A Brief History of Meth – The Salton Sea
History of meth as told by Val Kilmer’s character in “The Salton Sea.”
February 8, 2010
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Who’s Afraid of the Public Domain?
February 2, 2010Who’s Afraid of the Public Domain?
by Peter Saint-Andre
| Version: | 1.3 |
| First Published: | 2006-11-26 |
| Last Updated: | 2008-08-28 |
http://me.stpeter.im/essays/publicdomain.html
Introduction
You know who you are. You like to write, compose, draw, paint,
sculpt, photograph, perform, or engage in some other creative activity.
You are what I call a creative individual.
Most people make five assumptions about creative individuals:
- Creative individuals would not produce their works without the possibility of making money from them.
- Creative
individuals are endowed with the inalienable right to control who may
copy or modify those works, since without that “copyright” they would
not be able to make money from their creative output. - Copyright
is a straightforward extension of physical property rights and
therefore a creative work is a form of intellectual property. - To
protect the rights of creative individuals, governments may
legitimately prevent others from copying or modifying creative works. - It
is only government-enforced copyright that keeps a creative work safe
from the ravages of violation and abuse; when it is no longer so
protected, it lapses into a fearsome state of desuetude and disregard
called the public domain.
These assumptions seem as natural as the air we breathe. I know,
because I made them, too. My creative activities — writing, composing,
and the like — are a large part of who I am, and I didn’t want others
to profit from or modify my works. Yet slowly but surely I began to
question those assumptions. Eventually I overcame completely my fear of
the public domain, but only after a great deal of reading and thinking
about the history of copyright law, the nature of creative products,
and the implications of our ongoing technology revolutions [1]. Although I place all of my personal works [2]
in the public domain, I know that the decision to do so is not easy.
I’ve written this essay to share my conclusions so that you can at
least appreciate the importance of the public domain to the future of
our culture. If you decide to place your works in the public domain, so
much the better.
Wherein We Meet the Muse
OK, enough about me. Let’s talk about you.
Why do you create? Think back to when you first played an instrument
or picked up a pen. Was your fascination with your favorite creative
endeavor driven by the desire for money? I doubt it. First of all,
there are plenty of easier ways to make money than by penning poems,
composing music, writing essays, or blogging — selling insurance comes
to mind. I bet you create because you take great pleasure in the
activity itself, because you feel an inner compulsion to create, or
simply because you can’t help it: it feels as if you were you were born
that way and you can’t imagine life without your favorite creative
activity. The ancients had a name for this non-monetary source of
inspiration: The Muse.
That’s not to say you don’t also have more temporal motivations; but
in my experience those motivations are seldom primary, in large part
because of the sheer dedication to your craft that is needed (often
from an early age) to truly excel in creative production. The drive to
create comes first, and only later do you discover that as a result of
creation can come fame, fortune, power, and prestige. Indeed, I would
hazard that most creative individuals never seek to make a living from
their creative output; granted, such individuals are typically the
equivalent of Sunday composers, but even some well-known writers and
composers (such as William Carlos Williams and Charles Ives) have made
their living in other professions and have pursued their creative
endeavors on the side. (I, too, have followed this path, which is one
reason why I have been so open to questioning copyright — I never
expected to make money from my creative endeavors in the first place.)
Production and Publication
Creative individuals don’t merely produce works; they also publish
them. In the original sense of “making public”, publishing can take
many forms: a book, a manuscript, a recording, a recitation, a
performance, a transformation into another medium. Some results of
publication are physical objects, and some physical objects can be more
or less easily copied (compare a single poem to a long novel; compare
that novel to a larger-than life statue). Other instances of making
public are experiential processes, which given the current state of
technology cannot be fully captured in a physical object since they
require the human presence of both producer and consumer (musical
performances, poetry readings, theater plays, and the like); here, part
of the attraction is precisely the human element that cannot be
duplicated outside the time and place of performance.
Thus the fact that a work has been made public does not imply that
it is amenable to copying. What determines whether a work can be copied
is technology. Prior to the development of writing, a poem or myth
could be “copied” only by memorizing it, thus enabling one to recite it
at will. Prior to the invention of movable type, a written work could
be copied (at least during the European Middle Ages) only by visiting a
scriptorium in which the work resided and laboriously copying out the
manuscript by hand. Prior to the invention of digital storage,
retrieval, and publishing (especially the Internet), the ability to
copy large texts, images, and audio and video recordings was
effectively limited to large-scale publishing and media companies; now
that ability is distributed across the world. Although today we are
accustomed to live audio and video recordings, we know that they are
but a pale reflection of being there (those who experience a concert or
recitation or play don’t feel cheated by the existence of a recording,
since it is not a faithful copy of the original experience); thus the
livelihood of performing artists, motivational speakers, and other
experience-makers is not yet threatened by the ability to make copies.
Since the march of technological progress cannot be stopped, you may
need to think creatively about cashing in on your creative activities
(if indeed you want to). While I discuss some suggestions for doing so
at the end of this essay, my point now is only that the current state
of technology has a major impact on how you can make money from what
you create.
Technology also has an impact on the ability of others to modify
your works. As most creative individuals do, you probably have
something of a parental attitude toward your creations. You may worry
more about someone modifying your works than about someone copying your
works. For instance, if you write a song or create an image, you don’t
want someone else to palm it off as their own. Yet here publication is
your friend. If you publish early and publish often (especially on the
Internet with its “way back machines” and ubiquitous search engines),
it becomes more difficult for someone else to claim that they created
what you did. With effectively the whole world watching, plagiarism is
hard to pull off (as many college students have discovered to their
chagrin).
What is Properly Property
Do you own what you’ve created? It’s a tempting thought. After all,
you brought it into being. If the analogy of parenthood is appropriate,
think of it this way: do parents own their children? Well, no. They
have a special interest in their children, but they don’t own or even,
after a certain amount of time, control or influence them. Children
eventually lead separate lives, and so do creative works. This becomes
painfully clear when you die. Shakespeare, Beethoven, and other famous
creators no longer exercise any control over their works (their heirs
might like to, but that’s another matter).
In this way, children and creative works are unlike physical
property. The house I own today could be maintained, improved upon,
transferred, and re-sold to the end of time, all the while being
privately owned. By contrast, when I publish (“make public”) a poem on
my website, in a way it immediately becomes public property, since
anyone could memorize it, recite it, write it down on a slip of paper,
copy it to an e-reader, cache it on their hard drive, or otherwise
“inhabit” it without harming me in the least.
Thomas Jefferson captured this concept as follows:
He who receives an idea from me, receives
instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper
at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely
spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual
instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have
been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made
them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their
density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and
have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive
appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of
property.
A Monopoly by Any Other Name
Jefferson went on to write:
Society may give an exclusive right to the profits
arising from them [i.e., inventions], as an encouragement to men to
pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be
done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without
claim or complaint from any body.
Notice that the “right” to the profits arising from an idea is
granted by society. It is not a natural right, since natural rights
never expire (e.g., the right of someone to own my house does not
expire but instead is passed on through transfer or sale). So unless
you believe in perpetual limits over who may copy or modify your works,
you cannot maintain that copyright is a right at all. In fact copyright
is a government-granted privilege of monopoly power over making copies
and modifications to a work. Sure, if you are a Sunday composer or a
small-time blogger then it’s a minor monopoly, but it’s a monopoly
nonetheless. I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to
be a monopolist of any kind.
A Fearsome Desuetude
When the government-granted privilege of monopoly power that we call
copyright expires, your work passes into the public domain. It sounds
like a horrible fate, doesn’t it? Once your work is in the public
domain, anyone can copy it or modify it without your approval.
Yet the public domain is nothing to fear. The works of Homer,
Sophocles, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, Galileo,
Newton, Bach, Beethoven, and other creative giants are all in the
public domain. Their works are revered, not reviled. Sure, the fact
that the Fifth Symphony is in the public domain enabled Chuck Berry to
write “Roll Over Beethoven”; but far from defiling Beethoven’s good
name, Berry’s song indicates the level of respect that we still have
for Beethoven’s works. I bet you’d love it for your works to be
similarly known and respected two hundred years from now (what creative
individual wouldn’t?).
But certain commercial interests, such as the large media companies,
do think that the public domain is a fate worse than death for their
creative products (in fact, copyright was developed not to protect the
creative interests of authors but to protect the commercial interests
of printers and publishers [3]).
That’s why those media companies have bought off the American Congress
to continually extend the length of their monopoly privileges. For
example, if you’re a 30-year-old American today and you live to age 90,
your copyrighted work won’t pass into the public domain until 2136 –
unless of course the Congress extends the copyright terms again, which
it is very likely to do when the earliest Mickey Mouse films are once
again due to enter the public domain.
Because of that corporate influence over the copyright laws (at
least in America), you face a choice: accept that your works will never
pass into the public domain, or willingly place them there. You can
place your works into the public domain immediately (as I have done) or
specify in your will that your works shall pass into the public domain
upon your death. I find it simpler to place my works in the public
domain as soon as I publish them, but only you can decide the best
course of action for your own works.
Thinking Creatively about the Creative Life
At this point you may be wondering: am I crazy? Have I willingly
given up all possibility of benefiting from my creative activities?
Well, not so fast. Just because my works are in the public domain
doesn’t mean that I couldn’t sell them in certain forms. I could
publish physical books containing my writings (yes, some folks still
buy books), perhaps autographing them to give them unique value. I
could give readings of my poems. I could perform my songs in concert. I
could sell T-shirts and calendars and other paraphernalia. I could give
seminars on blogging or songwriting. In short, I could sell objects and
experiences for which there is demand even if my words and music are in
the public domain (no comparison of stature intended, but people do it
with Shakespeare and Beethoven, so why not with me?).
I freely grant that in some situations and domains it might be more
difficult for individuals to cash in on their creations. If you’re a
non-performing composer or a mute poet, you can’t give performances –
though you could teach, write instructional manuals, sell merchandise,
and find a collaborator to present your authorized performances. And
placing your works in the public domain means that anyone can publish
or perform them without compensating you (one solution, used by J.R.R.
Tolkein in response to unauthorized copies of The Lord of the Rings
in America, was to ask his readers to purchase the book only from his
authorized publisher — which happened to be great publicity! [4]).
The state of technology for the last 500 years has made the creative
life relatively easier for you if you’re a writer or composer (out with
fickle patrons, in with the buying public), and for the last 100 years
if you’re an actor or musical performer. Yet technology moves on,
introducing new challenges and new opportunities.
One of those challenges is the impending death of copyright (or at
least the ability to enforce copyright without seriously invading the
privacy of those who enjoy your works). Why try to forestall the
inevitable when instead you can place your works in the public domain? [5]
Personally I think that you’re up to the challenge and that you can
apply your considerable creativity to the task of successfully living
the creative life without the coercive safety net of a
government-granted monopoly over copying and modifying your works. It
might be difficult, but no one ever said the creative life was easy.
That’s why being a creative person is such a badge of honor. And it’s a
lot more fun than selling insurance, isn’t it?
Notes
[1] Some history of my reflections on the topic can be found at my blog. A great resource for thinking about copyright is QuestionCopyright.org.
[2] By “personal works” I mean all the works that I publish at my personal Internet domains (ismbook.com, monadnock.net, and stpeter.im). By day I mainly write Internet protocol specifications for the XMPP Standards Foundation, whose documents are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License; I also write specifications for the Internet Engineering Task Force,
articles for professional journals, books for technical publishers, and
whitepapers for my employer, but unfortunately the publication policies
of these entities are not as liberal as I would prefer.
[3] For details, see The Promise of a Post-Copyright World by Karl Fogel.
[4] For details, see Intellectual Property and Middle-Earth by Milton Batiste.
[5] For information about methods for placing your works in the public domain, visit Creative Commons, specifically their public domain license and their public domain dedication form.
Revision History
1.3 (2008-08-28): Corrected several errors and updated several links.
1.2 (2007-05-23). Added links to my blog and to QuestionCopyright.org.
1.1 (2006-12-30). Added footnotes regarding my personal works and regarding methods for placing works in the public domain.
1.0 (2006-11-26): Initial version
Imam Killed In FBI Sting Was Shot 21 Times: Report
February 2, 2010Imam Killed In FBI Sting Was Shot 21 Times: Report
By Daniel Tencer
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24556.htm
February 01, 2010 “Raw Story” – A Detroit-area imam who died in a shootout with the FBI in October was shot 21 times — at least once in the back — and found by police lying down with his wrists in handcuffs behind him, says a local Detroit news report.
The FBI has described Abdullah, whose mosque served some 25 families, as “a separatist Muslim intent on overthrowing the United States government,” according to the New York Times, but the bureau has not alleged any terrorist activity against him, and has charged that Abdullah was involved in fencing stolen goods. Federal authorities had been monitoring Abdullah “for years,” the Times reported.
Now a medical examiner’s report, obtained by Fox Channel 2 in Detroit, shows the imam had been shot 21 times, including at least once in the back, and his body was found on the ground with his wrists handcuffed behind his back.
The medical examiner’s report is scheduled to be released this week, but had been delayed for months after Dearborn police, who are investigating the FBI in the matter, filed a court affidavit requesting the document be kept sealed, Fox 2 reported.
Informed of the circumstances of Abdullah’s death, a visibly stunned member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said the news only increased suspicions about the imam’s death
“I wonder why he was shot in the back … and handcuffed,” said Dawud Walid, Michigan executive director for CAIR. “It’s very difficult to comprehend. … We thought that transparency would be the best remedy to remove the clouds of suspicion over this case. Unfortunately, because of the autopsy report being suppressed per the request of the Dearborn Police Department,it’s brought more suspicion and more conspiracy theories regarding this case.”
“It’s even more horrendous than we first [thought],” Ron Scott of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality told the Detroit Free Press. Scott is calling for an independent investigation into the shooting.
John Freeman, a defense attorney and former prosecutor in Troy, Michigan, told the Free Press that you can’t draw conclusions from the number of bullets fired as to whether excessive force was used.
“You can’t draw any conclusions whatsoever by the number of times a person is struck by a bullet,” Freeman said. “The determination on whether anything was excessive has to be made on the totality of the circumstances, including what the deceased was doing and what he was perceived to have been doing.”
But CAIR’s Walid points to questions about the other circumstances reportedly mentioned in the coroner’s report.
“First of all, did the FBI agents follow established procedure when they shot the imam 21 times? How was the imam shot in the back? Was it proper procedure to handcuff either a dead body or a mortally-wounded suspect? If the agents found the imam alive following the shooting, did they call for medical assistance? All these questions need answers,” he said in a press release.
According to Fox 2, the raid began Oct. 28 when FBI agents sent in a police dog into the warehouse where Abdullah was located. Abdullah allegedly shot the dog, which later died. FBI officers then moved in, and began shooting when they took fire from Abdullah. The Free Press describes the day of the shooting like this:
FBI agents and local police surrounded a warehouse on Miller Road near Michigan Avenue [in Dearborn], believing Abdullah and others were inside.
When agents entered the warehouse, four of the men obeyed orders to surrender, but Abdullah opened fire and was shot to death, FBI agents said at the time.
The FBI has said that Abdullah opened fire first, and FBI agents at the Dearborn warehouse responded by firing on him. The FBI did not release what kind of weapon Abdullah had or how many agents opened fire.
The Detroit News reports that the FBI opened fire only after Abdullah had fired some three dozen shots. The firefight lasted only four seconds, and four FBI agents fired “an average of five shots each” at the suspect.
The following video was broadcast on Fox Channel 2 in Detroit, and uploaded to YouTube by CAIR.
Revolutionary Thorium Reactor – The most environmentally beneficial power source on earth
February 2, 2010OpEdNews
Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Revolutionary-Thorium-Reac-by-Christopher-Calder-090628-214.html
|
June 28, 2009 Revolutionary Thorium Reactor – The most environmentally beneficial power source on earth By Christopher Calder There are many so-called “Generation IV” nuclear reactor designs being studied to replace the world’s aging fleet of light water nuclear power plants. Light water nuclear reactors use ordinary H2O to moderate nuclear fission, for cooling, and to create steam for running turbines. All of the newer reactor designs have clear advantages over the old light water standard. China and South Africa are rapidly perusing meltdown proof pebble bed reactor technology, and the Idaho National Laboratory is experimenting with prismatic block reactors, reported to be even more efficient and stable. Most of the proposed new designs represent evolutionary improvements, but the LFT (liquid fluoride thorium) reactor design is truly revolutionary. LFT reactors are an earth friendly power source that solves all of the major problems associated with nuclear power. LFT reactors transform thorium into fissionable uranium-233, which then produces heat through controlled nuclear fission. The reactor only requires input of uranium to kick-start the initial nuclear reaction, and as the uranium can come from spent nuclear fuel rods, LFT reactors will inevitably be used as janitors to clean up nuclear waste. Once started, the controlled nuclear reactions are self-perpetuating as long as the reactor is fed thorium. As the fuel is a molten liquid salt, it can be cleansed of impurities and refortified with thorium through elaborate plumbing, even while the reactor maintains full power operation. This reduces reactor downtime and increases total yearly energy output.
LFT reactors produce electric power via a waterless gas turbine system that can use helium, carbon dioxide, or nitrogen gas. The reactors are small and air cooled, so they can be installed anywhere, even in a desert. Robert Hargraves, an LFT advocate, states that “Liquid fluoride thorium reactors operate at high temperature for 50% thermal/electrical conversion efficiency, thus they need only half of the cooling required by today’s coal or nuclear plant cooling towers.” LFT reactors will be manufactured on an assembly line, dramatically lowering costs and enabling electricity generation at a projected rate of about 3 cents per kilowatt hour. It has been estimated that a physically small 100 megawatt LFT reactor would cost less than 200 million dollars to build, which is a bargain. Multiple reactors can be installed at one location and connected to a single control room. With convenient modular design, LFT reactors can be transported in pieces by truck or barge for easy assembly on site. This allows for swift construction with reliable results, avoiding delays and cost overruns. Rapid assembly line construction also allows for easy updating of the design, which will get better and better, like the evolution of automobiles, airplanes, and computer chips.
LFT reactors are much more fuel efficient than other designs, because they burn up 100% of the thorium fed them. Light water reactors typically burn only about 3% of their loaded fuel, or about .7% of the fundamental raw uranium, which must be enriched to become fissionable. Because of their high energy conversion efficiency, LFT reactors produce less than 1% of the long lasting radioactive waste of light water reactors, making the controversial Yucca Mountain Repository for nuclear waste unnecessary.
A LFT reactor can never meltdown, because its fuel is already in a molten state by design. Any terrorists who obtained forceful entry into the reactor complex could not realistically remove any of the hot molten fissionable fuel. Coolant in LFT reactors is not pressurized as in light water reactors, and the fuel arrives at the plant pre-burned with fluorine, a powerful oxidizer. This makes a reactor fire or a coolant explosion impossible. LFT reactors do not require large, cavernous pressure vessels designed to contain an internal explosion of superheated steam, so LFT enclosures are tightly fitting and compact, which makes them less expensive to build. The reactors will be installed underground with a thick reinforced concrete cap, making an attack by a kamikaze airplane pilot ineffective. Overheating of a LFT reactor expands the molten salt fuel past its criticality point, making the design intrinsically safe due to the unchangeable laws of physics. Even a total loss of operational reactor control would not cause disaster. In addition to the fuel’s natural safety, any excess heat in the reactor core would automatically melt a built-in freeze-plug, causing the liquid fuel to drain via gravity into underground storage compartments, where the fuel would then cool into a harmless, noncritical mass.
We have enormous amounts of low cost thorium fuel available, with estimates of efficiently recoverable reserves ranging from a supply lasting thousands of years, to a supply lasting over 2 million years. LFT reactors can be used to manufacture synthetic gasoline made from atmospheric CO2 and water, or can produce high energy methanol fuel. The French Reactor Physics Group is leading in LFT research, and there are LFT experiments being conducted in Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, and in the Czech Republic. If the U.S. Government committed a relatively modest amount of money to LFT research in cooperation with France, a fully operational TOTAL ENERGY SOLUTION might be possible within as little as 5 years, because most of the basic research has already been accomplished and is well proven. LFT research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was ended in 1976, because the reactor’s design cannot practically produce weapons grade plutonium. LFT reactors will not lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
LFT technology will have a very small footprint on planet earth, unlike renewable energy schemes that use up impossibly large amounts of land and vital resources. Scientist Jesse H. Ausubel, Director of the Program for the Human Environment, found that to meet U.S. electricity demand for 2005 with wind power would require about four million megawatt hours of electricity. Even with impossible around-the-clock-winds, he calculated this would require a wind farm covering over 301,159 square miles, which is about the size of Texas and Louisiana combined. It has been proven by real-world experience that solar and wind power schemes are far more costly than a simple price per kilowatt hour comparison would suggest. Their unreliable on-again, off-again nature requires huge backup power reserves from other energy sources, which greatly increases costs.
The Energy Information Administration, which provides official energy statistics from the U.S. Government, has projected the estimated cost of electricity from U.S. power plants of different varieties that will come into service in the year 2016. These average levelized costs, expressed in 2007 valued dollars, includes all costs of construction, financing, fuel, and all other operating costs. The EIA also listed the expected Capacity Factor (CF) for each power plant type. A power plant with a CF of 85 generates energy at its rated capacity an average of 85% of the time during a given year. The ideal power plant would have a CF of 100, meaning it could output energy at full power 100% of the time. As capacity factor drops, economic efficiency drops, usefulness drops, and real-world costs increase. In the comparison below I have inflated the projected cost of electricity produced by LFT reactors from the projected 3 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) to 6 cents per kWh in order to allow for unexpected cost overruns.
Natural Gas in Conventional Combined Cycle @ 8.34 cents per kWh (87 CF) – Not carbon free; small footprint; cost effective and cleanest fossil fuel available.
Conventional Coal @ 9.3 per cents per kWh (85 CF) - Not carbon free; medium footprint; causes approximately 24,000 U.S. deaths per year due to air pollution, which also damages buildings. Judged in total, coal is not cost effective due to the environmental damage it creates.
3rd Generation Light Water Reactor Nuclear Power @ 10.48 cents per kWh (90 CF) – Carbon free; small footprint and cost effective.
Geothermal @ 11.67 cents per kWh (90 CF) – Carbon free; small footprint and cost effective.
Wind @ 11.55 cents per kWh (35.1 CF) – Carbon free; extremely large footprint; not cost effective due to unreliability and very low CF.
Solar Thermal Mirror Oven @ 25.75 cents per kWh (31.2 CF) – Carbon free; extremely large footprint; not cost effective due to unreliability, high construction cost, and very low CF.
Solar Photovoltaic Panel Power Plant @ 38.54 cents per kWh (21.7 CF) – Carbon free; extremely large footprint; very high construction cost; cannot be updated after manufacture; relatively short lifespan; solar panels are not cost effective for large scale power production.
LFT Nuclear Reactor @ 6.0 cents per kWh (over 90 CF) – Carbon free; small footprint; highest CF available; highest cost effectiveness. If things go well, the actual eventual cost per kWh may be at or close to the original 3 cents per kWh projection, which would be wonderful. LFT technology’s tiny ecological footprint on planet earth makes it the most environmentally harmless energy source available.
Reference links: Aim High (brief overview) – http://rethinkingnuclearpower.googlepages.com/aimhigh Aim High slide show on 3.2MB PDF – http://home.comcast.net/~robert.hargraves/public_html/AimHigh.pdf Energy from Thorium – http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Paradigm – http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971
French Reactor Physics Group – http://lpsc.in2p3.fr/gpr/gpr/
EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2009 - http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/index.html
Turning nuclear power into gasoline – http://www.lanl.gov/news/newsbulletin/pdf/Green_Freedom_Overview.pdf
Author’s Bio: Christopher Calder is an advocate for world food supply security, and has no financial interest in any energy related business. |
How a Desire for Profit Led to the Invention of Race: Eric Foner Reviews The Dominion of War by Anderson and Cayton
February 2, 2010OpEdNews
Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/How-a-Desire-for-Profit-Le-by-GLloyd-Rowsey-100201-682.html
February 1, 2010
How a Desire for Profit Led to the Invention of Race: Eric Foner Reviews The Dominion of War by Anderson and Cayton
By GLloyd Rowsey
[Thebook under review is:The Dominion of War: Empire and conflict in North America 1500-2000 by Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton - Note by GLR]
Is the United States an empire? Only in the US could such a question even be asked. To the rest of the world, the answer is obvious: the US is perhaps the most powerful empire the world has known. Empire means dominion, the desire and ability to determine the fate of peoples near and far. And in every index of power “hard’ and “soft’, military, economic and cultural the US far exceeds all other nations. It accounts for one-third of the world’s gross domestic product and military spending. Even before the Iraq war, it had more than 700 military installations overseas. It is not surprising that in such circumstances, many Americans feel that the country can impose its will on the rest of the world, establishing rules of conduct for others while acting as it sees fit.
Professor Foner in September, 2009 (Wikipedia)
In recent times, it has mainly been critics of the country’s foreign policy who have spoken of an American empire. Empire has seemed distasteful, a relic of a less enlightened era of international relations. America, George W. Bush insisted during the 2000 election campaign, had “never been an empire’ and had no intention of becoming one. Politicians still shy away from the term. But since the attacks of 11 September 2001, the term “empire’ has been used without embarrassment by political commentators in the US. The need to shoulder the burdens of empire is now a common theme in discussions among the foreign policy elite. Conservative writers such as Charles Krauthammer forthrightly defend American empire as an exercise of raw power, while traditional liberals like Michael Ignatieff promote it as a way of protecting human rights against tyrannical regimes.
Perhaps the leading current populariser of the idea is Niall Ferguson. Only an American empire, he insists, can secure order in a dangerous, unruly world. He does not deny that the US is and always has been an empire. The only question for him is whether it possesses the means to continue to act as one. His recent book, Colossus, is a how-to manual for Americans ambivalent about the financial and psychological costs of empire.[*]
The idea that the US is and should be an empire has a long history, one linked to the belief that by example, force or a combination of the two, the country should try to remake the world in its own image. Our empire, however, was to be different from all others. Jefferson spoke of America as an “empire of liberty’. When the nation stepped onto the world stage as an imperial power in the Spanish-American War of 1898, President William McKinley insisted that ours was a “benevolent’ imperialism, that the conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines ought not to be compared to the despotic actions of European powers. Woodrow Wilson insisted that only the US possessed the combination of military power and moral righteousness to make the world safe for democracy.
Like Ferguson, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton begin with the premise that the US has always been an empire. But in contrast to Ferguson’s brief, sanitised account of US history, which leaves the impression that the country’s territorial expansion on the North American continent took place largely through peaceful settlement and the purchase of land, Anderson and Cayton emphasize the centrality of military conquest.
They are nothing if not ambitious. Their aim in The Dominion of War is to dismantle what they call the traditional “grand narrative’ that portrays American history as the emergence and triumph of freedom in one nation, its spread across the continent, and its mission to liberate the oppressed peoples of the world. Long since abandoned, or at least severely modified, by professional historians, this vision remains alive and well in the popular imagination, in our public monuments and in political rhetoric. “Ours,’ President Bush declared in 2002, “is a history of freedom; freedom for everyone.’
Anderson and Cayton insist that American history is a bit more complicated than that. War, they write, has been the major “engine of change’ that “defined’ American history and created the American empire. They reject the popular idea that Americans go to war only as a last resort, motivated by self-defence or the desire to preserve and spread freedom rather than national aggrandisement. “Good wars’, like the Revolution and World War Two, which seem to fit this model, are memorialised in Washington, Hollywood films and national bestsellers. Anderson and Cayton, by contrast, devote extended attention to wars for which no public monuments exist and of which most Americans remain ignorant. These include the war against Britain of 1812, motivated in large part by the hope of conquering Canada and seizing land occupied by Indians east of the Mississippi; the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, in which the United States forcibly annexed one-third of the territory of its southern neighbour; and the Philippine War of 1899-1902, in which American troops fought a brutal struggle against insurgents who viewed them as occupiers, not liberators.
The Dominion of War also challenges the venerable notion of American exceptionalism. Rather than a shining city on a hill (as the Puritan settlers believed) or the last best hope of earth (as Lincoln put it), Anderson and Cayton see the US as a nation no different from many others. It seeks to maximise its own power and to exercise dominion over as large an area as possible. There is nothing distinctively American, either, in the cynical deployment of moral arguments to justify empire. Sixteenth-century Spaniards claimed to be “freeing’ Indians from backwardness and superstition. Late 19th-century Britons insisted that imperialism in Africa was inspired, in part, by a desire to suppress slavery. There is nothing new in slogans like “Operation Iraqi Freedom’.
To forge a “counter-narrative’ of American history, Anderson and Cayton structure their book around a series of detailed vignettes, focused on nine individuals. Their selection includes some familiar names, such as George Washington and Andrew Jackson, and some surprising ones, including Samuel de Champlain, who did more than anyone to create the French empire in 17th-century North America, and Antonio López de Santa Anna, the Mexican leader who suffered defeat both in the Texas War for Independence and the Mexican-American War.
Given that Anderson and Cayton are well-regarded scholars of colonial and early national America, it is perhaps not surprising that the early chapters are the most persuasive. They offer striking illustrations of how relations with Native Americans powerfully shaped the origins of the American empire, and how that empire eventually expelled or destroyed the continent’s original inhabitants. Believing that empire could be based on “intercultural co-operation’ rather than brute force, Champlain dealt with Indians on humane and relatively equal terms, in contrast to English settlers, whose policies smacked more of apartheid than engagement. Yet by introducing European weapons and forging military alliances with certain Indians, Champlain set in motion events that led to persistent warfare and the destruction of entire tribes.
No matter how benevolently conceived, empire is inherently violent and destructive. This lesson comes through in the story of William Penn, who founded the colony of Pennsylvania as a haven for persecuted English Quakers (and land-hungry Europeans generally). Penn promised settlers land at low prices, and tried to deal fairly with local Indians. But his policies were self-contradictory. The success of his colony, not to mention his fortune, depended on selling as much land as possible. Pennsylvania’s population doubled every 18 years. Burgeoning white settlement inevitably meant conflict with the Indians. By the mid-18th century, relations between Penn’s successors and Indians had become more violent and antagonistic than in any other English colony.
The same themes of territorial expansion and Indian subjugation inform the chapters on George Washington, which illustrate the continuities and differences between the British Empire and the American one created in 1776. Like the rest of the Virginia gentry, Washington engaged actively in land speculation and did not recognise any limit on westward expansion. (This is why the Proclamation of 1763, by which authorities in London sought to curb white settlement west of the Appalachians, alarmed Virginians as much as British taxes that tried to make them share the financial cost of empire.) When independence came, it produced an “imperial republic’ far more dangerous to the Indians than the British had been, since its proclaimed devotion to liberty through continuous territorial expansion required the “conquest and ethnic cleansing’ of the native population. Anderson and Cayton point out that the battles of the Revolutionary War celebrated in history books Saratoga, Trenton, Yorktown were accompanied by a forgotten “total war’ on the frontier that led to the devastation of entire Indian villages. Washington himself ordered that Indian communities in upstate New York “be not merely overrun but destroyed’.
American independence produced a decentralised, agrarian empire, in which liberty rested on opening up more and more land in the West while reducing the presence of the national government in Americans’ lives. This was Jefferson’s “empire of liberty’. Anderson and Cayton ignore a rival conception of empire, associated with Alexander Hamilton, that also arose in the aftermath of independence. Hamilton believed that national greatness required the construction of a robust central state modelled on Great Britain, with a standing army, a powerful navy and a government tied closely to the economic self-interest of the wealthiest Americans. Hamilton’s vision was rejected at the time, but it has more in common with today’s American empire than Jefferson’s agrarian republic.
Nearly half of The Dominion of War covers the colonial and revolutionary eras. The two centuries from 1800 to the present are treated in a far more cursory manner. Andrew Jackson exemplifies the rise of a populist, racist imperialism in which liberty became an entitlement of white men. Ulysses S. Grant consolidates the power of the nation-state through his victory in the Civil War, and as president tries to reconcile “American power with American values’ by adopting a “peace policy’ towards the remaining Indians, but to no lasting effect. The career of Douglas MacArthur illuminates the expansion of American global power in the first half of the 20th century.
The two hundred pages allotted to the 19th and 20th centuries are too few to do justice to the themes of warfare and empire. Anderson and Cayton’s account of the Spanish-American War of 1898 and its aftermath, however, bears an uncanny resemblance to today’s headlines. American leaders hailed the acquisition of the Philippines from Spain as part of the narrative of global freedom. But when residents of the islands rose up against the occupying forces, the American commander, Douglas MacArthur’s father, presided over a war that involved the torture of prisoners and horrendous civilian casualties.
After the subjugation of the Philippines, the American empire gave up territorial conquest. Economic penetration coupled with sporadic military intervention replaced long-term direct rule as the favoured mechanism for exerting American power. Nonetheless, the American empire was hardly benign or devoted to liberty. Woodrow Wilson spoke of bringing the virtues of democracy and self-determination to the world, but during his presidency, US armies occupied areas of Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua and Cuba. The aim was to protect American political hegemony and commercial interests, but the rhetoric was that of freedom. These aims, and this rhetoric, persist today on a global scale.
In an age of overspecialisation among historians, it is refreshing to encounter a work that sweeps over five centuries of American history, especially one that is readable, well researched and informed by a coherent theme and strong point of view. But in some ways, The Dominion of War is disappointing. For one thing, its structure is at odds with its argument. Biography is not the best vehicle for examining the large issues with which the book grapples. The choice of subjects is limited and sometimes difficult to understand: why only MacArthur and, in a brief epilogue, Colin Powell from the 20th century, and why Santa Anna at all? The biographical details are revealing but often seem unrelated to the book’s broad themes. How crucial to the history of empire are Washington’s preoccupation with order, Jackson’s sense of honour, Santa Anna’s womanising or MacArthur’s relentless ambition? The biographies stress individual decision-making and the unintended consequences of events. British victory in the Seven Years War produced the American Revolution; territorial acquisition from Mexico sparked the sectional controversy that led to the Civil War. But the authors’ emphasis on “highly contingent events’ leaves the reader wondering whether empire is intrinsic to the American experience or the accidental outcome of individual idiosyncrasies.
“What makes a book good is what you leave out,’ John Garraty once remarked. Obviously, selection is crucial in a work that tries to cover five centuries. But in this case, too much has been left out of the story, especially once the book reaches the 20th century, when the US acted most forcefully as an empire on the world stage. War, moreover, was not the only catalyst of overseas empire. The book ignores empire’s internal roots the quest for markets for America’s ever-expanding industrial production, the need for raw materials, the desire for places to invest capital. There is almost nothing about culture and ideology as sources of imperial power. In general, the US is treated as an undifferentiated imperial unit, expanding first on the North American continent and then internationally, with little attention to internal divisions, including divisions over the wisdom and morality of empire itself.
Perhaps the most glaring omission is any consideration of the centrality of slavery to the first 250 years of the American experience. The authors seem to view slavery as little more than an obstacle to the national unity necessary for the full realisation of the country’s imperial ambitions. But colonial America was part of a slave-based empire. After independence, slavery spurred expansionism and gave American nationality a distinct racial cast. African-Americans are almost entirely absent from this story at least until the final pages, when Colin Powell makes a brief appearance to illustrate how the Vietnam War affected thinking about the country’s role in the world.
Still, Anderson and Cayton deserve praise for their call for Americans to think about their history in terms of power as well as freedom. Current imperial policies, they suggest, do not result from the machinations of the president and a small group of malevolent advisers, but have deep roots in the American experience. Greater knowledge of the idea and practice of empire might help Americans understand why other nations resent our penchant for pursuing our own interests as a world power while proclaiming that we embody universal values. The Dominion of War offers a valuable reminder that the benevolence of benevolent imperialism lies in the eye of the beholder. Indians and Mexicans did not choose to surrender their land to the onward march of the empire of liberty. Filipinos and Puerto Ricans did not necessarily share the judgment that they were better off under American rule than as independent nations. As we watch from our living-rooms the progress of Operation Iraqi Freedom, it is worth remembering Anderson and Cayton’s observation that most American wars have been fought “less to preserve liberty than to extend the power of the United States in the name of liberty’.
The Dominion of War might be read alongside J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians. Coetzee’s protagonist, a well-intentioned petty bureaucrat living on the imperial frontier, develops a passionate hatred for a brutal official sent from the centre to extract information about a local insurgency. He comes to understand that the torturer and the humanitarian are both intrinsic to the practice of empire. “I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold, rigid colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when the harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less.’ Empire is a way not of protecting democracy and human rights, but of destroying them.
“Republic or empire?’ This was the central question of the presidential contest of 1900 between William McKinley, the proponent of benevolent imperialism, and William Jennings Bryan, who viewed empire as incompatible with democracy, at home as well as abroad. At least McKinley and Bryan were candid about what was at stake. In the 2004 campaign, empire was the idea that dared not speak its name. Bush repudiated the word while pursuing the policy. Kerry offered, in effect, empire with a human face. By a small majority, the American people chose the unalloyed version. The question now is whether the rest of the world will consent to live as its subjects.
[*] Penguin, 400 pp., 8.99, June, 0 14 101700 7.
Author’s Bio: “Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.” – Dostoevsky ** I’m sixty-eight and live in Northern California. I graduated from Stanford Law School in 1966 but have never practiced law. I retired in 2001, after working 23 years for the U.S. Forest Service. I have radical politics, and before going to work for the Forest Service in 1978 I spent ten years trying to contribute to the revolution. I have a LiveJournal blog with one or two of my writings which aren’t at OEN. Google to it at: Yourdad65.
February 2, 2010
Future Governor of Texas Debra Medina On Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano
February 2, 2010
Mind blowing speech by Robert Welch in 1958 predicting Insiders plans to destroy America
Proof that the NEW WORLD ORDER has been planned by the elite. Robert Welch, Founder of The John Birch Society, predicted today’s problems with uncanny accuracy back in 1958 and prescribed solutions in 1974 that are very similar to Ron Paul’s positions today. This is proof that there are plans in place by the elite to systemically disassemble US sovereignty. I wonder who those elite are.
February 2, 2010
Operational Amplifier Tutorial & super microphone circuit
Afroman goes over the basics of how to use an operational amplifier to amplify tiny voltages, and builds a circuit to listen to very faint sounds with a microphone. Don’t forget to vote 5!
The final microphone amplifier circuit diagram is here:
http://www.afrotechmods.com/groovy/amplifier_tutorial/amplifier_tutorial.htm
For more information about amplifiers, Google “inverting amplifier” “non-inverting amplifier” “instrumentation amplifier” “class A amplifier” “class B amplifier” “class AB amplifier” and that should give you a lot to chew on.
