29 April 2016

US, NATO scared by Brexit referendum

The Blog


Britain's withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit) would undermine the military goals of the American regime in Europe, Britain's Foreign Affairs Committee admits in a report.


Meanwhile, Britain's own capability to defend itself would be left unaffected by withdrawing from the European Union. The insolent United States would try to ignore Britain, bypassing London to try and control European governments directly - in its continuing hopes to use them as human shields in confrontations with Russia or other states.

The following vital points in the 26 April report "Implications of the referendum on EU membership for the UK's role in the world" were admitted, and deserve attention when it comes to assessing Britain's future relations with the American regime if Britain leaves the EU:
"Since EU defence co-operation remains intergovernmental, withdrawal from the EU should arguably have a relatively minor impact on the UK’s long-term defensive posture and capabilities...
"UK withdrawal from the EU would eventually result in a “diminution of Britain’s influence on both sides of the Atlantic...
"President Obama and his Administration have made it clear that they would prefer the UK to remain inside the EU, where it is generally seen to promote Atlanticist policies (such as TTIP, which the UK has championed in part to bolster the political relationship between the US and EU)...
"outcomes contain risks for the NATO... With the US increasingly looking to its European partners to shoulder more of the burden for their own defence, a weak and divided EU might unsettle the NATO alliance...
"the EU could become more coherent and unified, but—in the absence of the UK—might do so in ways that threaten to decouple it from NATO, damaging the integrity of the transatlantic alliance."
The report omits the fact that Britain would be safer without having strong ties with the extremist regime in Washington, puppet governments in Europe, and the wars they are waging to support the US government and military's vanity. In particular since the 9/11 attacks, the American regime has conflated its own security with its NATO allies and used them as cannon fodder in Afghanistan, relying on the "alliance" to sacrifice the British people without their consent.

Meanwhile, the British Tory government has continued to celebrate its loyalty to Washington, as can be seen from former Foreign Secretary William Hague's belief that there must always be a "pro-American regime" in London and his recent remarks defending President Obama's right to meddle in UK politics.

While the government report uses a negative tone in its view of the "transatlantic alliance" failing, such failure would bring joy to most of the world's population, who have been stomped on and oppressed for years by western forces and live in fear of the west's increasing weapons of mass destruction. As such, people wanting to reduce the US regime's aggression will likely be voting to leave the EU.


The clubof.info Blog

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Veterans' political views aren't special

The Blog


Discussing the undue favor shown to veterans in US political discourse, Garrison Center Director Thomas Knapp noted in a recent article that they shouldn't be excluded from having to back up their arguments with evidence.


Often, supposed military heroes like Arizona Senator John McCain (also current Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee) see their opinions being revered for no reason other than that they "once wore a uniform and collected a government paycheck".

Knapp rejects this type of thinking in his April 26 Garrison Center post, instead saying "If you really want to honor veterans, treat us like you treat everyone else. That means requiring us to prove, rather than merely assert, our political arguments."

It is worth considering that John McCain, although a veteran, is far from a hero. Much of his notability in Vietnam came from killing his own fellow servicemen during the USS Forrestal Fire. The bombs McCain dropped on US forces in the deadly incident killed 134 Americans, yet many people still consider him a war hero due to his disastrous part in killing hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians in a pointless war.


The clubof.info Blog

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26 April 2016

"Liberation technologies" to come?

The Blog


The following video is narrated by Harry J. Bentham, author of Catalyst: A Techno-Liberation Thesis (2013), using the introduction from that book as a taster of the audio version of the book in production.


As the book opens, "The gravest danger to hegemony and oppression lies at the transformational crossroads of liberation and technology".

In the book, the version of futurism used by the author to influence readers at the Beliefnet website's L'Ordre blog is presented in detail. Watch the clip below to get an idea of what it's all about.



Writing on the planned audio book release at Beliefnet, the author explained the grand vision for advanced technologies hidden in that short book:
I think new industrial refining and manufacturing technologies will emerge with the intent to keep certain (western) countries in economic favor. But these are going to become small enough (synthetic organisms, micromanufacturing devices, additive manufacturing machines, nano-factories) to be shared quickly with the world’s poorer countries, allowing the global poor to develop faster, achieve their aspirations and settle their score with the rich and exploitative countries.
This "techno-political" standpoint is also the main influence on The clubof.info Blog, which focuses on global injustices and the power of technology to change power relations for the better.


The clubof.info Blog

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Hillary Clinton's four paths to defeat

The Blog


Mont Order brother and Garrison Center director Thomas L. Knapp recently plotted out four paths for defeat for Hillary Clinton, highlighting how unstable her prospects are as a US presidential candidate.


Whether Hillary Clinton falls prey to illness or her shady criminal dealings with the Saudi regime and major arms dealers, there are a number of ways her rival Bernie Sanders could pass her to claim the Democratic Party nomination.

Knapp explains these four possible Hillary Clinton defeats in the following commentary at the Garrison Center website:
Path #1: (HEALTH PROBLEMS) "Clinton’s health fails"- "multiple public fainting spells since 2005" - "cerebral venous thrombosis, a life-threatening blood clot condition" - "hypothyroidism"
Path #2: (SERVERGATE) "Clinton is indicted in, or otherwise dragged down over, the “Servergate” affair, in which she appears to have illegally mishandled classified information while Secretary of State."
Path #3: (CORRUPTION) "Clinton comes to big legal or political grief over apparent connections between large donations to her family’s foundation on one hand and her actions as Secretary of State on the other. For example, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia donated $10 million to the Clinton Foundation and Boeing donated $900,000. Later, Secretary Clinton cleared a $29 billion arms deal involving the two parties...
Path #4: (LEAKED SPEECHES) "The texts of Clinton’s Wall Street speeches, for which she received millions of dollars in honoraria, are leaked"... "Everything comes to light sooner or later. If it’s sooner — that is, before July —  we may find out how just how damaging"...
Hillary Clinton's supporters tend to ignore her history of lying and all her vices, to believe she is the default candidate to keep the much-loathed Republican (almost-certain) nominee Donald Trump out of power. A sense of inevitability plagues their narrow vision of what may happen, unaware of all that may go wrong with Clinton's faltering campaign.


The clubof.info Blog

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22 April 2016

Rep Press shames Clinton's dishonesty

The Blog


Amidst the heat of battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Representative Press urges Democratic voters to choose Sanders over the "dishonest" Clinton.


Appealing to Clinton supporters to change their minds before it is too late, and not vote for the vicious neoconservative Clinton, political conflict reporter Tom Murphy at the YouTube channel Representative Press commented as follows.

Showing a video of Clinton laughing off Sanders when he accuses her of supporting destructive wars such as the US aggression in Iraq and Libya, the playlist description reads as follows:
Hillary Clinton has a track record of a being dishonest, disrespectful and arrogant politician who accepts money from powerful interests like Wall Street and sells out the working class by voting against legislation that would help us.
She gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches for the rich and powerful and then she does the bidding of the rich and powerful.
Representative Press is best known for candidly discussing the real motive of the 9/11 attacks against the United States using YouTube and other services - US support for the Zionist Israeli regime.

Watch the new playlist at YouTube to see Representative Press coverage of Clinton's history of deceit.


The clubof.info Blog

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Audio book of "Catalyst" coming?

The Blog


The Catalyst thesis this blog is based on may be coming in audio form soon.


As announced at a post to the L'Ordre blog on Beliefnet, "I do indeed plan to produce an audio book version of it once I get the time, narrated in my own voice of course" (Harry J. Bentham, author).

Catalyst: A Techno-Liberation Thesis is a short educational futurist book from 2013 about how to use technology to diminish monopolies of wealth and power, and liberate millions of people from poverty-stricken, economically sanctioned or oppressed regions in which they were born. The book can currently be ordered in print or, if you love your Kindle e-reader, downloaded over Amazon.

According to Catalyst, extremely consequentially technologies involved in manufacturing will continue to get smaller, and eventually the act of one person stealing single objects like synthetic life-forms or items of micro-manufacturing atomically precise manufacturing (nanotech) equipment will be able to change the entire balance of power between countries and regions of the world.

This is a good thing, Catalyst theorized quite radically, because it will undo the global exploitation perpetrated by the few high-tech western countries against large poor regions of Africa, Asia and South America.


The clubof.info Blog

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19 April 2016

"Age of information" creates ignorance

The Blog


Reflecting on the ironies of the internet and the prior incredible growth of the sum of scientific knowledge in the previous and current century, Beliefnet's L'Ordre blog mentions the sheer volume of information available as a source of intellectual laziness and confusion.


The result is that, surrounded by more knowledge than ever, people are increasingly starved of actual information because they don't know what to read. Describing information as "worthless" without adequate guidance alongside it, the post notes conspiracy theories are the "worst outcome of all" to come from amateurish attempts to quickly grasp the meanings of vast information available on the internet.

While referencing Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World, the blog post aims to discredit the somewhat famous quote that "in the age of information, ignorance is a choice". Noting that the author of the quote was fairly ignorant himself, the post goes into detail on how the complexities of modern life, technology and science have only made it harder for the average person to grasp it all.

The result is that people are finding it hard to grow up and become adults, never mind obtain enough information to be adequately informed about the world and unclouded by falsehoods and online mutterings by amateurs. Concluding that "ignorance is an accident of birth, not a choice", the post notes with great irony that the unlimited ability to self-publish is to blame as "If anyone can tell you how the world works, no-one can".

Also of mention is the technological singularity, at which people hand over all governance and control of human knowledge to machines as it is too complicated for them to manage it anymore.


The clubof.info Blog

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Refugees are the west's fault, inevitable

The Blog


The "refugee crisis" is the fault of western regimes, such as the US and Britain, Mont Order members say.


In the text version of an online discussion held by the Mont Order back in February, the future of migration is discussed. L'Ordre offers the view that the refugee crisis really is a crisis (contrary to the comments of other members who see this as an exaggerated description). Furthermore, the west caused it by waging destructive wars.

The relentless US and western meddling, arms supplies, funding trails and other types of intervention by the west in Syria to support another fake "color revolution" are one such destructive war, a more subtle version of the aggression against Iraq seen in 2003.

L'Ordre emphasized that this makes the west responsible for the fate of the refugees fleeing the conflict zones it created. L'Ordre said back in February:
you can either be completely isolated from the events in which case you take no responsibility and no responsibility over any of the people. Or else you get heavily involved in which case you become responsible for all those people. In a way the West by being involved in Syria is responsible for a lot of these people. That's the way I see it. It's responsible for them fleeing that area because of the level of intervention
It puts a burden on the west to allow refugees into their countries, if the west can learn to accept that their wars have displaced so many people.


The clubof.info Blog

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15 April 2016

Anti-encryption to destroy Silicon Valley

The Blog


What will happen if a recent draft anti-encryption bill gets passed in the US? No less than the evisceration of America's tech industry.


Prepared by US Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, the "bill to require the provision of data in an intelligible format..." demands US tech companies create vulnerabilities to allow encryption to be easily broken. Commenting that the idea seems to work off delusions that only law-abiding American companies could possibly encrypt anything, Garrison Center Director Thomas L. Knapp believes "this bill is custom-made to destroy the US tech industry".

According to the Garrison Center analysis of April 12, such efforts are doomed to relocate all credible companies specializing in encryption offshore. The law will stimulate foreign developers to race ahead in providing encryption services in other countries where they are safe from the authoritarian meddling of the US regime. Not only would this improve the standing of other countries and diminish the US regime in terms of liberty, but it would likely cause the US economy to tank.

It will get a lot worse for the US if this bill becomes a reality. As well as undermining the faith of US consumers in their own tech industry and forcing them to look to foreign companies for privacy protections, the bill is utterly useless as kind of defense against terrorism. Effective encryption is simply a mathematical certainty at this point, and will continue to be abundantly available to everyone from terrorists to essentially any regular citizen trying to avoid surveillance.

However, the US regime will never accept the reality that there is anything it can't control, the analysis continues. According to Knapp, "Nothing’s more important to a politician than believing he or she is in control".

The US regime is so infatuated with the idea of full-spectrum dominance over its own people that it will be unable to resist meddling in the tech industry. It will happen even if this bad course causes the US economy to tank, as industry flees abroad.


The clubof.info Blog

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Mont Order conference presentation

The Blog


Capturing some of the feelings of the main online authors of the Mont Order society on current events, a new conference presentation is available.


This conference presentation, published to the Academia.edu website, offers much of the text originating at a February 2016 conference by members of the disparate Mont Order.

Discussed in the jointly authored presentation are a number of issues as follow:
  • Introduction
  • Migration and scapegoating
  • Future of migration
  • Future of migrants
  • Future of Europe
  • Future of the Kurdish people
  • Future of citizenship
  • Origins of the Syrian Conflict

While for now the presentation is still in a draft stage, it is being additionally published to L'Ordre's Mont Order shared website lordre.net. Subscribe to the newsletter there to receive the rest of the presentation in parts.

As always, Mont Order members condemned US wars in the Middle East, while looking at the origins of conflict and the singular guilt of western regimes for causing the extensive loss of life.


The clubof.info Blog

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12 April 2016

'Anti-Trumpism' over the top: academic

The Blog


Writing in a commentary at the start of April, left wing historical social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein wrote that the rhetoric against US presidential candidate Donald Trump is highly exaggerated, and Trump would not be a "catastrophe" if elected.


Donald Trump is primarily no threat to liberals or the Democratic Party, but to entrenched GOP elites, who are highly distressed by him not committing to their agenda (in fact, Wallerstein believes Trump has no ideological agenda at all, and that's why he is loathed so much). The expected GOP candidates have been cast aside by Trump in the presidential nomination race, losing all hope in their party's support base as it rallies around this loose cannon.

Dismissing any theory about Trump as a menace to human rights, women and other issues of grave concern to liberal commentators, Wallerstein's April 1st analysis, "Anti-Trumpism", points out that Trump seems to retract many statements he makes on controversial subjects. What this means, Wallerstein says, is that Trump actually doesn't care whatsoever about conservative issues such as religion, abortion or immigration. He has no particular agenda at all, although he does appeal to the Republican support base's favorite slogans and ideas with the goal to win.

Extract from the Wallerstein commentary relating to Trump foreign policy:
Look at all the hints he has thrown out about his actual agenda. He does not intend to send troops on the ground anywhere. He does not intend to support so-called free trade treaties. He does not intend to revoke the diplomatic opening to Cuba or the agreement with Iran. He is for a bi-state solution in Israel/Palestine. He will not change Social Security. He... is open to increasing taxes on the truly wealthy.
So while many in the Republican leadership have reasons to fear Trump's wrath if he is triumphant, a Trump Presidency should be of no concern to the political left and possibly even favorable to left wing forces such as the anti-war movement.


The clubof.info Blog

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Are the Panama Papers a conspiracy?

The Blog


Although the "leaks" known as the Panama Papers are considered a big story across the world, some are critical of their value and the true forces behind the story.


UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the tax avoidance exposed therein is only the "tip of the iceberg". Meanwhile, many western publications have obsessively tried to implicate Russian President Vladimir Putin in the tax avoidance scandals resulting from the Panama Papers, despite the complete absence of any reference to him in them.

The Papers are already credited with causing the resignation of Iceland's leader, and of stimulating mass protests urging the British regime's PM Cameron to resign immediately.

There is even a conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin himself orchestrated the Panama Papers, with the lack of US figures named in the leak indicating a high level form of blackmail by Russian intelligence agencies threatening to bring down the US regime or businesses using the scandal. This, according to the conspiracy theory, explains why Putin is not incriminated in the documents, yet neither are US officials and business figures.

Less ridiculous is the view, propagated by WikiLeaks and various hacktivist-aligned experts, that the Panama Papers are too heavily redacted, and that this has been done to the benefit of the US. The leaks also appear to have been sponsored by US-aligned figures and evidence suggests they are "engineered" to benefit the US. The release of the Papers was not a chaotic act of liberation like WikiLeaks' release of US diplomatic cables causing massive fallout for the US regime across the world.


WikiLeaks has itself been asserting via Twitter that the Panama Papers exclude US businessmen and officials from any blame because they are designed mainly to destabilize other countries to serve the US regime's hegemony over them. This view later got cited by Putin himself.


The clubof.info Blog

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8 April 2016

US isolated by its own savage aggression

The Blog


Responding to the idea that US libertarians are "isolationists" because they oppose the repeated acts of aggression by the US regime against other countries, Thomas Knapp wrote that in fact libertarians believe in an interconnected world.


The claim that politicians who oppose US and western wars of choice are "isolationists" is commonly repeated in political debates and rhetoric. Knapp, as always, has an effective counterargument to such nonsense.

Knapp wrote at the Garrison Center website on 2 April"we support, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “friendship and commerce with all nations, entangling alliances with none,” where real isolationists have historically opposed not just foreign wars but foreign commerce, calling for protectionist trade and immigration policies". This is, of course Knapp's idea of libertarianism, more closely aligned with the views expressed at the Center for a Stateless Society and less the bulk of members of the Libertarian Party.

In addition, Knapp quotes John McAfee, who is once again quoted below:
“I think isolationism is taking on the role of world policeman, making us a separate entity from the rest of the world. We’re the policemen and you guys are the people that we police. … Dropping bombs on families where mothers and fathers are killed, or brothers and sisters. I would be angry too. You would be angry too. So it is not isolationism to say that we need to bring our troops home, or that we need to stop interfering in the affairs of foreign nations. It is reality and practicality.”
With the above effectively summing up how the US regime is stupidly isolating itself and constantly creating and refining its own enemies with its continuous aggression, Knapp concludes Hillary Clinton and other presidential candidates "with their Caligula-style approach to foreign policy — “let them hate us so long as they fear us” — are the real isolationists."

The disastrous effects of America's self-imposed isolation can even be seen in Europe, where badly conceived US-led sanctions to suppress Russia's resurgent economy are failing, cause more harm and multiplying resentment towards the US in Europe now bordering on revolt against US control of Europe.


The clubof.info Blog

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"Visions" (Lifeboat Foundation, 2015)

The Blog


Prior to this blog's Harry J. Bentham review of the Lifeboat Foundation book Prospects for Human Survival, a review went up at h+ Magazine of an additional Lifeboat book called Visions of the Future.


Both books were published in 2015. Whereas Visions brings together many different futurist authors' works into a single book, Prospects was the sole work of mathematician Willard Wells. Prospects focused mainly on the idea of existential risks rather than future prosperity.

In the March 31 review of Visions at leading transhumanist publication h+ Magazine, the verdict given is positive, expressing that it "belongs on the bookshelves of anyone trying to get acquainted with what futurism, and more so the Lifeboat Foundation, are about".

Great attention goes to Metcalfe's Enernet theory already mentioned in earlier posts. Of this, the h+ Magazine review states:
Jose Cordeiro‘s essay contribution to the book draws attention to the idea of the Enernet, which has been of great interest to me. Ethernet creator Robert Metcalfe’s idea, the Enernet would be part of the “Energularity”, a “global energy network” that would dispense free energy in much the way the internet dispenses free information today. It would, Cordeiro predicts, “positively transform humanity by increasing the global standard of living and connecting everybody around the planet” (p. 596). My own prediction is that providing free energy from distributed sources would be enormously empowering to impoverished communities and isolated, poor countries.
Despite this, various technological advances in energy storage and a revolution in manufacturing may need to occur to really produce such empowering results, the review speculates.


The clubof.info Blog

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5 April 2016

Prospects for Human Survival (review)

Harry J. Bentham at the Blog


As a mathematician, Willard Wells provides much of his thought in probabilities as in his other book, Apocalypse When?, in Prospects for Human Survival. As scientifically valid as it may seem, there is reason to be skeptical of such an approach. It is hard to account for the proliferation of unknowns using probabilities based on current data.


No study of existing firepower in 1943 or 1944 would have told you that bombs would be able to blow up entire cities in a single blast by 1945. The humanity-killing forces of the future will be equally sudden and unexpected. They may suddenly emerge and destroy us all tomorrow, or they may never emerge. They could be developed in secrecy, as the Manhattan Project was, making any predictions based on what we do know unhelpful. Often, such things impose themselves on civilization without any omens, invented and used recklessly before they are even known to be dangerous even to the wisest and most skilled thinkers.

In the domain of atomically precise manufacturing (APM) or nanotechnology (nanotech) as it is commonly called, Wells correctly predicts new means of assassination (p. 67-69) by programming tiny robots to kill with poison. Remarkably, he then fails to acknowledge that governments would be the biggest abusers of such technology, instead arguing that giving even more authoritarian powers and invasive surveillance technologies to states (p. 91-92) is the only solution to such threats.

Consider the behavior of governments in the modern day. Although it is not law, they seem bound by an instruction to seek out, possess and use to maximum lethality and invasiveness any technology they find. They did this with the internet. No-one who made the internet or smart phones possible saw them as a way of having a bug or a camera installed in everyone's home, a way of quickly judging who to detain or assassinate to protect a regime. But governments still managed to make this nightmare possible.

The "grey goo" ecophagy (ecosphere-eating) nanotech disaster scenario presented by Robert A. Freitas is given some attention by Wells (p. 69). This is the scenario in which microscopic robots are capable of reproducing independently using whatever matter they encounter, and proceed to "eat" the world - or more specifically the biosphere, bringing an end to life as we know it on Earth. He argues, correctly, that this danger exists (albeit extremely unlikely) but that it cannot be averted by any ban on nanotech. Such a ban might only encourage more dangerous activities to be undertaken covertly, without sufficient review or intervention by the scientific community.

Wells asserts that there must be regulation of emerging nanotechnology to prevent or detect early the formation of such a disaster. This position in itself can be rejected for the same reasons as the hypothetical ban. Heavy regulation would only have the same result of pushing risk-prone entrepreneurs to working covertly, thus the danger of "irresponsible development" proliferates exactly as it would under the nose of any government ban. More probably, having maximum freedom coupled with transparency in the development of nanotech would be the safest route, as this way everything may be seen and the "good guys" can create defenses in time, as Wells encourages.

The best defense against runaway nanotechnology may be the fact that there is no rationale for someone in search of profit to produce self-replicating robots, as Wells himself points out:

"No sane robot manufacturer working for profit would make a self-replicant on their own because their market vanishes the moment their customers start giving away surplus units (just as people give away surplus kittens)." (p. 70)

So there is no reason for corporations to make the "grey goo" creating robots, at least when we look at it as a problem of self-replicating machines. It is perhaps possible, though, that some tiny refining or mining robots could uncontrollably malfunction and begin mining or cutting up everything they come into contact with, in a belief they are collecting minerals. If they had been deployed on a large scale by a mining company to process tons of ore, they might not need the ability to replicate in order to cause massive destruction in the surrounding environment.

Wells repeatedly imagines "terrorists" being the ultimate agents behind any possible technological threat emerging in the future, but often this seems close-minded or ignores far more obvious culprits. He writes, "Terrorists want self-replicators; legitimate users want factories making factories". This is based on the assumption that "legitimate" means commercially-minded, and anything else must be irrational terrorism. However, what of state agencies? The most powerful scientific end engineering corps today, those making the greatest strides in technology and paving the way for the corporations, are not profit-hungry corporations but state agencies. Self-replicators would almost certainly be needed in space colonization, so NASA (not ISIS) are the most likely ones to place an order for self-replicating robots.

Genetic engineering and its more advanced cousin, synthetic biology, could present similar threats of consumption or infestation of the environment. Wells offers a fascinating hypothetical scenario in which some type of manmade infestation (whether biological or technological) causes the destruction of vital marine ecosystems and destroys more than half the world's oxygen supply (p. 74-78). Wells postulates "conspirators" might seek to do this intentionally. It is such a specific event that an accident seems unlikely to cause it. However, this belief in exceedingly nasty and yet highly capable inventors ought to be rejected. It is not even clear how any terrorist would benefit from doing this. No extremist ideology exists, or has existed, that would want to destroy the world's oceans and make everyone sluggish through lack of oxygen, so it seems strange to theorize about this scenario at all.

Much like the above unlikely scenario is the "mad scientist" germ attack hypothesis, which is hardly valid from any historical perspective. The idea holds that a "mad scientist" might plot to destroy humanity by engineering a virus (p. 79). However, there is no real-life example of an evil scientist of the kind found in movies and comic books, so it does not make sense to ever expect there to be any in the future.

Within Prospects for Human Survival, little attention is given to biological threats. Biological agents have been intentionally designed to destroy entire continents' food supplies, and could be a very real threat to human survival if ever used, even coming back to wipe out the side that deployed the weapon in the first place. J. Craig Venter's discovery of how to artificially synthesize entire new genomes and invent and patent new living organisms is possibly the most consequential discovery of the century, and is not mentioned at all.

Wells' attitude towards surviving nuclear war and disaster seems ill considered. The talk of preserving humanity's seed using underground survival bunkers stocked with plenty of women for breeding purposes is something right out of Dr Strangelove. Wells argues that it doesn't matter if the wealthiest one percent (likely the ones who started the war) are the only ones who get to escape into these bunkers.

The political rationale for expenditures to save humanity's genetic future in the first place is not shared by Wells. Who told him anyone wants to save humanity? Most people actually have no interest in it, and would only be concerned by the more unpleasant scenarios in which they would personally undergo pain (e.g. shredded by a swarm of malfunctioning nanorobots). Couples voluntarily exterminate their genetic future all the time using contraceptives, and for worry over finance and the world's overpopulation. Wells (and for that matter Steven Hawking, who also comments that humanity must avoid extinction) have offered no argument for why human genes are special enough to be worth saving. For most people, whether humanity endures as a species is just irrelevant, and Prospects for Human Survival fails to appeal against their philosophy.

Although I concur with Wells on a number of issues about science, I disagree with many of the book's recommendations and fail to see the rationale behind others. Although there is no good reason to fear the development of artificial intelligence at this stage, Wells' kind of authoritarian artificial intelligence appointed to watch over and farm humanity for its safety is not enticing and seems dystopian (p. 91-92).

Futurism should not be about making excuses for concentrated authority, controlled scarcity, and hubs of control and supervision. We should be making excuses for total equality, total abundance, total freedom, and humanity's ultimate achievement of technological adulthood. If humanity is "irresponsible", it should not be treated like a group of children, but raised to adulthood, even at grave risk.


Harry J. Bentham

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Arab Spring as a violent failure in Syria

The Blog


Reflecting on the Syrian Civil War, now in the final stages with defeat looming for all the armed factions except the Syrian government and the Kurds, Zena Chamas wrote about the fate of the so-called Arab Spring.


With the exception of Tunisia, the Arab Spring simply didn't really bring changes in the Arab world and can be considered a failure, the journalist noted in a recent post.

In Egypt, the result of the Arab Spring was the ousting of dictator Hosni Mubarak, but the joy lasted very shortly before the new ruler Mohammed Morsi began to suppress dissent, and was himself overthrown after popular demonstrations culminated in a coup. The new ruler, President Sisi, comes from the same clique of generals to which Mubarak belonged, establishing himself as a dictator and simply continuing Mubarak's legacy. In the end, Egypt showed that it simply lacks any democratic candidate to rule and is only capable of being the domain of one dictator or another.

Syria was an even worse failure, with "rebels" quickly degenerating into vicious terrorists eager to abduct and murder the very same western journalists who supported them when they first took up arms against Bashar al-Assad's so-called "tyranny". In reality, as Zena Chamas implies, the "revolution" in Syria was violent and abortive from the beginning, just as driven by a goal to force the Syrian people into submission as any dictatorship. The losers of the conflict, once again, are simply the common people, who lack any credible person to construct a democracy for them.

Left out of this analysis is Libya, which is possibly the worst failure of all, although US State Department head Hillary Clinton was obsessed with the carnage in the country as her greatest victory. Today, Libya is still in a civil war, largely thanks to Clinton and her hatred of Gaddafi, which came at great expense to the Libyan people in the end.

Also noted is the fact the Arab Spring was an American phrase in the first place. At all times, the US propped up fake uprisings and repeatedly tried to install Americans (exiles who had lived in America for decades) as the democratic representatives of the people of Syria, Libya and other countries.

As good as democracy can be in theory, it cannot be imposed on other societies by force or propped up by the CIA. It can never be upheld by the deceptive and blatantly fake democracy of the US.


The clubof.info Blog

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1 April 2016

Clinton to be "forced to resign" if elected

The Blog


Writing at OpEdNews recently, the Garrison Center's Thomas L. Knapp launched criticisms of US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.


Noting the scandal surrounding Clinton's use of a private email address while working as US Secretary of State, Knapp suggested it is possible Clinton will face prosecution even if she is elected as President. If winning the top job doesn't shield her from the sword of justice, she could be forced to resign shortly thereafter.

This is an example of how serious breaches of security - no matter how petty these seem for a name as big as Hillary Clinton's - should be taken into account by voters.

147 FBI agents are presently investigating Clinton's use of a private email address for state purposes. Prosecution is not off the table. In view of this, Knapp asks, "Do Democrats really want to go all in on Hillary Clinton’s narcissistic sense of self-entitlement, especially when it’s looking more and more likely that the next card the dealer turns up will be grand jury indictments?"

The scandal surrounding Clinton's emails cannot be underestimated, despite how dismissive she and her supporters have been of it. "Even if Clinton herself escapes prosecution, it’s worth remembering that Richard Nixon was never indicted either, but was forced to resign after several of his closest aides were", Knapp warns US voters in the post at the Garrison Center.

Also worth considering is that, while this reckless use of a private email address may seem a minor infraction by someone as high up as Secretary of State when the offense is reported to the public, it is sufficient grounds to get any other civil servant sacked and barred from the job. Any government worker will tell you so.

Why should a presidential candidate be excluded from the penalties applied to other government workers or job candidates? Arguably, the most important job in the United States needs to exercise even harsher penalties against candidates than all the lower jobs in government departments - not let people off just because their name seems too big to be prosecuted.


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Govt cowers under benefits protest

The Blog


A London protest against homicidal Tory disability benefit reforms was silenced on the air, with absurd reasons being offered by UK state and corporate media, Steve Topple writes.


Accusing the government of acting like a vicious mob while protesters assembled peacefully, Topple noted the protest was nevertheless a "triumph".

In the account, which appears at the blog Mutterings from the Left, skepticism about Britain's supposed democratic system is expressed. "MP’s are permitted to shout, hurl insults, espouse lies and propaganda and generally behave like a braying mob in one part of Parliament", Topple writes, while at the same time the very voters these rulers get their mandate from are not allowed to stage a peaceful benefits protest using banners nearby.

Commenting on the disaster of Tory benefits reforms, which were cruel enough to be mentioned by Iain Duncan Smith as a reason for his recent resignation, facts are pointed out by Topple:
  • "1000s of individuals have died after being declared “fit for work”"
  • "countless more have committed suicide after being left destitute by sanctions"
  • "rough sleeping has doubled since 2010"
  • "500,000 more children are in poverty.""
  • "£30 a week cut to ESA"
  • "the chaos that is Universal Credit"
  • "unnecessary stress surrounding the move from DLA to PIP"
  • "800,000 people are set to lose out because of clandestine changes to the tax credit system"
  • "Independent Living Fund that was abolished last year"
  • "there are already two UN investigations into possible human rights breaches by this Government going on (due to their “benefits reforms”)"

Topple says the UK mainstream media is completely ignoring these facts and refusing the cover them, as well as the benefits protest.


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