I have long thought that there may be someone in charge, behind the scenes. Thing work out well, for example a lot of people expected nuclear war to end the world, but it never happened so far.
Corporations, old-boys networks, politicians, secret society, aristocrats, media.
Any thoughts on whom or what it is. And how we can join;) ?
Or maybe its just spontaneous order?
In the case of this specific example, a great deal of credit is probably due Carl Sagan, whose "Cosmos" series on public TV (the book was translated into a great many languages, as well) was in many ways a "rising and falling siren" as to the dangers of global nuclear weapon interchange, with the virtual end (or very, very lengthy setback) of the human species being a likely outcome.
For the future, there an organization called the Nuclear Threat Initiative, that ran a one hour program on HBO recently, where the sole aim was to attract people to their website, at which they offered to send you a "Free DVD" of what you just saw. It was a dramatization of the potential for use of gun type weapons (nuclear) by terrorists; one of the most realistic projections I've ever seen. I'll include the link here:
Last Best ChanceAnd, for those of you who might be interested, here's Amazon.Com's link for "Cosmos"
CosmosAs just a brief comment on the posting by wassname, "spontaneous order" is exactly what Carl Sagan implied, at the very end of Cosmos, when he showed a fantastic panorama or human activity, and then commented,
"These are some of the things that 'hydrogen' can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution!" This comment, at the end of over a dozen episodes that among other things, gave a great introduction to biological evolution as well as the non-biological development of the universe, was about as strong an endorsement of the "spontaneous order" idea (or Extropy, as one of the transhumanist organizations promoting this idea calls it), that I've ever seen!
boundlesslifeps: I'd strongly recommend having a look at that "Free DVD" that's offered by NTI. When I saw the one-hour program, which was shown on HBO as a "movie", described as a depiction of how Al Quieda (or however you spell it) terrorists might construct a nuclear weapon and use it for terrorist purposes, it was so realistic that I commented, "Wow! I bet there are a lot of security people in the U.S. and elsewhere that are upset about this!"
The reason I felt this way was that the movie showed, in great detail, the concept of sawing through the explosive shell of an implosion weapon to remove the embedded nuclear material for fabricating a gun-type weapon, without disturbing the implosion weapon's detonators. [Back in the 1950's, I'd been involved in what was then called "Nuclear Weapons Disposal" in the military, and there was a lot of stuff classified Top Secret that was less detailed than that.] The film also showed a hypothetical technique of sneaking the finished weapon across the Canadian Border, disguised as a very large "museum exhibit", in a bulky enough container so that a gieger counter survey did not reveal the presence of nuclear material in the back of the van, which then proceeded past the "Welcome to the United States of America" sign, and on into the U.S.
At the end of the film, there was nothing except the website linked above. That's all! And, at that link, if you take it, there's a further link to an article in the "New Yorker", that gives an "outsider's" viewpoint on the movie, and it's makers, that's very strong, as well as startling. I'll stick in a brief excerpt from that article; at the link above, you can take the link to "The New Yorker" for the whole thing (it's one of the first links you'll see).
COMMENT
RAIN AND FIRE
Issue of 2005-10-03
Posted 2005-09-26
Movie screenings in private theatres for invited audiences, with drinks, canapés, and opportunities to schmooze with stars and directors, are a favorite tactic of the Manhattan branches of Hollywood’s publicity machines. The goal is to generate buzz, which, with any luck, will trickle down to the ticketbuying masses. Early autumn is a big season for new releases, and last week, what with the opening of the New York Film Festival and all, there were lots of such screenings around town.
One of them was different. Its setting was a modest auditorium in the immodest East Side mansion that houses the Council on Foreign Relations. The audience consisted of diplomats, military officers, international bankers and lawyers, and think-tankers. The speakers after the lights went up were white-haired gentlemen in business suits: Pete Peterson, the council’s chairman; Ted Turner, the billionaire philanthropist and founder of CNN; Warren Buffett, the folk philosopher and fabulously rich investor; Richard Lugar, Republican, the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Sam Nunn, Democrat, the retired chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and now head of a nongovernmental organization called the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
The film, “Last Best Chance,” was a bit unusual, too. You might even say it isn’t really a movie at all—it just plays one on TV. Set in the near future, it takes the form of a slick international suspense thriller, the kind that cuts from a rainswept warehouse in a bleak corner of the former Soviet empire to a dimly lit White House Situation Room. It has no sex scenes, no car chases, and no wisecracking sidekicks, and it is only forty-five minutes long, but it lays out a frighteningly plausible narrative of how terrorists might buy or steal the makings of a nuclear bomb, assemble one, smuggle it halfway around the world, and send it on its way to an American city in an S.U.V. The closest thing to a star in the cast is Fred Thompson, the lawyer turned actor turned Republican senator from Tennessee turned actor again. Thompson plays the President of the United States, and his character is mature, wise, and serious—the one jarringly unrealistic note in the picture.
“Last Best Chance” was made not by a movie studio but by a singularly unraffish indie producer: Nunn’s Nuclear Threat Initiative, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the MacArthur Foundation. The blurb on its poster comes not from Ebert & Roeper but from Kean & Hamilton—Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chairman and vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission. Its grosses are zero. For the past five months, it has been distributed free on DVD. Now it has been taken up by HBO, which plans to show it repeatedly, beginning on October 17th.
“Last Best Chance” is entertaining, in a grim sort of way, but entertainment is not its raison d’être. Its purpose is to stimulate public support and political pressure on the Bush Administration and Congress to do something serious about the terrifying danger of nuclear terrorism. And this is a scandal. It is scandalous that at this late date, four years after the attacks on New York and Washington, people like Nunn, Lugar, and Buffett feel it necessary to go to such unorthodox lengths to get the attention of Washington’s responsibles. “Last Best Chance” is a symptom of an immense failure of national, and especially Presidential, leadership. “As short a time ago as nine years or eight years,” Turner said in his remarks after the screening, “I still thought that nuclear weapons, biological and chemical weapons, was an area that the government took care of.”
One of the attendees at the screening was Graham Allison, the founding dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the director of its Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, who held high Pentagon posts under Reagan and Clinton. Allison’s “Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe,” which has just been published in an expanded paperback edition, is the indispensable text on the subject. “Americans are no safer from a nuclear terrorist attack today than we were on September 10, 2001,” he writes. “A central reason for that can be summed up in one word: Iraq.” The invasion and occupation have diverted essential resources from the fight against Al Qaeda; allowed the Taliban to regroup in Afghanistan; fostered neglect of the Iranian nuclear threat; undermined alliances critical to preventing terrorism; devastated America’s standing with the public in every country in Europe and destroyed it in the Muslim world; monopolized the time and attention of the President and his security team (for simple human reasons, an extraordinarily important factor); and, thanks to the cry-wolf falsity of the claims about Iraqi weapons systems, “discredited the larger case for a serious campaign to prevent nuclear terrorism.”
