Letters

Stephanie R. Baker Begs to Differ

I beg to differ with your "Racial Chickens" article in the June 1992 issue.

What has offended me, and what should offend anyone with any knowledge of American history and current events is your broad reference into racist events being almost monopolistically Southern in the past. We Southerners certainly haven't had any kind of patent on racism. Just ask people who knew Malcolm X.

Detroit, Boston, Chicago and New York have all be(en) the host cities for racial riots and abuse of minority civil rights. Such a statement as "Similar situations, and even worse, happened in the South all the time in the past" in Reference to the Rodney King beating, is a disgraceful attempt to exonerate the rest of the country of its racist history.

The South accepts its shameful history and has made an effort through more equal government representation to right its wrongs. It's high time the rest of the country matured and stopped throwing stones and starting making strides to do the same.

Finger-pointing, like the pre-adolescent mindset it represents, will get us nowhere.

...Stephanie R. Baker...
Cordele Dispatch
Cordele, GA
November 24, 1992

American Foreign Policy Mystique

U.S. foreign policy received little attention during, the 1992 presidential campaign. George Bush boasted that his expertise in foreign policy, contrasted with Bill Clinton's lack of it, dictated re-election in order to protect the nation. Clinton said foreign policy can be no stronger than domestic policy.

After Clinton's victory at the polls, U.S. foreign policy "experts" busied themselves during the political transition lull speculating about foreign policy problems Clinton would have to face. They warned some were serious enough to deflect Clinton from his "laser beam" concentration on reviving the nation's economy, the chief domestic policy problem. Their commentaries implied Clinton's lack of experience and expertise dictated his dependence on "experts," they alone being able to fathom the mystique of foreign policy.

Arthur Schlesinger was among a few dissenting voices. On a PBS broadcast interview, he sought to expunge mystique, replacing it with common sense, which Bill Clinton possesses in abundance. As one involved for 40 years in U.S. international relations, I strongly endorse Schlesinger's view.

Some U.S. experts still believe America "won" the Cold War. Most have been slow to acknowledge that the voluntary action of the Soviet Government, then under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, brought the Cold War to conclusion. Soviet leaders had the courage and common sense to initiate the demise of the Soviet communistic form of government, considered by them and by us as the bulwark protecting USSR national security and the means of carving out and maintaining the USSR'S place in the world. They concluded command economics of communism had failed to bring progress and prosperity to the Soviet people, and it could not do so in the future. In dismantling their communist system Soviet leaders knowingly risked the national security of the USSR. Moreover, in launching the nation on an uncharted course, they accepted on open-ended risk to national security.

Lack of application in many instances of common sense in U.S. foreign policy raises serious questions about the competence of U.S. foreign policy "experts" and about their mythical "mystique" surrounding foreign policy.

Currently, the so-called experts are contributing to another potential foreign debacle by perpetuating the myth that the United States is still a in superpower and is capable of resolving any or all international conflicts. The commentaries seen in the media during the transition from Bush to Clinton oozed with self aggrandizement and purposeful perpetuation of "mystique."

For the thinking American, it should be enough to note how miserably the experts have failed to fill in the foreign policy void following the close of the Cold War. How they have failed, for example, to grasp fully the opportunity to give the United States a leadership role in the essential task to devise a new world order unreliant on war to maintain peace. The pages of history are stained by the failures of war to achieve lasting peace in world faces too many potential conflicts even to consider resolving them by war.

Formulation of a new world order could have begun resoundingly with an effort to settle by peaceful means Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Surely the risk to U.S. national security would have paled by comparison to the risk taken by Soviet leaders in voluntarily abandoning their communist system.

But, wearing foreign policy mystique like a halo, George Bush, opted for war, an easier way to become a hero, especially with an election looming. Well, the American people rejected Bush, while in Saddam Hussein remains in power. So much for foreign policy mystique.

The following examples fall within my experience of American foreign policies devoid of common sense. They are indicative of just how wrong the foreign policy experts can be.

• The Domino Theory. During the 1950's period of mass hysteria over communism, fomented initially by then Congressman Richard Nixon and skillfully exploited by Senator Joseph McCarthy (both, of course, foreign policy "experts"), U.S. policy makers gave birth to a simple-minded political/military concept based on the children's game of dominoes. Their theory was that all the nations of Indochina, and perhaps others, would fall like dominoes to communism if the United States failed to protect South Vietnam. The resulting war in Vietnam was a tragic. and costly foreign policy blunder, the legacy of which Americans have yet to outlive.

• NATO and the Nuclear Deterrent. In the early 1960s, U.S. foreign policy 'experts' tried to arm twist NATO allies into endorsing a military security concept dubbed the Multilateral Nuclear Force. The concept called for mixed NATO crews aboard naval vessels carrying nuclear weapons, including submarines. Apart from the mind boggling idea of mixing languages and cultures in sensitive and demanding security circumstances, the concept completely overlooked political realities in Europe. Europeans governments flatly and with much resentment rejected the American idea of "putting the German finger on the nuclear trigger."

I'm sure you can think of other foreign policy debacles, yourself, that arose because the 'experts' ignored or overlooked common sense. Let's not leave common sense, of which Bill Clinton seems to have a lot, out of our foreign policy equation.

...Robert Sturgill...

Information, Communication, Language

The building blocks of the universe are time, information, matter, energy, and space, (TIMES). Imagine a singularity—the object from which a universe will be created. It has near infinite mass. It has no space or time. Nothing can happen in zero time; so nothing is happening. Since there is no space it has near transfinite density. There is no temperature since there is no motion. It has an inside but will never have an outside even when it explodes into a universe. It does not expand into space and time it creates space and time as it expands. Unexpanded, the singularity has no information.

When the singularity exploded, the work of the universe began. Matter was created ahead of antimatter, so that when they began mutually to anhillate each other, the asymmetry of the creation process left more matter than antimatter. If the creation process of our universe had been symmetrical, matter and antimatter would have incompletely annihilated each other and the universe would exist as a dilute soup of photons. A photonic universe would contain minimum information.

The starting conditions of our universe produced an asymmetrical, probabilistic universe. From the first instant, along with the setting of the universal constants, randomness and entropy provided the basis for information. A universe, where the products of creation and the events that created them are random and normally distributed, is knowable. Since our universe is probabalistic it is one of a set of universes that could have arisen in similar fashion but with vastly different properties depending upon the starting conditions.

Symmetry generates little information. Asymmetry depending upon its complexity generates information approaching the transfinite. The creation of particles and subparticles created information and the mere location of these items in space and time created vastly more information.

As the urstoff of the universe chilled out, creating an array of particles and their related forces, certain associations occurred. Quarks clumped into protons, neutrons and electrons. Gluons glued the nuclei together and the charges of the agglomerating particles gave the whole in an electrical charge. Since the charged particle of the nucleus is the in proton, the nucleus has a positive charge. Electrons with negative charges were left to swarm around nuclei. Nearly weightless and with no charge, photons teemed though space, colliding with electrons, energizing them upon contact, flying off at lower energy when the electron's energy state stabalizes in a lower orbital level. Every new particle, every new locus in time and space created new information. Information moved, magnetically, electrostatically, gravitationally, mechanically. The more work that happened, the more entropy was created and in turn they both created more information.

Great clouds of hydrogen—an atom with a single proton and a single electron—condensed under the influence of gravity and formed stars. The stars ignited producing the light of the universe.

Information moving from point A to point B, by any means, which causes any amount of work to be accomplished is communication. An electron which settles into orbit around a nucleus through the mechanism of the magnetic field caused by its rotation has information which it communicates to the nucleus. Vibrating atoms communicate with each other and form molecules.

At the level of organic life, self-replicating molecules of RNA occurred first, followed by self-replicating molecules of DNA assisted by protein. RNA and DNA are libraries of information. These molecules communicating with the substances of their environment create proteins which create cells. Cells communicate with each other and form colonial and multicellular organisms.

Green plants communicate with their environment and photosynthesize. The Cape hunting dog of Africa, uses complicated signals to hunt and capture prey. Males communicate with females, from fireflies to birds and elephants, mothers to children and reverse where ever the terms are applicable. Information exists. Communication occurs in real time.

Language without information is a non-concept. Language is a form of communication that has the property of referring to the thing not there in real time and progresses to the thing not there in the future and the historical past. The future does not exist but was invented as a concept, but with language, concepts are as real as if they had physical properties. The great concepts of language are time, space, being, number and/or quantity. Language can be used for real time communication, but it's enormous power lies in referring to the future and the past. Language based technology has set humans apart from all other life forms and is the basis of civilization. It will be the life or the death of the species.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1993
Institute for domestic Tranquility