In praise of the free market
Roy Davidson
Grain of Sand
ra...@webtv.net (Roy Davidson) wrote:
> A free market (what is sometimes referred to as free trade) has not been
> adequately defined. The politicians, spin masters and economic witch
> doctors will often refer to free trade as a somewhat less restrictive
> policy vis a vis the exchange of goods and services between nations.
> They might even suggest reducing the heavy hand of the political state
> re: internal markets. But they totally fail in delineating the free
> market.
> I would suggest that free trade or a free market means that individuals
> or businesses anywhere in the world are able to exchange goods or
> services of any description without hindrance. This means a) no taxation
> or tariffs b) no license requirements c) no subsidies d) no regulation
> e) no intimidation or harassment. In short, willing and able buyers and
> sellers are off limits to the political state.
> Economic freedom is the sine qua non of all other freedoms. Societies
> developed from barbarism to civilization to the extent that markets
> prevailed over rulers.
Freedom requires self-restraint.
--
" Victory breeds hatred. The defeated live in pain. Happily
the peaceful live, giving up victory and defeat." - Dhammapada
Frank Clarke
wrote:
<noone-C8F1ED....@news2-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
>Freedom requires self-restraint.
Quite an assertion. Is there something to back it up beyond your
opinion?
(change Arabic number to Roman numeral to email)
Grain of Sand
Frank Clarke <m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 12:19:14 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
> wrote:
> <noone-C8F1ED....@news2-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
>
> >Freedom requires self-restraint.
>
> Quite an assertion. Is there something to back it up beyond your
> opinion?
What happens when you do not practice self-restraint?
Bernard Curry
> Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net> wrote:
>>In article <23217-41...@storefull-3277.bay.webtv.net>,
>> ra...@webtv.net (Roy Davidson) wrote:
>
>> A free market (what is sometimes referred to as free trade) has not been
>> adequately defined. The politicians, spin masters and economic witch
>> doctors will often refer to free trade as a somewhat less restrictive
>> policy vis a vis the exchange of goods and services between nations.
>> They might even suggest reducing the heavy hand of the political state
>> re: internal markets. But they totally fail in delineating the free
>> market.
>> I would suggest that free trade or a free market means that individuals
>> or businesses anywhere in the world are able to exchange goods or
>> services of any description without hindrance. This means a) no taxation
>> or tariffs b) no license requirements c) no subsidies d) no regulation
>> e) no intimidation or harassment. In short, willing and able buyers and
>> sellers are off limits to the political state.
>> Economic freedom is the sine qua non of all other freedoms. Societies
>> developed from barbarism to civilization to the extent that markets
>> prevailed over rulers.
>
>Freedom requires self-restraint.
The most important element of any economy, which is the
biggest problem, and which is invariably overlooked in
trumpeting the idea of a world-wide, free-market,
libertarian economy is that _any_ viable economy _must_ have
a freely circulating money.
Neither the world nor any individual society has a freely
circulating money supply. All of the wars and economic
turmoil in the world are generated by one or another fascist
community attempting to cartelize various money supplies. At
this stage in man's intellectual evolution it is beyond
possible that the world economy could have a freely
circullating money supply and until it does, a world-wide,
free-market economy will not occur. Authoritarians like it
like that.
If and when a society develops a freely circulating money
supply it will do so as a free-standing libertarian society
as ours has been. But authoritarians have gained control of
our money supply, our economy, and our society. And they are
_not_ going to give it up until they suck the liberty and
prosperity out of our society as the Saudi royal family has
done to Arabia. Think of that a bit, and of the friendship
between the Bushes and the Saudi royal family and you will
see why our legislators gave him the power, and why he
arrogantly, illegally, and tyrannically used it to go to war
with Iraq.
In any case, libertarianism is failing in the U.S.
Bernard Curry
Men will heal Earth only when liberty heals men.
Bernard Curry
*****************************************************
Email : bc...@ispwest.com
Grain of Sand
Bernard Curry <bc...@ispwest.com> wrote:
J. Krishnamurti
Talk at the National
College, La Plata
Friends,
To most of us, profession is apart from our personal life. There is the
world of profession and technique, and the life of subtle feelings,
ideas, fears, and love. We are trained for a world of profession, and
only occasionally across this training and compulsion we hear the vague
whisperings of reality. The world of profession has become gradually
overpowering and exacting, taking almost all our time, so that there is
little chance for deep thought and emotion. And so the life of reality,
the life of happiness, becomes more and more vague and recedes into the
distance. Thus, we lead a double life: the life of profession, of work,
and the life of subtle desires, feelings, and hopes. This division into
the world of profession and the world of sympathy, love, and deep
wanderings of thought, is a fatal impediment to the fulfillment of man.
As in the lives of most people this separation exists, let us inquire if
we cannot bridge over this destructive gulf.
With rare exceptions, following any particular profession is not the
natural expression of an individual; it is not the fulfillment or
complete expression of one&'8217;s whole being. If you examine this, you
will see that it is but a careful training of the individual to adjust
himself to a rigid, inflexible system. This system is based on fear,
acquisitiveness, and exploitation. We have to discover by questioning
deeply and sincerely, not superficially, whether this system, to which
individuals are forced to adjust themselves, is really capable of
liberating man&'8217;s intelligence, and so bringing about his
fulfillment. If this system is capable of truly freeing the individual
to deep fulfillment, which is not mere egotistic self-expression, then
we must give our entire support to it. So we must look at the whole
basis of this system and not be carried away by its superficial effects.
For a man who is trained in a particular profession, it is very
difficult to discern that this system is based on fear, acquisitiveness,
and exploitation. His mind is already vested in self-interest, so he is
incapable of true action with regard to this system of fear. Take, for
example, a man who is trained for the army or the navy: he is incapable
of perceiving that armies must inevitably create wars. Or, take a man
whose mind is twisted by a particular religious belief: he is incapable
of discerning that religion as organized belief must poison his whole
being. So each profession creates a particular mentality, which prevents
the complete understanding of the integrated man.
As most of us are being trained or have already been trained to twist
and fit ourselves to a particular mold, we cannot see the tremendous
importance of taking the many human problems as a whole and not dividing
them up into various categories. As we have been trained and twisted, we
must free ourselves from the mold and reconsider, act anew, in order to
understand life as a whole. This demands of each individual that he
shall, through suffering, liberate himself from fear. Though there are
many forms of fear-social, economic, and religious-there is only one
cause, which is the search for security. When we individually destroy
the walls and forms that the mind has created in order to protect
itself, thus engendering fear, then there comes true intelligence, which
will bring about order and happiness in this world of chaos and
suffering.
On one side there is the mold of religion, impeding and frustrating the
awakening of individual intelligence, and on the other the vested
interest of society and profession. In these molds of vested interest
the individual is being forcibly and cruelly trained, without regard for
his individual fulfillment. Thus, the individual is compelled to divide
life into profession as a means of livelihood, with all its stupidities
and exploitations, and subjective hopes, fears, and illusions, with all
their complexities and frustrations. Out of this separation is born
conflict, ever preventing individual fulfillment. The present chaotic
condition is the result and expression of this continual conflict and
compulsion of the individual.
The mind must disentangle itself from the various compulsions,
authorities, which it has created for itself through fear, and thus
awaken that intelligence which is unique and not individualistic. Only
this intelligence can bring about the true fulfillment of man. This
intelligence is awakened through the continual questioning of those
values to which the mind has become accustomed, to which it is
constantly adjusting itself. For the awakening of this intelligence,
individuality is of the greatest importance. If you blindly follow a
pattern laid down, then you are no longer awakening intelligence, but
merely conforming, adjusting yourself, through fear, to an ideal, to a
system.
The awakening of this intelligence is a most difficult and arduous task,
for the mind is so timorous that it is ever creating shelters to protect
itself. A man who would awaken this intelligence must be supremely
alert, ever aware, not to escape into an illusion; for when you begin to
question these standards and values, there is conflict and suffering. To
escape from that suffering, the mind begins to create another set of
values, entering into the limitation of a new enclosure. So it moves
from one prison to another, thinking that it is living, evolving.
The awakening of this intelligence destroys the false division of
life-into profession or outward necessity, and the inward retreat from
frustration into illusion-and brings about the completeness of action.
Thus, through intelligence alone can there be true fulfillment and bliss
for man.
Bernard Curry
>Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net> wrote:
Snipped
Are you serious? If so, what's your (or J.K.'s) point?
Grain of Sand
Bernard Curry <bc...@ispwest.com> wrote:
> >On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 13:18:30 GMT,
> >Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net> wrote:
>
> Snipped
>
> Are you serious?
Yes.
>If so, what's your (or J.K.'s) point?
That is for you to find out.
--
Grain of Sand
Socialism is a Mental Disease <root@localhost.> wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 01:19:27 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
> wrote:
> >
> >>If so, what's your (or J.K.'s) point?
> >
> >That is for you to find out.
> >
>
> This pseudo-density of thought is simply garbage. "Grain of Sand" must
> refer to his brain.
You insult me, and at that moment of insult, if there is total
awareness, there is no recording, I do not want to hit you back I do not
want to call you a name, I am passively aware of the insult or the
flattery and therefore there is no image-making. Next time somebody
insults you or flatters you, be totally aware, then you will see that
the old structure of the brain becomes quiet, doesn't instantly operate.
The recording does not record, because you are totally aware. Please see
this when you go out next time, look at a tree, just observe it, see the
beauty of it, the branches of it, the strength of the trunk, the curve
of the branch, the delicate leaves, the shape of it, without the image,
the image being the previous knowledge of your having seen that tree. So
you look at it without the observer, look at your wife or your husband,
as though you are seeing her for the first time, that is, without the
image.
Krishnamurti in India 1970-71, pp 120-121
Bernard Curry
>>In article <0jqph0pu9b836jest...@4ax.com>,
>>Bernard Curry <bc...@ispwest.com> wrote:
>
>> >On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 13:18:30 GMT,
>> >Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net> wrote:
>>
>> Snipped
>>
>> Are you serious?
>Yes.
I was afraid of that.
>>If so, what's your (or J.K.'s) point?
>
>That is for you to find out.
Not for me. I often judge a writer by the wisdom of the
reccomender. If the latter has no wisdom I would not expect
to find it in the teacher. So I seldom read writers whose
reccommender is wisdomless.
So, I'll pass. Even though I have some appreciation of
Krishnamurti from other things I know of him.
Bernard Curry
Grain of Sand
Socialism is a Mental Disease <root@localhost.> wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 04:54:41 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
> wrote:
> >
> >In article <hg1rh0t4cqj4m7i3q...@4ax.com>,
> > Socialism is a Mental Disease <root@localhost.> wrote:
> >
> >> On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 01:19:27 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
> >> wrote:
> >> >
> >> >>If so, what's your (or J.K.'s) point?
> >> >
> >> >That is for you to find out.
> >> >
> >>
> >> This pseudo-density of thought is simply garbage. "Grain of Sand" must
> >> refer to his brain.
> >
> >
> >You insult me, and at that moment of insult, if there is total
> >awareness, there is no recording, I do not want to hit you back I do not
> >want to call you a name, I am passively aware of the insult or the
> >flattery and therefore there is no image-making. Next time somebody
> >insults you or flatters you, be totally aware, then you will see that
> >the old structure of the brain becomes quiet, doesn't instantly operate.
> >The recording does not record, because you are totally aware. Please see
> >this when you go out next time, look at a tree, just observe it, see the
> >beauty of it, the branches of it, the strength of the trunk, the curve
> >of the branch, the delicate leaves, the shape of it, without the image,
> >the image being the previous knowledge of your having seen that tree. So
> >you look at it without the observer, look at your wife or your husband,
> >as though you are seeing her for the first time, that is, without the
> >image.
> >
> >Krishnamurti in India 1970-71, pp 120-121
> >
>
> More crap. Not unexpected, though!
why do you think it is crap?
Bernard Curry
>Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net> wrote:
>In article <0jqph0pu9b836jest...@4ax.com>,
> Bernard Curry <bc...@ispwest.com> wrote:
>
>> >On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 13:18:30 GMT,
>> >Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net> wrote:
>>
>> Snipped
>>
>> Are you serious?
>
>Yes.
>
>>If so, what's your (or J.K.'s) point?
>
>That is for you to find out.
On second thought:
I have considerable respect for Krishnamurti because of a
minor statement he made that I doubt I could show you the
importance of so I won't try. I have more respect for his
adoptive mother because she brought ancient spiritism (or
spiritualism) into the modern world as the realistic
alternative to the monotheistic religions.
Both were mystical. The problem with that is that their
focus was on the mystical when our social problems lie in
the material. As men, we have the right and responsibility
of resolving social problems and making society as we like
to say we want it. Unfortunately, when men get focused on
the mystical they become of little earthly good.
Focusing on the mystical (energial) keeps us from focusing
on the material. As a result we understand neither. That is
why the world is in the mess it is today. We have all of
eternity to focus on the mystical. We have only our finite
lives to solve earthly (societal) problems.
For me the problem is why are libertarians always overcome
by authoritarians. To solve that problem we need focus on
the material (objective), not the mystical (subjective).
Bernard Curry
PS You are impertinent, presumptuous, and hubristic to
decide what I need "find out". But we already knew that.
BC
************************************************************
Authoritarians teach what is written
When they have taught they can teach no more
Libertarians teach what is unwritten
When they have taught they have just begun
Bernard Curry
********************************************************
Email : bc...@ispwest.com
********************************************************
Grain of Sand
Socialism is a Mental Disease <root@localhost.> wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 15:45:34 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
> wrote:
> >
> >> More crap. Not unexpected, though!
> >
> >why do you think it is crap?
> >
>
> That's for you to find out. (Sounds familiar?)
Yes. I will need more then two words from you however. So in order for
me to find out I need to ask you questions. I do feel however that it is
because you are afraid to give up the security of your beleifs.
If you want to read more on krishnamurti there are hunderds of books of
his dialouges.
Grain of Sand
Bernard Curry <bc...@ispwest.com> wrote:
> >On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 01:19:27 GMT,
> >Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net> wrote:
>
> >>In article <0jqph0pu9b836jest...@4ax.com>,
> >>Bernard Curry <bc...@ispwest.com> wrote:
> >
> >> >On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 13:18:30 GMT,
> >> >Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Snipped
> >>
> >> Are you serious?
>
> >Yes.
>
> I was afraid of that.
Are you not serious about life?
>
> >>If so, what's your (or J.K.'s) point?
> >
> >That is for you to find out.
>
> Not for me. I often judge a writer by the wisdom of the
> reccomender. If the latter has no wisdom I would not expect
> to find it in the teacher. So I seldom read writers whose
> reccommender is wisdomless.
Why would you say I lack wisdom?
And who said Krishnamurti was a teacher?
>
> So, I'll pass. Even though I have some appreciation of
> Krishnamurti from other things I know of him.
--
Grain of Sand
Bernard Curry <bc...@ispwest.com> wrote:
> >On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 01:19:27 GMT,
> >Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net> wrote:
>
> >In article <0jqph0pu9b836jest...@4ax.com>,
> > Bernard Curry <bc...@ispwest.com> wrote:
> >
> >> >On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 13:18:30 GMT,
> >> >Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Snipped
> >>
> >> Are you serious?
> >
> >Yes.
> >
> >>If so, what's your (or J.K.'s) point?
> >
> >That is for you to find out.
>
> On second thought:
>
> I have considerable respect for Krishnamurti because of a
> minor statement he made that I doubt I could show you the
> importance of so I won't try.
Why not? Please?
>I have more respect for his
> adoptive mother because she brought ancient spiritism (or
> spiritualism) into the modern world as the realistic
> alternative to the monotheistic religions.
>
> Both were mystical. The problem with that is that their
> focus was on the mystical when our social problems lie in
> the material. As men, we have the right and responsibility
> of resolving social problems and making society as we like
> to say we want it. Unfortunately, when men get focused on
> the mystical they become of little earthly good.
You, I think, have read a superfical amount of his dialouge.
Responsibility for these problems
Is this vast problem of the world your problem and my problem, or is it
independent of us? Is war independent of you? Is the national strife
independent of you, the communal strife independent of you? The
corruption, the degradation, the moral disintegration - are they
independent of each one of us? This disintegration is directly related
to us, and therefore the responsibility rests with each one of us.
Surely, that is the main problem, isn't it? That is, to put it
differently: Is the problem to be left to the few leaders, either of the
left or the right, to the party, to the discipline, to an ideology, to
the United Nations, to the expert, to the specialist? Or is it a problem
that directly involves us, which means: Are we directly responsible for
these problems, or are we not? Surely, that is the issue, is it not?
The Collected Works of J.Krishnamurti, Vol V, pp 182
>
> Focusing on the mystical (energial) keeps us from focusing
> on the material. As a result we understand neither. That is
> why the world is in the mess it is today. We have all of
> eternity to focus on the mystical. We have only our finite
> lives to solve earthly (societal) problems.
Krishnamurti had alaways said "What you are the world is." He was not
mystical at all. He poo pooed mystisicm.
"Friends,
When one hears something new, one is apt to brush it aside without
thought; and as I come from India, people are inclined to imagine that I
bring to them an oriental mysticism which is of no value in daily life.
Please listen to this talk without prejudice, and do not brush it aside
by calling me a mystic, an anarchist, a communist, or by any other name.
If you will kindly listen without prejudice but critically, you will see
that what I have to say has a fundamental value."
>
> For me the problem is why are libertarians always overcome
> by authoritarians. To solve that problem we need focus on
> the material (objective), not the mystical (subjective).
To be free, you have to examine authority, the whole skeleton of
authority, tearing to pieces the whole dirty thing. And that requires
energy, actual physical energy, and also, it demands psychological
energy. But the energy is destroyed, is wasted when one is in conflict.
... So when there is the understanding of the whole process of conflict,
there is the ending of conflict, there is abundance of energy. Then you
can proceed, tearing down the house that you have built throughout the
centuries and that has no meaning at all.
You know, to destroy is to create. We must destroy, not the buildings,
not the social or economic system- this comes about daily- but the
psychological, the unconscious and the conscious defenses, securities
that one has built up rationally, individually, deeply, and
superficially. We must tear through all that to be utterly defenseless,
because you must be defenseless to love and have affection. Then you see
and understand ambition, authority; and you begin to see when authority
is necessary and at what level-the authority of the policeman and no
more. Then there is no authority of learning, no authority of knowledge,
no authority of capacity, no authority that function assumes and which
becomes status. To understand all authority- of the gurus, of the
Masters, and others- requires a very sharp mind, a clear brain, not a
muddy brain, not a dull brain.
JK
>
> Bernard Curry
>
> PS You are impertinent, presumptuous, and hubristic to
> decide what I need "find out". But we already knew that.
>
Who does not need to find out the truth?
Frank Clarke
wrote:
<noone-348576....@news3-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
>In article <i6fnh05t91him7qb4...@4ax.com>,
> Frank Clarke <m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 12:19:14 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
>> wrote:
>> <noone-C8F1ED....@news2-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
>>
>> >Freedom requires self-restraint.
>>
>> Quite an assertion. Is there something to back it up beyond your
>> opinion?
>
>What happens when you do not practice self-restraint?
Innovation?
Bernard Curry
>Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net> wrote:
Snipped
>In article <ivjsh0pe500ltpdjh...@4ax.com>,
> Bernard Curry <bc...@ispwest.com> wrote:
>> On second thought:
>>
>> I have considerable respect for Krishnamurti because of a
>> minor statement he made that I doubt I could show you the
>> importance of so I won't try.
>
>Why not? Please?
>
>>I have more respect for his
>> adoptive mother because she brought ancient spiritism (or
>> spiritualism) into the modern world as the realistic
>> alternative to the monotheistic religions.
>>
>> Both were mystical. The problem with that is that their
>> focus was on the mystical when our social problems lie in
>> the material. As men, we have the right and responsibility
>> of resolving social problems and making society as we like
>> to say we want it. Unfortunately, when men get focused on
>> the mystical they become of little earthly good.
>
>You, I think, have read a superfical amount of his dialouge.
I have read none of his writing except the one small item I
mentioned above. Nor do I intend to read any.
>Responsibility for these problems
>
> Is this vast problem of the world your problem and my problem, or is it
>independent of us? Is war independent of you? Is the national strife
>independent of you, the communal strife independent of you? The
>corruption, the degradation, the moral disintegration - are they
>independent of each one of us? This disintegration is directly related
>to us, and therefore the responsibility rests with each one of us.
>Surely, that is the main problem, isn't it? That is, to put it
>differently: Is the problem to be left to the few leaders, either of the
>left or the right, to the party, to the discipline, to an ideology, to
>the United Nations, to the expert, to the specialist? Or is it a problem
>that directly involves us, which means: Are we directly responsible for
>these problems, or are we not? Surely, that is the issue, is it not?
>
> The Collected Works of J.Krishnamurti, Vol V, pp 182
No, we are not responsible for the problems. But we have the
right and responsibility to solve them.
>> Focusing on the mystical (energial) keeps us from focusing
>> on the material. As a result we understand neither. That is
>> why the world is in the mess it is today. We have all of
>> eternity to focus on the mystical. We have only our finite
>> lives to solve earthly (societal) problems.
>
>Krishnamurti had alaways said "What you are the world is." He was not
>mystical at all. He poo pooed mystisicm.
My explanation of mystical is broader than yours. It
includes subjective ideas that do not correlate with
objective reality. The idea that "What you are the world is"
has no significance about the objective world or our
relativity to it. It is the kind of mystical thinking that
men ponder throughout their lives. It prevents understanding
the problems of the material world and how to solve them.
>"Friends,
>
>When one hears something new, one is apt to brush it aside without
>thought; and as I come from India, people are inclined to imagine that I
>bring to them an oriental mysticism which is of no value in daily life.
>Please listen to this talk without prejudice, and do not brush it aside
>by calling me a mystic, an anarchist, a communist, or by any other name.
>If you will kindly listen without prejudice but critically, you will see
>that what I have to say has a fundamental value."
>> For me the problem is why are libertarians always overcome
>> by authoritarians. To solve that problem we need focus on
>> the material (objective), not the mystical (subjective).
>
>To be free, you have to examine authority, the whole skeleton of
>authority, tearing to pieces the whole dirty thing. And that requires
>energy, actual physical energy, and also, it demands psychological
>energy. But the energy is destroyed, is wasted when one is in conflict.
>... So when there is the understanding of the whole process of conflict,
>there is the ending of conflict, there is abundance of energy. Then you
>can proceed, tearing down the house that you have built throughout the
>centuries and that has no meaning at all.
That is the same kind of mystical statement as above. It
helps solve nothing. A more realistic nderstanding of the
problem of authoritarians versus libertarians begins with
cognizing that "authority" is a status of social existing
that is generated by men who believe authoritarianism should
be the underlying principle of the socioeconomic system.
If you think about authoritarianism enough, you see that it
is not really a belief. Beliefs are an effect of mind
function. Authoritarianism is an attitude and is an effect
of brain function.
Attitudes are the effect of reactive function of our animal
brain as it causes survival behavior. Because we are
predatory pack animals we have an inherant, instinctive
reaction to other men of attempting to dominate them. We do
so by using force and deceit. A big problem is that the mind
enjoys dominating (it makes the body feel good) and has
developed it as belief in authority, i.e. authoritarianism.
You can take it from there -- if you can get your head out
of your mystics.
> You know, to destroy is to create. We must destroy, not the buildings,
>not the social or economic system- this comes about daily- but the
>psychological, the unconscious and the conscious defenses, securities
>that one has built up rationally, individually, deeply, and
>superficially. We must tear through all that to be utterly defenseless,
>because you must be defenseless to love and have affection. Then you see
>and understand ambition, authority; and you begin to see when authority
>is necessary and at what level-the authority of the policeman and no
>more. Then there is no authority of learning, no authority of knowledge,
>no authority of capacity, no authority that function assumes and which
>becomes status. To understand all authority- of the gurus, of the
>Masters, and others- requires a very sharp mind, a clear brain, not a
>muddy brain, not a dull brain.
>
>JK
That is more of the same. The last sentence is typical. Note
that you are unable to differentiate between brain and mind.
>> PS You are impertinent, presumptuous, and hubristic to
>> decide what I need "find out". But we already knew that.
>
>
>Who does not need to find out the truth?
My statement stands.
Bernard Curry
************************************************************************
The eternal vigil that is the price of liberty is a vigil against
authority that begins within ourselves as individuals and within
the groups to which we belong.--Bernard Curry
************************************************************************
Email : bc...@ispwest.com
******************************************************
Grain of Sand
Frank Clarke <m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 21:11:08 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
> wrote:
> <noone-348576....@news3-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
>
> >In article <i6fnh05t91him7qb4...@4ax.com>,
> > Frank Clarke <m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 12:19:14 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
> >> wrote:
> >> <noone-C8F1ED....@news2-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
> >>
> >> >Freedom requires self-restraint.
> >>
> >> Quite an assertion. Is there something to back it up beyond your
> >> opinion?
> >
> >What happens when you do not practice self-restraint?
>
> Innovation?
>
is that all?
Grain of Sand
Bernard Curry <bc...@ispwest.com> wrote:
> >On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 21:44:19 GMT,
> >Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net> wrote:
>
> Snipped
>
> >In article <ivjsh0pe500ltpdjh...@4ax.com>,
> > Bernard Curry <bc...@ispwest.com> wrote:
>
> >> On second thought:
> >>
> >> I have considerable respect for Krishnamurti because of a
> >> minor statement he made that I doubt I could show you the
> >> importance of so I won't try.
> >
> >Why not? Please?
> >
> >>I have more respect for his
> >> adoptive mother because she brought ancient spiritism (or
> >> spiritualism) into the modern world as the realistic
> >> alternative to the monotheistic religions.
> >>
> >> Both were mystical. The problem with that is that their
> >> focus was on the mystical when our social problems lie in
> >> the material. As men, we have the right and responsibility
> >> of resolving social problems and making society as we like
> >> to say we want it. Unfortunately, when men get focused on
> >> the mystical they become of little earthly good.
> >
> >You, I think, have read a superfical amount of his dialouge.
>
> I have read none of his writing except the one small item I
> mentioned above. Nor do I intend to read any.
So be it.
May all beings live in peace.
bulba
wrote:
What that guy wrote is building in so many words the tripe
upon tripe upon tripe upon true, genuinely childish feeling.
In short, it is bullshit, the product of intellectual (and
I mean intellectual, not economic) third world mentality.
>>With rare exceptions, following any particular profession is not the
>>natural expression of an individual; it is not the fulfillment or
>>complete expression of one&'8217;s whole being.
No shit - as what we need other people to do for us is not
what they want to do and what we want to do is not what
other people need us to do. No, it's not going to ever be
different.
Knudson explained that well:
"Who, I wonder, is going to decide of his own
free will that his real ability lies in collecting other
people's garbage? And what about the man who thinks that he
is the greatest artist since Leonardo da Vinci and decides
to devote his life to painting mediocre landscapes while the
community literally feeds his delusions with food from the
communal warehouse? Few people, I dare say, would opt to do
the necessary "dirty work" if they could choose with
impunity ANY job, knowing that whatever they did - good or
bad, hard or easy - they would still receive according to
their needs.** "
" Even today people are beginning to complain about the
injustices of the (relatively mild) welfare state. Theodore
Roszak writes that in British schools there has been a
"strong trend away from the sciences over the past four
years" and that people are showing "annoyed concern" and
"loudly observing that the country is not spending its money
to produce poets and Egyptologists - and then demanding a
sharp cut in university grants and stipends."[27] If people
are upset NOW at the number of poets and Egyptologists that
they are supporting, what would it be like if EVERYONE could
simply take up his favourite hobby as his chosen profession?
I suspect it wouldn't be long before our professional
chess players and mountain climbers found the warehouse
stocks dwindling to nothing. "
>If you examine this, you
>>will see that it is but a careful training of the individual to adjust
>>himself to a rigid, inflexible system.
Rubbish. That's just resorting to this hollow, cliche-ish emotion.
>>This system is based on fear,
>>acquisitiveness, and exploitation.
Rubbish. That's just resorting to this hollow, cliche-ish emotion.
>>The mind must disentangle itself from the various compulsions,
>>authorities, which it has created for itself through fear, and thus
>>awaken that intelligence which is unique and not individualistic.
All right, now the common bullshit: if you get this thing for
free to other people, they like it. That's a surprise. All
that remains now is to paint the nonsense in so many
words until the experience is blabbered away.
If you can't express this explanation in clean, logical, minimalist
way using plain language (which is not to say the explanation
has to be uncomplicated or easy or not tricky), it's most likely
bullshit.
As simple as possible, but not simpler, Einstein said, regarding
what explanation of a problem should be like. Now THAT is
a principle that isn't bullshit. And it obviously isn't
employed in that pretentious rubbish.
>>Only
>>this intelligence can bring about the true fulfillment of man.
Yes, every child dreams that what he feels can bring
"the true fulfillment of a man". The explanations
given (if any are given instead of resorting to usual
innuendo) are as usual sentimental, contrived, illogical,
counter-factual, unsupported by the wide spectrum
of evidence, unscientific and out of sync with experience
of typical day in your life.
As usual, contrived bullshit (not to be confused with tricky
and elusive problems of the real world) tends to have very
simple delusions at the foundations.
Really, it is either western civilization that is getting
stupider by the day or the third world mentality that
is getting more and more sentimental support in spite of
being ever more impotent.
--
I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
bulba
wrote:
>You insult me, and at that moment of insult, if there is total
>awareness, there is no recording, I do not want to hit you back I do not
>want to call you a name, I am passively aware of the insult or the
>flattery and therefore there is no image-making. Next time somebody
>insults you or flatters you, be totally aware, then you will see that
>the old structure of the brain becomes quiet, doesn't instantly operate.
>The recording does not record, because you are totally aware. Please see
>this when you go out next time, look at a tree, just observe it, see the
>beauty of it, the branches of it, the strength of the trunk, the curve
>of the branch, the delicate leaves, the shape of it, without the image,
>the image being the previous knowledge of your having seen that tree. So
>you look at it without the observer, look at your wife or your husband,
>as though you are seeing her for the first time, that is, without the
>image.
That's just a garbled ersatz for gestalt psychology and the fact
that our brain has this indeed incredible "algorithm" for
"compressing" the representation of this thing we already
know and have seen a few times into a few data points. This
is stuff for neurobiology and/or psychology, not for lame
quasi-philosophy.
A bit of European imperialist logic for you here: Nihil novi
sub sole.
bulba
wrote:
>I do feel however that it is
>because you are afraid to give up the security of your beleifs.
You're like this automaton controlled by the shallowest of
emotions instead of acquiring insight with the use
of intellect.
I pity you.
bulba
wrote:
>So be it.
>May all beings live in peace.
All the stupid beings believing rubbish like that will indeed live in
peace of mind, even if not in peace in reality.
Newsflash: the real world is about anything but the peace of
mind. It is complicated, ambigous, rather dangerous
and bleak place. It refuses to be addressed by contrived
bullshit and simplistic self-deception like that written
by that Indian guy.
bulba
<m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>>> >Freedom requires self-restraint.
>>>
>>> Quite an assertion. Is there something to back it up beyond your
>>> opinion?
>>
>>What happens when you do not practice self-restraint?
Bill Clinton? :-)
bulba
Hello!
I strongly recommend reading the "Introduction" below. If you also
find it both interesting and powerful, then you will probably also
find the whole, lengthy article well worth your time. Hopefully you
will be able to access it by clicking on "PDF" a few lines below. If
it doesn't work, please let me know and I'll send it to you as
an attachment.
As always, if you would like to come off my List, just let me know.
Best wishes
Derek Bernard
-----Original Message-----
"Firearms Possession by 'Non-State Actors': The Question of
Sovereignty," 8 Texas Review of Law and Politics 373 (Spring 2004, No.
2), David B. Kopel,Paul Gallant & Joanne D. Eisen. PDF
<http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/Non-state-actors.pdf> .
(Introduction excerpted, only, below. Click on PDF link for text of
full article.)
I. Introduction
II. Ancient Greece
III. Mainland Asia
A. Cambodia
B. China
C. Japan
IV. The Pacific
A. East Timor
B. Bougainville
V. Africa
A. Niger
B. Angola
C. Zimbabwe
D. Uganda
VI. Europe
A. The Warsaw Pact
1. Afghanistan
2. 1989 Revolutions
3. Romania
B. Bosnia
VII. Conclusion
I. INTRODUCTION
At United Nations conferences and in other international fora, many
diplomats and NGOs have called for prohibiting or severely limiting
firearms possession by "non-state actors." Use of the phrase
"non-state actors," however, reveals a profound misunderstanding of
the nature of sovereignty. While the phrase implies that sovereignty
belongs to the government, sovereignty properly belongs to the people
and is merely delegated by them to the government. In this article,
we examine the connection between arms possession and sovereignty and
we detail the horrible violations of human rights that have so often
resulted from the prohibition of guns to "non-state actors."
From ancient Athens to modern Zimbabwe, weapons bans for
"non-state actors" have often led to human rights abuses by
illegitimate governments; these abuses are perpetrated against the
legitimate sovereigns: the people of the nation.
When Confucius was asked what would be the first step if a government
sought his advice, he answered that "[i]t would certainly be to
rectify the names.. . . If the names are not correct, language is
without an object."1
The modern push for civilian gun prohibition - for banning gun
ownership by "non-state actors" - is based on the faulty premise that
"the government" is equivalent to "the state." To the contrary, as
the Declaration of Independence teaches, it is a self-evident truth
that governments are created by the people of a state, in order to
protect the human rights of the people.
2 As sovereigns, the people have the authority to change the
government when they determine that the government is no longer
fulfilling its function of protecting the people's rights.
The people are the only true and legitimate rulers of a state, and the
government is only their instrument and servant. To the extent that a
government is not founded on the consent of the governed, it is
illegitimate. As a United States federal district court put it, "the
people, not the government, possess the sovereignty."
3 At the 2001 United Nations Small Arms Conference, Iran took the lead
in promoting a ban on weapons supplies to "non-state actors."
4 The "non-state actors" clause would require vendors "to supply
small arms and light weapons only to governments, or to
entities duly authorized by government."
5 The clause would make it illegal, for example, to supply weapons
to the Kurds, or religious minorities in Iran, even if Iranian
persecution or genocide drove them to forcible resistance. The clause
would have made it illegal for the United States to supply arms to the
oppressed Kurds and Shia of Iraq before the Saddam Hussein regime was
toppled.
Had the "non-state actors" provision been in effect in 1776, the
transfer of firearms to the American patriots would have been
prohibited. Had the clause been in effect during World War II, the
transfer of Liberator pistols to the French Resistance, and
to many other resistance groups, would have been illegal.
At the U.N. Conference, the United States delegation stood firm
against the "non-state actors" clause, rejecting compromise efforts to
revise the language, or to insert it into the preamble of the Program
of Action.
6 Although Canada pushed hard, the U.S. would not relent. U.S.
Under-Secretary of State John Bolton pointed out that the proposal
"would preclude assistance to an oppressed non-state group defending
itself from a genocidal government."
7 U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette (of Canada) explained
that in some parts of the world, an AK-47 could be obtained for $15 or
a bag of grain.
8 Small-arms "proliferation erodes the authority of legitimate but
weak governments," she complained.
9 U.S. delegate Faith Whittlesey replied that the U.N. "non-state
actors" provision "freezes the last coup. It favors established
governments, while taking away rights from individuals. It does not
recognize any value higher than peace, such as liberty."
10 According to the United Nations, any government with a U.N.
delegation is a "legitimate" government. This U.N. standard conflicts
with the Declaration of Independence's standard that the only
legitimate governments are those "deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed."
Mao Zedong once observed that "[p]olitical power grows out of the
barrel of a gun."
American Federalist Noah Webster would have agreed. Arguing in 1787
for adoption of the proposed American Constitution, Webster urged
Americans not to worry that the new federal government could become a
military dictatorship, for "[b]efore a standing army can rule, the
people must be disarmed." Not all governments that have disarmed
the people have become dictatorships, but dictatorship is rarely
present without an attempt by the government to obtain a monopoly of
arms. Let us study some examples....
bulba
Rapagnetta once claimed how shameful of us it is to
use up energy at such "alarming rates".
OK, let's assume fusion can't work (even though e.g. the
Sun is one giant fusion reactor working as we speak).
This article goes, pardon the bad pun, purely nuclear:
------------
Facts from Cohen and others
How long will nuclear energy last?
These facts come from a 1983 article by Bernard Cohen.
Nuclear energy, assuming breeder reactors, will last for several
billion years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life
on earth.
Here are the basic facts.
In 1983, uranium cost $40 per pound. The known uranium reserves at
that price would suffice for light water reactors for a few tens of
years. Since then more rich uranium deposits have been discovered
including a very big one in Canada. At $40 per pound, uranium
contributes about 0.2 cents per kwh to the cost of electricity.
(Electricity retails between 5 cents and 10 cents per kwh in the U.S.)
Breeder reactors use uranium more than 100 times as efficiently as the
current light water reactors. Hence much more expensive uranium can be
used. At $1,000 per pound, uranium would contribute only 0.03 cents
per kwh, i.e. less than one percent of the cost of electricity. At
that price, the fuel cost would correspond to gasoline priced at half
a cent per gallon.
How much uranium is available at $1,000 per pound?
There is plenty in the Conway granites of New England and in shales in
Tennessee, but Cohen decided to concentrate on uranium extracted from
seawater - presumably in order to keep the calculations simple and
certain. Cohen (see the references in his article) considers it
certain that uranium can be extracted from seawater at less than $1000
per pound and considers $200-400 per pound the best estimate.
In terms of fuel cost per million BTU, he gives (uranium at $400 per
pound 1.1 cents , coal $1.25, OPEC oil $5.70, natural gas $3-4.)
How much uranium is there in seawater?
Seawater contains 3.3x10^(-9) (3.3 parts per billion) of uranium, so
the 1.4x10^18 tonne of seawater contains 4.6x10^9 tonne of uranium.
All the world's electricity usage, 650GWe could therefore be supplied
by the uranium in seawater for 7 million years.
However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact
3.2x10^4 tonne per year.
Cohen calculates that we could take 16,000 tonne per year of uranium
from seawater, which would supply 25 times the world's present
electricity usage and twice the world's present total energy
consumption. He argues that given the geological cycles of erosion,
subduction and uplift, the supply would last for 5 billion years with
a withdrawal rate of 6,500 tonne per year. The crust contains
6.5x10^13 tonne of uranium.
He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun
will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a
renewable resource.
Here's a Japanese site discussing extracting uranium from seawater.
Comments:
Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life of
4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his postulated 5
billion years.
He didn't mention thorium, also usable in breeders. There is 4 times
as much in the earth's crust as there is uranium. There's less thorium
in seawater than there is uranium.
He did mention fusion, but remarks that it hasn't been developed yet.
He has certainly provided us plenty of time to develop it.
The main point to be derived from Cohen's article is that energy is
not a problem even in the very long run. In particular, energy
intensive solutions to other human problems are entirely acceptable.
------------
Again, that was known A.D. 1983. The persistence of
ignorance is amazing, isn't it?
One more proof that some people do not need facts to get
in the way of their assumptions. As Mencken put it, people
love ideas that are simple, plausible, and completely wrong.
Grain of Sand
bulba <abb...@poczta.onet.pl> wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 21:28:23 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
> wrote:
> >I do feel however that it is
> >because you are afraid to give up the security of your beleifs.
>
> You're like this automaton controlled by the shallowest of
> emotions instead of acquiring insight with the use
> of intellect.
Surely, a man who is understanding life does not want beliefs. A man who
loves, has no beliefs- he loves. It is the man who is consumed by the
intellect who has beliefs, because intellect is always seeking security,
protection; it is always avoiding danger, and therefore it builds ideas,
beliefs, ideals, behind which it can take shelter. What would happen if
you dealt with violence directly, now? You would be a danger to society;
and because the mind foresees the danger, it says "I will achieve the
ideal of non-violence ten years later which is such a fictitious, false
process.... To understand what is, is more important than to create and
follow ideals because ideals are false, and what is is the real. To
understand what is requires an enormous capacity, a swift and
unprejudiced mind. It is because we don't want to face and understand
what is that we invent the many ways of escape and give them lovely
names as the ideal, the belief, God. Surely, it is only when I see the
false as the false that my mind is capable of perceiving what is true. A
mind that is confused in the false, can never find the truth. Therefore,
I must understand what is false in my relationships, in my ideas, in the
things about me because to perceive the truth requires the understanding
of the false. Without removing the causes of ignorance, there cannot be
enlightenment; and to seek enlightenment when the mind is unenlightened
is utterly empty, meaningless. Therefore, I must begin to see the false
in my relationships with ideas, with people, with things. When the mind
sees that which is false, then that which is true comes into being and
then there is ecstasy, there is happiness.
Grain of Sand
bulba <abb...@poczta.onet.pl> wrote:
Yes, nothing is new. And nothing is the same.
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>Rapagnetta once claimed how shameful of us it is to
>use up energy at such "alarming rates".
>
>OK, let's assume fusion can't work (even though e.g. the
>Sun is one giant fusion reactor working as we speak).
>
>This article goes, pardon the bad pun, purely nuclear:
>
>How long will nuclear energy last?
>These facts come from a 1983 article by Bernard Cohen.
>Nuclear energy, assuming breeder reactors, will last for several
>billion years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life
>on earth.
Sure, use up the Middle East's only significant source of revenue,
leave them poor and destitute, and then, hell, give them the
capability for nuclear proliferation and provide targets for terrorist
attacks which could annihilate the entire eastern seaboard!
Brilliant, bulba. You're a real thinker.
I'm sorry, were you saying something about salt water? Jackass.
(By the way, I love how you posted a solution to the energy crisis
requiring a one-world military government to two libertarian
newsgroups.)
bulba
<n0spam....@gmx.net> wrote:
>>Facts from Cohen and others
>>How long will nuclear energy last?
>>These facts come from a 1983 article by Bernard Cohen.
>>Nuclear energy, assuming breeder reactors, will last for several
>>billion years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life
>>on earth.
>Sure, use up the Middle East's only significant source of revenue,
>leave them poor and destitute, and then, hell, give them the
>capability for nuclear proliferation and provide targets for terrorist
>attacks which could annihilate the entire eastern seaboard!
>Brilliant, bulba. You're a real thinker.
Rapagnetta, again: what you write as usual doesn't have any
basis in reality.
Nowhere I have recommended "using up ME's only significant
source of revenue" - what does that mean? stealing their
oil or smth? Bc if it is paid for with $, then I guess they
do get the value for money?
Again, nowhere I have claim that GIVING them the nuclear
technology is wise. Where did you get the idea that
they are the ones that should get it? Isn't it obvious
that nuclear technology is necessary rather for those
that do NOT have the oil or gas available in large
quantities and obviously do have the know how
(and thus it is highly probable that they are the civilized
countries)?
And while I didn't recommend that, you didn't protest
about this Thelasian poster supporting Iran getting
the nukes even if it officially denies its nuclear
program is for acquiring nukes (even though it obviously
is)?
What you write makes less and less sense.
>I'm sorry, were you saying something about salt water? Jackass.
You're sputtering, Rapagnetta, that is a sign of desperation
and/or frustration.
Frank Clarke
wrote:
<noone-436A9C....@news3-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
>In article <1vfth0101rb8a75b0...@4ax.com>,
> Frank Clarke <m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 21:11:08 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
>> wrote:
>> <noone-348576....@news3-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
>>
>> >In article <i6fnh05t91him7qb4...@4ax.com>,
>> > Frank Clarke <m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 12:19:14 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
>> >> wrote:
>> >> <noone-C8F1ED....@news2-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
>> >>
>> >> >Freedom requires self-restraint.
>> >>
>> >> Quite an assertion. Is there something to back it up beyond your
>> >> opinion?
>> >
>> >What happens when you do not practice self-restraint?
>>
>> Innovation?
>>
>
>is that all?
What? Isn't it enough?
Grain of Sand
Grain of Sand
Frank Clarke <m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Aug 2004 03:39:02 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
> wrote:
> <noone-436A9C....@news3-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
>
> >In article <1vfth0101rb8a75b0...@4ax.com>,
> > Frank Clarke <m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 21:11:08 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
> >> wrote:
> >> <noone-348576....@news3-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
> >>
> >> >In article <i6fnh05t91him7qb4...@4ax.com>,
> >> > Frank Clarke <m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> >> >
> >> >> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 12:19:14 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
> >> >> wrote:
> >> >> <noone-C8F1ED....@news2-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
> >> >>
> >> >> >Freedom requires self-restraint.
> >> >>
> >> >> Quite an assertion. Is there something to back it up beyond your
> >> >> opinion?
> >> >
> >> >What happens when you do not practice self-restraint?
> >>
> >> Innovation?
> >>
> >
> >is that all?
>
> What? Isn't it enough?
It=f it were enough there would be no issue. Is that all that happens?
Can you tell me of a time when someone did not show self-restraint?
Think blue dress....
SAP BASIS Consultant
> bulba:
> >Rapagnetta once claimed how shameful of us it is to
> >use up energy at such "alarming rates".
> >
> >OK, let's assume fusion can't work (even though e.g. the
> >Sun is one giant fusion reactor working as we speak).
Stuff deleted..
> >Nuclear energy, assuming breeder reactors, will last for several
> >billion years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life
> >on earth.
>
> Sure, use up the Middle East's only significant source of revenue,
> leave them poor and destitute,
You are implying that the West is leaving the Middle East "poor and
destitute" by purchasing their resources at market rates, and at the
qualities in which the Middle Eastern states are willing to sell.
How does this work? The military power exists among Europe and America
to take over the oil fields of, say, Saudi 100 times over. Yet, that
is not done. (Nor do I, or any serious person, advocate this).
The West pays them, likely, trillions of dollars since WWII
for oil (Even enduring their various blockades that either triggered
or worsened recessions in the West in the 1970s). In fact, the West
also picked up the tab for defending them against Saddamn.
If they have not been able to build up a diversified and dynamic
economy despite the trillions of petro-dollars, military
assistance, etc.., this is strictly the fault of their various
dictatorships.
Israel, South Korea, Japan, etc.. built decent economies with many
fewer resourcesa at their disposal.
Bottom Line: There is absolutely no reason to be apologetic in
purchasing oil from Saudi and the gang at market rates as long
as they are willing to sell it, and purchasing it elsewhere
when they run out. If you run a business and purchase, say, $100000
in legal services from a law firm for 20 years, you do not have
an obligation to do so for the next 20 if you no longer need
their services.
> and then, hell, give them the
> capability for nuclear proliferation and provide targets for terrorist
Yes, mistakes were made is selling them nukes. Bush is trying
to change this.
> attacks which could annihilate the entire eastern seaboard!
> Brilliant, bulba. You're a real thinker.
>
> I'm sorry, were you saying something about salt water? Jackass.
>
> (By the way, I love how you posted a solution to the energy crisis
> requiring a one-world military government to two libertarian
> newsgroups.)
What energy crisis? Over the long run (Say, the past 100 or 200 years),
the price of energy (Coal, oil, electricity, etc..) as a percentage
of income have decreased fairly consistently as technology and
distribution improves. Thus, as a trend, energy is becoming cheaper
and more plentiful. See the book "The Ultimate Resource"
by Julian Simon. I highly recommend it. True, over a few years,
oil could become more expensive but as technology and distribution
improves, it becomes more and more affordable. This is one of
the beauties of capitalism.
Bernard Curry
>Gabrielle Rapagnetta <n0spam....@gmx.net> wrote:
Snipped
>Sure, use up the Middle East's only significant source of revenue,
>leave them poor and destitute, and then, hell, give them the
>capability for nuclear proliferation and provide targets for terrorist
>attacks which could annihilate the entire eastern seaboard!
Every nation in the Middle East is run by a tyrant. Whether
communist (S. Hussein), royalist (Saudi King), monotheist
(Ayatollah or whatever as in Iran), or whatever other kind
of tyrannical regime.
A clear insight is the Saudi King and his royal family
numbering some fourty thousand. All of them must be
supported in the manner in which royalty likes to become
accustomed -- luxury and no work.
They use all the money they can get their hands on and
demand more. They bankrupt themselves gorging their
insatiable appetites for luxury. They care not a whit for
their country or the people in it. They are the ones who are
selling us their oil -- and for their own purposes. _They_
are the ones who render their countries poor and destitute.
You appear to be no more than another communist -- peddling
Marx's corrupt authoritarian ideology for whatever you get
or hope to get out of it. The gentries of the Middle East,
whether oligarchists, plutarchists, theoarchists, or
royalists are as corrupt as any gentry in the world; more so
than most. The responsibility for what happens in and to
their countries is their own.
Bernard Curry
Men will heal Earth only when liberty heals men.
Bernard Curry
*****************************************************
Email : bc...@ispwest.com
Frank Clarke
wrote:
<noone-737F47....@news3-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
I thought we were talking about freedom, markets, and free trade? I
don't know what point you are driving at (and possibly you don't
either) -- make it and be done.
bulba
Consultant) wrote:
>How does this work? The military power exists among Europe and America
>to take over the oil fields of, say, Saudi 100 times over. Yet, that
>is not done. (Nor do I, or any serious person, advocate this).
I start to get to the opinion that maybe this would not be
such a bad idea.
Invade those countries, line up the Saudi princes and ayatollahs
against the wall and mow them down and let the people
there choose whatever govt they want to have.
Toby
Since breeders create Plutonium-239 out of Uranium-238 there is no supply
problem. The probelm is, in fact, the opposite--what to do with all that
extremely deadly Plutonium
"bulba" <abb...@poczta.onet.pl> wrote in message
news:q0t1i0d29kjfsrnp8...@4ax.com...
Grain of Sand
Frank Clarke <m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
I am talking about those things. If one does not show self restraint in
life why would thy act any other way in business? Business is a part of
life.
If one does not show self-restraint they loose their freedom.
Toby
But as I was saying, fast breeders are not exactly a safe technology. Every
country that has experimented with them AFAIK has aborted or suspended their
programs--even France gave up on the Super-Phenix. The proud Japanese have
had to mothball Monju after the liquid sodium leak several years ago.
Then of course there is the question of what to do with all the Plutonium
created by breeders. You can reprocess it into MOX fuel (with U-238) for use
in light water reactors, but you still end up with dangerous radioactive
waste. No permanent solution for spent fuel storage has yet been found, and
one thinks that such a vital issue should be addressed before building up
too many unrecyclable radioactive wastes. Japan has been storing them in the
nuclear facilities themselves, and they are building up and becoming a
problem, as no one has any long-term solutions (AFAIK).
Then, of course, there is the problem with what to do with aging reactors
themselves. Neutron bombardment tends to make metallic elements such as the
coolant pipes quite brittle over time, and even non-radioactive incidents
such as the recent secondary cooling system pipe break at Mihama #3 in Japan
point to the kinds of unexpected accidents that can occur in aging systems.
The question is not if accidents will happen, but when--they are unavoidable
in complex technologies such as nuclear reactors, and breeders are doubly
dangerous because of the nature of their cycle.
A good introduction to some of this is "Normal Accidents, Living with
High-Risk Technologies" by Charles Perrow.
In Japan, as elsewhere, light-water reactors, when first built, had a
projected life span of 30 years; now power companies are planning to double
that--keeping reactors designed for a 30 year life span in service for 60
years.
There are some disasters here just waiting to happen.
Here is an article that discusses the other side of the glowing picture
presented by nuclear power advocates:
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1997/so97/so97vonhippel.html
There is no question that alternative sources of energy need to be found to
replace fossil fuels. Wind, tides, waves, ocean temperature differential,
solar--all offer possibilities on various levels with none or few of the
deleterious effects of burning fossil fuels or fission. (Fusion is not yet
on the horizon in any commercially-feasible form.)
However the power companies are not too happy about these alternatives,
partly because of the difficulty of centralizing and controlling them as
means of power generation.
Our present means of power generation have unavoidable downsides. Have a
look here for further reading:
Toby
"Toby" <kymar...@ybb.ne.jpp> wrote in message
news:412213e9$0$83024$45be...@newscene.com...
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>> bulba:
>> >Rapagnetta once claimed how shameful of us it is to
>> >use up energy at such "alarming rates".
>> >
>> >billion years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life
>> >on earth.
>Gabrielle Rapagnetta:
>> Sure, use up the Middle East's only significant source of revenue,
>> leave them poor and destitute,
SAP BASIS Consultant:
>You are implying that the West is leaving the Middle East "poor and
>destitute" by purchasing their resources at market rates, and at the
>qualities in which the Middle Eastern states are willing to sell.
>
>How does this work? The military power exists among Europe and America
>to take over the oil fields of, say, Saudi 100 times over. Yet, that
>is not done. (Nor do I, or any serious person, advocate this).
>
>The West pays them, likely, trillions of dollars since WWII
>for oil (Even enduring their various blockades that either triggered
>or worsened recessions in the West in the 1970s). In fact, the West
>also picked up the tab for defending them against Saddamn.
>
>If they have not been able to build up a diversified and dynamic
>economy despite the trillions of petro-dollars, military
>assistance, etc.., this is strictly the fault of their various
>dictatorships.
and...
Bernard Curry:
>You appear to be no more than another communist -- peddling
>Marx's corrupt authoritarian ideology for whatever you get
>or hope to get out of it. The gentries of the Middle East,
>whether oligarchists, plutarchists, theoarchists, or
>royalists are as corrupt as any gentry in the world; more so
>than most. The responsibility for what happens in and to
>their countries is their own.
I lumped these two responses together because they both embody the
same flawed logic. Here it is:
"The West pays them..."
"If they have not been able to..."
"...what happens in and to their countries..."
Let's turn this around. Do SAP Consultant and Bernard take
responsibility for the economy of Western nations? Do they get up in
the morning, read in the newspaper that the Dow Jones is up, and feel
a sense of personal accomplishment? Unless they've got a serious
hubris complex, I doubt it.
So who is this "they" that we are talking about? Who does the West
pay for oil? Tycoons who take that money and invest it not so much in
their own countries, but rather back in the West. Saudi Arabia is
dumping money into US treasury bonds instead of Saudi infrastructure.
So when I say that depleting the world's oil reserves will leave the
Middle East mostly poor, it is quite likely given current investment
trends -- most of the population does indeed remain poor.
Now the oil market is nothing that remotely resembles free trade. It
is an arrangement between princes of the East and West. The Good News
Capitalists are using a double standard to justify this arrangement.
When they say "They sell oil" they are talking a handful of wealthy
individuals. So don't pretend that "what happens in and to their
countries is their own responsibility". Their definition of "they"
does not apply to 99.99% of the Middle East population. On the other
hand, their definition of "us" includes nearly the entire world. So
who is in a better position to accept responsibility for the trends
which are rapidly depleting a non-renewable resource in the span of
just a few generations: SAP BASIS with his SUV in a double garage, or
the Iraqi farmer who shares his tractor with twelve other people?
The responsibility of sustainability belongs to everyone. There is no
"us and them" when you talking about depleting a global resource.
James A. Donald
"Toby"
> But as I was saying, fast breeders are not exactly a safe
> technology. Every country that has experimented with them
> AFAIK has aborted or suspended their programs--even France
> gave up on the Super-Phenix. The proud Japanese have had to
> mothball Monju after the liquid sodium leak several years
> ago.
Largely because uranium enrichment is sufficiently cheap that
breeding cannot compete economically. If, however, the price
of uranium was to rise enormously, then breeding would become
economically feasible.
>
> Then of course there is the question of what to do with all
> the Plutonium created by breeders.
Breeders are supposed to create plutonium - as fuel.
> You can reprocess it into MOX fuel (with U-238) for use in
> light water reactors, but you still end up with dangerous
> radioactive waste.
Nuclear reactors create less radioactive waste than coal fired
plants - because coal ash is so voluminous, it has to be dumped
immediately, whereas nuclear fule can be buried somwhere it
will stay put for a few thousand years. After a few thousand
years nuclear waste is less radioactive for the amount of power
produced than the radioactivity of coal ash
> No permanent solution for spent fuel storage has yet been
> found,
That is because you guys keep raising the bar on "permanent".
No one worries about the "permanent" disposal of arsenic waste,
cyanide waste from gold processing, etc. They just put it in
a great big pile, and bulldoze some dirt on top.
Here is the James Donald solution for radioactive waste.
Dig deep hole. Mix waste with cement, pour in hole.
Fill in hole. Forget. Permanent enough for me. After all,
the stuff was radioactive before we dug it up.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
srDEIaWihabx9rCXaQpMyriCRc4gu/5VDbV7Wo+k
4St5KvTvsHLlXXwuWOgegHozvJRdYKnKLFhGSq2C8
bulba
>But as I was saying, fast breeders are not exactly a safe technology. Every
>country that has experimented with them AFAIK has aborted or suspended their
>programs--even France gave up on the Super-Phenix. The proud Japanese have
>had to mothball Monju after the liquid sodium leak several years ago.
They may have come too early into that in fact:
"The real costs could easily be higher, since the DAE's cost estimate
is too low. The cheapest plant that has come on line since 1980 is the
Russian BN-600, which is about one-third more costly per megawatt than
the DAE's estimate for Kalpakkam. If the latest U.S. reactor, which
went on line in 1980, is used as the benchmark, Kalpakkam would cost
Rs. 22,000 crores. If the Japanese reactor Monju (1994) is used as the
benchmark, the capital cost would shoot up to Rs. 46,000 crores. This
enormous variation in capital cost is one sure sign of an immature,
and hence an economically very risky technology."
http://www.ieer.org/op-eds/breeder.html
The argument about highly diverse prices as the sign of immature
technology definitely seems convincing. As usual, more research
necessary.
Still, there have been light-water experimental breeders, not
the ones using liquid sodium that operated successfully:
http://www.atomicinsights.com/oct95/LWBR_oct95.html
>Then of course there is the question of what to do with all the Plutonium
>created by breeders. You can reprocess it into MOX fuel (with U-238) for use
>in light water reactors, but you still end up with dangerous radioactive
>waste. No permanent solution for spent fuel storage has yet been found, and
>one thinks that such a vital issue should be addressed before building up
>too many unrecyclable radioactive wastes.
One solution would be more research on integral breeders that
use the plutonium further in the process as its own fuel, sort of
"fueled for life". There's no problem with reprocessing then.
At the end of the useful life of core the waste that remains
is about as harmful as uranium and has short half-life. The
design is viable, but as usual it hasn't been tried. Oh well.
>Japan has been storing them in the
>nuclear facilities themselves, and they are building up and becoming a
>problem, as no one has any long-term solutions (AFAIK).
A solution for waste is developing technology that would allow
to dump the waste into... the Sun.
I'm serious. The mass drivers have been practical to build
in 1980 already:
http://www.oz.net/~coilgun/theory/electroguns.htm
In purely technological terms it's not even very hard
to build: gee, 2 km of traditional ramp plus the
maglev on top.
And there are containers designed in such way that
they can withstand the free fall from the 10 km attitude.
Position such a ramp with a railgun somewhere on
the coast so it points towards Pacific with no
inhabited landmass, build good containers
and start launching the containers into the Sun. Even
occasional misfire would not be very dangerous if
you have to build the container that has to withstand
acceleration from a 1,000 g to 10,000 g. Even
the misfire and the unlikely loss of the ablative shell
would be unlikely to release much radioactive material
since it would be a metal lump and the misfire
would mean it would be unlikely for it to have orbital
velocities, so it would not burn like a meteor falling
into atmosphere. To reduce that risk even further,
make containers small and launch them rapidly.
Remember that the cost of amount of energy it took
to take the Apollo ship to the moon all the way and back when
calculated as equivalent in electrical energy would be smth
like $200 (two hundred dollars). Certainly this is a problem of
energy efficiency, not the amount of energy necessary.
"The Space Shuttle burns half its fuel just to reach 1000 mph (Mach
1.3) because it struggles to push through the dense lower atmosphere
with a full fuel load. NASA's maglev assisted launch studies showed
that a 600 mph (Mach 0.8) assisted launch can reduce the required fuel
by 25%, allowing a single-stage RLV to make orbit with a substantial
payload."
Anyway, there are good ideas what to do with spent
fuel:
http://www.ieer.org/fctsheet/srs-snf.html
But as usual, this is vested interest problem in the govt
research and "enterprises": it is in the interest of the
govt officials to build at the expense of the taxpayers
uneconomic water dams that damage rivers, continue
reprocessing of nuclear wastes instead of research and
use "melt and dilute" approach, not develop cheaper
access to space and continue doing things like
spending $450 mln per space shuttle launch so the
astronauts could get into station, flip the switch in
the equipment into "on" position, then get into
space shuttle and back to Earth (bc their physical
presence might disturb the experiment).
The costly & unsafe technology is good from the POV from
govt employee, since it is the taxpayer that picks up
the tab, and the greater costs, the greater share
of "profit" made indirectly, in size of budget,
perks, number of jobs of this institution, political
influence and the conferences in countries with
nice weather, etc can be made, since when there
is no market evaluation of this thing, the operation
necessarily runs on the model "costs plus arbitrary
percentage as reserve", so the bigger the costs, the
better, and in addition that is politically appointed.
Hence the natural govt preference for technologies
that are unviable, costly and dangerous, not the
ones that are viable, cheap and safe.
I was once advising this head of govt institution
where I worked for some time in the negotiations
about new IT system (not very big, some 200
people worked there, and I was the senior system
admin, so naturally the director had been relying
on me WRT such things in the institution). The
director was calculating every module and a piece
of infrastructure with some 100% totally
unnecessary overhead.
The waste made me so sick that at some point
I just couldn't keep my mouth shut and I said
"Sir, I could get this done at the half of the
cost". He simply said "I know" and continued
estimating in the same manner.
I was so pissed off, but in a way I don't blame
him - I learned much about his position and
what he could and couldn't do.
>Then, of course, there is the problem with what to do with aging reactors
>themselves. Neutron bombardment tends to make metallic elements such as the
>coolant pipes quite brittle over time,
There have been materials developed for fusion that do not become
irradiated when bombarded by neutrons. Surely smth could
be done in this regard for smth as trivial as coolant pipes.
> and even non-radioactive incidents
>such as the recent secondary cooling system pipe break at Mihama #3 in Japan
>point to the kinds of unexpected accidents that can occur in aging systems.
This is the problem with govt solutions: you build them when they
are politically viable, i.e. early in development, not when they
matured enough, which would often take decades of intensive
and costly research. When they finally mature, nobody is interested
in it politically anymore, so it is not build. Ergo, things like sky
ramp, safe light-water breeder or integral breeder, "melt and dilute"
do not get developed & used, but precisely the least viable solutions
get used.
When this sort of thing happens on the market, like dotcom
bubble (which was really insane), this is put to an end
quickly. Not in the govt, bc there is no bottom line and
no operating only on your own budget.
Note that each of the technologies has been killed early
in development in internal politics in the govt agencies:
light-water breeder (shut down and never reopened),
integral breeder (initial build plans shelved), sky ramp
and a number of other cheap space access technologies
(by NASA, which has been doing what it could to keep
the access to space from becoming cheap and deny
it to private operators).
>The question is not if accidents will happen, but when--they are unavoidable
>in complex technologies such as nuclear reactors, and breeders are doubly
>dangerous because of the nature of their cycle.
>A good introduction to some of this is "Normal Accidents, Living with
>High-Risk Technologies" by Charles Perrow.
Develop low risk technologies then.
>In Japan, as elsewhere, light-water reactors, when first built, had a
>projected life span of 30 years; now power companies are planning to double
>that--keeping reactors designed for a 30 year life span in service for 60
>years.
>There are some disasters here just waiting to happen.
>Here is an article that discusses the other side of the glowing picture
>presented by nuclear power advocates:
>
>http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1997/so97/so97vonhippel.html
Oh I agree that politicians have the tendency of jumping right
into a bad solution without paying much attention to the details,
like if it is economically viable or safe. Since this is done about
time when the world gets excited about this solution without looking
into details and spending another decade or two on research, bad
initial solutions tend to persist in bureaucracy. Vested interest
takes over et voila, the mess is ready.
The experience certainly demonstrates: don't do smth until
you're damn sure what you are doing. The political process
can definitely result in wrong technical solutions being chosen,
there are countless examples of that.
>There is no question that alternative sources of energy need to be found to
>replace fossil fuels.
Nevertheless, there's no danger of running out of the oil soon:
http://www.ieer.org/op-eds/radio/20oilout1.html
It's only fortunate that we're probably not much in the danger
of global warming:
>Wind, tides, waves, ocean temperature differential,
>solar--all offer possibilities on various levels with none or few of the
>deleterious effects of burning fossil fuels or fission.
I beg to disagree - those have low density. There's no way
to make them massively deployed and providing anything but
a small fraction of energy. This has been discussed at
great lenghts on sci.econ in the past by quite knowledgable
people, BTW.
Once for fun I have estimated what would be
the amount of solar cells needed to provide the world
with the current energy consumption. Quick & dirty
calculations gave me number that suggested that
over a half of total world landmass would have to
be covered with solar cells (of course that depends
heavily on the kind of solutions that are used
as assumptions).
There is this engineer in California who promises that
he could make a solar cell 30 times more efficient than
what they are now (pretty inefficient) and thus
they'd skip the "energy sink instead of energy source"
trap among others. We'll see.
> (Fusion is not yet
>on the horizon in any commercially-feasible form.)
What can you expect from politicians and societies
that casually spend a few billion dollars on one olympic
games but don't want to shell out $6 bln for the first
viable fusion reactor in the world which could in the
long run solve the energy problems of the world for
practical forever, oh well..
Regarding technology like this: high-tech is always
extraordinarily expensive at first. Remember
the issues with prices of antibiotics or computers
at the beginnig of the development.
Later the prices of high-tech fall to the rock bottom
bc the main problem is the know-how and organizing
operation, unless like in the case of fission reactors
dangerous materials are used and then majority of
the costs are actually related to making the operation
safe. Fusion has only this little bit of a problem with
it as it uses tritium as part of fuel in the process.
New materials would even limit or eliminate altogether
irradiation of most of the parts of the reactor.
This is the main part of the problem with fusion for
now: capital costs. The costs of operation are actually
very low.
>However the power companies are not too happy about these alternatives,
>partly because of the difficulty of centralizing and controlling them as
>means of power generation.
I'd rather say the problem is capital cost, in case of windmills
for example the cost of power potential is huge. One of
the problems is that there is little way to get this
design very advanced. Because econuts don't like windmills
very much anymore: they "spoil the landscape and kill birds".
>Our present means of power generation have unavoidable downsides. Have a
>look here for further reading:
>
>http://www.dieoff.org/
Doomsday projections are about the oldest sport in
the world.
I've seen that site a long time ago. I'm not convinced with
long extrapolations because something totally unknown
previously happens on the way and the projection
becomes useless.
The only danger that we're in is not there are no
potential alternatives that could exist, but that
we do not research them in enough depth before
the moment comes at which we need them.
bulba
<jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
>Here is the James Donald solution for radioactive waste.
>Dig deep hole. Mix waste with cement, pour in hole.
>Fill in hole. Forget. Permanent enough for me. After all,
>the stuff was radioactive before we dug it up.
One of the solutions is also "melt and dilute": you melt
the radioactive waste together with the depleted
uranium from the earlier process, so you get smth
that is not all that much more radioactive than the
uranium ore. A metal lump like that stored deep
underground in geologically stable location isn't going
to be very dangerous.
Obviously, relevant technology for that isn't developed
by the govt. Guess why.
bulba
<n0spam....@gmx.net> wrote:
>So who is this "they" that we are talking about? Who does the West
>pay for oil? Tycoons who take that money and invest it not so much in
>their own countries, but rather back in the West.
Since there's nothing in the Muslim countries to sensibly invest into,
they have to.
Unless you count the sand and the camel dung in the Muslim
countries as "viable investment".
First, madmen like Saudis or Iranian ayatollahs would have
to start respecting the rule of law as well as private property
rights, including those of infidels. Which is smth they don't
want to do and the left in the world makes damn sure nobody
even blames them for that.
There has been the very first aircraft factory built ever
in an Islamic country, in Jordan and with support of
the king of Jordan. He's the only one that actually
tries to do smth and expects results in Islamic world.
Even then, it is not certain if that is viable investment:
it has been highly political and the aerospace today
is very competitive. Still, I wish them luck. Nevertheless,
everything begins with respecting private property and
that is something neither Khomeinis not the left
in the Western media want to see.
>Saudi Arabia is
>dumping money into US treasury bonds instead of Saudi infrastructure.
Hard to do when the primary job of the Saudi "worker" is going home
about noon.
The talking stick goes to sheik Yamani again:
"Our forefathers used camel dung for fires. If we continue
to manage the money from oil today the way we do,
we will have to use camel dung as fuel in the future as
well".
>So when I say that depleting the world's oil reserves will leave the
>Middle East mostly poor, it is quite likely given current investment
>trends -- most of the population does indeed remain poor.
May I suggest this is their own fault? Like, them not respecting
property rights, from the poorest to the wealthiest people having
no respect for that?
>The responsibility of sustainability belongs to everyone. There is no
>"us and them" when you talking about depleting a global resource.
Yes, there is us and there is them and there is an individual free
agent who'll never act like an idiot like you think would act and
he COULD never act like an idiot like you think could act and
on top of it all the "sustainability" is a myth suitable for children
and UN bureaucrats.
What are you, five year old?
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>>So who is this "they" that we are talking about? Who does the West
>>pay for oil? Tycoons who take that money and invest it not so much in
>>their own countries, but rather back in the West.
bulba:
>Since there's nothing in the Muslim countries to sensibly invest into,
>they have to.
>
>Unless you count the sand and the camel dung in the Muslim
>countries as "viable investment".
James, Constantinople -- would either of you like to make a comment on
bulba's response?
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
bulba:
>One of the solutions is also "melt and dilute": you melt
>the radioactive waste together with the depleted
>uranium from the earlier process, so you get smth
>that is not all that much more radioactive than the
>uranium ore. A metal lump like that stored deep
>underground in geologically stable location isn't going
>to be very dangerous.
>
>Obviously, relevant technology for that isn't developed
>by the govt. Guess why.
James, Constantinople -- would either of you like to comment on this?
bulba
<n0spam....@gmx.net> wrote:
>So who is this "they" that we are talking about? Who does the West
>pay for oil? Tycoons who take that money and invest it not so much in
>their own countries, but rather back in the West.
P.S. you again garble the issue, bc unlike the Muslims, in the West
property rights are generally respected and the money that
buys valuable property and investment in the West is most
probably going to be respected. So it's not like they are
left with nothing: they are the owners of that property that
money from the oil has bought. So they do retain the
value they get for the money from oil.
And who actually gets this title to the property is that
who buys. That means those Muslims who have the money
from the oil.
And that, Rapagnetta, is the internal affair of the Muslim
country. Don't whine that it's somehow the fault of
the capitalists or the West if Muslims among them
can't settle down on the issue who and how gets to
spend the money made on the oil.
(In fact, I think that the recent invasion of Iraq
will allow for more transparency and accountability
for the Iraqi govt when dealing with Iraqi oil - the
Americans hardly want to be blamed for stealing
the oil or allowing it to be stolen by some plutocrats;
sure, the plutocrats and the clerks have the interest
in it like UN officials liked oil vouchers from Hussein,
but USG has the political interest in not allowing that
to happen, now the only issue remains if USG will
not fuck that job up again by its usual clumsiness)
It is obvious it is corrupted, but again, pointing out
that it is the fault of their inane social system gets
me labelled on this very ng as racist.
bulba
>responsibility for the economy of Western nations? Do they get up in
>the morning, read in the newspaper that the Dow Jones is up, and feel
>a sense of personal accomplishment? Unless they've got a serious
>hubris complex, I doubt it.
That's not how it works, Rapagnetta, as usually you
perceive the issue via the "fun with ideology" filters:
it is if they get up in the morning and then get to the
job of infringing on the private property of other
people or if they cooperate with other people while
respecting their property.
That means they either participate in building
the capital stock in the society up or they
erode it.
In this way yes, they (and incidentally all of us) are
literally responsible for the economies of Western
countries.
Thelasian
> >On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 15:27:23 -0700,
> >Gabrielle Rapagnetta <n0spam....@gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Snipped
>
> >Sure, use up the Middle East's only significant source of revenue,
> >leave them poor and destitute, and then, hell, give them the
> >capability for nuclear proliferation and provide targets for terrorist
> >attacks which could annihilate the entire eastern seaboard!
>
> Every nation in the Middle East is run by a tyrant. Whether
> communist (S. Hussein), royalist (Saudi King), monotheist
> (Ayatollah or whatever as in Iran), or whatever other kind
> of tyrannical regime.
Hate to break the news to you, but
1- Saddam's regime was not "communist" - it was socialist, much like
most of Europe today (you know, where unlike in America, elderly
people can eat and have their medicine too!)
2- Most of the repressive dictatorships in the Mideast were supported
and/or installed by the USA - including Saudi Arabia.
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>It is obvious it is corrupted, but again, pointing out
>that it is the fault of their inane social system gets
>me labelled on this very ng as racist.
Well, perhaps you could point out the particular aspects of Islamic
culture which result in a blatant disregard for property rights.
Muslims will tell you that property rights are sanctified in shariah.
The Quran says "And in no wise covet those things in which Allah hath
bestowed his gifts more freely on some of you than on others: to men
is allotted what they earn and to women what they earn: but ask Allah
of His bounty: for Allah hath full knowledge of all things." That
reads like the definition of liberalism.
And here's the Quran prescription for neoliberalism: "O ye who
believe! eat not up your property among yourselves in vanities: but
let there be amongst you traffic and trade by mutual good-will: nor
kill (or destroy) yourselves: for verily Allah hath been to you Most
Merciful."
These people have had the framework for liberal property rights since
the beginnings of Islam. It is not enough to call them corrupt and
inane.
bulba
>Then of course there is the question of what to do with all the Plutonium
>created by breeders. You can reprocess it into MOX fuel (with U-238) for use
>in light water reactors, but you still end up with dangerous radioactive
>waste.
To make it absolutely clear:
-----------
"At 12:30 am, on August 26, 1977, the operators at the Shippingport
Atomic Power Station began lifting the central modules of the
experimental breeder reactor core into the blanket section. At 04:38
am, the reactor reached criticality. During the next five years, the
core produced more than 10 billion kilowatt-hours of thermal power -
equivalent to about 2.5 billion kilowatt hours of electrical power -
with a current retail value of approximately $200 million.
It showed no signs of approaching the end of its useful life. It was
obvious from the core performance that the reactor was at least a very
efficient converter with a long life core. However, in October, 1982,
the reactor was shut down for the final time under budgetary pressures
and a desire to conduct the detailed fuel examination needed to
determine if breeding had actually occurred.
A report on the experiment was quietly issued in 1987. The core
contained approximately 1.3% more fissile material after producing
heat for five years than it did before initial operation. Breeding had
occurred in a light water reactor system using most of the same
equipment as used for conventional reactor plants."
-----------
Heard that? Five year of operation and only 1.3% of radioactive
material more than on the beginning.
So: no messy plutonium reprocessing necessary, at least not
basically, for sake of using it in another reactor. All that
remains is to dispose of waste.
And it uses light water, not sodium. Hence it's not as prone
to accidents.
( http://www.atomicinsights.com/oct95/LWBR_oct95.html )
The main cost appears to be in the very high precision of
machining the core elements.
Again, this is just an issue of money & know-how. Not the energy,
radioactive waste or other problems that are hard to solve
for physical reasons.
Those were Japanese that have developed this plastic
that you dump into the sea, get it out after a few
months and the mud you get contains heavy metals.
Couple that with "melt and dilute" for waste and rather
safe & non-polluting methods like above for extracting
thorium and uranium from seawater (both elements
are there, though the proportion of thorium to uranium
is like 1 to 4) et voila, you have the system that produces
lots of energy at the viable cost with just a little of the waste
that can also be economically and safely disposed of.
There is ONE risk, though: since even this single, unique
reactor was shut down early (that "early" being five
years of operation without adding any fuel into it) we
don't really know how it would behave at the end of
its useful life. The only true way to know is to run this
thing for 10 or 20 years, until it visibly breaks. No, I
don't believe opinions and projections, in principle
something MAYBE works only when it has been
thoroughly tested.
Hence the risk I've been talking about: it's not about
lack of potentials and possibilities, it's about lack of
decades of intensive & systematic research of the
issues. Because when we start to build those things
in haste, this is when accidents happen.
One of the renown catastrophes of Russian nuclear submarine,
(they even made the movie about it, with Rutger Hauer as a
captain) happened for a single reason: this welder was
in haste to meet his socialist "norm" of work, so he didn't
notice when a small piece of the welding material fell into the
coolant pipe of the primary circuit (i.e. the one that gets
moderating liquid into and out of the reactor core) he was
welding (and obviously nobody bothered to carefully
check the reactor later).
That was all that was necessary.
bulba
<n0spam....@gmx.net> wrote:
> bulba:
>>It is obvious it is corrupted, but again, pointing out
>>that it is the fault of their inane social system gets
>>me labelled on this very ng as racist.
>
>Well, perhaps you could point out the particular aspects of Islamic
>culture which result in a blatant disregard for property rights.
Like the one that the power should be executed by
"correctly guided caliphs", which is invitation to
dictatorship, arbitrary treatment, corruption and
the govt exempt from accountability bc after all
the govt is of divine origin (this belief even in a
lot more restricted form has done quite a lot of
damage in Christian Europe, too), so automatically
criticizing the govt smacks of blasphemy?
Incidentally, why should there be the division
of power in such a scheme? For what? If
the "hand of God" guides that all?
And how's separation of church and state possible
in such circumstances? If the religion is a state
doctrine, even the "cuius regio, eius religio"
is not possible which at least provides some
ideological flexibility for pragmatic reasons?
Beliefs like those get Muslims into Dark Ages
of the backwarded tyranny. It is that more
dangerous that it is coupled to religion: when
Soviet model of communism fails, few people but
those for whom the communism itself is a
religion attach any meaning to it. But since
metaphysical matters are not possible to
evaluate with material means, the beliefs
tied to it can't be effectively criticized,
questioned, tested and evaluated.
Religion is not so much opiate for the masses
as that it could be used as the fuel of the
government.
>Muslims will tell you that property rights are sanctified in shariah.
>The Quran says "And in no wise covet those things in which Allah hath
>bestowed his gifts more freely on some of you than on others: to men
>is allotted what they earn and to women what they earn: but ask Allah
>of His bounty: for Allah hath full knowledge of all things." That
>reads like the definition of liberalism.
The religious scriptures tend to be ambigous enough to allow
for just about any interpretation of a complicated issue
and very primitive interpretation of a basic issue.
So you can't get to advanced ideas in social life when
founding decisions on scriptures, but you're guaranteed
to get to very primitive & stupid ideas when founding
the decisions on them.
The scripture may be a good guide for an individual
in his life. The issues are intuitive enough for that.
Even then the religious people meet the hard dilemmas
all the time in their lives and fill confession booths
and the religious periodicals with their problems.
But NOT regarding complex social issues.
I've read a little bit on "social doctrine" of Catholic
Church. What a bullshit!
>And here's the Quran prescription for neoliberalism: "O ye who
>believe! eat not up your property among yourselves in vanities: but
>let there be amongst you traffic and trade by mutual good-will: nor
>kill (or destroy) yourselves: for verily Allah hath been to you Most
>Merciful."
>These people have had the framework for liberal property rights since
>the beginnings of Islam. It is not enough to call them corrupt and
>inane.
It is if the ideas like verboten interest on the loan and no infidels
in the land of Muslims, among others, do get them corrupt and insane.
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>>[Muslims] have had the framework for liberal property rights since
>>the beginnings of Islam. It is not enough to call them corrupt and
>>inane.
bulba:
>It is if the ideas like verboten interest on the loan and no infidels
>in the land of Muslims, among others, do get them corrupt and insane.
The vast majority of muslims do not practice verboten interest or
intolerance of infidels. You also mentioned that muslims insist on a
caliphate and a unity of church and state. This is also untrue for
most muslims. In fact, the word khalifah, as used in the Quran,
refers not to a supreme leader, but to all muslims. It means the
responsibility that is shared by all muslims to be God's stewards on
earth.
Do you have any other theories or evidence to suggest that property
rights are incompatible with Islam?
Frank Clarke
wrote:
<noone-1DD230....@news1-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
That assertion is completely unproven. Clinton didn't loose (sic) his
freedom by failing to restrain himself; millions of German Jews did
lose their freedom (and lives) because of their self-restraint when
the Nazis first disarmed them and then killed them.
A businessman who takes a gamble on a new product may not be showing
self-restraint and he may make a killing on that gamble. Or not;
that's why they call such things 'gambles'. A high-flyer businessman
may be your rock-steady church-going family man. You simply can't
generalize about people the way you do.
I'm now 100% certain you don't know what you're talking about. Seeya.
Sean Burke
Gabrielle Rapagnetta <n0spam....@gmx.net> writes:
It does not appear to me that religion is a useful predictor
of prosperity. Consider the Americas for example - the protestant
nations are markedly more prosperous than the catholic ones.
Since the religious differences are comparatively small, it seems
more likely that cultural heritage is the determining influence.
-SEan
Bernard Curry
>thel...@yahoo.com (Thelasian) wrote:
Snipped
>>Bernard Curry <bc...@ispwest.com> wrote in message >>news:<6lb3i05ccdv40b7f4...@4ax.com>...
>> >On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 15:27:23 -0700,
>> >Gabrielle Rapagnetta <n0spam....@gmx.net> wrote:
>>
>> Snipped
>>
>> >Sure, use up the Middle East's only significant source of revenue,
>> >leave them poor and destitute, and then, hell, give them the
>> >capability for nuclear proliferation and provide targets for terrorist
>> >attacks which could annihilate the entire eastern seaboard!
>>
>> Every nation in the Middle East is run by a tyrant. Whether
>> communist (S. Hussein), royalist (Saudi King), monotheist
>> (Ayatollah or whatever as in Iran), or whatever other kind
>> of tyrannical regime.
>Hate to break the news to you, but
>
>1- Saddam's regime was not "communist" - it was socialist, much like
>most of Europe today ...
Hate to spoil your fun, but:
Belief in control of production by Government is communism.
Saddam's "socialist" Government control of production in
Iraq as was communistic (any fool should be able to see that
there was nothing social about S. Hussein).
To achieve their goals communists regularly use force and
deceit. One of the deceits they use is signifying communism
with any word _except_ "communism". (Communists don't want
the world to know that they promote the horrific system used
by S. Hussein and J. Stalin.) Starting with the most
popular, favored words are: socialism, liberalism,
progressivism, economic democratism, the public sector, the
dictatorship of the proletariat, et al.
Communists world-wide and in the US, tolerate any atrocity
done in the name of communism (by any other name). That is
why there is so much antipathy toward the US for attacking
Saddam's "socialist" Government. Anything he did was OK with
world and US communists as long as he called it socialism.
They excuse such atrocities as a necessary part of the
ongoing communist revolution.
> ...(you know, where unlike in America, elderly
>people can eat and have their medicine too!)
I do not know that and I will not take your sarcasm as
proof. You are talking like a communist (by any other name)
and what you say is presumably a lie.
>2- Most of the repressive dictatorships in the Mideast were supported
>and/or installed by the USA - including Saudi Arabia.
There I agree with what you say, to some extent, though not
with you -- you are simply propagandizing for communism. Any
true thing you say is strictly coincidental or accidental.
You can expand that statement to include most of the nations
south of our Mexican border and I would still agree to some
extent. But you would still be propagandizing for communism
and anything you say is slanted for that purpose.
One thing you are not taking into account is fascism. The
two socioeconomic doctrines that dominate the world today
are fascism and communism. They are both forms of socialism
in that both are socioeconomic doctrines, but both are
authoritarian.
Of the two, fascism is dominant, and is the socioeconomic
doctrine that has been used to dominate societies throughout
history. America too is dominated by fascism; which is why
the US Government supports and establishes fascist regimes
world-wide.
Bernard Curry
************************************************************************
The eternal vigil that is the price of liberty is a vigil against
authority that begins within ourselves as individuals and within
the groups to which we belong.--Bernard Curry
************************************************************************
Email : bc...@ispwest.com
******************************************************
Toby
James:
> Largely because uranium enrichment is sufficiently cheap that
> breeding cannot compete economically. If, however, the price
> of uranium was to rise enormously, then breeding would become
> economically feasible.
That's only half the story. Here's the other half:
"When a Uranium (U235) or Plutonium (Pu239) atom is split by a neutron, 2 -
3 neutrons are released, one of which then splits another U atom. In an FBR
most of the other neutrons (on average 1.3) are absorbed by U238 atoms in a
blanket surrounding the FBR reactor core, turning them into Pu239,
theretically producing more Pu239 in the blanket than is burnt up in the
core. This is a rather delicate procedure. If too many neutrons start
splitting other atoms, you have the chain reaction of an atom bomb!
In order to maximize this breeding effect, a FBR is more similar in
construction to a bomb than to a LWR. LWR fuel only contains 5% U235 in
oxide form, not 95% or more pure metallic Pu as the FBR or bomb. In an LWR
ordinary water is used to slow down neutrons before they split more U235
atoms while in a FBR (or a bomb) they are not slowed down at all so they are
more likely to be absorbed by U238 to produce fresh Pu or (in case of the
bomb) to step up the reaction that leads to the blast.
Therefore, FBRs can't be cooled with water and use liquid sodium instead, a
metal that doesn't slow down neutrons yet spontanously catches fire when
exposed to air above room temperature and explodes when it gets into contact
with water. Burning sodium can't be extinguised with anything but inert gas
(nitrogen), so fire hoses spraying water are a BAD idea. Small leaks in heat
exchangers where sodium has to pass its heat to water for generating steam
to drive turbines can be quite dangerous. Because sodium is solid at room
temperatures, the FBR has to remain electrically heated to almost the
boiling point of water to keep the coolant from solidifying while the FBR is
being refuelled, a frequent cause of fires. The French Superphenix had a
number of such problems. In addition the sodium coolant does absorb some
neutrons and gradually becomes radioactive.
Because fast neutrons are less efficient at splitting atoms the fuel in the
FBR core has to be much more tightly packed than in an FBR to achieve a
sustained reaction (criticality), which again makes it ressemble a bomb more
than a normal nuclear power station. That creates thermal problems and puts
special strain on the building materials.
If an LWR overheats so the cooling water starts boiling or completely looses
its cooling water its neutrons simply become too fast to be good at
splitting atoms and the chain reaction comes to a halt (even though the
reactor core might still melt at this point). In an FBR if the sodium boils
at 883 C or coolant gets lost somehow, the reaction actually steps up. In
other words, the only thing that might then prevent a minor nuclear blast
are the cadmium control rods that can absorb extra neutrons. Because of the
high packing density, inserting them becomes difficult once the fuel rods
start deforming due to overheating. Metallic Pu has a much lower melting
point than LWR oxide fuel. There have been such incidents in experimental
FBRs, with molten Pu fuel collecting at the bottom of the reactor. Because
LWR neutrons are produced partly from secondary delay 2-3 seconds after an
atom has been split, response times for activating these neutron eating rods
are actually almost two orders of magnitude shorter in FBR reactors than in
normal LWRs, leaving less of a safety margin for mecahnical malfunctioning
or human error.
On particular concern is that excess neutrons (for example through blocked
cooling ducts) in one part of the reactor could cause a minor blast that
would deform the remainder of the core, leading to massive supercriticality
in the rest of the FBR core (i.e. nuclear explosion). That secondary
explosion might be minor compared to the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bomb but even
the energy of several thousand kg of TNT predicted by computer simulations
would be sufficient to destroy the containment and could release massive
amounts of Pu into the atmosphere around central Japan."
And from a different source:
"A number of problems have plagued the design and operation of breeder
reactors:
Breeder reactors are more difficult to control than light water reactors
because runaway nuclear reactions (including complete loss of control, or
"prompt criticalities") can occur far more easily in fast breeder
reactors than in light water and other reactors that use slow neutrons for
the chain reaction.
Sodium, while it is an excellent coolant, reacts violently with air and
explodes on contact with water. These and other properties raise severe
safety issues, design complications, and operating difficulties. For
instance, air and moisture must be kept out of the two necessary sodium
loops.
The presence of plutonium as a fuel in breeder reactors raises security
risks that require more safeguards than are necessary with LWRs.
Fabrication of plutonium fuel is far more costly than fabrication of uranium
fuel due to higher radioactivity of, and safeguards requirements for
plutonium.
Extraction of plutonium from reactor fuel to enable its reuse in reactors
(reprocessing), is costly and raises many safety, security, and
environmental issues. [Reprocessing is covered in the January 1997 issue of
Energy & Security.]
The greater risk of catastrophic accidents and the more serious potential
consequences of such accidents necessitate greater safety measures."
> >
> > Then of course there is the question of what to do with all
> > the Plutonium created by breeders.
>
> Breeders are supposed to create plutonium - as fuel.
But that same fuel is weapons-grade plutonium. There are serious concerns
about proliferation problems, apart from toxicity concerns about actinides.
Supposedly, according to several people to whom I have spoken to here (but
this is uncorroborated), Japan's insistence on pushing its breeder program
was partly due to the need for unregulated plutonium for a very secret
nuclear weapons program that they have been carrying out for a couple of
decades. How happy will you be when NorKor and Iran get breeders?
>
> > You can reprocess it into MOX fuel (with U-238) for use in
> > light water reactors, but you still end up with dangerous
> > radioactive waste.
>
> Nuclear reactors create less radioactive waste than coal fired
> plants - because coal ash is so voluminous, it has to be dumped
> immediately, whereas nuclear fule can be buried somwhere it
> will stay put for a few thousand years. After a few thousand
> years nuclear waste is less radioactive for the amount of power
> produced than the radioactivity of coal ash
I'd love to see your documentation for this assertion, it sounds absurd as
presented.
High level radioactive waste stays dangerous for hundreds of thousands of
years in the case of some isotopes.
" While there are methods of significantly reducing the amount of high level
radioactive waste, some (or all) high level radioactive waste must end its
journey in long term storage. Because "long term" refers to a period of
thousands of years, security of the radioactive waste must be assured over
geologic time periods. The waste must not be allowed to escape to the
outside environment by any foreseeable accident, malevolent action, or
geological activity. This includes (but is certainly not limited to)
accidental uncovering, removal by groups intending to use the radioactive
material in a harmful manner, leeching of the waste into the water supply,
and exposure from earthquake activity or other geological activity. In
addition this security must be maintained over a period of time during
which, not only will the designers of the storage area die, but the country,
and the "modern world", will likely fall and be replaced many times over. It
has only been 3000 years since the Egypian Empire, yet some high level
radioactive waste will take over 20,000 years to decay.
Causing further difficulty is the fact that some of this waste is plutonium,
and other actinide elements, produced as byproducts (often purposefully) of
uranium fission. These elements are not only highly radioactive, but highly
poisonous as well. The toxicity of plutonium is among the highest of any
element known. "
Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has this to say:
" Spent nuclear fuel is used fuel from a reactor that is no longer efficient
in creating electricity, because its fission process has slowed. However, it
is still thermally hot, highly radioactive, and potentially harmful. Until a
permanent disposal repository for spent nuclear fuel is built, licensees
must safely store this fuel at their reactors....
Because of their highly radioactive fission products, high-level waste and
spent fuel must be handled and stored with care. Since the only way
radioactive waste finally becomes harmless is through decay, which for
high-level wastes can take hundreds of thousands of years, the wastes must
be stored and finally disposed of in a way that provides adequate protection
of the public for a very long time. "
>
> > No permanent solution for spent fuel storage has yet been
> > found,
>
> That is because you guys keep raising the bar on "permanent".
> No one worries about the "permanent" disposal of arsenic waste,
> cyanide waste from gold processing, etc. They just put it in
> a great big pile, and bulldoze some dirt on top.
>
> Here is the James Donald solution for radioactive waste.
>
> Dig deep hole. Mix waste with cement, pour in hole.
>
> Fill in hole. Forget. Permanent enough for me. After all,
> the stuff was radioactive before we dug it up.
Obviously you don't have children, or don't care about them. Your appalling
ignorance of the issues becomes quite clear here. And you are quite wrong
about hazardous waste disposal. There are quite strict regulations about it,
making correct disposal very expensive--which is one of the main reasons why
many industries try to ship it offshore where governmental regulation cannot
reach as easily.
Because of their long-term radioactivity--high (and even low) level nuclear
wastes present a very different disposal problem. To say that the stuff was
radioactive before we dug it up highlights your lack of knowledge about
isotopes, how they are created and how they decay.
Toby
Toby
Looks like your knowledge isn't much better than James's. Care to give me
some references for this miraculous process?
Toby
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>> >Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>> >>[Muslims] have had the framework for liberal property rights since
>> >>the beginnings of Islam. It is not enough to call them corrupt and
>> >>inane.
>> bulba:
>> >It is if the ideas like verboten interest on the loan and no infidels
>> >in the land of Muslims, among others, do get them corrupt and insane.
>Gabrielle Rapagnetta:
>> The vast majority of muslims do not practice verboten interest or
>> intolerance of infidels. You also mentioned that muslims insist on a
>> caliphate and a unity of church and state. This is also untrue for
>> most muslims. In fact, the word khalifah, as used in the Quran,
>> refers not to a supreme leader, but to all muslims. It means the
>> responsibility that is shared by all muslims to be God's stewards on
>> earth.
Sean Burke:
>It does not appear to me that religion is a useful predictor
>of prosperity. Consider the Americas for example - the protestant
>nations are markedly more prosperous than the catholic ones.
>Since the religious differences are comparatively small, it seems
>more likely that cultural heritage is the determining influence.
There is a lot that could be said in response to your comment. But
first, how is it that you can differentiate religion from culture
heritage? Seems to me that they are mostly the same thing.
James A. Donald
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
> > > So who is this "they" that we are talking about? Who
> > > does the West pay for oil? Tycoons who take that money
> > > and invest it not so much in their own countries, but
> > > rather back in the West.
bulba:
> > Since there's nothing in the Muslim countries to sensibly
> > invest into, they have to.
> >
> > Unless you count the sand and the camel dung in the Muslim
> > countries as "viable investment".
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
> James, Constantinople -- would either of you like to make a
> comment on bulba's response?
No investment is possible without rule of law and property
rights. Even in the most free and secure country in the arab
world, the UAE, most forms of property investment can only
function by political favor, and in most of the rest of the
arab world investment is entirely meaningless and pointless,
since the investor has no prospect of receiving the benefits.
In the UAE, Quatar, and Tunisia, investment is possible with
extreme caution and a lot of political scout work - but for the
rest of them, it is pretty much financial suicide.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
6vA6oF60wnDqeu+RrTrH1/Cc/6MMa7ty7Mh33r9s
4LShU6g5j2tjNEFPvV+Y7/EXyVs+nuFaODJj5euLj
Michael Gray
<n0spam....@gmx.net> wrote:
:
>There is a lot that could be said in response to your comment. But
>first, how is it that you can differentiate religion from culture
>heritage? Seems to me that they are mostly the same thing.
Sorry to butt in here-
It seems an all too common mis-conception that religion and culture
are "the same thing".
This confuses "religious practice" with "religious belief".
To most people "religion" equates with "religious belief", not
practice, which is incidental and need not rely on any particular
belief in a deity.
An atheist could follow all the practices of a religion without having
any "belief" whatsoever.
The same applies to culture. It is a loosly defined set of actions,
conventions and practices, that do not require any particular
"belief".
So "religion" (as a belief in a deity or deities), and "culture" (as a
set of social conventions) are not the same thing in any way, shape,
or form.
Grain of Sand
Frank Clarke <m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Aug 2004 14:07:16 GMT, Grain of Sand <no...@nowhere.net>
> wrote:
> <noone-1DD230....@news1-ge0.southeast.rr.com>
>
> >In article <f2q3i0t1jcrqepjn0...@4ax.com>,
> > Frank Clarke <m5s...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>
> >> I thought we were talking about freedom, markets, and free trade? I
> >> don't know what point you are driving at (and possibly you don't
> >> either) -- make it and be done.
> >
> >I am talking about those things. If one does not show self restraint in
> >life why would thy act any other way in business? Business is a part of
> >life.
> >
> >If one does not show self-restraint they loose their freedom.
>
> That assertion is completely unproven. Clinton didn't loose (sic) his
> freedom by failing to restrain himself; millions of German Jews did
> lose their freedom (and lives) because of their self-restraint when
> the Nazis first disarmed them and then killed them.
Self-restraint does not mean that you do not act unwisely.
>
> A businessman who takes a gamble on a new product may not be showing
> self-restraint and he may make a killing on that gamble. Or not;
> that's why they call such things 'gambles'. A high-flyer businessman
> may be your rock-steady church-going family man. You simply can't
> generalize about people the way you do.
He is showing self-restraint if that is all he does.
>
> I'm now 100% certain you don't know what you're talking about. Seeya.
>
>
> (change Arabic number to Roman numeral to email)
--
James A. Donald
bulba:
> > It is obvious it is corrupted, but again, pointing out that
> > it is the fault of their inane social system gets me
> > labelled on this very ng as racist.
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
> Well, perhaps you could point out the particular aspects of
> Islamic culture which result in a blatant disregard for
> property rights.
I have done so times without number: Here it is again, in
perhaps more detail.
Today's Muslims tend to talk of defeating "Capitalism" rather
than defeating "Christendom" - a view that is obviously
unkoranic, the very opposite of fundamentalist, but is widely
accepted, and with which the most Muslims sympathize.
Islam was designed to be a warlike religion that inherently
goes to war with other religions, but when contained, it became
a religion that wen to war with freedom, and thus became
anticapitalist.
Islam says that the faithful and the unfaithful should be
treated differently before the law - that crimes by faithful
against the unfaithful require a much higher standard of
proof, and a much lower level of punishment, and that what
constitutes a crime when done by the unfaithful against the
faithful does not constitute a crime the other way around -
hence terrorism.
This tends to result in large scale collective theft of
property, which results in collective, rather than individual
property rights.
In principle one could have both private property rights for
the faithful, and legitimized pillage by the faithful,and this
was in fact largely what happened under Mohammed and his
immediate successors, but in practice one tends to gives rise
to the other, and the slide, from robbing the unfaithful to
robbing everyone, is legitimized by Shariah, which has taken
every loophole created by the many cases where Mohammed broke
his own rules, and expanded them to completely swallow the
rules he promulgated, with the result that though Mohammed's
state was arguably capitalism, at least for the faithful,
Shariah these days is anti capitalist and has been since the
tenth century.
The way Shariah is supposed to work is that there should be a
separation between law and state, as there was with the english
common law. What is supposed to happen is that clerics/legal
scholars decide what the law is, and the state is supposed to
be under the law - that is the theory of Iran's Islamic
republic.
This is workable if the law sticks to uncontroversial matters -
theft, rape, assault, murder, but entirely unworkable if the
law starts to regulate everthing including the length of
beards. The political institutions mandated by the Koran are
only workable in a fairly minimal state - for example a prophet
who leads a large mob of not very disciplined nomadic
marauders, and is trying, with only partial success, to get
them to rob outsiders rather than each other.
The trouble is that as soon as the state settled down to ruling
the faithful rather than robbing the unfaithful, the laws
multiplied like rabbits. By the tenth century, Shariah had
ceased to be a workable system. There were too many laws for
the state to be under them: It had to above them, and Shariah
has remained in that condition ever since.
As soon as the outsiders surround these marauders with a ring
of steel,the one sided justice tended to indirectly produce a
heavily interventionist state - because the faithful endorse
marauding the unfaithful, this winds up as the state marauding
the faithful, which not only directly produces poverty, but
also produces a conflict between state institutions, and those
endorsed by the Koran - no one was *less* Koranic than the
Taliban regime. Shariah commands a state under law, and also
makes a state under law impossible.
> Muslims will tell you that property rights are sanctified in
> shariah.
Muslims will also tell you Islam is the religion of peace - by
which they mean that everywhere outside the domain of Islam is
the domain of war, which means that anything goes against non
Muslims, which is not very peaceful at all.
Mohammed was very much in favor of private property rights,
private ownership of the means of production, and freedom of
trade, both because these things were threatened by widespead
disorder, and because these things were threatened by
*himself*. The institutions he created had an inherent
tendency to crush these things, and he was trying, with
considerably less than complete success, to resist and
restrain this tendency. When he died, replaced by considerably
lesser men, the institutions he created swiflty went their
natural way.
By the tenth centruy, a regime of property rights had become a
regime of third world kleptocratic socialism, and so it has
remained ever since.
> The Quran says "And in no wise covet those things in which
> Allah hath bestowed his gifts more freely on some of you than
> on others: to men is allotted what they earn and to women
> what they earn: but ask Allah of His bounty: for Allah hath
> full knowledge of all things." That reads like the
> definition of liberalism.
Indeed it does - but in the ensuing centuries this was
subjected to interpretation and re-reinterpretaion, and
re-re-reinterpretation.
As I have repeatedly said, the problem is not Islamic
fundamenalists, but Islamic radicals - and that has been the
problem since the tenth century.
Our enemies are not the Islamic equivalent of born again
Christians. They are the Islamic equivalent of liberation
theologians and the World Council of Churches.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
4cTmyNsgZLuqmoGhrTqqfNQO8xRboc3y7VMzL/js
4Y/o4kgLaefb5YTU6J6kkUJmrG7kYLmfIQD+zC46d
James A. Donald
On Tue, 17 Aug 2004 13:35:54 -0700, Gabrielle Rapagnetta
> who believe! eat not up your property among yourselves in
> vanities: but let there be amongst you traffic and trade by
> mutual good-will: nor kill (or destroy) yourselves: for
> verily Allah hath been to you Most Merciful."
>
> These people have had the framework for liberal property
> rights since the beginnings of Islam. It is not enough to
> call them corrupt and inane.
Our enemies worship, rather than read, the Quran. They do not
say they are at war with "Christendom", but rather say they are
at war with "Capitalism"
Our enemies are not the Islamic equivalent of born again
Christians. They are the Islamic equivalent of liberation
theologians and the World Council of Churches - who tend to be
allied with them. They do not care what the Quran says any
more than a liberation theologian cares what the bible says.
Islamic fundamentalists, such as Massoud, are our natural
allies against these guys.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
oOaf8Zs2So3i+1s0Fdp5haBSumBPy5rIUWcy2wqy
4lJfywxwGYhnvYqVF9ZBxFx2ol97YyqUcoS5zCcF8
bulba
>> One of the solutions is also "melt and dilute": you melt
>> the radioactive waste together with the depleted
>> uranium from the earlier process, so you get smth
>> that is not all that much more radioactive than the
>> uranium ore. A metal lump like that stored deep
>> underground in geologically stable location isn't going
>> to be very dangerous.
>> Obviously, relevant technology for that isn't developed
>> by the govt. Guess why.
>Looks like your knowledge isn't much better than James's. Care to give me
>some references for this miraculous process?
It was right there in my long response:
"There are two drawbacks to the melt and dilute approach. First, SRS
has repeatedly refused to request full funding to develop this
technology, leaving DOE officials in Washington, DC, to add it to the
SRS budget. This reflects internal DOE politics and the preference of
many people at SRS to continue reprocessing as long as possible. "
http://www.ieer.org/fctsheet/srs-snf.html
Happy now?
James A. Donald
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
> The vast majority of muslims do not practice verboten
> interest or intolerance of infidels.
In almost every muslim state, minorities are fleeing. The
question is, is this the result of the state, or the people?
The Neoconservatives had a very libertarian answer: Supposedly
it was the state. Events in Iraq and Indonesia have
demonstrated that they were wrong.
They are and were right that we are threatened by states, not
by secretive terrorists acting in defiance of these states, but
by not-so-secret terrorists acting with a wink and a nod from
states that fund and protect them. They were wrong to believe
that the majority of Muslims would vote against this
wink-and-nod.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
d4IVT1EjF7c2ZzIgmwQOvKGkkH0iEtmjbw88HCQt
44rOx/TwtriJ0kBYDE/2RJyWhnHZG9ZmOmuxTWvoh
bulba
<jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
> --
>Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>> The vast majority of muslims do not practice verboten
>> interest or intolerance of infidels.
>
>In almost every muslim state, minorities are fleeing. The
>question is, is this the result of the state, or the people?
>The Neoconservatives had a very libertarian answer: Supposedly
>it was the state. Events in Iraq and Indonesia have
>demonstrated that they were wrong.
I beg to disagree with that. I think the reason for the minorities
fleeing is stuffed BETWEEN the people and the state, so
to speak. Truly stupid religion invades partially the
people and partially the state. State likes the sharia law
bc it reinforces its power; the people's bigotry is reinforced
bc the persecution is merely the result of the supposedly
divine truth that the Muslims are supposedly the only just
people loved by God.
That is why I think the world has such a tough problem
on categorizing Muslims. When the Nazies were dealt
with, there was no problem in acknowledging who
and what is wrong.
Muslims, like FDR, sort of enjoy the power bc it is so
well concealed in ambiguities people fall for, like
that FDR was truly democratic president and he
was merely a cameleon, taking "colors" of democratic
president very well and he was frighteningly good
at concealing his power, not so much abusing democracy
as manipulating it skilfully (even he was a cripple, during
his life not a single reporter has managed to take the
photograph of him in the wheelchair and run away with
it), and Muslims enjoy the power, too bc of people's
difficulty in settling down just what the heck is the
real source of persecution, bigotry and corruption in
he Muslim countries.
bulba
<n0spam....@gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>>>[Muslims] have had the framework for liberal property rights since
>>>the beginnings of Islam. It is not enough to call them corrupt and
>>>inane.
>bulba:
>>It is if the ideas like verboten interest on the loan and no infidels
>>in the land of Muslims, among others, do get them corrupt and insane.
>The vast majority of muslims do not practice verboten interest or
>intolerance of infidels.
The fact that they do not practice verboten interest is indeed
part of the problem: how are they supposed to develop martyngals
and swaps combined with futures if they don't practice it?
And the fact that they do not persecute intolerance of infidels
is caused precisely by the fact that they have driven the
infidels away by their persecution. "no infidels will live
in the lands of Muslims" or smth like that.
Compare that with the New Testament: "there's no Greek, no
Roman, no Jew anymore, but we're all children of God now"
(IIRC). Sure Christians have frequently strayed from that path.
Nevertheless, that is the doctrine and that has social consequences.
>You also mentioned that muslims insist on a
>caliphate and a unity of church and state. This is also untrue for
>most muslims. In fact, the word khalifah, as used in the Quran,
>refers not to a supreme leader, but to all muslims. It means the
>responsibility that is shared by all muslims to be God's stewards on
>earth.
Oh neat.
If so, why are they backwarded?
Do they need things like the rule of law then, habeas
corpus, presumption of innocence, constitutional
separation of church and state and constitutional
guarantees of freedom of speech, independent
central bank, etc (I could go on like this for pages
probably) or is that belief in God's power that makes
the most advanced nations on Earth or are they
just plain superior people?
See, you just reinforce what Scruton has written
on the problem: "divine origin of things" is the
only _organizing principle_ that they know.
And that belief apparently is not much good, if one
looks at the effects.
>Do you have any other theories or evidence to suggest that property
>rights are incompatible with Islam?
It's not only about property rights. That is only a small
fraction of necessary ideas they lack and that they
I described above.
P.S. in sharia, IIRC, the woman's word in court is
assigned only half of the weight that of a man's
word; maybe the Islam does have good sides
after all - in the Islamic court I would not have
to argue with your nonsense, but the court
would just declare you wrong and me right. :->
James A. Donald
Sean Burke
> It does not appear to me that religion is a useful predictor
> of prosperity. Consider the Americas for example - the
> protestant nations are markedly more prosperous than the
> catholic ones. Since the religious differences are
> comparatively small, it seems more likely that cultural
> heritage is the determining influence.
The religous differences between protestantism, and South
American Roman Catholicism seem to me very large indeed, and
the differences between American protestantism and Roman
Catholicism, though less, are still very great.
Do you observe any third world protestant countries?
Protestant countries: Pretty much all rich.
Roman Catholic countries: Mixed.
Islamic countries: Pretty much all poor.
Confucian countries: Mixed, mostly well off except where
subject to Marxism or legalism.
Hindu countries: Dirt poor and covered with a thin layer of
human shit, due in part to the substitution of ritual
cleanliness for actual cleanliness.
So while religion is not a perfect indicator, it is a mighty
strong indicator.
Hinduism inculcates poverty in a way similar to Islam - by
blessing oppression on the basis of group identity. Hindus
that have escaped the caste system tend to be quite prosperous.
I expect the same will be true of Islam once the more
intolerant and anticapitalist versions have been hammered down.
The authoritarian character of Confucianism renders it
politically helpless before the ruthless authoritarian violence
of Marxism or legalism. The confucian ideal is benevolent
authoritarianism, but when ruthless authoritarians accuse it of
hypocricy, while revelling in their own savagery, Confucianism
has no very persuasive reply. There was a huge difference
between the Confucian authoritarianism of Lee Kuan Yew and the
Marxist authoritarianism of Ho Chi Minh, but it is hard to
explain what the difference was.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
o69fIDuyQApUqb8g+lBlSm8Rr2TsJrCsWLUMtadr
4HXCqIdLEt3xX8QteNdw2XZcQBXNAjon5Zo4e5AOW
James A. Donald
> "communist" - it was socialist, much like most of Europe
> today (you know, where unlike in America, elderly people can
> eat and have their medicine too!)
No, it was socialist as in the state owning the means of
production, for the most part.
And the state still does. The Pentagon planned to introduce
capitalism, but was overruled by the state department.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
/BwaOZG4YmvyDWt83bAt++C57E3JExbSwyHVcCbD
4gYEh3ULgS4wXI/6/ttGAg5onX2y57S2eC9BsjZA+
James A. Donald
On 18 Aug 2004 00:29:14 -0500, "Toby" <zdft...@ggol.com>
wrote:
> That's only half the story. Here's the other half:
>
> "When a Uranium (U235) or Plutonium (Pu239) atom is split by
> a neutron, 2 - 3 neutrons are released, one of which then
> splits another U atom. In an FBR most of the other neutrons
> (on average 1.3) are absorbed by U238 atoms in a blanket
> surrounding the FBR reactor core, turning them into Pu239,
> theretically producing more Pu239 in the blanket than is
> burnt up in the core. This is a rather delicate procedure. If
> too many neutrons start splitting other atoms, you have the
> chain reaction of an atom bomb!
>
> In order to maximize this breeding effect, a FBR is more
> similar in construction to a bomb than to a LWR. LWR fuel
> only contains 5% U235 in oxide form, not 95% or more pure
> metallic Pu as the FBR or bomb. In an LWR ordinary water is
> used to slow down neutrons before they split more U235 atoms
> while in a FBR (or a bomb) they are not slowed down at all so
> they are more likely to be absorbed by U238 to produce fresh
> Pu or (in case of the bomb) to step up the reaction that
> leads to the blast.
>
> Therefore, FBRs can't be cooled with water and use liquid
> sodium instead,
Breeding has been done successfully, though rather slowly, in a
light water reactor, by exercising considerable care with
neutron economy. It can also be done, rather more easily, with
heavy water reactors, which are inherently more economical with
neutrons.
The only real obstacle to breeder reactors is that uranium is
cheap. We do not yet need to use breeders. Thus all existing
breeders are merely proof of principle systems, not really for
practical use.
The pirnciple, however, has been proved. Pretty much every
reactor configuration, even the least neutron efficient of them
all, light water reactors, can breed fuel.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
CX6KELe14V6x1Bux4kCDBfcttgAl24Ccl+Z4TGo8
47bUWOpGr+049AecPIVkERrWGdErgpOPL5pTQ/r8M
Toby
you get something not much more radioactive than the uranium ore. The
advantage to "melt and dilute" seems to be that it eliminates high-level
radioactive waste, which the paper points out is extremely dangerous (JAD
take note with your concrete approach):
"The most dangerous of this waste is called high-level waste -- a liquid
waste stream carrying chemicals used in reprocessing along with many
radioactive isotopes from the spent fuel or other material. This high-level
waste would be added to over 30 million gallons of liquid waste from past
reprocessing already stored in underground tanks at SRS. Some of these tanks
have leaked, and storage of the waste in this form poses risks of fire or
explosion resulting from chemical reactions inside the tanks. Moreover, in
January 1998, SRS officials acknowledged -- after over a decade of warnings
and a half billion dollars in expenses -- that one of the techniques
intended to help remove waste from the tanks is unsafe. A replacement
technology may not be ready until 2005. "
However what you failed to point out was that the only real advantage to
this approach is by making the waste stable, with dangers of its
own--volatized radioactive material--extremely dangerous:
"DOE wants to end reprocessing and begin using a simpler technology -- melt
and dilute. With this technique, the spent fuel or other nuclear material
will be heated, diluted with depleted uranium if the fuel contains HEU, and
sealed inside a stainless steel container. The result would be a stable
waste form.
There are two drawbacks to the melt and dilute approach. First, SRS has
repeatedly refused to request full funding to develop this technology,
leaving DOE officials in Washington, DC, to add it to the SRS budget. This
reflects internal DOE politics and the preference of many people at SRS to
continue reprocessing as long as possible.
Second, when the fuel is heated to be melted, some of the radioactive
material may be volatilized. That would make it airborne and carried along
with the air leaving the melt and dilute facility. DOE is confident a system
can be designed and implemented to capture most of the radionuclides before
they go out the building's exhaust stack, but until they prove it, the
technology cannot be safely implemented. "
So you see us lefties aren't the only dishonest ones...
Toby
"bulba" <abb...@poczta.onet.pl> wrote in message
news:ke37i0pmeti7q67pr...@4ax.com...
bulba
>I've read your reference and am still trying to find the part that says that
>you get something not much more radioactive than the uranium ore. The
>advantage to "melt and dilute" seems to be that it eliminates high-level
>radioactive waste,
Not really. That is not "neutralized" this way precisely because
the technology for "melt and dilute" isn't yet developed and
thus obviously unused. Or at least that's the impression I got.
>However what you failed to point out was that the only real advantage to
>this approach is by making the waste stable, with dangers of its
>own--volatized radioactive material--extremely dangerous:
I don't think it would be somehow "extremely dangerous" - what,
some fumes? If any sign of danger appears, you just stop
the process and contain the facility/device until the fumes are
cleared out?
I mean come on, there are lots of chemical plants in the
world today that make use of vast amounts of highly
dangerous & toxic chemicals (even if they're not radioactive)
and with proper care somehow all those terrible accidents
with some of them released don't happen very frequently?
When some substances do get released, like in that
terrible accident in Union Carbide plant in India, it's not
just some fumes from a process that is stopped instantly, but
simply huge amounts of volatile chemicals used in the
process "got out"? While if you either make use of continous
or batch production process of lumps, melting and diluting
only a small quantity that is being actually processed at this
moment, what volume of fumes could actually be released?
And given the high energy density of nuclear fuels
is it really all that much? I mean, think - is "30 mln gallons"
of waste acquired as result of years of operation really
much or little in terms of volumes of industrial materials
processed? The number sure sounds impressive, but
that is circa 120 mln liters, which is 120 thousand cubic
meters. That's a cube with not even 50 meters edge.
Big deal.
In barrels, that is about 714 thousand barrels. _Daily
domestic_ oil production in US is about 7.9 million
barrels. All of that has to be transported, processed,
etc. And that's just a small fraction of what floats
in tankers on the seas every day and gets processed
in refineries, etc. What about byproducts?
And again, you abstract from the problem this is
the waste from the reactors that are very traditional
and producing lots of radioactive trash. Unbuilt
integral breeder or uranium-thorium light-water
breeder do not have this problem as big. All
you have to do after 10 or 15 years of operation
is simply melt down the used core.
>Second, when the fuel is heated to be melted, some of the radioactive
>material may be volatilized. That would make it airborne and carried along
>with the air leaving the melt and dilute facility. DOE is confident a system
>can be designed and implemented to capture most of the radionuclides before
>they go out the building's exhaust stack, but until they prove it, the
>technology cannot be safely implemented. "
>So you see us lefties aren't the only dishonest ones...
Methinks like you're trying to find difficulties where
they can be easily avoided or solved.
Sean Burke
Gabrielle Rapagnetta <n0spam....@gmx.net> writes:
But my point was exactly that catholics and protestants in north and
south America have very similar religious beliefs, but very different
cultural heritage (latin vs anglo-saxon), so the two are separable.
If we are discussing the political and commercial success of Arab nations,
i think it makes more sense to speak about Arab culture, rather than
Islamic theology.
-SEan
Thelasian
Oh for god's sake - the Cold War is OVER. The hippies and
"subversives" are old and near dead. Leave the 1950's and join 2004.
There are no more pinko fellow travellers in Hollywood.
Sheesh.
Toby
again:
If you think Shippingport was so wonderful read this:
http://www.ratical.com/radiation/SecretFallout/SFchp15.html
The bottom line is that until the responsible agencies start being honest
about the dangers the people rightly are going to remain suspicious and
resistant to dangerous technologies.
<snip, snip, snip>
">
> Hence the risk I've been talking about: it's not about
> lack of potentials and possibilities, it's about lack of
> decades of intensive & systematic research of the
> issues. Because when we start to build those things
> in haste, this is when accidents happen.
No, the accidents are inevitable in any complex technology. I cannot
transcribe the whole book, but here is a section from "Normal Accidents" by
Charles Perrow:
"...characteristics of high-risk technologies...suggest that no matter how
effective conventional safety devices are, there is a form of accident that
is inevitable. This is not good news for systems that have high catastrophic
potential such as nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons systems, recombinant
DNA production, or even ships carrying highly toxic or explosive cargoes. It
suggests, for example, that the probability of a nuclear plant meltdown with
dispersion of radioactive materials to the atmosphere is not one chance in a
million a year, but more like one chance in the next decade.
Most high-risk systems have some special characteristics, beyond their toxic
or explosive or genetic dangers, that make accidents in them ineviatable,
even 'normal.' This has to do with the way failures can interact and the way
the system is tied together..."
>
> One of the renown catastrophes of Russian nuclear submarine,
> (they even made the movie about it, with Rutger Hauer as a
> captain) happened for a single reason: this welder was
> in haste to meet his socialist "norm" of work, so he didn't
> notice when a small piece of the welding material fell into the
> coolant pipe of the primary circuit (i.e. the one that gets
> moderating liquid into and out of the reactor core) he was
> welding (and obviously nobody bothered to carefully
> check the reactor later).
In capitalist societies the same haste exists, except that it is caused by
competitive pressure and the desire to increase profit. The fatal
criticality at the Tokaimura reprocessing plant in Japan, which dispersed
radioactivity into the surrounding countryside causing considerable
agricultural damage, was caused by managers instructing workers to take
shortcuts in the book procedure. The material should have been mixed in
batches no larger than 2 Kg--the batch that went critical was 16 Kg.
Post-accident investigation revealed numerous violations of accepted
procedure.
In the past decade a whole series of accidents in Japanese nuclear reactors
has seriously undermined public confidence in nuclear power. Again after
each of these accidents investigations revealed that no only were there
widespread violations of safe procedure (inspections, maintenance) but that
the companies involved (TEPCO and KEPCO) regularly hid or falsified data to
try to cover up the violations.
But even with the best safety systems in place there are as Perrow points
out, inevitable accidents that are waiting to happen, such as the Three Mile
Island incident, in which a serious of unfortunate coincidental problems,
none too serious in itself, caused a major accident--all within the space of
14 seconds.
Following Popper--a system can never be proven safe, it can only be proven
unsafe. It is always a process of refinement of the system based on problems
that arise, such as has been happening in the Space Shuttle program.
Unfortunate as the Challenger and Columbia catastrophic failures were, the
damage was quite localized. In a catastrophic failure in a nuclear plant,
the damage could affect millions of people over a widespread geographic
area, conceivably for thousands of years. The relatively small incident at
Chernobyl is a case in point.
At least in a democracy citizens are given the possibility of deciding
whether the risk is acceptable. In many places the decision vis-a-vis
nuclear power is that it is not.
Unfortunately for many reasons industry and government have decided to push
nuclear, at the expense of alternative forms of energy. R & D funding on
clean alternatives to nuclear is very small compared to the money spent on
nuclear.
I personally think that research on nuclear should go on, but I am loath to
see other plants go online at the present state of development, both of the
technology and the society.
>
> That was all that was necessary.
My point exactly.
Toby
I love the smell of aerosolized plutonium in the evening.
SAP BASIS Consultant
> >> bulba:
Stuff deleted.. Original point of discussion: Gabrielle's statement:
>>> Sure, use up the Middle East's only significant source of revenue,
>>> leave them poor and destitute,
Stuff deleted..
>
> "The West pays them..."
> "If they have not been able to..."
> "...what happens in and to their countries..."
>
> Let's turn this around. Do SAP Consultant and Bernard take
> responsibility for the economy of Western nations? Do they get up in
> the morning, read in the newspaper that the Dow Jones is up, and feel
> a sense of personal accomplishment? Unless they've got a serious
> hubris complex, I doubt it.
No, we do not take responsibility for the economy of the
Western nations, as we do not have the power to do anything
about it. (I assume that Bernard, like me, does not have the
power to affect fiscal or monetary policy, etc..)
>
> So who is this "they" that we are talking about? Who does the West
> pay for oil?
The "they" are the governments of Saudi and the other Middle
Easten dictatorships. Our argument is that the West is not doing
anything wrong by purchasing oil from the Saudis, and, thereby,
helping them deplete their resources.
Do you believe that we are wrong? How does your view work in the real
world? Suppose that Saudi sells X million barrels of oil a day, and
that experts come to the conclusion that they should be selling X/2
in order to avoid depleting their resources. (In reality, we keep on
finding more oil, so the resources will not deplete so fast). Should
the West refrain from buying X/2 barrels of oil a day from them, and,
thereby causing their GDP to fall by some 25% or 30%? How does this
work? By legislating that it is illegal to buy oil from Saudi past
a certain date, imposing huge tariffs on Saudi oil and triggering
a recession, etc..? Imagine the following headline "Bush leads
worldwide push to limit Saudi to Y barrels of oil per day: Saudi
revenue to fall by 40%, U.S to impose tariffs on countries and
companies purchasing too much oil from Saudi". Would the left love
this?
If you accept the fact that Saudi and other countries should be able
to control their own resources, and not be under the imperial control
of, say, the U.S or U.K, you must accept the fact that they will have
the ability to mismanage their resources.
Do you believe in the theory that the U.S and U.K should occupy
Saudi in order to control their oil flows and infrastructure? Is that
not imperialism?
> Tycoons who take that money and invest it not so much in
> their own countries, but rather back in the West. Saudi Arabia is
> dumping money into US treasury bonds instead of Saudi infrastructure.
Some 40% to 50% of Saudi revenue comes from oil. (I am sure a lot of
the rest is indirectly from oil; Travel due to oil business,
transportation ultimately related to oil, etc..)
Thus, the oil companies pay a lot of money to Saudi in order
to drill for oil there.
If the Saudi gov't decides to invest the money elsewhere, that is
not the fault of the countries purchasing oil from them. Again,
if you are fond of imperialism and racial profiling, I suppose
you could stop that by legislating that, say, Saudi and Kuwaiti
princes cannot invest in the U.S and Europe. Would the left go for
this idea? If not, you must accept their ability to invest their
money like any other foreigner.
On Saudi economy...
http://www.samba.com.sa/investment/economywatch/pdf/2003%20Q1%20Update.pdf
> So when I say that depleting the world's oil reserves will leave the
> Middle East mostly poor, it is quite likely given current investment
> trends -- most of the population does indeed remain poor.
>
And the population would be poorer without the Western business
interests over there. The fact that Europe and the U.S invests in
country X, and that its population is poor, does not imply that
the investment causes or aggravates the poverty.
> Now the oil market is nothing that remotely resembles free trade. It
> is an arrangement between princes of the East and West.
It is a market based on supply and demand, with, granted, some
oligarchies. The supply comes from Saudi, Kuwait, UAR, Iran, Mexico,
Venezuela, Canada, Norway, Russia, etc.. Some are led by princes,
some are semi-democratic, and some are democratic.
> The Good News Capitalists are using a double standard to justify this
> arrangement. When they say "They sell oil" they are talking a handful
> of wealthy individuals. So don't pretend that "what happens in and to their
> countries is their own responsibility".
If you do not like the idea of America and the U.K taking over countries
and making decisions on their resources, then you accept the fact that
the countries will often be ruled by nasty dictators. Barring some cases
such as genocide in which intervention may be warranted, you must deal
with these dictators to do business over there. I suppose that you could
buycott all business with dictators and greatly impoverish yourself
and, mainly, their citizens.
> Their definition of "they"
> does not apply to 99.99% of the Middle East population. On the other
> hand, their definition of "us" includes nearly the entire world. So
> who is in a better position to accept responsibility for the trends
> which are rapidly depleting a non-renewable resource in the span of
> just a few generations: SAP BASIS with his SUV in a double garage, or
> the Iraqi farmer who shares his tractor with twelve other people?
I do not have an SUV, but I have nothing against people who do. The
countries that use resources heavily usually contribute a lot to finding
resources, and to coming up with better ways of distributing and
transporting them. Thus, they are often a net plus to the energy
equation. See the book "The Ultimate Resource, Volume II" by Julian
Simon for this argument.
Thus, I feel no guilt about my energy use. We know about more oil
reserves than we did in 1900, 1920, 1950 or 1980.
>
> The responsibility of sustainability belongs to everyone. There is no
> "us and them" when you talking about depleting a global resource.
Whenever the responsibility belongs to everybody, it belongs to
nobody.
Toby
serious problems and technologies that have a much greater catastrophic
potential than other types of toxic waste. One look at the effects of
Chernobyl as compared to Bhopal or even Seveso should tell you that. You
also tend to minimize the risks and make light of the technological
challenges involved.
You might be comfortable with the risks but other people are not.
Toby
"bulba" <abb...@poczta.onet.pl> wrote in message
news:2ss7i0t7sbe53v963...@4ax.com...
Toby
read alongside the official declarations which emphasize the safety and
controllability of the technologies involved:
http://www.technidigm.org/c5001/nucl_haz.htm
http://www.heartofamericanorthwest.org/newsreleases/release102199.html
http://www.nci.org/s/sp102497.htm
http://www.laka.org/teksten/steps-95/5.html
Toby
"bulba" <abb...@poczta.onet.pl> wrote in message
news:2ss7i0t7sbe53v963...@4ax.com...
Toby
been shown to work, and breeders can reduce the waste problem via
transmutation. There is increased danger in a meltdown due to components of
the fuel, which would have to be weighed against the economic concerns.
However none of this directly addresses the very real dangers of nuclear
technology, or whether in the long run it would be more sane to invest more
research funds into cleaner energy alternatives, which do exist.
Toby
"James A. Donald" <jam...@echeque.com> wrote in message
news:1rd7i0h4idaq3vsas...@4ax.com...
bulba
>Your ignorance of the issues is showing.
And I thought I graduated the polytechnic where they have
taught us lots of general science and engineering stuff.
Including quite a lot of physics.
>You try to make light of very
>serious problems and technologies that have a much greater catastrophic
>potential than other types of toxic waste. One look at the effects of
>Chernobyl as compared to Bhopal or even Seveso should tell you that.
The dangers were actually greatly overrated.
The reactor core in Chernobyl has mostly melted down and the
mass has leaked down into the construction below it. It stabilized
there and that was it.
We know now the crews of helicopters that have been working
so bravely on dumping neutral materials in hope of containing the
radioactivity have exposed themselves to radiation and died
for nothing. That's horrible, but that is the way things are.
Now, it's understandable Ukrainians would want to make
lots of PR around the Chernobyl disaster. Nevertheless,
little of that is about real risks and more about perceived
risks.
I live in southern Poland, a region relatively close to Chernobyl.
It is pretty obvious here we have watched that with keen interest.
The doctors and radiation physics researchers from Warsaw
and Krakow actually have been doing research on the effects
of Chernobyl, in Poland and in the neighbouring Eastern
countries, Byelaruss and Ukraine. They found exposure of
general population to radiation resulting from Chernobyl
accident was less than one lung X-ray test or less
than exposure one gets in typical passanger flight
at 10 km attitude from Moscow to NY (there's a reason for
the crews of airliners getting leukemia or cancer at
three times the rate of general population; if you fly a lot, you
should be aware of that as well). They found no signs of
statistically detectable increase in cancer rates. And it's not
in our (Poland) interest to cover up the screwups of
the former Soviet Union republic, so I find that plausible.
And Chernobyl reactor _truly_ sucked. It was one of
the worst types, plus it contained design errors (it
was unstable at low power output). And it has been
built so poorly that the differences in diameters of
some pipes in the system was significantly different
than those in the blueprints. And Ukrainians from
time to time have been doing truly criminal things
there, like letting the steam out of the secondary
circuit into the air, so the turbines rotating bc
of inertia could generate a few minutes worth
electricity more after powering the reactor down.
The Russians and Ukrainians are extremely, criminally
careless with what they are doing, like dumping the
spent nuclear fuel rods overboard from submarines. And
doing that in the harbor, while submarine is not
at the sea.
There are a few thousand rotting RTG (radio-thermal
generators) power sources left in Soviet Union, that
contain quite a lot of very dirty stuff. Somehow
there are no massive deaths from that. I don't
recommend such practices, obviously, that's being
utterly, criminally stupid and careless. That's a
crime what they are doing. Nevertheless, if you
do things the _right_ way, all such problems can
be addressed. If people built airplanes using so
political and emotionally charged process as
what gets nuclear reactors built, the airplanes would
fall from the sky like rain drops.
>You
>also tend to minimize the risks and make light of the technological
>challenges involved.
More like I'm trying to understand real risks and choose the
technologies and approaches that have little risks. Unlike
the politicians and layman reporters and activists.
>You might be comfortable with the risks but other people are not.
Look.
If you TRY to do things in dangerous, polluting, costly
and bad ways, for instance by choosing obsolete and
dangerous designs, you can always do it and then
be scared with truly bad, bad consequences that happen.
And it seems like govts, polticians and activists are
bent on doing things precisely the worst possible ways.
The point is, you don't have to and all it takes is trying
to understand how it truly works. What are the real risks.
You haven't actually addressed specific points. Just
shied away from them and complained in general.
The point is that paranoia like yours isn't helping
at all: it is precisely the reason for govts trying
to supress the fear by censoring the information
about the dangers of current unviable designs
& practices. So you get the result opposite to
your intention.
An example: Americans have this totally irrational
fear of diesel engines bc of the very bad pollution
that is supposedly a lot worse than from those
from the gasoline engines.
In Europe, the progress in research on diesels
has made the diesel quiet, economic and relatively
clean. And I don't think that environment in
Europe is somehow worse off in comparative terms
bc of diesels than the environment in USA without them.
If Europeans feared this engine irrationally, we would
not make the progress in turning the diesel engine
from smth that is truly dirty & uneconomic into
an engine that can very well compete with gasoline
engines in terms of pollution & noise.
bulba
You have reinforced my points: the govt jumps right into solution
right at the moment when the technology is barely viable (not
one decent breeder has been tested well before govt decided
"yes, we get into reprocessing plutonium for use in breeders
forever! HOORAY!"), not when it is well-researched.
Then, naturally, govts try to cover up screwups and defend
the bad policy and bad solutions.
Then the activists start to tell doomsday stories and show
how much they "care", trying to make themselves appear
as heroes in the process (feels good, doesn't it?), naturally
overestimating dangers a lot and pulling the attention
away from viable solutions onto the bad solutions. So
nobody even thinks other designs could be tried.
Not once in this thread you have had anything to say
about light-water breeder, that goddamit, has been
built and successfully operated (sure it probably
has some specific risks, the point is we don't know and
instead persist with the bad designs). You have
carefully avoided it, as if it didn't exist.
Instead you just jump into usual whining mode.
Now, I'm not saying it HAS to be nuclear energy.
Maybe something else is more viable _in reality_.
But instead of working on real points of wind
turbines vs sea-thermal-current generators vs
nuclear energy vs fusion all we get is operating
on basis of paranoia, fear, hope and trying
to get smth for nothing.
This is why I think in general the humans are very
stupid species.
bulba
<jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
>Nuclear reactors create less radioactive waste than coal fired
>plants - because coal ash is so voluminous, it has to be dumped
>immediately, whereas nuclear fule can be buried somwhere it
>will stay put for a few thousand years.
A few thousand years is not necessary. There are designs
that burn the nuclear fuel to the isotopes that have
half life about 50 years (57 years IIRC), so it would
be like hundreds of years to get it almost harmless.
Yes, there are also designs that produce horrible
waste that thousands of years are necessary to
get neutralized, or maybe even more.
The point is, govts persist in choosing precisely
the worst possible solutions.
bulba
>Yes the principle of less-efficient-than-liquid-metal breeding has indeed
>been shown to work, and breeders can reduce the waste problem via
>transmutation. There is increased danger in a meltdown due to components of
>the fuel, which would have to be weighed against the economic concerns.
>
>However none of this directly addresses the very real dangers of nuclear
>technology, or whether in the long run it would be more sane to invest more
>research funds into cleaner energy alternatives, which do exist.
Like, specifically?
The only promising direction that I know of is in generators using
sea thermal currents. Nevertheless, the engineering challenges are
considerable. It is uncertain if they could be used on massive scale.
The Swedish govt has cut the very reasonable deal with the activists:
OK, if you get the real generating capacity to operate, we will
shut down the nuclear reactor of equivalent capacity and go with that
solution instead. But only on that condition: that you actually get
the power here.
It didn't happen.
Well, make it happen, Toby, what do I care where the
power comes from.
bulba
>However none of this directly addresses the very real dangers of nuclear
>technology, or whether in the long run it would be more sane to invest more
>research funds into cleaner energy alternatives, which do exist.
The impression that I have is not that activists want us to develop
alternative power sources.
My impression is that they want us all to drop using technology
in the first place: to "get back to nature".
Consider "precautionary principle". This philosopher didn't
simply want to shield us all against the effects of bad
technologies. He said off the record that he knew that
"principle" is scientifically and philosophically invalid.
He only thought that if caused political effect of preventing
using some technology at all, in principle, that's just groovy.
So getting us AWAY from viable alternatives - be it
either windmills (about which ecos complain), safe
nuclear energy (good for scaring if the design is bad),
fusion or solar cells - it's all nice.
They obviously can't succeed. But their emotional investment
into the issue, the fringe sentimentality they have developed,
including thigs like having "sanctuaries of whales", where they
literally "worship" the goddamn mammal "fish", makes them
do what they can to prevent adoption of a viable technology
so we shied away from technology at all. Nuts.
bulba
>However none of this directly addresses the very real dangers of nuclear
>technology, or whether in the long run it would be more sane to invest more
>research funds into cleaner energy alternatives, which do exist.
One interesting direction that a friend of mine suggested was
engineering biotech plants that would collect the nitrogen from
the air.
It may look like crazy, but even today there are natural
plants (salix viminalis and varieties) that some farmers
grow only for purpose of convert the biomass using
pyrolitic converters into synthetic gas (not gasoline)
that can be subsequently used as fuel in fuel cells,
microturbines, or advanced pyrolitic furnaces.
Nevertheless, the energy acquired this way is still not
very economic today, though it's improving all the time.
Biotech could help greatly in overcoming the limitations.
Yet look at how desperately the econuts are fighting against
biotech.
There's nothing the econuts can do to stop typical
industrial high-tech research, but against biotech they
can do smth.
I claim that at least some of them is tryign to present precisely
the most unviable alternatives as viable and viable alternatives
as unviable. Once people are disappointed with poor
experience with unviable alternatives, they're going to
become disappointed with technology itself. So the political
support for the viable alternatives would diminish.
bulba
>Your ignorance of the issues is showing. You try to make light of very
>serious problems and technologies that have a much greater catastrophic
>potential than other types of toxic waste.
OK, how about this:
"All of the breeder programes were cut short of their full development
and test cycle as instigated. The IFR for instance was cut down by
Jimmy Carter of political reasons not technical or economic ones. The
Japanese even offered to continue funding the research. The IFR was
very proliferation resistent becuase the pyro-processing can't produce
pure plutonium and never left the reator building however the fear was
that such reactors would ultimetly spread the abillity of other
countries to produce bombs."
And this:
"> Thanks for your reply. Did the IFR ever get to a point where it
could
> be made for commercial use? I know they had a plant in Idaho, I read
> an interview with the guy in charge. I think Clinton finally put the
> nail in the coffin.
I believe it got close. You need to build test plants and after that
pilot plants. There are a lot of practical things to learn. The
Molten Salt reactor also got close but it had corrosion problems. A
lot of the issues relate to the reactors breeding but not breeding
enough but overall the consensus is that these reactors are very
feasible.
There are VHTGR (Very Hight Temperature Gas Reactors) that are
breeders. One of the more intersting cycles is the molten lead
breeder. They can be built up to any size but if kept down to below
200MW they can be be built as a self contained capsule that is sealed
at the factory. The complete unit is shipped and then runs for 20
year with no intervention completely on passive cooling. It is then
switched of for a while and shipped back to the factory for disposal.
the Russians have a lead bismuth one. A chap called Greenspan is
trying to build one in the USA. Then there are the thermal breeders
that don't need fast neutrons. There are neutron beam pumped
breeders.
There is quite literaly dozens of viable ways of building breeders.
almost to many to choose from."
James A. Donald
James A. Donald
> > The religous differences between protestantism, and South
> > American Roman Catholicism seem to me very large indeed,
> > and the differences between American protestantism and
> > Roman Catholicism, though less, are still very great.
Socialism is a Mental Disease
> Care to elaborate on the differences? I have trouble seeing
> that many...
To answer your question plainly would just piss people off
unnecessarily. It is like asking what is wrong with Judaism.
Let me put it indirectly, waltzing around the question rather
than answering it plainly: To what religion do "liberation
theologians" nominally belong?
What is the World Council of churches accused of being?
I presume you agree that "liberation theology" causes povery,
hunger, and oppression, and is intended to cause poverty,
hunger and oppression. Then you should ask which version of
Christianity has the most in common with liberation theology,
is most apt to give birth to the kind of thinking
characteristic of liberation theology.
To waltz at the question from a different, though equally
evasive, direction. Consider the ritual of confession, which
proposes that the authority to remedy sin comes through a
hierarchy, which is not quite the same thing as saying that
hierarchy can define good and evil, but comes mightly close.
There is a similar resemblance between the doctrine
transubstantiation, and the communist view that official
reality is more significant that the reality that is actually
seen and experienced. Many of the doctrines of the Catholic
church have a close resemblance to to the doctirnes used to
rationalize totalitarianism and terror - as do the doctrines of
Judaism, coming from a slightly different direction.
If the church can make sins go away by performing a ritual, why
can the state not make pieces of paper worth something by
staining them with ink?
Heard on Pacifica radio: "The mass media present a very
distorted view of reality. Almost no Americans know that that
a quarter of American children go to bed hungry"
The speaker obviously did not believe that one quarter of
American children actually experience hunger at bed time. If
she really believed that, she would think that at least one
quarter of Americans were aware of it. Rather, she believed it
in the sense that Roman Catholics belive that wine and biscuit
is the blood and body of Christ, and that Communists believe
that communist states are a solution to the problem of hunger.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
K5TYuSuUQU7VCsNTRGPTMJ/krezApygmQr+uiTKv
4CZH1AUUB5Q6oG2edvK5viwK7Iw4h0v5rfeLvAe69
James A. Donald
On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 01:00:41 GMT, Sean Burke
<foo...@mystery.org> wrote:
> But my point was exactly that catholics and protestants in
> north and south America have very similar religious beliefs,
North America is dominated by protestants, South America by
Roman Catholics. I do not think that protestant beliefs are at
all similar to Roman Catholic beliefs.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
zeXudZlVjcROnc1Zwi1zBwPnMC7lbfUvAlkEbFjK
4mQwqkW0ETrAjqmeaWlCU+/UBAj16LeZfWVWg6zmq
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>>How is it that you can differentiate religion from culture
>>heritage? Seems to me that they are mostly the same thing.
Michael Gray:
>Sorry to butt in here-
>It seems an all too common mis-conception that religion and culture
>are "the same thing".
>This confuses "religious practice" with "religious belief".
>
>To most people "religion" equates with "religious belief", not
>practice, which is incidental and need not rely on any particular
>belief in a deity.
>An atheist could follow all the practices of a religion without having
>any "belief" whatsoever.
>The same applies to culture. It is a loosly defined set of actions,
>conventions and practices, that do not require any particular
>"belief".
>
>So "religion" (as a belief in a deity or deities), and "culture" (as a
>set of social conventions) are not the same thing in any way, shape,
>or form.
Religion is not just a belief in deities. That definition is more
along the lines of a cult. The broader religions all contain beliefs
that determine social conventions and organization.
I think you have narrowed your definition of 'belief' to include only
the various religious fairy tales that are told by the world's holy
scriptures. You're right that people can behave any way they want
regardless of their belief in those scriptures, but invariably
religions take on additional beliefs which do determine cultural
heritage.
For example, in Catholicism, the belief in the Trinity may not be
particularly relevant to cultural heritage. However, their belief in
the Pope as a divine instrument of God has influenced the cultural
heritage of Catholics for several hundred years. It determines the
days they take off work, agricultural contributions to feasts,
rational for wars, and relations to States,
James A. Donald
On 18 Aug 2004 18:44:20 -0500, "Toby" <kymar...@ybb.ne.jpp>
wrote:
> -- a liquid
> waste stream carrying chemicals used in reprocessing along
> with many radioactive isotopes from the spent fuel or other
> material. This high-level waste would be added to over 30
> million gallons of liquid waste from past reprocessing
> already stored in underground tanks at SRS. Some of these
> tanks have leaked, and storage of the waste in this form
> poses risks of fire or explosion resulting from chemical
> reactions inside the tanks. Moreover, in January 1998, SRS
> officials acknowledged -- after over a decade of warnings and
> a half billion dollars in expenses -- that one of the
> techniques intended to help remove waste from the tanks is
> unsafe. A replacement technology may not be ready until 2005.
> "
"Thirty million gallons" sounds like a lot, but if we mix that
amount of fluid with cement, we get a pile of concrete about
sixy meters in diameter.
Of course if you solidified it with cement right now, the
radioactivity would produce too much heat, breaking down the
concrete, but leave it another twenty years or so, and the heat
is not too great.
"Thirty million gallons" is nine tanks, each tank six meters
high, and fifty meters in diameters. That sounds like lot, but
in a place the size of America, not a lot.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
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4+qPEw+M2CUDmdkzUnfyjC13xS8M2cfsUc8g7whAA
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>> >> >>[Muslims] have had the framework for liberal property rights since
>> >> >>the beginnings of Islam. It is not enough to call them corrupt and
>> >> >>inane.
>> >> bulba:
>> >> >It is if the ideas like verboten interest on the loan and no infidels
>> >> >in the land of Muslims, among others, do get them corrupt and insane.
>> >Gabrielle Rapagnetta:
>> >> The vast majority of muslims do not practice verboten interest or
>> >> intolerance of infidels. You also mentioned that muslims insist on a
>> >> caliphate and a unity of church and state. This is also untrue for
>> >> most muslims. In fact, the word khalifah, as used in the Quran,
>> >> refers not to a supreme leader, but to all muslims. It means the
>> >> responsibility that is shared by all muslims to be God's stewards on
>> >> earth.
>> Sean Burke:
>> >It does not appear to me that religion is a useful predictor
>> >of prosperity. Consider the Americas for example - the protestant
>> >nations are markedly more prosperous than the catholic ones.
>> >Since the religious differences are comparatively small, it seems
>> >more likely that cultural heritage is the determining influence.
>Gabrielle Rapagnetta:
>> There is a lot that could be said in response to your comment. But
>> first, how is it that you can differentiate religion from culture
>> heritage? Seems to me that they are mostly the same thing.
Sean Burke:
>But my point was exactly that catholics and protestants in north and
>south America have very similar religious beliefs, but very different
>cultural heritage (latin vs anglo-saxon), so the two are separable.
>If we are discussing the political and commercial success of Arab nations,
>i think it makes more sense to speak about Arab culture, rather than
>Islamic theology.
1) Catholics and protestants have quite different beliefs -- mainly
that of the role of the Pope.
Here is a study by Rev. Napoleon Roussell published in the 19th
century which compares the wealth, knowledge, and morality of catholic
nations to protestant nations:
http://aleph.haifa.ac.il/F/?func=find-b&find_code=SYS&request=1015208
2) Arab culture is quickly eroding around the world. Islam appears
to be the only mechanism capable of protecting Arab culture in the
21st century. At least, this is what most Arabs tell us.
3) It isn't "arabs" who are being attacked by the likes of bulba and
co. I am responding in particular to bulba's comment, "unlike the
Muslims, in the West property rights are generally respected". My
posts are in response to people who want to see Islam eradicated and
arabs modernized. I fear any sensible discussion of arab culture
would be lost on these folks.
M J Carley
>North America is dominated by protestants, South America by Roman
>Catholics. I do not think that protestant beliefs are at all similar
>to Roman Catholic beliefs.
from the CIA factbook:
Country pop/m %/RC %/P
Canada 32.5 46 36
Mexico 105 89 6
USA 293 28 56
So North America is 190m RC and 182m Protestant (on those figures). If
we ignore Mexico (surely you know Mexico is in North America) the
figures become 97 versus 176, a big difference but hardly
`domination'. How do you explain the similarities between Canada and
the US given the differing proportions of RCs versus Protestants?
--
E' la storia di un pasticciere, trotzkista, un pasticciere trotzkista
nell'Italia degli anni '50. E' un film musicale.
No MS attachments: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
James A. Donald
On 18 Aug 2004 20:48:09 -0500, "Toby" <kymar...@ybb.ne.jpp>
wrote:
> light of very serious problems and technologies that have a
> much greater catastrophic potential than other types of toxic
> waste. One look at the effects of Chernobyl as compared to
> Bhopal or even Seveso should tell you that.
It is estimated that Chernobyl cause 30 deaths immediately, and
that 2500 have died as a long terrm consequence.
http://www.chernobyl.co.uk/ This is rather less than Bhopal,
which killed 3800 immediately.
Secondly Chernobyl and Bhopal reflected inherently dangerous
polticial systems, not inherently dangerous technologies. Both
political systems have killed more people with hoe handles,
than with complicated technologies.
--digsig
James A. Donald
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