This totally kicks arse, so funny.

This is a letter I sent like over two years ago now to
Melanie Phillips,after is her reply.
She is such a bitch (in the sooo eeeeevil kind of way).
Read on dear (bloggee?)......

Dear Ms Phillips,
As an opponent of state terror and Fascism I have several
points to make in your article condemming Norman Kember
and his organisation. Pacifism is not a weak ideology nor
is it a pro-Fascist ideology. It is about people not resorting
to violence to solve disputes, which is often a very brave
thing to do as it is very easy for politicians to send young
men and women(and often children in some parts of the world)
to kill and die on their behalf.

The point has to be made that state terror (aka "anti-terror
operations" or "pre-emptive warfare") kill easily orders of
magnitude more innocent people every year then non-state operators.
This in turn encourages workless individuals who have had family
members killed by the state to enact revenge, thus perpetuating
the cycle of violence.Although not a fan of mob justice, in a
situation where a member of the community is a known exponent
of terrorism, that member is often known and can be dealt with
without the intervention of the state.

You quoted the Iraqi ambassador to Canada:"Christian Peacemaker
Teams are OBJECTIVELY on the side of 'the fascists',Saddam
Hussein's loyalists and Al Quaeda in Iraq".Well he would say
that. With capital leaking out of
Iraq, it's resourses being looted by foreigners and oil
capital going to the oil companies at profits of upwards of
130%, what is the point of
government in Iraq except to promote state terror as the only way of
justifying their wages?Sounds a lot like fascism to me. It looks
like the only "democratic" discourse is for the Iraqi people to prevent
the exit of capital through reasserting control of their own resources,
overwise Iraq will very quickly become a Third World country.

It is interesting that you quoted George Orwell. If you had
read his work, you would understand that it only through independent
action by the working classes can Fascism, being the combining of
corporate and state interests against the interests of the labouring
masses,be truly defeated wherever it takes root.

I hope you can take note of what I have said.It would be a shame
for your attidudes to
perpetuate the horrific cost in human misery of
war and
poverty whcih may very well cause our extinction.

Her Reply:

Thank you for your interesting comments.

Best wishes

Melanie


Please see my articles and regularly updated Diary on my website,
www.melaniephillips.com


HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH HA HA HA HA
It'd be funny if it wasn't so fecken tragic.

As an anarchist, I believe in Wants not Rights: if you have a state or organised religion, someone always has the 'right' to beat you up, shoot you or otherwise tell you what to do. If there is to be a state, some form of welfare provision has to be in order, otherwise the state is nothing more than an organised protection racket at best and a terrorist organisation at worst.

But do I believe in Wants over needs, maybe a Pentacle is a better "description": five points of view connected by each being connected to two others. The Ego has Wants but these are not base desires; the Ego has Needs first and foremost.

A few comments on the ‘Culture’….The origins of the interstellar civilization, as stated by
the author of the novels, occurred when an unspecified number of autonomous star ships
and artificial habitats began to federate with a (small?) number of Artificial Intelligences
and a much smaller number of planetary based polities. In the period the novels are set,
many Culture citizens (this mainly refers to the (post-) human population but not exclusively)
live aboard so-called ‘Rocks’, habitable, space-faring asteroids. This number presumably
makes up a significant proportion (10% of all humans, drones etc) of the Culture’s population
that live at any one time aboard their interstellar craft. It is safe to assume that these people
are the descendants of the Culture’s founders. Most of the (human) population, however, live
on artificial worldlets called ‘Orbitals’.

There is much ambiguity in the novels over what constitutes a habitat and what constitutes
a starship, simply because even Orbitals can move under their own power to some extent.
To our minds, Orbitals would be spaceships, albeit not ‘true’ starships capable of traversing
interstellar distances in a human lifetime. In the novels, what constitutes a Starship is that
it is controlled by a Mind (or similar level AI), can carry crew/passengers of at least one and
can easily exceed the speed of light by at least two-hundred times. In fact, for a Starship,
200c is considered pretty slow-this is the average/maximum cruising speed of the more
advanced Modules the Culture sometimes uses. Rocks usually have an AI-core if not a true
Mind, while it would appear that velocities of 250c are their limit. For this purpose, Rocks
are considered alongside regular (i.e. non-Orbital, median population 5 or so million) Habitats.

The Culture could probably produce about a million Starships. This would work out as one for
every eighteen million active Human citizens (i.e. not including those in Storage, existing in
VR or group minds, or the many drones and other devices considered Sentient), so actually
owning one’s own Starship would be a luxury akin to one owning a planet! If we have an upper
limit of a thousand people per Starship, this allows a billion Humans to actually live aboard
Starships, which is still a small fraction of the Culture’s population, even smaller than the
planetary population.

Out of a population of eighteen trillion:

This gives a (estimated)-
1. Planetary population of 300 billion
2. ditto aboard archaic and non-Culture starships-500 billion
3. Aboard Rocks (and Habitats)-150 billion
4. Aboard various Systems Vehicles -1.2 trillion
5. Orbital population-16 trillion (calculated as 15,850 billion)

On the face of it, it is difficult to see where the large numbers of people would come from to
populate the thousands of Orbitals in existence, but certain hints of the Culture’s beginnings
would explain this. Some of the genetic alterations ‘standard’ Culture Humans are born with
(being able to biologically swap gender, postpone or terminate pregnancies, the ability to
regenerate limbs and other abilities) would be of more use in situations among less developed
peoples as the technology to achieve these alterations genetically would coincide with other
technologies that enable individuals to perform similar feats anyway. It would appear that,
at some early point, the ancestors/founders of [many people in] the Culture were living
alongside less developed, possibly aggressive, humans for some period and/ or among
advanced aliens. Most of the Culture’s founding starships had probably been mothballed
by the period the novels are set and the original habitats were probably more crowded
(or, more importantly, had a policy of zero-population growth which was later relaxed)
at the point before/during the Culture’s brief period of terraforming (c.4K BCE?) which
happened before the first Orbitals were constructed.

Rings

Presumably a ‘Ring’ encircles an entire star. These include Morthanveld Nestworlds*
(“Matter”), and Rings are mentioned as being [capable of being] built by the Culture.
It could be expected that the Culture would have hundreds of Rings, each with a
population in the trillions, but it would seem that their main purposes are for manufacturing
and maintaining Starships and other products as opposed to being lived-in environments.
A Ring would most likely be built by an advanced society based in the same solar system
and would take advantage of both solar power and cosmic radiation for harvesting energy/
anti-matter. Considering the Culture, on a planetary level, has a small number of home worlds
(approx a dozen), there are unlikely to be more than about twenty, as Culture citizens/
machines could presumably have occupied Rings which were build and then abandoned
by other (long-since Sublimed) civilizations, each with a population of probably no more
than a billion or so, considering it would be easier to build an Orbital than to provide
workable/simulated gravity throughout something the size of a Ring (which would have
a diameter of at least 1AU).

“Spheres” are also mentioned, which could be Dyson Spheres (an encircled Star) but are
more likely to be habitable shells built around a Gas Giant or a Brown Dwarf (failed star)
at a distance which would provide a gravity of around or exactly 1g (suitable for Humans)
at their surface. Again, while these would be more habitable than a Ring (which, if a whole
structure, would have to rotate or provide artificial gravity in selected areas) but would have
their own power source in exploiting the strong magnetic fields involved. The problem with
Spheres (and planets) is that a ship leaving one would have to be capable of achieving the
Escape Velocity for that body. While the Culture is more than capable of building such
craft, this is very energy-intensive for inter-body travel and especially the transport of
consumer goods around a habitat. Air-spheres are also mentioned as being lived-in from
time-to-time by various “Involved”-level civilizations but not fully Culture-occupied.



*These are basically large conglomerations of small-to-medium sized habitats encircling a star,
so in this case for any Culture Ring based on this format its population would be considered
among those living in habitats

1.8.2008
Before School

Before school
I got dressed

Before school
I wished I was dead

Before school
I was happy

Before school
I knew what I was doing

Before school
I’d never met anyone interesting

Before school
I had breakfast

Before school
I was at school

Before school
I could read

Before school
I was alive

Before school
I was little

Before school
I was big

Before school
I was Master of the Universe

Before school
I was on the dole

Before school
I was working in a bar


I’m Both Joking and Serious I.V!

Homophobia, an infantile disorder of the Right
Technophobia, an infantile disorder of the Old
Technophilia, an infantile disorder of the Young
Militarism, an infantile disorder of Rupert Murdoch
Islamophobia, an infantile disorder of Melanie Phillips
Petrophilia, an infantile disorder of Jeremy Clarkson

Intellectual-phobia, an infantile disorder of Nazis
Deiophobia, an infantile disorder of Richard Dawkins
Tight-pants-o-philia, an infantile disorder of Fascists

Prole-o-phobia, an infantile disorder of Tony Blair!


27.6.2008

Rain
White
Noise
Constant
Writing
Playstation 2
Cappuccino
Sprinkled
With
Chocolate

But Warp 5 is effectively the speed limit within a Solar System,
presumably due to the increased levels of interstellar(planetary)
dust present, so this could be a realistic reasoning for the change
in formula after warp 5.

According to the calculated values, warp 1 is the speed of light,
warp 4.8 is 111 times the speed of light, warp 5.4 is 850 times
lightspeed and warp 8 is 4096 times lightspeed. This allows for
the Romulan Neutral Zone to be situated in the Beta Quadrant between
c.350 and 1700 light years from Sol in the direction of the Delta
Quadrant*. This also allows for the Romulans to have a vast empire,
most of which is in the Beta Quadrant of the Galaxy, thus explaining
why most of the Federation/Federation exploration is in the Alpha
Quadrant.

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Alpha_Quadrant
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Beta_Quadrant
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Gamma_Quadrant
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Delta_Quadrant

Apparent disparities: Obviously being a television
and film series not everything in Star Trek should be considered
canon (i.e. the changing appearance of the Klingons and Trills,
the postponement of World War Three), but there are some apparent
glaring contradictions with the limits on warp speed. For example,
in “The Final Frontier” both the Enterprise and a Klingon Bird
of Prey travel from a system in the Klingon Neutral Zone. to the
apparent centre of the Galaxy in a manner of days-presumably a
distance of at least 20,000 light years-when it would normally
take probably six years for a starship to traverse such a distance
(a very conservative estimate)**. However, for the purposes of
making a fast-paced filmed drama it would hardly do for long scenes
of the Enterprise crew playing cards or reading “War and Peace” for
the tenth time! A six-year journey would, however, fit in nicely
with the timescale for significant Federation events given in:

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Federation_history - Summary_of_key_dates

Which states the events in the Kirk movies taking place over a
nineteen year period (up to “The Undiscovered Country”), while in
the real world they were in production over a twelve year period.
This may also explain why the, apparently newly-constructed,
Enterprise-A was ordered to be decommissioned at the end of
“The Undiscovered Country”.

[• 2272: An attack on Earth by a massive machine lifeform called
V'Ger is closely averted. ***
• 2286: Another devastation of Earth is averted, when a reply to a
probe of unknown origin can be given, whose attempts to contact
Humpback whales severly affect Earth's atmosphere.
• 2293: On the Khitomer Conference between the Klingons and the
Federation the Khitomer Accords are
signed to establish a lasting peace between the two powers.]

*In the NG episode “The Neutral Zone”, the Enterprise crew discover
and revive three cryonically preserved humans, who ‘died’ in the
late 20th century, near the Romulan Neutral Zone. Presumably the
pod/ satellite containing them was accidentally taken in by the warp
wake of one or other of the ships establishing one of the Earth
colonies which (TOS) had been established near what would become
the buffer zone between the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire
at some unspecified time in the 22nd century when traveling these
distances had become feasible for Earth-built starships.

No real details of the RNZ are described, but it is reasonable to
assume it extends at least 1500 light years in a roughly straight
direction between the RSE and the UFP facing roughly ‘north’ in
the Galactic plane towards the Delta Quadrant as this distance is
the thickness of the Galaxy/ Galactic plane (think of the Galaxy
as a dish 1500 light years thick on average) in order to allow no
opportunity for it to be circumvented by one side or the other .

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Romulan_Neutral_Zone

**When Q transports the Enterprise-D 7000 l.y into the Delta
Quadrant, Data comments that it would take two years to reach
the nearest Starbase.

***If this date is canon, the events take place three years at
most after Kirk’s five year tour of duty, but “Star Trek: The
Motion Picture” was in production ten years after the Original
Series was made.