Poetry is good for you

Pick a poem, any poem to read, of mine

http://peaceworld.100mb.com/013POEMS.htm

Or those of others.

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/

Poetry is the broccoli of the mind:

An acquired taste, but worthwhile.

According to Mark Lynas', Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

“In constraining carbon through rationing, we might soon find that we were building a different sort of society, one emphasizing quality of life before the raw statistics of economic growth and relentless consumption. I have no grand plan for how this society might look, nor do I pretend that it would be some kind of utopia. Life would go on, with all its trials and tribulations—and that, after all, is precisely the point. Unless we do constrain carbon, life will very largely not go on at all.” Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., 2008, p. 302. The next few paragraphs (ending in a grim list with a few addenda of mine) are my summary of this vital global warming primer. Read them and weep.

Picture God as a senile old coot, once lauded as the master artist of his time. Having lost his eyesight these last few years, he has reduced his worldly pallet to four colors: tans, grays, the purest aqua blue and cloud white. Gone all the icy white, erased without mercy from equatorial mountains (one degree), from the Arctic Ocean (two degrees), then from the Alps, the Rockies and the Andes (three degrees), and finally from the mighty Himalayas, even Greenland and the Antarctic after a mere five degrees of increase in average world heat. Gone forest green, tropical or temperate, since the ice’s life-giving rivers would no longer flow so dependably in summertime; gone the dark browns of good soil, either washed away by floods or turned into dustbowl by drought. In the heat engine of a hotter Earth, rains will conform to the following biblical scheme: “For to those who have much more will be given, but for those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” No more fallow fields, no woods, no living coral reefs and no fish.

Gone all the port cities, flooded no matter how they fortified themselves; gone the bioluminescence of human cities by night, a few remaining smudges of survival luminosity closed up against polar shores, if they could get away with it. Instead, bright lights flash out to sea, where once-frozen, now thawed methane hydrate froths up from square miles of continental shelf and detonates in titanic explosions that will interrupt the occasional Force 6+ hyper-hurricane with massive tsunamis. The oceans are the purest aqua blue because there is no oxygen in the water and therefore no life. The remaining biomass is inedible scrub and mangrove swamp, and not much of that; all induced by a mere five degree rise in average world temps. Six degrees and forget human bioluminescence for at least a few centuries while the climate stabilizes from the equivalent of the Permian-Triassic die-off when the world almost became a barren ball of rock. A few humans might survive, reproduce and rebuild, in good time. An equivalent drop of six degrees would glaze the entire planet in ice, perhaps all the way to the equator.

To avert this fate, we would have to start scheduling ‘wedges’ or statistical pie slices of saved energy and reduced greenhouse gas (each wedge would reduce CO2 emissions by 1,000 metric tons per year by 2050), this according to Robert Socolow and Stever Pacala of Princeton University. If we ‘insert’ enough of these wedges into our lives, say 13 of them, and do so quickly enough, we may perhaps avoid the most deadly of these heat death phenomena. Some of the wedges to pick from, to discard as too noxious, or to duplicate several times, include:

• Double every automobile’s fuel efficiency
• Halve every automobile’s yearly mileage
• Halve the number of autos on Earth (Should I lead by example and drive my VW Bug over the nearest cliff so no one else can use it?)
• Make as many (?) habitations as possible energy-neutral
• 700 one-Gygawatt nuclear power stations (look out for those that go Pop!)
• Two million one-Megawatt wind power or water power turbines
• Five million acres of photovoltaic solar panels (27 square feet per person on Earth; should I lead by example and go broke lining the roof of my house with solar panels?)
• Massive reforestation (? million acres of replanted trees) and bury those trees once they’ve matured
• End all clear-cutting and massive burns of tropical forests, as of yesterday
• Devote 618 million acres to biofuel instead of food (arm yourself against the famine-struck)
• Sequester 1,000 metric tons of liquid CO2 underground
• Artificial photosynthesis (biomechanical, in vertebrates, in humans?)
• Genetically engineered coccoliths (plankton) producing calcium carbonate by the thousands of metric tons
• Orbiting mirrors, spray the sky with shadow-inducing nitrates?
• Orbiting solar power plants beaming power back to Earth (look out for unforeseen atmospheric effects)
• A massive ‘cull’ of humanity: one Plague or several (natural or weapon grade) or an Apocalyptic disaster that would painfully but conveniently subtract 25%, 30% or more of humanity, and probably us, too, between now and as soon as possible (the Celts feared nothing except that the sky should fall on their heads…)
• ?... (Any other ideas: good crazy, bad crazy or otherwise?)

It's time to withdraw when

It’s time to execute an immediate withdrawal strategy when one or more of the following events occur (not necessarily in this order):

1. 1) You began the campaign based on well-documented lies.
   
   2) After thirty days in-country, you are not spending at least $10 on local development for every $1 spent on bullets.
   
   3) More than ten percent of your funding cannot be accounted for.
   
   4) The natives start fighting each other (beyond police round-ups) despite your troops on the ground.
   
   5) The native security forces you have set up are fighting each other over the spoils, or unreliable in combat, or despised by the local population.
   
   6) More than ten percent of the advisors you dispatch are ignorant political appointees, and less than 90% are topic-specialists fluent in local languages.
   
   7) The core district of the capital city is off-limits to average natives.
   
   8) Most journalists and NGOs evacuate the area of operations.
   
   9) Anecdotal, on-the-ground perceptions of occupier-native relations are in total contradiction of media/administration propaganda.
   
   10) You are sending the world’s most expensive aircraft out to bomb the world’s cheapest infantry.
   
   11) You cannot afford to maintain a ten-to-one ratio of your own troops versus high-end estimates of opposition combatants.
   
   12) Your human rights violations become a matter of routine and your troops start committing overt war crimes in large numbers.
   
   13) ??? (Feel free to add your comments).

A little late, maybe, but I won.

It’s funny; I won a war game of the Falklands War quite handily as the Argentineans.

I parked the Argy fleet of ex-World War II rust buckets in three- and four-ship packets at all the Falklands landfalls, and used its modern Air Force very sparingly just to protect the Argentine coast (shorter flights, more missions, better coordination, more loitering/dogfighting capability; most importantly, a final kamikaze reserve kept carefully intact). As I lost ships, I shuffled the survivors around so that Stanley remained a deadly flak trap against low-flying, not-so-fast Harriers I shot down in droves, fouling their bombing runs and eventually chasing them away. I sank the Brit nuke sub in shallow water when it tried to sneak into Stanley Harbor and torpedo my Belgrano flagship (subs are much more vulnerable there, despite their high-tech).

When the British fleet maneuvered close inshore to make a landing, I flung all my ships against it (a short hop: too short for the Brits to react effectively) and sank its pocket aircraft carrier in a conventional gun/torpedo battle. The Brits never made a landing; if they had, my surviving close-support naval artillery would have made their task ten times hotter. That left the Argentine Army and jet Air Force intact, no successful Brit bombardment, no attrition losses. I lost quite a few Argy ships and prop planes in the process, but the UK lost the war, hands down – barring nukes.

No big deal. I just used my Argentine assets so as to optimize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. Argentina could have done much the same under the command of other than fascist idiots. The USA, now, likewise. When you’re Mohammed Ali, you dance like a butterfly and sting like a bee; you don’t stand planted there with your jaw hanging out for some bruiser to dislocate in his own sweet time.

The thing about “internal security” operations is, it rots out the military from the most brass-laden honcho down to the last common trooper; turns them into bullies, self-serving shirkers, thieves, liars, cowards and tactical idiots. They cannot stand against an equivalent military force uncontaminated by it. They turn into a gaggle of gangsters with no loyalty, trust, sense of sacrifice or focus on the common good; the few remaining good ones among them quit in disgust, throw their lives away on the cheap, turn stoner or stand back and let the rest hang themselves.

Never confound military honor with militarist fascism; the two are self-contradictory. Military honor is a vital strategic benefit for any healthy society; it can rot away at the slightest infusion of fascism. Lose it and you lose for good. Thank God, or by now we would all be corpses stacked in the concentration camps, toe-tagged by the meticulous sociopaths that history seems to produce inevitably; or just nuclear war survivors chipping radioactive rocks for our next meal.

Military honor is the only thing that checks this spiral into chaos. What are categorically anti-military peaceniks going to use? Your good looks? You’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

March 3, 2007 -- Switzerland and Lichtenstein go to war!

March 2, 2007 – A company of Swiss Militia got lost during night maneuvers and wandered across the (unmarked, unfortified) border of Lichtenstein. They hadn’t realized where they’d wound up until they strayed into a nearby village, got their bearings and quietly withdrew home.

Results, awkwardness all around (Lichtenstein has no Army). A thorough chewing-out, no doubt, for the Company Commander in question after his Battalion and Regimental COs were informed of how badly he had embarrassed the hallowed traditions of the martial Swiss. It is said there is nothing more dangerous than a junior officer maneuvering his tight-reined unit with a map and compass by twilight. Casualties: none beyond a few bruised egos and sore muscles. Damage: zero. Strategic threat: zero.

A few laughs for the rest of us, a momentary break from our daily grief over serial massacres around the world, while everyone looks on via TV without doing anything serious to stop it.

In short, Switzerland and Lichtenstein just suffered my kind of war, the kind that would be commonplace on PeaceWorld. Heavily armed, highly skilled soldiers training hard so their country would never, ever be invaded again. All the local civilians peacefully asleep in their snug homes, never suspecting their lives were in danger from foreign invaders because the whole peril would be patently absurd. Everyone goes home with apologies all around.

On PeaceWorld, everyone everywhere would be protected by heavily armed local Militias on the Swiss Model: local youths well paid, harshly trained and superbly equipped to confront any Aggressor. The World Court would ensure strategic security as reliably as the EU government ensures peace between European countries. No serious international threats, no terrorism beyond sensation-seeking theatrics, no more military crackdowns against helpless civilians. Ever. Any hint of such would be forbidden and swiftly punished by the World Court until organized warfare between any two groups on Earth would be as unthinkable as between Switzerland and Lichtenstein.

No more Palestinian and/or Israeli massacres. No more millions of African war casualties, not even dozens. No more fundamentalist Mujadeen… well, some Mujadeen might continue to fight in Afghanistan and nearby (since no one has ever found another hobby they would abide by), but they’d do so in isolation among themselves and at the expense of their own neighbors until their wisest tribal leaders saw reason in peace.

All this is entirely within our actual political, communications and military means. It would be a question of a few months’ massive reeducation by the global orthodox media of the world, then massive reorganization of the world’s war fighting capabilities. We refuse to make it happen because we are politically powerless by choice. If enough Learners chose to check it out, no one on Earth could stop us until PeaceWorld were an everyday certainty.

March 2, 2011 – Heavily armed units of Palestinian or Israeli, Sri Lankan, Somali or American, Chechen or Russian, Central African -- pick your most fearsome military tough guys -- penetrate foreign borders during night-time maneuvers. Casualties: zero. Damage: zero. Strategic threat: zero. The slumbers of local civilians aren’t even disturbed and everyone goes home casting apologies all around. Headlines on the hour.

http://peaceworld.110mb.com/300WORLDMILITIA.htm

I ask you: What the Hell are we waiting for?

I love Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King was not killed because he advocated for Black America. He was not killed because he advocated for minority rights in America. The powers that be had already established that they were amenable to those things; the interests of American elites and those of its minorities were tied together and mutually dependent. Insofar MLK advocated for those things, he was their pioneer spokesperson and their best publicist. The result of his efforts in that line of thought is the America we now see: an America where any person of good standing and character can achieve his or her goals regardless of skin color or ethnic origin. There are still many injustices and errors to rectify, of course, but these are relatively minor technicalities compared to the brilliance of his achievement. You are reading this text because you are not out on the streets arguing these issues in battle maneuvers; you don’t have to do so because Dr. King achieved your primary goals peacefully.

Martin Luther King was killed because he advocated for non-violence and World Peace. He was killed because he advocated for the brotherhood of all humankind on Earth. The powers that be were repelled and panicked by those things; the interests of American elites and those of World Peace were antithetical and mutually contradictory. Insofar MLK advocated those things, he was a raving revolutionary and their worst possible menace. The results of his effort in this respect were his murder and another fifty years of rejection of his most prized belief; thus, a world where no one is secure in the knowledge that his or her children will not be incinerated this very afternoon in some global holocaust, or sent off quietly to soldier for some obscene end and kill the children of other people. There is no progress; on the contrary, we are getting closer and closer to the global chaos he warned us against, with no relief in sight. You are reading this text because Dr. King failed at this primary goal at this moment in time; you do so because you live in an intellectual vacuum otherwise.

To those of you out there who revere Dr. King on this his birthday, rejoice momentarily in the triumph of his aspiration that American minorities be treated with equal respect and welcome. Then despair in the catastrophic rejection of his vision of World Peace. Work for that, now. No other task is fitting enough reverence for his memory. In addition, the technical errors you perceive in the treatment of American and world minorities will disappear once the scourge of World War is removed. The one results from the other. World-dominating elites were short-sighted enough to believe they could resolve the former problem without addressing the latter; are you? Dr. King was far-sighted enough to see this would never be the case; are you?

http://www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/MLK-nobel.html

http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/about_king/warandpeace/wpquotes.htm

http://almaz.com/nobel/peace/1964a.html

MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACKING: CIRCA 2012.

May the following adjectives be applied to every similar proposal in the future, that it may die abirthing; and to its slimeball advocates, so as to discredit them on the spot. May those same advocates be dispatched to do what they do best: like selling used cars “As is, no warranty.”

Rumsfeldian: adj. 1. Pertaining to a massive, aggressive and transformative project or nested series of projects based on questionable motives, leaky logic and a tissue of lies. 2. Pertaining to a magic fix in search of an imaginary problem, of apocalyptic consequence, tricky execution and perilous outcome. 3. Ruinously expensive: a cost vacuum that will suck in every resource, available or otherwise, and demand ever more, even beyond bankruptcy. 4. Of no possible benefit outside Fantasyland or Mafiaville. 5. Morally objectionable and pragmatically unconvincing at first glance by anyone without a self-serving interest in it, and growing less realistic and moral with time. 6. That grinds to powder any honest critic. 7. Which prohibits the likelihood of valid alternatives in the future. 8. Pertaining to a dead-end, plan-B destroyer; rammed through to its futile and counter-productive trailing-off (it can have no valid ‘conclusion’.) 8. Undertaken despite the warnings of disinterested experts and alarmed laymen alike, long before, during its inception and swelling in volume through its maturity. 9. To the peril, ruin and shattered morale of everyone involved at ground level, and destroying the reputation of every official who buys into it. See rumsfeldianism, n. and Rumsfeld, Donald, p.n.

Bushian: adj. Rumsfeldian, but with much less intelligence and based on appeals to base emotions like fear, herd instinct and greed.

Cheneyan: adj. Rumsfeldian, but with even less conscience and more bloody-mindedness.

Rovian: adj. Cheneyan, but from ambush behind the scenes and in a back-stabbing manner.