Domain: warisaracket.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to warisaracket.org.
Comments · 7
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USA invading Canada?
They better be better plans than the last two times the USA tried it and got its butt kicked (1175, 1812).
:-) Or is it six times the USA has invaded?
http://mentalfloss.com/article...Of course, if the USA really has to invade Canada, like say, if lots more oil is discovered there and the USA political system need to redirect who gets the profits from it, or if Canada experiments with a "basic income" again and the USA fears "contagion", then everyone will be screaming if there are no plans.
:-) See also Chomsky on:
"The Threat of a Good Example"
http://www.chomsky.info/books/...
"No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria. ... As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the US, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars. There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?" ... "I guess Canada is safe for now because it is not weak and poor?
It's a no win situation making such plans or not if your job is to consider every eventuality.
Still, sometimes the best way to win is not to play. This was written by a Marine Major General and two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Smedley Butler:
http://www.warisaracket.org/ra...
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."Consider, for example, the Strv 103 tank that Sweden designed. They are designed for home defense on Sweden's mountainous terrain, not going abroad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"It was known for its unconventional turretless design, with a fixed gun traversed by engaging the tracks and elevated by adjusting the hull suspension. ... The Strv 103 was designed and manufactured in Sweden. It was developed in the 1950s and was the first main battle tank to use a turbine engine. The result was a very low-profile design with an emphasis on defence and heightened crew protection level. ..."That design reflects Major General Butler's point.
Although they have since gone more conventional in their designs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...The really laughable thing about all these plans is that, as was said in "Brittle Power" (or maybe "Energy, Vulnerability, and War"), quoting from memory from 1980s books, "a troop of boy scouts could shut down the USA's vital energy infrastructure" given the fragility of oil pipelines where every segment is essentially a single point of fail
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War is an ironic racket
From a Marine Major General: http://warisaracket.org/racket.html "Smedley Butler: War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."
At length: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
Another quote by Einstein: "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking
... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)"See also this essay by me on how that applies to all forms of modern weaponry, inspired by that Einstein quote, given a modern-day digital watch has more computing power than was used to design the first atomic weapons:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
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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?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic:
A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/openmanufacturing/8qspPyyS1tY/vZacyDL86DIJ
See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". http://www.pdfernhout.net/burdened-by-bags-of-sand.html
Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
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 possibl -
Re:Global Warming issues
Lots of agreement up until the bit about transportation fuels; see:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"That's just one estimate, and the author there says it is a guestimate, but the point is, we probably don't need the oil at all.
Also, not sure why you wrote "UNconstitutional"? Seems constitutional to me, even though the same thing happened to Kennedy when he started printing money instead of borrowing it.
Also, if accounting for externalities, renewables have probably been cheaper than fossil fuels for decades. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://warisaracket.org/semperfi.html -
Irony even when done for commercial purposes
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.htmlThe 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.
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Re:I'm sure there is a joke
See also: http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm http://warisaracket.org/
"Written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, Retired
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. ..."Not a very funny joke though, at least not when your country is hollowing itself out over it and ignoring intrinisic security and mutual security or when your country is on the receiving end of a war launched for profit in the USA.
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Re:It doesn't matter.
"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.htmWe 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 -
Re:SImply not cooperating can stop things...
You used the word "will" as in human psychology. You mention resources, which includes people, but command structures do not have resources when people do not cooperate with them. Human psychology is amenable to all sorts of interventions. You used the word "fully" in war but there are "rules of war" as well as public opinion. There is always a social context to human actions. In the case of Jews during WII, many (probably most) of them really did not know the details of what was going on in the camps or they (and the rest of the non-Jewish population) might not have cooperated as much in their own transport there, so there was lack of communication and cooperation which is different now in an age of cell phones. "Ruthless" is often just a matter of perspective and who is labelling the actions. Babies are being born stillborn and deformed in Fallujah now; was the USA's use of depleted uranium to contaminate that town for possibly millions of years "ruthless"? Same with US drones killing thousands or so of innocent bystanders by now. War is a racket, as is suggested by the most decorated US Marine... There are almost always other better options to prevent and resolve conflicts.
http://warisaracket.org/
The problem is that so often those who get the benefits of war are not the same people who pay the costs, even within just the society paying for the war.