Nuclear arms do huge indirect damage right now, but governments could care less.

When many people talk of or think about the existing nuclear weapons, they are often focus on the potential direct damage only - on the direct threat.
Yes, direct damage from the existing nuclear arsenal (proudly possessed by a number of 'civilized' countries like US, Russia, Britain, Israel, China, France etc), would be enough to make the most common mental conceptions of Apocalypse become a real-life experience. I think that anyone can go no further than Hiroshima experience to get a taste of it (for the Americans this could be a doubly understandable and clear illustration), but bearing in mind at that, that now the use of nuclear bombs most probably would not be confined only to one bomb and only to one nation.
But talking about nuclear weapons one tends to rather frequently forget about the HUGE indirect damage it makes even without any practical application thereof. Example: 200 (approx) nukes in possession of Israel 1) make all the 'high moral talks' about preventing Iran from having the same thing just a piece of comedian farce 2) establish huge barriers in the way of any Middle East piece efforts 3) push other nations strive to acquire this. Huge geopolitical and ethical (those two in this context inextricable) damage!
The USA has nukes hundreds times more than it really needs to provide a reasonable defensive potential: it too 1) undermines any efforts and reputation of the US in terms of peace-making 2) also justifies and provokes other governments to strive for nukes 3) consumes MONEY of the taxpayer
Any nuclear weapons abiding in the possession of all nations put together has consumed a HUGE amount of money and other resources (incalculable directly in monetary terms) and taken it away from the economic and technological development - money spent on a) development of those weapons and b) keeping, storing, replacement, cherishing and nourishing those weapons.
All of these are just part of the HUGE non-military damage that is done by nuclear weapons right now as I write these lines.
Added to that is a hardly calculable MORAL damage to everyone. I mean, our children from the very cradle get accustomed to the idea that nuclear weapons have just as normal a place in this world and in this life, as their school, their work, their mum and dad. This is a 'self-reproducing' sociopsychological culture of 'normality' of nuclear world.
The list is far from complete, but I hope it can give a general notion of 'how far nuclear weapons cause damage', including when 'peacefully stored' in their containers...

Intelligence services don't hurry to stop terrorists from killing people and France is no exception

As it transpires unsurprisingly:
1. French Intelligence had been tracking the terrorist for years & let him kill many people before capturing him, just like the US Intelligence had been tracking 911 terrorists for years and let them kill thousands before capturing some of them.

2. Instead of putting him to sleep or paralyzing with some kind of powerful tranquilizer (in the form of gas or a remotely gun-shot capsule) and taking him alive for the sake of eliciting more precious information from him later, they decided to kill him with a sniper shot and silence forever (there were all the possibilities to take him alive: there were no hostage and before they shot him dead they had been throwing GRENADES into his barricaded den - who would have prevented them from throwing some tranquilizing gas shells with, say, fentanyl-based base, or many other alternatives - technically 120% possible and tested).

From these the only rational conclusion I am coming to again, is that, as is often the case, Western intelligence services (which is a governmental agency) are as often as not UNINTERESTED in eliminating and preventing the terrorism and killings, and KNOWINGLY and deliberately keeps the probability (hence the actual rate too) of the carnage and killings of the people at artificially high levels, because thus they could 'extort' more money and attention from the people which there are meant to serve. In this sense they are involved in the terrorism - actual terrorism, and the political terrorism, which terrorizes the people into falsely thinking too much of the government as a guardian and defender. Just another example of this.


 That's the usual way with Intelligence services who are often in no mood to stop terrible terrorists from killing before actual the killing takes place, because intelligence services consider it BENEFICIAL for their image, PR, reputation to capture big killers only after killing. Because through 'allowing' terrorists kill they, as it is, show the public their indispensability, their irreplaceability and importance, they get bigger budgets - by letting people to be killed. Nothing surprising. Never had a doubt that German intelligence services knew very much about the perpetrators of the recent wave of racist murders in Germany, neither would it amaze me in the least bit to learn that Norwegian intelligence knew a thing or two about the Nazi lunatic who killed about 80 people last summer in a terrible carnage.
I don't have a shadow of a doubt that intelligence services (without or without a nod from governments) 'allow' innocent people to be killed - quite deliberately, in cold blood, to CREATE the work for themselves, terrorize their own nations into giving them more money, more credit, making themselves irreplaceable in the eyes of the general public.
Why is it possible? For the same old reason I've mentioned so many times: the presence of SEMI-democracy in the West in stead of REAL democracy. To put it simple, nations have NO CONTROL over what their governments are up to in a huge number of different areas, especially those affecting directly the lives or millions of lives of people - both within and without the national borders.
What's the remedy? DEMOCRACY of course - not a sham one but a true one, which is based not just of the cover of election (in which, for example, 300 mn of Americans elect for the president a mentally dubious grand kid of a former president) but on the practical, tangible, steel-firm public CONTROL of state, PARTICIPATION in state & 120% TRANSPARENCY of state. History shows that the state secrecy is just a form of autocracy, irresponsibility and usurpation of power, which quite logically turns state itself in a terrorist.
See also on similar topics:

Comments on the controlled explosion theory of the 911 attack
911 anniversary: terrorists celebrate victory
Yes, Bradley Manning and Assange deserve the Nobel prize possibly more than Obama does!
A few comments on Norway apocalypse

Idle meditations: Girls, don't break my heart! Save the world!

Existing model of antidemocratic anti-freemarket capitalism seems to be just another historic manifestation of male CANNIBALISM in essence (as well as the modern nation-state global political structure). My only hope's that women will create free-market democratic socialism (and genuine common values' based globalization). Hope that the 21th century will hand the reins of control to women, who hold the key to the future and survival of our dubious species :).
I am 120% sure that men have demonstrated enough of their concept of humankind development & progress throughout history up to this day (and continue to do so) - ZERO SUM GAME (war in the broadest sense) with BORDERS and KILLINGS (whether in the physical or any other sense: political killing, economic killing, reputational killing, social killing etc etc) as an absolute necessity, which, according to 'male morals' (not to be confused with honesty and justice) are not just lesser evil, but VIRTUE, a matter of PRIDE (be it so called national pride, personal, religious or class-based pride - whatever), the pinnacle of meritocratic satisfaction, the ultimate proof and confirmation of one's life's worth and self-esteem. It's not just cannibalism, it's MERITOCRATIC, raised to the power of the absolute virtue, cannibalism which distinguishes the male paradigm - paradigm of not only the absolute right of the sheer force but on the POSITIVE MORAL REFLECTION thereof, on the self-rewarding moral of the violence. The old and never-changing self-praising cannibalistic moral in the eyes of which the prevalence of power and any victory achieved the same is the retrospective proof of the RIGHTFULNESS and VIRTUE of use of the very force. Not morals serving to eliminate and expose the egoistic use of force but the other way around: the successful use of FORCE serving to create the morals in the form of a heap of demagogic masterpieces like 'END justifies the MEANS', 'historical necessity', 'evolutionary selection', 'invisible hand of the market' etc etc. The male-created morals that not only justify cannibalism and parasitism (as the main 'historical necessity', 'evolutionary driving force' etc) but in essence GLORIFY it!! (glorify in the nationalistic self-praising demagogy, religious messianic demagogy, patriotic, communist etc etc demagogy). But the same story goes on and on: women bear bear bear, men kill kill kill... and take (again not only in physical but in the broadest sense). 
History doesn't belong to Beethovens or Voltaires or Socrateses etc but to those who act.
Nothing changed: women bear bear bear, and men kill kill kill  (and rape rape rape, again, not just in the physical sense, but in the broadest possible sense) and pride themselves on that on the ground that they have managed to do it.
But there's a modest hope that women in practice, when given the chance by the history, may turn out to be the true followers of the those figures in their vision.
There are so many petty nations of men, and only one GIGANTIC NATION OF WOMEN on earth. This one nation holds key to the future of MENkind. Girls, don't break my heart! Save the world! :) from men... :) I know you can.
Just DOOO it! :)

EU tribulations have political, not economic roots: no democracy - no legitimacy

The problem for Greeks is not the austerity measures as such, but that they couldn't have possibly controlled the spending spree even if they had wanted and tried. It's purely political problem, and the root of all those demonstrations and riots in Greece is political, namely the ABSENCE of democracy (real democracy, not paper one), hence, the absence of legitimacy. They didn't and do not have their say in what's done in terms of borrowing, spending and paying back by their government within the existing EU and eurozone structure. That's it. The same goes for Hungary, Czech Republic and other countries. Poland became much more cautious and concerned about what the EU means for her.
It becomes increasingly obvious for European peoples that the EU is a kind of form of bureaucratic cooperation between their governments which is not only undemocratic in itself but allows those individual governments to undermine the existing national mechanisms of democratic control (bad and imperfect as they are) and juggle their responsibilities. All those protests on the streets of Athens or Lisbon or Budapest are economic in outward appearance only, but their root cause is POLITICAL in nature and is directly concerned with the problems of democracy and legitimacy of the EU structure (or, rather, lack thereof). In brief: economic manifestations of political problems. No democracy, no legitimacy, and the current crisis is a political one and, in my view, poses an existential threat to the EU.
The most absurd thing which I hear today from some pundits and observers is that EU suffers from 'too much' democracy in the economic competition with Asia (especially China), whereas it is watering down the existing democratic mechanisms as well as the absence of their timely 'upgrade' from the 19th century obsolete and now ineffective standards to the 21th century ones that really makes many Western countries and unions uncompetitive and insecure in the face of the Asian advance.
The only fair and wise thing I have recently heard from any of those so called 'leaders' (as they like to call themselves) is the last year Papandreou's decision to conduct a referendum on austerity measures in Greece, but, belonging to the heavenly host of the 'leaders', he duly backtracked and changed his mind at the first sign of trouble (don't you think for a sec that the decision of euroleaders could be connected in any way to democratic principles, or, nowadays, to any principles for that matter - playing with such words as 'referendum' 'will of people' for Papandreou is no more than an extra piece of bluff, an element of trading and bargaining with other 'euroleaders': absolutely reversible and forgettable in less than no time, and as cartoon as the very notion of the intelligent will of people in their mind).
Several times peoples of Europe clearly demonstrated to Brussels their indignation with the direction in which the EU progresses by rejecting successively several projects of the new EU constitution (virtually it was the only method left in the arsenal of the general public, who didn't have any serious objections to the text of constitution as such, but used the referendum to express their protest). But not only didn't so called 'euroleaders' hearken to those numerous and 'last-line-of-defense' protests and rejections, but also in a defiantly and demonstratively humiliating manner agreed to eliminate all the national referendums and SHOVE down the throat of Europeans the Lisbon treaty.
Just as I said in my previous articles, the main problem of the EU is that it's a BUREAUCRATIC  UNION of EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS, not a DEMOCRATIC UNION OF EUROPEAN NATIONS.
The deep and democratic reform of the union is an absolute and urgent necessity, which could be possible only and only after the recognition of the problem. Otherwise, if the euroleaders continue to persevere in their efforts to chip away at democracy (such as it is now) using the EU bureaucracy, it is really not unimaginable that this house will turn into a house of cards and just collapse.in quite a foreseeable future.

See also on the topic of 'eurotroubles':

Greece will fail without euro? Just another cynical myth?
ECB starts printing money big time: nightmares come true!
A few words about the EU: good idea, but in reality a big fraud
How can the eurozone be saved by all these summits in the longer term?

Prosecution of genocide denial: repressive use of criminal law by state

All those laws against genocide denial (be it Holocaust denial in Germany or the newly introduced legal nonsense in France about Armenian denial) are just a glaring example of repressive use of criminal law, which is neither compatible with the legal logic or ethics of criminal law, nor with the norms of a modern civil free society. And I am telling this despite the fact that I myself neither deny those mass those massacres that took place in Armenia, Germany etc, nor consider the present history education in school enough and proper for future generations to draw all the due lessons from those terrible historical events and state crimes.
The more the misuse of criminal law is escalated and promoted by Western states and governments, the farther the freedom and the rights-based democratic foundations are eroded - be it the prosecution of 'genocide denial' or the ban of face veils or prosecution of Wikileaks. This is a crystal clear measure, a litmus test, showing what the real trajectory of Western semi-democracy is: states seem to take to repressive use of the criminal law club. What's next?
The very formulation of those anti-denial laws is absurd, cos you cannot make a state of disbelief or denial of anything a crime (at least if you don't live in a place like Ottoman Turkey of the 1900s or Germany of the 1930s). Even more to the point, the very (and the only) UN-chosen definition of 'genocide' is an artificial construct, a deeply ideological conception, which may not reflect the reality properly or even may be immoral in itself in the eyes of many. The very definition of genocide, at least in the highly arguably and dubious form it is now, could be a subject of disbelief and rejection. That means for example, that if I don't recognize the validity, essentiality and even moral relevance of the term 'genocide' (in the legal sense in which one should apply and consider now this notion), I can be technically considered as being in denial of Genocide. To put it more simply, I for example recognize the terrible mass killings of Jews, Poles, Gypsies by the Nazi butchers, and I reckon those terrible acts as one of the most terrible crimes in human history, but I consider them so NOT because I believe in the notion of genocide in the form it's now formulated, but because for me the main point is the CRIME of a STATE against human and people LIFE. For me - I took myself here just as an example - the crimes of Hitler wouldn't have been less heavy, atrocious and punishable even in the least bit, if his government had killed not only Jews but Germans too (like Stalin did to Russians) and if OFFICIALLY Hitler's government hadn't declared Jews as a kind of genetically inferior people. Yet, in the eyes of the present definition of the term 'genocide' those crimes should be considered qualitatively lighter if the above conditions had existed in reality. I don't fully believe in the term 'genocide' in the form it's now, I reckon it itself to be racist based in a way. So, I suppose, I myself could be in future prosecuted for 'genocide denial'
The genocide now just blurs the line between the responsibility of any state for mass killings and torture of its people, and the crime of technically discriminating against ethnicity/nation as such. So in my opinion the notion of genocide is still very much cynical (putting the value of human lives much lower than the value of formal ethnicity, which in itself is not a proved essential notion and can be reasonably put into doubt as such by some scholars and ordinary people) and ethically dubious to say the least.
There's a different aspect to this problem of 'genocide denial', concerning responsibility - an aspect of possible insult to a group of people, whose relatives died in the genocide etc - but that is absolutely another story: those questions can, should and MUST be resolved within the framework of the CIVIL law. There must be established sufficiently thought-out civil law mechanisms that should allow those, who consider themselves victims of some kind of ethnic or 'historic insult', to initiate civil proceedings against those, say, 'deniers' and claim a good compensation in the form of money, apologies etc etc. But they must PROVE it in a civil court in the first place.
To add one more point about the genocide definition: now as such, the UN formulation is not only ethically ambivalent and confusing, in my opinion, but damaging in practical terms, because it provokes and gives all the grounds and possibilities to the most fundamentalist's radical nationalistic core of people withing different nations to most cynically CAPITALIZE on the DEATH of thousands of, in essence, people (whom they, without asking them, include in the same imaginable ethnic body to which they relate themselves), who had time ago fallen victims of mass killings and tortures conducted by one state or another for a set of reasons not always fully known and even able to be known and cognizable at all (but, de facto, accompanied by the state impunity and the self-proclaimed right of those butcher-states to dispose of people's lives at will). Good thing for those radical nationalistic beneficiaries, is that those killed are SILENT and UNRESPONSIVE, we cannot resurrect those Jews, or Armenians and ask their opinion or judgement. This thing is quite devilishly exploited by the very right nationalists.
For example, in my opinion, those among Armenians who feel that they can capitalize on the notion of collective responsibility in direct or any indirect way, will be for as much of the world's attention to the issue of genocide as possible (of course, there are also millions of other Armenians, and, like me, non-Armenians who very deeply sympathize with the victims of Turkish butchery and want to make the history as true and clear, as possible, but for whom the tragedy is not an element of a potentially successful PR campaign and a tool to extract moral debts and exclusive position - something, what I call 'racism inside out').     
All in all it's beneficial to engrave in the stone of the world history the position of your ethnicity as an uncompensated victim, cos in this case the descenders (and also self-proclaimed 'quasi-descenders') of those who actually lived in the times of the actual genocide, can reckon on indirect compensation (but 'never-ending' at the same time, cos those killed can never be resurrected, nor can they be asked their opinion on whether their death has been redeemed) and sometimes on direct compensation.
The idea is that some nations can put themselves in a position of always having a positive moral account balance with the rest of the world and morals as such (not to be confused with justice) have always been used by human creatures to derive benefits and compensations.
Many Jews CAPITALIZED politically economically etc on Holocaust - the same story (don't get me wrong, it in no way reduces the terror and absolute hell on earth of Holocaust and the necessity to prevent and remember such apocalypses) That's the point of radical nationalistic stance and the 'beauty' of it, because one cannot ask those killed - neither Jews nor Armenians - about their opinion in the discussion, nor can one return the compensation to THEM. So in practice one group of people at one time is KILLED ruthlessly and another group of people, publicly stating their belonging to one metaphysical 'nation-body' with those killed, tries get the actual compensation and benefits, assessable material part of which sometimes is no trifling at all...
It's not meant to say, that among those who call themselves Armenians or Jews, there are not those who, as their first priority, want historical truth, memory and recognition of the facts of genocide, but such groups are not those who influence the decisions made in France about laws against Armenian genocide denial. Besides you don't need to be Armenian to be in favor of historical truth. I am not Armenian, but I am for good history text books and good memory of this tragedy, and better and more fair historical education in schools.
Just to amplify a bit on what I said in the beginning, one of the most unpleasant problems, about which few people like to talk about, is that the very UN-confirmed and used notion of GENOCIDE is itself racism based in a way - it puts the value of national belonging HIGHER that the value of human life, it puts the crime against nationality as such HIGHER than crime of a state-sanctioned mass killing of human beings. In other words, if Hitler or Ottoman rulers would give purely technical reasons for their crime (not specifically racist) then according to today's laws and legal views, the crimes were much less substantial. Excellent example of this is Russia, which in Stalin's times exiled, imprisoned and killed a huge number of different ethnic minorities (and not only minorities in the case of so called golodomor), but the main justification used by Russia - used quite successfully, mind you - is that 1. They also killed many Russians in the process 2. The primary cause was the state security, not specific racism-based or ethnic-inequality-based theories and philosophies.

Comments on the controlled explosion theory of the 911 attack

All those speculations about controlled demolitions serve only one purpose: to shift the focus of the public discussion from the main RATIONAL question: what did the US government (and its agencies) really know about the terrorist acts in preparation, and what could the government obviously do to prevent it but DID NOT do? In other words, DID THE US GOVERNMENT HELP THE ATTACKS take place in one essential way or another??!!
That's the right and by the way absolutely legitimate question, because 1. Bush-Cheney team, being extremely hawkish, would have had potentially every interest in and motive for helping such like attacks and the obvious political possibilities and opportunities it would give them; 2. The US government in general case has the technical and organizational capacity and ability to help such attacks indirectly and heighten probability of such attacks to one degree or another, taking them from the category of 'almost improbable' to the category of 'quite possible' 3. It stems from the evidence already known for the public that quite probably they had the best opportunity possible for helping the 911 attack because the CIA and FBI data had just before pointed unambiguously to some terrorists efforts going on to organize some large scale attacks in the US territory (volumes have been said already on this topic. Some FBI agents, like Coleen Rowley or Bogdan Dzakovic even gave very accurate predictive assessments as to when this kind of terrorist attacks were to be reasonably expected with an accuracy of up to a one-two months).
You cannot get inside the head of Bush or Chaney (or Hitler for that matter) to look at intentions, but you can, at least in theory, establish the objective degree of knowledge and whether or not some obvious measures that ought to have been taken to prevent the apocalypse were taken by the government... No presumption of innocence in this case, cos the Bush administration was an interested party: there's a preponderance of evidence to believe that the political consequences for the Bush/Chaney team from the 911 attack were highly positive. They were hawks they never hid it, they always liked playing the war card, and one didn't need to be Einstein to predict, that the 911 event gave almost infinite freedom and public all-clear for starting any wars (any that could be physically possible without immediate disruption of the economic fabric of the US).
In the modern semi-democracies like the US the Government actually DOESN'T NEED to act directly to get as a result some terrorist acts on their home territory. If the US highest figures in power would wish to bomb the US for their own political purposes, they would try to do it with the hands of real terrorists - of course not by paying and giving them special VIP invitations, but just refraining from putting some critical obstacles in their way (cos the concentration of publicly uncontrolled and informationally non-transparent power in the quasi-democracies is HUGE - that's why they are not the true democracies). Yes it would probably require involvement of some very high figures in federal security agencies (like CIA or something), but this is not a problem, considering the objective interests of those agencies (the more terrorism the more need for them), their absolute secrecy and non-transparency (even inside themselves), intrinsic immorality, iron immunity to any checks from parallel branches of power, historical addiction to impunity and the historical experience (Bush needed some cheap falsification of the presence of nuclear sites in Iraq, and hey presto CIA in less than no time gave him a heap of very bad quality stuff (suitable only for 10 year olds), but they DID with pleasure. Simple friendly request was apparently enough.
So in my view, if the Government structure(s) KNEW about these things being prepared and they didn't do something to prevent it which reasonably should have been done, it would already give enough grounds to accuse the government in HELPING the attackers and attacks. Together with additional 5000 American boys and girls sent to their death to Iraq and Afghanistan 'meat grinder' such accusations would more than suffice to make it sensible to organize a nation wide criminal process - something like a 21th century Nuremberg - against the crimes of the US government committed against its own people (not to mention the victims beyond the national frontiers).

For me all these talks about the involvement of the US highest rank state figures in the 911 attack confirm some important points that don't directly relate to the tragedy as such:

1. Despite sometimes naive quality and formulation of the Americans' 'conspiratorial'  suspicions of the their own government's involvement in the 911 massacre, or, better to say, involvement of the STATE, those suspicions show a very low level of trust of the people of America to their own state (or to the state that owns them).

2. Those who don't trust the state system in the US (whether intuitively or quite consciously and reasonably) are quite legitimate and RATIONAL in their disbelief. This is one of the manifestations of the complete obsolescence of the American 'democratish' model, which, in fact, not only doesn't give to the people nearly enough power and levers to control what the state is up to, but also in this modern age very fast neutralizes and incapacitates those 300-year old 'primeval' tools.

3. Once more it confirms the old truth told by John Acton: power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Any state system, when gets more much more practical control over the people than is itself controlled starts to pursue only its own interests, becoming the main enemy and TRAITOR of its own nation: these truths have been proved by history countless times. Time for reform of the democratish system, the goal of which is using outward democratic cover and procedure to legitimize the existing state, into a real democracy, the main characteristic of which is TOTALITARIAN control of the civil society over the state power-invested structures, ABSOLUTE TRANSPARENCY, and non-stop direct participation of the society in changing the state management mechanisms and laws. NO PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE can be granted to governments (in the form it is now anyway).

See also on the related topics:
The US has a hopelessly out-of-date political system: reform urgently needed
How to avoid ridiculously 'freak' wars like in Iraq and Afghanistan in future?!
Yes, Bradley Manning and Assange deserve the Nobel prize possibly more than Obama does! 
EU tribulations have political, not economic roots: no democracy - no legitimacy
Don't be afraid of the word 'socialism' in the 21th century, it can be helpful

The International Tribunal in Hague couldn't care less about Assad

The fact that Hague Tribunal isn't doing NOW anything about #Assad just confirms for me once more that this institution is a sort of political concubine or or 'sex slave', which has nothing to do with the rule of law, but on the contrary slavishly follows the political decisions, fitting the law into the politics, not the other way around. The same thing happened in the case of Qaddafi when the Hague started to utter any sounds on this only AFTER Western military began targeting (unlawfully too) his living place directly with missiles... So Hague Tribunal is a very specific court which is designed not to independently start investigation and decide whether someone is guilty and administer punishment, but to kind of confirm a posteriori that a punished person is a criminal... Sadly it's just another 'sham institution' which corrodes the faith and confidence of the whole world in the West, in its intention and moral stand; which amongst many other things continues to ruin the image of the West in the eyes of the developed countries. It is very very sad because just a couple of decades ago the most progressive and educated people in the developed countries really really placed a huge amount of faith in Western political high moral principles and institutions purportedly designed to realize those principles in practice. This credit of confidence of the West was really a highly precious reserve, hugely powerful tool - a thing to keep and cherish. But by now all this 'gold reserve' has all but completely been frittered away, or, to be more accurate, just let go down the drain, alas...