The Truth and Pearl Harbor
Posted 9:35 AM

My whole life, I always believed that the Japanese attacked Perl Harbor. This was not an unprovoked attack. The U.S. and Britain and the Netherlands had been forcibly and militaristically colonizing throughout eastern Asia. Japan, as a result of losing power in the Pacific, had become heavily reliant on oil imports.

In July 1941, well before the Pearl Harbor attack, the US government announced a freeze on all Japanese funds in the USA and the suspension of all trade. Britain and the Netherlands, along with their colonies, quickly followed suit. Japan was left with about 18 months' reserves of petroleum.

I'm not saying that the attack was justified. Surely there are more creative methods of dealing with a lack of petrol. But, to tell children in schools that the attack was "entirely unprovoked", after the U.S. froze assets and imposed sanctions, is to teach lies in school to our children. Why lie? Because the truth is ugly and reveals the nature of war as ugly.

Think about how many people have died over this bullshit. It's not Bush. It's not Nixon. War is a sickness that has infected mankind since recorded history.

Labels: politics

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Realitivity Makes a Big Assumption
Posted 2:13 PM

Einstein, in his theory of relativity, made the assumption that the laws of physics were immutable across the universe. Upon this assumption, the speed of light must be constant.

But why must we make this assumption? It is very possible that physics of matter is different when that matter is moving at a different velocity or even in a different location in space.

It seems comforting to declare as axiomatic the assumption that the physics we experience here on earth are "the same everywhere else". But this is a bold and ego-centered assumption.

The earth, after all is whipping around the sun at 30 km/sec, and the sun is whipping around the galactic center at 250 km/sec. Things could, very well, affect the speed of light, and the relationship between mass and energy in some way. They would also affect the physics of our measuring devices, so detecting any changes in them would be difficult.

It is possible, for example, that simply "moving faster" changes our relationship to time, so that it is possible to move "faster than the speed of light" for the traveller, but that the observer sees the travel as simply lightspeed. The traveller would then arrive very quickly at his destination from his perception, but that when he arrives, he would find that it has taken a lot longer to get there than he perceived.

Labels: science

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