Robert J. Kolker

Ayn Rand said/wrote: I can say - not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and aesthetic roots - that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.--Ayn Rand Let us examine that. There is the matter of slavery which lasted from 1620 to 1865 and required a bloody Civil War to end. 620,000 Americans on both sides died and a million and a half were maimed. This in a country with a population of thirty million. Think about it. Then there was the matter of how the aboriginal peoples were treated. Their land overrun, their women and children killed, sometimes slaughtered without mercy (look up the doings of the Seventh Cavalry under Custer). Then there was the matter of black folk being denied their constitutional legal rights for nearly a hundred years. Then there is the matter of the income tax. Forty percent of your income is taken by force and much of it -redistributed- to unworthy people or wasted and frittered away. This is the only moral country in the history of the world? Bob Kolker

Surrender? What does that mean? It would mean we would have to -occupy- the country to enforce a surrender. Occupy a Muslim country? It seems we have already tried that. Our occupation force is subject to the death of a thousand cuts. Do we insist that Muslims give up their religion which teaches that someday they will vanquish (by force) the dar al Harb? So they go quiescent and two generations later we have the same problem all over again. The nature of Islam is such that its adherents are totally opaque to being reasonable as the last 700 years have shown. The phrase 'reasonable Muslim' is an oxymoron. Behold the "moderate" and "reasonable" Muslims on the streets of Denmark cities calling for the blood of cartoonists who "insult" Islam. To the extent one is reasonable then to that extent one must reject the Prophet and the Q'ran. Surrender would mean feeding our troops into a meat grinder that kills a hundred a month. Even our domestic police forces do not suffer that kind of attrition from our criminals. Do you expect that the Iranians or any other nation committed to Islam will meekly renounce their prior beliefs like the Japanese did? What happened with the Japanese was that the occupation authority engaged the help of some Japanese who opposed the war from the git-go. The occupation managers also convinced Hirohito to renounce his godhood and to claim he was just another human being. The Japanese were sane enough to drop the Bushido nonsense with the Emperor Worship and acquiesce to their defeat. The Japanese learned to walk the paths of peace and they have not looked back since. I have no reason to believe that the Iranians would ever be so reasonable. You have to see how the Iranians carry on at the Feast of Imam Ali. They flay themselves bloody, they mortify their flesh, they wail and weep over the death of Imam Ali which occurred over 1200 years ago. Do you expect people who behave like this to be reasonable? The Shi'ah embrace Martyrdom like a lover. Dream on. If you can convince me that religious Muslims can be domesticated and detoxified to the extent that they give up the memes of Jihad and Martyrdom, I will gladly acquiesce to a less dreadful and deadly way of dealing with these stormy folk. This happened in the Christian world, but there is not one sign of a Reformation in Islam. At most a few isolated individuals see the light (so to speak) but they are marked for death by fatwahs issued by the crazies. Even in the West there were over 200 years of deadly war before the Reformation was accepted and settled in. And even after that it took another 200 years before the notion of rights jelled in the minds of the Europeans. What do you expect in the dar al Sala'am? They would not know a right if it bit them on the nose. If we had 200 years in which a struggle might produce a more tractable form of Islam, I might go along with a less lethal course. But these guys are within five years of having nukes at their disposal. We are Out Of Time. In your probable lifetime you are very likely to see downtown New York City (or Washington D.C.) attacked with weapons of mass destruction or great havoc wreaked by low tech means. A bridge or a tunnel destroyed by an 18-wheeler full of high explosives. Or perhaps a tactical nuclear device smuggled in using a cargo container. Or perhaps New York City's water reservoirs poisoned. Are you ready for that? Bob Kolker

Not for the last 700 years. Why? Because I propose to kill our mortal enemies and I am not squeamish about collateral damage? If General Curtis Lemay were still alive and posting would you ban him? He systematically dropped incendiary bombs on Japanese cities made of paper and wood. He cooked babies. Or Air Commander Arthur 'Bomber' Harris who put the torch to Hamburg Germany in WW2. He set out to bomb civilians as a means of winning his war. To do that he burned babies alive. Make no mistake about it. Lemay and Harris were after civilians because the enemy war effort depended on their civilian assets. Please recall that in order to conclude the War in the Pacific the U.S. killed 200,000 by nuclear means. That included children. We are currently in a war. Please tell us how to fight it without collateral damage. Also, please remember that our enemies will have nuclear weapons in hand within five years. We have run out of time for persuasion. Now we fight for our survival. Tell us how we might do this gently. What will you say when a tactical nuke is shipped into New York City in a cargo container and detonated? Will you be so morally appalled at the idea of wiping out our enemies root and branch? Will you be so righteous if one of the major bridges is blown up in New York City or a tunnel breached during the rush hour? We are fighting for our very lives and civilization here. Why should we constrain ourselves? Whatever it takes to survive, that is what we should do. So I say to you, we are in a war for our existence. We are nearly out of time. Only dreadful and drastic action is left to us. And you want to ban me for sounding the alarm? Then propose a lesser action, but be very specific. Which cities shall we nuke (if any). What targets shall we strike (location, type and map co-ordinates). Since our enemies live in population centers of great density tell us how to avoid collateral damage. How many casualties will we probably inflict? If the number is in the millions, then you and I differ only in degree. Once you set on a course of action that will kill young children you are not only in for the penny, you are in for the pound. If you can achieve the end of eliminating our enemies (Muslims) or the threat they present, and save our civilization by a less drastic course of action within the probable time parameters, then you have won both my heart and my mind. Make sure your course of action will stop a team of Jihadists from setting off a nuke in New York or Washington. Bob Kolker

I assume you mean you agree with my #5 with reluctance and reservation and perhaps even disgust. Prior to 9/11 I too had reluctance and reservation and at that time I would not have even breathed the G-word. Since 9/11 I have no reservations at all on the matter. Islam, like any religion, was born in an age of ignorance and superstition. But it is worse than that. It is evil and demonic and has the potential (and often the actuality) of turning ordinary humans into killers who have no regard for their own lives, let alone the lives of their victims. And for that reason I think it must be eliminated and eliminated soon. There are other religions which are non-reasonable, but no others are as dangerous. Christianity and Judaism have been (largely) detoxified over time. Mainstream Christianity works in a secular environment. Judaism has long been adapted to a secular environment. Budhism, Bahai, Hinduism are absurd, but they do not constitute a mortal threat to civilization. You can accept these religions or reject them without becoming a menace to civilized life. Islam does not have within it it the seeds of its necessary modification to make it workable in secular world. Have you ever seen -Monty Python and the Holy Grail-? We are dealing with the Black Knight here. Have you ever seen -The Terminator-? We are dealing with the Terminator here. You can't reason with it, you can't appeal to its mercy (it has none), you can only run and hide from it or you can destroy it. Destruction is our only reasonable option. Bob Kolker

The nations of the world will do business with us if it is profitable (to them) to do so. Ethical principles are so much ka ka when there is a question of money and profit. I gave the example of Nazi Germany to illustrate this point. I am sorry I did not make explicit what my point was, the first time around. Sorry about that. Bob Kolker That is quite correct. While there is much in the writing of Ayn Rand I find useful, I am not, nor was I ever an Objectivist. I have read most of the Objectivist corpus. Some things I agree with, some things I don't. I have reservations concerning Aristotle which I have made plain in my postings on that subject. I hope this clarifies things a bit. Bob Kolker

In a medical situation where there is only enough medicine (or some other resource) to save one you have a -factual- contradiction to the state where both can survive. Before kidney machines became so cheap, that was the way it was for deciding who gets to use the kidney machine. Now they are cheap and everyone (just about) can be accommodated. Facts are so damned pesky! They do not give a damn about principles. In an emergency scenario such as the sinking of Titanic, the issue was not metaphysical but factual. There simply were not enough lifeboats for everyone. Someone had to freeze or drown given the situation as it was. In principle (and now in fact) large passenger carrying ships have enough lifeboats for all aboard and life drill is mandatory, but such was not the case with Titanic. Apparently the builders and owners were beguiled by their own overblown hyperbole. Unsinkable indeed! Any ship made of iron and steel can sink. Iron and steel are heavier than water and that is a -fact-. Best line in the movie: "God, Himself, could not sink this ship!" Bob Kolker

If you work at it you can come up with as many dimensions as you please. Mathematically we can formulate spaces with an infinite set of dimensions. For example a function over the real numbers can be thought of as a vector with aleph-1 components. Take the aleph-1 Cartesian product of the real number set with itself and you have the space of all real valued functions. I suspect ten is the "magic" number because a ten-space is the smallest space that can accommodate both general theory of relativity and quantum field theory. In short a ten space is the smallest big tent into which we can stuff physics. On the other hand there is a theory which requires eleven dimensions. Go figure. Mathematics can be both a liberating tool and a springboard into absurdity. One must be careful how one formulates and -interprets- the mathematics. Bob Kolker

I would not have used the word "logical". I would have said it looks more -intuitive- now. The only way we can intuitively grasp higher dimensional spaces is by using analogies. here is where we see the advantage of mathematics. Going to higher dimensional manifolds is simply a matter of adding more independent parameters. Why stop with ten dimensions. How about an infinite number of dimensions? Easy Peasy. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiable_manifold for a jump-off to the subject of differentiable manifolds of many dimensions. The presentation is a bit incomplete but the bibliography is useful. Bob Kolker

An excellent analogy. As the gas dissipates it is less and less capable of doing work. Hence its free energy decreases. This analogy is also very much in line with the K'balistic notion of the smashing of the vessels. G-D broke ten vessels (so the story goes) in order to make the physical world. When G-D called the world into being he said let there be Light, and Light there was. We still bask in its afterglow, the Cosmic Background Radiation. You might call this the Jewish version of the Big Bang. Compare the quiet static version of the cosmos put forth by Plato and Aristotle with the rather noisy and cataclysmic version put forth by the Jewish mystics. The Greek version says the physical world is a smudgy copy of the Ideal Real World. The Jewish version is that the real world is wreckage floating in the void, which is more in line with modern physics. Both versions imply that the cosmos goes to a less and less perfect state as time passes which is in line with thermodynamics. I am more partial to the modern physics version, since it can be quantified and tested. Bob Kolker

No. One cannot get any more ordered than being everything being squeezed into a singularity. The amount of free energy in the universe has decreased. Right in line with thermodynamics. Also right in line with statistical thermodynamics. The universe has gone from a less probable state to a more probable state namely one with minimal free energy. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_free_energy The entropy of the cosmos as an entirety has increased. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy The very high energy of the Big Bang singularity has dissipated into what you see now. What used to be a single compactum is now scattered in pieces. Sounds like disorder to me. If you really have to find a religious gloss to all this, consult the K'balah. When the Ein Sof (the Infinite One) created the physical cosmos He smashed ten vessels into pieces (or so it is told). That is the Medieval Jewish version of the Big Bang. The Infinite One also created a hole in His midst to make room for the physical cosmos. This is cognate to the notion that space-time is expanding. So the Infinite One sacrificed some of his compactness and wholeness to make room for the cosmos and us (so the story goes). Plato had a similar notion. Maybe the Greeks were not such dunces, after all. Frankly, I prefer the secular version of the Big Bang. Bob Kolker

No, it does not get resolved. (Darn!). It may be that Shepherd Book was at one time an "operative" for the Alliance and has forsworn that life and taken up a religious vocation. There is more to Shepherd Book than meets the eye. While he will no longer shed blood, he turns out to be a nimble fighter (see the episode -Heart of Gold-). Book can do more with a fire hose than most people can do with a gun. Bob Kolker In some respects -Firefly- is like an earlier British SciFi series -Blake's Seven-. Blake is a freedom fighter who has put together a rather eclectic crew to share his fight and his adventure. Like Reynolds in -Firefly- he ends up on the side that loses (Darn!). Bob Kolker

Malcolm 'Mal' Reynolds is not an Objectivist. He is a freedom fighter who fought on the side of freedom, which side lost in a civil war. Mal resolves to make his -own- way in life and stay under the government's radar (so to speak). He takes on jobs, not all of which are legal. Yet he is guided by a steadfast morality. See what happens in one episode -The Train Job-. Mal returns the loot he stole because it was medicine needed by miners suffering from a wasting disease. By returning the loot he puts his life at risk end ends up on the hit list of the master criminal who hired him to steal the medicine in the first place. Why did Mal take the job? Because he thought he was stealing from the government. When he actually meets the people who will die if they do not receive the medicine he relents and delivers the loot to those for whom it was originally intended. Firefly appeals to libertarians, freedom fighters, people who do not like the Nanny State (the Federation in the t.v. series is really quasi socialist governments you find in Europe, Canada and the United States). Anyone who values his freedom must hate the kind of government we now have. He must be a "Browncoat" (the uniform of the side on which Mal fought and lost). Bob Kolker

Why was General Patton included and Generals Grant (USA) and Lee (CSA) excluded? Grant saved the Union. Lee almost won independence for the Confederacy. Lee was tactically and strategically one of the greatest generals. Grant, as Lincoln said, understood the arithmetic. He had the manpower to spend, and spend it he did to bring home victory. Grant' strategic vision made Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea possible. Bob Kolker

The closest star system is Proximi Centuri. That is about 4 ly distance. How interesting do you think a conversation with an 8 year latency is likely to be? It gets to be much worse than that in very short order. The real problem is our life span. Humans live (these days) about a hundred years (order of magnitude). That would mean our conversations with the Centuri-ites could go about 4 to 6 rounds, then the conversation participants die. That is way too short for us to have interesting conversations with ETs especially ETs with longer life spans. We are cursed with king sized curiosity and aspirations and a pint sized life span. Bob Kolker

You wrote: "I did not know, until I later researched the topic on the Net, that "hypercomplex numbers" had already been discovered by a long line of geniuses in the past. But apparently there were many types: quaternions, Cayley-Dickson constructions, etc.--and I had come up with one, and only one, type of such numbers! The difference was that my ideas were generated by investigating the basic nature of numbers as such, according to a philosophy." I am troubled by the phrase "numbers as such". There are all sorts of numbers. There are numbers which, as a set, form locally compact topological spaces (for example the real numbers). There are numbers which form a linear dense set, but which do not contain all their limit points (for example, the rational numbers). Then there are numbers which form an linearly ordered but discrete (non-dense) set (for example the integers. These systems of numbers are related but they form topologically and algebraically distinct systems. So I would contend that there are no numbers -as such-. There is this kind of number and that kind of number and which kind it is depends are which postulates they satify. Bob Kolker

I understand Wile's strategy perfectly well. It is explained in a non-technical book by Singhe. It is the details of the proof that I would have trouble following. Both God and the Devil are in the details. However give me five years to learn the underlying group theory and modular forms and I will be able to follow the proof just fine. What I rely on is a committee of mathematicians whose work I have been able to follow. They have established their bonafides to my satisfaction. Eventually a more elementary proof for FLT will be found. That is how it usually goes in mathematics. Bob Kolker

Not to me personally, but triage is a frequent situation handled by medical managers. And the decision of the triage chief can mean doom for one person and a chance of life for another. Bob Kolker

Google <medical triage>. Yes, things like this happen every day. Bob Kolker

Poster: 1.) It will create more hate in the Islamic world against the US. Impossible. The Muslims hate our guts for a number of reasons. Poster: 2.) It will likely cost the US many of its current valuable allies. No it won't. Profit ueber alles. The world was doing business with the Nazis prior to the invasion of Poland and there were American firms doing business with the Nazis even after 1939. Poster: 3.) It will decrease the current international bias in favor of nuclear abstinance. Puhleeeeze. What abstinance? The North Koreans have the bomb. Iran is working on it and the Saudis are not talking about it. Poster: 4.) It might provoke nuclear retaliation. Delivered by oxcart or camel. We are already vulnerable to small nukes and 'dirty' bombs being walked in or carried in on shipping containers. If we do nothing, it is a only a matter of time before a WMD is used on New York City (where the Jews are). The Russians will not attack us, since it will mean their destruction nor will the Chinese. Right now we have a sufficiently large nuclear arsenal to lay civilization on earth waste. Poster: 5.) It is insane? No. Genocide is the sanest reaction to Islam currently available. Fifty years ago we might have been able to do considerably less to the Muslims to lessen the danger they pose to us. But we have bought their oil and their hostility. We have actually put in their hands the means by which they will attack us. It is now possible for an Islamic state to build atom bombs using chump change. They would not even have to dip into their Swiss bank accounts. Bob Kolker

Fairness is an attribute of a conscious sentient being. Nature is neither conscious nor sentient. Nature is (in a manner of speaking) as dumb as a sack full of bricks. We cannot compensate for what was never missing in the first place. By the way, this means that Nature (Reality) is neither benevolent nor malevolent since benevolence and malevolence are likewise properties of sentient beings capable of formulating and acting on intent. Bob Kolker