They pretend an object is not what it really is.
In the hopes it will not be that which it always is.
Imagination, it seems to them, is meant to be absurd.
They use a gun instead of reason to make their voices heard.
They won't come to ever see how their morals shape reality, the only end they care to see is violent: forced equality.
They pretend your mind is something that belongs to them.
It's only meant to serve all those whose needs are still not met.
Self-destruction is, to them, a means that serves an end.
Self sacrifice and immolation make the best of men.
They won't come to ever see starvation comes from equity, if equal men are made by force, they turn the best into the worst.
They pretend that you'll provide under the yoke of force.
Their need the right to claim all you have made and force out more.
They pretend that they won't starve without a working mind.
And they wont see where they end up is where they wished to find.
They won't come to ever see their morals shape reality, the only end they care to see is violent: forced equality
– Thosquanta lyrics
---------------------
In the late 50's as Chairman Mao Ze Dong solidified power in "Revolutionary China" he sought to increase the standing of China on the international scene. To do this, China had to sell it's primary domestic product; food. Of course in China most people producing food consumed the food they were producing. The communist party of China issued new orders and directives, every bit of food produced by the population would be 'given' to the government, who would then re-distribute it according to who needed it, or rather, according to what would benefit the oppressive rulers the most. Mao's ruling part of China began a campaign to become one of the world's largest agricultural exporters. Farmers were forced to hand over at gun point the food they were growing while they were starving. Where they were producing more than enough food for themselves and others, now there was not even enough food to feed the population of China. People were literally working themselves to death growing and collecting their own food, and being forced to give it away. Millions and millions of people starved to death. In all, historians estimate, about 35 million Chinese peasants starved to death during this period in the absolute worst human famine to have ever occurred, yet few today know about it.
This famine was not cause by droughts or freezes, but instead by a controlled economy in the hands of a murderous dictator, in fact all of the famines experienced in the 20th century were at the hands of controlled economies
Additionally Communist party members were fans of an "alternative" science, brought about by philosophical Dialectical materialism, which asserts all growth comes from conflict, among other bad ideas, and also abandons the mechanism of heredity, genetics, in favor of a deadly Marxist pseudoscience, Lysenkoism. Lysenko and his poor science caused the famines in the Soviet Union which killed tens of millions of people, and many of these policies, despite these spectacular failures, were adopted in China promulgating Mao's famine. Later, when adopted in Cambodia, Ethiopio, and North Korea, all produced still more man-made famines. The lysenko ideas including 'conditioning' seeds to grow in cold weather by dunking them in cold water, forcing peasants to bury seedlings much deeper, and forcing peasants to cover fields with 5 times as many seeds as a field could support, on the theory that similar plants do not compete with each other for resources.
You can read more on these dreadful policies here
http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/health/hunger/famine/chinese_famine.html
Beyond that, Communist party members sought to make China a world player on the industrial scene in the world and desired to capitalize on their greatest resource; manpower from physical labor. Tens of millions of farmers and peasants were ordered to leave their productive farms and build small communal "steel refractories" these refractories resembled termite mounds more than steel production furnaces and produced steel that looked more like animal droppings earning it a nickname in kind.
The single major change which ended this dreadful famine was when farmers were again allowed to produce food as they saw fit, and while they still had to provide a large quota to the government, they were allowed to keep any excess they grew and sell it. Within 5 years agricultural output in China, from 1960 – 1965, almost tripled. Production continued to climb until Chairman Mao regained much of the power he lost and instituted a "cultural revolution" where anyone eductated in the ways of the west was executed, again agriculture production plummeted as the people responsible for the radical increase were sent to prison camps or outright executed as "counter revolutionaries" Millions of educated Chinese fled the country, and chances are if you are in a western country and have some Chinese friends, their parents most likely fled the cultural revolution.
Read more here is as well
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/319/7225/1619
Many people in western nations have a hard time believing such statistics, assuming by de-facto that governments tend to operate well and for the benefit of the people. But government encroachment into markets does not bring about equality, increased standards of living, or a general betterment of society, it always plummets toward ineptitude, corruption, and inefficiencies. . No bureaucrat can ever respond quickly enough to rapidly changing climate and markets to get the food where it is needed, only the independent and rapid decisions of the millions of producers and distributors are capable of adjusting with lighting rapidity to great strains on products. Any politician who controls immense swaths of the economy is immediately open to corruption, where the currency de jour is not product superiority but instead influence and bribery. To the extent at which governments interfere in markets is the extent to which people in those nations suffer harder, shorter, more painful lives, and to the extent to which nations let free people make free decisions and produce the goods they desire of their own accord, and trade with each other of their own free will, is the extent to which a nation and it's people prosper and live longer, healthier, happier lives as a whole.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
50,000 galaxies, killer asteroids, and beat again
Some quick news items
Somebody beat me to it =( Still, mine will be better, but too slow on the draw again...
http://i.n.com.com/i/ne/p/2007/34monotracer550x365.jpg
Check out this amazing Hubble image, 50,000 galaxies, be sure to load the zoomed version and explore the galaxies, 50,000 of them!
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/06/image/c/format/zoom/
On existential threats: NASA lacks funds to find killer asteroids
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/03/06/nasa.asteroids.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
"They are a threat even if they don't hit Earth because if they explode while close enough -- an event caused by heating in both the rock and the atmosphere -- the devastation from the shockwaves is still immense. The explosion alone could have with the power of 100 million tons of dynamite, enough to devastate an entire state, such as Maryland, they said."
Some quick news items
Somebody beat me to it =( Still, mine will be better, but too slow on the draw again...
http://i.n.com.com/i/ne/p/2007/34monotracer550x365.jpg
Check out this amazing Hubble image, 50,000 galaxies, be sure to load the zoomed version and explore the galaxies, 50,000 of them!
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/06/image/c/format/zoom/
On existential threats: NASA lacks funds to find killer asteroids
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/03/06/nasa.asteroids.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
"They are a threat even if they don't hit Earth because if they explode while close enough -- an event caused by heating in both the rock and the atmosphere -- the devastation from the shockwaves is still immense. The explosion alone could have with the power of 100 million tons of dynamite, enough to devastate an entire state, such as Maryland, they said."
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Check out my updated essay "Humanity Needs an Insurance Policy" on AssociatedContent.com
Humanity Needs an Insurance Policy
Is Self Destruction from the Rapid Growth of Technology the Answer to the Fermi Paradox?
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/137048/humanity_needs_an_insurance_policy.html
Humanity Needs an Insurance Policy
Is Self Destruction from the Rapid Growth of Technology the Answer to the Fermi Paradox?
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/137048/humanity_needs_an_insurance_policy.html
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Here in south eastern CT, one of the most heavily traveled corridors of the nation sitting squarely between Boston and NYC, a battle is being waged between rational progress and environmentalist paranoia. In the early 70’s a highway was constructed which connected route 2 near Hartford, the capital of CT and major business center, with south eastern CT. Before that the highway route required traveling the edges of a box, north to Norwich area of CT and then west to Hartford. Route 11 was supposed to be a nice diagonal connecting the two corners of this important exchange, instead the project lost funding in 1974 half way through completion and stopped at the interchange with Route 85. South eastern CT is home to Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Global Central Research headquarters, General Dynamics Electric Boat submarine building facility, a large Navy base, and the US Coast Guard academy. So commuters heading here from all central and western parts of Massachusetts and New York enjoy highway for the majority of the journey, only to get off and travel on a rural undivided tree lined winding route for the last 10 miles. A route where giant signs demand headlights to be on at all times, where joggers and bicyclists have abandoned for fear of their lives, residents pray before they pull out of their driveways, and where this 10 miles stretch averages 1 fatality per year.
A recent front page story ran in The Day, the largest local newspaper. Did it run a profile on each person that has been killed on that road commuting to work? Did it show how much money is lost to the area on that road in damages from non fatal accidents? No, it featured a pretty waterfall, a beautiful wooded landscape, and some pictures of rabbits; revealing a very obvious bias on the project. For 20 years the state of CT has repeatedly attempted to get Route 11 completed, which would bypass the dangerous Route 85 and save lives, and it has been repeatedly blocked. This time the EPA is at it again arresting any progress or development. The EPA has publicly stated that in general it opposes all new roads and it is given virtually limitless power to stop new road construction. Is this reasonable? It opposes ALL NEW ROADS? Is this the way to progress? Is this the way to strengthening our economy?
In a story that ran on June 26, 2006 on Route 11 The Day reports:
Environmental Concerns Could Derail Route 11 Plan
"Bartlett contends that the road designs would “cause or contribute to significant degradation of waters of the United States, ” and he and the top U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official call the most recent assessment of the project's environmental impact inadequate"
And really now, an 8.5 mile highway will cause SIGNIFICANT DEGRADATION OF THE WATERS OF THE [ENTIRE?] UNITED STATES. Are they serious? More delays and studies, favorite tactics of the EPA.
The article quotes a lone voice of reason:
"The agency has been studying whether building the road could deplete the habitat of the New England cottontail rabbit, which is being considered for endangered species status. U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Connecticut, has ridiculed the study, contending the agency is more concerned with rabbits than the human lives lost because of accidents on Route 85."
In 1919 future president and then solder Dwight D. Eisenhower traveled with a military caravan on a cross country trip. The journey was torturous and took months to complete, with horses and wagons and trucks routinely getting trapped in muddy ravines and overburdened roads. There is no doubt this terrible experience played a role in his future advocacy of a national interstate highway system. From 1956 to 1975 the Federal Highway Act created 35,000 miles of it’s planned 42,000 miles of highways. In the subsequent 20 years from 1975 to 1995 only the remaining 7,000 miles were built. In the latest 10 years from 1995 to today, a mere 4,000 more miles have been paved, a 10% percent increase. According the Bureau of Transportation Statistics the number of vehicle miles traveled in 1975 was 1.4 trillion miles, in 1995 was 2.4 trillion miles while in 2005 that number was 3 trillion. Today highways represent less than one percent of the nation’s total road mileage yet carry over 20 percent of the nations traffic. We see barely 20% more highway travel lanes than in 1975, while the number of vehicle miles traveled has doubled, and the number of cars on the road continues to sky rocket.
Interstate 95, which goes from the Florida Keys to the cost of Maine, through Atlantic City, New York city, and Boston, also passes through Connecticut on it’s southern coast. Most of 95 through CT is two lanes, and the Stretch of 95 that goes from Danbury CT (near the New York border) to Old Saybrook is one of the busiest exchanges in the country. Recently a plan was unveiled to add one single lane on the north and south bound parts of 95 in CT, along 65 mile stretch. The estimates for the cost and time frame? 20 billion dollars and 20 years! Are you kidding me, we paved half the nation in that time and cost.
In 1991 work began in Hong Kong on the most ambitious civil engineering project of the 21st century. In the following 7 years, and at a cost of 20 billion dollars, a six lane one mile tunnel, two bridges, one of which was the worlds longest double decker suspension bridge, the other the worlds longest cable-stayed bridge, twenty-two miles of an elevated superhighway, much of it built over an existing fourteen lane highway which remained opened, a high speed rail along that highway, an artificial island and on top of it a new airport with the worlds largest passenger terminal in history were built. Yet it takes the US 20 years and 20 billion dollars to add one lane to 65 miles of highway!
(Learn all about Hong Kong's mega engineering project - here)
This is completely absurd. Our interstate highways are the lifeblood of our economy. They are not called major arteries for nothing, if you choke of a major highway, all transportation suffers, all manufactured goods, fuels, and foods are delayed. Everything is more expensive. Sitting in endless traffic jams with engines idling for hours on end. The nation suffers as a whole. America has the majority of its population on opposing costs separated by a thousand miles of nothing except massive farms. The greater metropolitan area of New York contains an estimated 21 million people, people who get their food, goods, and fuel primary by vehicles traveling on highways. The greater metropolitan area of Los Angeles is home to 18 million people, again all fed, clothed, and fueled primarily through highways. The greater metropolitan area of Chicago, the 3rd largest in the US and the only major one in the middle of the east and west coasts, is home to 10 million people. Together these three cities make up almost 50 million people and contain 1/6 of the nations population. A cursory look at any population density map shows that the majority of the US’s population lies on opposing costs, with huge swaths of land in between with population densities of 1 – 5 people per square mile. This area, of course, is where much of our food, and a significant portion of the worlds food supply, is produced. Roads and highways are the only way to get these goods to their destinations. Our entire economy and livelihood center on fast, efficient, and smooth transportation, with the interstate highways at the core. Yet we would rather pull our teeth out than build new roads, and when we do they cost an absurd amount of money and take decades to construct. What is going on here? Have we lost our minds?
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Nuclear Power vs Coal Power
Many people consider Uranium and subsequently nuclear power to be worse, over all, than coal or other fossil fuels. They claim, for various reasons, including mining, refining, storage, and disposal; that nuclear power is worse than coal, but the reality is that in all areas Uranium and Fission power far outshine coal power.
Lets take a quick look at the Energy Density of these sources of energy to start with.
Coal - ~6,150 kilowatt-hours (kWh)/ton
Uranium – 2,000,000,000 kWh/ton
Uranium, Fast Breeder reactors (up to 100x more) - 200,000,000,000 kWh/ton
Energy density is measured in power divided by mass of a material, so when we say that Coal has 6,150 Kilowatt-hours per ton, it means that one ton of coal will produce 6,150 kW for one hour, or 615 kW for 10 hours, etc. To compare this with a typical piece of home equipment, say a television, a television might consume 500W of power when in operation, if run for one hour that would be 500 watt – hours. Two televisions would then be 1 kilowatt – hour. So one ton of coal would power 12,300 televisions for 1 hour. Current energy costs (which you can read in your electric bill) hover around 10 – 15 cents per kilowatt hour.
As noted above, Uranium, per ton, produces more than 300,000 times the amount of energy that coal does. What, exactly, makes a material with 300,000 times as much energy as coal 'uneconomical' then? Is uranium 300,000 times more difficult to mine and obtain? 300,000 times more expensive to dispose of? Will it kill 300,000 times more people? The answer, of course, even combining all the complexities of nuclear power, is a resounding NO. Lets compare Uranium Fission, which generates about 15% of US power, with Coal generated power, which generated 80% of the US’s power.
Claim: Coal poses almost no hazard for human health, except when swallowed or hit on the head and therefore doesn't have to be kept safe and secured at all times.-
Certainly NOT true, the atmospheric irritants emitted by the combustion of coal and their effects include:
- Sulphur dioxide (SO2) - respiratory disorders, impaired breathing
- Nitrous oxide (NOx) - respiratory disorders, infections, pulmonary diseases
- Carbon monoxide (CO) - fatal angina, various other effects
- Ozone (O3) - respiratory disorders, impaired breathing, asthma, edema
- Particulate matter (PM10) - various toxic particle (organic matter, carbon, mineral dusts, metal oxides and sulphates and nitrate salts) effects, main
mortality factor due to fossil fuels
- Toxic substances, heavy metals - specific substance effects
All of these combustion products of fossil fuels are estimated by the WHO in its 1997 report on sustainable development, to account for 6% of the total 50 million annual global deaths. That's approximately 3 million deaths *every year* from atmospheric pollutants released from the combustion of fossil fuels. These are real people dying painful deaths every year. 3 million. Outdoor air pollution in the U.S. due to particulate pollution alone was estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1997 to cause at least 20,000 premature deaths each year. 3rd world countries, many of which cook on wood or dung fired stoves, fare much worse, and are some of the places that would benefit most from cheap electricity generated by a full fledged global nuclear infrastructure.
Claim: Coal is not suitable for deadly weapons and therefore of no value for villains of any kind, including despotic dictators -
True of course, coal has little intrinsic value to oppressive regimes, unlike Nuclear power which is a stepping stone to nuclear weapons. If 'suitability for deadly weapons' was the only consideration of what type of power source should be utilized, you could make a strong case against nuclear and for coal. However, other factors include a) cost b) number of people it kills every year d) monopolistic domination potentials etc. etc. Because Uranium fission holds 300,000 times as much energy, it is far more cost effective, makes electricity available to more people at less of a cost, and consequently directly raises their standards of living. Coal kills many people per year, not only in frequent large accidents (which happen most often in mines) but slowly and spread out over the globe. Coal and oil, because they are present in small areas in dense qualities and require little technology to utilize, easily facilitate the rise to power of oppressive regimes. Most of the worlds Oil is in the middle east, where the exports have financially supported the oppressive rulers of that region, every single one of which is a brutal oppressive dictatorship or theocracy. Luckily for many people the worlds largest coal deposits happened to be in the lands that were free-er earlier on, in the UK and in the US. The US alone has a coal field that is the size of the UK. However the vast coal fields in Europe fueled the Nazi war machine. So while it is more difficult for an individual to utilize any aspect of coal as a weapon, it’s extraordinarily easy for governments to do so, and history shows us that governments have killed far more people than individual terrorists and even wars have
Claim: The by-products of coal can be put back without any hazard for the biosphere. Coal ashes are not dangerous and does not need to be kept off our biosphere for thousands of years.-
Again, certainly NOT true. Billions of tons of harmful chemicals and radioactive uranium are dumped into the air during the process of burning coal, even in highly advanced modern coal burning plants. Additionally other heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, lead, mercury, nickel and vanadium are present in coal ash. In fact living near a coal burning power plant, even a modern hi tech one, is far more hazardous to your health than living near a nuclear power plant. The background radiation levels are always higher around coal plants than nuclear plants specifically because coal plants are allowed to dump their waste into the air, which, again, includes radioactive uranium ash. In fact a typical coal plant actually chemically burns and releases into the air more Uranium than is used in a comparable nuclear reactor, as fuel. Indeed, you could put a nuclear reactor on the smokestack of a coal plant and generate more power than the was generated from the coal. Remember, one pound of Uranium generates as much energy as more than 300,000 pounds of coal.
Claim: Even a very large malfunction in a coal fired power plant could not devastate a large area, cost millions of lives and billions of Euros (please read about the effects of Tschernobyl '86 in FSU and Europe).
Anti Nuclear advocates love to point to Chernobyl as an example of the dangers posed by nuclear reactors. However Chernobyl killed 31 people when a pressurized steam channel blew (which was not even a chemical explosion, let alone a nuclear one) and released approx 6% of the radioactive contents of the reactor. The accident resulted in 31 short term deaths, with 28 due to extremely high radiation exposures. Additionally, some 200,000 clean up workers received average exposures of twice the yearly permitted, and a few thousand more received ten times the permitted yearly doses. Of the 116,000 nearby residents evacuated, 95% received less than the average of the fist group of cleanup workers. A remaining 400,000 received significantly less than that. For the 1,116,000 total affected out of the workers, evacuees, and nearby residents, the predicted long term radiation induced cancer deaths and normally non-fatal thyroid cancers are projected to be some 3,500. Mostly later in life. A terrible toll of course, but this is about how many people are killed from the combustion products of fossil fuels every 12 hours. Most of these deaths from the Chernobyl incident could have been avoided had the Soviet government acknowledged the nuclear nature of the accident and administered the iodide pills it had all ready stockpiled for just such an incident. Additionally, this reactor would have never been built, licensed, or operated in any country that actually cared about its people, unlike the Soviet Union, which had a long track record of sacrificing millions for 'the good of the state'.
In addition to the estimated 3 million annual deaths from atmospheric pollutants many people are killed from coal mining explosions, natural gas explosions, and obviously the many wars fought over and related to Oil, which in fact runs most of the world. Here are some of the worst coal mining disasters.
- Liaoning mine disaster, Fuxin, People's Republic of China (February 14, 2005), 210 reported killed.
- Sunshine Mine disaster, Kellogg, Idaho, United States, 91 killed (May, 1972)
- Buffalo Creek flood, Logan County, West Virginia, United States, 125 killed (February 26, 1972)
- Mina de Barroterán Coal Mine disaster, Coahuila, Mexico, (March 31, 1969), 176 died. Mexico's second worst coal mine disaster.
- Luisenthal Mine disaster (near Völklingen), Germany (February 7, 1962), 299 killed
- Marcinelle, Belgium, 262 killed (August 8, 1956)
- Gresford, Wrexham, 266 killed (September 1934)
- Hillcrest mine disaster, Hillcrest, Alberta, Canada, 189 killed (June 19, 1914). Canada's worst mine disaster
- Courrières mine disaster, Courrière, France, 1099 killed (March, 1906)
- Hanna, Wyoming, United States, Union Pacific Coal Company, Mine No. 1, 234 killed (June 30, 1903)
See a full list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters#Mining_disasters
Consider also
- Dam failures and overtopping have caused thousands of deaths and massive disruption in social and economic activities with the displacement of entire towns - the Varont dam overtopping in Italy and dam failures in Gujarat and Orissa in India are three such examples, each with several thousand fatalities.
- Explosions and major fires in the oil and gas industry have involved both occupational and public fatalities and injuries. A pipeline gas leak
explosion in the Urals involved 500 fatalities.
- There are estimated to be a few hundred CO related deaths every year in the US due to faulty or inefficient fossil fuel burning home heating systems.
At this point, one might suggest that while nuclear energy production is relatively the safest form of energy, the weapons made from nuclear power have killed 100,000’s of thousands. True enough, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts killed an estimated 400,000 people. But in considering these deaths as a consequence of nuclear power, we must all consider the deaths that came from the utilization of fossil fuels. How many people have been killed by conventional explosives in all wars in all of history? How many have been killed by the military industrial segments of brutal nations that run on these fossil fuels? The Japanese invasion of Manchuria, very obviously powered by Oil, Coal, and gunpowder, saw 400,000 people killed in the infamous “Rape of Nanking” alone. In fact, all throughout history we have seen a continual rise in the number of people killed in war, both as an absolute and as a percentage of the population, until 1945, when the number plummeted. Even after the use of nuclear weapons in war, and many subsequent brutal wars, the number of war dead still continues to fall. Fortunately, Nuclear weapons have had the effect of taming wars so far.
Claim: The byproducts of Nuclear power can be used for Terrorism
Indeed, and many many things can be used for Terrorism. Oil Wells, for instance, can be set ablaze, burning self sufficiently for months or years with devastating environmental effects. A typical Liquefied Natural Gas tanker has the explosive capacity of a small nuclear bomb. How difficult does one really think it would be to detonate a single hulled tanker full of LNG which contains hundreds of thousands of tons of fuel? How many of these tankers sit unguarded in ports all over the world? Which is more rational to protect against terrorism, a few well designed and guarded nuclear power plants, which can even be moved underground, or tens of thousands of gigantic bombs in the form of gas lines, gas tanks, tankers, and fuel storage facilities? Nuclear plants generate so much power that an entire nations energy supply can come from a few dozen of them set in areas far from dense population centers and well guarded.
Consider that unused, uranium still sits in the earth undergoing fission anyway, producing radioactive elements and heat, which is part of what warms the internal parts of the earth. In fact, a host of still unexplained observations about the Earth has led some physicists to suggest the core of the earth is actually a giant nuclear fission reactor. The theory was a cover feature in Discover magazine in August 2002. http://www.discover.com/issues/aug-02/cover/
Additionally, many technological developments have occurred in nuclear reactor design, including ceramic coated uranium pellets, which keep the uranium spaced out far enough to generate a controlled amount of eat and which can not be melted by the temperatures produced, completely negating the need for any active cooling system and making ‘meltdowns’ a physical impossibility. Further, other types of reactors, called “Fast Breeder” reactors can create more fuel from the waste products of the nuclear fission reaction, so much so that some physicists estimate that up to 100 times as much energy can be generated, meaning entire nations could be run on a handful of nuclear power plants.
Coal generated power kills thousands of people every year directly, and millions of people indirectly. It is far more dangerous, hazardous, and environmentally devastating than Nuclear power; generating essentially more than 300,000 times as much pollution as a comparable amount of energy generated from Nuclear sources does. If you are concerned about global warming from man made carbon dioxide, then Nuclear power is the only way to generate power without generating green houses gases. This is why world renowned environmentalist James Lovelock cites Nuclear power as one of the key solutions to global warming and why Greenpeace founding member Patrick Moore now says he was wrong about opposing nuclear power for the past 30 years and is now a nuclear power advocate.
Compared with every other form of wide scale energy production (hydro-electric, oil, coal) Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy creation yet used by man. So where is our Nuclear infrastructure? If Nuclear power makes so much more sense, why does it not supply the majority of our energy? Instead we are dependant on Coal and imported Oil supplies from brutally oppressive and murderous terrorist sponsoring regimes all over the world, who sustain their oppression only from their global oil proceeds. The reason is that an irrational and unscientific fear of Nuclear power was promulgated by a handful of influential public figures. While a healthy scientific assessment of things is always valid, this has gone overboard and has, literally, scared millions of people to death about nuclear power. We have been scared so much with the unscientific claims of potential deaths caused by nuclear power that it has been illegal to build any new nuclear power plants in this nation since the Carter administration, all the while millions of people worldwide choke on the soot, heavy metals, and radioactive ash pumped into the air because of the scare mongering of unscientific environmentalists, who while hyping up invalid fears of the environmental impact of nuclear plants are ignoring the millions of deaths caused by the inhalation from the combustion products of fossil fuels.
We need to wake up and smell the collective radioactive ash. Nuclear power is safe, reliable, and will free the western world from the tyrannical noose of the murderously brutal middle east. A few well guarded breeder reactor plants could provide a majority of the worlds power. These same plants could electrolyze water to provide clean drinking water and hydrogen as fuel for a 'hydrogen economy' or, at least, create synthetic fuels through sabatier cells and use existing hydrocarbon infrastructures but not contribute to greenhouse gas increases, as the sabatier cell needs CO2 from the atmosphere. Implementing such at system until fusion becomes viable is the only real, viable, practical method of maintaining exceptional standards of living and a healthy environment. Reducing the global standard of living is not an option, as many millions in third world countries need energy, and lots of it, to get out of poverty. Even small increases in the costs of energy will have devastating impacts on the poverty stricken 3rd world which depends on cheap food generated from the energy intensive agricultural industry to survive The ideological intellectually dishonest endorsement of fossil fuels over nuclear power leads to millions of deaths every year, continues to perpetuate global instability through propping up murderous regimes, and destroys the environment through a flagrant un scientific hysteria. Nuclear power is clean, safe, and cheap.
Many people consider Uranium and subsequently nuclear power to be worse, over all, than coal or other fossil fuels. They claim, for various reasons, including mining, refining, storage, and disposal; that nuclear power is worse than coal, but the reality is that in all areas Uranium and Fission power far outshine coal power.
Lets take a quick look at the Energy Density of these sources of energy to start with.
Coal - ~6,150 kilowatt-hours (kWh)/ton
Uranium – 2,000,000,000 kWh/ton
Uranium, Fast Breeder reactors (up to 100x more) - 200,000,000,000 kWh/ton
Energy density is measured in power divided by mass of a material, so when we say that Coal has 6,150 Kilowatt-hours per ton, it means that one ton of coal will produce 6,150 kW for one hour, or 615 kW for 10 hours, etc. To compare this with a typical piece of home equipment, say a television, a television might consume 500W of power when in operation, if run for one hour that would be 500 watt – hours. Two televisions would then be 1 kilowatt – hour. So one ton of coal would power 12,300 televisions for 1 hour. Current energy costs (which you can read in your electric bill) hover around 10 – 15 cents per kilowatt hour.
As noted above, Uranium, per ton, produces more than 300,000 times the amount of energy that coal does. What, exactly, makes a material with 300,000 times as much energy as coal 'uneconomical' then? Is uranium 300,000 times more difficult to mine and obtain? 300,000 times more expensive to dispose of? Will it kill 300,000 times more people? The answer, of course, even combining all the complexities of nuclear power, is a resounding NO. Lets compare Uranium Fission, which generates about 15% of US power, with Coal generated power, which generated 80% of the US’s power.
Claim: Coal poses almost no hazard for human health, except when swallowed or hit on the head and therefore doesn't have to be kept safe and secured at all times.-
Certainly NOT true, the atmospheric irritants emitted by the combustion of coal and their effects include:
- Sulphur dioxide (SO2) - respiratory disorders, impaired breathing
- Nitrous oxide (NOx) - respiratory disorders, infections, pulmonary diseases
- Carbon monoxide (CO) - fatal angina, various other effects
- Ozone (O3) - respiratory disorders, impaired breathing, asthma, edema
- Particulate matter (PM10) - various toxic particle (organic matter, carbon, mineral dusts, metal oxides and sulphates and nitrate salts) effects, main
mortality factor due to fossil fuels
- Toxic substances, heavy metals - specific substance effects
All of these combustion products of fossil fuels are estimated by the WHO in its 1997 report on sustainable development, to account for 6% of the total 50 million annual global deaths. That's approximately 3 million deaths *every year* from atmospheric pollutants released from the combustion of fossil fuels. These are real people dying painful deaths every year. 3 million. Outdoor air pollution in the U.S. due to particulate pollution alone was estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1997 to cause at least 20,000 premature deaths each year. 3rd world countries, many of which cook on wood or dung fired stoves, fare much worse, and are some of the places that would benefit most from cheap electricity generated by a full fledged global nuclear infrastructure.
Claim: Coal is not suitable for deadly weapons and therefore of no value for villains of any kind, including despotic dictators -
True of course, coal has little intrinsic value to oppressive regimes, unlike Nuclear power which is a stepping stone to nuclear weapons. If 'suitability for deadly weapons' was the only consideration of what type of power source should be utilized, you could make a strong case against nuclear and for coal. However, other factors include a) cost b) number of people it kills every year d) monopolistic domination potentials etc. etc. Because Uranium fission holds 300,000 times as much energy, it is far more cost effective, makes electricity available to more people at less of a cost, and consequently directly raises their standards of living. Coal kills many people per year, not only in frequent large accidents (which happen most often in mines) but slowly and spread out over the globe. Coal and oil, because they are present in small areas in dense qualities and require little technology to utilize, easily facilitate the rise to power of oppressive regimes. Most of the worlds Oil is in the middle east, where the exports have financially supported the oppressive rulers of that region, every single one of which is a brutal oppressive dictatorship or theocracy. Luckily for many people the worlds largest coal deposits happened to be in the lands that were free-er earlier on, in the UK and in the US. The US alone has a coal field that is the size of the UK. However the vast coal fields in Europe fueled the Nazi war machine. So while it is more difficult for an individual to utilize any aspect of coal as a weapon, it’s extraordinarily easy for governments to do so, and history shows us that governments have killed far more people than individual terrorists and even wars have
Claim: The by-products of coal can be put back without any hazard for the biosphere. Coal ashes are not dangerous and does not need to be kept off our biosphere for thousands of years.-
Again, certainly NOT true. Billions of tons of harmful chemicals and radioactive uranium are dumped into the air during the process of burning coal, even in highly advanced modern coal burning plants. Additionally other heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, lead, mercury, nickel and vanadium are present in coal ash. In fact living near a coal burning power plant, even a modern hi tech one, is far more hazardous to your health than living near a nuclear power plant. The background radiation levels are always higher around coal plants than nuclear plants specifically because coal plants are allowed to dump their waste into the air, which, again, includes radioactive uranium ash. In fact a typical coal plant actually chemically burns and releases into the air more Uranium than is used in a comparable nuclear reactor, as fuel. Indeed, you could put a nuclear reactor on the smokestack of a coal plant and generate more power than the was generated from the coal. Remember, one pound of Uranium generates as much energy as more than 300,000 pounds of coal.
Claim: Even a very large malfunction in a coal fired power plant could not devastate a large area, cost millions of lives and billions of Euros (please read about the effects of Tschernobyl '86 in FSU and Europe).
Anti Nuclear advocates love to point to Chernobyl as an example of the dangers posed by nuclear reactors. However Chernobyl killed 31 people when a pressurized steam channel blew (which was not even a chemical explosion, let alone a nuclear one) and released approx 6% of the radioactive contents of the reactor. The accident resulted in 31 short term deaths, with 28 due to extremely high radiation exposures. Additionally, some 200,000 clean up workers received average exposures of twice the yearly permitted, and a few thousand more received ten times the permitted yearly doses. Of the 116,000 nearby residents evacuated, 95% received less than the average of the fist group of cleanup workers. A remaining 400,000 received significantly less than that. For the 1,116,000 total affected out of the workers, evacuees, and nearby residents, the predicted long term radiation induced cancer deaths and normally non-fatal thyroid cancers are projected to be some 3,500. Mostly later in life. A terrible toll of course, but this is about how many people are killed from the combustion products of fossil fuels every 12 hours. Most of these deaths from the Chernobyl incident could have been avoided had the Soviet government acknowledged the nuclear nature of the accident and administered the iodide pills it had all ready stockpiled for just such an incident. Additionally, this reactor would have never been built, licensed, or operated in any country that actually cared about its people, unlike the Soviet Union, which had a long track record of sacrificing millions for 'the good of the state'.
In addition to the estimated 3 million annual deaths from atmospheric pollutants many people are killed from coal mining explosions, natural gas explosions, and obviously the many wars fought over and related to Oil, which in fact runs most of the world. Here are some of the worst coal mining disasters.
- Liaoning mine disaster, Fuxin, People's Republic of China (February 14, 2005), 210 reported killed.
- Sunshine Mine disaster, Kellogg, Idaho, United States, 91 killed (May, 1972)
- Buffalo Creek flood, Logan County, West Virginia, United States, 125 killed (February 26, 1972)
- Mina de Barroterán Coal Mine disaster, Coahuila, Mexico, (March 31, 1969), 176 died. Mexico's second worst coal mine disaster.
- Luisenthal Mine disaster (near Völklingen), Germany (February 7, 1962), 299 killed
- Marcinelle, Belgium, 262 killed (August 8, 1956)
- Gresford, Wrexham, 266 killed (September 1934)
- Hillcrest mine disaster, Hillcrest, Alberta, Canada, 189 killed (June 19, 1914). Canada's worst mine disaster
- Courrières mine disaster, Courrière, France, 1099 killed (March, 1906)
- Hanna, Wyoming, United States, Union Pacific Coal Company, Mine No. 1, 234 killed (June 30, 1903)
See a full list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters#Mining_disasters
Consider also
- Dam failures and overtopping have caused thousands of deaths and massive disruption in social and economic activities with the displacement of entire towns - the Varont dam overtopping in Italy and dam failures in Gujarat and Orissa in India are three such examples, each with several thousand fatalities.
- Explosions and major fires in the oil and gas industry have involved both occupational and public fatalities and injuries. A pipeline gas leak
explosion in the Urals involved 500 fatalities.
- There are estimated to be a few hundred CO related deaths every year in the US due to faulty or inefficient fossil fuel burning home heating systems.
At this point, one might suggest that while nuclear energy production is relatively the safest form of energy, the weapons made from nuclear power have killed 100,000’s of thousands. True enough, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts killed an estimated 400,000 people. But in considering these deaths as a consequence of nuclear power, we must all consider the deaths that came from the utilization of fossil fuels. How many people have been killed by conventional explosives in all wars in all of history? How many have been killed by the military industrial segments of brutal nations that run on these fossil fuels? The Japanese invasion of Manchuria, very obviously powered by Oil, Coal, and gunpowder, saw 400,000 people killed in the infamous “Rape of Nanking” alone. In fact, all throughout history we have seen a continual rise in the number of people killed in war, both as an absolute and as a percentage of the population, until 1945, when the number plummeted. Even after the use of nuclear weapons in war, and many subsequent brutal wars, the number of war dead still continues to fall. Fortunately, Nuclear weapons have had the effect of taming wars so far.
Claim: The byproducts of Nuclear power can be used for Terrorism
Indeed, and many many things can be used for Terrorism. Oil Wells, for instance, can be set ablaze, burning self sufficiently for months or years with devastating environmental effects. A typical Liquefied Natural Gas tanker has the explosive capacity of a small nuclear bomb. How difficult does one really think it would be to detonate a single hulled tanker full of LNG which contains hundreds of thousands of tons of fuel? How many of these tankers sit unguarded in ports all over the world? Which is more rational to protect against terrorism, a few well designed and guarded nuclear power plants, which can even be moved underground, or tens of thousands of gigantic bombs in the form of gas lines, gas tanks, tankers, and fuel storage facilities? Nuclear plants generate so much power that an entire nations energy supply can come from a few dozen of them set in areas far from dense population centers and well guarded.
Consider that unused, uranium still sits in the earth undergoing fission anyway, producing radioactive elements and heat, which is part of what warms the internal parts of the earth. In fact, a host of still unexplained observations about the Earth has led some physicists to suggest the core of the earth is actually a giant nuclear fission reactor. The theory was a cover feature in Discover magazine in August 2002. http://www.discover.com/issues/aug-02/cover/
Additionally, many technological developments have occurred in nuclear reactor design, including ceramic coated uranium pellets, which keep the uranium spaced out far enough to generate a controlled amount of eat and which can not be melted by the temperatures produced, completely negating the need for any active cooling system and making ‘meltdowns’ a physical impossibility. Further, other types of reactors, called “Fast Breeder” reactors can create more fuel from the waste products of the nuclear fission reaction, so much so that some physicists estimate that up to 100 times as much energy can be generated, meaning entire nations could be run on a handful of nuclear power plants.
Coal generated power kills thousands of people every year directly, and millions of people indirectly. It is far more dangerous, hazardous, and environmentally devastating than Nuclear power; generating essentially more than 300,000 times as much pollution as a comparable amount of energy generated from Nuclear sources does. If you are concerned about global warming from man made carbon dioxide, then Nuclear power is the only way to generate power without generating green houses gases. This is why world renowned environmentalist James Lovelock cites Nuclear power as one of the key solutions to global warming and why Greenpeace founding member Patrick Moore now says he was wrong about opposing nuclear power for the past 30 years and is now a nuclear power advocate.
Compared with every other form of wide scale energy production (hydro-electric, oil, coal) Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy creation yet used by man. So where is our Nuclear infrastructure? If Nuclear power makes so much more sense, why does it not supply the majority of our energy? Instead we are dependant on Coal and imported Oil supplies from brutally oppressive and murderous terrorist sponsoring regimes all over the world, who sustain their oppression only from their global oil proceeds. The reason is that an irrational and unscientific fear of Nuclear power was promulgated by a handful of influential public figures. While a healthy scientific assessment of things is always valid, this has gone overboard and has, literally, scared millions of people to death about nuclear power. We have been scared so much with the unscientific claims of potential deaths caused by nuclear power that it has been illegal to build any new nuclear power plants in this nation since the Carter administration, all the while millions of people worldwide choke on the soot, heavy metals, and radioactive ash pumped into the air because of the scare mongering of unscientific environmentalists, who while hyping up invalid fears of the environmental impact of nuclear plants are ignoring the millions of deaths caused by the inhalation from the combustion products of fossil fuels.
We need to wake up and smell the collective radioactive ash. Nuclear power is safe, reliable, and will free the western world from the tyrannical noose of the murderously brutal middle east. A few well guarded breeder reactor plants could provide a majority of the worlds power. These same plants could electrolyze water to provide clean drinking water and hydrogen as fuel for a 'hydrogen economy' or, at least, create synthetic fuels through sabatier cells and use existing hydrocarbon infrastructures but not contribute to greenhouse gas increases, as the sabatier cell needs CO2 from the atmosphere. Implementing such at system until fusion becomes viable is the only real, viable, practical method of maintaining exceptional standards of living and a healthy environment. Reducing the global standard of living is not an option, as many millions in third world countries need energy, and lots of it, to get out of poverty. Even small increases in the costs of energy will have devastating impacts on the poverty stricken 3rd world which depends on cheap food generated from the energy intensive agricultural industry to survive The ideological intellectually dishonest endorsement of fossil fuels over nuclear power leads to millions of deaths every year, continues to perpetuate global instability through propping up murderous regimes, and destroys the environment through a flagrant un scientific hysteria. Nuclear power is clean, safe, and cheap.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Communism and Moral Ambiguity
Most people react with vile disdain when they see a Nazi flag, and rightly so. Nazism has killed 20 million people, an estimated 6 million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and physically deformed people intentionally in prison camps. However, how many people share the same disdain for Communism? Even though it has killed almost ten times as many people as Nazism did, it still it is looked on by most people in a favorable light, taught by history professors with an ‘unbiased account’, considered ‘good in theory’ (is Nazism ‘good in theory’?) and as of yet just incorrectly implemented.
Communism has killed 170 million people this century, according to Political Scientist, Nobel Peace Prize runner up and author of the most cited historical book, R.J Rummel. By 1950 alone that number was in the dozens of millions, many millions in China and may millions in the Soviet Union; so it was right to be very weary of it and any communist political officer of influence.
From R.J Rummels site -
For perspective on Mao's most bloody rule, all wars 1900-1987 cost in combat dead 34,021,000 -- including WWI and II, Vietnam, Korea, and the Mexican and Russian Revolutions. Mao alone murdered over twice as many as were killed in combat in all these wars. Think about that. One man. Only one man did that much killing. If anything should cause us to avoid anyone having such power at any cost, here it is.
Rational people in this nation were more than justified in attempting to route out communists from government positions. Cables and messages released after the fall of the Soviet Union, revealed that most of the people McCarthy accused of being communist spies actually were, including Alger Hiss. Communism is no laughing matter, as it's death toll attests. The tendency today is to A) completely downplay it's historical atrocities B) ridicule the individuals concern with it at the height of the Cold War (i.e. derogatory comments about "The Red Scare" "McArthyism" and the "Domino Theory" ) C) and laugh at how the Soviet Union fell without a single shot being fired. (never mind the millions of battle dead in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Korea, South America, etc)
In that regard I highly recommend checking out R.J. Rummels site, Power Kills, http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html which documents murders committed by governments, left and right. Governments have killed more than 4 times the number of people that have been killed in wars this century, and the overwhelming majority of those murders were committed by communist governments.
I am a great admirer of Ayn Rand, and when she was asked what her political position was, she stated "Anti-Communist" but then recanted, refusing to define herself with a negative. She did however testify as a friendly witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee, which though not affiliated with McCarthy directly, was an effort in the same theme.
But I cant re-iterate this part of the story as well as Kelley Ross from http://www.friesian.com/rand.htm
"Another of Rand's sins against the Left and still of current interest was her willingness to testify as a "friendly witness" in the 1947 hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) on Communist infiltration of Hollywood. Rand's only complaint was that they didn't let her testify enough. She was the only person at the hearings who had actually lived under Communism, indeed been a witness to the entire Russian Revolution and Civil War, and she wanted to explain how anti-capitalist messages were included in many mainstream Hollywood movies. It may not be remembered much now that Rand got her real start in America working in Hollywood, living for many years in the San Fernando Valley. This is still of current interest because, after many years of hard feelings, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in 1999 finally gave an Oscar to Elia Kazan, director of such classics as On the Waterfront (1954) -- which itself was about a man fighting with his conscience over whether to expose his gangster (i.e. Communist) friends. Kazan, after leaving the Communist Party, was willing to "name names" to HUAC in 1952.
While Communism failed and fell in the real world, in the make-believe world of Hollywood Communist propaganda succeeded quite nicely, and many people still believe that the HUAC investigations were "witch hunts" for non-existent enemies or well-meaning idealists. Well meaning idealists there were, but they were not the targets of the Committee. Instead, they became the "useful idiot" liberals, in Lenin's words, who whitewashed all the real Communists and their activities. The useful idiots are still at it, though since the 60's many of them, as anti-anti-Communists, have been all but indistinguishable from their Communist friends in Vietnam, Cuba, and Nicaragua. As it turned out, the easiest way to find the Communists in Hollywood was just to subpoena all the suspects. Almost everyone who then refused to testify or took the Fifth Amendment, it happened, actually were Party members (acting on Party orders) or fellow travelers, as we know now from many sources, including the Soviet archives that also reveal the Soviet funding and direction of the Communist Party USA and its activities in Hollywood. These were not idealists but willing agents of tyranny, murder, and crimes against humanity. Rand would have no more patience now with leftists whining about "McCarthyism" than she did in 1947 with the lying and dissimulating agents of the living mass murderer Josef Stalin."
You can read Rand's HUAC testimony here -
http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/texts/huac.htm
Given the massive amount of murders committed by Communist nations, their typical political tendency to undermine intellectually non-communist nations (the first phase of their typical plan, the last of which is typically targeted executions of intellectuals in opposition to them) and the fact that most of these people actually were communist spies, it is incredibly disingenuous to deride McCarthy and HUAC in the manner that is so common today.
Perhaps in my assessment of communism is an instance where my thinking is much more black and white than is typically espoused today, with communism viewed with much more forgiveness and diminished moral condemnation. I can certainly understand what might drive individuals to communism, especially in the ratty shit-holes and murderously oppressive right wing nationalist nations that spawned communism in many cases, even if it was with a lot of Soviet help; however in every case those far left governments killed many more then even the worst of the far right governments. While I certainly understand and empathizes with the struggles an individual must face in a situation like that, I have absolutely no tolerance for those who simply want to make slaves out of every free man on earth.
In one sad case often cited as part of the “Red Scare” Physicists and head of the Manhattan Project Robert J Oppenheimer was accused of being a communist spy and some former members of his team testified against him, such as Edward Teller. Oppenheimer was a very sad victim in this and I am a great admirer of him and in fact Teller as well, but his accusation and subsequent loss of security clearance shocked the scientific community. Yet there was indeed a spy at the Manhattan Project in the form of Klaus Fuchs, who handed over the plans for an atomic bomb to Henry Gold, who then handed them to the Rosenberg's. Many people claim that the information provided by Fuchs was vital in the Soviet's achievement of a nuclear bomb (although some claim it was of little use)
I suspect from discussions of communism I have had that to many people black and what thinking equates with absolutist assessments of things, like my consideration of communism as evil or wrong, while others might search through all of it for some good. But it is fallacious to assert that in all things or people there is some good, because it simultaneously asserts that in all people there must be some bad, and consequently that no matter how hard one tries to be good they could never attain that, and no matter how evil someone or something is, like Stalin, Mao, Hitler, or communism, it has some good in it. I have no doubt that Stalin was probably nice to his dog, and that a few peasants were helped out by communism, but the overwhelming majority of horrific pain and suffering that communism caused could never even remotely be blemished by whatever miniscule good that came from it.
Many people strive to find value in divergent ideas and try to examine them from every possible angle, perspective, and scale, but to any value system based on the life of an individual, communism can have *no value* whatsoever. Communism is the absolute logical extension of anti-life, anti-human, anti-mind, anti-individual, and anti-progress. My love of books and ideas would have gotten me immediately purged, hung, smashed, or sent off to a gulag in very nearly every single communist nation.
[Tan Samay's] pupils hanged him. A noose was passed around his neck; then the rope was passed over the branch of a tree. Half a dozen children between eight and ten years old held the loose end of the rope, pulling it sharply three or four times, dropping it in between. All the while they were shouting, "Unfit teacher! Unfit teacher!" until Tan Samay was dead. The worst was that the children took obvious pleasure in killing.
----A Khmer Rouge execution – From R.J. Rummel’s “Power Kills” site
Simply having books *at all* was a death sentence to most people in Cambodia and in China. My love of ideas, and of self expression, would have gotten me, and probably my family, rapidly killed in these countries, if this is not a living objective embodiment of evil where *thinking* is a crime punishable by death *then what is?*
In the case of communism, gray or non-linear thinking seems to be a desire to avoid making moral judgments. When we consider again Nazism, there is no question about it’s moral stature. Can the same people that say they can find some good in communism legitimately say that can find no good in Nazism? Having read a great book on Hitler’s rise to power I can understand how individuals in pre-Nazi Germany could have felt oppressed and overburdened by the allies of WWI, and how these people who just wanted to have a decent life for themselves could end up promulgating on of the most murderous regimes in history. I also understand how with only minor changes our modern professors ‘non partisan’ lectures on the cold war they would read just like modern neo-nazi propaganda blaming the push of Germany into war on a hyper vigilant anti-German Europe and the Jews. It’s all context, and from the perspective of the German people leading up to 1935 it was not their fault! But they could not have done that without deliberately avoiding passing moral judgments on their own system, without deliberately dehumanizing their victims or opponents, or avoiding at all possible costs making moral assessments. There is no possible way a German citizen could have honestly morally defended Nazi policies so the only way for this rise to power to occur was to abdicate moral absolutism to vagueness, moral relativism, and evasion. The same is absolutely true of communism, which abdicates life, mind, and self to the collective and the state.
In cases where it is a life and death issue, one *must* pass moral judgment, moral indifference or agnosticism rewards immorality, just as absolute pacifism actually rewards violent and oppressive regimes by easily succumbing to their initiations of force. It is depraved indifference.
It’s always good to be vigilantly skeptical of any kind of dichotomous us vs. them thinking. The vast majority of it is baseless and arbitrary. But just because right and wrong / good and evil / and us vs. them has been hijacked by every ethnicity, nationality, special interest group, and collectivist ideal, does not mean that the concepts of right and wrong and us vs. them are invalid. There are certain fundamentals of human standards by which every culture and individual action must be judged against, and that is the respect of life and individuality. Non judgment is the height of moral relativism and means anything goes, whether it is simply a disingenuous white lie or an attempted genocide.
Yes, most forms of partisanship are worthless and arbitrary, but that does not mean that holding oneself and others to certain moral ideals and ethical basics is wrong Many African cultures mutilate young women’s genitalia is this right or wrong? Many Islamic cultures stone adulterers to death, is this right or wrong? Many traditionalist Chinese cultures used to bind young women’s feet was this right or wrong? Many western Christian nations still mutilate male genitalia at birth is this right or wrong?
Witness the indifference today to the brutal oppression of Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. Witness the callous disregard for genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and today in Darfur. Witness the left, our alleged defenders of human rights, and their complete and utter indifference in most cases, or worst, opposition to, the removal of one of the most brutal dictators of our time who slaughtered gay men and women and their families, executed dissidents, and held the world hostage. Witness that same callous disregard for the deaths and flagrant violation of every human right that permeates the dictatorships and theocracies in the Arab sea of tyranny in the middle east, and that same indifference to the tens of millions of deaths from Malaria the modern environmentalism movement has spawned by banning DDT. These are the fruits of moral relativism.
There are only two ways to completely end partisanship; to abolish all ideals, ethics, and moral codes which generate an us for them attitude (the liberal multi-culturalist moral relativist approach) or to abolish one side of the us vs. them conflict. In all these scenarios, the smallest minority are the defenders of the fundamental rights of sentient beings, the advocates of objective reality, those who base ethics on life. To deny any concept of moral foundation is to side indirectly and implicitly with the most brutal and murderous side of the us vs. them conflict. One may ask “when does this partisanship stop, when everyone embraces one ideology?” Yes, it stops when they all embrace fundamental rights, when all the other ideologies stop murdering and enslaving people who disagree with them. When they all accept, as a component and a foundation of their ideology, a respect for individualism, for life, and for freedom. Either that or it stops when one accepts any murder, oppression, slavery or assault as just someone else’s culture and equally valid. Where do you stand?
We are never hesitant in defending our right to self, individuality, and life, but are seemingly always dismissive of everyone else’s to such an extent that we are hesitant to morally condemn the most anti-self, anti-individuality, and anti-life ideology ever existed on this planet. I have no doubt that nearly every single one of those 170 million people loved their lives as much as I do mine, and you do yours, where is our compassion for them? Our vigilant defense of our own self and individuality is nothing less than an extremely dogmatic ideological stand, and in this we are the essence of black and white. We must presume axiomatically that everyone deserves that same amount of respect and thus rightly and justly morally condemn those ideologies which murder, enslave, and imprison people for nothing more than living, breathing, and thinking.
I can understand people’s hesitance to make any absolute moral declarations, but just because vile anti-individualist brain washing cults hi jack absolutism morality with their own morally arbitrary pronouncements doesn’t mean that a moral foundation in objective reality, life, and individuality is wrong, or that morally condemning those ideologies opposed to those things is wrong.
I am Pro-free private life, pro-individualism, pro-science, pro-reason, pro-free speech, pro-liberal democracy, pro-free economic life, pro-capitalist, pro-west, etc and I apply these values directly too all people and accept the logical consequences of my deepest values, wholly and willingly.
Most people react with vile disdain when they see a Nazi flag, and rightly so. Nazism has killed 20 million people, an estimated 6 million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and physically deformed people intentionally in prison camps. However, how many people share the same disdain for Communism? Even though it has killed almost ten times as many people as Nazism did, it still it is looked on by most people in a favorable light, taught by history professors with an ‘unbiased account’, considered ‘good in theory’ (is Nazism ‘good in theory’?) and as of yet just incorrectly implemented.
Communism has killed 170 million people this century, according to Political Scientist, Nobel Peace Prize runner up and author of the most cited historical book, R.J Rummel. By 1950 alone that number was in the dozens of millions, many millions in China and may millions in the Soviet Union; so it was right to be very weary of it and any communist political officer of influence.
From R.J Rummels site -
For perspective on Mao's most bloody rule, all wars 1900-1987 cost in combat dead 34,021,000 -- including WWI and II, Vietnam, Korea, and the Mexican and Russian Revolutions. Mao alone murdered over twice as many as were killed in combat in all these wars. Think about that. One man. Only one man did that much killing. If anything should cause us to avoid anyone having such power at any cost, here it is.
Rational people in this nation were more than justified in attempting to route out communists from government positions. Cables and messages released after the fall of the Soviet Union, revealed that most of the people McCarthy accused of being communist spies actually were, including Alger Hiss. Communism is no laughing matter, as it's death toll attests. The tendency today is to A) completely downplay it's historical atrocities B) ridicule the individuals concern with it at the height of the Cold War (i.e. derogatory comments about "The Red Scare" "McArthyism" and the "Domino Theory" ) C) and laugh at how the Soviet Union fell without a single shot being fired. (never mind the millions of battle dead in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Korea, South America, etc)
In that regard I highly recommend checking out R.J. Rummels site, Power Kills, http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html which documents murders committed by governments, left and right. Governments have killed more than 4 times the number of people that have been killed in wars this century, and the overwhelming majority of those murders were committed by communist governments.
I am a great admirer of Ayn Rand, and when she was asked what her political position was, she stated "Anti-Communist" but then recanted, refusing to define herself with a negative. She did however testify as a friendly witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee, which though not affiliated with McCarthy directly, was an effort in the same theme.
But I cant re-iterate this part of the story as well as Kelley Ross from http://www.friesian.com/rand.htm
"Another of Rand's sins against the Left and still of current interest was her willingness to testify as a "friendly witness" in the 1947 hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) on Communist infiltration of Hollywood. Rand's only complaint was that they didn't let her testify enough. She was the only person at the hearings who had actually lived under Communism, indeed been a witness to the entire Russian Revolution and Civil War, and she wanted to explain how anti-capitalist messages were included in many mainstream Hollywood movies. It may not be remembered much now that Rand got her real start in America working in Hollywood, living for many years in the San Fernando Valley. This is still of current interest because, after many years of hard feelings, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in 1999 finally gave an Oscar to Elia Kazan, director of such classics as On the Waterfront (1954) -- which itself was about a man fighting with his conscience over whether to expose his gangster (i.e. Communist) friends. Kazan, after leaving the Communist Party, was willing to "name names" to HUAC in 1952.
While Communism failed and fell in the real world, in the make-believe world of Hollywood Communist propaganda succeeded quite nicely, and many people still believe that the HUAC investigations were "witch hunts" for non-existent enemies or well-meaning idealists. Well meaning idealists there were, but they were not the targets of the Committee. Instead, they became the "useful idiot" liberals, in Lenin's words, who whitewashed all the real Communists and their activities. The useful idiots are still at it, though since the 60's many of them, as anti-anti-Communists, have been all but indistinguishable from their Communist friends in Vietnam, Cuba, and Nicaragua. As it turned out, the easiest way to find the Communists in Hollywood was just to subpoena all the suspects. Almost everyone who then refused to testify or took the Fifth Amendment, it happened, actually were Party members (acting on Party orders) or fellow travelers, as we know now from many sources, including the Soviet archives that also reveal the Soviet funding and direction of the Communist Party USA and its activities in Hollywood. These were not idealists but willing agents of tyranny, murder, and crimes against humanity. Rand would have no more patience now with leftists whining about "McCarthyism" than she did in 1947 with the lying and dissimulating agents of the living mass murderer Josef Stalin."
You can read Rand's HUAC testimony here -
http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/texts/huac.htm
Given the massive amount of murders committed by Communist nations, their typical political tendency to undermine intellectually non-communist nations (the first phase of their typical plan, the last of which is typically targeted executions of intellectuals in opposition to them) and the fact that most of these people actually were communist spies, it is incredibly disingenuous to deride McCarthy and HUAC in the manner that is so common today.
Perhaps in my assessment of communism is an instance where my thinking is much more black and white than is typically espoused today, with communism viewed with much more forgiveness and diminished moral condemnation. I can certainly understand what might drive individuals to communism, especially in the ratty shit-holes and murderously oppressive right wing nationalist nations that spawned communism in many cases, even if it was with a lot of Soviet help; however in every case those far left governments killed many more then even the worst of the far right governments. While I certainly understand and empathizes with the struggles an individual must face in a situation like that, I have absolutely no tolerance for those who simply want to make slaves out of every free man on earth.
In one sad case often cited as part of the “Red Scare” Physicists and head of the Manhattan Project Robert J Oppenheimer was accused of being a communist spy and some former members of his team testified against him, such as Edward Teller. Oppenheimer was a very sad victim in this and I am a great admirer of him and in fact Teller as well, but his accusation and subsequent loss of security clearance shocked the scientific community. Yet there was indeed a spy at the Manhattan Project in the form of Klaus Fuchs, who handed over the plans for an atomic bomb to Henry Gold, who then handed them to the Rosenberg's. Many people claim that the information provided by Fuchs was vital in the Soviet's achievement of a nuclear bomb (although some claim it was of little use)
I suspect from discussions of communism I have had that to many people black and what thinking equates with absolutist assessments of things, like my consideration of communism as evil or wrong, while others might search through all of it for some good. But it is fallacious to assert that in all things or people there is some good, because it simultaneously asserts that in all people there must be some bad, and consequently that no matter how hard one tries to be good they could never attain that, and no matter how evil someone or something is, like Stalin, Mao, Hitler, or communism, it has some good in it. I have no doubt that Stalin was probably nice to his dog, and that a few peasants were helped out by communism, but the overwhelming majority of horrific pain and suffering that communism caused could never even remotely be blemished by whatever miniscule good that came from it.
Many people strive to find value in divergent ideas and try to examine them from every possible angle, perspective, and scale, but to any value system based on the life of an individual, communism can have *no value* whatsoever. Communism is the absolute logical extension of anti-life, anti-human, anti-mind, anti-individual, and anti-progress. My love of books and ideas would have gotten me immediately purged, hung, smashed, or sent off to a gulag in very nearly every single communist nation.
[Tan Samay's] pupils hanged him. A noose was passed around his neck; then the rope was passed over the branch of a tree. Half a dozen children between eight and ten years old held the loose end of the rope, pulling it sharply three or four times, dropping it in between. All the while they were shouting, "Unfit teacher! Unfit teacher!" until Tan Samay was dead. The worst was that the children took obvious pleasure in killing.
----A Khmer Rouge execution – From R.J. Rummel’s “Power Kills” site
Simply having books *at all* was a death sentence to most people in Cambodia and in China. My love of ideas, and of self expression, would have gotten me, and probably my family, rapidly killed in these countries, if this is not a living objective embodiment of evil where *thinking* is a crime punishable by death *then what is?*
In the case of communism, gray or non-linear thinking seems to be a desire to avoid making moral judgments. When we consider again Nazism, there is no question about it’s moral stature. Can the same people that say they can find some good in communism legitimately say that can find no good in Nazism? Having read a great book on Hitler’s rise to power I can understand how individuals in pre-Nazi Germany could have felt oppressed and overburdened by the allies of WWI, and how these people who just wanted to have a decent life for themselves could end up promulgating on of the most murderous regimes in history. I also understand how with only minor changes our modern professors ‘non partisan’ lectures on the cold war they would read just like modern neo-nazi propaganda blaming the push of Germany into war on a hyper vigilant anti-German Europe and the Jews. It’s all context, and from the perspective of the German people leading up to 1935 it was not their fault! But they could not have done that without deliberately avoiding passing moral judgments on their own system, without deliberately dehumanizing their victims or opponents, or avoiding at all possible costs making moral assessments. There is no possible way a German citizen could have honestly morally defended Nazi policies so the only way for this rise to power to occur was to abdicate moral absolutism to vagueness, moral relativism, and evasion. The same is absolutely true of communism, which abdicates life, mind, and self to the collective and the state.
In cases where it is a life and death issue, one *must* pass moral judgment, moral indifference or agnosticism rewards immorality, just as absolute pacifism actually rewards violent and oppressive regimes by easily succumbing to their initiations of force. It is depraved indifference.
It’s always good to be vigilantly skeptical of any kind of dichotomous us vs. them thinking. The vast majority of it is baseless and arbitrary. But just because right and wrong / good and evil / and us vs. them has been hijacked by every ethnicity, nationality, special interest group, and collectivist ideal, does not mean that the concepts of right and wrong and us vs. them are invalid. There are certain fundamentals of human standards by which every culture and individual action must be judged against, and that is the respect of life and individuality. Non judgment is the height of moral relativism and means anything goes, whether it is simply a disingenuous white lie or an attempted genocide.
Yes, most forms of partisanship are worthless and arbitrary, but that does not mean that holding oneself and others to certain moral ideals and ethical basics is wrong Many African cultures mutilate young women’s genitalia is this right or wrong? Many Islamic cultures stone adulterers to death, is this right or wrong? Many traditionalist Chinese cultures used to bind young women’s feet was this right or wrong? Many western Christian nations still mutilate male genitalia at birth is this right or wrong?
Witness the indifference today to the brutal oppression of Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. Witness the callous disregard for genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and today in Darfur. Witness the left, our alleged defenders of human rights, and their complete and utter indifference in most cases, or worst, opposition to, the removal of one of the most brutal dictators of our time who slaughtered gay men and women and their families, executed dissidents, and held the world hostage. Witness that same callous disregard for the deaths and flagrant violation of every human right that permeates the dictatorships and theocracies in the Arab sea of tyranny in the middle east, and that same indifference to the tens of millions of deaths from Malaria the modern environmentalism movement has spawned by banning DDT. These are the fruits of moral relativism.
There are only two ways to completely end partisanship; to abolish all ideals, ethics, and moral codes which generate an us for them attitude (the liberal multi-culturalist moral relativist approach) or to abolish one side of the us vs. them conflict. In all these scenarios, the smallest minority are the defenders of the fundamental rights of sentient beings, the advocates of objective reality, those who base ethics on life. To deny any concept of moral foundation is to side indirectly and implicitly with the most brutal and murderous side of the us vs. them conflict. One may ask “when does this partisanship stop, when everyone embraces one ideology?” Yes, it stops when they all embrace fundamental rights, when all the other ideologies stop murdering and enslaving people who disagree with them. When they all accept, as a component and a foundation of their ideology, a respect for individualism, for life, and for freedom. Either that or it stops when one accepts any murder, oppression, slavery or assault as just someone else’s culture and equally valid. Where do you stand?
We are never hesitant in defending our right to self, individuality, and life, but are seemingly always dismissive of everyone else’s to such an extent that we are hesitant to morally condemn the most anti-self, anti-individuality, and anti-life ideology ever existed on this planet. I have no doubt that nearly every single one of those 170 million people loved their lives as much as I do mine, and you do yours, where is our compassion for them? Our vigilant defense of our own self and individuality is nothing less than an extremely dogmatic ideological stand, and in this we are the essence of black and white. We must presume axiomatically that everyone deserves that same amount of respect and thus rightly and justly morally condemn those ideologies which murder, enslave, and imprison people for nothing more than living, breathing, and thinking.
I can understand people’s hesitance to make any absolute moral declarations, but just because vile anti-individualist brain washing cults hi jack absolutism morality with their own morally arbitrary pronouncements doesn’t mean that a moral foundation in objective reality, life, and individuality is wrong, or that morally condemning those ideologies opposed to those things is wrong.
I am Pro-free private life, pro-individualism, pro-science, pro-reason, pro-free speech, pro-liberal democracy, pro-free economic life, pro-capitalist, pro-west, etc and I apply these values directly too all people and accept the logical consequences of my deepest values, wholly and willingly.
On Different kinds of Freedom
In a conversation with an Anarchist I was told the following:
“Just because someone is taking the free will of others, doesn't mean, in my opinion, that I have the right to take their free will (life).”
And
“The use of force to stop oppression is the same thing as the use of force to oppress. It is the will taking of another person's will through sheer force.”
Freedom is not the ‘right to do anything one wants’ which is what his statement suggests. If you find anyone who holds this as their conception of freedom I would suggest you stay the hell away, as they are indicating that they have absolutely no moral or ethical code what so ever. This conception of freedom suggests that any infringements of any actions of anyone for any reason is a violation of freedom. But it is a ‘violation’ of freedom if you prevent someone from killing you? You are, after all, stifling his free will. This mentalities suggest self defense is in fact an oppression of your attacker. Similarly, is it a violation of ‘freedom’ to stop someone from killing another person? When rational men, the founding fathers, and your everyday person speak of Freedom they are not speaking of it in this esoteric existentialist absolutist sense (ie the ultimate ability to do whatever you want to whomever you want) this is not “freedom” in the philosophical sense, but freedom in only the metaphysical sense. Any society based on such a thing would be nothing more than murderous anarchy, where whomever has the power can kill whomever he wants, that is his free will, after all, to choose to do so and it is wrong for you to choose to take his free will away, lest you would be oppressing him, according to this anarchist. Such a worldview is murderously incompetent and dangerous.
Clearly our use of the word freedom has a moral and ethical connotation to it, while this persons is purely a physical description of impediments on actions, *any* actions, even if it is to kill another human. That is not ‘freedom’, and no man is ‘free’ to kill another for whatever whim happens to strike his fancy. Philosophical freedom begins where your ‘freedom from restrictions of actions’ in one person begins to interfere with another. That is, when my freedom of will and action (a desire to stay alive) contradicts your freedom of will and action (to kill me) then this is where the ethical distinction of freedom is required. This is were politics, which ideally relates to the interaction of men, comes into play. Consider the difference between being bound by chains and being bound by the law of gravity, and that this anarchists idea draws no freedom draws no distinction between the two. This is an inherent problem with the English language, which uses the word ‘free’ to mean many different things. Consider the line idiotic line “they call this a free country then why does it cost so much to live” (from some dumb popular song) and then consider a similar statement which mixes the definitions of freedom in the exact same manner as that song “Sure I want black people to be free, everyone should get one!” Free from cost Is NOT the same thing as Free from political oppression. Greek language, for instance, uses a completely different word for ethical and political freedom, freedom of movement and actions, and freedom as in without expense, as does Vietnamese. Unfortunately English muddles the words and definitions up, and consequently causes some philosophical confusion among angst filled anarchists.
Political and ethical and objectivist freedom is the restriction of the initiation of force on others. Self defense is proper and just, and one should be militant about defending their selves and their freedoms, and self defense is a restriction on the initiation of force. In this way you also can not force freedom on people (as commentators on the Iraq War love to assert) you can only prevent others from restricting the freedoms of other people with force. This is the proper function of the military and police.
The fact that some anarchists might draw no distinction between these two conceptions of freedom is no doubt the source of their disagreement with minarchist libertarianism and Objectivism. It is also, with no doubt in my mind, a dangerous and disgusting philosophical position which simultaneously justifies mass murder for any reason anywhere anytime, justifies complete inaction in the face of any injustice perpetrated upon other beings in the world, and objects to the concept of protecting rights.
In a conversation with an Anarchist I was told the following:
“Just because someone is taking the free will of others, doesn't mean, in my opinion, that I have the right to take their free will (life).”
And
“The use of force to stop oppression is the same thing as the use of force to oppress. It is the will taking of another person's will through sheer force.”
Freedom is not the ‘right to do anything one wants’ which is what his statement suggests. If you find anyone who holds this as their conception of freedom I would suggest you stay the hell away, as they are indicating that they have absolutely no moral or ethical code what so ever. This conception of freedom suggests that any infringements of any actions of anyone for any reason is a violation of freedom. But it is a ‘violation’ of freedom if you prevent someone from killing you? You are, after all, stifling his free will. This mentalities suggest self defense is in fact an oppression of your attacker. Similarly, is it a violation of ‘freedom’ to stop someone from killing another person? When rational men, the founding fathers, and your everyday person speak of Freedom they are not speaking of it in this esoteric existentialist absolutist sense (ie the ultimate ability to do whatever you want to whomever you want) this is not “freedom” in the philosophical sense, but freedom in only the metaphysical sense. Any society based on such a thing would be nothing more than murderous anarchy, where whomever has the power can kill whomever he wants, that is his free will, after all, to choose to do so and it is wrong for you to choose to take his free will away, lest you would be oppressing him, according to this anarchist. Such a worldview is murderously incompetent and dangerous.
Clearly our use of the word freedom has a moral and ethical connotation to it, while this persons is purely a physical description of impediments on actions, *any* actions, even if it is to kill another human. That is not ‘freedom’, and no man is ‘free’ to kill another for whatever whim happens to strike his fancy. Philosophical freedom begins where your ‘freedom from restrictions of actions’ in one person begins to interfere with another. That is, when my freedom of will and action (a desire to stay alive) contradicts your freedom of will and action (to kill me) then this is where the ethical distinction of freedom is required. This is were politics, which ideally relates to the interaction of men, comes into play. Consider the difference between being bound by chains and being bound by the law of gravity, and that this anarchists idea draws no freedom draws no distinction between the two. This is an inherent problem with the English language, which uses the word ‘free’ to mean many different things. Consider the line idiotic line “they call this a free country then why does it cost so much to live” (from some dumb popular song) and then consider a similar statement which mixes the definitions of freedom in the exact same manner as that song “Sure I want black people to be free, everyone should get one!” Free from cost Is NOT the same thing as Free from political oppression. Greek language, for instance, uses a completely different word for ethical and political freedom, freedom of movement and actions, and freedom as in without expense, as does Vietnamese. Unfortunately English muddles the words and definitions up, and consequently causes some philosophical confusion among angst filled anarchists.
Political and ethical and objectivist freedom is the restriction of the initiation of force on others. Self defense is proper and just, and one should be militant about defending their selves and their freedoms, and self defense is a restriction on the initiation of force. In this way you also can not force freedom on people (as commentators on the Iraq War love to assert) you can only prevent others from restricting the freedoms of other people with force. This is the proper function of the military and police.
The fact that some anarchists might draw no distinction between these two conceptions of freedom is no doubt the source of their disagreement with minarchist libertarianism and Objectivism. It is also, with no doubt in my mind, a dangerous and disgusting philosophical position which simultaneously justifies mass murder for any reason anywhere anytime, justifies complete inaction in the face of any injustice perpetrated upon other beings in the world, and objects to the concept of protecting rights.
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