1864 Sect. of State William Henry Seward on Unionism/’The Union War’

Many Americans don’t know much about the political ideas of the time that made the civil war happen. More know about the flow of the battles than of the politics. I have encountered an interesting book published recently on the politics of northerners- the politics of the Confederacy were covered in a previous book by the author Gary W. Gallagher.

This book on U.S. Civil War history is named ‘The Union War’. I found a note fragment Gallagher provided from Sect. Seward to Lincoln on the topic of Unionism vs. secession. Taking an RS 2477 course at the Univ. of Alaska-Fairbanks in 1988 and sitting at a table with Joe Voegler-founder of the Alaska Independence Party later found murdered in the city landfill, I was interested on Seward’s ideas on unionism. Sect. Seward of course was instrumental in purchasing Alaska from Russia.

I decided to reprint it here. The state of Alaska is also releasing former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s quotidian emails during her time in office as transcripts today. Sect. Seward’s note to Lincoln is of more historical interest for me at least. The book is something of an historian’s history book reviewing ideas of other historians as well as presenting the author’s own on the subject.

Perhaps Americans have become a little forgetful of the political question of unionism and what it meant in the first half of the 19th century before the civil war rendered the topic res judicata. Equally likely we have forgotten many of the subtleties of politics that Abraham Lincoln and others were required to use politically to get a northern population that was 99% white to fight to liberate the slaves of the south. Gallagher’s book advances a credible thesis that popular sentiment to keep the union together was the main reason northerners volunteered 1.2 million men to fight a civil war even before conscription. The idea that abolitionists wanted to let the south go its own way-perhaps to get rid of the beast-is curious. Still, it is challenging to imagine that Wisconsin with a black population just .15% had much concern about ending slavery in Louisiana.

I read a quote from Ulysses S. Grant on his first experience of encountering slaves in the south while with the Army of the West in another book. Slavery hadn’t made much of an impression on him until then as it was not part of his experience. Thereafter he became hardened in sentiment against it.

Some historians have written about those all-white unionists before the United States Colored Troops units formed in 1864 as racists, supremacists and chauvinists (really).

That 19 million white northerners would fight fewer (13 million?) southern whites to keep the union together is not so surprising. I assume first nations tribes are not included as Northern unionists in the tally-even though a full blooded Indian Union Colonel named Parker wrote the document of surrender Lee would sign at Appomattox after his Army was decimated, barefoot and starving. First nation’s tribes had not fully reconciled themselves yet to being citizens of the Union.

Gallagher mentions that Negro slaves were counted as 3/5ths citizens in the ante bellum south for the purpose of political apportionment. Southern elitists were happy enough to have the swollen congressional representation numbers yet wanted more- leading to war. The tacit recognition that Negro slaves are both humans and citizens even if not voting ones implied that the terms would eventually change.
In retrospect the south did seem to press its will to secede too far to perpetuate its way of life. There were moderate Northern offers to gradually phase out slavery the oligarchs disdained.

As an oligarchy the southern leadership presented a direct threat to unionism. Northern whites supported their own egalitarian liberty and right to advance to a property owning class, and on that basis readily enlisted to combat the secessionist south. As the possibility of a global elitism recovering portions of the United States even for potential imperial rule grew, free whites obviously would be willing to war to preserve a union and collaterally eliminate slave labor.

Seward-more famous for negotiating the purchase of Alaska from Russia- wrote to Lincoln in 1864 ‘we must Change the question before the Public from one upon Slavery, or about Slavery for a question upon Union or Disunion”.

Lincoln ran in 1864 for the Presidency on a Union Party ticket rather than the Republican. Seward supported the Union Party and provides good political advice for the President’s re-election campaign.
Lincoln’s political approach for eliciting political support for the war against southern Democrat secessionists followed the narrative of preserving the union. Some retrospectively may regard the entanglement of unionism and black emancipation as inseparable. As William James might have observed though, the Confederacy presented the Union with a forced option of fighting or yielding to oligarchic expropriation of the southern states.

It is interesting that some vague ideas about a union of free people continues today as an underlying basis for a logic of support for global revolutions-even paradoxically as networked global concentrations of wealth via corporatism exploit labor globally. Human society is often not founded upon purely rational pragmatic methods politically, but instead evolves as a circumstance with a lack of adequate public interests in structuring effective and adaptive social and economic governance.

On Poetic Aesthetics

I believe it is important to discern changes in the world as well as to regard it aesthetically.

Reading about Elton's naturalistic investigation of Svalbard's ecosystem in the 1920's recently I was impressed by the time required to develop the planetary ecosystem, and of its fragility along with the coefficient of unawareness that most politicians embody.

The aesthetic perspective is also a consequence of the constant forces of physics-we humans are emergent characteristics in that unified field perhaps created by God initially even before the Q value was set to let the cosmic inflationary era cause galaxies eventually to form.

Meaning perhaps is in understanding of what nature is as well as in its appearance.

The Way Political Cookies Crumble (poem)

In the foe society cookies progressively crumble
legal sovereignty is apparent rather than real
harsh winds of flames soar
over stagnant floods of newspeak
employment is designed by rich
networks of non-workers leaving minimum
puny profit for the bottom ten percent

Nation X has the mirror of Internet ceilings
with trans-world optic fiber cables laid
better than a soviet organization of Afghanistan
in compliant communes before the next war's 3 piece suit role model
learns the Taliban formed as student loan default derivatives
better Swat enforcement might have stopped
returning the useless confederate college degree to the source
severing the association
to sweep up janitor's profits
to write of free space, liberal scrives run aground
searching beyond the tuppence of tomorrow


The assembly of computer percentages for the House
poor-rages for 1960
as if Nixon would have voided Vietnam
and time moved forward running backward.

Free Trade Good Yet Int. Free Trade Agreements May Reduce Free Enterprise

International free trade agreements set constants of uneven value to domestic free market players. Like the Q value that determined the distribution of matter in the inflationary era of the Universe free trade agreements favor a coalescence of the business mater of trade advantage to concentrated transnational corporate wealth comprising the dominate core of star formation and economic galaxies. Local markets are marginalized as a factor in state determination of trade constants letting concentrated wealth emerge as giant black holes of the mass of millions of solar masses around which all economic mass orbits to its eventual doom.

Adam Smith was not an American. One should not take his work as a sort of economic gospel. George Washington and the founders did not write that corporations had rights and citizens individually few. The constitution could have been structured such that every corporation is endowed with inalienable rights to have 500 employees nor more or less, and that all corporations (or communes) shall be regarded equally-we know that the Founders and even Adam Smith thought about social rights in terms of individuals as opposed to concentrated power and wealth in any form. Neither believed that an absolute, existential corporate competition of consolidating power-a financial progression toward global corporatist, communism or oligarchic power was a goal of democracy or of union of citizens or states.

The marketplace was intended to represent the free and equal access and opportunity for citizens to conduct free enterprise without the empirical disadvantage of dominating corporate, communal or royal power. Democracy with political equality was the heart of the American Revolution. Political equality is destroyed by concentrated corporate wealth and power-especially trans-national corporate power. One may call the U.S.A. a democratic society still, yet it has transitioned steadily toward co-option as a corporatist entity ruled far more by the interests of trans-national corporations than of individual citizen interests.

Corporate power pre-empts political liberty at a real employee level when citizen free speech must be in subjugation to corporate policy approval in order to have a job. Obviously Americans no longer give a damn about political freedom from corporate control since corporate employees have become who Americans are. The democratic revolution that the Democratic NPR-Arab Hurricane Season economic baby Arabian Twittheads seek to import in effect was replaced years ago by a synthetic corporate android network lurking like Dengue fever mosquitoes in a global free trade agreement.
A democratic society should limit the size of corporations arbitrarily in order to conserve citizen political liberty, economic opportunity, competition and social equality. Propaganda runs against that obviously.

If free trade and free enterprise are to exist outside of networked corporate control then an import-export market should be limited to 30% of g.n.p. except for special case nations such as Iceland. National democracies should be encouraged to have renewable, low entropy ecologically rational economies. Individuals should be limited t owning shares of 3 corporations to prevent crass social ownership networking and an eventually stagnant society. Patents should be limited to a non-renewable period of ten years with a 1% royalty to the inventor by other producers thereafter for 100 years. The maximum number of employees in any corporation should be 5000 (in the U.S.A.) in order to stimulate competition. Free trade work best when the most people are economically free, independent producers not light years removed from the top of the economic ladder, not controlled by aloof and powerful financial networks, not repressed by Wall Street first cousin C.E.O.s that own every business in every town except for a few dependent service companies.

Free trade agreements passed by the congress primarily benefits concentrated wealth in corporate form statistically most able to exploit cheap foreign labor and natural resources creating an unfair domestic advantage. Free trade agreements create very unfair trade for U.S. individuals that must compete against trans-nationally advantaged publicly listed prosperous corporations. How many small local businesses bit the dust as Wall Mart expanded in the U.S.A.?

The American democracy was a social union response to oppress concentrations of power and wealth. The Union victory over southern slave oligarchs in 1865 was an affirmation of national union power. Giving up political sovereignty except as corporate sycophancy is a response to the failure of U.S. political leadership to comprehend what democracy is in the United States historically, and of the economic parameters required to prevent concentrations of wealth and power through social organization that oppress individuals as basic economic equals, make equal legal rights nominal rather than actual, reduces legal sovereignty conditionally to ‘pragmatic’ elite review, and the need to limit the economic power of social and business organizations to preserve democracy.

Waveforms Upon Nothing (poem)

Slaves cross over the Rappahannock to freedom
mists in the blue sky over green
fading with cooler morn
the war moved on to Petersburg
there are no cliffs in cities
simply abrupt social edges
discontinuities of media incorrectness
continents ending while waves surge
ever rolling away like connestoga wagons into time

Ambrose Bierce following on to Vicksburg
the civilization of war excavating continents
the dead littering forests
stomachs dry in low hanging branches
armistice again takes refuge from reason
that reason that led to millions ending
personal experience and private interests
when public force was an insensible herd
balancing bullets of opposition
for whom the lone tree was a lovely treason told

An existential light in the darkness
shines brighter than atomic midnight
recycling ideas in concentrate form
whileover ten thousand delicate cuts
poison an environment with righter right
the journey to the breaking ice
models stone falling from the world
one that resembled a more poignant collection
elusively gone beyond a round horizon
a desert storm casting brown dust aloft
stirring motions of shadows in wind
written words of waveforms upon nothing.

"Just Six Numbers" That are Constant Physical Value Parameters of the Universe

“Just Six Numbers” That are Constant Physical Value Parameters of the Universe

Martin Ree’s book ‘Just Six Numbers’ published in 1999 is still a fine, brief introduction to six important physical constants of the Universe that shape its content making fit for life instead of extended unemployment. I was fortunate to find this book that is a yardstick by which to measure the progress of cosmology in the first decade of the 21st century (i.e. in comparison to the 2011 ‘The Book of Universes’ by Barrow. Barrow also wrote a book on constants of the Universe).

It was just in 1998 that discovery of the apparent acceleration of the Universe was announced- changing the way people think about the omega value that is used to calculate if gravity will make the universe eventually contract to a big crunch.
Since the discovery of lambda-the vacuum energy expanding space (well, it might be Einstein’s cosmological constant or something else perhaps)-the investigation of alleged missing dark matter has also changed-perhaps there is not so much missing matter if the Universe is actually expanding instead of remaining a static size in accord with the ‘less gravity, more space expanding’ formula.

Another change is in the mapping of the microwave background temperature of the Universe that gives clues to the Q value or distribution of mass causing irregularity in the pre-inflationary universe letting stars and galaxies eventually coalesce. Martin Rees also goes over string theory, extra-dimensions of a potential multi-verse and other topics.
I found the book enjoyable reading recently. It made me realize that a reason for lambda-a cosmological constant that would accelerate the expansion of space-is that it might just be an apparent effect rather than a physical force itself.

If gravity exists because of a relationship of mass to hidden micro-size extra dimensions in which strings are grounded, when enough mass is drawn together the extra-dimensions in one place may smooth out space elsewhere making it appear to expand in three larger dimensions-just an idea of course (not in the book) As mass is concentrated in galaxies with gravity the ‘weight’ upon space is decreased outside where the mass formerly was…that let’s space flatten out and expanding like a curled up newspaper might be flatter and larger unfolded.

Rees also mentioned monopoles, and that is a fascinating concept. There are several ideas in the book that allow one naturally enough to consider how they might apply in the real world as one imagines it might be.
Magnets have two poles as electro-magnetic fields. It is actually difficult to imagine a one-pole or one-directional field that does not loop in upon itself. One might believe that gravity could be a looping field too as an alternative to the micro-dimensional paradigm. If a field began at a particular location as a ‘knot’ in space-time it would send force in one direction and probably travel in the opposite as if it were repulsed. Any monopole would need to be grounded in another field. The entire universe may be a field rather than a monopolar event grounded in an infinite concentration of mass and energy as it’s ‘anchor’ to start from.

I suppose it is easy to regard the strong force binding nuclei together as a segment of a unified field energy in smaller-tighter-stronger configuration. As one goes up the scale of force they become weaker and greater in size or range. Strong-electro-weak to gravity force. Energy bound in various configurations such as quarks and gluons, electrons etc comprise the appearance of mass. Strings might be like an even tighter continuous micro-field of energy giving rise to the appearance of quarks.
The idea that small dimensions should not expand, and that three larger dimensions have expanded is of interest too. I believe that the math about dimensions might not model more than the shape of those dimensions, and physicists would need to describe the energy, strength and so forth of strings, multi-dimensional strings etc. That would seem a difficult task.
Dimensions can be abstracted and represented by complex math tables. How real small dimensions would pervade space-time and relate to our three spatial dimensions of this universe is ponderous subject. What for would keep a dimension small? What size would dimensions be at a singularity or before the inflation of the Universe?

Dimensions probably are all simple—they all just go in one direction or dimensional way. It is when they pile up an interact together that the space-time gets complex to understand.

Physicists have basically explained that atoms and regular orbits can only occur in three dimensional space, so if extra dimensions exist for the Universe they must be small in order for life to exist.

Logically dimensions should have no limit to size, and they should all occupy space simultaneously-perhaps in an infinite number. The use of particular dimensions rightly ought to be selected by the kind and form of energy structures thrown in to a region of space at any given time.
It is those extra small dimensions that might be the explanation for quantum mechanical entanglement or spooky action at a distance apparently faster than light. With extra-dimensions (shortcuts) to go through very small quantum mechanical wave-particles have many possibilities for downloading into the three dimensional universe.

Obvious questions arise to those considering how six small dimensions might relate to three large dimensions of space in the beginning. Were nine dimensions of equal, perhaps infinitely small stature before becoming full of power to such an extent that three overflowed to large spatial size in the inflationary era? Three large dimensions expanding outward in the fourth dimension of time in some way retained the basic tie to the other six still small dimensions perhaps unaffected by the 4th dimension of time.

String theory cosmology, ideas about dimensions and energy could all be as naïve as Ptolemaic astrophysics, yet be the best available today. Fundamental criteria about space-time, what dimensions are, the spatial limits of the Universe(s) may be wildly incomplete, and that situation may remain so even as knowledge continues to expand the human scientific data base through research.

Free Trade Agreements to Outsource Jobs

The United States has developed a new majority negating the historical position of straight while males. This is a politically incorrect subject to write about obviously, as the new majority coalition of women, non-whites and homosexuals have the ascendency especially in the internet. I read a former Baptist minister's pro/con message today about the new acceptability of gays in the same issue as photos of high school graduates--maybe next year there will be an article in some paper on the new acceptability of bestiality-who can say?

One of the consequences of the new age of an immoral majority is trade agreements between the United States and various other countries. Every time a free trade agreement is struck the former white Republican majority that have concentrated wealth can outsource jobs to a nation with different values better suited for profit.

Eventually the Moslem world too should be a place where 'free trade' with factories outsourced from the United States may flourish. Sending a factory from Iowa or Massachusetts to Peru or Egypt brings far cheaper labor, no obligation for employee benefits, and a docile work force that respects traditional vallues along with low, low taxes-then the relocated producer can export the product to the United States-perhaps Los Angeles-avoiding high teamster wages, expensive U.S. domestic transportation costs and so forth.

I write this unpleasant evaluation of free trade agreements as a white male of course, for whom real wages of that class have been in devline 40 years in the United States. There were lots of factory jobs at one time that even a philosopher might work in long enough to save a little for graduate school or for self-employment. No more is that true.

The U.S. Government thus rationally invests in foreign nation rebuilding in order to make the relocation of American businesses to those foreign regions practical. I imagine that close work with foreign leadership elements to redecorate the world for an acepptable business model should continue.

In the meanwhile the rise of women to leading roles in politics and the media should continue while illegal entry of foreign labor will also continue. The prospects for creating good jobs generally, with secure boundaries may decline. Yet the transition of upwardly mobile new majorities albeit at a lower comparative standard of living to past generations should provide a buffer to agitation againt the outsourcing of jobs to more compliant, cheaper labor forces.

Assuredly one day the United States may achieve a tranquil balance of labor forces-when all social classes are used to prosperity and feel less insecurity in regard to formerly advantaged classes. Alternatively the United States may become mired in global issues with little hope of freeing itself of foreign control, foreign conflicts imported to the nation and ecological issues that overwhelem the political competence of Americans.

Fundamentally I am trying to transtition to a post-active phase of political commentary as our own leadership seems so resolutely opposed to any political policy that would return sufficeint quality jobs that I too might profitably snag one. There are other things to be concerned about, and more nuanced methods of political-social investigations that yet do not conform to the pervasive social corruption of leadership of the United States today and perhaps for future generations.

Some optimism should be placed here for the happy ending purpose. Hmm- I believe that off-world space exploration could occur, that Jesus may return on Oct. 21st, that space-aliens might arrive to provide humanitarian and good employment with liberty and justice for all; that's enough happy ending ideas for now...