Because printed bound books are a commodity in a way that ebooks are not — that is, solid objects — they are made more or less valuable by scarcity. The scarcity can be produced in several ways: limited editions, controlled access (must be acquired from a certain shop, like MAC products), increased desire to acquire (popularity, status indicators), destruction of unsold or remaindered copies, and high population density. Do I need examples of each? What the contemporary publishers are panicking over is NOT that the books are no longer objects, but the secondary phenomenon: electronic access to books cannot be limited or controlled except by imposed gateways. Even then, they are easily pirated, as the music controllers know.

I want to discuss censorship. There are many kinds and degrees, but all limit access. First the most obvious: book burning. Authorities like the church or the state gather up material the community considers bad for them (obscenity leads to disorder) and burns it. When I was working at animal control, we had a pathology-tissue-level incinerator, the kind used to cremate bodies to ash. The sheriff brought out impounded marijuana, hard drugs, and pornography to burn there. (We were technically a part of the sheriff’s office.) It took a very long time to burn the porn because the attendants felt obligated to read it all before they burned it. Just in case someone had left valuable documents in there by mistake. Actually, there were often bullets included in the drugs because the purveyors knew about the burning, so one wanted to read at a safe distance.

Authorities routinely censor accurate directions to bomb-making, or floorplans of sensitive emplacements, or lists of undercover agents or protected witnesses, so the advent of the Internet has been very much an advantage to terrorists and criminals. This means that the government feels justified in using very harsh measures of suppression, though information always trumps force. Of course, it is always a temptation to censor in the interest of preserving one’s own interests, so authorities often abuse their power. And if censorship itself is valued, keeping a constant war simmering is a good excuse.

More effective is probably socially enforced self-censorship, saying to yourself, “Oh, I’d better not say that or I’ll get into trouble.” This varies from not cussing where your mom can hear, to not portraying certain acts, to not revealing government secrets. The curb may be defined by outside forces (your mother) or it may be developed from within for practical, rational, emotional or ethical reasons. (I try not to say things that will get me punched in the nose.)

And since no two people share the same opinion, there will always be those who want to publish information like how to commit suicide while others want to suppress that, believing that if people don’t know how, they won’t do it. There are also people who filter information at the point of intake from authority figures because they believe they are being lied to or that the source is stupid or contaminated.

 Tattletales find that their transmission of forbidden information become less and less valuable as it becomes more and more contaminated by previous inaccuracy.

Some authority figures will go to the suppression of the actual individuals: why burn the books when you can burn writers? But if you can’t, there are prisons for people like de Sade or Russian dissenters or semi-criminal men of color in the US.

Under imprisonment and torture, information becomes increasingly valuable but distorted. Prison rumors may be worth a lot of cigarettes or maybe not. Rivals who do not have the power to imprison each other may resort to social stigma, which can cut off sales, resources, and connections.

During the Native Amerian Literature Renaissance, some people tried to limit the number of NA writers by attacking their tribal credentials. In the end this furor over who was in and who was out made short term gains for some people and long term loss for the whole category. It was too contentious and irrational for anyone to want to mess with it anymore. The whole concept died except for a few persistent outliers.

 Anyway, the category was ignored by the sort of smart aleck urban self-defined intellectuals who run internet social websites like Wikipedia. They knew nothing about Indians and did not attract those who did (like Indians), so ignorance is also a form of self-censorship, usually unconscious in the now famous phrase of “not knowing what they don’t know” or even that there might be significant things worth knowing visible to others.

Making a whole category of ideas suddenly visible, like scientific knowledge, is bound to escalate efforts at censorship. Religious authorities don’t want anyone to know that the earth goes around the sun, we walked on the moon, or that safe abortion is possible. The self-censorship of morality has had to hustle (so to speak) to catch up. Preserving the comfort of ignorance has become more difficult.

There is another issue here. Remember Jack Nicholson bellowing, “You can’t handle the truth!” Our insistence that we CAN handle the truth and we want transparency is not really demonstrable. Many people nowadays have closed down sources of information via avoidance (newspapers, certain TV channels, some books) because they become so distressed by the death, destruction, injustice, chaos, and suffering on every hand.

They do not have the stamina to handle the subject matter by either confronting it or resolving it in their own minds, much less by taking action.

Anyway, it’s so much more comforting to believe lies about Obama’s citizenship than to believe a skinny black man with an elite education and a gorgeous black wife can an effective president. To keep from believing that, some people will destroy the country. Even if they have to do it by banning books.

The most efficient means of banning books is to stigmatize a whole category of authors/subjects: street people, rape victims, Mormons, sex workers — which will result in a backlash making these books more attractive so that people who seem to fit the category find it easier to sell a book. But society objects to this so much that people who speak for the stigmatized may be punished more severely than the authentic excluded person, who has no access to a voice anyway.

Censorship, stigmatizing and shunning may be a way to separate people in a group (as the scribes and pharisees did) from people outside the group (criminals and sex workers, whom Jesus included) in order to guarantee loyalty by preventing anyone from learning about the outsiders. Known people become human and likable. Buy only books that “people like us” read. Which can make individuals even more curious about what the outsiders read.

Banning, stigmatizing, shunning and so on make books more valuable in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. It is amoral strategy regardless of what the goal is purported to be.

 The motives for such strategies are a whole different story.

Losing weight and getting fit. If you’re reading this article then the chances are, you’ve struggled. It isn’t an easy world out there and with ‘weight-loss’ being treated as a market it’s not easy to see where you can go with all of that choice out there marketed to you, you don’t know what works for you, nor if you’re being taken for a ride. The brilliant thing is, we see all of these, ‘I lost x weight in y months’ and you’re thinking, ‘how can a person lose so much weight? Wow this must be effective.’

These solutions probably work and they probably can help you lose weight quickly, a friend was speaking to me about how he’s using these woman’s hormone pills to lose weight, allowing him to eat only 500 calories per day without having the cravings to eat more, though he has to keep exercise low. It sounded like it was working, in fact, he recommended it to me. But it didn’t sound too healthy.

In trying to lose weight and get fitter, I have read a bit around the websites and articles and it seems one thing that isn’t often considered is long term effects. Sure you might lose weight quickly, but what happens then? You can’t keep to the same routine because it’s not a healthy one as your body needs calories.

 So when you’re off the routine, what do you do? I was told that the faster you lose weight the more likely you’re going to put it back on. Paying attention to that advice immediately wiped out a great number of weight-loss solutions. ‘Slow and steady’ was my new philosophy.  That’s not what every person who wants to lose weight can feel too strongly about, but it works and it’s sustainable, without you having to make too many drastic changes at once.

You can’t keep to the same routine because it’s not a healthy one as your body needs calories.

Your body thinks it needs calories because it doesn’t know when you’re next going to eat; this is why we have fat reserves, so that if you can’t find food, you’ve got the energy to keep going.

So I tend to think of weight loss in the same way I think about giving up smoking.

Your body craves, and a sudden change isn’t going to make your body pleased, hence smokers tend not to go cold turkey, but gradually smoke less and less until they’re able to train their body to stop. To lose weight, I believe the best way is to train your body and that’s a slow process. I’ll describe to you my 3 years at University from a dietary perspective:

First two years, junk food as snacks, over-eating, comfort eating, no-exercise. Gained weight quickly and found I wasn’t losing it. I tried to look for solutions, but none that were convenient whilst I was studying, nor could satisfy my student budget. My third year, my student budget was even lower and cost of living was higher thanks to the economic climate. Junk food is cheaper than healthy food – you can buy a pack of 12 burgers in Farmfoods for £ 1.75, or if you want the economy burgers, you can get even more in a packet and a bag of chips/fries will cost you £1. That’s cheaper than a weight-watchers meal.

So during the academic year, I just decided to gradually eat less, put less on my plate, eat fewer snacks (not cut them out) and as I walked everywhere, I had a certain level of exercise.

To avoid comfort eating I found other ways of dealing with stress (it was particularly stressful for the first semester because of Student Finance England made a major screw up with student loans, I didn’t get my loan until the middle of December). Gradually I turned to healthier things; after all, vegetables are cheap, even if you don’t want them on your plate, chips can be replaced with new potatoes and eventually you can eat fewer potatoes and replace the missing ones with broccoli or any green veg your taste buds don’t repel.

If you’re making a curry, why do you need so much chicken? There are vegetables that can bulk it up, like carrots for instance (avoid celery, as it weakens the flavour); this means you can save money on chicken too.

Two chicken breasts cost £2 – £ 4 in most supermarkets, if you bulk it with veg; you might find that chicken lasts for 4 meals, maybe more. For me to move to that kind of diet took a little while, but once I did, I was able to lose weight, and I’ve trained my body to eat better food and my cravings have pretty much gone. This probably took a process of 9 months. In September I weighed 17 stone, in June, I weighed 16 stone.

When you think about it, it doesn’t sound that impressive, loss of 1 stone in 9 months, but the important thing is, I have a comfortable diet. Now that I’m no longer a student, I can focus more on my weight loss, this is why I am a member of the gym, because at the end of the day, you don’t need to starve yourself or pop pills to lose weight, you just need get out there and work it off. If the gym doesn’t provide you with a routine, you can find help online.

Remember, everybody has the power to lose weight.

On the 5th of August, the first day that marked the Japanese to “endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable” in a post-WWII era, hundreds gathered for the annual Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony in Japan for the 65th anniversary of America’s atomic bombing on Hiroshima. Prominent attendees included Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan, the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, and for the first time – a U.S ambassador. The annual event is both an event to “never forget” the effects of nuclear weapons and a political move to discourage further nuclear proliferation.

At exactly 8:15 A.M, the ceremony was silent for a few moments to honor the memory of the dead. 

Additionally, the United Nations held another memorial ceremony in Austria for both Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims today.

While news of U.S presence at the ceremony has spurred speculations on the significance of the presence of the only nuclear power to ever use nuclear weapons, it renewed an old debate: was it the right decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The Americans and the Japanese

The Pacific theatre in World War II was appallingly brutal and unforgiving to both Japanese and American sides. Scarcely any  prisoners of war were taken during and after battles that raged throughout the islands of the Pacific. Countless photos, accounts, and statistics show this savagery to the modern observer.

Propaganda played an important role in pushing the savagery to its limits: The Japanese thought American soldiers were cruel devils that were unfit to live as they supposedly had a feeble will in battle. The Americans thought the typical Japanese soldier was a buck-toothed, glass-wearing yellow primate intent on raping and killing every human being in sight.

As American soldiers island-hopped, the frightening conviction shown by their Japanese enemies made U.S strategists reconsider the invasion of homeland Japan. After all, if this kind of conviction was shown for islands not part of the homeland, what’s to be expected in Japan? Thousands of casualties kept racking up on the list, the ratio of the dead to the wounded, particularly on the Japanese side, showed such a large gap it started to make U.S commanders wonder if “the Japanese people would be extinct” by the end of the war.

Meanwhile, the Japanese Imperial military command hoped that “one important victory” would have American diplomats scurry to the table and discuss a compromise between the two warring nations. As Japan’s Imperial Navy tried to gain enormous naval victories, at Midway and such, the Imperial Army was simply unnotified of major defeats at sea and was told to fight to the death as an effort to deter American forces from ever setting foot on Japan.

At this point, Japanese soldiers had ‘evolved’ from banzai charges to digging in trenches dotted on targeted islands withstanding even the most fearsome naval barrages and aerial bombings. Most Japanese fought to the death on Saipan, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, the Phillippines, Shuri, and elsewhere which considerably slowed the inevitable movement to Japan.

Despite the Potsdam ultimatum of unconditional surrender, Japan’s leaders refused to surrender.

The Alternative Plan

Before Truman approved the use of the atom bomb, Allied forces built up an invasion plan called “Operation Downfall” with a few other plans which would include an amphibian invasion several times larger than D-Day in hypothetical cooperation with Soviet Russia. One theory presented that the U.S would invade and seize important areas such as Honshu and Kyushu while Russia would sweep down into present-day Manchuria, northern China, Korea and invade the northern part of Japan. From its foothold Okinawa, the American navy actually pummeled coastal cities with thousands of shells while “precision bombings” were carried out on more than 60 cities including Tokyo.

The Allies were dismayed when decoded messages showed the stubborn Japanese government was training tens of millions of civilians to “each kill at least two Americans” with crude weapons. Even more unfortunate for the Allied planners was the news of Japan’s preparation for an Operation Downfall and the almost insane enthusiasm shown by Japan’s leaders for a invasion. They actually hoped for an invasion! Even at this point in the war the Japanese clunged to the belief a prolonged war would bring about a Japanese-controlled negotiation.

 The Japanese leadership knew their country’s layout well and figured out most of Operation Downfall’s targets; consequently they quadrupled existing forces in targeted areas. Reports of Japan’s reserved air force of some 5,000 functional fighters to be used as kamikazes also troubled the Allies.

 Strategists at that time estimated that 1 to 3 million American soldiers were to die in the subsequent invasion.

For the average American soldier, it meant one out of every three of them would die. The time it would have taken for the invasion to occur would have been more morally wrong than dropping the atomic bombs as civilians would be subject to starvation and disease especially after the firebombings. 

If the war was to continue indefinitely, the 168,000 American POWs in Japan could have been subjected to ’rough treatment… treatment similar to the treatment of prisoners of war in Bataan. Moreover, Japanese casualties were estimated to skyrocket up to 20 million if the invasion was to occur.

 Opposing Side

My opponents say the atomic bombings were “unnecessary”, particularly the bombing on Nagasaki, and further argue that the bombings were one of the most horrifying war crimes! Weren’t the Allies’ carpet bombing campaign, without atomic bombs, on countless European cities that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians a war crime? Should we not focus on the Rape of Nanking or the ghastly purges in Stalin’s Russia? It was war and it had to end quickly with minimal casualties and the atomic bomb was the weapon to use to achieve that end.

Those who demonize the historic use of atomic bombings as a sudden terror forget thousands of leaflets advising civilians to evacuate were dropped on Hiroshima days before the Enola Gay came along. Yet there was no mass exodus, the Japanese government had downplayed the warnings of a “terrifying weapon”. Even after the Hiroshima bombing, the Japanese military again downplayed the effects of the blast that stripped flesh from bone and turned many into radiated ghouls. This of course led to the Nagasaki bombing.

War crime, ‘unnecessary’, and terroristic are not the words that should be applied to the twin atomic bombings. While unfortunate for the victims and survivors, the two events at Nagasaki and Hiroshima ensured an end to the second World War and the protection of millions of lives quickly and efficiently.

(Cover Picture: Arch-Hiroshima)

Carrie Prejean: I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage and, you know what, in my country and my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anyone out there but that’s how I was raised and that’s how I think it should be between a man and a woman.

As you see in the video above, audiences were supporting Prejean’s opinion by clapping  and she had nothing to say that would really offend any gay. But did you see Hilton’s expression at the end of the video? The video below is the product of Perez Hilton, the judge who asked Prejean the question.

People boo’ed her? Scroll up and look at the first video, nobody boo’ed. Perez asked a question, and Prejean answered to the best of her ability. If Perez wanted to hear the answer he wants to hear every time he asks that question, then maybe he should go ask his fellow homosexuals. Why are gays upset? Is it because the majority disagrees with their sexual orientation? People just have different opinions on being gay or having a legal marriage for gays in their state.

Back in the ’50s, Alan Mathison Turing, the greatest computer scientists accepted treatment with female hormones in chemically castrating homosexuals. Back then, being gay was practically a bit taboo in the UK and in many other parts of the world. Nowadays in the UK, US, and so on, no one really cares what gays do with their partners. But gays keep insisting on ”introducing” other individuals to a ‘window’ of understanding of their sexual preference, political situation, or whatever else which has spawned quite a few people patrolling for “homophobics”.

Which brings me to my next point: The biggest problem with gays is that they and their affiliates accuse people like me of being a fascist, bigot, or a bible-thumping Christian. Why is thinking straight over gay is wrong? Why are gays asking us to change when we already, perfectly understand their situation?

Today, California overturned the notorious gay marriage ban, a move that has already become controversial between the sides of anti-gay marriage and same-sex marriage. Gay marriage, in my opinion, is simply wrong. Tied in with child adoption, it’s even more troubling for people who feel “shy” around gay individuals. My side believes that children who are adopted by gays may get confused at a young age, at this point some research shows that a household with a mother and a father is very beneficial for the children.

Some proponents of gay marriage say other individuals like criminals are allowed to marry and in many cases, abuse their children but that’s what the multiple government agencies are there for: to stop the abuse and land the criminals behind bars. And what’s to say gay parents won’t be abusive? If gay marriage is to protect gay rights, then what about the children’s rights?

It is time, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Yousuf Raza Gilani, fires the Chief of the Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvaiz Kayani, and the top officials at the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).

Mr. Gilani is also required to file a First Investigation Report (FIR) at the nearest police station against Kayani and the ISI bosses for the murder of 3,400 Pakistanis; these Pakistanis were killed by suicide bombings carried out by the terrorists directly under the command and control of Kayani and his ISI cohorts.

Mr. Gilani would have to make sure that the police acts on his FIR and arrests Kayani and his cohorts, locks them up and presents them in a court to be tried under the law for mass murder and treason.

The spokesman of the Foreign Ministry of Pakistan has said that the contents of the WikiLeaks disclosures are mere lies; this false statement made the whole world look down upon the Islamabad government as nothing but a bunch of stubborn liars. Mr. Gilani would have to act to remove this dark stain from the face of the Pakistani nation.

Between us Pakistanis, it is not that dark a stain on our faces. We Pakistanis take pride in our skillful lies. To tell lies, not to tell the truth, is our culture. The politicians and the generals are the most practiced liars in Pakistan.

However, the world outside Pakistan is different. The world outside Pakistan may not be willing to buy Pakistani lies. The parents of the British and the American soldiers in Afghanistan are going to raise hell and force their governments to act against Pakistan, to cut the aid off, to punish it the way Taliban’s Afghanistan was punished.

Lying through the teeth and demanding to prove the WikiLeaks charges against Pakistan is not going to work; it did not work with Taliban’s Afghanistan. Does anybody remember Taliban denying complicity after 9/11 and demanding the Americans to come up with a proof?

Well, the Americans proved that they meant business.

Prime Minister Cameron visiting India.

The Islamabad regime failed to realize the fact that by calling the WikiLeaks material a pack of lies, it would not be able to convince anybody simply because the Americans themselves are not challenging the credibility of their own classified documents and are, rather, trying to contain the damage caused by the leaks.

The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, displayed utmost contempt as he verbally attacked Pakistan in Delhi. He refuses to withdraw his condemnation of Pakistan as a sponsor of terrorism and the People of Britain stand solidly behind him. Next thing; Mr. Cameron gets physical.

Chris Alexander, Canada’s former ambassador to Afghanistan, recently said in an article:

“The Pakistan army under Gen. Kayani is sponsoring a large-scale, covert guerrilla war through Afghan proxies – whose strongholds in Baluchistan and Waziristan are flourishing. Their mission in Afghanistan is to keep Pashtun nationalism down, India out and Mr. Karzai weak…

“It has nothing to do with Islam, whose principles they trample; indeed, the flower of Afghanistan’s ulema (religious leaders) have been among their victims…

“Gen. Kayani and others will deny complicity. But as the WikiLeaks material demonstrates, their heavy-handed involvement is now obvious at all levels…

“In Pakistan, Taliban-led suicide attacks since 2007 have killed an estimated 3,400 – mostly civilians. Thousands more have been killed in operations to root militants out of Swat, Bajaur, Kurram, South Waziristan and elsewhere.” [1]

So far, Pakistan has four nations accusing it of sponsoring terrorism presently; Afghanistan, India, Britain and Canada. There may soon be a fifth country joining the chorus; Pakistan’s dear ally, the United States of America. The American people can force the White House and the State Department to change course and treat Pakistan the way the U.S. treated Taliban’s Afghanistan after 9/11.

The Taliban backed Al-Qaidah against the West and lost; by backing Kayani and cohorts, the present Islamabad regime would meet the same fate.

Mr. Gilani needs to take one look at the devastation Afghanistan had been through for not handing over the terrorists to the West after 9/11.

If Kayani and his ISI cohorts are not fired, arrested and prosecuted, Mr. Gilani should know, Pakistan would lose its last chance of redemption.

To the NATO arsenal of cruise missiles and fleets of B52 and Stealth bombers, are now added swarms of the low-cost, field-tested, drones.

Arrest Kayani and company, Mr. Gilani, and save Pakistan, its people and your own self.

- Article Contributed By: Syed F. Hussaini

[1] Chris Alexander’s article was posted on chowk.com by DONN as an iLog titled: Globe and Mail- The huge scale of Pakistan’s complicity.

Pakistan remains a victim of its vicious “Islamic State” paranoia since its inception. Zia Ul Haq fanned the Islamic powers to unite the country against India and launched Operation Topac. He began employing Jihadis as an instrument of state policy to bleed India through a thousand cuts since 1989.
As per a stratfor report, the period between the Soviet collapse and the rise of the Taliban — the 1990s — saw India at a historical ebb in the power balance with Pakistan.

The rise of militancy in Kashmir had a direct link with Pakistan enrolling Jihadis of all nationalities, especially Afghans to perpetuate a delicate security situation in the Kashmir Valley. It also supported and funded separatist forces to weaken the Indian state. With a friendly Taliban government at the helm, Pakistan scored handsomely in managing the situation both to its East and West. It used the Pashtun affinity across the Durand Line to manage its internal and external policy. Albeit not without a backlash that burned Pakistan internally.
The American reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks changed all that. The U.S. military had eliminated Pakistan’s proxy government in Afghanistan, and ongoing American pressure was buckling the support structures that allowed Pakistan to function. So long as matters continued on this trajectory, New Delhi saw itself on track for a historically unprecedented dominance of the subcontinent.

In 10 years, India had gone from a historic low in the power balance with Pakistan to a historic high, watching U.S. support for Pakistan shift to pressure on Islamabad to do the kinds of things (if not the precise actions) India had long clamored for.

What went wrong? Will the WikiLeaks change anything? In my opinion nothing except hastening NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan and embarrassing the US establishment.
The previous post has covered some ground on this score and the reader participation from India largely accepts that this is a fait accompli for America and despite revelation of Pakistan overtly opposing and covertly supporting Taliban, it will surprise only those who want to be. The “Vietnamisation” of Afghanistan due to the exit policy announced by America will make it accept these distortions in Pakistani viewpoint. Not that one can fault Pakistan’s Good Taliban, bad Taliban policy, especially in the imminent vaccuum in the region post NATO withdrawal. It has to survive with a largely Pashtun dispensation in the Af Pak region. Doing otherwise would only endanger its survival and increase Indian influence in the region.
For Pakistan, Afghanistan is an area of fundamental strategic interest.

The region’s main ethnic group, the Pashtun, stretch across the Afghan-Pakistani border. Moreover, were a hostile force present in Afghanistan, as one was during the Soviet occupation, Pakistan would face threats in the west as well as the challenge posed by India in the east. For Pakistan, an Afghanistan under Pakistani influence or at least a benign Afghanistan is a strategically important. It is therefore irrational to expect the Pakistanis to halt collaboration with the force that they expect to be a major part of the government of Afghanistan when the United States leaves. The Pakistanis never expected the United States to maintain a presence in Afghanistan permanently. They understood that Afghanistan was a means toward an end, and not an end in itself.

Before the leaks, U.S. and Pakistani interests not only appeared aligned again, the two countries began engaging sections of Taliban as an essential ingredient of the new Afghanistani cocktail. The Indians are concerned that with American blessing, there would be once again a military-mullah-militant nexus unleashed on to India that so effectively limited Indian power in the past.

They are right.

The Indians also are concerned that Pakistani promises to “manage” the Taliban would eventually result in rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the region, especially in Kashmir. Here, too, the Indians are probably right. According to an assessment by stratfor, the Americans want to leave — and if the price of departure is leaving behind an emboldened Pakistan supporting a militant structure that can target India, the Americans seem fine with making India pay that price. The United States has thus created a situation in which the only rational policy for Pakistan is two-tiered, consisting of overt opposition to the Taliban and covert support for the Taliban.
That Hamid Gul along with Musharraf and Kayani in his ISI avatar followed this policy all along was very well known to America, especially CIA. America could pressurise them only upto a point. Beyond that Pakistan, a failing state, would have collapsed. America took recourse to pragmatic realism and relieved the pressure replacing with aid. Aim being to prevent a Pakistani collapse. If Pakistan collapsed, then India would be the sole regional power, not something the United States wants. The Pakistani military combine loved this congruence of American paranoia and fleeced the US of billions of dollars in aid while playing the Good Taliban – Bad Taliban game.

Hamid Gul.

Kayani had been at the helm supervising the American bidding – which explains US support for his extension. More so, it is plain clear now that the Pakistani civilian leadership had been kept in the dark of all the machinations of ISI in Afghanistan.

 Oblivious and scared they had no option but to continue with Kayani and Shuja Pasha to extricate them from the mess they found themselves in.
There is another school of thought which articulates, as proven by history, that Pakistan needs a patron to guarantee its survival against India. The obvious choices are USA or China and China is something the US doesn’t want. Therefore, WikiLeaks or no leaks, this is a win win situation for Pakistan and it would be naive not to exploit both these patrons.

As per Stratfor, the Afghan war is about an insufficient American and allied force fighting a capable enemy on its home ground and a Pakistan positioning itself for the inevitable outcome. This though is not without a caution – any faltering in calibrating its response to the Taliban may well result in an Islamic Inferno within Afghanistan and Pakistan where the ethnic map may be redrawn with blood of innocents.

For detailed analysis of Pakistani fixation with India and its links with the terror groups, there is enough material on this blog but I would specifically like to direct the readers attention to an article titled Cancer, not India…. or better still punch in Taliban on the search button and all the articles will roll out.

(Cover Picture: EPA)

I’ll approach the film from some odd directions to try and interest you in some of the easy-to-miss depths of this movie:

 
Nolan’s “Inception” can be seen as a variation on themes from Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS.  I’ve argued that Kuhn’s book was the most influential book of the past 50 years.  It introduced the word “paradigm” into public and intellectual discussions, was cited as the foundation book/impetus for the whole New Age movement, and the last time I checked (over 10 years ago), it was still — and easily — the most cited book in scientific literature — maybe in all current writings, I forget.  

Kuhn’s argument was that our “mere facts” are given meaning through the paradigms we use to understand them, and that paradigms are lenses that give us creative license to augment the images.  (Example: people who watch political debates rate the “winner” differently depending on whether they’re Republicans or Democrats – each tends to see his/her candidate as the winner.  A religious believer can see all of life through the lens of her faith, just as the believer sitting next to her can see a very different world through different beliefs.
Our paradigms, myths, stories, and assumptions help create our world.  So “evolution” could be seen as just one damned thing after another, or as signs of instability obviously built deep into nature, or as a grand saga connecting us to all other life on earth, letting us see one of the processes by which all life has changed and continues to change — at least until it arrives at a form that continues to be a good fit for its (mostly unchanging) environment: sharks, horseshoe crabs, cockroaches, e.g.   Good paradigms, including those in “Inception,” can easily be applied to almost every field.  I’m using the words paradigm, model, theory, picture, pattern and metaphor as roughly equivalent.

 Just a few examples:
 
Psychology – the Freudian, Jungian and Behavior Modification psychological models each see the human psyche coherently, but very differently, with different diagnoses and recommended treatments.
 
Science – the Big Bang paradigm, Quantum paradigm, Einsteinian, and relativity paradigm, etc.
 
Religion – Each style of religion is grounded in a different picture/paradigm: literal or liberal Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, nature religions, and the rest.

 
Interpersonal relationships — the “family,” “friend,” “lover,” and “partner/mate” paradigms all show (and exclude) different facts about our relationships, and shape most of what we can both look for and see.  Each of these has other, subsidiary, pictures. So “family” can be linked to “Blood is thicker than water” (which can help us sort out our allegiances); “friend” can include “good/tried-and-true friend,” “soul mate,” etc. — and these help us focus the depth of our attraction, what we expect from those friends, what we feel we owe them, etc. 

The difference between “lover” and “partner/mate” has subordinate paradigms like “The kind of girl/boy you date versus the kind that you marry,” the notion that “lover” is, by definition, a temporary category, while “partner/mate” is, by definition, supposed to be far more permanent.  And so on.  The paradigms, as Kuhn and so many others have seen (the New Age movement was big on this) structure most of our thinking for us, like the dreams/illusions in “Inception.” I think it’s impossible to overstate the importance and reach of these internalized patterns. 
 
ADD or ADHD — it has been seen as abnormal, a diagnosis, treatable by chemical and/or talk therapy.  But it’s also becoming the norm.  The paradigm “multitasking” helped in that evolution.  (“Multitasking” could also be described as scattered, unfocused, uncommitted, superficial, etc.) Once we buy the paradigm, we’ve bought way more than we think, because it shapes and limits what we can see, or even the questions that make sense to ask.  (If people diagnoses with Attention Deficit Disorder could make the rules, they might diagnose everyone else with EDD: Excitement Deficit Disorder.)
 
 
 
Wittgenstein would love this – and I think love “Inception” – because one of his most profound aphorisms – on the subject of what’s true and false, how can we know, epistemology, etc. – was “Certainly is only an attitude.”  There’s a whole philosophical revolution right there.  We can be dead certain and dead wrong at the same time, and there is no logical contradiction. In “Inception,” DiCaprio’s wife illustrated this business of different meanings in different worlds wonderfully.
 
What “Inception” adds to this discussion is an imaginative illustration of how the paradigms — the root ideas, assumptions, patterns, pictures, metaphors — interact with our own imagination to create the worlds within which we live.  We usually need to believe that our certainties are our own, that we’re sure of them, etc.  But they can operate only within some paradigms, assumptions, ideas that we’ve internalized: otherwise, the illusion comes apart. 
 
 

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein’s paradigms: “language games” and “forms of life”

 
“Inception” uses the idea of “dream worlds” for these co-created worlds within which we each live.  Wittgenstein called them “language games” and “forms of life.”  A “language game” is like a grammar we impose on reality to locate ourselves within it and find our way around.  It’s like a city map, with all the shortcuts and back alleys shown.  It’s how we make sense of ourselves and our world.  It can be a scientific theory, a theology, mythology, or the way people in a certain culture think and talk: Christians, Muslims, secular humanists, liberals, conservatives, “Tea Partiers,” etc.

 
Some language games

 
Theology.  The game is to use the word “God” as central and unquestioned, then draw conclusions or implications, either for thinking or living.  But Buddhists draw equally good conclusions and implications for thinking and living through their distinction between living in illusions vs. waking up.  (In this sense, “Inception” was a challenge to Buddhist thought, saying/showing that we often can’t tell the difference between illusion and “reality” (if that word even has a clear meaning). 
 
Christianity.  Jesus Christ is my lord and savior.  He died for my sins, his blood ransomed me from my own weakness and made me pure.  If I love and follow him, he will guarantee me eternal life in heaven with him and God.  Liberal Christians would be more apt to say Jesus is a model or paradigm of how we should live.

 
Science (ala Richard Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens et al).  My salvation comes through understanding correctly, which involves accepting the correct theories/paradigms, then reasoning logically from them to gain an accurate picture of myself, others, and the world.  There is a prize for doing all this right: we get to be Right, on the side of Truth, maybe even consider ourselves Enlightened.  By joining the search for truth, we align ourselves with something transcendent and eternal – and true. 
 
Once within any of these games, there are certain ways to talk, and ways we must not talk.  (You can’t be in the Science language game if, when you reach the edge of your understanding, you say, “And then a miracle happens.”)  You can’t be in the literalist Christianity language game if you say, “Of course all this God-Jesus-Heaven stuff is mythology.  It doesn’t really exist, but I like the story.”  (Though you can be a liberal Christian this way — Bishop Spong or Karen Anderson, e.g.)
 
The point of language, as the point of any game, Wittgenstein said, is not only playing it well, but also winning.  You win heaven, “Avatar of Truth,” and so on by playing, talking, or thinking right.

 
 
Forms of Life

 
But surely there’s more?  Surely it isn’t as superficial as just a smorgasbord of language games, none any better than the others?  (Hitler vs. MLK, tyranny vs. democracy, e.g.)  Well, Wittgenstein said, yes and no.  Language games are given their deep integrity and power through the “form of life” (way of living) that must support them.  Otherwise, to just talk the talk without walking the walk, can make us very shallow or hypocritical people.
 
This too works at infinite levels.  Our commitment to a relationship (with a person or an institution or Idea) is only good as long as it’s contained within a form of life where we can trust and be trusted, have the moral courage to defend the most basic moral and ethical rules – on which the whole possibility of a healthy and stable world depend – etc.  If a partner cheats or beats, a corporation is finally seen as selfish, destructive, dishonest, etc. – then the grammar of our commitment (language game) becomes both incoherent and deeply wrong.  This link between language games and forms of life is profound, even if those terms are awkward.  I guess a good shorthand would just be talking the talk (the games we play with language) and walking the walk (form of living). 

 
The bad news – and again, I think this was Wittgenstein’s most profound insight – is that NOTHING supports a form of life.  Here are some of his aphorisms that come immediately to mind on this:
 
“Remember that we stand on the earth, but the earth doesn’t stand on anything else (children think it’ll have to fall if it’s not held up).”
 
“But if you are Certain, doesn’t it mean your eyes are closed?  They are closed.”
 
Or the saying (not Wittgenstein’s) that “a fact is what you get when you stop thinking.”
 
Here’s a more nuanced and emotional illustration he gave.  He drew a simple line drawing of an animal that could be seen as either a duck or a rabbit.  (I always thought of the very detailed 19th century drawing of … Vanity, I think.  A young beautiful woman sitting in front of a dressing-room mirror, admiring herself.  But if you focus on the picture differently, you can see within her image an ugly witch.  Another version has a big skull rather than the witch.) 

Wittgenstein’s comment – uncharacteristically sensitive without judging – was that those who see his drawing as a duck can’t see the expression on the rabbit’s face. 
 
At this level — since our way of living can’t be grounded in Undoubtable Truth — we look for Truths to transcend our forms of life.  I think there are some, but they’re not absolute.  That’s what evolution and ethology have done: found deep patterns that we share with thousands of species, showing that key parts of our way of living are “true” beyond just the context of our species or genus.  Sense of fair play, duty, care for young, willingness to fight, etc.  That’s something.  But it falls short of the nostalgia for a worldview in which God created the whole shebang, took care of it, and loved us best.  So that’s what we do with our paradigms, myths, stories and forms of life – ways of living.  That creates the “world” within which our certainties feel justified and persuasive. 

 
How do you tell the difference between being “awake” and “dreaming” (a key point in “Inception”)?  This was also the Buddhist question, of course.  Here, the movie stops short of Wittgenstein by (nearly) ignoring any moral considerations.  You can live within any worldview that persuades you.  Is there a prize for getting it right, or a penalty for getting it wrong?  Not once you go beyond your worldview. Again, Wittgenstein’s aphorisms are amazingly condensed and on point:
 

Imagine that a certain man lived at some time.  He believed everything his church taught him to believe, never questioned it, and gave his life the form of his beliefs, as he was told to do.  He loved all, was a blessing to all, and was beloved by all.  He worked, loved, played, laughed, had many friends, felt that his personal, professional and spiritual life had made a good difference, all based in the faith of his accustomed beliefs.  At the end of a long life, he died peacefully and fulfilled.  Now imagine that – somehow – just two weeks later it was shown that everything the man believed was false.  Very well, you can say that the man’s beliefs were false.  But can you say that his life was false?  And if not, what role does truth play in either religion or living a meaningful, purposeful, fulfilling life? 
 
To paraphrase this: Can we find “true” happiness in an illusion?  Sure.  Can we find “truth” but be miserable people?  Sure.  What’s the difference between an illusion, dream, reality, or enlightenment?  Perhaps just that we locate our certainties differently.  “We stand on the earth, but the earth doesn’t stand on anything else….”
 
 
“Inception” shows the psychological mechanisms of all of this, as I saw it, more brilliantly than anything I’ve seen. 

 I hope this was interesting, or at least boringly useful.

Saturday, the usual day recognized as the start of the weekend by school-weary students from elementary to middle schools but to high school students it’s the one day where they must sit through for hours to take the standardized test to, by slight exaggeration, determine the rest of their lives.

The SAT, more older and prominent than the ACT in many regions of the U.S, has been a tradition for high school students in 11-12th grade before applications are sent out to various schools in hopes of being accepted. Hard earned GPA along with the stack of academic or community achievements added with the list of sports and after-school activities students participate in is looked at with SAT scores. If an individual does well, perhaps around 2100 (perfect score as of now is 2400) and has done well in school, wrote a college essay that stood out then chances look rosy for that individual.

What did that individual do to get such a high SAT score?

“My parents put me down on a chair and said study! But when I couldn’t study by myself I was shoved into a seat over at the local education center and sat through SAT prep classes, was handed a vocabulary list every week, and I practiced, practiced, practiced until I took the test in October.” recalls Michael Polenski, 27. Michael had gotten a 1600 after he took the SAT twice.

SAT or ACT prep lessons are offered throughout the U.S by educational organizations such as C2 Education or Princeton Review, books offering to help students with SAT mathematics can be seen almost everywhere in a few sections of your local Barnes & Nobles or Borders.

Some high schools have put in SAT prep courses as electives, tutors are called by parents, guides are bought and the studying begins! This exam can be taken multiple times and it’s become a tradition of the tradition to sit through the exam twice (that’s $94) for more than 50% of SAT testers. So with enough practice and a couple of tries, the SAT can be conquered, and the order of the difficulty of the problems on the SAT can be predicted easily while a pattern of answers for the Grid-In section can be guessed. 

But this is the end of the upside of this college entrance exam.

One thing those from College Board ”forgot” to tell you is that a lot of the content on the SAT have never been properly introduced to you in middle or high school. The writing section seems easy but when was the last time you practiced parallelism? When was the last time you learned about antecedents or gerunds? What about subject-verb agreements? Perhaps. Maybe in elementary school, but throughout middle and high school, you mostly learn how to write a proper essay with the correct MLA citations, read assigned books, complete projects, but you barely step into the pool of grammar.

Yet almost every SAT writing question skinny-dips into that pool. If it’s tough for native English speakers, then imagine the situation if you’re an English-as-2nd-language student in this or another country taking the SAT!

Critical reading sections of the SAT can be easy if you know vocabulary which means you can usually cancel out five answer choices down to two making guessing a lot more better statistically. However there are questions that pop out at you that requires you to actually know the words. Vocabulary can be subjective depending on where you’re raised which many criticize and media labels as ”cultural bias”. Excerpts from essays, short stories, and scientific journals can be a bore in the reading section but they’re quite nasty when questions asking for your interpretation of the author’s views, tone, intentions, and assumptions come up, and doesn’t everyone have different interpretations or feeling of the same material?

A SAT question sent through email (CollegeBoard)

Lastly, the essay, which is not optional contrary to the ACT, is given 25 minutes to be completed. At least 25% of the writing section’s score comes from the essay.

The essay section is quite controversial as proven by MIT’s Doctor Les Perelman’s 2006 ’experiment’ of training high school students to write nonsensical, but legible essays which contained a few “high-level” vocabulary words and spanned at least a page and a half. Shockingly, 100% of the students’ essays were placed at least in the 92nd percentile which makes you think: are legibility and lengthness the only requirements for a passing essay? Any English teacher would deny it profusely.

So: Just as long as you study hard in those preps, everything will be alright, right? Yes, if you can afford it.

Paying thousands of dollars for sessions to take an exam? Middle class families may struggle with it for a short time but what about the hopeful parents with low-income who can’t afford the lessons for their children? Tough luck. Recent studies have shown higher family incomes can affect SAT scores positively while lower family income affect scores negatively.

There have been many cases in the past when students had earned above a GPA of 3.5 yet was still rejected when college admission offices only looked at whether the score was near 1600 or specific scores for reading and math were matched. Volumes of college applications are still immense which means admission officers must quickly shift through the piles by skimming your college essay, SAT score, then everything else.

What I’m just trying to point out is, the SAT can be very unfair for many Americans and other groups of people abroad. This one test alone can’t determine a person’s knowledge in the entire sector of mathematics or writing. Nor can this test correctly determine the rest of a human’s life after that human gets into college.

Oh well.

Until a better alternative can be found in the future it doesn’t matter if we “love it or hate it, the SAT still rules” as Mary Marklein from USA Today pointed out.

(Cover Picture: National CrossTalk)

- Article Contributed By: Samuel Muhli

What really caused the so-called “Global Crisis”?
“His story reflects the cocaine use that medical experts say is rampant in the City, London’s financial district. It’s a habit that often goes hand in hand with heavy drinking. Addict X says he and his mates wanted to maintain the thrill they felt at work as they poured into the Square Mile’s pubs and clubs after a day of getting high on finance.”
(extract from a special Bloomberg report)

 
In the world’s largest money laundering country, aka the alpine yodel, state that syphons off trillions from tax evaders the police and judiciary have been plainly told to lay off the Banks and the massive golden eggs they keep on laying and give them a break from the global market manipulation activities by letting them relax on cocaine freely supplied by their Colombian clients.

“Swiss banker Bradley Birkenfeld would do just about anything for the wealthy Americans who entrusted him with millions of dollars they wanted to hide from the Internal Revenue Service.
He’d help them set up phony companies to conceal their deposits. He’d give them credit cards to access their hidden cash. On one occasion, he converted an American client’s money into diamonds, then smuggled the gems across the Atlantic Ocean in a toothpaste tube. Those actions, detailed by Birkenfeld in court documents, were part of a coordinated – and illegal – effort by his employer Swiss banking giant UBS , to help U.S. clients hide their fortunes from the IRS. Birkenfeld was one of about 6000 covert bankers whom UBS sends from offices in Geneva, Zurich and Lugano to the wealthiest enclaves of the U.S. and all over the world lately to China and India to woo clients for whom the bank sponsors an array of events – including art exhibitions, golf tournaments and regattas – at which Birkenfeld and other UBS bankers could rub elbows with the wealthy who might be looking for a hiding place to stash their money away.”
(from an article on Swiss bank UBS in the Los Angeles Times)

Bradley Birkenfeld (Left)

This is the global culture of “city” dealers of the world’s banks – often from pretty rough backgrounds, ignorant and arrogant – who earn millions of dollars from manipulating markets with leveraged debt that goes into trillions. Massaging markets upwards has a twofold benefit for city dealers: it increases their annual multi-million dollar/pound/swiss franc bonuses and it expands the global economic growth bubble that inspires the global junkies for more of the same ad infinitum.

Of course, the prestigious charm of UBS has in no way changed – any would-be racketeer can be bought to work for them particularly from fellow banks who employ the same standards. Total global derivative deals probably exceed trillions of dollars.
Nobody knows the exact figure because it’s all about placing bets on bets 50 years ahead.

Derivatives enable high end traders to buy up long and sell short entire crops of rice, wheat, sugar, soya, and so forth ten or twenty years ahead without knowing whether these crops will still exist in the worsening climate change reality. It’s making profits based on bets that will be paid by tommorow’s victims who have been born today. It makes roulette or chemin de fer in a Casino seem like child’s play with petty cash. It can be said that the world’s financial crisis that debt-financed the world’s environmental crisis that causes destruction of nature, extinction of biodiversity, and endless wars over resources will leave the planet with nothing but cockroaches, rats, and humans in overcrowded bunker cities. All this caused by ‘cocaine addicts’ who play the markets to finance their addiction.

In the entire history of the planet nobody has produced a shred of evidence why there should be a global market for stocks, commodities, precious metals and pollution that serves only a small band of racketeers to make billions in profit based on fictitious expectations or blatant planet destruction growth while effectively holding the rest of society and the global life support system to ransom for nothing other than personal gain and underlying economic growth.

The Vatican and its associated “Economics” Institutes call it “wealth creation” and “human capital”. Religious countries are easily identified by the lack of forests and trees particularly in urban areas or by the annual mutilation of the few trees left over; a specialty of France, Italy, Spain, Morocco, and the rest that mirrors the anti-nature attitude humans hold.

Religious countries are also at the forefront of global corruption, racketeering, market manipulation, and planet destruction because it’s all “predestined” by their so-called “God”. The rempant urban development witnessed in recent decades along the Costa del Sol has close ties with the Italian mafia. The police are too inexperienced and weak to deal with these organised criminal gangs, which operate with the full complicity of some politicians on the southern coast of Spain.

That is the damning conclusion of an investigation carried out by one of Italy’s leading daily newspapers, La Republica. Quoting police chiefs in Napoli, the article calls the Costa de Sol the “Garden of Eden” for mafiosi on the run from Italian authorities. Senior officers believe that entire families have relocated to Spain and use parts of Catalunya and the Balearic Islands as bases.

When former Mayor “Jesus” Gil was sent to prison for corruption, the Bishop of Malaga personally made a pilgrimage to jail to demand the release of Gil and miraculously…it was granted. These racketeers are of course not only operating from their bases in Spain but are the root cause of the worldwide construction boom that is covering the natural environment with concrete, tarmac, and ever more bunkers surrounded by golf courses usually sponsored by the notorious Swiss bank UBS that provides funds to make it all look legitimate.

If religion is about morality and ethics, then why does it drive the immorality of the ideaology of planet destruction yet imposes hypocritical restrictions of sexuality and denies the right to free contraception-based libido? Apart from an invented fellow they call “God”, the cunning individuals have set up the so-called United Nations under a Charter that would make even comedians look stupid. This organisation has expanded into the world’s most expensive racket that feeds thousands of overlapping, mutually back-scratching, planet destructive GOs and NGOs employing millions of parasites that all regurgitate the same slogans as soon as some marijuana geek has invented a new one.

When they’re not jetting from resort to resort, sitting in VIP lounges or standing around, they are busy dreaming up new environmental schemes that involve hundreds of billions of dollars that they pretend benefit the global economy because these dollars must first be made from the destruction of the natural environment.

If all the money that has been wasted on the U.N in the last 50 years had been spent on condoms there would be a manageable Earth for all. Manila Archbishop Guadencio Rosales said having homosexuals dress up as female saints during processions is horrendous and defeats the real purpose of the processions, i.e. to promote multiplication of ever more planet destructive shopping zombies – a staggering piece of hypocrisy from a member of the world’s largest transvestite freaks community that prescribes repressive sexual standards for all except for their own pedophiles.

The world’s most planet destructive per capita trading syndicate better known as European Union is a copycat organisation of the United Nations. The EU like the UN is an ever larger growing army of bureaucrats that employ thousands of sub-contracted consultants, lawyers, accountants to endlessly rewrite rules, regulations, laws and edicts that apparently make life easier for the citizens of the countries involved:
The reality is that EU like the UN has and continues to foster nationalism, racism, regionalism, sexism, xenophobia and anti-immigration fervour that ultimately will lead to war going by the current violence and animosity displayed towards foreigners in just about every EU country.

- Article Contributed By: Global Alliance Against Ignorance

Well-Being 2030 Policy is just one of the absurdities bandied about by the millions of self-inflating institutions, think tanks, “experts”, and leaders sustained by the vested interests to deceive the multiplying idiot masses that have been indoctrinated to treat everything as entertainment and to sustain their shopping, zombie existence through the lives of the “stars” and regurgitating the rubbish diktats of the icons that are served up as desirable lifestyle models compounding global ignorance.

The racketeers expanding their globalised empires on endless “spam” better known as advertising and marketing along with PR have conspired to eliminate anything that might be worth knowing or reading by giving it the same nasty label that serves to grow their rackets.
This has turned the Internet which is nothing more that a “yellow pages” directory with postal and telephone facilities into the world’s most grotesque extortion racket feeding millions of parasitic moneygrabbers through the mutually expansive objective of causing the problems for which they then sell the “solutions“ that in themselves contain the new problems in a perpetual rip off spiral.

The moral in human society is to make the crime big enough so that it punishes its victims while rewarding the perpetrators with self-bestowed honors, recognition, and encouragement to growth inciting endless limitations. Is there anything else to be said in a global society that sustains its existence through growth financed with debt? Yes there is:

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress...But then I repeat myself - Mark Twain

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. - Winston Churchill

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. - George Bernard Shaw

From “job” summits to “climate” summits, humans continue to deny that growth other than that which they lack in intellect is ultimately self-destructive:

A. Material economic growth feeds on the planet’s life support system, i.e resources and ecology.
B. Printing money and issuing debt fuels the material economic growth that destroys the planet’s life support system.
C. Restricting consumption, pollution, and waste laying could help in delaying the planet destructive environmental quantum effect of ever more humans but it can never stop it or make good the damage.

Hence, only idiots would promote and stimulate economic growth; promote job creation to increase consumption, increase taxation on incomes and profits that are made from debt-financed economic growth activities, and continue to rob Peter, the global life support system, to pay the multiplying Pauls, or simply the consuming zombies whose expansive over-proliferation is stripping the planet of its biodiversity.

- Article Contributed By: Global Alliance Against Ignorance