@goldfish, politics -- trotsky, 10:08:12 11/08/06 Wed
u wrote:
"politics.... and, we all get to 'play'..... if we want to.
I did.
Did you?"
you mean play along with selling out whatever principles you hold dear in the pursuit of power? play along in the charade of lies and corruption? trying to 'reform the system from within'? (bwahahahaha). in the end finding out that all you have done is legitimize the status quo?
what on earth for, if not for the understandable (if revolting) reason to relieve the public trough of some of its goodies?
mozel@nihilism -- trotsky, 10:01:54 11/08/06 Wed
your imagination is getting the better of you. my rejection of government is NOT 'nihilism'. i believe that we don't need a government. without it, a spontaneous order would arise, and it would without a doubt be based on laws (only on FAR FEWER laws than exist now). contrary to now, they would probably mean something. your 'thickening of the veneer' activities won't lead anywhere - the opposition is too strong.
i realize of course that the call for a capitalist anarchy is similarly doomed. however, the more people live their lives ignoring and avoiding Leviathan the best they can, the more legitimacy he will lose over time. in any case, i've stopped believing in the naive notion that government can be restrained by laws - it only SEEMS to work for a while, until it doesn't anymore (no need to list all the historical examples i trust). some crisis always comes along and is used as a pretext to install a monster of a state.
oh, and as to the 'thin veneer' - it has, if anything, become a lot thinner in recent years, especially in the past 5. as usual,a crisis situation was misused to chip away more of the citizenry's rights. in other words, your work was for nothing as far as the actual outcome thus far is concerned.
nuclearson@string theory -- trotsky, 23:18:27 11/07/06 Tue
string theory is an attempt at marrying quantum theory with relativity, finding the "GUT" (Grand Unifying Theory) that brings gravity into the ambit of quantum theory. the problem is, so far no graviton (the particle transmitting the gravitational force) has been found, and gravitational waves are therefore equally elusive. string theory (to be precise, there is not ONE string theory, but several, and they're generally referred to as 'superstring theories' these days) posits that there are actually several additional dimensions in space time (11 altogether, although some proposals for even more dimensions also exist), which are so small that we can't detect them - only the size of a Planck length (10 to the power of minus 33 metres). it describes the basic particles that make up matter/transmit forces as vibrating strings instead of 'points'. in other words, all interactions between the basic particles are described as a sort of constant frequency modulation activity. the extra-dimensions are rolled up, like tiny circles or cylinders. the strings that represent the particles are attached to the membranes of these cylinders. gravitons are thought to be 'free-floating' closed strings unattached to any mebranes, and can thus move through all the dimensions freely. an interesting side effect of the string theory view of the world is that it automatically leads to the conclusion that a great number of other universes must exist, attached to the 'other side' of those membranes, and possibly having different laws of physics than ours.
this is just from memory from reading various articles on the topic, i don't claim to truly understand it. however, i know that one of the big questions is the observed weakness of the gravitational force compared to the other three forces , and the current lack of understanding of how gravitation works at extremely small distances. the large Hadron collider that is currently being built will allow experimenters to observe interactions at distances as small as 10 to the power of minus 19 metres, still enormously larger than the Planck length. interestingly, the law governing gravitation has only been experimentally verified to distances of about 1 millimetre thus far (i.e. the fact that gravitation becomes weaker by the square of the distance between two objects when they move away from each other and vice versa). it is possible that future experiments will show the law of gravitation at extremely small distances to be different.
regarding truly understanding all of this beyond the basic concepts, i just looked at quantum theory course material from the local university, and i can't even conceptually relate what i understand of the mathematics used therein to the observations they describe. in short, it's an almost impossible to grasp subject for laymen, but it's still fascinating to read up on in publications such as Scientific American that often contain good explanatory graphics. in any event, this is the very frontier of physics , where philosophy meets nature, so to speak.
string theory basics:
superstringtheory.com
mozel@tax trials -- trotsky, 22:04:58 11/07/06 Tue
see, that's why we have a fiat money system. that way tax revolts can be kept small and manageable.
in addition, the government-instituted highway robbery has been so widely accepted as 'necessary' that those who want to opt out are declared 'freeloaders' worthy of punishment by their fellow citizens.
since a certain evil institution exercises the so-called 'monopoly of force' you can only do what Hambone suggested, which is 'live with it' as he phrased it - alternatively you can go the Hovind route and become an unsung martyr, rotting forever in a small cell, and forgotten by the public 5 seconds after you've disappeared in it.
you bemoan that there is no legal authority for these going-ons. you still haven't understood what the essence of 'government' is. its authority has always been, and will always be, derived from force. there is nothing voluntary about it, elections or no elections.
recall, i once rethorically asked, what if e.g. Bush gets other ideas besides instituting secret prisons, torturing captives of the GWOT, starting wars at the drop of a hat, etc. - who's going to stop him? with what divisions?
putting tax slaves into their place demonstrates the principle underlying all of this very nicely. invoking old parchments won't help, the mask of civilization will simply be taken off at the appropriate moments.
Cherokee@ the aether -- trotsky, 20:08:44 11/07/06 Tue
"In the late 19th century luminiferous aether ("light-bearing aether") was the term used to describe a medium for the propagation of light. Later theories including special relativity were formulated without the aether concept, and today the aether is considered to be a superseded scientific theory."
a good overview on wikipedia, including how the Michaelson-Morley experiment killed the aether theory:
en.wikipedia.org
@a quick note on the CDS market and Middle Eastern markets -- trotsky, 20:00:16 11/07/06 Tue
i've just come across this article posted here earlier today:
theaustralian.news.com.au
when one sees the word 'panic' in a financial headline, it is usually assumed that something is crashing. and well, something IS. however, this is a sort of 'reverse panic' if you will, in the sense that what is crashing are the insurance premia for corporate bonds. in short, the value of default risk protection is plunging - something that would normally be seen as a very bullish event, as it is the market's way of stating 'no defaults are likely'.
HOWEVER - what is usually the best time to buy a corporate bond? when the exact opposite sentiment obtains - i.e. when credit spreads and credit derivatives are soaring, such as in the summer of 2002.
in other words, these recent events are probably a powerful CONTRARIAN signal, indicating that the discounting of the likelihood of corporate defaults has progressed to a point from whence things can only get worse, not better.
it is btw. supremely ironic that this recent 'bullish event' is apparently actually impairing the hedge funds who were buyers of the CDS.
in an unrelated development, the Saudi Arabian stock exchange has broken to new lows for the year. this may strike you as not significant, but note the following:
the Saudi stock market entered a bubble in 2005, soaring to breath-taking levels (at one point, a Saudi conglomerate that's basically unknown in the West was the 10th largest company in the world by market capitalization). then in February of this year, the entire Middle Eastern stock market bubble crashed, in the form of two distinct crash waves that shaved off between 50-60% of the value of the region's markets. the significance is threefold: 1. in spite of 'official' and 'organized' (from the wealthy elite) support for the market, it never managed anything beyond a pathetically small bounce before beginning its most recent breakdown (so much for 'plunge protection teams' ability to save a market), 2. the ME crash in February was a precursor to the global mini-crash in May/June and 3. it was also a precursor to the Lebanon war.
note that in all great manias, markets on the periphery tend to get whacked first. recall Thailand in 1997, or South Korea, Russia, Indonesia and Malaysia in '98. in that sense it seems likely that the resumption of the decline in Saudi Arabia will once again have a 'canary in the coal mine' function. furthermore, it may foreshadow the source of coming financial instability, namely further trouble in the region. note that a US or Israeli attack on Iran is not necessarily the only thing that could happen. how about a revolution in Saudi Arabia or Egypt? how about the civil war in Iraq beginning to spread out? note that all of Iraq's neighbors are eyeing developments there with growing alarm, for various reasons (e.g. Turkey and Iran fear that the Kurds will go independent and try to carve some territory from them, while the Arab states mostly fear their own Shia minorities may get ideas).
add to that the fact that the confrontational tone between Israel and Iran continues to escalate (btw., Israel's new minister 'for strategic threats', Avigdor Lieberman, is a foaming-at-the-mouth rightwing militarist of the worst sort, just the man for this time), and you're looking at a real powderkeg there.
i fear General Odom had it exactly right when he opined that stranding the US army in Iraq could well turn out to be the biggest strategic blunder in US history.
Saudi Arabia's stock market is an excellen barometer of the region's social mood - and it currently predicts fresh trouble is coming down the pike.
cherokee -- trotsky, 11:19:41 11/07/06 Tue
u wrote:
"several years ago 2 russiian astro-phycisists determined that our SOLar system had drifted into a part of the galaxy the contains 400% MORE energy floating in the aether than the region we had recently departed...."
ahem. i think the idea of the so-called 'aether' hasn't been part of modern physics since at least 1912 (or was it 1905? i'm not 100% sure). i seem to recall that the Michaelson-Morley experiment finally put paid to it, if so, 1912 is the correct date. as to the vaccum energy (a.k.a. 'negative pressure') in the universe, i believe its distribution is uniform. as to dark energy and dark matter , they can not be measured by anyone, Russian or otherwise. their presence can only be inferred, without them the current cosmological models would be difficult to reconcile with observations. anyway, the 'aether' can't have anything to do with global warming by dint of its lack of existence. the sun however very much exists, and apparently goes through long term cycles in its behavior. this would also adequately explain why there have been several periods of severe global warming as well as cooling well before the industrial age. |
