The Spent Nuclear Fuel Scandal

Posted on January 18, 2012 by ehurst

It has been proven that nuclear fuel rods can be used up and rendered pretty much inert.
I suppose it depends on how much you know about nuclear energy. In the first place, had we gone with the thorium process, none of this would be a problem. Look it up. Thorium nuclear power generation is better in every measure, but one thing prevents development: It would remove control from the vested interests run by psychopaths in uranium production.
But even uranium and plutonium nuclear power generation need not produce the so-called nuclear waste which threatens every life on this planet. The main problem with Fukushima is not the reactors, but the stored nuclear waste sitting in the pools above the reactors. The meltdown is an additional problem. Had the US under Carter not been so utterly stupid in making fuel reprocessing illegal here and elsewhere, there would be no nuclear waste.
At the risk of oversimplifying, let me draw the following image. The whole idea is based on isotopes. An isotope is a natural element with extra neutrons. It’s the same material; it has the same properties in the sense it has the same number of protons and electrons, which is the very essence of what gives it its identity. But it’s got some extra goodies packed in there called neutrons. The stable form has X number of them, while the form with extra neutrons is X+ some higher number. This is unstable in the sense it kicks out lots of energy trying to get rid of the excess. Stick enough of this material together in one place and it starts to get hot because all that radiating energy is hitting the other atoms and making them even more unstable. A nuclear bomb results from letting enough of this stuff collect in one place it can’t stay in one piece any more, and the whole thing kicks out it’s energy all at once.
Bombs require that the heavy isotope of the radioactive metal be something like 90-95% pure of that one isotope. Using these unstable metals to create heat to boil water and make a giant steam generator means using a far less purity, something like 5-10% (medical uses require about 25-30% pure). You cannot make a bomb easily from the generator grade metal. The whole thing of purifying is incredibly expensive and finicky just to get the 5%, and monumentally difficult for the bomb grade, such that only wealthy governments even think about it. The equipment runs into the billions of dollars just to get tiny amounts of just the low-grade stuff. It requires entirely different equipment to get above that. (Hint: Iran doesn’t even have the equipment to make bombs.)
So the generator grade is easier and cheaper, but still radioactive so as to get hot enough to boil water. The process of using uranium and plutonium to generate power requires a fairly simple mix,  in the sense that the radioactive parts all are the same isotope, the same “grade” of the metal with the same radioactive properties. They break down a little as they continue kicking out this energy. The process eventually makes it a little unstable because it becomes a mixture of more than one isotope after awhile. Once this stuff gets degraded by some 5%, the current policy is to pull them out. Keep in mind, this is 5% used up of that 5% pure metal isotope.
They have to do something with them because they can’t be used in the same simple process. They are still radioactive, but if you separate the rods and cushion them from each other with water, for instance, they are still dangerous to be around, but not going to heat up much. Ideally, you could take these rods and put them into a different kind of steam generator, which uses something other than water in a more expensive and complicated process, but it basically burns off those impurities. When the impurities are gone, it no longer works in this other process, so you pull them out and they are ready to go back into the first one again. We call this secondary process “reprocessing” the fuel.
You can trade them back and forth until the metal rods are stable, so stable you can handle them with your bare hands safely. Somehow, the idiots in government allowed the psychopaths in mining to convince them this was somehow risky, that there was some danger the stuff could be diverted from this exchange process and and used in bombs. That is, of course, not possible. As noted above, the process of making them safe for use in generating power makes them too wimpy for bombs.
Instead, our policy is to pull those rods after they are only 5% used up, and let them sit in a temporary bath until there’s no room left. Then we try to find places to store them. Is this not insane? It’s an incredible, massive waste-fraud-and-abuse. The process of running them back and forth between two types of reactor would lower the price of electricity, cutting the price by about 90%. That’s even after you purchase the much more expensive secondary reactors. It would also reduce the massive profits of the industry which lobbied and lied to Congress about the safety factors involved.
As I understand it, other countries, our allies, begged to buy up this “spent fuel” so they could use it in their secondary reactor system, and Congress refuses to sell. The US government continues operating based on mythology, while the psychopaths get rich and pass off some graft to the bureaucrats called “regulators” — they regulate everyone except the folks they were appointed to watch.
Once again, you need to understand something: Most of what’s wrong with government is special interests. What most people don’t understand is virtually nothing in government is left to run its own course. Not a single item in the massive regulations is left untouched. It’s pervasive. Every single item in the trillions of dollars government spends is subjected to this corruption. This business of nuclear energy is nasty only because of politics, but it wouldn’t matter what we are talking about, because politics has taken over the entire nation at every level of human activity. To use biblical terminology, you cannot lift a hand or foot anywhere in the world without someone in US government trying to tax it or confiscate whatever can be moved.
This is why people who actually know what’s going on will tell you our government cannot be fixed, because there is nothing to reform; this is the nature of the beast itself.

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Trust Requires Breathing Room

Posted on January 17, 2012 by ehurst

People scrambling for limited living space tend to screw over almost everyone they encounter.

My friend Robert mentioned something fundamental to human nature. When you squish people together in a small space, there is a powerful tendency for trust to die.

The problem with us Chinese — mind, not so much the Hong Kong and overseas Chinese as it’s more in the case with Chinese mainlanders — is that even primitive levels of trust have now disappeared from their society. The fast and radical economic and social changes in China after it had reintegrated with the rest of the world 30 years ago just ended up creating a dog-eat-dog world over there.

Notice where it is the strongest in the PRC itself. Take the same people out of that setting, and they tend to change their basic assumptions about survival’s necessities. Something in the cultural mix of Hong Kong, something about the British influence, dampens this tendency, the same as simply moving to a Western country, for example. This, despite the very high density of humanity in Hong Kong.

I tend to think this reflects a very basic human instinct about enemies. If you have enemies, you naturally want to band with others to face them. That element of recognized or felt commonality under threat is the key to organizing defense. It makes politics useful and possible. If all your enemies are too far away, then all your threats are your own kind. It’s not as if the PRC has no enemies, but in the awareness of the people, they are all far away. Instead, one’s own kin may be the worst enemy, but almost surely someone geographically close but not directly dependent on you is your enemy. As a consequence, politics are nearly impossible.

Dependency registers in the mind as not something we choose. Trust is something we have to choose. It’s always more complex than that, but we seldom understand what we cannot characterize and discuss in brief. Thus, I sense the Chinese mainlanders see themselves forced into a measure of dependence, and they take their independence where they can get it — mostly from each other. Robert notes you can’t go anywhere without having to watch intently for being shafted by anyone and everyone. There is no activity safe and regulated to the point you can trust it or the people involved.

Thus, we should hardly be surprised when outsourcing to China comes at the price of toxic dog food and baby formula. If you can’t play by their rules and watch them like a hawk, you won’t get what you expect. That’s not a put down; it’s the facts. I note this does not prevent businesses there prospering when they play by Western rules, but that’s another matter.

Of course, I’ve noticed a great many other Asian folks have some of this. There may be some adjustments over what they trust each other for, but there seems an element of distrust which is always sly and sneaky from people who live under the bootheel, as it were, of a particular type of oppression. Everyone is oppressed in one way or another, but it seems to me tied to a particular kind of oppression, and a particular sense of consciousness about it.

Naturally, I am only philosophizing from an outside position, so my own consciousness of the issues is limited. However, it seems to me at least half of the issue is consciousness for those under the gun. Few cultures understand serenity better than some of the Eastern religions and philosophies, but it would seem this treasure has been denied the masses.

Most of my readers would recognize the language of cultivating some mastery of your own destiny. We can’t simply ignore the moral context or we will be speaking the wrong language, and our assertion of self would mean nothing. I might have a tough time carrying my brand of manhood to any number of Asian cultures.

But at the bottom of things, I know trusting another human requires the sense I have some choice in the matter, as it does for everyone else.

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Sins of the Fathers

Posted on January 17, 2012 by ehurst

You have a limited choice about your native character.
People familiar with the Old Testament have likely run across something which seems ambiguous to our modern eyes. In one place it says flat out the children will pay for the sins of their fathers. God warns in the Books of Moses about visiting the sins of one generation upon the third generation. In yet another place, we are told in no uncertain terms, “the soul that sins, it shall die.” Indeed, Ezekiel goes on at length about the latter.
And this is the key. We happen to know Ezekiel was talking about the Law of Moses; specifically, it was about the individual obligation of every burn under the Covenant to live by it consciously. The specifics of Moses reflect a fundamental moral reality. On this plane of existence, if you walk in evil, then turn from that, you’ll find mercy and be forgiven. If you walk rightly, then turn and become evil, you’ll reap the consequences of God’s wrath. It’s simply a matter of actions, but what the actions say about what’s going on inside you. People make mistakes and regret them, and they tend to repent. People without regret are monsters, or in modern parlance, psychopaths.
Most Christians don’t realize — most openly deny — that there is a God of Laws over the Realm of Flesh. This is why most Western Christians are so utterly confused about morality, and so powerless to practice what they preach. They don’t understand the categories because they reject them.
But that business of “sins of the Father” is reference to another kind of sin. We recognize this as the influence of parents over their own children. The third generation is God’s general rule about how long it takes for a bad habit to be forgotten, barring other interventions. Thus, only after the third generation could certain resident aliens enjoy full citizenship privileges.
When I look in the mirror of my soul, I inevitably see the imprint of my dad. For the most part, we look nothing like each other, but there are distinct character traits from him for which I have no power to remove. They are burned into my very personality. By being aware of this, I am not powerless to turn his trash into some kind of treasure.
The trick is to first embrace the truth this is what I am. Then, I have to ensure I seek to understand human nature itself enough to recognize the difference between a manifestation and basic tendency. My dad expressed certain character traits in ways which didn’t work out for good to others. I have some of the same stuff in me, but I need not be bound to his way of expressing those things. I can choose to channel them in other ways. All I really need to do is understand what lay under the ugly manifestation. By rejecting his fears, angers, etc., I am able to be a different man. To suggest I’m actually “better” would be for later generations to say, since I am in the process creating my own huge mistakes. My son now has the task of deciding which of my traits are worthy of emulation, and which require adjustment.
You can’t fight evil until you understand the source.

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The Boundaries of Sanity

Posted on January 16, 2012 by ehurst

There are some folks we cannot help.
It is particularly hard for evangelical Christians to grasp this: There are times and places where you shake the dust off your sandals and move on down the road. There are people in this world God did not appoint you to help. It’s not a limitation on truth, but a limitation built into each of us.
The fundamental flaw is the assumption logic is the right tool, or even the main tool. Humans use logic, but hardly operate by it. We should not expect them to do so, and it would be frankly wrong to believe reason is the best standard for human operations. It has a very limited application to reality. To believe the highest aspiration of humanity is to operate by reason is itself bad religion.
Jesus, the Son of God Himself, told His followers to shake the dust off their sandals when the message of truth was rejected. Persistence in loving is not the same as persistence in bugging someone. There is more than one meaning to, “True love waits.”
I belong to a mailing list for which I am a moderator. Of the small group who share this task, I have the most time, and I am the most active. I have to read all the messages, despite some of it grating on my nerves. We have at least one very educated Christian Pharisee. He’s not a cartoon Neocon. He is a Neocon, but not stupid. I don’t harass him or insult him. I do consider him irredeemable.
The nature of the Pharisee’s error is rather plain, to me at least, in the text of the New Testament and in the Talmud. Theirs is a closed system. Nicodemas gave us a hint during his discussion with Jesus that night in John 3. He saw the miracles of Jesus, felt the power of His teaching, but knew it was against everything he was taught on the way to his PhD. It didn’t fit; there was a jarring disconnect. What Jesus said confirmed it didn’t fit, because Nick was closed to the truth. It was impossible for him to absorb a standard Hebrew parable, the one about being reborn.
He and Jesus spoke in the Hebrew vernacular of the day, but we can be sure John recorded the gist of things in his schoolboy Greek. The term anothen offers a certain ambiguity to us, and from the ensuing discussion, we can safely assume it was equally confusing in Hebrew because Nick had a Greek mind. It is generally translated “above” and can imply “from the top” in the same sense we use that phrase. Unfortunately, the English phrase “born again” has taken on a lot of baggage which simply misses the point. Jesus was trying to warn Nicodemas his head was in the wrong world.
For at least three centuries, Nicodemas and his kind were pickled in Aristotelian logic, while trying to disengage his epistemology. The jarring disconnect between this and their acknowledgment of miracles, and things supernatural in general, forced them to create a mental space where the stuff they dared not deny as their entire national tradition was kept around as superstition. Sacred superstition, but really it was little more than magic, inexplicable and operating by obscure rules which didn’t make sense to them.
Jesus was telling this Dean of the Law School, as it were, he wasn’t even on the same planet as what Jesus was doing. Had the Judean leadership remained faithful to the Covenant of Moses, Jesus would not need to do these miracles. He was simply restoring the justice, the birthright of the Covenant, by correcting things Satan was permitted to break and pervert. The leadership had opened the gate to Satan’s evil power because they were no longer guarding the gate. They weren’t teaching the Law as Moses gave it, but were engaging all sorts of silly legalistic nonsense. The Covenant was not simply legislation, but an orientation toward justice. It was far more flexible and merciful than most of us grasp from where we stand today, because the Jews had turned it into a shallow caricature.
They were absorbed in the joys of analytical discussions of the words of Law on an intellectual level, without reverencing the fundamental mystical nature of the Law. They ended up embracing their logical analysis as more binding than the Law itself. To protect this body of analytical study, they built up a mythology of saying it was the oral tradition from the lips of Moses.
Scholars completely outside both Judaism and Christianity can see almost immediately how the Talmud (“Oral Torah”) is patently a rejection of the written Torah. There is a painfully obvious gap in the very assumptions about language and knowing itself between the two. The rabbinical scholars were reading the same old Hebrew words from an alien intellectual climate.
How many of us can recall the indescribable thrill when, in our youth as we clawed our way toward adulthood, we stumbled across the ability to reason and use logic? Somewhere beginning around age ten to twelve, humans develop the capacity for formal logic. With a good education, this can be a very heady experience. We suddenly reject all the past because we realize we can see through all the crap we’d been told by people who couldn’t be bothered to explain the whys and wherefores. We knew. Of course, we were full of crap, but with responsible teachers around us, we would have eventually worked that out.
There was nobody around to help the rabbinical scholars when they first discovered Aristotle, shortly after Alexander the Great conquered the region and brought his own very evangelistic Hellenism in tow. They bought it, were utterly thrilled with it, couldn’t resist the siren song of claiming mastery of mysteries. They had managed to bring God down to their inspection, and found themselves competent to decide what He could and could not be. This is what happened in the Garden of Eden when someone convinced Adam and Eve they could be like gods, judging good and evil for themselves — it was the very essence of the Fall.
Jesus had the mission to offer the Pharisees a corrective. Most of them rejected it. These were the same folks Paul faced later in his churches as a threat to genuine faith in Christ. We today refer to these very beguiling and charismatic Pharisee preachers as “Judaizers.” They claimed they were seeking to bring Gentile Christians back to Moses, but they didn’t even comprehend Moses. They were dragging the Christians by various deceptions into what we now call Gnosticism. That’s because the Judaizer heresies drifted naturally in that direction. Kabbalism is simply a derivative of this from a yet later period. The nation of Judea had plenty of problems already, but none of that would have happened without embracing Hellenism. Something unique about the way this intellectual trap works in the mind creates a fortress which serves to imprison those taken by it.
It works precisely the same in modern evangelical Christianity. Not everyone is that way, any more than was every Judean in Jesus’ day. However, it is so deeply rooted in the core leadership, it’s almost impossible to break the rest free. Having been inside and outside and all around this thing, I can now smell them at a distance. Sure, I’ll give them a chance to see some light, but they almost uniformly denounce it as darkness. There are some, like Nicodemas, who can probably stumble through the darkness into the light, as I did. Sadly, so far, most do not.
When I run into them, I refuse to debate with them. Debate itself as a form of exchange is simply meeting them on their own turf. I simply state the truth when the opportunity is given, help those who reach out for it, and let the rest wallow in their graves. I can’t fix that. I’ve been crucified plenty of times, and I’m glad for the opportunity to share in my Savior’s sacrifice. It has nothing to do with whether they will some day met me in Heaven. I have no idea what their eternal destiny is, any more than they do about mine. What I do know is I don’t have to work with them, nor take them seriously, any more than context itself requires while I carry out my mission from God.
But logic is not the answer; it is the jail which holds them.

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New Year Grammar Grouch 2

Posted on January 15, 2012 by ehurst

This should be pretty simple.
there = a location, any place which can’t be called “here”
their = the possessive of they — “It’s their choice.”
they’re = a contraction for “they are”
All pronounced very much alike, though actually the last one offers a subtle difference most people don’t catch in ordinary conversation. That’s a function of our sloppy American mispronunciation of English, which is a known contributing cause of much misspelling. While the American dialect isn’t supposed to sound like any of the various colloquial dialects from the British Empire, it does have it’s own precision if we bothered.
Did you ever notice most popular singers perform English language songs with a flattened American accent? And why does one seldom see reference to a Canadian accent? Newfies, of course, but the great North American Heartland is pretty vanilla all the way up to the ice. Each regional dialect is the result of particular waves of immigration. I guarantee George Washington bore a proper upper class British sound.
I reject all arguments any one dialect is pure or original English. Few of us could understand spoken Middle English, much less Old English. Nor is “proper” necessarily whatever folks do where you are located. Proper is whatever those most careful in your area taught you, but includes your relative ability to absorb and blend in with what you hear around you when you move to another place.
It isn’t proper to correct anyone’s grammar unless it is your civil duty. That is, if you are a teacher or custodial/leading adult of children, your job is to help them get it right for the context in which they live at the time. If your relative position otherwise qualifies you as someone expected to do this for whatever reason, in some contexts you can get away with it.
Otherwise, civility requires you avoid correcting others. Granted, you can subtly do a lot of correcting simply by making sure you do it right yourself. Someone does it wrong, and you simply stick to your guns and ignore their mistakes, with the possible exception of asking what they meant. Be tactful.
I get grouchy with folks running around correcting everyone else. I do all my grammar grouching where people can safely ignore me.

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We All Need a Human Touch

Posted on January 15, 2012 by ehurst

“Mama! She’s looking at me!”
Childish whining of this sort deserves punishment. No one should be permitted to demand the rest of the world bend to their outrageous requirements and whims. I’ll bet you’ve seen teenage girls in schools dress like whores, then complain because the wrong guy — the social outcast — looks at them. It’s wonderful when the popular Alpha males ogle them, but not okay when the Omega stares from a distance. Notice there was nothing about anyone touching, or even speaking to them; it was merely that the Omega was permitted to enjoy the view to which they objected.
Sorry, but your body in a public place is not like a password protected website.
So much we understand as mature adults. What riles me even more is the “no touching” rules creeping into modern Western society of late. It reflects the same coddling of petulence which destroys the world for the sake of one person’s reasonable demands. That some single individual is troubled cannot be used to justify chaining all mankind. As a prophet of God, I tell you this is evil. It indicates a much deeper error.
Humans are wired to interact. We deeply need some visual, verbal and physical interaction within our capabilities. Yes, our fallen nature creates lots of problems with this, but it’s no excuse for refusing to work around them with sane customs and habits. Utopia cannot exist, and pining for it is sin. For every school administrator who thinks making blanket rules about no touching, you deserve to go to Hell, because you are defying God’s revealed intention. Yes, it’s that serious, and it applies to corporate management, as well as every other human institution. This hyper-sensitive whining political correctness is an abomination.
If you as leader/manager are unwilling to accept the challenge of constructing sane and flexible organizational rules about human interaction, resign now. God judges rulers more harshly than those ruled. Yes, people will transgress every policy, pretending they have observed the precise wording. Punish that legalistic silly attitude in the first place as a separate violation, then punish them for fudging the rules and ignoring the intended result.
Society is going to Hell in a literal sense because no one is willing to accept reality. Normal humans touch each other as part of communication. It is healthy, and a revulsion to human touch is mental illness. You may have rules about whom you permit inside certain degrees of proximity and interaction, but you cannot exclude all humanity, nor can you torture humanity with highly variable whims about it. We can’t read your mind, and we shouldn’t be obliged to try. That’s the core of damned feminism (that adjective means “Satan likes it”), and it has no place in human society. It’s evil to whine about touching in itself. If you want to avoid touching, stay away from other people; keep your sickness to yourself. If you insist people gather in close proximity for more than a few seconds at a time, or insist on participating in the benefits of such congregating, expect touching and make sane and predictable rules.
There will always be places on people you don’t touch, and we should always seek to correct “bad touches.” Grab me or my family members certain places and God says I really must punch your lights out. And I would rightly expect the same be applied back on me. There are contexts which change how those rules apply, and we are all intelligent enough to understand that. Complications are a part of the business of breathing the air.
The Ancient Near Eastern cultures did it best. They recognized the very real need for human touch even as they carefully kept the sexes segregated. Most Westerners would be embarrassed by the degree of physical closeness proper for ANE men, because most Westerners reject reality in the first place. We think we can dictate by some misbegotten logic what reality ought to be, instead of trying to understand a very real need for human emotional health. People are not entirely rational by any standard, nor have we any business expecting it. That in itself is irrational. We have enough perversions arising from very real fallen nature without aggravating things through intransigence.
In every part of the world, there are various customs regarding give and take, who does what to whom. Everyone, even the lowest members of every society, have God’s permission for some outlet to the normal expression of the same human needs we all have. Touching is a very real human need. With no outlet, or with unreasonable restrictions, we justly call such customs evil. There is a divine standard which judges all human constructs, and is the only one this writer will recognize. There is always room for debate, reform and improvement of things. Don’t run from your responsibilities by simply blocking off whole areas of human need.
Thus saith Lord, so argue with Him.

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New Year's Grammar Grouch

Posted on January 14, 2012 by ehurst

Granted, in English we seldom differentiate between the direct and indirect object, but we do retain a distinct difference in pronouns for subject and object. The problem is, nobody wants to use it when we come to the various forms of the word “who.”
We generally use it as pronoun, but because it indicates an unknown person, folks get confused. It’s really not that hard. I ask you is pretty obvious, no? The reverse is you ask me. Notice what happens to “I” becoming “me”. One is for the subject of the sentence — what’s this about? The other is the object — what is the recipient the action? But just because “who” rhymes with “you” is no cause to think they take the same form. We could make it really clear if we make it all a little silly so it becomes obvious.
You ask you.
I ask me.
He asks him.
She asks her.
Who asks whom?
Now was that so hard? If you are using “who” as a pronoun for the subject, it remains in that form. When “who” becomes the object, it changes shape to “whom.” If you need a clue, use the masculine third person he and him as an indicator.
Addenda: Just now, after posting this, I ran into something related. Try to keep in mind, despite the political correctness idiocy, in the English language the masculine is inclusive. That is, when you don’t know which gender is precisely applicable, use the masculine. This is reflected in the various forms of “who”. So:
who’s = who is
whose = belonging to whom
It’s the same is he’s and his.
It matters.

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Technocracy of War, Epilogue

Posted on January 14, 2012 by ehurst

So as he sat in his chair some years later, Mantis reflected on how quickly his ad hoc academy had gone from a two story WW2 barracks building with barely 200 machines to where it was today. He was Chief Instructional Officer in a building rivaling any corporate skyscraper for floor space and thousands of systems. Almost all of them were running Bread and Butter, or Toast and Jam.
He missed Thad. His old friend had generously poured his life into the mission when they first got back together down in that old wooden fire hazard of a building. The poor man was relentless in cranking out the instructional materials and teaching the first few cycles himself. He seemed to have an instinctive grasp of what his students did and didn’t already know, and his lessons seldom missed the real need. Thad had found the one thing for which he was born, and he didn’t care how much it took from him.
He literally worked himself to death, collapsing at his desk. Even Brandon Breeze was wet-eyed at the funeral; Jennifer Runston and Peter Jimmerson showed up, too.
Who would have thought this crackpot OS would have become the ultimate answer to crackers and such? No, not invulnerable, just awfully hard to break, while easy to use, and easy to manage. Few knew the massive verbal and political battles behind the scenes to prevent turning it into another wide-open mass of patchwork ideas for the sake of everyone’s convenience. When no government employee could install his favorite games, and when watching videos was simply not possible with the underlying OS, systems were far more secure. Mantis, Peter and Brandon all fought furiously against the corrupt lobbies.
Mantis was at the peak of his professional track, but he wasn’t really happy at what it cost to be in that position. The freedom to turn aside that sort of political pressure meant the kind of police state in which the death of partisan politics was also the death of anything even hinting of accountability to anyone, much less the people he was pretending to protect. Even now, things were unraveling, as there were other military battles they had lost for other reasons, reasons eventually leading back to that same lack of accountability, that same power to ignore politics, because it meant the psychopaths could ignore everyone and forge ahead with plans benefiting very few, indeed.
He dreamed of disappearing, perhaps to the kind of country that nest of crackers came from…

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History of History and Failure

Posted on January 13, 2012 by ehurst

History is as much an art as a science.
We dig through the available artifacts and try to make sense of them. It helps so many previous people bothered to tell what they believed was the story of certain events. Of course they got things wrong, as we do today and surely will into the future, as we continue trying to rewrite history over and over again.
It’s the writing which makes it so very human. The very act of recording is itself biasing, because it is per force necessary to answer the questions of the contemporary world of the historian, some of which we recognize as matters of language and culture. What we are less likely to recognize is the fundamental bias which teaches us to assume everyone in the past must have been looking at the world through the same lens as we. We may give lip service to the intellectual frame of reference being different, but Western historians are uniquely poor at actually thinking through the implications of this different worldview.
In every age, the majority of those thinking and writing somehow assume their intellectual approach is universal. This is why we reasonably question historians past, and seldom succeed in questioning our own, except within the narrow differences of political and philosophical agenda which loom so large to us. Each generation creates their own idols, particularly idols of thought.
The problem is history today serves one particular agenda which unites and lies under all the others. We refer to asking and answering the question: “How did we get here?” This is asked in the broadest sense of what brought us to this situation. Devising a means of getting from here to where we would like to be requires knowing how we got here, no? Yet, in ancient histories, this is often not the real issue. A particular wealthy and/or powerful figure might well commission a history writing project for that very reason, but a whole host of history writing came from another purpose. Particularly in the East, a great many histories came from something more akin to the priestly scholars, whose whole orientation was more at pointing out human foibles for whatever they considered a redemptive purpose.
This is not the same as a merely mechanical approach, but specifically translates into something like teaching humility. The provision of information might well serve the purpose of knowing what we should do next, but was not the primary intent. It was to make the person have a perspective. When people with power get involved in the process, they always aim to shape the process to their own ends. Consciously or not, they want folks to arrive at certain selected conclusions. Thus, the inputs are whittled down pragmatically to include only what the power wants folks to know. It’s propaganda, not history per se.
The scholar-priestly approach is more aimed at broadening the horizon, making you see the entire vastness of things not obvious to your initial experience of life. They are frankly willing to let people decide for themselves what to make of it all, or at least aiming at that ideal. We give much lip service to that in Western Classical Education, but it seldom works out that way. Doing all that work of researching and writing requires paying some talented soul to do stuff which doesn’t put food on the table right away. It’s not as if religions are any more altruistic than secular governments. Organizing humans for any kind of specialization and efficiency inevitably ends in someone having power, and with it the inevitable lure of abusing it. We’ve had a few good rulers, and a slightly higher proportion of good priests, as it were, but the problem remains getting that talented guy or gal to work on something we all want, but no one can easily afford without some corruption getting involved.
So maybe we thought democratizing of wealth and power would help? Not at all; it’s actually worse under the rise of the middle class (AKA merchant class). If there is any group less altruistic than the greedy middle class, they have yet to appear in human history. The middling sorts are generally decent, but more prone to enforcing utter uniformity than any other level of human society. It matters not what their relative wealth might be at any point, it’s that drive to gain more control over the circumstances of life which corrupts any hope of humility.
Western Civilization as we know it is primarily a creature of the middle classes. As it lies dying face down in the muck of human passage on this plane, already we see later generations sneering and snickering at the unspeakably foul pretense to greatness of their predecessors. We have a history replete with hypocrisy, saying we don’t want elitism even while we build one more corrupt than ever. It’s coming apart so hideously precisely because it’s so utterly fake, finding itself sliding right back down into the same pattern of human social structure so utterly instinctive and necessary for life. Only, without the grand legacy of noblesse oblige, we have been so horribly bad at it. We pass the job of doing art to those with the least measure of talent because we fear anything which cannot be controlled. Everything is a product, wholly artificially shaped at every step of the way, down to the smallest molecule. We are so sure we have worked out cause and effect on the sub-atomic level, if we could just pile up a little more data from research. Our “proud legacy” is dragging the whole of humanity down into a childhood fantasy of what cannot be, seeking to banish fears, not by growing up and facing them, but blocking out anything we cannot shape to our deeply flawed expectations and petulant demands.
I know beyond all doubt I am not the only one to notice every civilization and culture pays lip service to things they cannot do. But am I the only one to notice what the West pays lip service to is not the least bit ennobling and great as the things of past civilizations?
Bad as all the alternatives have been, what we have now could hardly be any worse.

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Technocracy of War, Part 10

Posted on January 13, 2012 by ehurst

Early that next morning, Thad was clawing up from a deep and troubled sleep to realize his phone was ringing. Struggling to be alert enough to respond intelligently to whatever it was so important to wake him just after dawn.
His eyes refused to focus on the caller ID, so he just picked up the receiver.
“Tech Sergeant Thaddeus Eyrie?”
“I haven’t heard that in a while.”
“Get used to it, sergeant. This is Captain Thiel from the Base Adjutant’s Office. You’ve been reactivated.”
Thad knew there were various caveats and clauses in military contracts which allowed for this. Once you raise your right hand, the only permanent escape was death. “What do I do now?”
“Just so you’ll know this isn’t a hoax, I’ll let you look up the Air Terminal’s number here on the base. You’ll find it in the Blue Pages of your local phone directory, page six. Call them, give them your name, rank and last four, with this order number… Prepared to copy?”
Thad wrote the long string of letters and digits on a pad he kept by his phone. Orders to fly to DC area and report to the NSA. No uniform, no change in appearance, just show up ready to work. That had to be connected to what kept Mantis so busy he couldn’t respond.
Thad hoped he could finish his Bread and Toast tutorials before he got there, because he was sure he would need them.
While waiting for Thad to arrive, Mantis finally learned his surveillance target that day was a known criminal hacker, and was found in the company of three others. None of them were US citizens. They readily admitted to the work they had been doing, because they had finished and received the final payments. Where these men came from, going to prison for life, or even execution, was not so bad if you left a fat sum in the bank back home for your family.
His briefing was short on details, and he knew better than to ask questions — it was always “need to know.” He had already known of the planned military adventure somewhere on the other side of the planet, and that it was the first time such activity took place under CIA command and control, versus simply with their cooperation as in the past. He also knew now it had gone badly. They had not gotten to the nest of crackers in time, and something had ripped through the military networks and left everything in utter chaos. SIPRNet had been compromised, and most networks were simply taken offline to avoid exacerbating the problem. But precious few personnel even had a clue how to do war the old fashioned ways. Imagine computing artillery fire with paper, pencil, protractors, slide rules and topographical maps, not to mention the huge amount of time lost in having to actually speak the jargon over radios. Drone flights were simply impossible.
Plenty of stateside networking was a mess, too. Manny’s mission now was to get his new training site up and running ASAP, because a lot of mission critical stuff was being moved to the Bread and Toast operating system. This was something previously considered, but now moving full speed ahead. The first three class cycles would be trainers themselves from all branches of the government.
Mantis was told to pin on his CW4, and that his newly reactivated training specialist NCO was promoted to E-7 immediately upon arrival. Thad was now a Master Sergeant. Mantis chuckled to himself at how cheap that was compared to a civilian contract. Even as the briefing was concluded, there were plans to convert one of the larger buildings to a Bread and Toast training center for the entire government. No, it was not possible to simply forget all the other operating systems, but for once there was a very decisive and concerted effort to force a change as thorough as possible, in as short a time as possible, and politics be damned.
Brandon Breeze had been hoping to sell just enough support licenses to break even in five years. Today he was looking at a billion dollar initial start up award, and an otherwise open contract.

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