BaalChatzaf

There is no denying the courage of the Spartans. That is what they were born and bred to do, stand and fight and even die if necessary. However their motives were not liberty as such (Spartans enslaved the Helots), but -independence-. Spartan had no wish to bow the head or bend the knee to Xerxes or any other foreigner. I point out that the Japanese Kamikze pilots (who died for an evil cause) were very Spartan in their determination. The Spartan military memes have worked their way into just about every national society, be it free or tyranny. Ba'al Chatzaf

Yabut! Not all the registered voter actually vote. Percentages do not count. Electoral College votes count. The only percentage that matters is the percentage of -actual voters- in a State. Regan won by genuine majority of those who bothered to vote, not by mere plurality. Clinton won both his terms with a plurality vote. But he did garner a majority of the Electoral College vote, which is, legally speaking, the only vote that counts. Ba'al Chatzaf

Here is an opportunity to discuss my motives for giving. And I am not doing this to solicit admiration, but to explain why a rationally selfish person like myself should give at all. I do two things: I give blood regularly at the Red Cross and I help prepare books for the blind and dyslexic at Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic of New Jersey (RFBDNJ), part of a nation-wide organization. Why do I do it? Partly out of generosity and sympathy. My contract permits to have four decent impulses a year (that is a joke). And partly out of superstition. What! you say? Its a Karma thing. If I expect blood to be in the pipe line when I need it, it behooves me to put some of my own into the pipeline. Think of at as a kind of diffuse Trader Principle. Likewise, if I should become blind (heaven forfend!) I would want recorded books to be available for me. But it seems ungraceful to expect this service without either contributing to the effort monetarily or contributing labor. All good things must be paid for, somehow. Besides, the process of preparing recorded books (of high quality and accuracy) is rather exacting. It requires focus, concentration and attention to details. While it is not Rocket Science, it cannot be done half-ass either. So it is a challenge. And that is why I do it. Altruism has nothing to do with it all. I do it because of what I expect and what I owe to my own best interests. Ba'al Chatzaf

Say a person gives to a cause or another person because that cause or other person instantiates his values. In a sense the generous person is giving to his own cause and for his own ends. Generally there is an -impulse- of generosity that goes with this, it is not entirely calculated. People who detest this sort of charity fault it on the grounds that the giver did not give out of Duty, but out of impulse and inclination. This criticism sounds rather Kantian, don't you think? Kant not only got science and mathematics wrong, he also misunderstood human motivation. The only thing that runs on Duty is a machine that makes fertilizer. Ba'al Chatzaf

Done and done. Until the next Big One. Then you will hear from me. Ba'al Chatzaf

\ With equally due respect, I have read the Q'ran, the Haddith and Sayyd Q'tub-s book. It is bone chilling. Islam is a toxic, evil and demonic religion. It has not undergone the same detoxification the Judaism did. The Jews altered their religion after getting the shit kicked out of them for 1500 years. Judaism is now a Rabbinic Religion, not a Biblical Religion. It has toned down quite a bit. That is why it is safe to live next door to Jews. When was the last time a gang of Jews hijacked a plane full of unarmed travelers and crashed it into a tall building full of equally unarmed occupants? By their fruits you shall know them (The Muslims that is). We found out what Islam was about on 9/11 and even more on 9/12 when Jordanian and Palestinian immigrants were dancing in the streets of New York. I will alter my views after the next Million Muslim March Against Terrorism, not one day before. Everything that happened Sayyd Q'tub called for in his book. Alas! The world did not take -Mein Kampf- seriously either. Ba'al Chatzaf Delenda Islama est

Nah. Deluded ole me prefers reason. Michael I will not pursue the argument further at this time. After the Jihadis inflict a second Pearl Harbor on us (the Japs only got one) I will be curious to hear your reaction. Will you still fondle the hope that one can engage "moderate" Muslims? We shall see. Until then.... Ba'al Chatzaf Delenda Islama est We will make a Desolation and call it Victory.

Pipes is making the same error that the authors of the Rand study made. He overestimates the possibility that the are enough sane Muslims to work with. There aren't. Their religious upbringing guarantees that 99.9 percent will be unable to fight their childhood conditioning. It is a very rare person, brought up Muslim that can overcome the memetic distortions inflicted upon him/her in childhood. You can count the people who have fled Islam and overcome its grip on your digits. Face it. They are crazy. They will be well armed in short order and the cosmic battle between the dar al Salam and the dar al Harb -will happen-. It is frakking Armageddon. The crazies are coming at us and for us. Be prepared for the battle of our lives. If we lose this one our great grandchildren will be paying the Dhimi tax or sticking their asses up in the air five times daily. I have five grandchildren I would like to rescue from this possible fate. If Islam triumphs it will be a very Long Dark Night for the human race. I would rather fight, and most likely die than submit to this fate. A nuke! A nuke! My kingdom for a Nuke! Si vis pacem, para bellum. Delenda Islam est. We must make a desolation and call it -victory-. Ba'al Chatzaf

What is it you mean by "skepticism"? If by "skepticism" you mean a denial that knowledge is possible a priori, then it is clear this view annihilates itself. If, on the other hand, you take "skepticism" to mean a very critical and careful examination of ideas or principles before they are accepted, I would ask -- what is wrong with that? Would you buy a pig in a poke? Would you purchase a horse before checking on its teeth? If you are prudent, you would not. Did not Rand admonish us to check our premises? Ba'al Chatzaf.

It was on this very day April 19, in the year 1775 that the Minute Men of Lexington Massachusetts gathered on the Green to face the British Regulars marching up from Boston to seize arms and gunpowder stored in Concord. The Minutemen had been warned of the approach of the Regulars by Paul Revere and William Dawes riding on horseback to spread the news. The Regulars showed up around two in the morning. The Minutemen had been given their orders by their commander, Capt. John Parker. The orders were brief and clear: "Stand your ground, do not fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it start here". There was an exchange of fire. Eight of the Lexington militia men were shot dead and several others were wounded. The British Regulars marched north to Concord where they were met by other Minutemen on the bridge over the Concord River. There fighting erupted. That day the British Regulars lost over a hundred men to rebel gunshot discharged from behind walls and trees. The Brits were rescued by a relief column sent up from Boston. At days end, there was no going back. The war was on, the Revolution had begun with shot and blood. The world has not been the same since. The battles at Lexington and Concord lack the high drama of the stand of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, but the effect on the world was greater and will be remembered for as long as men recall battles for liberty and independence from tyranny. The Spartans were soldiers first, always and only. That is what the -were-. The men at Lexington Green were just plain folks who were soldiers because they had to be. Which was the greater heroism? Ba'al Chatzaf.

I have read about forty pages (I plan to finish the document) and I have discovered the flaw in the Rand study. They assume Muslims are basically sane, even the so-called moderates. Not so. Their religion has fried their brains. The damage is done in childhood with the insertion of the two Memes from Hell. The Jihad Meme and the Martyrdom Meme. It is extremely difficult for an adult Muslim to become sufficiently sane to reject the essential ethos of his religion. Read -In the Shade of Q'ran- by Sayyid Qtab. This is almost literally the -Mein Kampf- of the Islamic movement. Please recall that no one took Hitler's book seriously until the Nazis started to overrun and wreck Europe. The Europeans (who are gutless swine in any case) figured the Nazis were really like them and could actually be talked to and with. Their mistake. Result: six million Jews slaughtered, six million other "sub-humans" slaughtered and thirty million other combatants and non-combatants slaughtered all because of this goody two shoes assumption about the enemy. We have to demonize the enemy because,..... well because the enemy is a demon. Perhaps if we had attempted to achieve some kind of intellectual and moral rapport with the Enemy fifty or sixty years ago (right after WW2 for example) we might have tapped into a vein of moderation in the Ummah. It is to late for that. The Ultra Crazies will have nuclear weapons within five years. We are out of time. Many thanks for the pointer. I am afraid we are in for hard times. Our smartest people have mistakenly granted to the Muslims a sanction -- the assumption of sanity. We will have to wait for the next WMD attack on New York City (where the Jews are) or Washington D.C. (where our government is) to be disabused of this error. It is sad, but that is how it is. Ba'al Chatzaf.

All it will be is a dream, a fancy, a fond wish and a hope. We have run out of time to have a dialog with Islamic crazies. There are within five years of getting hold of nuclear weapons. The only question is do we wipe them out now, or do we let them nuke New York City (where the Jews are) first? I suspect the latter (alas!). We are dealing with people who have been rendered insane by their religion. But your suggestion is a good one. What is his URL? Ba'al Chatzaf

Moderate Muslims??!!!. All one hundred and twenty three of them? Michael, you have just given Wishful Thinking an entire new dimension. Dream on! In the land the Muslims the word for "moderate Muslim" is takfir (apostate). There has been no "Protestant Reformation" of Islam. When will that happen? I suppose the day after my Grandma grows testicles. One of the things I missed after 9/11 was the Million Muslim March Condemning Terrorism. Maybe I was asleep that day. What I -did- see was Jordanian immigrants dancing in the streets of New York City. Yodah says: Do not hold your breath, Young Michael, until moderate Islam becomes, else blue turn you will. Ba'al Chatzaf

That is the kind of Hero which Rand never addressed. I think she missed out on something. I don't think Rand was an admirer of military memes. What I really wish someone would do is a motion picture based on Howard Fast's novel -April Morning-, the battle between the Minute Men and the Brits on Lexington Green. Every time I see Captain Parker's words (graven on stone), I get goose bumps: "Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it start here" Sigh! That is right up there with Molon Lahbe! (come and take them). But John Galt's -get out of my way!- wasn't bad either. I now live in New Jersey (the bad-a-bing state) but my heart is in Massachusetts, the home of the American Revolution, before it was stolen by Washington and Hamilton. Ba'al Chatzaff Ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι. Go tell the Spartans....

Nah! 300 was a hoot and half. I loved it. The action and the soundtrack were spectacular. Beholding the Lacedeamonians (Spartans) helps me get in touch with my Inner Fascist. When I was a little kid my life ambition was to be a bombardier on a B-17 or B-29. The thought of dropping hot flaming death on my enemies filled my youthful imagination with delight. I wanted to be Hitler's worst nightmare: A Jew with a Norden Bombsight. and Tojo's nemesis, an American with an incendiary bomb. When I grew up a bit I wanted to be a mercenary or professional soldier and kill enemies for pay. Alas! Chronic bronchial asthma finished off that dream. So I became an applied mathematician. One of my "babies" is a terrain tracking algorithm which, to the best of my knowledge, is still in use in our cruise missiles. So I got my wish. My efforts have lead to the death of thousands of our enemies. It looks like I did my bit for King and Country after all. My fondest wish (one that will never be realized) is to fire a nuclear weapon that will land on Meccah in the middle of the Haj. Aiming point: The Q'abah. In my next life (I won't bet on that!) I want to be Spartan. AH-ROO! AH-ROO! AH-ROOH! or as we Americans say HOO-rah! The Way of the Warrior is the best way. Ba'al Chatzaff Molon Lahbe! (come and take them! [i.e. the Spartan's weapons]). Loh tepohl shaynit Matzadah -- Matzadah will not fall a second time. Conan; What is best? To smash the enemy. to drive them before us and to hear the lamentations of their women.

That statement is right as far as it goes. An abstract mathematical formalism -by itself- has no empirical content whatsoever so it cannot describe the world. What is missing? An interpretation. An interpretation establishes a correspondence between the mathematical objects of the system and measurable quantities in the world and operations performed to get the measurements. It is the interpretations that give a mathematical system its physical meaning. Ba'al Chatzaf

The Marquis de Sade had a very sick and disturbed mind. He -wrote- terrible things. He was never convicted for actually doing any of the things he wrote about, yet he was imprisoned many years. Do you think this is right? Just because de Sade wrote snuff porno, he goes to jail? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade for details. Ba'al Chatzaf

Bad thoughts are not actionable. Only bad deeds are. Ba'al Chatzaf

This is a fact we can both agree on. I think we also agree on what we class as evidence. This is where we don't agree. This is a judgement that depends on the contextual lens through which one views the evidence. Your lens is in alignment with that of the establishment of modern physics. Yours is well documented and well supported. The contextual lens through which you and most physicists view the evidence is shaped by the action-to-action concept of causality. This conceptual lens determines how the evidence is shaped into an integrated vision of existence and thus, determines how we judge such theories. Quantum physics is a-causal and there is no action to action production of events. That is because time and energy are conjugate variables. The actions cannot be fixed exactly. Quantum physics calculates the odds, not the outcomes. You have said something equivalent to: the physicists have loaded the dice. I disagree. If what you said were the case then no experimental outcome could be trusted. What shall we use in the place of experiments? Philosophical insights? We have been there, done that and got the T-shirt. That is what Aristotle did in dealing with matters of motion (matter -in- motion). He was mostly wrong. It took nearly two thousand years to correct the errors derived by Aristotle's followers from Aristotle's basic incorrect works on how physical nature works. If a metaphysical principle collides with a sound, vetted and replicated experiment, woe unto the metaphysical principle. Nature does not care one bit about our philosophical principles because nature cannot care. Nature just is. Experiments are one of the ways we found out what Nature is. Ba'al Chatzaf

There are several levels of unpredictability. One example is a version of QM with hidden variables (the prospects are not good for such theories, but they are not a priori impossible). Such a theory may be deterministic in its hidden variables, but as they are hidden and we only can observe statistical results, we can't use them for exact predictions (one may wonder whether hidden variables that can't be used in practice have any real meaning, but that's a different question). Hidden variable are not a priori impossible (i.e. the assumption that such exist do not lead to a logical contradiction). However the experiments testing out Bell's inequality show the failure of this inequality to hold and that the inequality is the consequence of the assumption of hidden variables and locality of action. So the prospect for hidden variables does not appear to be good. Quantum physics is consistent with the outcome of these experiments. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_Inequality particularly section 6. Ba'al Chatzaf

The square root of -1 the root of the polynomial x^2 + 1 = 0. Just as square root of 2 is the root of the polynomial x^2 - 2 = 0. Both are abstractions and have no physical existence. There are the epiphenomena of neural discharges taking place somewhere between your ears and somewhere between the front of your head and the back of your head. Ba'al Chatzaf

The difference between the living and the non-living is that living things consist of molecular structure that replicate themselves (possibly with errors). Things that do not replicate their structure are not living. There maybe a twilight zone insofar as there are quasi-living replicators, certain virus like structures that can assimilate chemicals from their environment and replicate using those. As the late Carl Sagan said -- We are all made of stuhr-stuff from billyuns and billyuns of stuhrs. Every last atom of stuff on earth other than hydrogen and helium was cooked up in the belly of a nova or supernova. Since we are all made of the same stuff the same laws of physics should apply, or so it would seem. Any "magic" of living things derives from their molecular structure. Ba'al Chatzaf

You realize, I hope, that you advocate the imposition of duties where there is no prior contract creating these duties. One has the duty to honor a contract that he has willing assented to. I don't know of any contract requiring us to guard the lives of strangers. We have a legal contract not to endanger the lives of others, but that is an entirely different thing. What you propose is making an -act of omission- in a non-contractual situation actionable. Is that what you really, really want? Ba'al Chatzaf

The quickest and surest way to drive the transition is for the cost of oil and natural gas to go sky high, which it almost certainly will. The Chinese are coming on-line. Since they gave up Marxist-Leninist Communism and have become garden variety fascist thugs, they have been very busy, they are working very hard and above all they are -hungry-. Confucianism meets Industrialism (in a way). The result will be the Chinese will bid up the price of oil. Our rational response will be to further develop non-petroleum based energy sources. Our best bet is to silence the eco-phreaks and build lots of fission power plants including fast breeder reactors. That way we can make so much electricity we will only need petroleum as a chemical feedstock for making polymers and other useful chemical. For that we have quite enough oil reserves domestically. In a pinch we can use make use of coal of which we have 200 years in reserve (at least). There are methods of burning coal in which the nasty gases SO2, NO2 and H2S are sequestered. CO2 can also be sequestered (use lots of calcium to make calcium carbonate). When the use of oil starts pinching us in the wallet we will be on our way to a better future. It has taken about 120 years for us to dig ourselves in the Oil Hole. And in a way, oil based energy makes a lot of sense. Oil is very energy dense; lots of joules per kilogram. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density. But we are in a hole. In response to this I invoke The Three Laws of the Hole: 1. stop digging 2. put the shovel down 3. climb out of the hole We did it with whale oil, we can do it with petroleum. This is all doable, but the main impediment is our very own politicians. You see, they LOVE scarcity. Why? Because when things are scarce they can print up ration stamps and we will all have to tug our forelocks and ask pretty please for our mite and meager allotments. Ba'al Chatzaf

Nor I. That is dazzling. When I look at this material I keep hearing Carl Sagan's voice: In the cusmos there are billyuns and billyuns of stuhrs and we are all made of stuhrstuff. The cusmos is all there is, all there ever was and all there will ever be. Ba'al Chatzaf