Extraterrestial life and intelligence?

I look at how our perspective changes and our horizon broadens. I remember sitting in elementary school and the teacher saying at one time we thought the earth was the center of the universe. The sun and planets revolved around us. I was later to learn this was the orthodox view of Catholicism when all Christians were Catholic. I also learned about Copernicus and Galileo that held a different view.  Eventually it was acknowledged the earth was not the center of the universe.

I remember the reported intellectual difficulty of accepting our sun was one of many. I witnessed the difficulty of accepting our galaxy was full of millions of stars and there are millions of galaxies. Now they are trying to get across the concept there might be many universes.

But I was thinking closer to home. How long before our horizon on life expands? Suppose there is intelligent life most everywhere in the universe. Life that does not adhere to our model. The idea of "extremophiles" is just making its way in our psyche. Suppose there is life in the tremendous gravity of Jupiter, the heat on Mercury or the cold of Neptune. We could easily miss being visited. If you came from a much greater gravity or atmospheric dense environment, your destination would be the deepest parts of the ocean. You would seek an environment most like what you were used to from where you came.

Maybe one day we will marvel at how myopic a perspective we had.

Who ya gonna call …?”

Historically conquers know you do not directly rule conquered people, you rule their rulers. In many cases, you install rulers of your choice and set up “puppet” governments.

America is no exception. It has installed and propped up rulers to do bidding such as the Shah of Iran,  Pinochet in Chile,  Chiang Kai-shek in China [later fled to Taiwan], and Mubarak in Egypt. Even our “Allies” were not immune to American machination. Rulers such as Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Sarkozy in France and Howard in Australia received our covert domestic political assistance.

Controlling the rulers has become much more complicated. As “stateless” entities take hold, we are left dealing with fragmented and disjointed groups. The difficulty is often finding someone with enough authority and a willingness to deal. 

It is further exacerbated where colonial powers carved up territories and created artificial states. Therefore politically united factions or ethnic groups cross state borders in the traditional sense. The Kurds are an example. 

Privately we cheer the military take over of Egypt. We have someone with the power and willingness to make deals. Israel has been the first benefactor. One of the first acts by the military was to close tunnels in to Gaza. It makes you wonder what incentives America and Israel gave the military to take down the Muslin Brotherhood?

There is also the moderately aligned that asserts independence from time to time. Two are Erdoğan the Prime Minister of Turkey and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Often when they do assert themselves it results in a devastating situation for American objectives.

Traditionally small factions have not been a major problem for large powers. In most cases they could either be ignored or crushed. That is proving impossible in places like Afghanistan.  The newspaper today pointed out that military leverage has been turned on its head. Factions and small groups can craft or acquire biological weapons [viruses] that have the potential to kill millions and can easily be deployed. Add to that the Achilles Heel of extreme cyber dependencies in America.

There are a couple of lines from the movie “Ghost Busters” theme song that sums things up.

“If it's somethin' weird and it won't look good,

Who ya gonna call …?”

Back to the Future

Perhaps one of the most successful marketing campaigns is “digital”. In the public mind digital represents technological improvement and a better product. The alternative is “analog’.

The government and Comcast advertise the reason to move from analog to digital is to free up bandwidth, the amount of information transmitted. Contrary to what you might believe, the less in transmission is not really due to better compression schemes.

Information in the electromagnetic spectrum, such as light and sound, is a wave. A wave is a continuous oscillation and therefore analog. How does digital differ? Imagine you have a scene passing outside your car window as you are riding. You take out your camera and take repeated snap shots in a sequence as you ride. The goal is to take enough snap shots to give the illusion of a continuous image without gaps. Now you have a roll of these snap shots and you take your scissors and cut the very top and bottom off. The rationale, who really focuses on the very top and bottom? All this missing information is marketed to those remotely interested as of no consequence.

Today there is a resurgence of vinyl records. They are analog. They contain far more music information then a digital recording. Audiophiles claim it has better sound. One reason is the inaudible and other parts left out in a digital recording have an impact on the sound you actually hear. This impact is what Audiophiles claim to hear in analog music.

The next in the series of types of communication was known from the start. It is Pulse Modulation or PM. It encapsulates a snap shot of the oscillation. In other words, moving back towards analog and larger bandwidth utilization.

In the 1980s America faced an onslaught of Japanese products that seemed technologically unique and superior. The Japanese had a fully functional high definition television standard. Rather as a patriotic move or racism, President Reagan refused to accede to the Japanese. The Japanese HD died without effective access to the American market. The Japanese standard would have also required American communication companies to increase their bandwidth dramatically to carry the signal. If that had happened, America would not be in the position today of its broadband offering being considered by the rest of the world failing to meet minimum transmission capabilities.  The Reagan hubris resulted in a more than 40 year delay for high definition to take root.

Travel a couple of decades in the future. Look for analog to come back if technically prowess continues.

Politics of American Racism

Only America in the industrialized world has an expansive birthrate. The other places lack a birthrate that will maintain or exceed the current population. There is irony. In America the positive birthrate has been largely achieved through non-Whites. America is a White nation. All the history, acknowledged achievements, and conquests are a celebration of that fact. The media re-enforcing that perspective and the image has been sold to the world.

The more cerebral of White Americans do not wish their nation taken away. They do not wish the face of the nation significantly changed from the dominate White race and Eurocentric cultural heritage. The answer to safe White supremacy is drive up the White birth rate.

A multi-pronged approach is in progress. First, block abortions. Force unwanted pregnancies to occur.  Second, restrict birth control. Make reproductive management difficult.  Third, structure things to drive marriage and child birth. Make the job market and the laws such that women are driven into marriage. Fourth, disenfranchise education. The better educated females become, the more choices they are able to exert over their lives and reproduction. Fifth, lower the standard of living. People with lower standards of living have a higher birthrate. Sixth, popularize religion. Religion has family as its core tenet. Seven, build a coalition to create a social and political avalanche. The strategy works because people are too naive to connect the dots.

A paradox occurs because of American entertainment media. It has been popular throughout the world for decades. The media has sold the idea that a White woman is highly desirable over all others. What about the offspring? The off spring of Whites conceived with non-whites are never embraced as White. Therefore, not only is the White race jeopardized by birthrate, it is also jeopardized through the dilution of miscegenation. American media is popularizing the notion of America as White nation and contributing to the American White race dissolution. Finally, non-Whites in second and third world cultures have a significantly higher birthrate. It means that an increase in White birthrates may still not be enough to prevent Whites from eventually being overwhelmed in the world by non-Whites. 

Pat Buchanan, despite being a politician, made it crystal clear. He did not equivocate. He publicly said the goal is to keep America White.

Billy Michell Moment 

I see myself as another Billy Michell. Billy Mitchell was court marshaled because he augured that planes with bombs could sink battle ships (1920s). This was heresy to the military of the time. The capital weapon was the battle ship, like we believe today in the aircraft carrier. The military killed the messenger by court marshaling and silencing Billy Mitchell. The invincible nature of battle ships continued as a philosophy for the next couple of decades. Then guess what happened, Pearl Harbor!

My Billy Michell moment is that I am also amazed at our myopia. The myopia is driven by money. The money flowing to the military industrial complex, even in reported times of austerity. We know that confrontation in the world is most often not going to be that of one nation directly against another. It is going to be border-less factions against nations.

In the game of nation roulette we have placed all our bets on “sophisticated hardware”. Such things and nuclear armaments, tanks, ships, subs and planes. A significant attack will be another supposedly 911 surprise.

How do you leverage a position against an adversary of overwhelming force? All over the world, particularly in under developed areas, health researchers identify and track down illnesses. Surreptitious agents offer a bounty for their discoveries that might be used as a weapon, our own CIA amount them.

Here is how things will unfold. Someone will discover a virus, let us call it “H11N7”. The virus will have some unique properties that are native or can be modified to include them. It will be highly contagious. It will be transmittable through the air and by touch. It will have an incubation period of at least 30 days before obvious symptoms. It will mimic many other aliments, making positive identification difficult. The mortality rate will be about 80% after a few weeks steady decline.

A fictional situation: action by certain oligarchs that stand to lose billions with American dominance of the natural gas market. They give untraceable funds to a faction that desires to attack America. They steer them to H11N7 as a means.  A half dozen martyrs of the faction infect themselves. They travel were American tour groups and tourist congregate in international locations. They infect as many people as they can just before they leave to return to America. Then they disappear.

The Americans go home passing through airports, restaurants and resume their lives. Each infected person infects 100 others. By the time the first people becomes sick, over a million have been infected. A frantic search for a cure and vaccine will take 6 to 8 months. The only answer is to identify people that might be infected and quarantine them. But after the fall out from several high profile quarantines, that too is given up. In six months America has over 10 million infected people being cared for by 50 million others.  The stock market has crashed. America as a nation is quarantined. The insurance industry is bust. The medical facilities are beyond capacity. Most people refuse to go where other people congregate, including work. The store shelves are empty, hotels are empty, movie theaters are empty, and schools are empty.

America empties the last of the gold in Fort Knox to buy things on international markets because the dollar has collapsed. Soon America is selling tanks, subs, jets and even aircraft carriers to any and all buyers.

Americans look back on things from a rear view mirror perspective and wonder how could we have been so stupid placing our bet? Another Billy Mitchell moment.

Caught by Surprise

There is one conclusion you come to if you live long enough and are observant. That is that things change. This is true for some things that seem to be impervious to significant change.

It would surprise people today that are not senior citizens, that business did not always value or want college graduates.  Up until the middle of the last century, it was tradition that employees rose through the ranks and achieved tenure. The person that occupied the corner office likely started in the stock room and advanced over decades. Even a founder family member had to apprentice. Business believed that the way to get the best employees was to develop and acculturate them. They frowned on people that changed jobs or careers. They were considered not to be loyal. Loyalty was valued.

The biggest large diverse businesses at the time, such as AT&T, IBM and General Motors had their own employee education facilities. Their facilitates could rival some of the better universities. Remember the times. America was still a manufacturing behemoth and most any job was hands on. This skill development was not going to be acquired in a traditional classroom setting. Nor was the desired acculturation to the business.

The training at these business education facilities was specific to the needs of their jobs. It was a "best practices approach". Employees in the more technical areas amassed certification credits. However, there was also a gentlemen’s agreement amount these businesses that the credits were not accepted at another company. This locked the employees in to their company. 

What changed? Manufacturing picked up the moniker of "the rust belt". Manufacturing shifted "off shore" and facilities were idled. America in the 1980s inaugurated its shift to a service economy. Service economy jobs required far less skills training. What was required was basic competency in reading and writing. The businesses needed far less workers and could pay less. They shifted much of their core training needs to the traditional education system. The businesses were able to reduce their training expenses and be more profitable. The public picked up the tab. 

Many graduate schools have what is known as a "capstone" project. It is where a group of students goes to a business and craft and execute something in the business' interests. This is done under the guise of giving students real business experience. Most often is an opportunity for business to get something done for free. It is no accident you hear the cry in regards to education, "...give business what they want".  We have shifted from an education system developing analytical thinkers to providing task skills.

The shift to college educated workers caught a whole generation by surprise and disenfranchised them from a here-to-fore middle class life style with a secondary education.

I started off by saying the only thing certain is change. Will you be caught by surprise at change, by something today seemingly impervious to significant change?

     

If Mitt Romney had won

If Mitt Romney had won the Presidential election, his Administration would be basking in the adoration of an improved economy. He would be taking credit for a lower jobless rate, a housing sector improvement, increased business spending and a surging stock market. There would have been no “Sequester”. The upbeat financial situation would allow pushing through the Conservative agenda. But as they say on those late night sales pitches …” but there is more”.

The Romney Administration would be trying to resist the neo-conservative hawks. The Hawks would want intervention in Syria. They would want an attack of Iran. They would want a direct confrontation with China. Romney would be looking at what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He would be thinking about the evolving fall out from the “Arab Spring”. More importantly he would be keeping his fingers crossed that World War III does not start on his watch.

Few Americans realize how precarious the situation with North Korea is at this point. We have consistently over the years misread their intentions. Today the government is downplaying the catastrophe that might take place. A Romney Administration would see it as a jeopardy to its domestic agenda. They know they cannot avoid being drawn in with a significant North Korean provoking. Other nations would see it as an opportunity to enhance their position with America by provoking situations of their own that further stretch resources. The other nations can use this angst as a bargaining chip. It would not be just Iran, but Israel and many others. America would find itself surrounded by a herd of restless cats nipping at its heels.

Perhaps North Korea’s belligerence is directed at the new administration in China too. China may have signaled they want change or greater control of North Korea. China would be forced to respond to significant American action in regards to Korea in some way. China would likely avoid direct military action. It has an arsenal of things it could do. America would need to placate China quickly to keep things from spinning completely out of control. America would probably immediately allow Chinese sovereign wealth funds to buy things considered strategic assets as a bribe.

Mitt Romney's domestic platform would be crafted to reward major election supporters. He would eviscerate the National Labor Relations Board, the EPA, the EEOC, and consumer watchdog agencies. He would reduce the effective tax rate of the wealthiest and dismantle public education. Religious initiatives would be instituted in public education. He would privatize social security, repeal Roe vs. Wade, shift more NASA funding and work to the Pentagon, fully militarize the southern border and enlarge the Medicare doughnut hole.

However most Americans would feel comforted that the Nation is back in the hands of a traditional White American.