Read more“Anyone wanting to know why the United States is hated across much of the world need look no farther than this book. The Brothers is a riveting chronicle of government-sanctioned murder, casual elimination of ‘inconvenient’ regimes, relentless prioritization of American corporate interests and cynical arrogance on the part of two men who were once among the most powerful in the world.”
Both brothers, Kinzer tells us, were law partners in the New York firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, a firm that, in the 1930s, worked for I.G. Farben, the chemicals conglomerate that eventually manufactured Zyklon B (the gas used to murder the Jews). Allen Dulles, at least, finally began to have qualms about doing business in Nazi Germany, and pushed through the closure of the S&C office there, over John Foster’s objections. The latter, as Secretary of State under Eisenhower, worked with his brother (by now head of the CIA) to destroy Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, among others. The two of them pursued a Manichaean world view that was endemic to American ideology and government, which included the notion that threats to corporate interests were identical to support for communism. As John Foster once explained it: “For us there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others.” It was not for nothing that President Johnson, much to his credit, privately complained that the CIA had been running “a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean,” the beneficiaries of which were American corporate interests.
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But the most trenchant comment made by Kinzer reflects an argument I have repeatedly made, namely the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm. “They are us. We are them,” says Kinzer, and this is the God-awful truth: that it is a rotten culture that produces rotten representatives. Americans benefited, materially speaking, from the corporate profits generated by the violence fostered by the CIA and the State Department, and didn’t say boo. They mindlessly got on the anti-Communist bandwagon, never questioning what we were doing around the world in the name of it. Their focus was on the tail fins of their new cars, and the new, exciting world of refrigerators and frozen foods, not on the torture regime we installed in Iran, or the genocide we made possible in Guatemala. By the latest count, 86% of them can’t locate Iran on a world map, and it’s a good bet that less than 0.5% can say who John Foster Dulles even was. When Mandela says that “they don’t care for human beings,” we have to remember that the “they” is not just the U.S. government; it also consists of millions of individual Americans whose idea of life is little more than “what’s in it for me?”—the national mantra, when you get right down to it. The protesters who marched in the streets against our involvement in Vietnam, after all, amounted to only a tiny fraction of the overall American population, and it’s not clear that things have changed all that much: 62% of Americans are in favor of the predator drone strikes in the Middle East that murder civilians on a weekly basis. You don’t get the Dulleses rising to the top without Mr. John Q. Public, and he is as appalling as they. Like the Dulleses, he typically believes in a Christian world of free enterprise vs. the evil others who do not, “thinks” in terms of Manichaean slogans, and is not terribly concerned about anyone outside his immediate family—if that. America didn’t get to be what it is by accident; this much should be clear.
Quotes
Read moreIn the interview embedded above he tells the story of when Armstrong was a guest of honour at the White House in 1994. At the end of his speech he turns to the assembled high school students and says: “There are wonders beyond belief on the moon for those who can remove truth’s protective layers.”
Two things. Officially there aren’t wonders beyond belief on the moon. It’s boring. And since when does truth practice safe sex?
Read moreA heretical thought I have had about Star Trek: the Federation has no need for Star Fleet. They’re fantastically wealthy and cannot meaningfully gain from trade in physical items. They’re not just singularity-esque wealthy relative to the present-day US, they’re equally more secure. Nobody kills mass numbers of Federation citizens. That occasionally happens on poor planets elsewhere. Sucks but hey poverty sucks.
So why have a Star Fleet? Because Jean Luc Picard is a Federation citizen, and he wouldn’t be happy as other than a starship captain. It’s a galaxy-spanning Potempkin village to make him happy. Why would they do that? You’re thinking like a poor person. Think like an unfathomably rich person. They do it because they can afford to. He might have had a cheaper hobby, like say watching classic TV shows, but the Federation is so wealthy that Starfleet and a TV set both round to zero.
This makes Star Fleet officers into in-universe Trekkies: a peculiar subculture of the Federation who are tolerated because despite their quirky hobbies and dress they’re mostly harmless. Of course if you’re immersed in the subculture, Picard looks like something of a big shot. We get that impression only because the camera is in the subculture, not in the wider Federation, which cares about the Final Frontier in the same way that the United States cares about the monarch butterfly: “We probably have somebody working on that, right? Bright postdoc somewhere? Good, good.”
Read moreThe Overton window is a political theory that describes as a narrow “window” the range of ideas the public will accept. On this theory, an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within that window rather than on politicians’ individual preferences
Read moreThe complete inability to have a mature discussion about the woeful shortcomings of the official Egyptological story as espoused by notorious Anti-Semites, without someone assuming you’re about to say “aliens” is so fucking convenient for mainstream academics that you would be forgiven for thinking it was a deliberate conspiracy.
It’s like someone labelling you a truther because you dare to suspect that a bloodthirsty shadow state with a seventy year history of lying may have lied to you in its thirst for blood. This is known as ‘shaping’ or ‘framing’ and it is the last resort of morons who know they are in the wrong and hope you’ll just go away.
Read moreUntil recently most researchers would have dismissed such talk of Ice Age mariners and coastal migrations. Nobody, after all, has ever unearthed an Ice Age boat or happened upon a single clear depiction of an Ice Age dugout or canoe. Nor have archaeologists found many coastal campsites dating back more than 15,000 years. So most scientists believed that Homo sapiens evolved as terrestrial hunters and gatherers and stubbornly remained so, trekking out of their African homeland by foot and spreading around the world by now-vanished land bridges. Only when the Ice Age ended 12,000 to 13,000 years ago and mammoths and other large prey vanished, archaeologists theorized, did humans systematically take up seashore living—eating shellfish, devising fishing gear, and venturing offshore in small boats.
But that picture, Erlandson and others say, is badly flawed, due to something researchers once rarely considered: the changes in sea level over time. Some 20,000 years ago, for example, ice sheets locked up much of the world’s water, lowering the oceans and laying bare vast coastal plains—attractive hunting grounds and harbors for maritime people. Today these plains lie beneath almost 400 feet of water, out of reach of all but a handful of underwater archaeologists. “So this shines a spotlight on a huge area of ignorance: what people were doing when sea level was lower than at present,” says Geoff Bailey, a coastal archaeologist at the University of York in England. “And that is especially problematic, given that sea level was low for most of prehistory.”
Concerned that evidence of human settlement and migration may be lost under the sea, researchers are finding new ways of tracking ancient mariners. By combining archaeological studies on remote islands with computer simulations of founding populations and detailed examinations of seafloor topography and ancient sea level, they are amassing crucial new data on voyages from northeast Asia to the Americas 15,000 years ago, from Japan to the remote island of Okinawa 30,000 years ago, and from Southeast Asia to Australia 50,000 years ago. New evidence even raises the possibility that our modern human ancestors may have journeyed by raft or simple boat out of Africa 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, crossing the mouth of the Red Sea. “If they could travel from Southeast Asia to Australia 50,000 years ago, the question now is, how much farther back in time could they have been doing it?” Bailey asks. “Why not the Red Sea?”
Read moreThe salvation of CNSA’s [Chinese National Space Agency] public image is likely thanks to the insights of a group of young people with a Weibo account, whoever they may be. On Dec. 2, 2013, the account started to report the Yutu lunar mission in the first person, anthropomorphic voice of a brave rabbit explorer, who often interacted with ordinary Internet users using the latest web slang. As a result, while Chinese taikonauts – likely heavily coached by members of state-run media – have come off as robotic, the purported Weibo voice of what’s assuredly a robot has paradoxically seemed deeply human. En route skyward, the Yutu avatar wrote that it stole one last look at Earth: It was “really blue,” which made him “a bit sad.” The account lamented forgetting to “strike a pose” when the United States’ Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter flew by to take a picture. Occasionally, Yutu’s account retweeted images of actual rabbits.
One possible explanation for Yutu’s unusually savvy campaign is that its architects are not in fact employed by Chinese authorities. The identity of Yutu’s Weibo handlers remains a mystery; although U.S. outlets including CNN and news satire The Daily Show have referredto Yutu’s Weibo comments as if they hail directly from state media, the account generating the quotes is not actually verified as the official account of CNSA’s mission control, although it seems to have inside knowledge of Yutu’s latest comings and goings. Internet users have speculated that the account is actually managed by Guokr, an online community site dedicated to explaining popular science. (Guokr is one of only three accounts that Yutu follows and there are frequent interactions between them.) In other words, if the government is behind this social media success, many can’t believe it.
Regardless of the identity of its ultimate mastermind, the successful effort to personalize China’s Yutu mission shows a path to PR success for a Chinese space program that has been searching for one for more than a decade.
Read more“For about two years, I had the coolest job title in NASA: manager of the interstellar propulsion research project.”
Johnson’s team determined that the most practical path to the stars was via solar sails, which required fewer scientific breakthroughs than fusion-powered nuclear engines or exotic propulsion methods like warp drive. Ultra-thin sails would use the faint but constant pressure of sunlight or high-powered lasers to propel them to a few percent of the speed of light. (NASA plans to launch a 124-foot solar sail, called Sunjammer after a sail in an Arthur C. Clarke novel, in 2015, although it will stay well within the bounds of the solar system.) “Sailships are the only way we know to get to velocities that are anywhere close to the speed of light,” Gregory Benford, another physicist/sci-fi author, tells the Starship Congress attendees.
Yet even with this relatively reasonable-sounding technology, the problems are so vast that we won’t be sailing to the stars anytime soon. Johnson says that to propel a craft to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, a solar sail would have to be as big as the state of Alabama, and would need a millennium to travel the 4.3-light-year distance. Change the power source from solar radiation to terawatt-scale lasers and you could cut the travel time to a century. The big drawback? Such a system would require power “equivalent to the total output of humanity today,” Johnson says.
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Lubin acted as conference contrarian, frequently asking presenters pointed questions about their proposed technologies. But he also offered up his own sci-fi-sounding project: a planetary defense system that could double as a solar sail’s power source, using beamed energy to propel an unmanned probe to the stars.
The system would collect sunlight with miles-wide solar arrays in Earth orbit and convert it to a beam of energy, similar to a giant laser. Lubin says that over a year, such a beam could completely vaporize a threatening asteroid a third of a mile (1,760 feet) wide at a range of one astronomical unit—the distance from Earth to the sun (93 million miles)—and deflect much larger ones. “It wouldn’t require any miracles, just a lot of hard work,” he says. Such a system could start on a much smaller scale—big enough to zap space debris, perhaps—then be expanded as engineering and funding allow.
If used to propel starships, the energy beam could boost probes to substantial speeds, Lubin says. A 100-kilogram (220-pound) probe with a 100-foot reflector to catch the beam could reach Mars in three days; with a much larger reflector, such a probe could hit three percent of lightspeed—up to 20 million mph—by the time it reached the edge of the solar system in less than a month.
We are now living in a history glut; the Internet has muddled the line between past and present.
The transformation was slow at first, and hardly anyone besides librarians noticed. Project Gutenberg, founded in 1971, was a cheerfully radical effort to turn old books into text files. When the web came along, the Online Books Page appeared and began listing links to thousands of digitized titles. Then, after the turn of the millennium, the pace rapidly accelerated: Google set up Google Books, Amazon launched Kindle, and Archive.org started scanning public-domain works from libraries. Meanwhile, shifts in the economics of music, film, and video set off an explosion in the digitization of back catalogs, until then the furtive territory of file-sharing pirates. Spotify and Netflix, Apple and YouTube have all now built enormous businesses based on organizing the past for commercial exploitation. Suddenly we find ourselves living in an online realm where the old is just as easy to consume as the new. We’re approaching an odd sort of asymptote, as our past gets closer and closer to the present and the line separating our now from our then dissolves.
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There’s an irony here: All of the data we’re collecting, all of the data points and metadata, is history itself. Much as we marvel at Babylonian clay tablets listing measures of grain, future generations will find just as much meaning in our log files as they will in the media we consume. Sure, Frank Sinatra sang a bunch of songs; sure, Jennifer Lawrence was a big star in 2014. But the log files tell you who listened, and when, and where they were on the planet. It’s these massive digital archives—and the records that show how we used them—that will be the defining historical objects of our era.
Netflix and Google Books Are Blurring the Line Between Past and Present
BY PAUL FORD – http://www.wired.com/underwire/2014/02/history/
Read moreFor over a thousand years before the appearance of the Yoga Sūtras (YS) and Bhagavad Gītā (BhG), yoga was a practice of yoking the physical body. Yet today, even when scholars, teachers, and commentators say they are talking about the “ancient tradition” of yoga they are (often knowingly) suppressing its actual history.
The result of denying the roots and realities of yoga, says White, is that “nearly every history of “yoga” written to date has in fact been the history of meditation.”
Erasing a meaningful understanding of yogic yokingin order to give a hyperbolic importance to the practices of contemplation turns out to be a switch not unlike that accomplished by yogis who stole the bodies of kings and went on to live as royal impostors.
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White argues against academic colleagues who play down villainous yogis. Given the ubiquitous occurrence of “yoking of another” animal or human body “with one’s own self (ātman)” as the chief mode of operation of yogis in more than a thousand years of Indian texts, White maintains sinister yogis are not mere “literary fixtures.” Through copious (quite captivating) examples, White demonstrates in the entire period of literature, no other representation of yogis even exists.
Why is it that not a single yogi in these narratives is ever seen assuming a yogic posture (āsana); controlling his breath, senses, and mind; engaging in meditation (dhyāna); or realizing transcendent states of consciousness (samādhi) – all of the practices of what has been deemed “classical yoga”?
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White, like other scholars, is keen to dismantle the hagiography of contemporary yoga. The idea that yoga is an ahistorical, unbroken transmission is a perfection White holds as pure fabrication, a recent and fantastical construction based on singling out specific passages of just two texts.
The reef upon which many of these modernist constructions have stranded themselves is the notion that the BhG and YS were capstone works, literary culmination of an unbroken and unchanging tradition of yogic theory and practice extending back to, if not beyond, the Vedas of the second millennium BCE.
In fact, these are works that were compiled toward the end of a five-hundred-year period in which a new synthesis of theory and practice, sometimes referred to as “yoga,” was very much in vogue throughout South Asia.
It’s easy to appreciate this by checking out the commentary of almost any copy of the Yoga Sūtraswhich often obviate the significance of the vibhūti, in spite of the fact this pada on attainment of extraordinary powers comprises over a quarter of the YS.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 