November 29, 2006

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• As nuclear arms discourse is not exactly my forte, I'll just offer some fluff for thought. I can't help wondering if this isn't a case of missing the trees for the forest. To belabor the metaphor, some of these trees (fallen branches?) are tripping us up daily, and it would make sense to me to clear the paths first before worrying about flame catapults that no sane person would actually fire. I'm not deliberately being obtuse; of course I understand the danger that nuclear weapons pose, especially in the hands of those who would use their mere existence as bullying tools, but haven't we been living under this threat for decades now anyway? I guess my point is, if this was indeed the most important thing, then priorities would need to be shifted, and I wonder what any of us will actually be able to do about "top priority" while other, more pressing issues eat away at us daily. /steps aside to let actual substantive arguments flow forth
• I agree with you, sly_polyglot, to a certain extent. Tens of thousands of Americans are killed every year by unsafe driving practices -- where's the anti-car jihad? Well, I mean, aside from me. Armstronghu Ackbar! *cough* The problem with even the most serious risk analysis though, is it tends to be short-sighted. Future disasters tend to be disregarded because they cost too much to prevent. There needs to be vision which will allow very unlikely events to be ameliorated before they become probable.
• It would take a lot of nukes to kill near the number of people who die each year of starvation and disease then do now. But they die with a whimper and not with a bang, so we feel its somehow "natural" and go on being tittilated by the big bang. The one area where there is a total lack of any common strategy is the one that may well present the greatest danger of all: the area of nuclear weapons. Certainly important, but a case where nation-states care more about their own power than the lives of individual huamns.
• "huamns" are those beings called "you and me".
• "huamns" are those beings called "you and me". I thought they were deep-fried street delicacies from Viet Nam. Yum! (alternatively: church songs for crying babies? a small group of islands in the deep Pacific? a new Internet protocol?)
• The Dinner Table, the Tulip From: Mapping the Chaos, 1995, pp 57-58 So what do we do with this, this world, this uncertain spring, the tulips still holding, things green and cold. Take the tulips, composed, driven to yellow or rose from their chilly green, given to order, unfolding. The colour they move towards held for a day, or a week, contingent on the weather, accident. Then paling or darkening into other shades, then the quick or slow decomposing. Coming to grief. To being not tulips. Does rot have its own order? I think not. Theorists see things moving to degeneration, some, and looking down, I might be inclined to agree, skidding down to an agreement since more than the weather this spring is uncertain. Systems large and small are flawed, disintegrating. Think of anything: my respiratory system, the world's. Today I run along the cul-de-sac in the swanky end of our neighbourhood. As always, there are vans parked in the driveways. Things are being taken care of, expensive systems in need of maintenance. The rest of us are short on money, time, love. And you so careless, the roof needing repair, plaster crumbling from the living-room ceiling, faith battered, struck by dilemma. Yes you, I'm talking to you - reader, lover - pay attention to this poem! It's a good thing it is spring, my faith still holding, in R. Tregebov, a body running along concrete, however the lungs rasp. Spring inclines me elsewhere, to lean towards other theories - anti-chaos, the universal yearning towards order. Setting the table just so. The tulips in the right vase. Yearning, yes, the scientist wanting it to be the case that we are at home in the universe, that life is inevitable, the consequence of broad avenues of possibility, not back lanes of improbability. Although, agnostic, I might settle for back lanes. I've loved their rough edges, seamy sides: rusted garbage cans overturned, the opportunity for scrounging, the possibility of unexpected plenty. A clump of fat white violets beside the garage and beside them, blue ones, their pansy faces attentive. Not an aberration but a plan. Agnostic, I bless those looking for a science of emergence, of complexity, looking for a way to model complicated systems like the dinner table, the tulip. And I of science, but ours why is there something rather than nothing. —Rhea Tregebov
• It's the Richard "Shoebomber" Reid syndrome. After Richard, everyone has to get their shoes checked. Until we have a nuclear bomb go off somewhere, we're not going to see the attention this issue deserves.
• "Almost everyone in today’s world feels insecure, but not everyone feels insecure about the same thing..." Many of the examples that Annan cites imply that we are all afraid of each other or, to put it another way, that we are collectively afraid of ourselves. To me, the most desirable "global strategy" would be to admit that we're all in the same boat and we've sprung a leak.
• how is it in your words I often find your heart's the very same as mine?