Opposing Einstein

[drew hempel]

Recently it was stated that Einstein's "theory of relativity" is based on the Pythagorean Theorem and therefore the Pythagorean Theorem is correct.

The below blog entry I wrote just about a year ago was reposted on the website forum -- "opposing digits" by some unknown reader. It's all about why Einstein is wrong:

http://www.opposingdigits.com/forums...0a21abac87da5d

[craazyman]

that's a misreading on two levels.

1. The Pythagorean theorem is only "right" within its own reference system, i.e. Euclidean geometry. In fact, there are no right triangles in the real world, only resemblences.

2. Einstein is no more "right or wrong" than Newton or Gallileo or Thales of Miletus. His theory simply fits the data better than previous theories.

No doubt the philosophers of science covered these arguments decades if not centuries ago.

[drew hempel]

The "real world" is indeed a "convenient fiction" when based on increasing rates of genocide, slums, mass starvation and finally -- collapse of the whole life-support system for the planet. Nice thing that Cheny and Kissinger can go to their underground FEMA survival cities -- the REAL real world. haha.

Euclid got his geometry mainly from Eudoxus who stole it from Philolaus who was a Pythagorean that lied -- breaking the oath of secrecy and thereby creating a

FAKE REFERENCE SYSTEM based on deep disharmony.

[craazyman]

Drew how would you explain the Tutus and Hutsis, if you want to relate the propensity for mathematical abstractions to some notion and practice of an abstract morality. Those clever cow hearders and farmers didn't need technology to create a holocaust, just knives and spears.

And where do your fine notions of morality come from? Definitely not from "indigenous" or "shamanic" societies. North America was wall-to-wall tribal warfare and warrior macho cult cultures before Europeans showed up and joined the fistfight.

I guess the greys were watching then too. I wonder what they were thinking?

(By the way, I take garlic and cayenne every day. )

[Isaiah Mpski]

No,no,no,no,no.
You've got it all wrong CM.I admit,being a bit Indian I may be biased but America before the white man was big-time trading and peace.There may have been easily 100 million people then.Easily and I've talked to some historians who said the figure was 200 million.

Now there were periods-around 1000 AD when drought forced some tribes out west to become marauders.But overall there were few problems in America before the white man.

The trade was done mostly by waterways and even reached the Caribbean Islands and Mexico by NA Indians.

[drew hempel]

Craazyman -- I just read "The Africans" by David Lamb -- an excellent LA Times journalist who travelled to 100 countries.

anyway the answer about the Rwandan genocides is quite simple -- the WHITES FUCKED UP AFRICA through "divide and conquer" policies.

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org...j73/kimber.htm

[ielectric]

whites gave natives blankets infected with smallpox.
read bury my heart at wounded knee.

the international football team, new zealand all-blacks. they do a maori war dance at the start of each match. warfare between tribal peoples most often consisted of such braggadaccio. if a handful of opposing tribesmen were killed in battle, the war had reached standards of brutality the europeans would have considered no more than a barfight. this was as true of africans as it was of indigenous americans.

barring all that, most people in any given war -- including modern warfare -- choose not to fight. humans are not warmongering. more people are refugees than fighters. most people will give up their land before defend it to the death -- theirs or the usurpers. history, of course, does not report on the strategy and logistics of refugee populations. the new york post will report that THREE TEENS KILL FOUR before they will say EIGHT MILLION DIDN'T KILL ANYBODY. insurance companies bet you x dollars annually that you will die a natural death because, statistically, you will.

more good happens to people than bad, but we fear saying so. it's more acceptable to say "i forgot my wallet" than it is to say "i just remembered to bring my wallet."

i hate to be so positive.

peace.

[nanouk]

rugby, mate, rugby...not football... the all black's chant. it is Maori, in True Sense.

love and respect,

~N~

[ielectric]

i stand corrected. i only recall seeing the dance, not a match. confess i'm not much of a team sports fan. i will, however, watch boxing on tv. even unknowns in non-title bouts. not regularly. know nothing about the sport, really. it just strikes me as so right. i mean, if you want sport, have at it. me, i'm a lover, not a fighter. i did compete on varsity track, lacrosse in high school. walking -- lately yoga -- sufficed since then.

peace

[ielectric]

oh. for the full record, i did instigate a competition among several townspeople here two summers ago. the goal was to find and enjoy the greatest number of swimming holes in ulster, greene, and columbia counties. [new york state, very western mass: hudson river/catskills/berkshires] we never compared tallies, though. i'm not sure who won. but we kept cool and wet in the thick of the heat.

peace

[ielectric]

craazyboy

this recent post on the intrade thread from sidecross explains your misunderstanding quite plainly.

Published on Friday, February 16, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World

By Michael Parenti

There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?

Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs.

The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses---much to the outrage of labor unions here at home who see their jobs evaporating.

The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.

By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.

In Haiti, for instance, workers are paid 11 cents an hour by corporate giants such as Disney, Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penny. The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities, and are often paid less than the minimum wage.

The savings that big business reaps from cheap labor abroad are not passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do not outsource to far-off regions so that U.S. consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990, shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United States.

U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries.

The aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on U.S. products, and the recipient nation is required to give investment preferences to U.S. companies, shifting consumption away from home produced commodities and foods in favor of imported ones, creating more dependency, hunger, and debt.

A good chunk of the aid money never sees the light of day, going directly into the personal coffers of sticky-fingered officials in the recipient countries.

Aid (of a sort) also comes from other sources. In 1944, the United Nations created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Voting power in both organizations is determined by a country’s financial contribution. As the largest “donor,” the United States has a dominant voice, followed by Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain. The IMF operates in secrecy with a select group of bankers and finance ministry staffs drawn mostly from the rich nations.

The World Bank and IMF are supposed to assist nations in their development. What actually happens is another story. A poor country borrows from the World Bank to build up some aspect of its economy. Should it be unable to pay back the heavy interest because of declining export sales or some other reason, it must borrow again, this time from the IMF.

But the IMF imposes a “structural adjustment program” (SAP), requiring debtor countries to grant tax breaks to the transnational corporations, reduce wages, and make no attempt to protect local enterprises from foreign imports and foreign takeovers. The debtor nations are pressured to privatize their economies, selling at scandalously low prices their state-owned mines, railroads, and utilities to private corporations.

They are forced to open their forests to clear-cutting and their lands to strip mining, without regard to the ecological damage done. The debtor nations also must cut back on subsidies for health, education, transportation and food, spending less on their people in order to have more money to meet debt payments. Required to grow cash crops for export earnings, they become even less able to feed their own populations.

So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries’ export earnings---which creates further impoverishment as it leaves the debtor country even less able to provide the things its population needs.

Here then we have explained a “mystery.” It is, of course, no mystery at all if you don’t adhere to trickle-down mystification. Why has poverty deepened while foreign aid and loans and investments have grown? Answer: Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations.

There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few.

In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign aid and IMF and World Bank structural adjustments “do not work”; the end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient nations, they point out. Why then do the rich member states continue to fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just less intelligent than the critics who keep pointing out to them that their policies are having the opposite effect?

No, it is the critics who are stupid not the western leaders and investors who own so much of the world and enjoy such immense wealth and success. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programs because such programs do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono?

The purpose behind their investments, loans, and aid programs is not to uplift the masses in other countries. That is certainly not the business they are in. The purpose is to serve the interests of global capital accumulation, to take over the lands and local economies of Third World peoples, monopolize their markets, depress their wages, indenture their labor with enormous debts, privatize their public service sector, and prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by not allowing them a normal development.

In these respects, investments, foreign loans, and structural adjustments work very well indeed.

The real mystery is: why do some people find such an analysis to be so improbable, a “conspiratorial” imagining? Why are they skeptical that U.S. rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue such ruthless policies (suppress wages, rollback environmental protections, eliminate the public sector, cut human services) in the Third World? These rulers are pursuing much the same policies right here in our own country!

Isn’t it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world---and want to own it all---are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies”? You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should we.

Michael Parenti's recent books include The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.


http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0216-30.htm

peace

[drew hempel]

Yeah refugees tell me about it. I know 3 people who each, in their respective countries, had to flee by foot for several days straight, covering some 60 miles a day, and dodging bullets. 1 Somalian. 1 Burmese. 1 Eritrean.