Posted on 10/25/2002 12:14:19 AM PDT by jennyp
The Recent Nightclub Bombings in Bali Illustrate Just What the "War on Terror" Is Really About
On the night of Saturday, October 12--the second anniversary of the suicide bombing of the USS Cole, a year, month, and day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and mere days after terrorist attacks in Yemen, Kuwait, and the Philippines--two car bombs detonated outside neighboring nightclubs on the island of Bali, triggering a third explosive planted inside, and killing nearly 200 people (the majority of whom were Australian tourists), injuring several others, and redirecting the focus of the war against terror to Indonesia.
Also on the night of Saturday, October 12, the following bands and DJs were playing and spinning at several of Seattle's rock and dance clubs from Re-bar to Rock Bottom: FCS North, Sing-Sing, DJ Greasy, Michiko, Super Furry Animals, Bill Frisell Quintet, the Vells, the Capillaries, the Swains, DJ Che, Redneck Girlfriend, Grunge, Violent Femmes, the Bangs, Better Than Ezra, the Briefs, Tami Hart, the Spitfires, Tullycraft, B-Mello, Cobra High, Randy Schlager, Bobby O, Venus Hum, MC Queen Lucky, Evan Blackstone, and the RC5, among many, many others.
This short list, taken semi-randomly from the pages of The Stranger's music calendar, is designed to illustrate a point that is both facile and essential to reckoning the effects of the Bali bombings. Many of you were at these shows, dancing, smoking, drinking, talking, flirting, kissing, groping, and presumably enjoying yourselves, much like the 180-plus tourists and revelers killed at the Sari Club and Paddy's Irish Pub in Bali. Though no group has come forward to claim responsibility for the bombings, they were almost certainly the work of Muslim radicals launching the latest volley in the war against apostasy.
Whether the attacks turn out to have been the work of al Qaeda or one of the like-purposed, loosely connected, multicellular organizations that function in the region--groups like the Jemaah Islamiyah (an umbrella network that seeks a single Islamic state comprising Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore), the Indonesian Mujahedeen Council (led by the nefarious Abu Bakar Bashir), Laskar Jihad (which waged holy war on Christians in the Spice Islands before mysteriously disbanding two weeks ago), or the Islam Defenders Front (which makes frequent "sweeps" of bars and nightclubs, attacking non-Muslims, and violently guarding against "prostitution and other bad things")--will ultimately prove to be of little consequence. What matters is that the forces of Islamic fascism have struck again, in a characteristically cowardly, murderous, and yes, blasphemous fashion that must register as an affront to every living human with even a passing interest in freedom.
The facile part: It could have happened here, at any club in Seattle. It's a ludicrous thought, of course--at least as ludicrous as the thought of shutting the Space Needle down on New Year's Eve because some crazy terrorist was arrested at the Canadian border--but that doesn't make it any less true. That doesn't mean we should be looking over our shoulders and under our chairs every time we go to a show. It simply means that it could happen anywhere, because anywhere is exactly where rabid Islamists can find evidence of blasphemy against their precious, imaginary god.
Which brings us to the essential part: The Bali bombings were not an attack against Bali; they were an attack against humankind. In all the jawflap about the whys and wherefores of the multiple conflicts currently dotting our collective radar screen--the war against terror, the war on Iraq, the coming holy war, et al.--it seems worth restating (at the risk of sounding pious) that the war against basic human liberty, waged not by us but on us, is at the heart of the matter. Discourse has justifiably, necessarily turned to complexities of strategy, diplomacy, and consequences. The moral truth, however, remains agonizingly basic. We are still dealing with a small but indefatigable contingent of radicalized, militant absolutists who believe that every living being is accountable to the stricture of Shari'a, under penalty of death. As Salman Rushdie wrote, in an oft-cited Washington Post editorial, the fundamentalist faction is against, "to offer a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex." If these were fictional villains, you'd call them hyperbolic, not believable. But they aren't fictional. Their code would be laughable if it weren't so aggressively despicable.
As headlines about Bali cross-fade into news of North Korean nukes, and there are further debates about the finer points of Iraqi de- and restabilization, it's crucial to remember that there is, in fact, a very real enemy, with a very real will, and the very real power of delusional self-righteousness. How to remember? Consider the scene of the attacks (as reported by various Australian and European news sources):
It's a typical hot, sweaty, drunken, lascivious Saturday night. People, primarily young Aussie tourists from Melbourne, Geelong, Perth, and Adelaide, are crammed into the clubs, mixing it up, spilling out into the street. Rock band noises mix with techno music and innumerable voices as latecomers clamor to squeeze inside. Just after 11:00 p.m., a car bomb explodes outside of Paddy's, followed a few seconds later by a second blast that smashes the façade of the Sari Club and leaves a hole in the street a meter deep and 10 meters across. The second bomb is strong enough to damage buildings miles away. All at once, everything's on fire. People are incinerated. Cars go up in flames. Televisions explode. Ceilings collapse, trapping those still inside. Screams. Blistered, charred flesh. Disembodied limbs. Mangled bodies. Victims covered in blood. Inferno.
Now transpose this horrible, fiery mass murder from the seedy, alien lushness of Bali to, say, Pioneer Square, where clubs and bars are lined up in the same teeming proximity as the Sari and Paddy's in the "raunchy" Jalan Legian district, the busiest strip of nightlife in Kuta Beach. Imagine a car blowing up outside the Central Saloon and another, across the street at the New Orleans. Again, it seems too simple an equation, but the fact remains that the victims were not targeted at random, or for merely political purposes. They were doing exactly what any of us might be doing on any night of the week: exercising a liberty so deeply offensive to religious believers as to constitute blasphemy. And the punishment for blasphemy is death.
There is an ongoing lie in the official governmental position on the war against terror, which bends over backwards to assure us that, in the words of our president, "we don't view this as a war of religion in any way, shape, or form." Clearly, in every sense, this is a war of religion, whether it's declared as such or not. And if it isn't, then it certainly should be. Not a war of one religion against another, but of reason against religion--against any belief system that takes its mandate from an invisible spiritual entity and endows its followers with the right to murder or subjugate anyone who fails to come to the same conclusion. This is the war our enemies are fighting. To pretend we're fighting any other--or worse, that this war is somehow not worth fighting, on all fronts--is to dishonor the innocent dead.
Before I dealt with this bird I didn't realize there was a branch of mathematicians called 'formalists' who have this unusual way of looking at everything. That they can't see the fallacy of their thinking is unusual, but there are many means of dodging logic
it fails conspicuously in subnuclear physics to explain the 2-slit experiment
This is the BIG QUESTION that you can expect to face endlessly. That this doesn't refute the law of identity, only that we haven't found the proper identity, is never entertained. According to this view we can't be certain of anything except that the law of identity is invalid in this case. The contradiction of this view is never examined because contradictions are never valid except when he says they are, never when you say they are.
my ability to be both happy and not(happy) that my mother has died. It is just one of several mathematical descriptions of how elements in well-formed sets behave. As such, it does not constitute the entire warp and weave of the universe. It is a useful tool for many purposes, it is not a ghost that inhabits every corner of the universe.
Here is another one. When you are talking reality, he will talk mathematics. When you talk mathematics, he will shift to ephemeral things like emotions. That way neither of you will ever be on the same 'domain of discourse' no matter how hard you try to land it there.
Chomsky level
Chomsky? Pardon me while I go puke. Just say commie idiot and be done with it.
Kindly just answer the question: is "This sentence is FALSE" FALSE? If we assume the sentence is FALSE, (as you say, because it is contradictory), than upon evaluation, we find it declares itself to be TRUE, which we must believe, because we declared it to be FALSE. If it is true, it must therefore be FALSE, therefore, it must be TRUE...are you getting the drift here? Contradiction does not necessarily just mean FALSE--it could mean you cannot get a value. You hang up if you try. You are using a loose and inadequate notion of contradiction as if it were ubiquitous. It is not, it is quite easy to have validly formed predicates that are neither TRUE nor FALSE in any formally acceptable sense. That is what most of 20th century formal mathematics was about.
I liken it to a forebrain problem like sociopaths. They either get it or they don't. You either see the contradiction (speaks against itself) here or you don't. You cannot make someone see a contradiction. You cannot make a person acknowledge a contradiction. That this didn't invalidate all that logic proved was also brushed aside. That this this conundrum is meaningless was never considered, it becomes the holy grail. Then I asked him if fallacies were invalid. He said yes. The conversation stopped. If a person can commit a fallacy and still think he is thinking, there is no hope.
I wish you luck.
Here is a link to Galatians 5
Read the chapter and get back.
A BI-PHOTON DE BROGLIE WAVELENGTH has been directly measured in an interference experiment for the first time. In the early days of quantum mechanics, Louis de Broglie argued that if waves could act like particles (photoelectric effect) then why couldn't particles act like waves? They could, as was borne out in numerous experiments (the double-slit experiment for electrons was voted the "most beautiful" experiment in a recent poll—see Physics World, Sept 2002). In fact intact atoms in motion and even molecules can be thought of as "de Broglie waves." Molecules as large as buckyballs (carbon-60) have been sent through an interferometer, creating a characteristic interference pattern (see Update 579, www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2002/split/579-1.html).
The measured wavelength for a composite object like C-60 will in part depend on the internal bonds of the molecule. What then if the corporate object is a pair of entangled photons? One of the more fascinating predictions made regarding quantum entanglement (Jacobson et al., Physical Review Letters, 12 Jun 1995) was the suggestion that the de Broglie wavelength for an ensemble consisting of N entangled photons (each with a wavelength of L) would be L/N. This proposition has been verified now by physicists at Osaka University (Keiichi Edamatsu, 81-6-6850-6507, eda@mp.es.osaka-u.ac.jp) for the case of two entangled photons. The daughter photons were created by the process of parametric down-conversion, in which an incident photon entering a special crystal will split into two correlated photons. These photons are then sent through an interferometer (see figure at http://www.aip.org/mgr/png/2002/169.htm).
The resultant interference pattern shows that the photons behave as if they acted as a single entity with a wavelength half that for either photon alone, a feature which might improve the sharpness of future quantum lithography (the narrowness of lines on a circuit board being no better than the wavelength of light used in the fabrication process). But since the parent photon already had this shorter wavelength, what will have been gained by splitting the photon in half? The advantage will come when, at some point in the future it will be possible to generate entangled photons from non-entangled photons of the same wavelength, a process called hyper-parametric scattering. (Edamatsu et al., Physical Review Letters, 18 November 2002)
I want to be offended, but considering who is saying this, I cannot.
Do I have to claim the idea? Can I admit that the idea, the principle is bigger than me? That I have a hold of something that I realize is more important than I am?
In merry moments, I suppose you are the sort of person who can best be understood as a "tempter in training" AWOL from Screwtape's famous (and permanently endowed) Tempter's College....
and I almost posted how disappointed I have been at the really important ideas that I have posted that you have glossed over in favor of lessor ones, but I didn't want to kick you like you are doing to me here. . ... ....... ...
Fortunately, I haven't been very "merry" in recent times...so don't feel particularly pressed to deal with this question.
Oh, gee. That is too bad. I wish I had that luxury. But my feelings aren't relevant, and i know that. If we are ever to get out of this sandbox then i can't base what i communicate upon how i feel. Feelings don't matter in this case, thoughts do. But only for those who think. Maybe one day you can join us.
care to explain? i won't beat you up. just curious.
The answer is in a question no one dares to ask.
How can this be?
The resultant interference pattern shows that the photons behave as if they acted as a single entity with a wavelength half that for either photon alone,
Gee, each of the half acted as if they were half of one alone. What a surprise!!! So we still have a lousy map. Go back to the drawing board!
Probably, but the closure would make the whole argument worthwhile--and tell me that you are someone who can be argued with, rather than a moving target who slyly slips from position to position to avoid clarity.
The answer is in a question no one dares to ask.
So it seems. Here's some additional information for y'all:
THE FIRST ENTANGLEMENT OF THREE PHOTONS has been experimentally demonstrated by researchers at the University of Innsbruck (contact Harald Weinfurter, harald.weinfurter@uibk.ac.at, 011-43-512-507-6316). Individually, an entangled particle has properties (such as momentum) that are indeterminate and undefined until the particle is measured or otherwise disturbed. Measuring one entangled particle, however, defines its properties and seems to influence the properties of its partner or partners instantaneously, even if they are light years apart. In the present experiment, sending individual photons through a special crystal sometimes converted a photon into two pairs of entangled photons. After detecting a "trigger" photon, and interfering two of the three others in a beamsplitter, it became impossible to determine which photon came from which entangled pair. As a result, the respective properties of the three remaining photons were indeterminate, which is one way of saying that they were entangled (the first such observation for three physically separated particles).
The researchers deduced that this entangled state is the long-coveted GHZ state proposed by physicists Daniel Greenberger, Michael Horne, and Anton Zeilinger in the late 1980s. In addition to facilitating more advanced forms of quantum cryptography, the GHZ state will help provide a nonstatistical test of the foundations of quantum mechanics. Albert Einstein, troubled by some implications of quantum science, believed that any rational description of nature is incomplete unless it is both a local and realistic theory: "realism" refers to the idea that a particle has properties that exist even before they are measured, and "locality" means that measuring one particle cannot affect the properties of another, physically separated particle faster than the speed of light.
But quantum mechanics states that realism, locality--or both--must be violated. Previous experiments have provided highly convincing evidence against local realism, but these "Bell's inequalities" tests require the measurement of many pairs of entangled photons to build up a body of statistical evidence against the idea. In contrast, studying a single set of properties in the GHZ particles (not yet reported) could verify the predictions of quantum mechanics while contradicting those of local realism. (Bouwmeester et al., Physical Review Letters, 15 Feb.)
Bell's Inqualities and Kolmogorov's Axioms (pdf)
New Loophole for the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox
Simple question...
Why, the God of Abraham?
I'll go revisit your last couple posts, and will respond as soon as I can (though I am back at work today, having been off all last week).
"Why, the God of Abraham?" More like the Blessed Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And why the Trinity? Simply, because it makes the most sense to me.
I never could. Just when I thought I'd wrangled things around to some area of agreement I'd find myself faced with jumping through those two slits again, as if the previous conversation never took place. It appeared to be more argument for the sake of argument than actually trying to communicate something worthwhile. When I asked point blank if fallacies were valid and the answer came back 'no' I realized the impossibility of the situation and did something I rarely do, gave it up as futile. First I watched PH go through the same wrangling, (but I know he had followed what I had gone through so he knew what he was getting into and must have some purpose in mind) and then noticed you entrapped. You have some very interesting answers to this nonsense, so it has been fruitful for me to see yet another angle of refutation, but don't beat your head against the wall, man.
And I think I've answered your question. A discussion between the two of us would probably be rather boring since I think we are both on the same side of the fence.
Yet another example of denigrating and diminishing orthodox jews for their love the law. What's the point? Is this the heirarchy list by which I may determine which laws God wasn't just joking about? If I follow this list, it appears that Commandments 1 and 2 are "ceremonial" and need not be obeyed. Is that what you think?
So it seems. Here's some additional information for y'all:
I've alluded to this before. This paradox is analogous to those that confronted physics before the turn of the last century, when everyone was sure they had everything wrapped up in a tidy little box except for a few 'loose ends.' And then Einstein came along and blew up the box!
This is an interesting paradox. Einstein's theories give rise to QM which is the foundation of Bell's Theorem which then in turn, violates Einstein's theories. I like the last line of the second paper you referenced here:
"This proves that quantum mechanical theory is logically consistent with relativity."
They are trying to keep the whole thing from falling down, which they can see is a real possibility with QM. There IS something wrong here. But where?
You might know of, or run across, since you are clearly deep into this, much more than I am, (if I only had the time!) so let me ask you about something I've seen other writers allude to a couple times (years ago when I was really trying to understand this stuff, so I can't remember where to go back and look it up) that:
QM is a house of cards built upon Planke's Constant and that Planke's Constant is bad math, not derived from any actual observation but by working backwards and plugging in a certain figure because that is the only figure that works but no one knows the how or why of that figure. Nobody wants to question it because if they find a fault here then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
You ever run across something like this? It may have been superceded since then and I wouldn't know about it.
Thanks again (I think, you are tempting me and arousing an interest that is hugely time consuming to just follow, let alone understand, and that I really don't have the time for. Good job!)
Touchy thing, ain't I? Way too serious for my own good. Of course, apology accepted. Just in time though. When I wrote that last night I was just mildly irritated and I'm usually less so in the warm sunlight of the morning. I woke up far more instead of far less and was contemplating a rather rabid response. I'm glad it didn't turn out that way.
Take your time, I'm trying to cut down anyway. I love FreeRepublic, this is one of the best sites on the web. But it takes too much of my time. Even if I'm not writing I'm thinking about what I'm going to write. I need to spend more time on other things.
Hope you had a nice week off.
I can be as persistently recollective as you can be in denial. Once again, I give you the quote that started it all:
"Pharisees is just another word for jews."--donh post 1133
Why don't you just admit that you erred or changed your mind or something and dispense with it?
Well, because possibly the Catholic encyclopedia says otherwise, your punctilious objections to the contrary notwithstanding, and because it is rather a big point with anti-semitic bigots and apologists to this very day. I give you an example to contemplate:
Here's a lovely tidbit from
a particularly ugly anti-semitic website
It is absolutely essential to remember that these Pharisaic people were what later became known as Sephardic Jews. Their blood was that of Israel, they were the killers, the conspirators with Judas who after the Crucifixion hanged himself.
Nice, eh. Are you thrilled to be helping to burying attention to this point in doubtful pedogogical minutia?
Whose?
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