More Singularity Critiques
Remember what I said yesterday about the Google-Plex developing sentience? It’s not just conspiracy ranting y’know!:
In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet’s complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. “The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind,” says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. “It might already have a degree of consciousness”.
Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain’s processes get the most resources. “Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control… than a jump to a wholly different level,” Heylighen says.
How might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.
Now, you can go to the website Ignorance Is Futile right now and see how the blog owner has done quite a bit of research into the Google distributed network; from DARPA’s involvement to Sergei Brin’s stated goals.
These people want to trigger a Technological Singularity.
Is that wise?
Read and decide for yourselves.
Could the net become self-aware?
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Hear’s more on Ray Kurzweil, Transcendent Man:
* Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. Magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers. Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame , established by the US Patent Office. He has received sixteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. Ray has written five books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.
Again, H/T
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Speaking of Google, check this out:
Real-time web search – which scours only the latest updates to services like Twitter – is currently generating quite a buzz because it can provide a glimpse of what people around the world are thinking or doing at any given moment. Interest in this kind of search is so great that, according to recent leaks, Google is considering buying Twitter. (emphasis mine)
The latest research from the internet search giant, though, suggests that real-time results could be even more powerful – they may reveal the future as well as the present.
Google researchers Hyunyoung Choi and Hal Varian combined data from Google Trends on the popularity of different search terms with models used by economists to predict trends in areas such as travel and home sales. The result? Better forecasts in almost every case.
Projected sales of cars and vehicle parts, for example, can be extrapolated from the figures for the previous month and this time last year, but adding in the volume of automobile-related search queries to the model cut the error rate by 15%.
Now you can take this info for what it’s worth and decide if you think Google is going to be the tool to bring about a Singularity Event, or that it’s just conspiracy theory-woo-woo crap.
Now IMHO if a Technological Singularity is going to occur, by its very nature and definition no-one is going to be able to tell beyond the level it might attain, or predict, let alone control how it might come to pass, if it happens at all.
If one looks at the past 150 years, after the American Civil War to the present, you can see how our world came into being, with the roots in the fertile death-grounds of post-1865.
Everything we have now stems from the Civil War tragedy.
A person can look upon that as a kind of slow “Singularity.”
And I think that’s how it’s going to continue to be, whether it’s managed by human beings or not.
How your search queries can predict the future
Yes, the Hat Tip is here, LOL!
Surprised?
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Singularity Stuff
Check out this interview of the 1st Apostle of the Singularity, Ray Kurzweil, as he says the event will occur by 2040.Kurzweil Interview on VBS.TV
I think we have to get by the End of the Age Mayan Calendar change-over in 2012 first Ray.
Or is it the Rapture?
I can’t tell which, there’s so many to choose!
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Speaking of the Singularity, George Dvorsky of Sentient Developments asks the question, “when (or what for that matter) is a person a person?”
A number of Sentient Developments readers have asked what I mean when I refer to non-human persons and the personhood spectrum. It’s a fair question, and to be honest, I have yet to see a satisfying personhood taxonomy with an attendant list of traits that fully circumscribe the personhood continuum. I consider this an incredibly important issue as we move into a ‘transhuman condition’ and as we work to give non-human animals greater moral consideration. If I ever go back to school I think this will be a likely topic for a thesis.
A big question I would like to answer is, should personhood status be described as a spectrum or as a definitive, fixed state. In other words, are dolphins and bonobos as much persons as a genetically modified and cyborgized transhuman? And is such a distinction even necessary? Should persons, regardless of where they are situated in the personhood spectrum, all have the same moral and legal considerations?
More philosophically, given the space of all possible minds, how can we begin to identify the space of all possible persons within that gigantic spectrum?
I’m assuming since George is a Transhumanist, beings such as uplifted apes and dolphins, and various machine intelligences with “conscious” software should be considered “legal persons”.
This matter is not at all cut and dry.
Given the number of conservative societies we have in the world, the US and most Moslem nations being the most rightist, I foresee a problem getting such beings any kind of civil rights at all.
That will be moot if DARPA’s plan for the Google-Plex to turn hyper-intelligent pans out, then humans will be behind the curve!
But I have doubts about that happening.
What is a person?
H/T
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As a parting shot at (for?) the Singularity today, Adam Korbitz of Estimate of the Situation sez that “Mind Reading Computers are already here”:
…this year you will be able to buy for about $300 a headset that enables you to use EEG technology to control computers with thought alone.
I know, the computer isn’t reading your mind, humans are the ones doing the controlling.
But for how long?
Mind Reading Computers
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Thunderbolts on rocky, wet planets and how the Fermi Paradox is moot
Thunderbolts and rocky, wet planets:
A recent ESO (European Southern Observatory) press release announced that the “lightest exoplanet” ever discovered is orbiting a nearby red dwarf star. The planet has less than twice the mass of the Earth, and its “year” is about three days long. It is, “very likely, a rocky planet.”
Another planet in the same system orbits within the star’s “habitable zone” and “could even be covered by a large and deep ocean.”
Or not.
Let’s back away from the philosophical chasm over which these speculations are suspended and check what’s anchoring the cantilevered assumptions that support them. What astronomers observed were variations in the spectrum of the light from the star. The rocks and oceans and habitable zones extend from assumptions about how gravity organizes matter. Gravity extends from assumptions about mass. Mass, it turns out, is simply not anchored.
Astronomy is founded on a sensory bias: we see motion. With a few comparison tools—a ruler and a clock—we can measure position and distance and can directly calculate velocity and acceleration. Sight is our only “astronomical” sense. All others are “local,” terrestrial: for example, we sense force with muscles and measure it with hands-on comparison tools such as springs and balances. Hence, the physics of early astronomy—of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler—was kinematics, motion without muscle.
I’m not a physicist, so I can’t comment on the Thunderbolts post other than say that “matter is plasma” is true because plasma has been called the “fourth state” of matter because super-high temperatures required; after solid, liquid and gas.
So is matter a condition of plasma/electromagnetism?
I don’t know, but conditions like the Hutchison Effect could possibly be explained this way.
Imagine Another Wet, Rocky Planet
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Adam Crowl at Crowlspace dug up something about a paper Carl Sagan wrote in 1963 concerning advanced interstellar civilizations visiting each other in person in Bussard ramjets. Needless to say that the mainstream of the day took umbrage to it.
Unfortunately bussard ramjets turned out to be a better braking system than a constant acceleration one, but Adam adds a twist onto the idea:
A lot of arguing over interstellar travel, alien life and the Fermi Paradox has happened since then. Can we conclude anything from all the arguments? One positive thing is that interstellar travel can be achieved at relativistic speeds even if interstellar ramjets can’t be made to work. All sorts of beamed-energy designs mean that it’s an unreasonable objection to visits by aliens to claim interstellar travel is impossible. It’s not.
But could it be made even easier than we imagine? One technology that would enable easy interstellar travel – in so far as packing a closed-loop environment or a lot of frozen meals is “easy” – would be total annihilation drives. Frank Tipler’s current formulation of the Omega Point Theory requires the invention of macroscopic sphaleron generating… somethings to annihilate matter and in one version he proposes the conversion of baryons into lots of neutrinos. This would allow the drive to be operated without melting down the local topography with terawatts of gamma-rays – in otherwords it could launch from the surface of a planet, even your own backyard.
Once you’re in space what else is liable to impede one’s progress? Interstellar matter. So turn a problem into a virtue and Bussard scoop the lot into one’s mass annihilator. Thus a ravening proton-storm becomes one’s neutrino-beam to the stars. The Galaxy is yours.
Except… well there is the travel-time issue.
The time travel in this case is Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory that points out the faster an object approaches the speed of light, an observer on the object would notice that time slows down relative to the outside environment. Adam has the formulas to prove it.
As far as I’m concerned, if interstellar travel is possible in the future, so could alien civilizations have visited us in the past and possibly now.
The Fermi Paradox is over-rated.
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NWO Biowar and long range alien detection
Bio-war, or nature?
On 23 rd April 2009 the world began to become aware of a very strange new version of swine flu H1N1 in Mexico with limited cases in Texas and California. By the morning of the 24th of April, we began to hear that there were hundreds of sick and 20 or so dead. By late in the day, we have learned that over 1,000 are now reported ill and over 60 are reported dead. There are solid reasons to suspect that this new Mexican Swine Flu is NOT a naturally occurring event but instead is an Advanced Biological Warfare recombination DNA genetically engineered virus.
Here is what we know of the virus so far. This virus has already gone international having crossed the border from Mexico to America. All schools in Mexico City have been canceled, millions of students told to stay home due to Mexican Swine Flu. Sick victims of this strange new virus are currently reported in California and Texas. Over 60 deaths reported in Mexico (could be substantially higher considering the state of Mexican health care and reporting).
Young healthy adults seem to be the most at risk. This is similar to the deadest killer flu in history, Spanish Flu in 1918. Most if not all nations with advanced biological warfare programs have been interested in recreating the Spanish Flu DNA sequence and several are reported to have done so.
I just got over a bad flu bug a while ago, I certainly don’t need a killer one!
NWO test? Or is it just nature? Remember, Spring Break was just a couple of weeks ago, so college students can spread this back to their home towns, or big cities if they’re going to a large private school.
Mexican Swine Flu – An Advanced Bio-War Event
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Huh? Left, or right-handed light?
If a scientific team working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is right, we may be able to find extraterrestrial life even before it leaves its home planet—by looking for left- (or right-) handed light.
The technique the team has developed* for detecting life elsewhere in the universe will not spot aliens directly. Rather, it could allow spaceborne instruments to see a telltale sign that life may have influenced a landscape: a preponderance of molecules that have a certain “chirality,” or handedness. A right-handed molecule has the same composition as its left-handed cousin, but their chemical behavior differs. Because many substances critical to life favor a particular handedness, Thom Germer and his colleagues think chirality might reveal life’s presence at great distances, and have built a device to detect it.
“You don’t want to limit yourself to looking for specific materials like oxygen that Earth creatures use, because that makes assumptions about what life is,” says Germer, a physicist at NIST. “But amino acids, sugars, DNA—each of these substances is either right- or left-handed in every living thing.”
Okay, I get the idea. But wouldn’t that apply to ETs studying us that way also?
It also amazes me that these studies stresses the point that we have increasing proficiency in long-range tele-presence/sensor technology, just the tech that Seth Shostak and his followers push.
I’m not saying increasing our knowledge in this particular way is bad, in fact, I think it’s great.
But we should also look for ways to physically explore interstellar space, like the good folks at the Tau Zero Foundation are doing.
Alien Detection System Proposed
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History Lessons
A history lesson here:
Prof. Panarin is a former KGB analyst and a Russian professor of political science, Dean of the Ministry of the Foreign Affairs Diplomatic Academy in Moscow and author of several books on geopolitics. Thus one can hardly call him a fruitcake. Actually, he first made this prediction not after the economic meltdown that started last year but in Linz, Austria, in September 1998 in front of 400 delegates at a conference devoted to information warfare and the use of data to get an edge over a rival. Of course it was received with consternation. “When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise,” he says. Later, many delegates asked him to sign copies of the map. Its like when the French political scientist Emmanuel Todd made his famous forecast in 1976 about the collapse of the Soviet Union 15 years before it actually did and many people laughed. But Todd had the last laugh.
Prof. Panarin doesn’t say that America’s collapse is a forgone conclusion. “There’s a 55-45 percent chance right now that disintegration will occur,” he says. But if it comes it will be driven by three factors “mass immigration, economic decline and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the US will break into six pieces. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the US. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the Union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The US will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.” All we Pakistanis thus have to do is hang in there and soon America will not be meddling in our affairs any more, what to talk of General Patraeus’s adviser David Kilcullen saying that Pakistan could fall apart in five or six months.
It’s not easy to comprehend the collapse of an empire or a superpower. When termites are eating away at their vitals for years one cannot see it. People are too much in thrall of their power, wealth and panoply. Thus when the collapse comes it seems sudden, and takes people by surprise. “I went to sleep last night and when I woke up next morning the Soviet Union was gone.” The most powerful war machine ever built couldn’t save it. Remember the British Empire on which “the sun would never set”? It set so firmly that only six decades later Britain is not only bankrupt, it has become America’s appendage, a third rate power and could itself disintegrate soon with Scotland seceding. The history of the world is replete with the demise of civilizations, empires and superpowers. The graveyards of nations are full of their bones.
Prof. Panarin is a former KGB analyst and a Russian professor of political science, Dean of the Ministry of the Foreign Affairs Diplomatic Academy in Moscow and author of several books on geopolitics. Thus one can hardly call him a fruitcake. Actually, he first made this prediction not after the economic meltdown that started last year but in Linz, Austria, in September 1998 in front of 400 delegates at a conference devoted to information warfare and the use of data to get an edge over a rival. Of course it was received with consternation. “When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise,” he says. Later, many delegates asked him to sign copies of the map. Its like when the French political scientist Emmanuel Todd made his famous forecast in 1976 about the collapse of the Soviet Union 15 years before it actually did and many people laughed. But Todd had the last laugh.
Prof. Panarin doesn’t say that America’s collapse is a forgone conclusion. “There’s a 55-45 percent chance right now that disintegration will occur,” he says. But if it comes it will be driven by three factors “mass immigration, economic decline and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the US will break into six pieces. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the US. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the Union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The US will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.” All we Pakistanis thus have to do is hang in there and soon America will not be meddling in our affairs any more, what to talk of General Patraeus’s adviser David Kilcullen saying that Pakistan could fall apart in five or six months.
It’s not easy to comprehend the collapse of an empire or a superpower. When termites are eating away at their vitals for years one cannot see it. People are too much in thrall of their power, wealth and panoply. Thus when the collapse comes it seems sudden, and takes people by surprise. “I went to sleep last night and when I woke up next morning the Soviet Union was gone.” The most powerful war machine ever built couldn’t save it. Remember the British Empire on which “the sun would never set”? It set so firmly that only six decades later Britain is not only bankrupt, it has become America’s appendage, a third rate power and could itself disintegrate soon with Scotland seceding. The history of the world is replete with the demise of civilizations, empires and superpowers. The graveyards of nations are full of their bones.
Scary? It should be.
As collective denial continues to sweep across this country, the lessons of history are relearned the hard way.
A Must Read: The Crash of ’09 – The Collapse of ’10
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Here’s some contemporary history for y’all to chew on; the reasons the US is going to fall down on its own sword in support of a “political” system of a small “nation” in an area of the globe that has known nothing but war, death, disease and theft of resources for over 80 years:
AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby shop with the power to make or break politicians who don’t tow the line, have long been accused by critics of engaging in espionage in Washington on behalf of the settler-colonial state, America’s stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East.
Two AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weismann were indicted in 2005 for trafficking classified information on Iraq and Iran obtained from government officials. Lawrence Franklin, a policy analyst with a top secret classification, worked for Under Secretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith and Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and was AIPAC’s conduit.
According to FBI surveillance tapes, Franklin relayed top secret information to Rosen, then AIPAC’s policy director and Weismann, a senior Iran analyst with the lobby group. The New York Times reported in 2004 that Franklin was one of two U.S. officials that held meetings with Paris-based Iranian dissidents, including Iran-Contra figure, the arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar.
The Pentagon-endorsed meetings were apparently brokered by the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Ledeen, another key Iran-Contra figure, identified by Italian journalists Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D’Avanzano in their book Collusion, as a key facilitator of the bogus “yellow cake” dossier during the run-up to the 2003 American invasion and occupation of Iraq.
One purpose of the Paris meetings according to The Jerusalem Post was to “undermine a pending deal that the White House had been negotiating with the Iranian government,” involving the exchange of top al-Qaeda operatives in Iranian custody in return for an American promise to halt its support of the anti-Iranian cult group, Mujahideen al-Khalq, whose fighters were based in Iraq.
Interesting, isn’t it?
But if you mention anything at all concerning Israel, AIPAC and Zionism, you’re automatically an anti-semite and a gas-chamber filling Nazi.
Screw them!
AIPAC, NSA Spying and the Corruption of Congress
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Rings of the Universe
In spite of all our travails on this small, blue water world in this huge daunting Universe, nature shows us beauty everywhere:
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The rings of Jupiter, as explained by Stephen Smith of Thunderbolts.info:
Conventional theories assume that the universe is electrically neutral, so when observational evidence confirms electrically active plasma for instance, localized phenomena no matter how improbable are invoked. Tidal forces and volcanoes are presented as the cause for the activity seen on Io and the evidence for electric circuits is ignored. In the case of Jupiter’s rings, the same thing is happening. The ring charge is said to be caused by sunlight and shadow rather than by an electrically active circuit between Jupiter and the Sun.
Jupiter is connected with the Sun and the Sun is connected with the Milky Way – and the Milky Way is probably connected with the Local Group and then with the Cluster and so on and so on. That idea is what forms the basis of Electric Universe Theory that all things throughout the cosmos are composed of electrically quasi-neutral conducting plasma – extremely diffuse on the large-scale but capable of transmitting currents powerful enough to energize stars and the galaxies.
An electrical interaction between Jupiter and its moons means that they are charged bodies and are not electrically neutral. Jupiter exists in a dynamic electrical relationship to the Sun and it is now known that charged particles from the Sun and not “electric dynamos” power the planetary aurorae. Just like the aurorae, the ring system on Jupiter is probably behaving in similar fashion to what is seen on Saturn, so a similar explanation is most likely correct.
The more I read from these Electric Universe guys, the more sense they make.
But they have a tough row to hoe if they think they’re gonna usurp Hawking’s black hole theories any time soon, especially since the guy just beat the Reaper again! (No, I didn’t wish the guy dead, I have the utmost respect for someone who thumbs his nose at Death numerous times!)
But they’ll have their day soon I suspect!
Shedding Some Light On Jupiter
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Oh hell, might as well add this ring for extra measure:
The submitter states that:
“That thing went miles in a matter of seconds. Just doesn’t seem to wanna go away, what a pest.”
The post also goes on to mention that this could be a hoax.
Oh well. I thought it would be fun.
Blame my dry sense of humor.
California – Video of Rare Ring UFO
Hat Tip
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The National Security State, UFOs and The Thing We Dare Not Name
A quote from the blog, CiteLibre:
“We think we’re Luke Skywalker,” says a friend of mine, “when we’re actually Darth Vader.” America is a country with a bad conscience, nominally a republic and free society, but in reality an empire and oligarchy, vaguely aware of its own oppression, within and without. I have used the term national security state” to describe its structures of power. It is a convenient way to express the military and intelligence communities, as well as the worlds that feed upon them, such as defence contractors and other underground, nebulous entities. Its fundamental traits are secrecy, wealth, independence, power, and duplicity.
“We think we’re Luke Skywalker,” says a friend of mine, “when we’re actually Darth Vader.” America is a country with a bad conscience, nominally a republic and free society, but in reality an empire and oligarchy, vaguely aware of its own oppression, within and without. I have used the term national security state” to describe its structures of power. It is a convenient way to express the military and intelligence communities, as well as the worlds that feed upon them, such as defence contractors and other underground, nebulous entities. Its fundamental traits are secrecy, wealth, independence, power, and duplicity.
This is from a post concerning the National Security State, UFOs and conspiracy theories; why it’s so easy to maintain secrecy when most folks claim, “How can the government, inept as it is, maintain secrecy for over 60 years?”
Here’s how:
The UFO cover-up (precisely the right phrase) is one secret among many within the American national security state. Like other areas within its domain, the UFO problem has been handled secretly, with great deception, and significant resources. The secrecy stems from a pervasive and fundamental element of life in our world: that those who are at the top of the heap will always take whatever steps necessary to maintain the status quo.
1. Secrecy. Nearly everything of significance undertaken by America’s military and intelligence community in the past half-century has occurred in secrecy. The undertaking to build an atomic weapon, better known as the Manhattan Project, remains the great model for all subsequent activities. For four years not a single member of Congress even knew about it, although its final cost exceeded the then-incredible total of $2 billion. During and after the Second World War, other important projects, such as the development of biological weapons, the importation of Nazi scientists, terminal mind control experiments, nationwide interception of mail and cable transmissions of an unwitting populace, infiltration of the media and universities, secret coups, secret wars, and assassinations all took place far removed not only from the American public, but most members of Congress and a few Presidents. Indeed, several of the most powerful intelligence agencies were themselves established in secrecy, unknown by the public or Congress for many years.
2. Wealth. Since the 1940s, the U.S. Defense and Intelligence establishment has had more money at its disposal than most nations. In addition to official dollars, much of the money is undocumented. From its beginning, the CIA was engaged in a variety of off-the-record “business” activities that generated large sums of cash. The connections of the CIA with global organized crime (and thus de facto with the international narcotics trade) has been well-established and documented for many years. [6] In addition, the CIA maintained its own private airline fleet which generated a tidy sum of unvouchered funds primarily out of Asia. Finally, much of the original money to run the American intelligence community came from very wealthy and established American families, who have long maintained an interest in funding national security operations important to their interests.
3. Independence. In theory, civilian oversight exists over the U.S. national security establishment. The President is the military Commander-in-Chief. Congress has official oversight over the CIA. The FBI must answer to the Justice Department. In practice, little of this fond theory applied during the period under review. One reason has to do with the secrecy: the compartmentalization of information within military and intelligence circles. “Top Secret” clearance does not clear one for all Top Secret information. Sensitive information is available on a need to know basis. Two CIA officers in adjoining rooms at the Langley Headquarters can be involved in completely different top secret activities, each completely ignorant of the other’s doings. Such compartmentalization not only increases secrecy, but independence from the wrong (e.g. official) kinds of oversight.
Great latitude of activity is not merely the prerogative of the CIA. During the 1950s, President and five-star general Dwight Eisenhower effectively lost control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The situation deteriorated so much that during his final two years in office, Eisenhower asked repeatedly to get an audience with the head Strategic Air Command to learn what America’s nuclear retaliatory plan was. What he finally learned in 1960, his final year in office, horrified him. If a revered military hero such as Eisenhower could not control America’s nuclear arsenal, nor get a straight answer from the Pentagon, how on earth could Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, or Nixon regarding comparable matters?
4. Power. Secrecy, wealth, and independence add up to power. Through the years, the national security state has gained access to the world’s most sophisticated technology, sealed off millions of acres of land from public access or scrutiny, acquired unlimited snooping ability within U.S. borders and beyond, conducted overt or clandestine actions against other nations, and prosecuted wars without serious media scrutiny. Domestically, it maintains influence over elected officials and communities hoping for some of the billions of defence dollars.
5. Duplicity. Deception is a key element of warfare, and when winning is all that matters, the conventional morality held by ordinary people becomes an impediment.
These are excerpts from Richard M. Dolan’s book “National Security State: An Unclassified History Volume One: 1941 to 1973. “
CiteLibre: Secrecy about UFOs and Extraterrestrials show true color of an aspiring US Global Empire
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The Thing We Dare Not Name:
“The truth never suits Israel’s flag-wavers and stooges. They have to twist it or strangulate it.
When Mr. Ahmadjinedad got up to speak at the UN racism conference the British Ambassador, Peter Gooderham, was among those who walked out in the worst show of diplomatic bad manners this century. Gooderham is reported to have said that “such inflammatory rhetoric has no place whatsoever in a United Nations conference addressing the whole issue of racism and how to address it.
“As soon as President Ahmadinejad, started talking about Israel, that was the cue for us to walk out. We agreed in advance that if there was any such rhetoric there would be no tolerance for it.” Referring to the Iranian leader’s accusation of Israeli racism he added: “That is a charge we unreservedly condemn and so we had no hesitation at that point in leaving the conference hall.
“TV inquisitor Jeremy Paxman asked Gooderham the difference between Zionism and racism, to which he replied that Zionism is a political movement and racism is something else – we recognize it when we see it.
The trouble is, these characters don’t recognize it at all. Nor are they daily on the receiving end, as the Palestinians are, of Israel’s brutal racist policies. Nor were they under Israel’s genocidal blitzkrieg on Gaza that vaporized and incinerated women and children in their hundreds and blew their body-parts to kingdom-come.”
The USSR had their Gulag, South Africa had their apartheid “reservations.”
Why can’t we call this what it is for crying out loud?
No, The Zionists Have No Stranglehold
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Political Paroxyms
St. Ronnie Raygun must be having wet-dreams in his grave over this one:
US aerospace mammoth Boeing has made a bold announcement, saying that it will “transform naval warfare in the next decade” by developing powerful warship raygun turrets able to blast enemy missiles and aircraft out of the sky from afar.
The arms globocorp said yesterday that it has been awarded an initial $6.9m contract in a deal potentially worth as much as $169m, to develop a prototype Free Electron Laser (FEL) beam cannon.
Boeing say that this will provide an “ultra-precise, speed-of-light capability and unlimited magazine depth to defend ships against new, challenging threats, such as hyper-velocity cruise missiles”, and that “FELs are capable of achieving the megawatt power the Navy requires for ship defense”.
US aerospace mammoth Boeing has made a bold announcement, saying that it will “transform naval warfare in the next decade” by developing powerful warship raygun turrets able to blast enemy missiles and aircraft out of the sky from afar.
The arms globocorp said yesterday that it has been awarded an initial $6.9m contract in a deal potentially worth as much as $169m, to develop a prototype Free Electron Laser (FEL) beam cannon.
Boeing say that this will provide an “ultra-precise, speed-of-light capability and unlimited magazine depth to defend ships against new, challenging threats, such as hyper-velocity cruise missiles”, and that “FELs are capable of achieving the megawatt power the Navy requires for ship defense”.
This is part of St. Ronnie’s “Star Wars” defense plans coming to fruition after 25 some-odd years of stealing the taxpayer’s money so we can be “free.”
Hooray. 8^P
Boeing: Raygun dreadnoughts will rule ocean by 2019
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Nolocontendere of Piglipstick sez:
Looks to be a busy year for the expurgators.
Top ten:#1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
# 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
# 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
# 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
# 5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets
# 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
# 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
# 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
#10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
This is the best little political blog on the InnerTubes IMHO!
Project Censored Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009
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Paddling Against the Meme-Stream
From Thunderbolts.info:
According to conventional cosmological theories, black holes are formed when a star with a mass approximately five times that of our sun uses up its thermonuclear fuel and collapses under the force of its own gravity. Because the equations that describe gravity can be manipulated in irrational ways, some solutions imply that such a large star can contract into a zero volume containing infinite inertial mass. Astrophysicists have contended for years that black holes are real and that their effects can be observed, although they are invisible to detection.
[…]
The research team’s observations are of Doppler-shifted Fraunhofer lines in the spectrum of J0927. Due to “red-shift equals distance and speed” calculations, the “accretion disk” of matter surrounding the black hole is said to be moving at 2650 kilometers per second. The acceleration is presumed to be from the “recoil” of two black holes colliding, causing them to rebound and fly out of their parent galaxy as a single, supermassive combination of the two.
In previous Picture of the Day articles, we have taken issue with the very idea of black holes and the indirect “evidence” for them that has been presented by the scientific community. Any substance with a “multimillion-degree” temperature is not a gas but is ionized plasma. What the Max Planck scientists fail to realize is that the x-rays they are seeing is synchrotron radiation and not the incandescent glow of hot gas. The x-rays (and the gamma rays and ultraviolet light) are due to electrons spiraling along helical magnetic fields.
According to conventional cosmological theories, black holes are formed when a star with a mass approximately five times that of our sun uses up its thermonuclear fuel and collapses under the force of its own gravity. Because the equations that describe gravity can be manipulated in irrational ways, some solutions imply that such a large star can contract into a zero volume containing infinite inertial mass. Astrophysicists have contended for years that black holes are real and that their effects can be observed, although they are invisible to detection.
[…]
The research team’s observations are of Doppler-shifted Fraunhofer lines in the spectrum of J0927. Due to “red-shift equals distance and speed” calculations, the “accretion disk” of matter surrounding the black hole is said to be moving at 2650 kilometers per second. The acceleration is presumed to be from the “recoil” of two black holes colliding, causing them to rebound and fly out of their parent galaxy as a single, supermassive combination of the two.
In previous Picture of the Day articles, we have taken issue with the very idea of black holes and the indirect “evidence” for them that has been presented by the scientific community. Any substance with a “multimillion-degree” temperature is not a gas but is ionized plasma. What the Max Planck scientists fail to realize is that the x-rays they are seeing is synchrotron radiation and not the incandescent glow of hot gas. The x-rays (and the gamma rays and ultraviolet light) are due to electrons spiraling along helical magnetic fields.
The Electric Universe Theory runs counter to the accepted “gravity run” universe theories that are mainstream and I have to say their arguments are very compelling.
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*Sigh*
It looks like Shostak’s “vision” of space exploration is going to be the consensus reality here, unless people get a serious wake-up call:
Swooping in over Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars, you see lava flows and the Pangboche Crater. Opening your traveler’s guide, you find that Olympus Mons is not only the highest mountain on Mars, but the largest volcanic cone in the whole solar system. You hover briefly over the crater and then zoom in on Guzev, where the cute little Mars Explorer Rover (MER) Spirit is busily taking pictures of the very red, desert-like landscape. Yes, little Spirit is still alive!
Is this the “Red Mars” of 2061 from science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s famous Mars Trilogy? Where thousands of Earth colonists from completing political and religious groups attempt to implement their visions of utopia? Where megacorporations invest heavily in terraforming and mining, using an orbital space elevator to shuffle settlers out of low orbit to the Martian surface from a resource-depleted, overpopulated, hothouse Earth?
Well, no, not exactly. You can travel to Olympus Mons or Vallis Marineris (the Grand Canyon of Mars) today – from the comfort of your home PC or Macintosh computer using the latest free Google Earth software. Don your 3D gasses and view the latest anaglyph images of Mars recently released by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) or simply fly around where Phoenix, Beagle, and the MER rovers are exploring today.
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter continues to send astonishing photos back to Earth. Although other Mars missions have taken 3D images, HiRISE is the most powerful camera to ever orbit another planet. It resolves features as small as one meter across – roughly the scale of a person. “I am very happy!” says principal investigator Alfred McEwen of the “sharp, clear and beautiful” images it produces. Another HiRISE team member says: “If you’re not jazzed by this, you’re not alive!”
Hoo-f*cking-ray, more virtual reality navel gazing. I can’t wait.
Maybe we are living in a Bostrum Simulation.
NASA and the Post-Capitalist Vision of Kim Stanely Robinson
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Somewhere, Bob Heinlein is working for Richard Branson as head of R&D along with Burt Rutan designing moon landers for Branson’s Lunar Hotel business.
There would be none of this silliness going on.
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Uncle Seth’s “Cult of SETI”
After reading Paul Gilster’s post today on Centauri Dreams, I felt I had to blow off some steam and out of respect for Paul at the risk of getting carried away with myself, I decided to write a little piece here concerning Seth Shostak’s op-ed in the New York Times instead of commenting there. Here’s the item that got my short-hairs lit-up:
IT’S a birthright proffered by science and prophesied by “Star Trek,” “Battlestar Galactica” and a thousand other space operas: We’re destined to go to the stars. Our descendants will spread beyond this nondescript solar system and seek adventure and bumpy-headed pals in the stellar realms.
Well, cool your warp jets, Mr. Scott, because we’re not about to breach the final frontier. Piling into a starship and barreling into deep space may long remain — like perfect children or effort-free bathroom cleaners — a pipe dream.
The fastest rocket ever launched, NASA’s New Horizons probe to Pluto, roared off its pad in 2006 at 10 miles per second. That pace would be impressive in the morning commute, and it’s passably adequate for traversing the solar system, something we’ve done and will continue to do. Combustion rockets, like New Horizons, can deliver you to the Moon in a matter of days, Mars in a matter of months, and the outer planets in a matter of years. But a trip to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the Sun and 100 million times farther from us than the Moon, would consume a tedious 800 centuries or so. You’ll want to upgrade.
IT’S a birthright proffered by science and prophesied by “Star Trek,” “Battlestar Galactica” and a thousand other space operas: We’re destined to go to the stars. Our descendants will spread beyond this nondescript solar system and seek adventure and bumpy-headed pals in the stellar realms.
Well, cool your warp jets, Mr. Scott, because we’re not about to breach the final frontier. Piling into a starship and barreling into deep space may long remain — like perfect children or effort-free bathroom cleaners — a pipe dream.
The fastest rocket ever launched, NASA’s New Horizons probe to Pluto, roared off its pad in 2006 at 10 miles per second. That pace would be impressive in the morning commute, and it’s passably adequate for traversing the solar system, something we’ve done and will continue to do. Combustion rockets, like New Horizons, can deliver you to the Moon in a matter of days, Mars in a matter of months, and the outer planets in a matter of years. But a trip to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the Sun and 100 million times farther from us than the Moon, would consume a tedious 800 centuries or so. You’ll want to upgrade.
First of all, what makes this guy think that we’ll still be using chemical rockets to launch space probes by the end of the 21st Century?
Unless he’s pretty certain that research into advanced propulsion systems won’t be funded. Not very heartily anyway. He does concede that some form of nuclear rocket is needed to launch nano-sensors in order to have his ‘Google-Interstellar.’
And what of the weight of technical advances itself?
Granted, government funded enterprises like the ‘civilian’ NASA might come to an end because of no more printing press money, but certain individuals like Branson and Elon Musk will put money into research for advanced propulsion technology, simply because not everyone is tied to funny money like us slaves are.
No, Uncle Seth’s reasons for down-playing manned space exploration beyond the Solar System is economic IMHO. He may make logical arguments that sound real good to his true believing green-tech, human caused global warming, Gaia worshipping, the Google-Plex will save us crowd, but I’m not buying into it.
SETI requires funding that may soon become real scarce. And competition for the resources will be fierce.
Get the picture?
But hey, I can’t blame the guy and the others that work with him, this is a dog-eat-dog world man!
And he might actually believe his memes.
But I’m reminded of this quote by the late, great Sir Arthur C. Clarke:
If a[n elderly but] distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Sorry Seth, Sir Arthur gets my vote here.
And besides, why not Star Trek?
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Note: The term “Cult of SETI” is attributed to Stanton Friedman, nuclear physicist and UFO researcher.
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