What Happens When You Lack Ruthlessness

This is what happens.

Secret U.S. Mission Hauls Uranium From Iraq On July 5, 2008, the Associated Press (AP) released a story titled: Secret U.S. mission hauls uranium from Iraq .

The opening paragraph is as follows: The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program – a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium – reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.
[…]
We have been hearing from the far-left for more than five years how, “Bush lied.” Somehow, that slogan loses its credibility now that 550 metric tons of Saddam’s yellowcake, used for nuclear weapon enrichment, has been discovered and shipped to Canada for its new use as nuclear energy. It appears that American troops found the 550 metric tons of uranium in 2003 after invading Iraq .

They had to sit on this information and the uranium itself, for fear of terrorists attempting to steal it. It was guarded and kept safe by our military in a 23,000-acre site with large sand beams surrounding the site

By now it is too late since the enemy’s propaganda has already done their damage. It’s fine if you have 100,000 men up against the enemy’s 20,000, but that is only true if you can prevent the 20,000 from seizing your capital’s fortress citadel. Your 100k vs 20k means victory for you only up until the 20k occupies an important piece of territory. Bush, by allowing his enemies to do whatever they pleased in the UN and in domestic America, just kept giving away the game. The only thing that saved Bush and Iraq, in the end, were Bush’s character virtues (which included stubbornness) and the quality and genius capability of the United States military.

David Weber Interview At Blackfive

The Anti-Social vs the Asocial

If a Killer Kills Someone no one is much surprised. Likewise, if the killer is killed by his intended victim, that’s understandable irony. But if no one meant to kill anyone, and someone ends up dead, well, then it’s cartoon exclamation points all around. Everyone, including the newly-minted killer, is surprised. Cries of “How could this happen?” and “But I didn’t want to kill him!” ring out. In the end it gets labeled as an unfortunate accident.

But these ‘accidents’ happen often enough that when a new one pops up I can still recall the last one I read about. Primates have a territorial dispute, and begin vocalizing at each other to communicate their displeasure, then aggression in a sideways request that the other capitulate. When neither one backs down, it goes to blows, again to run the interloper off. Usually, this works out fine, as nature intended. But when it’s bodyweight + brain + concrete, one can end up running their rival not just off their territory, but off this mortal coil entire.

This is pretty funny but only to people with a certain sense of humor.

Steen Knuckles (look under violence category) writes about some ways to defuse anti-social situations: those times when people start a bar room brawl because they got angry or wanted a woman or something. Social intimidation is usually like when somebody uses a loud voice, a look, a tone of voice, verbal threats, or getting inside your private space to coerce you to backdown.

Using the things Target Focus Training teaches you in an anti-social or social situation is like using a nuclear weapon on a city because the city didn’t like you or insulted you. Or in a more personal scale, it is like tacking the kitchen knife and stabbing somebody in the back in their kidneys just because they borrowed something of yours that they didn’t give back (yet).

Killing killers is funny or entertaining (before or afterwards) but killing people inside the laws and rules of society is not so funny. It’s a tragedy. Serial killers and mass murderers like 9/11 hijackers getting hijacked by the passengers of Flight 93 and terrorists getting assassinated by Predator Hellfire missiles is funny and entertaining to see. But when honest citizens die while attempting to kill pirates and outlaws, it isn’t funny.

Justice has a sense of humor that isn’t like most people’s sense of humor.

Free Will: Talking about Firefly and Eugenics

[Made a couple of revisions for clarity and added in Book’s link]

In the wake of Sarah Palin’s appearance on the national political scene, some Obama supporters made some pretty deranged statements about the Palin family decision to go ahead with a pregnancy when they knew that the baby would have Down Syndrome. There was a lot of eugenics-type talk about the social utility of handicapped children (none) and the societal wisdom of destroying them (huge).

To those of us who have been paying attention for periods longer than this political season, these ugly outbursts weren’t surprising. After all, Pete Singer, “dean” of American ethicists (with a chair at Princeton), and founder of the American animal rights movement, has long advocated that it is ethical to give parents a 30 day window after a child’s birth within which to destroy the child should the parents deem it defective. Singer, like others with his statist views, have a peculiarly Utopian view of the perfectibility of humans, one which depends, not on moral growth, but on government force.

And yes, you’re not imaging it — Hitler did in fact put this ideology into effect. Aside from trying to kill entire races he deemed defective, such as Jews and Gypsies, he was also big on genetic management, which involved prostituting German women to SS forces to make “perfect” Aryan babies and, on the flip side, killing those Aryans he deemed defective. My uncle on the Christian side of the family was gassed because he was a manic-depressive. This is what happens when the state makes decisions because, as I’ve said before, the state has no conscience.

-Bookworm

Source courtesy of Shrinkwrapped

Y’all got on this boat for different reasons, but y’all come to the same place. So now I’m asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this – they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin’. I aim to misbehave.

Captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) Serenity

I can’t say much without spoiling the movie for others, but folks here who have watched Serenity knows.

Another of Shrink’s post on Firefly, you should read for background either now or later.

This relates to some of the things I’ve written about ethics, free will, and macro scale planning. To a certain extent, “perfectibility” is a bad state to be in. In the universal laws of physics, the “perfect” is the unchanging and the static. The static is the stagnant and the stagnant is the dead or soon to be dead and replaced.

Once the nuclear fusion inside a star goes out of balance, meaning the pressure coming in exceeds the pressure going out from the fusion, the star collapses and dies until a new equilibrium is reaches. The key note here is “equilibrium”, “balance”, and “harmony”. These things are not the same thing as stagnancy, static things, and perfect things/states.

If you recognize the free will of each individual, you can reach a state of harmony but not a state of perfection. A star does not collapse because of its mass due to the fact that its fusion provides a counter-balancing force against gravity’s pull. But once things are made “perfect” and unchanging, then it will collapse. It has to. That is why the longer lasting the star is, the more it tends to produce less energy. Static states of equilibrium tends to stay longer if it uses less energy. “Perfect states” only exist for the dead. Once a star’s material is dead and unable to initiate fusion of iron or fall inwards to form a black hole then it can be that way for almost forever.

The same is true of human hierarchies and weather patterns (Chaos Theory’s butterfly effect). The Left believes the optimal state of things is reached by forcing people and things to their will. People like me believe that the optimal state of things for the human species is reached through the competition of people’s free wills. The goal is similar, in that I want a state of constructs that operate more efficiently than the sum of its parts. But my way does not require the “perfection” and stagnancy of each individual component in that super structure. I don’t need to increase the endurance by decreasing the power and vitality of people. THe Left doesn’t know how to compete fairly so they jack the system up by cheating, by making their individual units “perfect”. Redistribute the wealth will certainly make the poor last a whole lot longer.

But it doesn’t work. You cannot create harmony or any great super structure more effective than the sum of its parts by locking in stasis the state of every component. That’s not just me, as a single human, saying that. Those are the laws of the universe itself. You cannot have “stuff” going on in the universe, planets, stars, and galaxies without things that change: often they change unexpectedly along unpredictable routes. Quantum theory even posits that things change based upon perception, not just luck. Evolution also demands that cells cooperate together. There is no such thing as a “super cell” that can’t get any better cause it is now godlike”. There is such a thing as symbiosis, cooperation, and competition between cells, however, that create higher level organisms and species.

The Left cannot tolerate how human beings can change their mind and decide to do things contrary to this perfect ideal of utopia held by the state or Great Leader. They see this as an obstacle to perfection and stasis. I see it as the requirement for a healthy and vital system of interlocking parts.

Black tribes in Al-Ameriki

My reply to Book’s post on how blacks defend blacks like Arabs defend Arabs, regardless of what crime or evil they did.

Arabs have an inferiority complex and so do blacks here in America. While blacks from Africa tend to have the same views over Colonialism and Europeans, they don’t have the political hang ups of the American Democrat party black loyalists.

These complexes tend to develop if a certain people feel alienated from the whole by some superficial or actual difference. The economic disparity and the difference in superficial skin tone between blacks and whites, or even blacks and asians, produces the foundation for this inferiority complex.

Most human beings, even if they know they are inferior to others, won’t feel rejected or become anti-social so long as the social hierarchy accepts them. Even if they occupy a lower pole on the social hierarchy, the simple promise of climbing the ladder will focus the feelings of inferiority into actions of production.

The Arabs have this little problem with motivation given their religious beliefs and Inshallah cultural precepts. That’s another subject, however.

Blacks, being a minority here in America, feel notably left out and so they, like all other outnumbered people in history with good central leadership and stability, will band together, pool their resources, and fight against the foreigners together. The foreigners being whitey and Big Business and Republicans.

The Democrats have become very clever in exaggerating divisions between black and white, poor and rich. Democrats came up with abortion and Roe vs Wade, which predominantly have killed black children, preventing blacks from gaining any true demographic advantage over whites except in heavily black districts like Cynthia McKinney’s in Georgia. This, combined with economic sabotage of the black middle class, creates a perpetual resentment factor that the Democrat party can turn into loyalty to government handouts and bribes.

However, this kind of social experiment could never work unless the Democrats had people fronting for them from inside the black community. People like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, and many many other black folks provide the illusion that this is the black community solving their own problems, as it should be. That, of course, is still an illusion regardless of what people think it should be.

It’s very similar to what would have happened had Casey finished up his plan in Iraq for getting an “Iraqi face” on the streets. Casey, not being a master Democrat operator, didn’t realize that you needed more than a front, or face, operating with the occupation powers. You needed a synergistic and grass roots effort to convince people that the policies they are adopting came from within their own community, that it didn’t have anything to do with the Americans. The Americans are only providing support and help after it has been requested by the Iraqis themselves, in the form of their local leaders (local leaders being the face Iraqis see, while Americans hold most of the real power).

Even once you get that working, there are still two versions of it. There’s the real version, called real grass roots support and honest representation of Iraqi interests in alliance with American interests, and then there is the astroturf “fake” version from the Democrat party.

See, the Democrat party’s representatives in the black community are not representing the black community. This seems like a paradox but it’s just a simple fact of life. You can have real grass roots support like what propelled Sarah Palin to the nomination of the VP office for the Republican party or what Al Anbar cooked up with the assassinated leader of the primary Awakening tribe, but you can also have fake grass roots like what has been reported by Java Report concerning Democrat propaganda firms creating videos smearing Palin that seems like it went viral on its own.

Happenstance, coincidence, and “it just happened to be” are either real coincidences or events designed to coincide.

The Last Samurai: Social, political, and military analysis

I just finished watching the Last Samurai for the first time. While I wanted to see Tom Cruise kill himself at the end, still, it wasn’t that bad even though the plot and context were typical of Hollywood: Leftist Hollywood but perhaps that would be redundant a characterization.

I went and saw it not because I love Tom Cruise but because I have just finished reading Shogun by James Clavell primarily due to Soob’s listing of that novel in Quantum Library. One of the reasons (okay the only reason) I hadn’t seen it yet, even though I knew about it and heard the name often, was because of the star actor, Tom Cruise. I had seen him in other flicks like Mission Impossible I and II and I wasn’t impressed. Unlike many people who criticize a movie or book by its plot, excitement, lack of it, slowness, or lack of “authenticity” or “acting ability”, I didn’t like Tom Cruise because I didn’t like Tom Cruise’s actions. Not the “authenticity” or “acting ability”, you understand. I am concerned with the ethics of what the producers, writers, and directors have their people do in a film and I am concerned with the type of actors that agree to accept a role in such scripts.

To start off with some relevant details about me, I am a student of the Art of Propaganda as well as the Art of War. What this means is just that these topics are not typically entertainment value to me. They are interesting, yes, but they are interesting because they have real consequences to real people not because they look good on film or because it is an exciting thing to read about. Or rather, not solely (or even primarily) because it is an exciting thing to read about.

The Last Samurai is a proto-typical Hollywood construction made out of equal parts political entropy (corruption), black vs white characterizations, and the white guilt desire to resolve things through war and death (revolutonary means).

Evidence for my first claim, political entropy, can be seen in how the movie portrays the Emperor Meiji (the movie may or may not call him that but that is the name of the Emperor ruling over that specific time period the movie wants to highlight) as a uncertain youth that gets manipulated by his advisers (oil and railroad tycoons, robber barons, and Dick Cheney look alikes) into sending conscripts, downtrodden blacks and minorities, into a war for exploitation (war for oil, blood for oil, etc). A pretty concise overview, eh? I thought so.

Sarah Palin’s Magic Flute

Sarah Palin in her beauty pageant Flute Talent competition

About the only time that I would put something in both the categories of ‘politics’ and ‘beauty’.