The computer controlled flashes of light to start and stop this gene expression, "learning" how to reach and maintain a set value.

The groundbreaking approach could find use in future efforts to control biological processes, such as the production of biofuel from microbes.

It appears in Nature Biotechnology.

The approach is a comparatively simple means to take control of fantastically complex biochemical processes to achieve a desired result.

"The neat thing about this is that there are many people who have tried to do things like this by, for example, coding in the cell itself a synthetic circuit, putting genes and mechanisms in the cell," said co-author John Lygeros, of the Automatic Control Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich.

"That's had limited success up to now."

Prof Lygeros joined Prof Mustafa Khammash of the ETH's Biosystems Science and Engineering department and Prof Hana El-Samada's group at the University of California San Francisco to try to achieve better control.

The team started with the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae - a well-studied strain of yeast familiar since ancient times in brewing and baking.

A study in the same journal in 2002 found that when S. cerevisiae is exposed to light, a molecule called phytochrome within it can switch forms; red light converts it to an "active form" and a deeper red converts it back.

The activity of the phytochrome can start or stop the genetic machinery that results in the production of a given protein.

The team used this trick to ensure that when the yeast was producing that protein - corresponding to the gene being switched on - it could be tracked by using a "reporter" molecule that itself gives off light in a process called fluorescence.

In that way, the team had a full loop of control: upon shining red light in, they could track how much a population of yeast cells was expressing the gene, and apply the deeper red to curb that gene expression.

Better behaviour

The process is not simply an on-off switch, Prof Lygeros explained.

"Experimentally, it s a fairly challenging thing to do," he told BBC News.

"The fluorescence is not the only thing - there are half a dozen chemical reactions involved in this process."

The team developed a computer model to track how long each burst of light should take to precisely maintain a given amount of gene expression, allowing it to control the light tightly in a feedback loop.

The work adds to a growing amount of scientific literature in which the delicate machinery within life can be bent to the will of experimenters.

Most recently, researchers at the University of California San Francisco showed that a substantially similar approach could direct a prescribed amount of a protein to the cell wall.

Their findings should help us better understand cell signalling - the chemical messages that cells share as they co-operate within an organism.

Such methods are helping to complement time-honoured but labour-intensive genetic trickery to accomplish similar goals, Prof Lygeros explained.

"It's quite difficult to engineer synthetic circuits that do something robustly in the cell, and the hope is that by augmenting this with external signals, you can get them to behave better," he said.

"That for example may have applications in biofuel production, or antibiotic production, where they use genetically engineered organisms to increase the yields of reactions."

Source: BBC News

The therapy is much more precise than other light-therapy methods attempted to date, and it has the potential to replace chemotherapy and radiation.

Researchers at the National Cancer Institutecoupled cancer-specific antibodies with a heat-sensitive dye that damages cells when exposed to specific wavelengths of light. The antibodies recognize proteins on the exterior of cancer cells, so they would easily and accurately seek out their quarry, leaving healthy cells alone. Once bound to the cancer, the antibodies’ piggyback heat-sensitive molecule could be activated to do its job.

Led by Hisataka Kobayashi, researchers worked with several photosensitizers (light-activated molecules) before settling on one called IR700. It activates in near-infrared light and has the added bonus of fluorescence, so the researchers could easily watch its progress. They attached it to three cancer antibodies that bind to three different proteins: HER2, which is over-expressed by some breast cancers; EGFR, which is over-expressed by some lung, pancreatic, and colon cancers; and PSMA, which is over-expressed by prostate cancers.
Working with mice that had been implanted with tumors, the researchers say the cancer cells bound to the protein antibodies, and when they were exposed to infrared light, the cells died. Even a single dose of IR light made a significant difference, as the image at the top shows. Infrared light has the added benefit of penetrating several centimeters into tissue, much deeper than other wavelengths, the researchers say.

One key thing about this therapy is its selectivity, the researchers say. While other light-therapy methods can damage healthy tissue, just like radiation and chemotherapy can, this method only targets cells that are over-expressing proteins associated with certain types of cancer.
Much more work needs to be done to verify that this can work in humans — for instance, the breast cancer protein used in this study is only present in less than half of breast cancers — but the team says their method shows promise.

Source: Popular Science

The research group, led by electrical and computer engineering professor Xiuling Li, developed a technique to integrate compound semiconductor nanowires on silicon wafers, overcoming key challenges in device production. The team published its results in the journal Nano Letters.

Semiconductors in the III-V (pronounced three-five) group are promising for devices that change light to electricity and vice-versa, such as high-end solar cells or lasers. However, they don't integrate with silicon seamlessly, which is a problem since silicon is the most ubiquitous device platform. Each material has a specific distance between the atoms in the crystal, known as the lattice constant.

"The biggest challenge has been that III-V semiconductors and silicon do not have the same lattice constants," Li said. "They cannot be stacked on top of each other in a straightforward way without generating dislocations, which can be thought of as atomic scale cracks."

When the crystal lattices don't line up, there is a mismatch between the materials. Researchers usually deposit III-V materials on top of silicon wafers in a thin film that covers the wafer, but the mismatch causes strain and introduces defects, degrading the device performance.

Instead of a thin film, the Illinois team grew a densely packed array of nanowires, tiny strands of III-V semiconductor that grow up vertically from the silicon wafer.

"The nanowire geometry offers a lot more freedom from lattice-matching restrictions by dissipating the mismatch strain energy laterally through the sidewalls," Li said.

The researchers found conditions for growing nanowires of various compositions of the III-V semiconductor indium gallium arsenide. Their methodology has the advantages of using a common growth technique without the need for any special treatments or patterning on the silicon wafer or the metal catalysts that are often needed for such reactions.

The nanowire geometry provides the additional benefit of enhancing solar cell performance through greater light absorption and carrier collection efficiency. The nanowire approach also uses less material than thin films, reducing the cost.

"This work represents the first report on ternary semiconductor nanowire arrays grown on silicon substrates, that are truly epitaxial, controllable in size and doping, high aspect ratio, non-tapered, and broadly tunable in energy for practical device integration," said Li, who is affiliated with the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the U. of I.

Li believes the nanowire approach could be applied broadly to other semiconductors, enabling other applications that have been deterred by mismatch concerns. Next, Li and her group hope soon to demonstrate nanowire-based multi-junction tandem solar cells with high quality and efficiency.

Source: EurekAlert

Luc Douay, of Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, extracted hematopoietic stem cells from a volunteer's bone marrow, and encouraged these cells to grow into red blood cells with a cocktail of growth factors. Douay's team labeled these cultured cells for tracing, and injected 10 billion of them (equalling 2 milliliters of blood) back into the marrow donor's body.

After five days, 94 to 100 percent of the blood cells remained circulating in the body. After 26 days, 41 to 63 percent remained, which is a normal survival rate for naturally produced blood cells. The cells functioned just like normal blood cells, effectively carrying oxygen around the body. "He showed that these cells do not have two tails or three horns and survive normally in the body," said Anna Rita Migliaccio of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.
This is great news for international health care. "The results show promise that an unlimited blood reserve is within reach," says Douay. The world is in dire need of a blood reserve, even with the rising donor numbers in the developed world. This need is even higher in parts of the world with high HIV infection rates, which have even lower reserves of donor-worthy blood.

Other attempts to synthesize blood have focused on creating an artificial blood substitute, rather than growing natural blood with artificial means. For example, Chris Cooper of the University of Essex in Colchester, UK, is working on a hemoglobin-based blood substitute that is less toxic than the protein in its unbound state. Artificial blood substitutes present a solution for transfusions after natural disasters and in remote areas. The artificial substitutes do not require refrigeration, unlike fresh and stem cell-grown blood.

The stem cell method has its own pros, though. "The advantage of stem cell technology is that the product will much more closely resemble a red cell transfusion, alleviating some of the safety concerns that continue around the use of the current generations of artificial products," says Cooper.
While Douay's results, published in the medical journal Blood, are a major step forward, mass-produced artificial blood is still a long way away. A patient in need of a blood transfusion would require 200 times the 10 billion cells that Douay and his colleagues used in the test. Robert Lanza, one of the first people to grow red blood cells in a lab on a large scale, suggests using embryonic stem cells, which could generate 10 times the amount grown by Douay.

Source: Popular Science

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

On February 6th 2012, The Zeitgeist Movement Israel will host a Global Awareness Event in Tel Aviv, Israel in the context of Human Sustainability and World Peace.

On the heels of what appears to be an accelerating intent for military intervention in Iran from the United States and it allies, along with the world's major powers rapidly increasing armament developments in the midst of growing social destabilization, resource depletion and economic breakdown, The Zeitgeist Movement, a worldwide sustainability advocacy group working without borders or countries will be conducting a conference on the increasingly important issues of global cooperation and the means to obtain peace and human prosperity for the long term.

A feature of the event will be a lecture conducted by Peter Joseph, founder of The Zeitgeist Movement, entitled "Defining Peace". This talk will examine the historical roots of war; its technical irrelevancy; the State's historical psychological coercion of mass appeal; the inherent exclusive benefits to the upper class and denigration of the lower class; the broad inefficiency of the State itself as a diversionary/business entity and its inherent conflict propensity; along with how the only way of achieving lasting human peace is through the dissolving of the Market System catalysts, the Ownership Class and the State entity itself.

This now sold out event will be streamed live online for free via Ustream:
www.ustream.tv/channel/peter-joseph-live-on-z-fest-2012-tel-aviv-israel#events

Event Website:
www.izm.org.il/

About:
The Zeitgeist Movement is a global sustainability activist group working to bring the world together for the common goal of species sustainability before it is too late. It is a social movement, not a political one, with over 1100 chapters across nearly all countries. Divisive notions such as nations, governments, races, political parties, religions, creeds or class are non-operational distinctions in the view of The Movement. Rather, we recognize the world as one system and the human species as a singular unit, sharing a common habitat. Our overarching intent could be summarized as “the application of the scientific method for social concern.”

To learn more about our work, please visit www.thezeitgeistmovement.com

Scientists are reporting development of a fast, reliable new test that could help people avoid a terrible type of food poisoning that comes from eating fish tainted with a difficult-to-detect toxin from marine algae growing in warm waters. The report appears in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry.

Takeshi Yasumoto and colleagues explain that 20,000-60,000 people every year come down with ciguatera poisoning from eating fish tainted with a ciguatoxin -- the most common source of food poisoning from a natural toxin. Fish, such as red snapper and sea bass, get the toxin by eating smaller fish that feast on marine algae that produce the toxin in tropical and subtropical areas, such as the Gulf Coast of the U.S. There's no warning that a fish has the toxin -- it smells, looks and tastes fine. But within hours of ingesting the toxin, people with ciguatera have symptoms that often include vomiting, diarrhea, numbness or tingling in the arms and legs and muscle and joint aches. Debilitating symptoms may last for months. The current test for the toxin involved giving it to laboratory mice and watching them for symptoms. It is time-consuming, may miss the small amounts present in fish, and can't tell the difference between certain forms of the disease. That's why Yasumoto's group developed a faster, more sensitive test.

They describe development of a new test, using standard laboratory instruments, that avoids those draw backs. Yasumoto's team proved its effectiveness by identifying 16 different forms of the toxin in fish from the Pacific Ocean. Clear regional differences emerged -- for example, snappers and groupers off Okinawa shores had one type, whereas spotted knifejaw captured several miles north of Okinawa had another type. They also identified 12 types of toxin in a marine alga in French Polynesia, which could be the primary toxin source. The researchers say that the method outperforms current detection methods and in addition to helping diagnose patients, it will also help scientists study how the toxins move through the food chain from one animal to another.

Source: American Chemical Society

It is already used in Swiss elections to ensure that electronic vote data is securely transmitted to central locations. And as far as we know, no current quantum cryptographic system has been compromised in the field. This may be due to the work of security researchers who spend all their waking moments—and quite a lot of their non-waking moments—trying to pick the lock on quantum systems.

Their general approach can be summed up as follows: if you can fool a detector into thinking a classical light pulse is actually a quantum light pulse, then you might just be able to defeat a quantum cryptographic system. But even then the attack should fail, because quantum entangled states have statistics that cannot be achieved with classical light sources—by comparing statistics, you could unmask the deception. In the latest of a series of papers devoted to this topic, a group of researchers has now shown that the statistics can also be faked.

Quantum cryptography relies on the concept of entanglement. With entanglement, some statistical correlations are measured to be larger than those found in experiments based purely on classical physics. Cryptographic security works by using the correlations between entangled photons pairs to generate a common secret key. If an eavesdropper intercepts the quantum part of the signal, the statistics change, revealing the presence of an interloper.

But there's a catch here. I can make a classical signal that is perfectly correlated to any signal at all, provided I have time to measure said signal and replicate it appropriately. In other words, these statistical arguments only apply when there is no causal connection between the two measurements.

You might think that this makes intercepting the quantum goodness of a cryptographic system easy. But you would be wrong. When Eve intercepts the photons from the transmitting station run by Alice, she also destroys the photons. And even though she gets a result from her measurement, she cannot know the photons' full state. Thus, she cannot recreate, at the single photon level, a state that will ensure that Bob, at the receiving station, will observe identical measurements.

That is the theory anyway. But this is where the second loophole comes into play. We often assume that the detectors are actually detecting what we think they are detecting. In practice, there is no such thing as a single photon, single polarization detector. Instead, what we use is a filter that only allows a particular polarization of light to pass and an intensity detector to look for light. The filter doesn't care how many photons pass through, while the detector plays lots of games to try and be single photon sensitive when, ultimately, it is not.

It's this gap between theory and practice that allows a carefully manipulated classical light beam to fool a detector into reporting single photon clicks.

Since Eve has measured the polarization state of the photon, she knows what polarization state to set on her classical light pulse in order to fake Bob into recording the same measurement result. When Bob and Alice compare notes, they get the right answers and assume everything is on the up and up.

The researchers demonstrated that this attack succeeds with standard (but not commercial) quantum cryptography equipment under a range of different circumstances. In fact, they could make the setup outperform the quantum implementation for some particular settings.

The researchers also claim that this attack will be very difficult to detect, but I disagree. The attack depends on very carefully setting the power in the light beams so that only a single photodetector is triggered in Bob's apparatus. Within the detector, the light beam gets divided into two and then passed through polarization filters and detected. For a single photon beam, this doesn't matter—only one detector can click at any one time. But Eve's bright bunch of photons could set multiple detectors clicking at the same time. If you periodically remove filters, then Eve will inadvertently trigger more than a single photodiode, revealing her presence.

Source: Physical Review Letters, 2011, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.170404 - Ars Technica - via ZeitNews.org

Topic:

Strategies for reaching people in various activist groups. How to concentrate on what we all have in common, and how to avoid alienating these groups when spreading your message. And the necessity of the various groups (Occupy, Tea Party, etc.) to join forces against common foes to affect real change. 

Free TZM Global Show Archives:
http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/radio_shows

Friends,

On Feb 1st 2012 at 4pm EDT Neil (A.K.A VTV) and Aaron (A.K.A StormCloudsGathering) will host this week's TZM Global Radio Show.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/zmglobal/2012/02/01/tzm-global-radio-show-feb-1st-12-host-neil-aka-vtv

About : Started in 2009, TZM Global Radio is a weekly radio show presented by various coordinators/lecturers of The Zeitgeist Movement in a rotational fashion.

My name is Neil Kiernan, a.k.a VTV. V-RADIO is an activist radio show dedicated to spreading awareness of the need for mankind to focus on sustainability, equality, and peace. Topics frequently discussed on V-RADIO are: The Venus Project. The life's work of industrial designer and social engineer Jacque Fresco. The Zeitgeist Movement and the work of filmmaker Peter Joseph. Charlie Veitch and the love police. Ben Stewart of the Hanged Man Project. The "Occupy" movement particularly Occupy Detroit. Interviews with many other filmmakers, scientists and activists. V-RADIO is an effort funded by donations from it's listeners. If you would like to support V-RADIO click the "Donate" tab up at the top of this page.

If you are new to V-RADIO, you can check out the V-RADIO archives on one of the tabs above and get started. On the links page you will find links to my various social networking sites, (Facebook,MySpace, etc) and links to other radio shows dedicated to spreading awareness of this direction. Click on the "Must see TV" link for links to many great documentaries that are viewable for free on the internet that give more great information and insight into why we are doing what we are doing in the Zeitgeist movement. All of my shows are also on iTunes as well. And also, if you are here for Zeitgeist TV now you can view it and participate in the chat room right here on V-RADIO.org.

Thanks again to all of my supporters as you are the reason I am doing this.

Simulating these fluffy puffs of water vapor is so computationally complex that even today's most powerful supercomputers, working at quadrillions of calculations per second, cannot accurately model them.

"Clouds modulate the climate. They reflect some sunlight back into space, which cools the Earth; but they can also act as a blanket and trap heat," says Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). "Getting their effect on the climate system correct is critical to increasing confidence in projections of future climate change."

In order to build the break-through supercomputers scientists like Wehner need, researchers are looking to the world of consumer electronics like microwave ovens, cameras and cellphones, where everything from chips to batteries to software is optimized to the device's application. This co-design approach brings scientists and computer engineers into the supercomputer design process, so that systems are purpose-built for a scientific application, such as climate modeling, from the bottom up.

"Co-design allows us to design computers to answer specific questions, rather than limit our questions by available machines," says Wehner.

Co-design Test Case: Clouds

In a paper entitled "Hardware/Software Co-design of Global Cloud System Resolving Models," recently published in Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, Shalf, Wehner and coauthors argue that the scientific supercomputing community should take a cue from consumer electronics like smart phones and microwave ovens: Start with an application—like a climate model—and use that as a metric for successful hardware and software design.

The paper which uses the climate community's global cloud resolving models (GCRMs) as a case-study argues that an aggressive co-design approach to scientific computing could increase code efficiency and enable chip designers to optimize the trade-offs between energy efficiency, cost and application performance.

According to coauthor David Donofrio, a co-designed system for modeling climate would contain about 20 million cores (today's most powerful scientific cluster, Japan's 'K Computer' contains about 705,000 cores) and be capable of modeling climate 1,000 times faster than what is currently possible.

"Most importantly, the system would remain fully programmable so that scientific codes with similar hardware needs to the GCRMs, like seismic exploration, could also benefit from this machine," says Donofrio, a computer scientist at Berkeley Lab.

"Today when we purchase a general purpose supercomputer, it comes with a lot of operating system functions that science applications don't need. When you are worried about power, these codes can be very costly," says Shalf. "Instead of repurposing a chip designed for another market, the scientific HPC (high performance computing) community should specify what they want on a chip—the intellectual property (IP)—and only buy that.'"

According to Shalf, a co-designed system for modeling climate would use about one quarter to one tenth the energy required for a conventional supercomputer with the same capabilities.

Consumers Pave the Way for Next Generation Supercomputers

Although innovative for scientific supercomputing, the idea of application-driven design is not new. Electronics like cell-phones and toaster ovens are built of simpler embedded processor cores optimized for one or a few dedicated functions.

"Because the ultimate goal of the embedded market is to maximize battery life, these technologies have always been driven by maximizing performance-per-watt and minimizing cost. Application-driven design is the key to accomplishing this," says Shalf. "Today we look at the motherboard as a canvas for building a supercomputer, but in the embedded market the canvas is the chip."

He notes that the most expensive part of developing a computer chip is designing and validating all of the IP blocks that are placed on the chip. These IP blocks serve different functions, and in the embedded market vendors profit by licensing them out to various product makers. With an application in mind, manufacturers purchase IP block licenses and then work with a system integrator to assemble the different pieces on a chip.

"You can think of these IP blocks as Legos or components of a home entertainment system," says Donofrio. "Each block has a purpose, you can buy them separately, and connect them to achieve a desired result, like surround sound in your living room."

"The expensive part is designing and verifying the IP blocks, and not the cost of the chip. These IP blocks are commodities because the development costs are amortized across the many different licenses for different applications," says Shalf. "Just as the consumer electronics chip designers choose a set of processor characteristics appropriate to the device at hand, HPC designers should also be able to chose processor characteristics appropriate to a specific application or set of applications, like the climate community's global cloud resolving model."

He notes that the resulting machine, while remaining fully programmable, would achieve maximum performance on the targeted set of applications, which were used as the benchmarks in the co-design process. In this sense, Shalf notes that the co-designed machine is less general purpose than the typical supercomputer of today, but much of what is included in modern supercomputers is of little use to scientific computing anyway and so it just wastes power.

"Before this work, if someone asked me when the climate community would be able to compute kilometer scale climate simulations, I would have answered 'not in my lifetime,'" says Wehner. "Now, with this roadmap I think we could be resolving cloud systems within the next decade."

Although climate was the focus of this paper, Shalf notes that future co-design studies will explore whether this will also be cost-effective for other compute intensive sciences such as combustion research.

Source: PhysOrg - via ZeitNews

Written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient

Major General Smedley D. Butler

USMC, Retired

CHAPTER ONE

WAR IS A RACKET

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

Again they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast sheep's eyes at each other, forgetting for the nonce [one unique occasion], their dispute over the Polish Corridor.

The assassination of King Alexander of Jugoslavia [Yugoslavia] complicated matters. Jugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other's throats. Italy was ready to jump in. But France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people – not those who fight and pay and die – only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.

There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.

Hell's bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?

Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, Il Duce in "International Conciliation," the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:

"And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace... War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it."

Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well-trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war – anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter's dispute with Jugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dollfuss showed it too. There are others in Europe too whose sabre rattling presages war, sooner or later.

Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not greater menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.

Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose. In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the "open door" policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.

Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war – a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.

Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit – fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends.

But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?

What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

Yes, and what does it profit the nation?

Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn't own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became "internationally minded." We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington's warning about "entangling alliances." We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.

It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people – who do not profit.

CHAPTER TWO

WHO MAKES THE PROFITS?

The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven't paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children's children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.

The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits – ah! that is another matter – twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent – the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it.

Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket – and are safely pocketed. Let's just take a few examples:

Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people – didn't one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn't much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let's look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump – or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

Or, let's take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.

There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let's look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.

Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.

Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.

Let's group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.

A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.

Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren't the only ones. There are still others. Let's take leather.

For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That's all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.

International Nickel Company – and you can't have a war without nickel – showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.

American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.

Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.

And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public – even before a Senate investigatory body.

But here's how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.

Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought – and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.

There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn't any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it – so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.

Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches – one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!

Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.

There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.

Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 – count them if you live long enough – was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.

Undershirts for soldiers cost 14˘[cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 30˘ to 40˘ each for them – a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers – all got theirs.

Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment – knapsacks and the things that go to fill them – crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them – and they will do it all over again the next time.

There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.

One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.

Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn't ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.

The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some of the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn't float! The seams opened up – and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.

It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.

The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.

Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying "for some time" methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee – with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator – to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn't suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.

Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses – that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.

There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.

Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.

CHAPTER THREE

WHO PAYS THE BILLS?

Who provides the profits – these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them – in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us – the people – got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par – and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.

But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men – men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.

In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.

There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement – the young boys couldn't stand it.

That's a part of the bill. So much for the dead – they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded – they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too – they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam – on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain – with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.

But don't forget – the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.

Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share – at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn't bargain for their labor, Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn't.

Napoleon once said,

"All men are enamored of decorations...they positively hunger for them."

So by developing the Napoleonic system – the medal business – the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.

In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.

So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side...it is His will that the Germans be killed.

And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies...to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.

Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure."

Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.

All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill...and be killed.

But wait!

Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance – something the employer pays for in an enlightened state – and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.

Then, the most crowning insolence of all – he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.

We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back – when they came back from the war and couldn't find work – at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!

Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly – his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.

When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too – as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.

And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.

CHAPTER FOUR

HOW TO SMASH THIS RACKET!

WELL, it's a racket, all right.

A few profit – and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.

The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation – it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted – to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages – all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers –

yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders – everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!

Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.

Why shouldn't they?

They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are!

Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket – that and nothing else.

Maybe I am a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say. So capital won't permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people – those who do the suffering and still pay the price – make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.

Another step necessary in this fight to smash the war racket is the limited plebiscite to determine whether a war should be declared. A plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying. There wouldn't be very much sense in having a 76-year-old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manufacturing plant – all of whom see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war – voting on whether the nation should go to war or not. They never would be called upon to shoulder arms – to sleep in a trench and to be shot. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.

There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected. Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote. In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote. In some, you must own property. It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the World War and be examined physically. Those who could pass and who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite. They should be the ones to have the power to decide – and not a Congress few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in physical condition to bear arms. Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote.

A third step in this business of smashing the war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only.

At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don't shout that "We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation." Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.

Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.

The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.

The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.

The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can't go further than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.

To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.

We must take the profit out of war.

We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.

We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.

CHAPTER FIVE

TO HELL WITH WAR!

I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.

Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had "kept us out of war" and on the implied promise that he would "keep us out of war." Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.

Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?

Money.

An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:

"There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.

If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money...and Germany won't.

So..."

Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy. When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy" and a "war to end all wars."

Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.

And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.

Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don't mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?

The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.

The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe.

There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane. Even this, if it were possible, would not be enough.

The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with machine guns. It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.

Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too.

But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.

If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war – even the munitions makers.

So...I say,

TO HELL WITH WAR!

Source: http://lexrex.com