minosians were subsequently eradicated by their own weapon system when it went out of control. One of the few Minosian artifacts surviving, the Echo Papa 607 system was responsible for the destruction of the USS Drake and attempted to destroy the USS Enterprise-D. (TNG: "The Arsenal of Freedom") "

Thus:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

"January 23, 2009 -- President Obama 'orders Pakistan drone attacks'"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece
"Security officials said the strikes, which saw up to five missiles slam into houses in separate villages, killed seven "foreigners" - a term that usually means al-Qaeda - but locals also said that three children lost their lives. "

See also, my comments:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=254000146591&topic=16411

That is a copy of this site that seems to have gone offline recently:
http://www.suppressedscience.net/

Suppressed? :-) At the very least by marketplace forces? :-(

See also:
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090308132014/http://suppressedscience.net/physics.html
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090309114648/http://suppressedscience.net/

Stuff I wrote building on those ideas:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html

http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html

Essentially, Google needs to decide whether it wants to be a post-scarcity institution or an artificial-scarcity-based institution. One approach has a long term future, although it is challenging to surf that wave moving from scarcity to abundance... Google is doing a pretty good job of it in a lot of ways intuitively, but maybe they need to reflect on that issue more deeply?

See also, for related ideas about Princeton University:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html

Essentially, Google needs to decide whether it wants to be a post-scarcity institution or an artificial-scarcity-based institution. One approach has a long term future, although it is challenging to surf that wave moving from scarcity to abundance... Google is doing a pretty good job of it in a lot of ways intuitively, but maybe they need to reflect on that issue more deeply?

See also, for related ideas about Princeton University:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

Having been around people who did financial engineering in grad school and work, and thought and read about it some afterwards (IBM Research), here is what I have learned:
* Much paper money now is in the casino economy:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxo_XPdpI_s
* Much of "financial engineering" goes into a financial arms race in that casino, where the net result is essentially just stasis.
* Much financial engineering is based on picking up "nickels in front of steam rollers" (Warren Buffet, and others, have used that phrase) where, as you imply, you get regular returns investing other people's money, with some small chance of catastrophe, and when the catastrophe (black swan) happens, you don't have to give back years of salary and bonuses (at worst the company, not you as an employee/partner, goes bankrupt).
* There are several types of economic transactions in our society, of which exchange is only one:
1. Subsistence gathering from the environment and home production
2. Pollution (dumping back to the environment)
3. Gifts to friends and the community (including volunteerism online)
4. Planning at multiple levels (home, neighborhood, government, UN)
5. Exchange by roughly equal partners
6. Theft or some other form of parasitism
The balance between those shifts based on cultural change and technological change.
* It's been said (Mark Twain?) the hardest thing to do is to get someone to see something that goes against his or her financial interests.

Of course, being the kind of person who thinks about such things, it did not bode well for a PhD in Operations Research at Princeton 20+ years ago. :-)
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

See also my own comments here on putting together knowledge about self-replicating infrastructre:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Others:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main

You might like this guy's writing starting from a charcoal furnance to make a machine shop from scrap:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery