Say Anything Blog

Here, here, and here.

Although tool use is known to occur in species ranging from naked mole rats to owls, chimpanzees are the most accomplished tool users. The modification and use of tools during hunting, however, is still considered to be a uniquely human trait among primates. Here, we report the first account of habitual tool use during vertebrate hunting by nonhumans. At the Fongoli site in Senegal, we observed ten different chimpanzees use tools to hunt prosimian prey in 22 bouts. This includes immature chimpanzees and females, members of age-sex classes not normally characterized by extensive hunting behavior. Chimpanzees made 26 different tools, and we were able to recover and analyze 12 of these. Tool construction entailed up to five steps, including trimming the tool tip to a point. Tools were used in the manner of a spear, rather than a probe or rousing tool. This new information on chimpanzee tool use has important implications for the evolution of tool use and construction for hunting in the earliest hominids, especially given our observations that females and immature chimpanzees exhibited this behavior more frequently than adult males.

Chimpanzees have been seen using spears to hunt bush babies, U.S. researchers said on Thursday in a study that demonstrates a whole new level of tool use and planning by our closest living relatives.

Perhaps even more intriguing, it was only the females who fashioned and used the wooden spears, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani of Iowa State University reported.

Bertolani saw an adolescent female chimp use a spear to stab a bush baby as it slept in a tree hollow, pull it out and eat it.

Two notable aspects of the behavior observed in the Fongoli group were that on the one hand, it is rare for chimpanzees to consume prosimian prey—in other study sites, red colobus monkeys, hunted mainly by males, are the chimps’ most common prey—and on the other hand, the tool use appeared to be primarily restricted to females and immature individuals. These two behavior characteristics could both be related to the fact that the Fongoli community inhabits a mosaic savannah that is relatively dry, and where red colobus monkeys are absent. This habitat may promote efforts—such as the observed tool use—to obtain meat through other means. The authors point out that the females and immature chimpanzees using the spear-like tools appear to be exploiting a niche relatively ignored by males, an observation that supports a previous hypothesis that female hominids played a role in the evolution of the earliest tool technology and suggests that this technology may have included tools for hunting.

I thought the girls came from the guys rib or something? Hominids - a satanic, socialist conspiracy? Some one, say it ain’t so...!

Abortion. Wow. Its a charged topic. I love it (and think its a good topic). Anyway, there have been plenty of nice arguments recently over it involving many different angles and viewpoints.

My basic stance is as follows: At the time of fertilization and shortly afterward, when we are talking about a two or three celled thing, it is clearly not a person. It is, in fact, a couple cells that just came from people, but it is not one yet. This seems pretty clear to me, primarily because I am not willing to extend my definition of persons to include two-celled things. Beyond the two-celled point there seems to me to be a gray area as far as the line drawing is concerned. What I mean is: At birth, it is clearly a person, albeit a small and slimy one, but there is no clear and distinct point at which to draw a line before which the thing was not a person and after which (s)he was a person. Due to the fact that the mother is clearly a person, deserving of rights, and the two celled thing is not; the mother’s positive autonomy to do what she wishes with herself is clearly more appropriately upheld than the two-celled thing’s negative autonomy (freedom to not be messed with). Furthermore, the gray area and the difficulties with the line drawing extend, in my mind, the time period during the in uterus growth that this same mother’s rights first situation should persist. Because I am willing to admit that it becomes a human before it ‘enters the world’, let’s say I’m against third trimester abortion. It is a consideration between something that may be deserving of rights (fetus) and something that clearly is (mother).

The opposition not only has a problem with aborting the more then two-celled thing, they also have a problem with the abortion of the two-celled thing which, if they don’t qualify it as a person (which most appear to), is deserving of the right to life that trumps the mother’s positive autonomy to do what she wants with herself (namely choose to abort). The two-celled thing’s rights limit the mother’s positive autonomy in this way. If I was to adopt this position, I would stress that the two-celled thing has ‘future interests’, but I do not adopt this position and have heard nothing about ‘future interests’ or the like. It is a matter of it actually being a living person and of it deserving these rights, or so it has been argued. To paraphrase Rob, its obviously murder and its obviously wrong. ‘Plan B’ would obviously be opposed by everyone in this camp because it ‘murders’ a two-or-more-celled thing.

So then I started thinking of how to wiggle around a bit and attack the ‘popular position’ around here… that this two-celled thing deserves rights. So I started thinking of ways in which we waste these two celled things en masse, like the Chinese do birds, without a moral consideration at all. Then I thought of IUDs.

The presence of a device in the uterus prompts the release of leukocytes and prostaglandins by the endometrium. These substances are hostile to both sperm and eggs; the presence of copper increases this spermicidal effect. The same effect is believed to harm developing embryos. While the primary mechanism of the IUD is spermicidal/ovicidal, post-fertilization mechanisms are believed to contribute significantly to their effectiveness.

On top of that, the device actually stretches the uterus out a bit so that the walls aren’t wrinkly. This prevents the (autonomous) fertilized egg from lodging in the wrinkles and growing, assuming it makes it past all the other IUD horrors. It gets expelled - murdered! My God! Here’s the en masse murder that I was looking for.

So I guess that means Rob and his camp are opposed to IUDs and Plan B, when properly informed of their mechanics. The IUD must be opposed, in fact, because if they claimed the IUD was ok and sited the fact their was nothing more than passive, preemptive ‘disposal’ or whatever, then they might be susceptible to having to also say a hypothetical device that is surgically installed ahead of time that grinds the baby up into pieces right before it comes out into the world is also acceptable. For them there is no difference in ‘person hood’ or autonomy between the two-celled victim of the IUD and the baby liquefied by this hypothetical in-utero blender.

So perhaps I haven’t made an advance although I began thinking about mandated health care for expectant mothers. Let’s rehash something fundamental to the other camp first:

The opposition has a problem with the abortion of the two-celled thing which is deserving of a right to life that trumps the mother’s positive autonomy to do what she wants with herself.

So we can look at abortion as merely one example of the mother’s positive autonomy. Rob and his camp clearly feel there is a strong need for laws to enforce this limit on the mother’s autonomy. The mother though, remains free to do many other things that will kill the fetus; including but not limited to the following: alcohol abuse, malnutrition, abuse of ‘legal speed’, or any other number of harmful things, some of which can potentially arise from the financial inability to secure food or proper health care. I am just wondering where the limits of the enforcement of this little two-celled person’s rights stop? Are we talking mandated healthcare here Rob? Are we talking about funded rehab programs for all the crack mothers who will otherwise have stillborn babies or, failing that, will have retarded, braindead babies that will become wards of the state that we all pay someone $35-40 bucks an hour to care for? How much governmental intrusion into these mothers’ rights are you willing to sling for this two-celled person?

I am sincerely interested.

See here.

A High Court judge has ruled that Zambia must pay a substantial sum to a so-called “vulture fund”.

British Virgin Islands-based Donegal International paid less than $4m (£2m) for a debt the African nation owed, but sued Zambia for a $42m repayment.

It said its bill was the result of interest and costs, but the judge has indicated that Zambia should pay less.

The ruling has angered anti-debt campaigners, who say it will undermine Zambia’s plans for poverty reduction.

The judge ruled against Zambia’s application to dismiss Donegal’s claim, but at the same time proposed to end a freeze of Zambian assets secured by the fund.

Donegal, however, will have a chance to argue the case for a continued freeze of Zambian assets.

According to BBC economics reporter Andrew Walker, people familiar with the case believe that the judge will order Zambia to pay Donegal between $10m and $20m, less than half what Donegal sought.

Lawyers for Zambia, however, said the judgement was a victory for Zambia.

Janet Legrand of DLA Piper called the ruling “fantastic news for both the government of Zambia and its people”.

The fight against Donegal’s claim had been “entirely vindicated and [marked] a significant milestone in the efforts of [the Zambian government] to fight corruption and maintain a stable economic course”.

In 1979, the Romanian government lent Zambia money to buy Romanian tractors.

Zambia was unable to keep up the payments and in 1999, Romania and Zambia negotiated to liquidate the debt for $3m.

But before the deal could be finalised, Donegal International, which is part owned by US-based Debt Advisory International stepped in and bought the debt from Romania for less than $4m.

Debt Advisory International founder Michael Sheehan was confronted by the BBC’s Newsnight programme before the court ruling, but said only: “No comment. I’m in litigation. It’s not my debt.”

DAI is proud to rip off the poor for huge amounts, creating wonderful conditions for terrorism and militancy to grow naturally.

Original stories here, here, and here. PDF of DoD report summary here.

Former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith is under fire again. A new Pentagon report suggests that his office manipulated pre-war intelligence to heighten fears of a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida.

We’ve heard this before, yet many here at SA go to great pains to argue that no, in fact there was no disinformation campaign before the Iraq war coming out of the Pentagon policy offices, dressed up as intelligence, inflating the case for us to go to Iraq because the CIA would not tote the line or offer intel that aligned with the prior intentions in the White House and the Pentagon to go into Iraq. Feith not only denies supplying the information to the White House as ‘intelligence’, he calls his office’s disinformation campaign surrounding the intel ‘criticism’ of the CIA’s intel.

...the office gave top Bush administration officials assessments that were not supported by available intelligence — such as asserting that there was a mature symbiotic relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

But Feith, who headed the Pentagon policy office, disputes…

“The criticism that is being directed now at my former office is because my office was trying to prevent an intelligence failure.

“We had people in the Pentagon who thought that the CIA’s speculative assessments were not, were not of top quality, they were not raising all the questions they should raise and considering all the information they should consider.”

So Feith would have us believe he was preventing an ‘intelligence failure’ by presenting faux intel to the White House as fact. This, to Feith, is ‘criticism’. Notice he makes no effort to construe the info about the Iraq - Osama connection coming out of his office as being true. HE KNOWS IT WAS BULLSHIT LIES. That’s why he is calling it ‘criticism’ now. This reminds me of one of my favorite maxims, “you can’t polish a turd”. Criticism! Hee hee hee.

But according to acting Pentagon Inspector Thomas Gimble, who defended the report before the panel, the problem was not the criticism Feith’s office aimed at the CIA. The problem was that the office presented only one side of highly controversial intelligence assessments.

“We don’t believe they followed the prescribed intelligence vetting processes,” Gimble told the panel. “And they had information that went up that was not vetted and it was not shown to be divergent from the other in these briefing charts.”

Alright alright. They are liars. Big fat liars. This is why lots of people have issues with the Iraq conflict. For those of you frustrated that some of us don’t appear to be “supporting the troops” with our opinion the US shouldn’t be in Iraq, please direct your frustration at Feith and others in positions of power who take advantage and manipulate for interests other than those of the citizens of the country they are serving… like Larry Franklin.

Q: ...first of all, who is Larry Franklin?

A: He’s a colonel is the Air Force Reserves and a career analyst with the Defense Department, who served in the Pentagon’s policy division as an expert specifically on Iran. He worked for Undersecretary Douglas Feith, who’s one of the neoconservative hard-liners who’s been pushing for a tougher stance toward Iran. And a while back the Pentagon confirmed that Larry Franklin met in 2001 with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer. And you may recall that name from the Iran Contra scandal, where he was a big figure. The goal of that meeting may have been to back Iranian dissident groups in Iran.

Q: And what’s he accused of doing in this case?

A: Well, this case involves charges in an FBI affidavit that was unsealed today. Franklin is accused of meeting with two men, who are not named, but we know them to be two former officials with AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a very powerful lobbying group here in Washington. And over that lunch, in a restaurant outside of Washington, he verbally shared top-secret information with them. The information had something to do with threats to US forces in Iraq. It isn’t spelled out exactly.

Press reports have said that the threats may have had to do with Iranian-backed groups in Iraq that want to attack US forces and that some of that information was later passed on to Israel. But none of that is mentioned in the complaint against Larry Franklin. It just says that it was information about threats to US forces.

In addition, the FBI says that Franklin shared classified information with a reporter. And FBI agents also said they found 83 other classified documents at his home in West Virginia. Many of those were top secret. He had no permission to store those documents at home or to share the information with all those people I mentioned. And that’s why he’s facing a criminal charge today.

Q: ...what would the goal of this alleged disclosure have been? Was it to benefit Israel in some way?

A: Well, there’s been a lot of speculation about that, and the indictment doesn’t really spell that out. But the reports about this information before the indictment said that it may have been destined to Israel, so that Israel would get an upper hand in its efforts to push a harder line by the US against Iran because Israel is very concerned about Iran’s nuclear programs. The indictment only says, however, that aside from sharing the information with the two AIPAC officials, that he disclosed information to an unnamed foreign official. So we don’t know whether the Israeli Embassy is involved in any way. The Israeli Embassy has denied any sort of involvement in any of this. And, in fact, it says it hasn’t spied on the US since the arrest and conviction of Jonathan Pollard in the mid-’80s.

So, we went into Iraq on fabricated, unverified intel that just so happened to support the ultimate goals of Feith and Wolfowitz, namely going into Iraq. Now all the same people want to go to Iran. Mike Leeden has been frothing at the mouth for years over it… and now we have people from a policy office in the Pentagon being caught handing over info on our troop vulnerabilities to Israel, someone who definitely wants us to go into Iran. Furthermore it appears the whole guys life is strewn with various ‘top secret’ documents that shouldn’t be where they are. Perhaps some of the ‘traitor’ talk directed at the NYTimes and other left-aligned interests over disclosing or reporting intel info should be directed at the people in the Pentagon who are supplying Israel with documents on how to pressure the US into going into Iran for them.

If the White House and the Pentagon expect support for their wars, they have an obligation not to misinform the public. If they want the citizens to support the troops, they must do so also by handing down very serious punishments for traitors like Larry here and also by being very critical of Israel who is blatantly interested in getting us into Iran, no matter what needs to be done, including traipsing around with top secret intel about how to hurt our troops in Iraq.

Original here.

Nine hundred “battle-injured soldiers” who served in Iraq and Afghanistan officially owe the government $1.2 million. But many can’t afford to settle the debts and the government’s efforts to collect the money have “placed significant hardship” on some of the veterans, the Government Accountability Office reported today.

ABC News, which also got hold of the report in advance, told the tale of Army specialist Tyson Johnson. Seriously injured by a mortar blast, “his injuries forced him out of the military,” ABC reported, “and the Army demanded he repay an enlistment bonus of $2,700 because he’d only served two-thirds of his three-year tour. When he couldn’t pay, Johnson’s account was turned over to bill collectors. He ended up living out of his car when the Army reported him to credit agencies as having bad debts, making it impossible for him to rent an apartment.”

GAO recommends that Congress give the Pentagon more authority to forgive soldiers’ debts.

Jeez.

See here.

WOONSOCKET — A 36-year-old mother was arrested after getting entangled in a fight between her 14-year-old daughter and a female cousin at a school bus stop Friday afternoon.

Robin L. Sevigny, of 26 Bernice Ave., was charged with simple assault after she allegedly hit and slapped her niece, and then held the girl down while her daughter punched the girl at the corner of Rockland and South Main streets Friday afternoon.

Yea. Ok.

Woonsocket High School Principal George Nasuti said he was informed of the incident yesterday afternoon, and that neither of the students, who have not been suspended, was in school yesterday. Because the fight occurred outside of school grounds and after school hours, it is unclear what role school administrators will take, Nasuti said.

“I don’t know what responsibilities I have for the students,” he said.

Schools Supt. Maureen B. Macera said she will meet with Nasuti today to discuss the fight. She said the incident is further proof that young people need responsible adult role models in the community.

“I think it’s just very sad and unfortunate that adults are contributing to this conduct by not setting good examples,” she said.

Yea. Right.

So this superintendent goes on to suggest that Woonsocket have tax-payer funded parenting classes for shitty parents.

WHAT!?!

My suggestion is Mother-Daughter ‘Ultimate Fighting’ Championships or tag team wrestling for Woonsocket. Another mother daughter brawl happened there on Jan 10th at the middle school. There would be lots of participants and they could fund the parenting classes with ticket sales. It seems like every mother-daughter team in town is ready to brawl anyway. A chain link dome to fight in in some vacant lot won’t take too many tickets to recoup and I think they could have a simultaneous pay-per-view of the event on cable. This has some real $$ potential.

There has been a lot of heat surrounding the whole illegal alien debate of late. Well, for those Cubans still interested in defecting and becoming American, I have come up with a fool-proof method.

Living in the good ole USA is worth it! Work out, save up, buy that hot bikini, spend a little time shaving up, swim hard past all the sharks, and, when you get to the southern coast of Florida, make sure you arrive looking like this and you shouldn’t have any issues at all stateside:



Plenty of Cubans have had a difficult time, from those picked up ‘on the bridge’ and deported to poor little Elian, so make sure you make your arrival at your new home easy, care-free, and pleasurable for the Coast Guard or citizens nearby.

So the great victory for the fledgling Iraqi military this weekend in which they killed 300 al Qaeda linked terrorists turned out to actually be an air and ground reinforced operation in which the Iraqi military made costly errors in judgment and relied heavily on US air, and later disclosed ground, reinforcements during the fight. On top of that it is also revealed that the ‘al Qaeda linked’ terrorists were really cult-type Shiites out to cleanse the plains of opposition figures to the messiah who, of course we all know, was do this past Sunday. Their targets were the higher-ups in the Shiite strata and boy, these suckers were armed to the teeth (probably a little clue in the mystery of the 15,000 missing, untraceable, small arms in Iraq in early fall of last year). This is just yet more evidence that people who want to please messiahs sometimes do odd and illogical, even dangerous, things.

At any rate the media is now ironing out the details and the corrections for this ‘Iraqi Victory Over al Qaeda’ and the extent of our protection of the Shiite religious leaders and warlords has also been made blatantly obvious. It seems bizarre to me to be calling out Iran right and left about their meddling in Iraq if we were complacent to it from 2003 until early 2006 and that we are waging weekend mini-conflicts on behalf of the Iraqi military to protect Iran’s main influence conduits into Iraq, these Shiite higher-ups. Inter-Shiite fighting also makes me wonder which faction is more closely aligned with Iran. Any simple-minded Shiite religio-political entrepreneur knows that any significant power that is sustainable (mandate-wise) has to do with alliances and support that cuts the US out (ah, democracy). So what’s going on here? Who are our financed and trained Iraqi military (with air and ground support from us) fighting for here? And al Qaeda?

In reality lots of people very hot and heavy with Iran are being elected in Iraq. Religio-political entrepreneurs abound. So now I guess we are fighting the Shiite-Iraqi-Iranians on behalf of the Sunni terrorists and visa versa, fighting the Sunni terrorists and giving the Iranian-backed nut job death squads some leeway. Jeez. All the theory that must go into this stuff…

Personally I think a 10% increase in US forces will really help push this around the last corner and onto the homestretch. I mean then we can really start to win this… we just need to figure out which side we’re on other than our own (and Israel’s and Saudi Arabia’s).

It is popular, in partisan arguments, to accuse the other of lacking, mis-using or over-using either emotion or logic in their stance or argument. Often one hears Rush lambasting the left for being emotion driven and lacking the appropriate use of rationale which would lead any sentient being to accept the soundness and supremacy of his stance.
Personally I believe that any stance or opinion on a topic requires both emotion and rationale. I do not necessarily think there is one supreme or objectively correct mix of the two or end result of that mixture; moral position or stance. Humans are almost all sentient beings yet our means of acquiring knowledge, stances, information… is nonsensical. Many are taught, through the manipulation of emotion and rationale, that there is but one objective truth, et al. One can easily see that, with the manipulation of other fears or the exploitation of other lines of rationale, that sentient being may be taught to believe in an entirely different ontology, perceived objective truth, et cetera. Taking these simple things into account can ad a great amount of amusement to observing and partaking in partisan arguments where two or three sides all assert the supremacy of their stance without flinching.
The left is accused of too much emotion which leads them to policies that tax the people in order to take care of the segments of society that suffer more. It is often said, among the right, that those who can manage and even stifle their emotion when considering some questions of politics or policy are able to come up with superior stances. This line becomes very hypocritical when one juxtaposes it with the right’s views on abortion or capital punishment, both of which are extremely emotion-laden stances. The right (who wish to retain the, “we are rational and the left are emotion kooks") my point to religious texts or biological distinctions which ground the rationale behind their stance. Here though, the connection to the text is a predominantly emotional one and any ‘line drawing’ with respect to when something is a person and when something isn’t a person is arbitrary. Even if the ‘line drawing’ wasn’t arbitrary and there was a clear distinction, the left (who here I will assume to be pro-choice) must stifle some emotion about the baby in order to give the mother’s autonomy of choice primacy. Indeed the right often accuses them of being ‘baby killers’ and the like, a blatantly emotional accusation.
In short I am tired of seeing the left and the right accuse each other of being ‘emotional’ or ‘cold’ and ‘rational’ or ‘nuts’. In fact, I think both are true of both party’s policies and stances. Any worthwhile cognition must balance these two, and not necessarily in a certain manner or in certain proportions on various issues. Furthermore, no contentious issue has one correct answer. In an objective world (assuming you believe of such a world (as a result of emotion about perfectness and the rationale that something like this could potentially exist)) they might, but we live in a democracy where the loud din of argument is what we fight to protect. Sadly or not, as a result, each issue is fed to the dogs by the MSM and there are 10 or so incorrect positions, all in disbelief at the others’ stupidity and well… its all kinda funny I think.
Even funnier, to me, is the fact that one can arrive at truth through 100% bullshit. Consider the man traveling to A. He comes to an unmarked fork in the road and asks the farmer nearby which road will take him to A. The farmer informs him to go left, which he does, and he does not arrive at A. Now, through bullshit, the traveler knows the other fork in the road would have lead to A. What becomes really funny is when the traveler continues to travel down the wrong road or returns to the fork and takes the road to the left again. When that type of idiocy occurs, clearly there are emotional-rationale problems occurring. Often times though, there is undue griping and hypocrisy on both sides of the isle from emotional and irrational chauvinists (not in the sex discrimination sense).

Original article here.

President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that a unipolar world order cannot solve the mounting crises on the globe and Russia advocates a multipolar world.

Speaking after a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi in the southern resort of Sochi, Putin said that after the Cold War, “somebody had an illusion that the world is unipolar and all problems can be resolved from one center.”

“This is not so. The number of crises is mounting, and possibilities of their settlement are lessening,” he said, quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency.

Russia will independently determine its place in the world and seek a balanced and multipolar world order, Putin said.

Prodi, for his part, said there are many conflicts in the world that need to be settled, referring to tensions surrounding Iran, Iraq, the Middle East, Afghanistan and Somalia.

“There are a lot of open fronts in the world, and time has come to close at least one of them,” he said.

Source: Xinhua

My post on international relations a few weeks back seems almost pre-cognizant of Putin’s feelings. Maybe he was reading SA. What a ‘biter’ - he should at least give me some credit.

I was in New Jersey and New York City this weekend. It was cold! Here’s a few photos:

Manhattan as seen from Brooklyn heading north.

Looking east-northeast over Harlem from atop Morningside Park in the Columbia University vicinity.

The hole at ‘Ground Zero’ at night.

This book has been getting some attention since it was published and, well, that really bothers me for a few reasons. It was written by an nontenured lit professor and an Italian inmate and I feel its total bullshit, delusions of paranoid sci-fi influenced post-modernist libs. What follows is my refuting their basic ideas the best I can in three or four pages. ‘Empire’ and ‘society of control’ are used synonymously in the piece. Also ‘biopower’ is used as a kind of human-based mechanism whereby the empire can expand through a sort of homogenization (...or something - Its kinda difficult to deal with these kooks using their terminology). Also I apologize in advance for citing people like Foucault, who I know many or all of you take issue with, but one must meet and beat these bastards on their own playground. Enjoy.

------------------------------------------------

A ‘society of control’ does not characterize contemporary international politics. There are many things that seem to evidence the existence and spread of ‘Empire’; a transnational, decentralized, self-propagating entity of networks; but this evidence actually reinforces the traditional sovereign states model and traditional inter-state relations. While it is clear that some aspects of the ‘society of control’ idea are true; for example, we have seen a shift from the disciplinary, Cold War-style discrete social norms to more post-modern norms (Hart 178, Campbell 172, L. 12/7). Working against this is the current popularity of nationalism, reminiscent of the Cold War, which continues to reinforce state sovereignty. Furthermore, many states reject the idea of Empire and the proliferation of capitalism – many of these states are not isolated and interact in business and politics with states that would generally be tempting candidates for inclusion in the Empire. When these more powerful, ‘society of control’ states interact with anti-capitalist or more socialist states, the importance of the state status and sovereignty is reinforced through mutual recognition and the accompanying diplomatic protocols (Bull 263). Even transnational banks and businesses, entities that seem to be part of the key to extending the ‘Empire’, interact and do business only with and within sovereign states. It is the stability and presence of a traditional states-system that recognizes and allows the business or the bank access – in this way, phenomenon that can be perceived as the spread of the ‘Empire’ actually only can occur in the continued presence of the sovereign states-system (Bull 254, 262). If the ‘Empire’s’ prerogative to use force is based around the idea of maintaining a just outcome, the states-system must be recognized in order to determine the justness of any inter-regional relations, war, or exploitation (Hart 10, 18; L. 12/7). Ultimately, a ‘society of control’ is not desirable since it will remove the control from the populace (and its representatives) of any one region or country. While it is clear that under ‘Empire’ the entire globe obviously won’t have the same laws and cultural diversity will remain somewhat; a sacrifice of control, self-determination, and freedom would need to be made by the entire population of the ‘Empire’ – in short, it will be less just than the current international states-system, which is to say it will be a very grim result (L. 12/7). The question of the ‘Empire’s’ success will hinge on ideology and whether the ‘Empire’ has the ‘biopower’ required to instill widespread complacency in the global population (Hart 23).

(more...)

One of my paranoid friends made me aware of this. It is kinda bizarre. I don’t know what to make of it, but I thought some of you may find it interesting. Comments? Help me out here.

In international relations today the most powerful institution is balance of power (BOP). International law (IL) and diplomacy (D) have taken a back seat to the continual making and remaking of economic and political alliances to resist the dominant powers. BOP prevents weak states from being conquered or plundered by the strong (Brown 244). BOP’s goal is to allow states to survive and prevent the transformation of the global states system into an empire. This is similar to the goals of D and IL, institutions that also influence behavior between states, but D and IL are only able to become more influential in international relations when the most powerful states consent to IL, choose to engage in D, or are forced by a balance of power to recognize IL or to partake in D. Today, because powerful countries do not consent to IL or choose to engage in D, BOP is the default institution of international relations that keeps the most powerful countries in check and preserves the state system.

The BOP within the states system is an institution or set of norms and structures and not a specific administration – it is based on, and results from, the assumption that international law has no final global authority. BOP must be objective; it must actually exist, in addition to being subjective, or being perceived as existing by the people (Bull 99). A simple BOP between two states requires that the two states be fairly evenly matched in power, while a complex BOP can involve many inequities in power. Multiple lesser states can align to balance out a disproportionately large, powerful state – complex BOP is seen as being more stable than a simple two state BOP (98). When BOP is an institution used in international relations, it can allow D and IL to develop and gain power in the global states system. BOP can be seen as a default means to preserve the global states system when D and IL have failed. While peace might be a goal of IL or D, BOP’s goal is not peace as war is often required to maintain BOP. Naturally, BOP tends to operate in the favor of the great powers because preponderant states are not restricted from violating the rights of other states by IL or D (99-104). (more...)