By Finian Cunningham

The US has become a psychotic superpower, high on paranoia induced by its own poisonous propaganda. This unstable, lawless rogue state, armed to the teeth and deluded by its own self-righteousness, poses the greatest risk to world security.

The Western public, in particular, should forget about all sorts of imagined evil enemies, and just focus on this one fact: the safety of the world and the future of mankind are being held hostage by the US government, its shadow agencies and the financial-military-industrial complex that it serves.

This week sees an ominous move towards the psychotic superpower being placed on a hair-trigger. According to the US-based Foreign Policy publication, the Pentagon is being advised by its own deluded people – the Defense Science Board – to create a doomsday retaliation force in the event of a «catastrophic cyber-attack».

The retaliation force is to be maintained as a separate entity from the conventional military structure. It would include B52 bombers with nuclear weapons that are ordered to strike on foreign enemies if the US government should «experience» a fatal cyber threat. Note the subjectivity here…

What makes this development disquieting is the self-fulfilling tendency. In recent months, American politicians and so-called news media have taken to accusing foreign states of launching computer virus attacks. China in particular has been singled out for allegedly carrying out hacking raids on American government and news media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

As with so many other recent secretive official US claims and decisions, the accusations of cyber attacks are not convincingly evidenced. Just like the Pentagon`s assassination drone program, the public is expected to accept the word of shadowy US government agencies about «imminent» foreign terrorism.

American claims of cyber warfare conducted by China, Russia and Iran seem unfounded and indeed betray a mindset that is hysterical, if not duplicitous. No doubt all governments conduct some level of computer spying and invasion as a modern technological extension of age-old espionage activity. But the claim made by the US that it is being subjected to an unprecedented wave of unilateral cyber attacks appears to be unhinged hysteria.

China in particular has denied any wrongdoing and in fact Beijing has produced data that purports to show that it is the one coming under massive cyber attack – from American sites. It is also conclusive that the US, along with its Israeli cat`s paw, has been sabotaging Iranian sites with the Stuxnet and Flame viruses.

The very real danger, therefore, is that the US is creating a cyber doomsday pretext to justify its long-held prerogative to launch war and destruction against any country that it so designates – regardless of fact or international law.

Whereas before, the US would have had to mount a lengthy, time and cost-consuming, politically tricky process of fabricating a cause for war, now the cyber trigger can be pulled in a secretive and efficacious manner.

Now, presumably, it would be so easy to set up a cyber Pearl Harbour incident or 9/11 type false flag to pin on any designated enemy. The lights go out in Washington for a few hours, social panic sets in with the help from the dutiful news media, and before you know it the B-52s are on their way to turn some alleged miscreant country back to the Stone Age. Stage then set for American-led capitalist neo-colonisation.

Since at least World War II, the genocidal propensity and practices of the US are proven, if not widely known, especially among its propagandized public.

The atomic holocaust of hundreds of thousands of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the beginning of the long shadow cast upon the world by this deranged superpower.

For a few decades, the crazed American giant could hide behind the veil of the «Cold War» against the Soviet Union, pretending to be the protector of the «free world». If that was true, then why since the Cold War ended more than 20 years ago has there not been peace on earth? Why have conflicts proliferated to the point that there is now a permanent state of war in the world? Former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan have melded into countless other US-led wars across Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

The «War on Terror» and its tacit invocation of «evil Islamists» have sought to replace the «Cold War» and its bogeymen, the «evil communists». But if we set aside these narratives, then the alternative makes compelling sense and accurate explanation of events.

That alternative is simply this: that the US is an imperialist warmonger whose appetite for war, plunder and hegemony is insatiable. If the US had no official enemy, it would have to invent one.

The Cold War narrative can be disabused easily by the simple contradictory fact, as already mentioned, that more than 22 years after the collapse of the «evil» Soviet Union the world is no less peaceful and perhaps even more racked by belligerence and conflict. The War on Terror narrative can likewise be dismissed by the fact that the «evil Islamists» supposedly being combated were created by US and British military intelligence along with Saudi money in Afghanistan during the 1980s and are currently being supported by the West to destabilize Libya and Syria and indirectly Mali.

So what we are left to deduce is a world that is continually being set at war by the US and its various surrogates. As the executive power in the global capitalist system, the US is the main protagonist in pursuing the objectives of the financial-military-industrial complex. These objectives include: subjugation of all nations – their workers, governments and industries, for the total economic and political domination by the global network of finance capitalism. In this function, of course, the US government is aided by its Western allies and the NATO military apparatus.

Any nation not completely toeing the imperialist line will be targeted for attack. They include Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. In the past, they included Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Grenada, Nicaragua, Chile and Panama. Presently, others include Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Mali undergoing attack operations.

The difference between covert and overt attack by the US hegemon is only a matter of degrees. The decades-long economic sanctions on Iran, the cyber sabotage of that country’s industries and infrastructure, the assassination of nuclear scientists, deployment of terrorist proxies such as the MEK, and the repeated threat of all-out war by the US and its Israeli surrogate, could all qualify Iran as already being subjected to war and not just a future target.

Likewise with Russia: the expansion of US missile systems around Russia’s borders is an act of incremental war. Likewise China: the American arming of Taiwan, relentless war gaming in the South China Sea and the stoking of territorial conflicts are all examples of where «politics is but war by other means».

What history shows us is that the modern world has been turned into a lawless shooting gallery under the unhinged misrule of the United States of America. That has always been so since at least the Second World War, with more than 60 wars having been waged by Washington during that period, and countless millions killed. For decades this truth has been obscured by propaganda – the Cold War, War on Terror etc – but now the appalling stark reality is unavoidably clear. The US is at war – against the entire world.

The latest move by the US ruling elite to give itself a thoroughly modern hair-trigger for its warmongering global plunder – the secret, unprovable cyber trigger – is the culmination of its psychotic depravity to rule the world.


Ain't Finian Cunningham right on target?

This just reminded me of an old song. Crazy Miranda
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I used to believe that man was basically good and the role of a good society was to better the lot of its people. Now I believe of the World that:

--- every prospect pleases and only man is vile!

and, of political systems, be they communist, capitalist, religously based, utopian or whatever:

A plague a' both (---should be all---) your houses!

Humankind is a terrible race and, regrettably, we're all part of it!

US: Psychotic Superpower on a Hair-trigger

You are playing right into their hands. What is more afearing than a psycho with a weapon ready to go off.
These guys like that kind of perception.

Terror is a long time practised form of warfare practised since the beginning of time.
It keeps the opposition guessing. So it never hurts to be percieved as a raving
psycho in a conflict. It causes hesitation.

Terror is a long time practised form of warfare practised since the beginning of time.
It keeps the opposition guessing. So it never hurts to be perceived as a raving
psycho in a conflict. It causes hesitation.

Yea! F the CC

@duncan_mk, I agree with you about most/all political systems but I disagree about individuals.

I think we get to choose whether to believe people are basically good or not and we tend to create a reality that reflects this belief. Taken to extremes, the belief that everyone is good leads one to believe that Anarchism is the ideal political system while the belief that everyone is evil leads to believing that Fascism is the ideal political system.

I strongly believe that people are inherently good but if you treat them like they are evil then they can start acting evil. Another problem is that almost all political systems concentrate power and this concentration of power causes hubris and corruption. It's not that everyone is bad, just everyone we put in positions of power!

I think human"civilization" is a very recent development on evolutionary timescales so humans have not evolved to function well in civilization. It's not that we are bad or evil, we are just poorly adapted to dealing with this new situation we created for ourselves.

I think that any functioning society relies entirely on people being basically good. We are so immersed in this basic goodness that we don't notice it just like a fish does not notice it is surrounded by water (in the same way a land creature would). Again, this goes back to evolution. The book Mutual Aid: A factor of Evolution was written over a hundred years ago. It was a counter to the burgeoning concept of social Darwinism (the poor deserve to be poor, etc). It systematically goes through a variety of animal species and a variety systems of human organization and it shows that as far as survival is concerned, mutual aid almost always trumps dog eat dog.

So I believe we have evolved to be"good" (help each other) but we have not evolved to deal with the concentrations of power found in (almost?) all modern civilizations. I also believe most of what is going inside of us and between us is subconscious/unconscious. People respond to how we treat them and how we perceive them even if no one involved is consciously aware of that communication. This is why, as far as human relationships are concerned, we do get to create our own realities (at least to a limited extent).

Another thing I've noticed is that if a group of people are exposed to the weather then the group as a whole tends to be happier and easier to get along with when the weather is favourable but they all tend to be more grumpy when the weather isn't pleasant. I think the weather has a small impact on each person but as they interact with others in the group during the day, these small impacts accumulate and eventually the mood of then entire group can rise and fall due to the weather much more than the mood of an isolated individual would.

This is a mechanism for how moods can be infectious. It is another reason why (at least to a limited extent) we tend to create our own reality in our relationships with others. If you choose to believe people are basically good and you treat people in your life this way then some of this gets reflected back to you. Likewise if you treat people around you as evil (or even just think they are evil and try to hide this thought) then that too will be reflected back to you. If you pay attention, you can see this happening in the people around you.

Hey Duncan_mk, this news just came in.


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@alanarchy & BitJam - My day is now officially made. Your responses are why the antiX-forum is the only one I hang around!

Your quite right BitJam, it has been a long cold winter - and, I guess, your right about individuals. In the UK the long hard winter started in 1979 with the arrival of Margeret Thatcher. There was a slight thaw under John Major, a false spring with Tony Blair (I'm ashamed, but I have to admit. I voted for him) and now we have this crew of pink & white, overfed, posh boys. It's like being ruled by Billy Bunter and his pals from St Cakes (or whatever the school they attended was).

And I sit in the pub (an activity I used to enjoy) and listen to the crap talked about immigrants, how they're all here sponging off the social services, native English people are disadvantaged by them, blah, bler, blah - my heart sinks within me.

Only mankind would be vain enough to believe that the force controlling the world - let alone the universe - could be a slightly improved version of himself or, indeed, that it would have any more interest in man as a species than it would have, say, in intestinal bacteria. I've put the Onion link out to my (fairly small) list of on-line contacts.

I'm sorry, BitJam, that my response to your carefully considered & worked through reply should be this rant. And I'm very sorry I have nothing to offer in reply to the excellent Onion link.

I am, however, very interested in the early church and, especially, Christian heresies - which were manifold. If I were an early Christian, I would espouse Pelagianism. Pelagius taught that it was not the following of the teachings of the Church that led to heaven but the leading of a good life. Anyone who led a good life (by which he meant, I guess, one in conformity with the teachings of Christ) would be welcomed through the gates whether they were Christian or not. Needless to say, the Church soon put a stop to that nonsense!

dmk

I thought Billy Bunter went to Greyfriars. __{{emoticon}}__

As you liked the Onion article, how about"We are the other people"?


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duncan_mk wrote:Your quite right BitJam, it has been a long cold winter - and, I guess, your right about individuals.

You just made *my* day.

I'm sorry, BitJam, that my response to your carefully considered & worked through reply should be this rant.

1) see above
2)"carefully considered" -->"coiled up inside waiting to spring out at a moment's notice"

Only mankind would be vain enough to believe that the force controlling the world - let alone the universe - could be a slightly improved version of himself [...]

I have to agree with you that most organized religions run into the same problems of hubris and corruption that plague our political institutions. However, I think the uncorrupted idea of God is a perfect ideal that helps us avoid hubris by reminding us of how imperfect we are. I think Carl Sagan had a similar feeling when he considered how small mankind is compared to the vastness of the Universe. For me,"God" is the same thing as all the information in the Universe. My reality, the universe I experience and live in is a tiny, incredibly imperfect, model that is created by my brain. IMO some of the more radical new atheists get these two things confused and thus suffer from the very hubris that a belief in God can help us avoid.

Einstein wrote:Our Psychological experience contains, in colorful succession, sense experiences, memory pictures of them, images, and feelings. In contrast to psychology, physics treats directly only the sense experiences and of the"understanding" of their connection; but even the concept of the"real external world" of everyday thinking rests exclusively on the sense impressions.

I believe that the first step in the setting of a"real external world" is the formation of the concept of bodily objects and of bodily objects of various sorts. Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impressions (partly in conjunction with the sense impressions which are interpreted as signs for sense experiences of others), and we correlate to them a concept -- the concept of the bodily object.

Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is a free creation of the human (or animal) mind. On the other hand, this concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it.

The second step is to be found in the fact that, in our thinking (which determines our expectation), we attribute to this concept of bodily object a significance, which is to a high degree independent of the sense impressions which originally give rise to it. This is what we mean when we attribute to the bodily object"a real existence."

On the other hand, these concepts and relations, and indeed the postulation of real objects and, generally speaking, of the existence of"the real world" have justification only in so far as they are connected with sense impressions between which they form a mental connection.

TL;DR (plus my spin):

• Subjective reality is the totality of all our experience
• Objective reality is a subset of subjective reality
• Science only deals with the subset
• Many people get this backward which is an extreme form of hubris
• The evolutionary, survival benefit of spirituality was to help us avoid this type of hubris

Below are two images from A Picture Book Guide to Spirituality (for Scientists and Engineers):

If you are a highly evolved alien to this planet, with superior intelligence. Would you reveal your self to a primitive culture like ours?, Or just study the culture, and let nature take it's course.
In the most part people in general are good, they help one-another at times of need.

.

Eino wrote:If you are a highly evolved alien to this planet, with superior intelligence. Would you reveal your self to a primitive culture like ours?, Or just study the culture, and let nature take it's course.

There is no way for me to know what someone with superior intelligence would do, almost by definition. It's like asking a chess novice what moves a Grand Master would make. A Grand Master might be able to predict what moves a novice would make but a novice can't predict the moves of a Grand Master (except if they get lucky).

In the most part people in general are good, they help one-another at times of need.

Agreed. I was watching the video Pray for Japan about the devastating earthquake and tsunami two years ago. I was very moved by how much people pulled together and helped each other despite their own dire needs and losses.

I also agree the culture that formed around the Grateful Dead tours showed some of this (from what I hear). I think Free and open-source software like antiX is another great example; thousands of people all over the globe working like crazy and giving it all away for free. It's this incredible, wonderful thing that happened in our world. Literally billions of people benefit from these gifts but overall it seems to be barely noticed. We certainly take notice when one single person does a terrible thing but we don't notice when many people do very good things. I wonder if it escapes attention because people being good is the norm or because it doesn't fit in with people's preconceptions of how the world operates?

I think the uncorrupted idea of God is a perfect ideal that helps us avoid hubris by reminding us of how imperfect we are. I think Carl Sagan had a similar feeling when he considered how small mankind is compared to the vastness of the Universe. For me,"God" is the same thing as all the information in the Universe.

I think we're probably going to disagree about the role and/or nature of God. Is there something controlling the universe? Well, sure there is. It's called physics. Is physics intelligent? I have no idea, but maybe it is!

Fred Hoyle the distinguished English astronomer and astrophysicist was generally believed by his peers to have gone bonkers when, after his retirement, he started promoting (this from Wikipedia):

the hypothesis that the first life on Earth began in space, spreading through the universe via panspermia, and that evolution on earth is influenced by a steady influx of viruses arriving via comets.

but he wrote a book called the Black Cloud. In this, a huge cloud of dust is discovered drifting through space which settles itself between the Earth & the Sun. Deprived of sunlight the Earth is dying until a group of astrophysicits manage to make contact with the cloud, explain what is happening, the cloud apologises and moves elsewhere. Hooray, we're all saved.

Obviously, this is a gross precis of a 300 page book! But the whole point was that the dust cloud generated electricity (that's physics for you). The functions of the brain are controlled by electricity and, over millenia, as it wandered thru' space, the cloud had developed intelligence. It also knew, apparently, that, in order to maintain itself, it needed heat - hence its interest in the Sun.. Hoyle was not some mad old man. He was highly distinguished - Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University and the founding director of the Institute of Astronomy. If he suggests a dust cloud can develop intelligence, who am I to argue. Why shouldn't physics be intelligent?

So far as I am concerned God supplies the Environment in which things (supernovas, black holes, galaxies, suns Etc) can happen - and that environment is infinite. There may be a cosmic intelligence there but it is wholly unaware of us - just as we are (normally) unaware of our intestinal bacteria. God has provided a planet where life can develop & survive. We (humankind) have developed - we can either live on the the planet or make it uninhabitable. It's up to us. Whatever happened to Moses when he went up the mountain, God sitting down and inscribing the 10 commandments on tablets of stone with his fingernail wasn't part of it!

How we should behave, however, is a different.

Pelagius taught that it was not the following of the teachings of the Church that led to heaven but the leading of a good life. Anyone who led a good life (by which he meant, I guess, one in conformity with the teachings of Christ)

There is an excellent book by Christopher Tyerman entitled God's War: A new History of the Crusades In which he has a chapter of 30 pages The Origins of Christian Holy War. This works its way from classical theory (Socrates, Plato) through the Old Testament (David, Joshua, an incident in the Red Sea) through to the suppression of the gentler texts of the desciples

Here is a quote from the end of that chapter:

The detritus of legal justifications, scriptural, Patristic and classical, thrown into relief by actual experience in the Carolingian period and by romanticized echoes of it enshrined in vernacular chansons de geste, supplied material from which fresh theories of holy war could be constructed ------------- Yet much of what was proclaimed as new by the call to arms in 1095 represented old wine in new bottles; the winepress from which it came was grimed with use and age.

These are the"justifications" under which wars are still being fought and the justification for the edict which caused the first post in this thread. By and large, man is vile and a plague on all your houses.

dmk

duncan_mk wrote:I think we're probably going to disagree about the role and/or nature of God.

Agreed!

Is there something controlling the universe? Well, sure there is. It's called physics. Is physics intelligent? I have no idea, but maybe it is!

I think there is another, much more important, factor that is usually glossed over: all the information in the Universe. With board games like Chess and Go, you need the rules and the position of the pieces on the board in order to determine the best move. Even if the rules are simple, the games can get incredibly complicated and perfect play becomes difficult due to the large number of possible configurations.

What does it mean to have a superior intelligence? One way of looking at is that it means to be able to make better predictions about the future. There are two aspects to this: (1) handling the information you have well, and (2) having/handling more information. Let's say you knew all the laws of physics perfectly and to make things even easier let's assume those laws are deterministic so that if you know the state of the Universe at one time you can know it at any other time (given sufficient processing power). Can you now predict what is going to happen? NO! Because you don't have access to the position and velocity of every particle in the Universe. You don't even have access to the exact position and velocity of just one particle (or for those worried about Heisenberg, you don't have access to the wave-function of a single particle).

If you believe in physics and atoms and all that jazz then you must also believe that we don't experience the Universe directly, instead we observe it via the sense impressions Einstein talked about. We only experience the Universe through a crude model we create in our brain that we call"reality". In his wonderful book The User Illusion, Tor Nørretranders explains that this reality we experience is roughly half a second behind what is actually happening in the real physical world. That's right, our reality is half a second behind.

What is even more significant is the amount of information reduction needed to create the model in our brain. For example when people studied the optic nerve leading from the eye to the brain they discovered that it does not just transport visual information, its major function is to reduce the amount of information along the way. This is the basis of many (all?) optical illusions; they are able to trick the brain by exploiting data-reduction steps that take place in the optic nerve. When you start digging into it you soon discover that the reality we experience is literally an illusion. It is a crude model in our brain that is rapidly refreshed. The processing required to do the refresh is very large which is why there is a half second delay between events in the real world and our experience of them.

Just like our eye is tricked by optical illusions, the reality we experience is also easily tricked. We have evolved to enjoy sex, we have evolved to enjoy updating our reality to correct mistaken illusions. This is called having a sense of humour. Almost all jokes create a false reality in the minds of the listeners and then the punch-line corrects the mistaken illusion and replaces it with an illusion that is closer to the reality in the joke. A person with a good sense of humour will inhabit a more accurate model of the physical world than a person who finds nothing funny. It should be obvious that living in a more accurate model of reality would be a big boost to survivability.

Knowing the laws of physics (or, more accurately for 99.9999% of the human race, knowing of someone who claims to know the laws of physics) does not magically convert us into being"rational". Nor does it magically obviate the survival benefits of spirituality.*** The important thing is the titanic information reduction from the physical world to the model of the physical world created by our brain which is our experience of physical reality. When you examine this data reduction and the information processing needed to create consciousness, you can see striking parallels to many spiritual practises and techniques. It then becomes clear that the survival benefit of spirituality is like the survival benefit of humour, they both help us experience and live in a more accurate model of physical reality. For example there are many spiritual techniques that serve to remind us of the vast difference between the models of reality we experience and the actual physical world. Sometimes, people who are constantly immersed in science forget this fundamental fact. They confuse their model with the actual physical world and this leads to significant ego problems that limit what they are able to accomplish. I call this the hubris of science. It's not a coincidence that ego problems are rampant in science. Nor is it a coincidence that most (many?) scientists who have made major reality-changing breakthroughs have managed to avoid getting tangled up in ego problems.


*** Even Richard Dawkins admits that spirituality and religion must have provided survival benefits in order to for them to be so ubiquitous in human cultures. Unfortunately, his prejudices lead him to make only make less than stellar guesses as to what those benefits are.

Tor Nørretranders explains that this reality we experience is roughly half a second behind what is actually happening in the real physical world. That's right, our reality is half a second behind.

Yep, quite right! That's the delay (actually, I thought it was greater than that) for the brain to react to sight. sound; smell or touch.

Knowing the laws of physics (or, more accurately for 99.9999% of the human race, knowing of someone who claims to know the laws of physics) does not magically convert us into being"rational".

Also right. But we are talking about a"spiritual" rightness rather than a"rational" one. I am interested in religion, not because I am religous but simply because I believe in"goodness" (and, it seems to me that this is what is lacking ). OK I'm a 68 year old teenager - niaive, inexperienced and unworldly - but I believe in goodness. And it seems to me that there are holy men - Christ, Buddah, whose teachings became the basis of religions - who laid out the foundations of goodness.

Knowing the laws of physics (or, more accurately for 99.9999% of the human race, knowing of someone who claims to know the laws of physics) does not magically convert us into being"rational". Nor does it magically obviate the survival benefits of spirituality.

So, I think that, what I see as God (and you see as"knowing the laws of physics") is largely irrelevant. The core of being has to be goodness - and that has nothing to do with physics. Hoyles' cloud was intelligent but was only a slightly improved version of mankind (although it did move when it realised it was endangering life).

dmk