Common Anti Pattern: (more)

An anonymous guest-poster at Dmitry Orlov's blog suggests leaving the US. (more)

A friend emailed me the body of an essay that disappeared from the Independent site today - so I've copied it to my Christopher Hitchens page.

Johann Hari interviews Christopher Hitchens to try and understand his shifts in attitude since (?) the World Trade Center. He explains by talking about the origins of his relationship with the neconservatives in Washington. "I first became interested in the neocons during the war in Bosnia-Herzgovinia. That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of Torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists."... "So that interest in the Neo-Con-s re-emerged after September 11th. They were saying - we can't carry on with the approach to the Middle East we have had for the past fifty years. We cannot go on with this proxy rule racket, where we back tyranny in the region for the sake of stability. So we have to take the risk of uncorking it and hoping the more progressive side wins." He has replaced a belief in Marxist revolution with a belief in spreading the American revolution. Thomas Jefferson has displaced Karl Marx... He gives an account of how the neocon philosophy affected the course of the Iraq war (War On Iraq). "The CIA - which is certainly not neoconservative - wanted to keep the Iraqi army together because you never know when you might need a large local army. That's how the US used to govern. It's a Henry Kissinger way of thinking. But Paul Wolfowitz and others wanted to disband the Iraqi army, because they didn't want anybody to even suspect that they wanted to restore military rule (cf Arab Spring)." He thinks that if this philosophy can become dominant within the Republican Party, it can turn US power into a revolutionary force... I stammer that I can't imagine him ever settling down on the American right. He pauses, and I desperately hope that he will agree with me. "Not the Buchanan-Reagan right, no," he says. There is a pause. I expect him to continue, but he doesn't.

Eugenics (/juːˈdʒɛnɪks/; from Greek εὐγενής eugenes "well-born" from εὖ eu, "good, well" and γένος genos, "race, stock, kin")[2][3] is a set of beliefs and practices which aims at improving the genetic quality of the human population.[4][5] It is a social philosophy advocating the improvement of human genetic traits through the promotion of higher rates of sexual reproduction for people with desired traits (positive eugenics), or reduced rates of sexual reproduction and sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits (negative eugenics), or both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

Hater of Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, and many others. (more)

William Lind on the roots of FourGW. The key to it, I think, is precisely "the triumphs of rationalism." Rationalism, or more broadly Modernity, believes in nothing. Belief is the opposite of Rationalism. Fourth Generation war is triumphing over the products of rationalism because people who believe in something will always defeat people who believe in nothing at all... As Martin Van Creveld points out in his key book on Fourth Generation war, The Rise and Decline of the State, up until World War I the West believed in something too. Its god was the Nation-State. But that god died in the mud of Flanders. After World War I, decent Western elites could no longer believe in anything: "the best lack all conviction." Fascism and Communism offered new faiths, but in the course of the Twentieth Century they too proved false gods (all ideologies are counterfeit religions). Now, all that the West's elites and the "globalist" elites elsewhere who mimic them can offer is "CivilSociety." Unlike real belief, civil society is not worth fighting for, killing for or dying for. It is far too weak a tea to serve in the global biker bar which is the Fourth Generation's world of cultures in conflict. Yikes. I would counter-argue that it has more to do with the increasingly Complex System that is human Civilization (with a reduction in Resilience), combined with the increased ability of the individual to use technology to perturb such systems.

practitioner of Fascism

William Lind ponders whether the War On Iraq will lead to Fascism, or just "abstract Nationalism". Fascism is not merely dictatorship. The core idea of fascism is Will as the highest Virtue. Fascism sought to drop the whole Judeo Christian content of Western Culture and return to the values of the classical world, where Power was the greatest good... This was a serious error, because it turned an instrumental value (Extrinsic), will, into a substantive value. In reality, will is good or evil depending upon what is willed. By attempting to turn will into a substantive value, fascism destroyed itself... I would suggest that, instead of fascism, the danger now facing America is one of the many ills released from that Pandora's Box, the French Revolution: Abstract Nationalism. As Burke pointed out, Conservative Patriotism is very different from the abstract nationalism of "la Patrie." It is a concrete attachment to our own places: our own valleys or towns, our farms, hills or plains. It is local, it is real and it rightly sees WalMart as a far greater threat than tin-pot dictators in Third World countries... But Martin Van Creveld's book also points to the likely fate of such an (abstract) nationalism: it will crumble after it fails in war. In Europe, the state as an ideal died in World War I, in the mud at places like the Somme and Verdun. I suspect that the same thing is going to happen here after the American people have to confront the reality of America's defeat in Iraq. Bush's wild Wilsonian-ism is out of time; it is a ghost from an era long past, an illusion that is now sustained only by the public's trust that somehow, our troops' unquestionable valor in Iraq will bring victory.

Norman Mailer on the War On Iraq and our endangered Open Society. Because Democracy is noble, it is always endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is Fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it... The need for powerful theory can fall into many an abyss of error. (That last bit captures the uncertainty-appreciation behind the Open Society concept.)

Chris Locke connects Abraham Maslow to the Eugenics movement. I'm not sure how much he's kidding... Anyway, a few days ago I picked up a new book by Edwin Black, the guy who wrote IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation... compellingly demonstrates how Hitler's ideas for the "final solution" germinated not in Germany, but in the U.S., driven by "scientists" including Edward L. Thorndike and Theodosius Dobzhansky. There is no reference to these two in Black's new book -- War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race -- but they were definitely part of the Eugenics movement... Abraham Maslow received his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and his PhD in 1934, all in psychology, all from the University of Wisconsin. A year after graduation, he returned to New York to work with E.L. Thorndike at Columbia... In 1959, Maslow put together a book of papers -- New Knowledge in Human Values -- including "Human Nature as a Product of Evolution" by the same Theodosius Dobzhansky, who five years later would ascend to Director, then to Chairman of the American Eugenics Society. Dobzhansky was also a professor of genetics at Columbia during Maslow's time there.

Application Programming Interface (more)

Computer Game (more)

John Robb's book Brave New War ISBN:0471780790 about Dealing With Terrorism/FourGW. (more)

book by Fred Siegel on the collapse of American Urban environments - mainly due to a Culture War where we stopped expecting new immigrants and other Lower Income people to adopt Middle Class values. (more)

Does it make sense to drive all your writing from WikiWord-s, if Search Engine-s become more available to everyone (consider Devon Think, etc.)? (more)

Drop Box has acquired Mail Box, the Mobile EMail app. (more)

Lifehacker is a weblog about Life-Hack-s and software which launched on January 31, 2005. The site is owned by Gawker Media... Gina Trapani founded Lifehacker and was the site's sole blogger until September 2005, when two associate editors joined her, Erica Sadun and D. Keith Robinson. On January 16, 2009, Trapani resigned as Lifehacker's lead editor and AdamPash assumed the position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifehacker

Life hacking refers to any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_hacking (more)

Messaging manager (more)