A soldier reflects on a lifetime of assimilation into religion, the American right wing and ultimately the US military. Turning a regular kid into a murderer ... One of the values I'd been taught and that you hear all the time in the rhetoric of political and military leaders was that democracy is a good thing and it thrives on the will of the people... Full interview here

Credit: http://www.sott.net/article/264834-Why-do-we-love-psychopaths-and-sociopaths //www.truthdig.com/report/item/this_how_we_should_actually_punish_bank_felons_20150622 Treating corporations as "persons" is a huge mistake but perhaps we can wind it back by expanding the criminal law as it applies to corporations. I agree that the *individuals* who control corporations must take responsibility for corporate crimes and be punished as thieves or, in some case, even murderers. But we *do* need ways to punish the *corporation*. The corporation has a life of its own and, as the article points out, hardly feels the sting of a multi-billion dollar fine. The approach outlined above is equivalent to shunning and banning, which goes a long way back as punishment for individuals for the crimes of individuals. It's brilliant. Just turn our backs on the perpetrators!http://dragontheory.blogspot.ca/ Why not stop buying gas from BP and Exxon (pollution)? Why not stop recognizing Ameri...

Title means "Praise be to you, my Lord" (the opening words of the Encyclical) Click picture to download full PDF  There is good reason to suspect that this document represents a historic re-definition of all the world's problems, not just climate change. He connects a wide swath of "religious" views, not just Catholic or even Christian, to challenge the existing technological, economic and political establishment. Throughout, he speaks with authority, but takes pains to base his authority on a very wide basis. He speaks for the Church (Bishops are extensively quoted, doctrinal tradition is brought to play). He speaks with the authority of Science. He brings in and authenticates the despair all of us feel as the natural world is destroyed right in front of us. At the same time, he speaks with humility not often found in powerful political figures. He openly acknowledges that may will not agree with his "take" on the situation. He carefully separates ar...

(This is a draft - more "Dragon Theory" analysis coming soon ...) The nuclear industry is still claiming that the Fukushima disaster could not happen even though it did. If they built a twin of the Titanic, it would be "unsinkable". Computer models have still failed to "explain" what happened at Fukushima years after the event. These are the *same* models that the industry uses to "prove" that reactors cannot fail the way Fukushima obviously did. In spite of all this, new reactors are being built at a brisk pace. New designs, such as the A P1000 are (you guessed it) fail-proof. How do we know? Well Westinghouse tells us so, even though the AP1000 *would* have failed at Fukushima. It seems to me that this technology is *not* safe because we can't trust our ass-covering politicians or anyone else to manage it. These things are not "intrinsically safe" as we hear so much. They are "intrinsically dangerous". Dozens of them in ...

I highly recommend Dan Carlin's introduction to the Khans, arguably the most terrible military force the world has ever known. If you don't know about these guys, I urge you to follow the link, sit back and let Carlin tell the story. That will be much more informative than anything I have to say about them. As always, in this blog, the subject is "Dragon Theory". The Khans are important in this theory because they created the most successful military machine in history. The machine crushed all opponents from China to the Middle East, from the Mediterranean to Eastern Europe . THE DRAGON You can think of the army of the Khans as the "Dragon", but it's different from modern "dragons" in that it is composed entirely of living things -- men and horses. Modern armies have a lot of hardware and you usually think of the "Armed Forces" in terms of their massive amounts of high-tech equipment. On a more subtle level, the army of the Khans was...

In response to a commentator who suspected I knew nothing about Hedges ... Actually I have read most of his early books (before he went crazy in my opinion). Hedges was once a journalist worth reading. I have watched and listened carefully to many of his recent interviews and commented on them in detail in my own blogs. I consider Hedges to be a dangerous lunatic, which is the motivation for my continuing interest in him. http://dragontheory.blogspot.ca/2015/06/chris-hedges-pope-of-truthiness.html http://diaryofachristianskeptic.blogspot.ca/2015/06/ordinary-craziness.html Hedges gets an alarming amount of attention just *because* of his manic charisma, which tends to obscure the real dangers and simply spreads panic. Otherwise, I could ignore him just like a million other crackpots screaming "The sky is falling". But just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they aren't out to kill you. Take a look at this discussion of Climate Change put together by an a...

Darwin did more than come up with "Evolution". He basically invented modern biology. He's a member of the modern pantheon. Like Einstein, is name is dropped to lend a bit of authority to ideas that may or may not make sense otherwise. Most of us are familiar with the modern debate between Evolution and "Intelligent Design". Most "modern" thinkers are firmly in the "Darwinian" camp. The evidence is overwhelming that "Darwinian evolution" is responsible for life on Planet Earth. Some even take the step to assert that the very definition of life must include what they think of as "Darwinian" evolution. This way of defining "life in general" often involves a drastic misunderstanding of Darwin's theory. This misunderstanding is signalled by the characterization of Darwin's idea as "Survival of the Fittest". Actually, Darwin's fundamental insight was "Descent with modification", the ide...

"Opinions are like assholes - everybody has one" - Anon Web 2.0, which introduced the ability of ordinary people to interact with the Web, has created a platform for sharing information that promises to change history. Call it the World Wide University (WWU). As an information junky, it's a dream world for me. But there are lessons to be learned.  Once you settle in, it can be like going back to University with a demanding schedule of a dozen difficult subjects. As in a real University, it's also possible to skip classes, change major and fritter way your time playing cards or engaged in loud and aimless discussions about subjects that none of the participants knows anything about. However serious people may seem to be, most of them are there to make friends or (how shall we put it) "hook up". You need to establish some goals and personal discipline. STAND UP AND MAKE A FOOL OF YOURSELF The first "book" in your book bag at WWU should be " Bei...

Full disclosure. I'm a professional systems analyst and a pretty good one. I recognize genius in my field when I see it. This is NOT a Quagmire! In a different universe only slightly to the right of the one we live in, Donald Rumsfeld would have been President of the United States instead of George H. W. Bush. In the Bush II administration, there were at least three "heavyweights" who could have been contenders for the job: Rumsfeld, Cheney and Powell. Whatever you may say about these guys, none of them were stupid. Rumsfeld was (and presumably still is) incredibly smart. However, he became the very template of the evil genius by exercising his craft in exactly the way he should have: by applying systems analysis to the US military and the Iraq invasion in particular. This was a fascinating problem. For Rumsfeld it was the chance of a lifetime to demonstrate his genius. Of course, by reducing the problem to something that Bush could see as a "solvable" puzzle, R...

Pogo famously puts his finger on the problem There is no doubt that the US and its allies (including my country of Canada) are in a war of some sort. People are killing and being killed, driven from their homes, subjected to oppressive regimes. Bombs are falling, bullets are flying. It's a war. But who is the enemy? Along side the physical war there is a war of terminology. Please allow me to muddy the waters further ... The 9/11 attack made rhetorical demands on the newly-inaugurated George Bush, who was not a "big thinker". The best he could come up with was the idea that it was about "democracy" and those who "hate" democracy. For students of democracy, this hardly passes the laugh test. America is hardly a model for actual on-the-ground democracy, although it has some good ideas. The additional problem is that Bin Laden himself seemed to be a champion of democracy, or at least the enemy of oppression, such as the brutal regimes in the Arab world (i...