End of Mayan Calendar & Record Low Arctic Ice Approach

The Arctic ice pack is on course to set a record low next week-and it is still in melting phase. The climate change toward the hot regions end of things affects northern latitudes earlier and more than in the temperate to warm -except for draught obviously.

Many are historically used to ships with ice breaking capability forging their way along the edge of the continents and the ice, yet with vast areas of the Arctic ocean increasingly open more cruise ships and cargo traffic directly between Russia and Alaskan will develop as they move directly over the North Pole.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=arctic-sea-ice-likely-to-hit-record

The Arctic ocean will experience record setting pollution and ecosphere degradation as well. With the failure of the United States to be an ecospheric renewal and green tech infrastructure innovative leader sufficiently to bring the world to a better, healthier course some may view the times as moving toward an end of cycle nexus. It is a problem of bad political leadership more than of environmental inevitability.

Evidently the end of restart of historical cycles was rather normal for the Maya. The United States has experienced some end of cycle event with the Mayan calendar is set to end Dec. 21 2012. It was recently publicized (June 28) that a discovery of more 13,000-year-old Mayan writing on the topic reveals that the end of the historical cycle is a rather usual event. One King named Calakmul was an official at the prior end of cycle festivities in 692 and connected himself to the end of the present cycle. Evidently as a political insider he did not like the concept of term limits.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/341976/title/Apocalypse%2C_not_so_fast

High U.S. unemployment, declining ecosphere vitality with poor fishing and hunting and vast U.S. public budget deficits are indicators of the end of cycle for some politicians one might guess. The new political cycle may start in January 20, 2013 with the Romney-Ryan administration, though obviously that wasn't written in Mayan hieroglyphs of yore.

image credit-Crosphere Today, N.A.S.A.,U.I.C.U.,N.S.I.D.C.

President Obama Warns of Possible U.S. Military Action in Syria

President Obama has warned of possible military intervention in Syria if the Assad Government allows its chemical weapons to 'fall into the wrong hands'. The administration of course hasn't consulted with the Congress about a declaration of war before military invasion as Presidents have become accustomed to just going for it when they feel the need.

Technically I believe the administration could war for 90 days without congressional approval, and he might have a head start while the Congress is away on vacation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/world/middleeast/syria-violence.html

I tend to have the opinion that U.S. foreign policy would work better if we were to stay out of foreign conflicts unless its really necessary for national defense or to relieve gross human rights crimes. It may be that Mr. Obama feels that war is his best political strength in this election year, and that Syria is a good malleable opponent.

President Obama had luck with his order to kill Osama Bin Laden around the tenth anniversary of 9-11. The intelligence gathering at Guantanamo Bay-a facility Mr. Obama wanted to close as a 2008 candidate, is said to have provided the lead to the location of the fugitive in a secure walled compound in the bosom of Pakistan's political and military center. Mr. Obama may want to keep the military-intelligence good times rolling for the economic security of select defense .

The President has taken the credit for ending the conflict in Iraq as he continued on the Bush II schedule to withdraw U.S. military forces. Yet as in the insecure Afghanistan military political environment with dozens of U.S. casualties shot by Afghan military and police personnel since the U.S. military started transitioning to the Obama homosexual platform,and since the President has announced support for homosexual marriage, the prospects for democratic stability between the Obama forces and even traditional Muslim warriors seems a little shaky.

The new Egyptian Government is consolidating power for the Muslim Brotherhood member President Morsi and they appear to be drawing toward a rapproachment with Iran. The President expresses support for Israel during this election year, yet being on the same side as Al Qa'eda revolutionaries in Syria while Iraqi Shia have hundreds and hundreds of civilian casualties in sectarian and terrorist strife present a confusing picture for policy interpretation.

The mixed bag of variegated conflict results isn't much of a confidence builder for American interests. Maybe the President just never talks with Americans off-script anymore-or maybe he never did sufficiently  to disclose his foreign policy design. His economic plan for the U.S.A. is to play dozens more of rounds of golf if re-elected and to run up a trillion dollars a year of public debt on his tax plan while essentially waiting for the private sector to sort things out and restart the economy. Someone out there has got to be responsible, and he has lots of golf to play and foreign conflict predator drone strikes to sign off on.

Self-awareness, Animal Consciousness and Non-Existent Objects

I listened to an interesting philosophical discussion on the topic of animal consciousness recently and so thought to make a comment on an element of that.There are several theories regarding how various animals might experience reality such as horses with nearly 360 degrees of vision, and octopus with neuron in their arms, yet it is the coherent concentration of neurons, the optimal spacing and size of circuits resembling the max theoretical for a computer regarding distance of connections, overheating and processing capacity that seems  to be the main thing for consciousness.

Human self-consciousness allows a reflective capacity for making complex decisions that probably isn't existent in simple neural networks. Atheists however tend to disregard intelligent decision making preemptively and shut themselves out of intelligent thought on greater topics than empirical existence. Yet even atheists may be able to consider the epistemological context of not existent objects such as Pegasus, a balanced federal budget, unicorns and etc.

Non-existent objects are a development of the capacity of self-consciousness to imagine and comprehend what exists and what might exist with detachment form automatic processing of immediate empirical sensory input. It is doubtful that animals without self-consciousness can imagine non-existent objects. Instead, like the face recognition circuits of a digital camera,the neural network of non-self-aware animals probably processes just immediate data possibly with pre-wired responses to threat objects such as fish with larger teeth.

Well, there is much work on the topic of self-awareness, animal consciousness (e.g.do they feel anything like being alive?) etc. that make it worth reading and thinking a little about. Following are a pair of web pages summarizing the work

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonexistent-objects/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/

Pussy Riot, The Sex Pistols and Bi-Polar Democracy

The Russian punk band Pussy Riot was sentenced to a term of two years being convicted of hooliganism for their profane musical performance contra Russian President Vladmir Putin from the capitol city of Moscow's main cathedral. The Russian President may have been unhappy with the egregious violation of the separation of church and state or secularism with the ladies' music lyrics. Probably he will have their sentence commuted to public service washing the feet of the poor in some distant oblast.

It is difficult to imagine the late British Punk Band The Sex Pistols being allowed to sing their hit song 'Anarchy' from Canterbury or Westminster cathedral. One wonders what the Metropolitan had in mind if the prelates gave permission for the performance of Pussy Riot in church?

Evidently the song lasted for just 40 seconds. There are several musicians and celebrities that have expressed support for Pussy Riot's right to perform secular 'prayers' in churches. One hopes that celebrities would tend to have respect for the sacredness of the church environment as well as the right of musical will-to-political-power.

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/18/entertainment-us-russia-pussyriot-reacti-idINBRE87H07X20120818

It is possible that the Pussy Riot Band made a sincere expression unto God I suppose. Certainly one doesn't want much editing of prayer by secular authorities, or any at all actually.

The time span of a song isn't really the best way to judge how bad a song is. There are some songs that I switch off on hearing instantly. The hegemony of musicians via radio to take political power and exploit the masses for profit is more notable these days internationally. Mostly musicians don't sing songs that contribute to a good economy or environment that make it to mass broadcast airplay. 

With the changes in Russia after the end of the cold war the restoration of nation's churches to an openly religious status has had some limits with the sects permitted to open a church being restricted. It seems probably that with the transition of youth from a godless atheist state intolerant of criticism of their mobster commie leadership (only joking) to a nihilist punk ethos without experience of churches as sacred instead of profane places they naturally wandered in to the wrong place to launch their political diatribe. The Russian President could help with that too.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/17/entertainment-us-russia-pussyriot-idUSBRE87F1E520120817

Like the Londoner's' tradition of speaking from a soapbox in Hyde Park their raving attacks on Prime Minister Cameron and additional suspect politicians Moscow should develop a platform in Red Square for occasion evening musical performances and in the other corner a preferred speakers soapbox. It could be the start of a new tradition for a more egalitarian democracy-for even in the U.S. Congress today their is little enough legislating that isn't of a bi-polar two party nature of illogical extremes. The Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. is on leave for bi-polar disorder and the rest of the congress is on vacation with something like the same roughly, approximately, more or less.

The strength of a democracy actually is in free speech and political pluralism-the trend today through networking is in the opposite direction-toward consolidation of power and wealth. President Putin could make another contribution toward the of defense and development of democracy with a few adroit moves.

Simple Digital Voter I.D. Database with Face Recognition Software

The national conundrum about voter I.D. laws to prevent undetected voter fraud is symbolic of the U.S. decline in innovative and creative thought miring about 25% of the people in under-employment and unemployment. Of course the elites don't care including the Democrat Party if the poor inertially founder in futility cause they've got theirs. The Democrat leadership of tuxedos and mint juleps with Hollywood Stars is the way things are.

It would be quite simple to use existing notebook computers, table digital cameras and photo recognition software to snap a picture of every voter and have a record to compare those with in the future. In fact even without and I.D. card state governments could create a voluntary voter photo database at some agency for free so each voter can be a real person instead of a faceless abstract theory to the electoral system.

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474981183096

I suppose some might argue that requiring some voters do drop their hijab and let their mug get photo'd would discriminate against the privacy of some and profile minorities unfairly in order to exclude them from taking over the nation; well, that could be so if they have ugly profile photos as well as straight on shots.

For every vote to count and in order for the franchise to be respected it is necessary that voter fraud does not become the ruler. Some Democrats may resist verification theories of voter I.D holding the mistaken belief that only Democratic partisans perpetrate voter fraud. It is not certain that the Jim Crowe south never had an advantage through use of voter fraud to nullify the rise of the negro vote.

In the close 2000 Presidential election a few thousand fraudulent votes here and their could have made illegal voters the electors of the President of the United States instead of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the partisan decision of the Florida State Supreme Court on criteria for determining if another round of recounts should proceed to determine finding what counted as a hanging chad and which way the wind blows. If those hanging chads were cast by illegal voters the troubles and paradoxes of inadequately documented hypothetical eligible voters is compounded.

I just wanted to point out that the U.S.A. is becoming a can't do nation too much these decades, rather than the opposite.

VP Biden's Gaffs & The Eignevalues of Random Hermitian Matrices

Vice President Biden made another of his famous gaffs recently in making a campaign speech to an audience with a preponderance of citizens of African American ancestry when he surpassed his prior remark that then candidate Obama didn't smell bad like some negroes with a remark that the Romney-Ryan Presidency would return them to wearing chains. He did not specify if that would be without or without hog jowls and chittlins.

In the quest to solve the Riemann  Hypothesis determining if the zeros of the zeta function all fall along a critical line of value 1/2 to infinity mathematicians for more than a century have sought ways to prove the theorem's validity and that has led to discoveries from the utility of factors and primes in generating Internet computer security codes (RSA) to the Dyson-Montgomery discovery that another way of mapping the distribution of the zeros of the zeta function of primes along the critical line resembles very closely, as Dyson famously observed; 'that's just the same as the behavior of the difference between pairs of eigenvalues of random Hermitian matirces!".

Some of us learn about the eigenvalues of random Hermitian matrices early in life as we move up the ladder of evolutionary progress to college, and others such as myself will learn about them today on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermitian_matrix

We may find with more research-such as reading a book named 'The Music of the Primes' that the patterns Dyson remarked about are representative of the spectroscopic distribution of heavy elements such as U-92. Because heavy elements and the frequency of vibrations of the particles of their nuclei are complex it is easier to statistically describe those than to graph them in particular. That's why I wanted to write this post today.

The average statistical relationships of power of fundamental elements averaged out within particular structures ought to provide a 1/2 paradignmatic balance between being and nothingness, between sticking together and flying apart, as the zeros of the zeta function of prime numbers appear on the .5 critical line between 0 and 1.

Philosophically speaking being and nothingness seem roughly equivalent to o and 1. There is another issue of 1 being representative of a monistic, non-pluralized universe. That might be a universal field concentrated at a singularity before it expands and differentiates metaphorically, yet it is perhaps better to just leave it philosophically as One without any denotable structure.

Prime numbers factors being just themselves and 1 no matter how large occupy a philosophical position within their number system of indivisibility and fullness regarding zero as the starting point leading to themselves-if folded in half along the zero-zeta function critical line their value is half with a fraction left over. They are perfectly balanced along the tipping point without turning in either direction as might a static universe be if its interior components too could have eternal renewability in a Fred Hoyle sort of cosmology.

Their are some things that never change-such as physical constants of the Universe-upon which myriad pluralistic forms evolve like scum froth on a standing tide-line presenting new appearances. We enjoy the thermal disequillibria if it doesn't go too far, and move with the waves of temporal advance along the parameters of thermodynamics. It would only be in a different sort of Universe-perhaps with more than four dimensions of space-time, that prime numbers would not be indivisible regarding Universe (1) mathematics criteria.

Multidimensional prime numbers instead of one-dimensional regarded in four dimensions might have random statistical eignevalues of complex Hermitian matrices disappearing into extra-dimensions with non-standard spacing of real energy components. Philosophically it is interesting to conjecture what sort of mathematical axioms physicists and mathematicians might use in a variegated universe in which energy and mass appear and disappear with eignevalues or imaginary number values that appear irregular.

Yet one could even so count on the gaffs of Vice president Biden for a renormalization of political levity.

Reduce Size of Government, Corporations, Schools and Global Heating

The Obama tax cuts passed with the President's vigorous leadership reestablished the low, low tax rates on millionaires and billionaires that cannot pay for the federal budget. The Presidents budget criteria plans for a trillion dollars of federal deficit for each year of the next decade bring the total U.S. public debt then to 26 trillion dollars with the interest on that debt being more each year than the present cost of funding the Department of Defense. The fundamental economic problem with the economic picture is that government spends too much in trying to keep up with the immense global economic and political power of global corporations.

The United States had intelligent founders able to invent a constitution that provided for an economic paradigm supported by the state of the art of business and the demographic realities of the era. The economic philosopher Adam Smith wrote in the same era his brilliant tome 'On the Wealth of Nations'. The current national intelligence for political philosophy generally relies on that economic theory of 1776. Adam Smith if alive today would reinvent and reform the prospects for free enterprise in order to liberate a nation from the snares of concentrated power and wealth.

Reduction of the size of corporations and government ought to accentuate the positive elements of free enterprise and full employment. The poor should be natural supporters of vouchers for private schools to break-up the multi-thousand union student ranches. Reducing the vast size of public schools,corporations and government while increasing ecospheric health ought to create new jobs.

The U.S. middle class faces challenging times ahead. It has been in decline since the end of the cold warn and even the past 30 years. As a class it has average intelligence and yet consumes more than perhaps half of the rest of the people of the nations of the Earth without really contributing more than people of average intellect would. With the post cold-war labor and intellectual market driven by billions of hungry people that condition of privilege isn't likely to continue with the current economic style.

Adam Smith however would have reformed capitalism to enable free enterprise to flourish once more outside the totalizing strictures of global corporate power. When global corporations grow large and government declines the era of pure corporatism envisioned by Mussolini and Hitler develops with the corporations becoming the big brother of a compliant revolving door government. The government appoints the same people from party to party because neither party does more than serve the will of the financial and economic elite.

Saving free enterprise from corporate hegemony and the fiction of corporations as individuals requires a cap on the number of employees any corporation might have that once to do business in the U.S.A. at just 5000 individuals. With fewer employees intelligence will become more important that management networking and racketeering of the system. With far more corporations and businesses with fewer than 5000 employees inventiveness and adaptability will become features, neither will technologies become 'too big to change' such as the automotive industry with more than a century of inertia driving perpetual renewal of the highway bill at about a half trillion dollars.

In order to increase competition and break up second degree monopolies through networking no individual with American citizenship could lawfully own shares in more than three corporations. No foreign national could buy shares in more than three U.S. corporations.

Another good idea would be to cut taxes in the reformed era on high-end earners, yet to raise inheritance taxes on estates of more than fifty million dollars in present terms to about 51%. There should be no penalty on an individual earning a lot from his business on merit so long as he does it within the legal criteria, nor should they be discouraged by not being able to pass on an inheritance to their descendents. With a 51% inheritance tax rate on large estates a non-productive generation would experience the regular reduction of their capital to the average social condition.

The point of competition with full employment and opportunity for all to start an enterprise without being repressed by networks, collectives and organizations of any sort is the pursuit of happiness. Human beings natural seek after their interests and good-even mathematicians pursuing construction of a program to disprove Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems are being idle gamers consuming just for the heck of it.

The United States may encounter real climate turbulence in the years and decades ahead with global warming desiccating productive farmland. A remedy should be to develop a vast public works desalinization of saltwater project to bring Wets Texas and the Midwest into an irrigated condition. Areas for wildlife should be thrown in to the reclamation project also getting a share of a man-made natural desalinization project exploiting gravity, solar power, evaporation and condensation.

The United States' middle class is the target of much political gamesmanship by the elites today even as they face the challenges of social and climate decline in the years ahead. Very likely continuing public debt increase will create a catastrophe shift toward a terminal dust-bowl future. The futurist and inventor of the Gaia Hypothesis James Lovelock foresees a challenged Earth reduced to a population of 200 million in the centuries ahead through climate overheating and economic collapse. Alaska may become the last resort for surviving Americans. Considering that state with even 30 million citizens in 50 of 70 years is breathtaking. If the Arctic ice pack is now in progressive decay and a rapid increase of global heating follows in the next couple of decades the present global corporate economic leadership is completely inadequately prepared to provide leadership.

Democracy is an important thing for the quality of life of average citizens, yet as Aristotle observed they tend to not lead themselves in a good direction and lapse into picking a dictator. Autocratic societies though are inflexible on permitting free enterprise and inventions that might disturb their control of political power. The remedy for the United States now ought to be for a reform to capitalism, a refocus on public participation and leadership in church, environmental recovery and space exploration and a securing of our national borders in order that political self-determination can continue to be possible. The self-determination should be more than a determination for debauchery, personal, social and environmental decay.

The Obama administration recently announced that it would allow oil drilling in the high Arctic of Alaska's national Petroleum Reserve sprawling nearly across half of the northern littoral of the state. It will also allow a network of oil pipeline to be built to support offshore oil drilling. The high Arctic is the region of the world with the greatest increase in global heating. It is also experiencing an increasing ozone hole and is a location where the pollution from fossil fuel machines can most affect climate change. Plainly the Democrat Party has insufficient concern about reversing global heating to take a stand on the development of oil and destruction of the health of the ecosphere.

Human beings are a biological life form with self-awareness. Automobile engines and other machine carbon exhaust is a non-biological contribution on a vast scale increasing the Co2 in the Earth's atmosphere-more than the ecosphere in balance without the human contribution can balance-thus the atmospheric heating that may bring about the end of human life. It is something to be serious about.