Should we reach out to the stars?

When we meet a civilization from another planet, it will almost certainly be much more advanced than ours just because ours is so new. The question here is will they treat us the way we treat less advanced and weaker civilizations? If so, we should beware. But how likely is that? 

Our European-grown global civilization, descended from the great Roman slave empire, has a quite extraordinary record of discovering new (to us) civilizations around the globe and conquering, plundering and consuming or destroying them. There have been voices denouncing this practice for a long time, voices of the victims and of radical critics from Padre Las Casas to Mark Twain, but It's only in the past century that any serious effort has been made by governments to restrain or reform our predatory practices. So it's only natural that we imagine this is what others would do to us. 

There have been many science fiction stories and films, starting with HG Wells' classic War of the Worlds, where aliens discover and trying to conquer or destroy us. One awesome recent science fiction film, Avatar, turned the story on its head and told of the plundering of a distant planet inhabited by intelligent beings - by us! But ultimately all these stories are not about alien life, about which we know nothing. They are about ourselves. Only a few, like ET, Close Encounters and Carl Sagan's Contact, depict aliens as benign. 

So how likely is it, really, that an alien civilization would be dangerous to us? I think it's unlikely. 

Any civilization that reaches our level of development must either bring its predatory phase to a close or destroy itself. That is the moment we are in. They will have survived and gone beyond it. 

Second, the distances are so impossible in terms of a human life-span that the only thing we really have that they could want is our story. 

The huge benefit of contact to us would be hope, hope that we too could survive our predatory phase, that humanity could have a future. 

Pain-killers are not the problem. It's our attitude toward Pain!

I commend Maura Healey for her promise of action in support of heroin recovery programs. I hope she continues to work with all the great people coming together to deal with addiction issues. But we as a people have to come to terms with a deeper issue: our attitude toward pain. 

I was just released from UMass Med. The care I received, from physicians, nurses, PCA's was wonderful. Its weaknesses were those not just those of American medicine but of America, and one of those was their attitude toward pain. 

As they poked, stuck and prodded, cleaned and swabbed and asked me to put a number on my pain, almost every time I flinched or grunted or reported a pain they treated it as a problem. I was told 1000 times how sorry they were something hurt, asked 100 times if I wanted something for pain - with the attitude of course I would. 

No, I didn't. No I don't. I was reporting to them as clearly and promptly as I could what was hurting, because they needed to know. 

Pain is not a terrible thing to be avoided at all costs. Pain is first of all information being sent from somewhere in your body to your brain that something needs attention. Or from one part of your brain to another. Knowing when and how to override our body's reaction to pain is something we must learn as we grow older. Yes there are times when we need to make our pain shut up. But generally it's something to pay close attention to, and if you figure out and deal with what it is saying, it usually fades to background. 

When I left, my physicians insisted I take another prescription for Oxycodone, even though I told them I'd only used one pill from the last batch. (I was sorry I did!) 

With that attitude toward pain no wonder there are so many addicts. Heroin, coke, speed, pain pills, alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, love, even 12-step programs, the list of addictions is endless. Human beings need to fully commit to something larger than ourselves, such as family, neighbors, community, even humanity. 

The more we do, the less our pain matters.

In response to "Broken young lives hard to fix" By Clive McFarlane TELEGRAM & GAZETTE, http://www.telegram.com/article/20141024/COLUMN44/310249916:

So the police are focusing on the problem youth, 105 of them, at the heart of a "subculture of young people living outside the rules and constraints of this city's civil community." 

They got that way because of "...early and prolonged exposure to violence, abuse, neglect, living in poverty and with family members involved in criminal activities, and with racism." 

Commenters point to lack of fathers, but what about lack of jobs? 

Chief Gemme's response is probably appropriate, what else can the Worcester PD do? But this is the tip of a much bigger problem: thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of young people who have never had and have no hope of ever having what my generation would consider a "good job". Many grew up fatherless because their birth father couldn't find or hold a good job either. 

By a "good job" I mean a "bread-winner" job which you can raise a family on, steady work with good pay and benefits and some assurance you won't be fired without good cause. Today many regard  temporary work for $15 an hour as good, which is ok if you have only yourself to support, but even those are few, fleeting and far between. 

The core problem is that THERE AREN'T ENOUGH JOBS! And the competition for the few jobs there are is driving down wages and conditions, making "benefits" a thing of the past. If you doubt this, go explore the BLS statistics for "Employed" and "Employment Population Ratio" at bls.gov/cps/cpsatabs.htm   and see if YOU can find a "recovery" there! 

In the meantime Governor Patrick has been sitting on some $16 Billion (with a B) in money for projects that could put tens of thousands back to work for 4 or 5 years, money authorized by the Legislature that he never chose to borrow and spend - despite record low interest rates. Congress and the Obama Administration, with the power to go after the unspent Trillions (with a T) that the billionaires and big corporations are sitting on, have utterly failed to tackle the task. 

And young people with no hope and no future get into trouble and throw their lives away. 

Ebola crisis, why now?

The failure of hospital workers to follow protocols and adequately protect themselves from the Ebola virus is something that should have been addressed a long time ago on a national scale and updated annually. Doing it on the fly will probably not work out well. There are grounds for being deeply suspicious of the integrity of the CDC, but it is a fact that their budgets have been cut steadily by a myopic Congress more intent on funding the US efforts to screw over the rest of the world and rescuing bankers from the consequences of their crimes than with meeting the needs of the folks who elected them.

Anyone who has trained in the use of haz-mat protection gear knows that understanding how to use it in theory is the easy part.  The hard part is retraining a lifetime of habits and becoming mindful of where every part of your body is and what it's doing. I've only trained in nuclear and chemical hazards, where a degree of screwup leads to a degree of contamination, and that was struggle enough.  "Humbling" is a good word for it.  

A situation which is binary, where even a fraction of a degree of screwup could be for keeps, is a far greater challenge.

Tens of thousands, then millions of health care and public safety workers will have to learn how to handle bio-hazard protective gear perfectly, without mistakes. Often they will have to learn without experienced trainers, without sufficient equipment to spare, under pressure of time and fear. To say that training videos will be no substitute is beyond understatement. Anxiety and urgency do not foster clarity, and learning this routine above all requires clarity of mind.  Overcoming habits takes time, drillling under supervision, measuring results, reflection and trying again. And it takes equipment to spare.  

When we look at how the US has handled public health emergencies in recent years - Hurricaines Katrina and Sandy spring to mind - it is easy to imagine that such massive screwups involved some kind of conspiracy. And there have certainly been enough demonstrable conspiracies going around to support that suspicion.  Plus, the large and growing bio-warfare establishment is real, malignant, and active in West Africa.  We should write nothing off at this point.

However, let's not ignore the part being played in this unfolding fiasco by

* the accumulated neglect, decay and collapse of our once great nation's entire civilian infrastructure,

* the loss of our moral center and social contract,

* the decay of our healthcare, public health and civil defense capabilities,

* the weakening of our population's resistance to disease due to unchecked pollution and contamination of our air, water and food,

* half the population weakened by the struggle with poverty and housing issues, a third suffering some degree of malnutrition

* the epidemic of depression, despair and hopelessness brought on by mass unemployment.

If the outbreak of this Ebola crisis was not planned to coincide with the imminent economic collapse, it is nevertheless not unrelated.

Gold Standard is no cure

re. 

Why is the Gold Standard Urgent?  by Keith Weiner

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-15/why-gold-standard-urgent

................

This good well-reasoned article ends with a logic failure and leap to an unsupported conclusion.  

Weiner writes:

"When the rate keeps falling, the borrowing keeps rising. Is there a failure point for debt?

"... What happens when an entire society doesn’t save?

"Our financial system has suffered an escalating series of crises. Each crisis has grown out of the fix applied to the previous one.

"The crisis of 2008 was different. No matter what the Fed has attempted, they have not been able to create even the temporary appearance of recovery (other than in asset prices). It’s not merely that growth will be slow, or slower than it should be in some theoretical ideal economic world.

"There will be no recovery while our monetary cancer rages, unchecked...."

Well put. Very well put.  But then he jumps to:

"We must rediscover the gold standard, which is the only cure."

Not so clear. I know, there are theoretical arguments that this should work, but what does the historical record show?

The founding of the Fed was not just simply a criminal conspiracy.  It took place during the 30-year "Long Depression" that began in the 1880's and ended with World War I, an economic and social crisis that saw the rise of populist, labor and mass socialist movements throughout the world including in the US.  By the time the smoke had cleared from that crisis, most of the old Russian Empire had repudiated capitalism and Germany had nearly followed suit.    

The next big lurch into fiat currency occurred during and just after the Great Depression, beginning with Roosevelt's confiscation of private gold holdings and crowned by Bretton Woods.  That crisis ended with the Soviet Red Army occupying Eastern Europe and Berlin, communist-led movements overthrowing old colonial empires, and the "fall of China".  By 1955 the terrified global bankers were hiding behind the threat of a world-destroying nuclear armageddon to save their system and their skins.  

The final lurch into a fiat currency world began during another profound system crisis in the 1970's, at a time when world capitalism appeared to be lurching back into depression. A depression my professors in the '60's swore could never again happen and would never again be allowed. The response was the final unpegging of the dollar from gold, followed by the unleashing, step by step, of what became today's de-regulated, financialized bubble economy, where money flows like water from the Fed, the central banks and great banking houses, where "value" and "price" have been fully conflated. 

Seen apart from this historical context, the rise of central banking and fiat currency can be modeled as simply a criminal conspiracy.  But in historical context, it appeared as a succession of apparently successful emergency responses to emerging systems failures.  But if that is how we should understand it, then it is hard to see how fiat money could be the root problem of the crisis, or how reverting to the gold standard could be the cure.

Which is not to say that gold won't play a key role in the global drama that's unfolding.  I'm just saying that it's illogical to jump to the conclusion that reverting to a gold standard alone could fix a crisis that predates and perhaps precipitated its abandonment.  

If we conclude that some underlying condition, problem or set of problems must have been driving the system into depression and mass unemployment over a century ago, and if we conclude that is what must have forced our grandparents' and great grandparents' generations to abandon the gold standard, then we should assume this underlying problem or condition must still be there waiting for us.

German Journalist Blows Whistle On How The CIA Controls The Media

Ever wonder how the doctoring and suppression of news and the propagation of lies through the mass media is organized?  How could so many intelligent, able and seemingly honorable people, many of whom started out with youthful idealism, be induced to cooperate with such a disgraceful and damaging travesty?  If so, you should take a look at this:

   German Journalist Blows Whistle On How The CIA Controls The Media

     Submitted by Michael Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-09/german-journalist-blows-whistle-how-cia-controls-media?

“I was bribed by billionaires, I was bribed by the Americans to report…not exactly the truth.”

- Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of one of Germany’s main daily publications, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Essential reading.  For a world where the good guys win more often than you hear about. 

Argentina defies US Judge

Aug 20, 2014

Argentina, which thought it had put the last crisis behind it with an IMF-brokered settlement and which has successfully been meeting those obligations, has now had the settlement invalidated by a New York Federal judge, and has been thrown into a sudden solvency crisis.

As is quickly becoming apparent, Argentina's rejection and defiance of the judge's ruling is a direct challenge not just to a New York court or some Wall Street investors, but to the Empire itself.  It's not purely accidental that Argentina should be the first vassal state to do this.  The Empire could and would have squashed Greece like a bug last year, before the BRICS development bank, before Russia's challenge to the dollar, and given its size and location.  The Empire must and will try to crush Argentina now, because 100 other countries are watching and will attempt their own breakouts if it escapes.  

What are the Empire's options here?  Probably not a military assault; Argentina is much easier to defend than Greece, and much has changed in the world over the past year. Argentina is much larger, better organized and more self-sufficient.  Of the US-controlled nations from which military aggression could be launched, Paraguay could easily be pressured by Brazil, and Chile is on the other side of the Andes Mountains.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union the Medeterranian is virtually a US-owned lake, but the only naval base the Empire has near (or, arguably, within) Argentina is in the Falklands.

The greatest threat Argentina faces is from its own military, with its ties to the US and a history of US-supported coups.  That same military however does have a recent history of challenging the Empire over the Falklands.  The Argentine government and leaders must move quickly to reorient its military toward Russia, China and especially Brazil, and to purge or sideline the officers who are known to be overly tied to the Pentagon and the US Embassy.  

It seems like everyone on this site (ZH) loves to diss the government of Venezuela.  But the turning poiint there was when the Venezuelan military, with US help and direction, staged a coup and took President Chavez prisoner, and the junior officers and rank and file troops rebelled and in 24 hours forced the top brass to back down.  That was the critical event when Venezuela passed outside US control.  This was possible because the entire people, including the members of the armed forces, were part of the national conversation about Venezuela's dilemma, about Latin America's dilemma.  

Argentina will soon face such a moment.  The future is unknown, but the formation of the BRICS bank has radically improved their odds.  This is a critical moment for Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa and other Latin American nations, a fateful test of their understanding and commitment to the project they have declared.