Politics

Why do we appear so willing to go to war with Iran and other countries?

I was watching the presidential debate and each time I do I’m struck by the amount of war mongering. Does not help that I think it’s largely done to get votes. And listening to the responses does not make me feel any safer.

The big why appear to be the fear of them setting off a nuclear bomb or something on US soil. Personally I think it’s to a large extent being afraid of the unknown, and of course the love mainstream media has for articles that scare people into buying their copy, accurate or not.

Foreign politics appear very mysterious so much so that it appears that the common man could not possibly understand it. (Of course there are a LOT of vested interests involved which tend to have the muscle to get their spin published. Which adds to the confusion.)

Looks like a recipe for war.

Have you ever had views of someone who you did not actually know, that changed once you got to know them? Once you spoke with them you discovered that they were very similar to you. Not to say that you had to agree with everything, but you now understood them and misconceptions that you had were corrected?

It happens to most of us. The interesting thing is that people are all the same when it comes to basic things. We love our family, group and country. We dislike being oppressed and made to do things against our will. We are willing to fight, and taking the risk to die, for freedom.

Having been fortunate to have visited several continents and met with people from literally all across the world, these are basics that have been shared by all. It did not matter what their politics were, what social, or educational, or any background they had.

The US constitution is unique. In fact every foreigner I’ve ever discussed it with wished they had it. Again, regardless of political views, etc.

Because in the end we are all people.

So why are we so willing to go to war? I’m not talking about vested interests which cook up some story so that they can invade someone and retrieve oil, or whatever. I’m talking about every day citizens.

There is a thing which people across the world are afraid of. The great unknown.

It can be the person next door, the people in the other part of town. Certainly people who live and speak differently and maybe live across the world. Because if there is unrest in Syria, or some other country, then we should just remover the “noise” by bombing or nuking them, according to some. Besides the obvious wrong, many people are way too eager to cause harm to others without having ascertained the correctness of their desired actions and proper use of force.

Sure we’ve been upset by someone and “wished they were dead!” But it’s simply an expression over how upset we were. Once calm and collected again we would not cause that harm.

Let’s switch it around a bit.

Let’s for arguments sake say that some countries did not like that we, oh lets say something very fictional such as, “drive too many cars”. Our use is threatening their way of life. Could be the extra gas consumption, how it ruins the air quality.

In this scenario most of the world is upset with us. Tourism drops as it’s seen by them as being supportive of our irrational ways. And we must be monsters for putting out all these fumes, threatening the ozone layer and so on. Indeed they all realize that they did not really know us after all. Because nobody they know would cause such harm.

(Similar to how people realize that they obviously did not know their spouse after all, after he or she did something, or was believed to have done something terrible or unreal.)

OK, so here we are. Countries around us start to move military closer to our borders because they know we can be a big threat, and clearly we don’t care about them. They decide to boycott us. Place sanctions to make us lower the number of cars we make and drive.

We are becoming more isolated, China wants to be paid for all the money we borrowed, and are now having harder and harder time paying back as other countries no longer want to buy our products.

In this scenario the world is no longer looking up to us, and indeed are heavily against us. Our neighboring countries are scared and putting up armies facing our borders to defend themselves from the fascist who are poisoning the planet.

Imagine what your response would be. You might would want to put up armed forces around OUR borders because they are so upset and might invade us! Let’s say a coalition of countries in Europe and Russia are year in and year out demanding we stop using cars. Talks about bombing the USA floats around in the media and the internet forums across the world.

You would feel threatened and uncertain about what would come next. Just look at the Cuban missile crises to see a real example. 

If it was your neighbor next door who talked about taking your car away you might just tell them that you will kill them if they touch your car! You would poster up in an attempt to scare the person from touching your car. Never mind if they said that about your kids. You would be talking WAR!

The simplicity of it is that in order to know people and actually understand them, you need to communicate with them. Find out what their considerations are. Why they said what they said.

We already insulate ourselves from each other in cities because we “know” there are a bunch of scary people so we attempt to isolate ourselves. Build fences and if possible use barbwire around our homes. Resulting in less and less communication. And what we do get is from the media so we get even more scared and communicate even less.

The way out of that fearful and horrible life is to be in more communication with the environment. I’ve been a bouncer at disco’s and restaurants. Not because I’m this big guy, which I’m not, but because I can handle the situation verbally. When the other big bouncers could not handle a situation I was called in. OK, so I practiced martial arts for years and I have a certain confidence that goes with it. But I never threatened the “bad” guys. Typically I simply showed them how their behavior scared the other guys. By consulting their understanding I never had to result to force and always resolved the situation. (I’ve been face to face with cop killers, gang members etc. When we part ways we are best friends. Even though I did not in any way support their criminal activities as solutions to their problems. But I can communicate with anyone on any subject without getting antagonistic or copping an attitude. And I’m willing to understand others. See it from their point of view. Which, by the way, being a friend makes it much easier to point someone in more positive direction.)

The simplicity of foreign policy is that you need to treat others the way you want to be treated. Show others respect and you’d be surprised how much respect you would get back.

If you have done something wrong you don’t actually mind being corrected if you can’t figure out how yourself. It’s how you are being handled, and spoken to, that make the difference.

We as a country need to treat others the way we want to be treated. You don’t start a fight unless they throw one first. Which means if a drunk comes and assaults you, you don’t immediately start beating him/her up. You simply step aside or handle the immediate danger by holding them down so that they cannot hurt anyone. You don’t hit them. They are obviously not operating at full capacity. Posturing is a sign that you are weak and insecure. If you are strong and secure you don’t bother posturing. You simply handle things as they come up.

Some of you might even have the experience of saying you were wrong in order to make it easier for the other party to be realize they were wrong. By showing that you could be a reasonable person others feel it’s OK to open up. And thus you can initiate positive relationships, or at least have respectful disagreements.

The same applies to groups. Treat other groups the way you want your group to be treated. Countries are big groups. Treat them the way you want them to treat your country.

That is the basics of any foreign policy regardless if that means your family, neighbors or other countries.

Sanctions are not necessarily very workable. If you have a democracy then the politicians can be voted out of office or forced to change their policy by popular vote. However, sanctions against countries that are not democratic only hurt the civilians. South Africa under apartheid became a strong and resourceful country after the sanctions were placed on them. That is to say that blacks, coloreds and Indians did not get better conditions. Because many of the whites were ignorant and thought lack of western education meant people were less than them. Sanctions in their mind were simply seen as ignorance of the South African “situation”.

When you are the little guy you handle yourself the best you can. However once you get in a position of power you immediately inherit big responsibilities. You now have to set a good example, or you will destabilize your zone or area. USA must be very gentle and safe in dealings with other nations, or we’ll become the massive bully others want to take down. Usually by covert means as they cannot win any other way.

That does not mean we give up our muscle. It means we strike fair and firm when needed to. The trick with force is to only use it to get someones attention. Once you got it you back off. Resume communication and resolve it without force. Try it next time you end up applying force to handle someone. And by the way, your voice can be very forceful as well.

Today I ran into a very interesting news site that has a section which contains a number of emails that were revealed in court. The message is clear as day. We don’t change, and, Open Source has to go.

A few excerpts from Bill Gates emails. You will see his inclination towards using patent as an anti competitive move. And how he completely distorts how the GPL works.

“This anti-trust thing will blow over. We haven’t changed our business practices at all. [May change e-mail retention policies]
– 1995

“One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers in one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

“We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
Anything else is suicide for our platform.
– 1998 “Highly Confidental” Email

[On being told of the free Star Office]
“An interesting development…
At some point we will have to consider the patents they violate.
– 1998 Email

“One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try to make the “ACPI” extensions somehow Windows specific.

“It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work.

“Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me.
Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.

“Or maybe we could patent something related to this
– 1999 “Highly Confidental” Email

“Software written in universities should be free software. But it shouldn’t be GPL software. GPL software is like this thing called Linux, where you can never commercialize anything around it; that is, it always has to be free.
– Government Leader’s Conference, Seattle, 2002

A good selection of emails are listed here.

It is sad that an industry leader Like Microsoft does not have what it takes to operate with integrity and feel it has to be above the law.

Make no mistake about it, Gates knows exactly how the GPL works, but chooses to distort it to compete with us. Of course most of us never had any desire to compete with him, we just want to have a reliable product. One that one can rely on to be upgraded timely, have effective bug fixing that does not break other things and above all interoperability.

Had Microsoft pursued a track where they made their O/S’s and applications work well with any other, had open standards as to how one can interact with them and so on, Linux might not have grown up to be this monster in their minds.

As it is, it is only going to get worse. Microsoft is “embracing” Open Source in one sentence and then out of the side of it’s mouth, directing it’s troops to infiltrate and cut down our popularity with imaginary patents. I say imaginary because they claim that we are in violation of a couple of hundred patents, but are yet to show a single one.

They know we will replace anything that is violating anyones intellectual property. There for it is a better scare tactic to just say we are in violation than actually getting anything resolved. See the court case involving SCO, and the license deal with Novell.

Today I stumbled upon the idea that as we switch more and more towards getting news online, we also get less and less disagreeing or opposing views. This is mainly due to the fact that we can and mostly subscribe to things that interest and mostly agree with our personal views.

I think it is clear that only hearing what we want to hear can isolate us and put us out of touch with what is really going on. This may or may not be bad in itself, but certainly it is not true to say what we don’t know won’t hurt us.

Knowledge is a vital asset as truth is at once needed to properly solve problems.

Just look at elections. Throughout history we vote people into power and then turn around and complain over what they are doing. The missing ingredients is us being involved enough to not only know what is really going on, but to ensure it goes in a direction we want.

We want someone to do the “dirty” work so that we don’t have to. It is easier to pass the buck and hope that some government will care for us, than to make sure things are the way we want them to be.

It has gone so far that Congress is at the lowest approval, possibly in history, certainly in many decades. I think one reason Obama was voted in was because we really wanted an outsider, someone very unlike the last President, in hope that such a person would make good on our inner wishes.

The US was founded in a time where people needed a much higher level of involvement just to stay alive. That threat of imminent death had enough motivation to have a high level of awareness and control of our environment. It was very fortunate that we got such a decent constitution and did not go the way of Tsar Russia or any number of countries not known for their freedoms.

That freedom is also what created the Internet. A free to communicate world where everyone has equal rights.

This new digital world is also a place that can become very automated and require even less involvement by us, with more individuation.

Of course it can also facilitate more and wider range of information. The question is, will you use the Internet to crawl into a hole, or to spread out and seek more knowledge?

There is a huge misunderstanding as to what constitutes news worthy.

The argument that people have the right to know is so abused it is not funny.

I’d say to anyone ruining peoples lives for no other reason than it being news worthy or the right for the people to know, let’s display Your used underwear on national news. After all, we have the right to know what kind of lives the people who bring us all this important news, lives!

The news media have removed dignity from the media as John Ridley pointed out on MSNBC. I’ve not followed what he stands for, but he’s certainly were dead on with that comment.

By never headlining terrorist or other criminal actions in the news, the acts would loose value. Terror requires news to be really successful. If news also got a proper balance, where good things that affects the whole nation is headlined and bad things that affects some single family is on page 22, we would slowly be improving peoples values.

If we did not make all the scary things that happened to some family look like the norm, Americans would not be so afraid or each other and be more caring. Which would snowball and raise our overall quality of lives.

Sure, it would take some time to “un-educate” people, but the price would be worth it. My family have gone for years without TV and newspapers and guess what! We are a very happy family. We are not afraid of our neighbors and we commit random acts of kindness to complete strangers. My kid complained when I removed the TV, but after a month I got a thank you, and a hug for caring.

A silly question is being asked about why Cho killed all these people at Virginia Tech. Which is why did he do it?

I call it silly because it is very obvious. In the previous last eight school shootings, including Columbine, the shooter(s) were on mind altering drugs. Just like Cho. People keep thinking that drugs=good, even though it’s very clear that people on drugs do crazy things. Ah, you say, these are prescription drugs!

True, but have you looked at what those drugs do? Did you know why many of those drugs now carry the black danger label? There is no coincident that Cho was so homocidial. People need to wake up to the side effects of these mind altering drugs and reach for natural solutions!

During a quick survey I found that there are a lot of natural solutions. In my experience drugs NEVER actually address the real why. They only address the symptoms. For the last 30 years I’ve never taken even a headache pill. When I have an headache it’s usually for not eating or drinking well or enough. Eating and or drinking water has always handled it. Of course I don’t drink sodas with dinner (or almost ever). When I eat it’s usually fairly healthy. If you pack yourself full of sugars you should expect headaches and poor health.

Having traveled across several continents and looked into the nooks and crannies of life I can tell you that Americans are being spoonfed bad news relative to most other countries.

I wondered why that was, and realized that the pursuit of money has been too much for most editors, including a lot of other people. Messed up education in homes and schools have done a good job. In our attempts to be politically correct, we’ve lost sight of what is really important. I’m not saying you should be rude and so on. But things have gone too far in many areas.

In the vying for your attention, editors have lost track of all things valuable to man. I’m talking about integrity, responsibility, decency, humanity and most other valuable attributes most people natively have in common.

Then we have the misdirects that is being done by those defending our war in Iraq. What is the first thing a person done who’s guilty of something? He or she tries to turn attention away from themselves. Accusing you for their own crime is typical.

The same can be observed by those defending the war by calling you un-american, against our troops and so on. What is bad is to send our troops into Iraq on false pretenses and properly care for them. Playing the troop card is in really poor taste and nothing but an attempt to turn the attention away from themselves.

Now, if you instead put attention and expanded upon great things that people did to each other, accomplishments and resolutions of problems, guess what? We’d have happier people and a greater nation.

The saying, you get what you put your attention on, applies. Let’s try to focus a bit more on all the good and positive things that people do every day. Let’s make bad news a little less important, and share more positive than negative news with others.

In an article in ARS Technica (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070115-8616.html)
we find the headline “Privately, Hollywood admits DRM isn’t about piracy”.

This is a very telling article showing what we have been thinking all along, Hollywood studios execs knows a lot about greed and avarice [An excessive or inordinate desire of gain; greediness for wealth].

It is one thing to mass produce illegal copies of movies for profit, quite another to watch a DVD movie when and where you decide. As we see the studios want to not only have a say of when and where you watch your legally obtained DVD, but actually control it.

For example I never believed that CD sale went down because of piracy. Besides from organized mass piracy, the people who does most of the copying are students, known for being poor. People who cannot afford to buy a lot, but with a great interest in music.

The smart thing to do is to get people educated and used to listening to music. Make it easy so that when they enter the profitable part of their life, they are already avid music lovers. I loved the idea of being able to discover some new music online and go out and buy the CD. Now you don’t dare looking for music. Subsequently I don’t buy any. I listen to radio and my existing collection instead.

When Napster hit the world sales of CDs went up, not down. When Napster went down so did CD sales.

But avarice seem to have this side effect of not being able to see clearly. Even if it is staring you in the face. So rather than fostering music lovers they sue pre-teens and senior citizens for tens of thousand dollars and use scare tactics to make them settle out of court.

Having big dollars makes it possible to go after average people who usually have no possibility to mount an effective defense. Their only hope is to settle out of court.

That turns out to be their only safe way of making money as they are rapidly discovering that the courts are starting to notice that they don’t actually have any good evidence that the alleged pirate IS a pirate. They have only gotten this far by screaming foul play and playing on lawmakers dislike of crime. In reality one might successfully argue that the real criminals may very well be the ones doing the suing.

MPAA head Jack Valenti actually lobbied to have the discretion to erase your hard drive if they detected foul play. We know what disaster that would have been as they have a very high rate of false detections.

Just look at Microslob, eh soft, ability to turn out safe software. They want you to trust them to manage what you run on your computer. To make sure nothing illegal occurs. Feel like a criminal yet? If you create people like criminals you will get more criminals. Again, blinded by avarice.

Never mind someone breaking through their “safety” schemes and taking over your computer.

The only way these things get a hold in society is because people are in general naive and too lazy to pay attention. There was a group lobbying for ten years for something which turns out to be quite insane like the ability to pick up anyone off the street for drug treatments. But after ten years a government was ready to let it pass because “they have tried for so long” and felt sorry for them.

Fortunately some people who cared discovered what was about to happen and managed to stop it by running a hard campaign educating the senators what they were about to pass.

We will be abused as long as we are ignorant and uncaring about each other. Usually all it takes is for someone to stand up and say something to open a door for a handling. But too many people just look the other way. A good saying goes something like “The price of freedom is the constant alertness and willingness to fight back”. Don’t let 9/11 or lazy ignorance turn this into a police state. Stand up and do something about it!

What would be unethical is to unlawfully take and use s/w not licensed to be so obtained/used/shared.

There’s nothing remotely counter survival in making and selling closed source s/w. There’s a choice to use it or not, and that’s about it.

ESR (Eric S. Raymond) would like everyone to think it’s unethical, but he’s simply over promoting a way of life. His way of life.

Closed source s/w has and does help a ton of people to live better lives. Just like open source does.

Society lives and breathes through exchange. You contribute and receive exchange for it. Closed or open source will hardly fit the bill as unethical.

Arguing that society would look much better with only open source s/w is like saying society would look a lot better with only free food, or free plumbing. Saying that non-free food or plumbing is unethical does not work either, as long as these people produce and charge a fair price.

It all comes down to this idea that ESR would seemingly want to see money disappear. Which would bring us waaay back to when you had to swap products & services to exchange with others.

Money was a great evolutionary step, unless you are incompetent and unwilling to produce and like to live by being a freeloader. (It used to be easy to get a night of free food and lodging in earlier days.) A society functions so much better through this idea that money will give you value for your products and services. I never liked the idea of dragging livestock and what nots around.

For example. You cannot travel very well without money. Let’s say you produce a lot of value in one community. It could be said that you have credit with people as you and your products/services are well known. But then as soon as you leave how do you retain that value?

Today’s society could certainly work in theory on open source only. Without any money being charged for software. The problem is that some people make a living coding, and it would be very unethical to stop them from their choice of earning an honest living. Just like it would be to stop a farmer from doing the same. A better way would be to allow for other types of exchanges to freely exist, for those who so choose. The important parts are production and exchange.

For those of us using open source, we should probably be more interested in contributing back, than harassing people about closed source. You offer it and to the degree it is contributed back to that degree it will be successful. Certainly a lot of good is and will continue to come out of open source.

This is one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a long time!

It has NOTHING to do with the websites, the Internet or anything else.

Take a guy who’s inept at something, anything. Let’s say fishing. He does not know how to attach the hook, that a bait can help or which bait is appropriate at the type of fish. He gets the idea to go fishing to impress his new girlfriend or whatever. He tells her he’s going to bring home some nice fish.

Now let him at it for long enough time and after enough frustration you may notice a quickening of the heart, profuse sweating, and furious tossing around and bashing the equipment. In extreme cases, the ailment can be identified by loud screaming.

Does that mean we have a new “fishing syndrome”?

No, all it means is that the guy is overwhelmed, frustrated or whatever. Nothing a good rest, or a walk cannot fix. Maybe some food and a rest is really what he needs. Then someone showing him how to fish.

Maybe you are at work and you told your tough boss that You’re The Man for the job, but you find there’s something you don’t understand and cannot get it right. As the deadline approaches and you’re still fighting to get it done you may notice a quickening of the heart, profuse sweating, and furious tossing around and bashing the equipment. In extreme cases, the ailment can be identified by loud screaming.

These “syndromes” are nothing but another attempt to make you think you suffer from a syndrome of sorts, but fortunately it’s nothing we can’t fix with the right psychotropic drug treatment. Unfortunately a lot of people have bought into that pseudo science. Which mostly lines someones pockets.

Did you know that during the world war in Britain not a single case of insanity was reported? But somehow here we all suffer from something unheard of 50 years ago. And Somehow it can all be treated with some drug!?

Actually the content of handbook used for billing treatments is voted in. They don’t scientifically discover some ailment but vote it in by popular vote. Yeah, Mouse Rage Syndrome my foot!

Wow!

Now this got me really scared! Some guys who are receiving money from the drug companies are doing suicide interviews to see if our school kids are in risk of committing suicide. Schools in turn receive more money for each kid on drugs!

First off I never thought about suicide as a child, I know of no normal child that has.

Secondly, steering them into evaluating suicide is not what you want to do.

Third, what constitutes a suicide indicator? Well questions like have you ever felt scared? Or uncomfortable in front of people? They offer kids pizza and movie tickets if they take these tests. Which will then label them for life.

Fortunately there is a lot of awareness coming up on these scam artists nationwide.

There is a teen screen link on Youtube. Check it out!

To mine, and many other parents, relief teen screen is running into very strong opposition all over the country and is not doing well at all. Some of the people at the top of teen screen is also being found lying to bodies like the US Congress.