It's Time to Panic! -- Tom Englehardt

Tom Englehardt takes time off from his blog TomDispatch over the holidays but comes back strong and focused in the new year.

"The Fate of Our Earth"

He opens his TomGram by getting directly to the point of putting threats of 2016 in perspective starting with: "Why the Islamic State Is the Minor Leagues of Terror".

The first line:  "It's time to Panic!"  Panic is  response to terror.  Tom starts with the Islamic State being a minor reason (cause) for terror (effect).  In the bigger picture of terror there are bigger things to focus on as the cause and effect of terror version 2016.

While something, some act, some big thing happening may light the fuse like WWI the bomb it is connected to ignite is a big one.  Atomic in the short flash of exploding, Environment in the longer term span of equally devastating explosive effects.  Maybe it is like a "pay me now, right now and big time"  or "pay me later over time, bit by bit".  The result will be the same.  Perhaps the difference is that in an immediate and devastating explosion there is associated immediate blame on a few.  In the longer term devastation the blame is on all of us.  It is a matter of IBGYBG.  I'll be gone, you'll be gone.  Talking death here.  When we view it from a cause of our violent death, up close and personal, terrorists are a cause way down the scale of probabilities with auto accident, gun shot, etc. way up the scale.  Those are a one at a time things, here and there.  The other big probability is all at once in great numbers.  Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were each about equal.  The atom bomb took enough to fill a sports stadium.  

Decay of wood in a forest is a slow burning of regeneration of wood that recycles itself through a wide variety of natural benefits.  It is like an extended concept of apoptosis beyond the actual demise of the living organism.  Fire is fast burn recycle directly to energy.  Both arrive at the same end but fire skips all the intermediate steps in the recycling process.  It kills and consumes living things immediately.

Terror is an elegant way to skin a cat by making it so afraid that all that is necessary to skin it is to say Bo! and then watch it jump out of its own skin. Skin if in fact the largest organ of our body.  In the strictly physical world without our skin, shedding it by jumping out of it or being skinned alive we die.  Snakes can do it and live.  Regenerate lost parts too.

My view of the world is that the Information Age gives us the ability to abstract the the Information of a thing from its physical binding and manage the conceptual information independently but in relationship to its physical association.  What does that mean?  The Information Age is using our heads to create tools to build with more than our hands.  Tools that were not available to us in the Industrial Age.  

Legacy systems always have a relationship to emerging systems in the problem domain of change.

If we do not use our heads then it is time to panic!  If we use our heads we can not only avoid panic but solve the problem domain that would otherwise cause it in an increasingly destabilizing chain reaction of physical real world events that we would address by using the physical tools  of the Industrial Age and failing to manage them with our Information Age ability to abstract the power of managing concepts from the tight binding physical association.  The power of conceptual truth extracted from the physical nature of a knife, arrow or bullet that delivers it in the past.

The truth is mightier than the sword.  A concept that I have wrestled with all my life.  To extract the conceptual power of the sword, detach it from its physical binding.  It is a difficult thing that perhaps involves faith more than reason to elevate it to the highest level?

I would settle for the level of reason.  If some want to go to a higher level of faith based on a commonly agreed upon truth of reason without contradiction then more power to them.  Give me that old time Reason of logic based Truth, its good enough for me.

Tom Englehardt is a hero because he swings a pen with the power of a sword.

David Poyer was also a navy officer.  I presented my sword with the following dedication to a new navy officer that I believed had the honor to carry it forward in his career.

The time has not yet come when we no longer need the sword at all but we are on that threshold of time when we can design a conceptual tool of the Information Age that extract the abstract power of the sword from its physical binding and therefore makes it more powerful.  If we don't then the sword rules.

Tomahawk

Poyer David

DEDICATION

Let this be dedicated to them both.

To those who forge the weapon,

Trusting in strength,

And those who renounce it,

Trusting in faith.

Those who lived through the time of trial warn us:

Better to have and not require

Than to grasp and find the scabbard empty.

But let us never cease to ask

If the time has come

When we no longer need the sword at all.