Showing posts with label contemporary histor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label contemporary histor. Show all posts

9/1/24

On Ukraine-If You are in a Hole Stop Digging it Deeper

The Biden administration has proven the truth of the axiom of the First Law of Holes that says; “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging it deeper.” Digging a vast economic and political hole in Ukraine through several Democrat administration in order to conquer land historically belonging to Russia was a feat of historically illiterate, bureaucratically minded union leadership quality personal egoist sociopaths.

The pathetic cost in human lives physically, injuries of war physically and psychologically is vast and the numbers keep compiling. There never was a reasonable chance of the west defeating Russia militarily to keep all of Ukraine for itself. Russians tend to be tough fighting on their home turf, and if they were actually to have lost the conflict would probably swiftly escalate to battlefield nukes to defrappe western military forces. The west would have to accept that or upgrade to M.A.D. retaliation basically.

President Biden is the worst reasoning war mongering President in U.S. history. He again moved to provide Ukraine’s government with up to 72,000 artillery shells per month for the rest of 2024 assuring more deaths, more property destruction and more impossibility of developing or investing in peace for the remainder of his term of office. A Harris or Trump administration would have hard choices to make about where to go with that conflict. Trump has said he would move toward peace and Harris has said she would go for the Biden approach she has supported for several years. Voters would be happier if she would just stipulate that she would accept President Putin’s reasonable peace plan or just go for the Russia gets the east bank of the Dnepr River and West Ukraine the western side.

The costs of rebuilding Ukraine will be great- in the trillions, and Ukraine will probable expect Europe and the U.S. to pay for it. I am somewhat offended by the idea of paying trillions to rebuild a nation that could have had war avoided with a practical peace plan a priori to adjust the wrong settlement of the Cold War boundary of Russia and Ukraine.

The Biden-Harris war lunacy has done great harm to world opinion about the United States since many perceive it as the school yard bully that could intimidate small nations and overstepped its power with Russian Ukraine. Democrat leadership about Ukraine is like maladroit engineering that mistakes its estimates of how easy it would be to build a dam across the Bering Strait bud decided to invest a trillion dollars to get something started anyway just to discover that tide and currents wash away the work.

The Biden-Harris war plan has restored the unity of the remaining communist block and strengthened it by forcing Russia to turn to a much closer relationship with that mixed economy state and neglect developing free enterprise capitalism. The negative effects of the conflict for the United States are great and will contribute to future economic issues for Americans. The astounding stupidity of the approach is what is breathtaking. How did the United States fall to such a low level of leadership after Ronald Reagan for twenty years of Democrats?

I should make a disclaimer here concerning Ayn Rand Republicans. Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ followers don’t recognize that she wrote in favor of the 1% CEO and shareholder people and was in a sense against the 99% of the public that aren’t CEO and owners of big businesses. She should have written a sequel for labor that isn’t union and demonstrated why hard individual work counts, or should count if there was an actual meritocracy in the U.S.A. Piece work of an objective nature is the only way to have real meritocratic labor and that doesn’t form the primary structure of what labor works on.

In the U.S.A. the six guys leaning on their shovels chatting will go farther and get better pay than the individual who thinks working better than others competitively will win out. Life does not recognize that kind of individual effort. That kind of worker burns out while being ignored.

There are so many unfair labor values empirically that union labor does have a way of getting a substantial chunk of change for numerous workers, although obviously union labor does have an element of a pyramid scheme structure to it- not all workers could be in unions without the wages paid becoming nonsensical and uniform while business would be inflexible and maladaptive. One would develop a Soviet Union or sovereign union sort of structure with the main difference being that government leaders might be CEOs instead of Union executives. In short a Hitler-Mussolini corporatism rather than a Soviet corporatism.

8/30/24

Is $40 Billion XM-30 A Priori Obsolete?

 The Army plans to spend $40 billion to replace the Bradly with a next generation fighting vehicle yet in light of drone developments one must wonder if the entire concept of blocky, chunky armored vehicles will soon be obsolete.

Mechanized infantry combat vehicles are solid targets for a plethora of new drone designs that can fly at ground contour proximity routes and get under or attach to tanks with a lot of plastic explosives at reasonably high speed. The entire paradigm seems slow. Helicopters are another easy target for next gen mobile missile platforms. One could even put tow missiles type anti-tank weapons on drone flying platforms to hunt from camouflaged hides chunky opposition forces sacrifices.

  War is just to clever to avoid. Next generation Hatsfields and McCoys need better toys to kill one another with plainly. How can that be accomplished so both are satisfied?

8/29/24

Donald Trump's Trouble at the Arlington National Cemetery

Donald Trump on a Presidential campaign visited the Arlington national cemetery with family members of servicemen buried there. The media have made much ado about that. I suppose the visit made family members of the fallen with him feel a little better.

Trump Visits Arlington National Cemetery

Visiting the cemetery was somewhat inappropriate, yet Trump is the peace candidate rather than a Democrat on the side of adding hundreds of thousands to graves in Europe from Ukraine and Russia. In fact that conflict could lead to millions of Americans losing their lives in nuclear war. These are extraordinary times.

Arlington is something of a gated community that Donald Trump probably couldn't be buried in because he wasn't in the military. Since he was commander-in-chief perhaps that would be his way in. Democrats probably would protest if he took up residence there when he passes some day as he nearly did last month. In the American political wars he earned a purple heart.

Homeless people that aren't veterans don't get to be buried in a national cemetery. Getting off a Greyhound bus years ago across the street from the National Cemetery at Arlington I got locked into a bathroom stall briefly when the door wouldn't let me out. For a few seconds I thought my stay at Arlington might be longer than I intended in case the bus left when the rest break time elapsed shortly. At last the door opened and I ran to the bus. Many homeless Americans are buried at public expense and cremated. One can honor the military dead best by not adding to their numbers in the U.S.A. or foreign troops too for that matter.

8/20/24

Faster Than Light Travel with Zero-Dimension Shortcut

 Science fiction writers like to fold space for faster than light space travel. Maybe Frank Herbert in Dune was the first to use the concept. It is attractive, clever and improbable. I shall explain why and suggest a different approach for science fiction stories.

The four dimensions of the Universe happened someplace without any dimensions- and the four dimensions coincided with expansion,. So what do you think about that? Parmenides and Heraclitus considered the spatial volume. If the number of dimensions was variable at the start then it must have had zero to start with.

Space doesn’t exist. What does exist is a unified field that unfolded in four dimensions from a compact singular condition. Space in the universe is a thin part of the energy and other forms of stuff that the Universe is made of. One can shape electric fields and gravity seems to be everywhere yet space of the Universe is also a part of the field. True nothingness is not the same as space. True nothingness that existed before the Universe and in which the Universe and its four dimensions exist probably has zero dimensions.

If the Universe might have had more or less than four dimensions (if it were designed for example) it probably would need to have appeared in a tabula rasa environment with zero dimensions. The Universe field differentiated with four basic forces today (plus unknown forces such as dark energy and dark matter perhaps) is grounded in zero dimensions. Instead of folding space or in other words folding fields with all of the problems that would follow reshaping portions of the Universe and all of the fields within portions of it, science fiction writers could simply have faster than light four dimension travelers in some way slip through to the zero-dimension/four dimension point of contact where distance does not exist; yet simultaneously does.

That paradox could be why select quantum particle and waves can convey information faster than light to entangle distant particles. At some level below the Planck length, the four dimension entangled state of mass and energy may contact the zero-dimension paradox and exchange information faster than light because there is no distance from A to B in zero dimensions. The interface of four dimensions with zero dimensions would be a quantum shortcut where everything in four dimensions has no distance apart. Exploiting the interface area would be challenging of course. To remain a four dimensional entity stepping somewhat beyond to the zero dimension ‘point’ where distance and other forces do not exist (such as gravity) might be comparable to exploiting the surface of a microscopic black hole that exists without gravity yet warps space (this is only a metaphor because space doesn’t exist- it is just field phenomena that are reshaped to a warp paradigm by gravity) so one could abridge distances down to near zero for the purpose of expediting travel time. Traveling around the Earth is faster near the poles. Consider zero dimension travel to be like the north pole (or south) that continues curvature to infinity and allows access to all locations of four dimensional spacetime without distance because of the topology.

Before the singularity existed in space-time there were no dimensions. For some reason the Universe expanded with four dimensions arising, although string theory posits smaller 'hidden' dimensions. There may be no necessity that a Universe must have four dimensions instead of ten. Some cosmologists speculate that the universe may exist on the surface or event horizon of a hyper-dimensional black hole in a Universe that actually has five or more dimensions. In order for the original empty space or void that pre-existed the Universe to allow a Universe to arise with x dimensions it need have no dimensions to start with, and the appearance of dimensions in the space-time expansion of a singularity is phenomenal. Though the Universe arises, it does so in the area or volume that has no dimensions. No dimension void is the host for all possible dimensions that might appear. If all of the dimensions that exist re-existed the Universe then they would have filled the true void unto infinity and would not allow more or less dimensions to exist. I suppose that is the basic presupposition of some who regard the singularity as expanding within a four dimensional void thereby sinking string theory.

https://youtu.be/Ua4Lu0Vo42g

Capitalism and Ludwig Von Trump (Science Fiction)

 Laura said; “Yes, I want confirmation. That extrusion of new space is at the edge of the Ludwig Von Trump galaxy forty million light years from the end of the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way. Alert the crew of the finding and take us to Ludwig Von Trump and a habitable cluster of stars with planets on our way toward, yet not beyond, the galactic habitation zone.”

Laura considered what she knew about the Ludwig Von Trump galaxy. It was named for the inventor Ludwig Von Trump of the original Earth-Mars Plutonic solar system. Trump invented a way of streamlining and accelerating patents applications with the vetting and granting of patents with a broad tree diagram of free induction slots to place a patent idea in-the-market and let it flow through the system toward potential emergence as the one, true idea returning standardized royalties to inventors from producers.

Human societies, Trump believed, needed to encourage and support intellectual inventions from everyone rather than to repress them. Often the rich could afford to restrict or co-opt ideas of poor inventors trickling up creativity with massive hydraulic pumps. Von Trump’s humble, liberating thought stimulated a cascade of new ideas bringing swiftly to market a wealth of inventions that became salient components in the drive to comprehend the cosmological mechanics of Meta-universal configurations.

Laura Thought regarded Von Trump’s ideas concerning liberation of the marketplace of ideas inadequate to inform the human race about the inability of capitalism to apply good human-sense management in democracy to promote ecospheric conservation and natural resource sustainability under classical human economic assault. For Laura, primitive, predatory, unreflective capitalism was comparable to ravenous insects landing on the leaves of tasty plants and mafia taking over police unions eliminating society of dissidents to mafia control of government with unions.

She knew that capitalism was the fundamental premise of evolution with species, and even mass under the power of gravity seeking to build up as much capital for itself as possible. It is the gravity that builds up planets and galaxies, the power that builds molecules and draws forests competitively upward. Yet reason must prevail as well as pluralism Laura thought, lest capitalism produce nothing more than black holes.

Directed capitalism like directed evolution requires intelligent design of structures to arise and exist in space-time. Capitalism and the invisible hand of Adam Smith weren’t repositories of human wisdom or political responsibility such as might exist across more enlightened societies with their own market wisdom limited in scope and utility. Human societies far too commonly replied on Adam Smith’s capitalist paradigm to replace environmental responsibility with the belief that the invisible hand of capitalism would provide the best of all possible worlds so long with royal supervision.

In actual fact capitalism is an expression of human values concerning supply and demand, lacking in-itself environmental wisdom or cognizance as one should expect politicians to have. Capitalism is a natural and consistent urge to swell in scale and power amplified with technology that will destroy the natural order unless it is carefully directed with intelligent human design. it cannot be more than a reflection of natural forms. President Franklin D. Roosevelt showed wisdom in political leadership is required to moderate irrational capitalist exuberance that puts on environmental blinders in an insatiable smirch for proplits.

Ensuing human abandonment of environmental and political reason brought humanity to environmental self-destruction with no environmental captain running the ship. The environmental crash of the first global civilization of Earth left survivors on Mars and Pluto; mostly rich elites and their breeding servants. While Chin Chi Wang led the Martian survivors through a protracted period of civil war toward unification, the second great Earth planetary civilization arose from the ash heap of history like a spring seedling in a scorched Earth forest. A greater trans-planetary system civilization grew with a library of intellectual capital to build upon, sending explorers and settlers beyond local Universes to the Metaverse.

The Shibboleth’s A.I. programmed a special relativity coordinate tensor to the Von Trump galaxy star system Drizzle and planet Drizzle Three. The ship’s pilot engaged the Higgs field decoupler and three-dimensional data transfer to send the S.V. Shibboleth faster-than-light across two dimensions as data into the Troposphere of Drizzle Three.

Paradigms for Reducing Atmospheric Heating

 Arresting and correcting global warming is a huge, challenging task possible too great for a nation of suers rather than doers to get done. Democrat party politicians can’t just sneak a lawyer’s Rube Goldberg environmental bill under wraps through Congress with a one-party majority vote and actually get the job done even if they are elected and spend half a billion dollars on day care as a partial remedy. The challenge is quite large and is likely to need vast changes in the economy and human tool kit. That will require a publicly reviewed and engineered approach; one that the Democrat Party could sign on to and support before their next presidential primary season.

In 2020 one of the Democrat candidates in the primaries advocated building aa great sun screen at L-5, while another had some kind of complex, unknown plan that journalists who reviewed it said would cost more than 50 trillion dollars. Approaches to solving the global atmospheric heating crisis require input from a host of disciplines including physics, biological, sociological, economic etc. There will be consequences for the world to any approach taken. Such a once-in-a-lifetime political action needs peer reviewed vetting of the highest order. Reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth could have vast unintended consequences that need be considered.

During the Eisenhower administration the nation could still get large physical infrastructure projects accomplished. In recent decades the nation has failed at such large projects with vast cost overruns and even cancellations mid-way. Bureaucracies and legal challenges have rendered the feral government unable to accomplish projects like the Interstate Highway System, the T.V.A., the Grand Coulee Dam , the Apollo Missions that had great scale and investment and complexity. There was even a plan to extend the Inside Passage from Alaska to Portland Oregon with a canal from Olympia Washington. That would have made western Washington State an island and provided a two-state solution with Washington’s blue voters on the Western Island and the Red voters on the mainland decades ahead of time. Not all projects turned out to be environmentally, and there is a lesson in that for any potential environmental bill to knock out global warming. It is not certain that any large, costly (if necessary) global warming reduction project would amount to anything more than a costly swamp for partisan spending.

Private enterprise has added some technology to capture and sequester CO2, solar voltaic panels have become more affordable and will reduce acceleration of warming gasses from the sunny parts of the world that might otherwise be emitted from electrification powered by fossil fuels. It is plain that government should provide leadership for example, in developing road surface material that reflects rather than absorbs sunshine to warm the atmosphere during the day and after dark. Asphalt manufacturers aren’t likely to invest in research to develop new materials; that is a task that government could accelerate by offering a 100 million dollar prize for a practical, pragmatic way to convert asphalt to have a high albedo character or to convert photons into electrons traveling in circuits. A remedy to asphalt caused heating would cool cities and eliminate developing nations paving millions more miles with asphalt.

If one wants to build a salt-water canal across the southern border to let sunlight evaporate fresh water that would be condensed and collected with sloped polycarbonate roofs to collection canals in order to fill the Salt Lake with fresh water the job would be nearly impossible to get done today. If one actually wanted to build a tin foil hat sunscreen at L-5 to keep out intelligent ideas from reaching the Democrat party, after the research was done to determine the affect on the world; its oceans, plankton etc and to determine if it would cause a new ice age very quickly it would be reasonable to use the thing for multi-tasking. That is, the sunscreen could be used as a dish to receive programming from distant alien civilizations in other galaxies far far away, or to collect sunlight and focus it to a collector node t heat a trapped gas to power a laser to particle beam that would in turn be the power line for space-transport modules racing at very high speed throughout the solar system (i.e. 2 months travel time Earth to Pluto at ¾ the speed of light).

Affecting global warming’s arrest and correction may be the largest challenge western civilization, or rather world civilization faces (along with mass species extinction and natural resource depletion. Arnold Toynbee said that a civilization does experience challenges that it overcomes or that alternatively end it. Recognizing and addressing empirical challenges successfully is a skill that political leadership should not fail to keep in its skill set. The Democrat party has failed to order its political agenda in such a way that a transparent and publicly reviewed plan to end the global warming and mass extinction challenges along with a political economy that works to support the plan exists.

Scenario 2- VP Harris, N.A.T.O. and M.A.D. Policy

 Mutually assured destruction was the basic deterrent for the use of nuclear weapons during the Cold War 1.0 Nuclear brinkmanship occurred several times over the years including one when the Soviet Missile Defense System had a bug with a false reading that said the U.S. had launched on them. Premier Andropov had 3 minutes to decide to retaliate with a full package of nukes on the U.S.A. and decided that it might be a false reading- and so he did not launch. President Biden and Vice President Harris have tilled the soil thoroughly in preparation for a global thermonuclear war.

Since the recent Ukrainian invasion of Russia in the Kursk region with a new front possible toward Belgorod, the arrival of F-16s in Romania- a N.A.T.O. country to attack Russian target in Ukraine and inexorable scalar increase of war the prospects for nuclear war have been enhanced. If Russia were to lose ground and territory because of N.A.T.O. participation it is likely that the Kremlin would decided to use tactical nuclear weapons to offset the disadvantaged position. What would follow from that?

Because Russia probably would prefer to attack Europe and not the United States because that would upgrade to M.A.D. policy directly with a full scale nuclear exchange, it is likely that N.A.T.O. member countries would experience atomic attack. Would that mean that a Harris administration would need to decide to retaliate and upgrade to M.A.D. implementation directly?

N.A.T.O. doctrine is for an attack on one member being an attack on all. Would a treaty obligation with N.A.T.O. obligate a President Harris to in effect destroy all human life on Earth? Alternatively could she step away from the N.A.T.O. paradigm and not retaliate upon Russia after Stockholm, Bonn, London, Madrid and Budapest were incinerated?

The Democrat Party is a wise-guy one-party system of conflict and war to force the world to acquiesce unto their social agenda for complete social structure makeover. The threat of nuclear war was an inevitable consequence of their confrontational and belligerent political way of being.

U.S. Politicians Fail to Fix Global Warming

 U.S. and Mexican politicians will fail to reduce global warming. Some like kamala Harris are afraid to suggest anything that wouldn’t gain more votes for election. Donald Trump is of a genre of business people focused on the throughput velocity of money. For those global warming concerns are an economic externality. Trump however is for world peace and prosperity while democrats prefer war in Europe and irrationally, peace in the Gaza to allow Hamas time to rebuild its military capacity.

N.A.T.O. is largely a democratic organ of the European Union with the U.S. being the blaster. Like a criminal gang members cannot demure from the wolf pack attack on Russian Ukrainian land. The European Union wants a to-state solution for implacable unilateral enemies (Hamas is the party dedicated to Israel’s destruction while Israel acknowledges the Palestinian’s right to exist in the Middle East) and categorically reject a two state solution for Ukraine. Candidate trump at least understands that the Democrat party gang insanity will likely lead to atomic war; bad for business. War though is an easy thing to sign aboard for gang members and anyone that wants out may be erased (for N.A.T.O. the equivalent would be leaving them exposed to possible attack with the same kind of perverse reasoning as affected the Union war vs the Confederates at Chickamauga when a Colonel with a peeve against a fellow officer failed to convey a message that would have moved troops and closed the gap that let Confederate forces surge through to rout Union forces.

The Democrat party should be plain and simple first in acting to reduce global warming. That is incompatible with truth and scale for party politicians wishing to hide from taking real action since they might not be elected. One simple plan would have three parts

1) remove millions of miles of asphalt streets that absorb and release solar heat.2) eliminate fossil fuel engines and other egregious sources of carbon monoxide/dioxide to the atmosphere3) ban coal burning power plants

Simple yet effective at great slowly anthropogenic climate change. Each measure would have detailed plans about how to accomplish it without great economic harm to those displaced by the change. Plainly a simple, realistic plan will complete fail to appear on party agenda the next 50 years.

Democrats will have bait and switch atmospheric heating reduction schemes and even some that have a positive effect on reducing greenhouse gases and asses (such as eliminating cattle grazing for the meat market on federal land) and designs for no-net loss of biota housing and zoning instead of providing free cash for the poor and middle class to make huge down payments on new homes that the poor and middle class will default on payments on in a couple of years when they can’t afford monthly home payments. The Harris housing scheme would probably cost 75 billion dollars at a minimum.

The 2007-2008 home mortgage derivatives banking failure and economic crash followed the Clinton administration’s drive to expand housing with loans to people with bad credit and the lower middle class. Bad money follows good; repeating the mistakes of the Clinton may well combine a perfect wave of some sort of unknown financial failure and tax cuts with a cascade of public debt default. Then N.A.T.O. might ask for a half trillion dollars as America’s share to help rebuild western Ukraine if that war is concluded without atomic conflict.

It would be better to provide cash to those that live in poor rural, non-electrified sheds to upgrade their properties with micro-wave, waterless toilets and saturate them with solar panels and free insulation, yet practical economics that reduce global heating is eschewed by the Democrat Party. One could build a dozen decent sheds for each $25,000 given for a down payment on a ‘starter home’. Many people on the planet would be happy with a good ten by twelve foot shed with an electric Incinolet toilet and solar panels to live in (those cost extra) to start and finish with.

Wouldn’t three million new homes demand 50 to 500 gallons of water apiece every day. A bath runs about 30 gallons and flush toilets a couple gallons per flush. Some people use dishwaters and water lawns besides. That new use adds up from 150 million to one and a half billion gallons of water every day. Environmentally speaking that is a disaster. Does the Colorado River have spare billion gallons of water for new western homes?

Won’t every scammer in the nation sign up for the free cash down payment and end up pocketing the cash after selling the place without making a single payment? Wouldn’t the poor without a good job that would qualify for a home loan of even the cheaper ‘starter’ $300,000 (yuppies will expect to move into a mansion after several years of hardship living in starter models) be excluded. Democrats often talk about the middle class (a class in decline) and sweep the poor under the rug. Many of the poor would be happy to just buy a decent length airstream trailer with their $25,000 if they would qualify. The prosperous and welcome often believe the poor are lazy not understanding that life doesn’t go equally easy and breezy as it might have been for them. Head bobbing sycophants sometimes find things go easy economically. Others are just well positioned and experience life without so many challenges; the ‘let them eat cake’ mentality is not uncommon. Will the homeless and unemployed have the free money those with sinecures get?

I did like the 2020 primary idea from a Democrat in the primaries about reducing global heating directly with a large sunscreen at L-5 in space. It would in effect be a vast tin foil hat constructed to keep harmful intelligent ideas from reaching the voters. The consequences to the Earth are of course entirely experimental and theoretical. It’s fun to consider the mass disasters that could result from that. Yet one must first consider some of the great number of variables for how the screen is deployed, designed and applied.

Would the screen be as large as the moon in diameter? Would it be adjustable like Venetian blinds? Would it partly block sunlight or entirely block it a few days a year like an eclipse? Would it reduce light all year or just a few months annually? Would the filter affect the entire planet or just part of the planet? The affects on global weather and ocean temperature and currents might produce drastic whipsaw events and a cascade of change that are irreversible. It is fun to consider the idea though and it would require a lot of government financed investigation and consideration by excellent scientists from a number of discipline for at least a decade before even considering build the thing.

Financing a vast sunscreen at L-5 would be challenging as would construction. Does one hire Boeing to get it done? The N.A.S.A. effort to return astronauts to the moon is going kinda slow. Would the 1000 mile tin foil sombrero get built faster?

Police Unions, Violence and Class Consciousness

 This is a theoretical deliberation on a social phenomenon; unnecessary police violence.

In Anchorage last week police entered a home following up on a call and shot to death a 16 year old girl with a knife. Like most other major urban police forces the officers were members of a union. Can the union mentality be a cause for overly lethal police violence? Instead of defunding police could it be that de-unionizing police departments would restore a equality in identity with citizenship and humanity to law enforcement?

Government unions are dangerous. They build a wall between themselves as self identity as ordinary citizens of a democracy. Ordinary policemen and government employees don’t share the same self-identity as being equal independent people. In order for the Bolshevik revolution to happen, soviet or in effect sovereign unions needed to infiltrate the military. When the Kronstadt naval rebellion occurred the cascade of union revolutions followed.

Unions can promote the sort of class consciousness found in gangs. Gangs and wolf packs can defend themselves too aggressively and effectively for their targets to survive close encounters. Wolves respect humans generally for their size and leave them alone. Wolves have a sense of easy association with humans, unlike police members of unions.

Cruising in cars sets them apart from two-leggers on the street easily as may walking heavily loaded with weapons, chemical mace, and clubs. They do not identify with the groups they police. So much as the great union pay and benefits.

Union programming sometimes transcends ordinary citizenship growing intolerant of any kind of threat to job security and risk from ‘scabs’. Hence the inclination to use excessive force to subdue dissent from civilians that appear to be any kind of threat to class security and power. Union broadcasters probably have their six. Government unions displace individual citizens as the primary people for government to serve. Instead the government exists to pay union members better salaries and retirement benefits. Union power has spread over governments like fungus. Reform becomes impossible.

Honest police forces are necessary for the stability of a healthy social environment where individuals and their rights including privacy have the primary and fundamental place in civil society. There can be higher and more power social class such as unions can present. Unions with guns can be hazardous to civil health, law and order.

The most civil violence in American cities beginning with the black lives matter movement occurred in cities with left-leaning politicians. Cities like Portland Oregon and Seattle Washington have experienced leftist, pro-union leadership and protracted periods of near urban anarchy since the Obama administration. Union workers probably don’t regard themselves as leftists, though politicians do.

Violence and police violence have raised calls to defund police from the left. Politicians of the left generally have union support. The entire situation can be self-reinforcing with class conscious union police using violence o leftist protesters to get support fro leftist politicians and media to defund police and redistribute power and prosperity to the leftist constituency.

Part of the problem with a malfunctioning American political economy is the decades of gerrymandering pay out entitlements that have made a Swiss cheese maze of unintended economic structures, advantages and disadvantages instead of plain social equality. To rectify the situation it might be a good idea to create a basic income of $12,000 for all adult U.S. citizens, and $3000 for minors while eliminating all entitlement programs from food stamps, social security, military and government retirement to unemployment, guaranteed student loans and so forth. Every citizen would have a basic income until they reached a threshold of $41,000 in annual income. That would render social entitlements as plain as Roman was Roman law. Collateral benefits would such as a drop in people going to jail costing $50,000 annually because of economic stress related crimes. Younger adults would have more access to capital for entrepreneurial ventures. All adults would be better positioned to endure ecological economic and other tech shocks to the system that are disruptive yet perhaps requisite for civilization to eliminate its economic practices that are destroying the health of the ecosphere and innovate constructive, synergetic ecological economic procedures.

It is of course quite reasonable for workers to use collective bargaining to market their product that is labor with massive organizations in the private sector. Separately negotiating other labor benefits or rights to unions exclusively instead of legislating rights for all workers in the nation together is harmful to the sovereignty of individual citizenship collectively. Government needs to be flexible and adaptable; unionized government interferes with that. If a citizen wants more than the basic income during working years and when old, they should get a job or start a business savings some of their capital perhaps combining that with a few friends’ capital. It is interesting to consider that housing is the primary expense. Transport could be made very cheap with electric go-carts for local lower speed use and freeways converted to automatic electric slots for moving vehicles automatically to selected off ramps with proper spacing and low-risk, zero pollution inter-modal progress. Food will remain costly as it is increasingly internationally supplied and delivered.

My grandfather’s house purchased in 1965 cost $5000. It was a decent place with a very good garden. The average cost of a home today in the U.S.A. is something like $400,000; that exemplifies the failure of capitalism to produce a better cheaper product over time, as is the case with automobile transport. More so than being capitalism’s failure, it may be a failure caused by the unionization of government and the quest for retirement wealth and luxury that is unsustainable as it ossifies and reinforces a limited, finite and exclusive enrollment period to in an ossified political economy. Political and economic ossification are prime causal factors within Arnold Toynbee’s historical cycles of the rise and fall of civilization. Surpassing the cycles requires intelligent leadership commonly lacking from the left’s social studies.

With a basic income of $12,000 an individual could live well enough in the U.S.A. if housing and transportation costs were recovered to a 1960s standard with of course the addition of contemporary electronic devices, solar panel roofing, foam insulation and ground Earth heating-cooling..

Ranked Choice Presidential Elections?

 Alaska presently has ranked choice voting. Could it be a model for future Presidential elections?

Here is an example ballot of ranked choice menu options (soon to appear at select restaurants for ordering food too) obtained from a likely voter.


1) Donald Trump

2) Pamela Harris

3) Gus Hall

4) Cornel West

4)) Robert Kennedy Jr.

5) Jill Stein

6) ‘Bull’ Maduro

7) Vladimir Putin

8) E.T.

9) Elvis


With those rankings the voters second choice could become the likely President if she gets more votes than the third place and seventh place candidates got in their votes combined. If the fifth place finisher is able to get exactly as many votes as Ferdinand Franco, she will get a $25,000 gift certificate from burgers-are-us if the seventh and fourth ranked candidates receive more votes than the second and first combined.


Ranked choices are useful for tie breaks, coffee breaks and electoral psychological breaks required to grease the way for second place finishers to leap up after careful computing and vote counts to first place. That way everything is plain and clear. Ranked choice voting plainly makes voter transparency transparent when is operated by the Magic Company.

The nation has many options to elect candidates now and in the future that will f things up good. One though may miss out on getting the atomic war started, and that is something to consider.

Israel Should Offer Homesteads to Palestinians in Gaza

 Israel needs to eliminate Hamas and Palestinians *an Israelis) need to get on with their lives. Should Israel just negotiate directly with Palestinians by offering mini-ranch homestead lots and condos to real citizens of Gaza that want to sign up to live in one on a first come, first served basis.

Israel and international financiers would help pay for most of the cost of rebuilding housing for the homeless in decent green, solar power structures with electric toilets. Each neighborhood could be something like a Kibbutz with independent political rule elected from their neighborhood and those people would merge into a national assembly administered by Israel for a time, as did the Privy Committee once rule Canada for the British.

it is time that Israel move on past Hamas.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxByVW3H4uo&pp=ygUaaXNyYWVsIHZzIGhhbWFzIHRvZGF5IGxpdmU%3D

1/20/24

Regarding Extremism

 Extreme views are nothing more than those that are not mainstream. For quite a while and even continuing today the green economic movement was regarded as extreme by the fossil fuel and coal mainstream votaries. The result is global warming. Mainstream opinions are driven by social inertia and are not necessarily the best. Instead they simply dominate for sundry reason including the concentration of wealth and power invested in the established order.

The historian Arnold Toynbee pointed out that one of the basic reasons for the failure of a civilization is that once its economy becomes established it is very difficult to get it to change. Not just economics; politics too. He used ancient Greece as an example of a failed civilization with a cause of being unable to upgrade to a Republic like Rome with a unification of all of the city-states into one nation. Without unification they were easy prey for the Roman legions.

Common mainstream views need be upgraded for a society to continue to advance after it has already reached maturity. Usually societies do not. If they are successful the wealthy become globalists so far as possible and neglect upgrades to their own country. I suppose the United States is a contemporary example. Fundamentally anything that would actual change the established social structure is considered extreme. It is the media that presently defines what is or isn’t extreme anyway.
Leading, new ideas are often perceived as extreme in comparison to established mainstream ideas. I believe that some ideas are good and others bad. Mainstream views are safe because they have been around a while. new ideas may be good or bad because they are untested and haven't been implemented. Remember that in the ante bellum south abolitionists were regarded as extremists.

1/16/24

Sartre, Epictetus and Epicurus version 2.0

 I wanted to write something about the late first and early second century philosopher Epictetus's idea concerning death. The Roman was a well read individual who actual spent time as a slave during the reign of Nero. The Emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Italy so the freed slave move to Greece where he established a school. Because he wrote a lot; primarily his 'Discourses' history informs us of his way of thinking about many concerns. What is remarkable about his view of life is that it is similar in outlook to the 20th century French philosopher of Existentialism/aka French rationalism, Jean Paul Sartre.

Epicurus' thought about death is 'that it isn't anything to fear because one fears existing bad things rather than non-sense' (to paraphrase). Life is sense experience and death is the cessation of sensory input (Epictetus believes), hence there is nothing to fear because there is no sensation. Sensation is required to have anything to fear in Epicurus' experience.

The premise that one does not exist after death cannot be confirmed while alive. Non-existence after physical death is an assumption. One knows that information cannot be destroyed (Shannon Entropy) and that an omnipotent God could map or store all of the information comprising a human life (maybe even quantum computing will achieve that capability some time), and so restoration of a human life after death could occur whenever anyone with the information wanted to do so. Thus one could arrive at the premise about existing after death with something new to experience. That is nearly as plausible as existing now.

Epicurus was a hedonist. Epictetus was a stoic who believed in God in nature at least yet his viewpoint isn't too different concerning death than that of Epicurus. The main differentiator is that Epictetus might not go so far as to say about death; something that he hasn't experienced, that it is the absence of sensation, for that is an assumption- a logical yet unsupported inference. Instead Epictetus might say that he hasn't knowledge of it personally; there is no thought within his experience that knows it first-hand.

Epictetus and Sartre each regarded the human mind and its content as existing within the control of the individual. Some things are within our control and somethings aren't. Those things within our control are easy to think about and those without one's control are not to be too concerned about since the thought one uses about such things and relationships exists within the individual mind. One shouldn't allow one's own thought to act like a dog chasing its own tail around in a circle. That is an individual shouldn't create or generate thoughts to be fearful of or deceive oneself about the reality of one's thinking or necessity for thinking particular things; that existential viewpoint covers even death.

Epictetus believe there is nothing to fear of death because if there is, the fear is created within one's own thought. Dividing things within one's control and things that aren't, death is finally one of the things that aren't and so one should not spend much thought being troubled about it. Epictetus and Stoics believed God rules nature and the natural order. God's will and nature has its course and the things it has given to an individual, such as life or real estate it can recover and return to other purposes-even the lives of others.

Though Sartre believed that death is "the complete triumph of the other" he does not well describe what the heterodox otherness is, or who it is-perhaps nature or God or God through nature that is not the content of one's own thought. In that regard neither Sartre or Epictetus are solipsists.

There is an implicit valid logic regarding the Stoic outlook on death and the unknown. One should not invent troubling thoughts concerning things one hasn't muck knowledge of nor control over. Epictetus apparently knew little of Jesus Christ and the way to eternal life in the gospel; he believed in God or Zeus as an omnipotent ruler of nature. He has read Plato and Aristotle apparently being in agreement with the heterodox nature of the phenomenality of life.

Castes and Concentrated Wealth

 The Indian caste system is about 3000 years old and is still strong. Despite some liberation following independence in 1947 with the untouchable class being outlawed or abolished, the majority- 85% of the population remain in lower castes. The caste system affects the economy pervasively; is the development of the concentration of wealth in the United States the equivalent of developing a national caste system?

"In the third quarter of 2023, 66.6 percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 2.6 percent of the total wealth"-quote from https://www.statista.com/statistics/203961/wealth-distribution-for-the-us/#:~:text=In%20the%20third%20quarter%20of,percent%20of%20the%20total%20wealth.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/caste-social-differentiation

Real discrimination follows economic lines. Caste systems of priests and warriors developed long ago for practical reasons, yet the value of those for protecting or advancing social development stopped long ago and instead, economic classes resembling castes became oppressive and a factor of economic retardation.

Intellectual liberation occurs when intellectuals of any social background are free to develop their interests with equal opportunity. Social and intellectual repression occurs when castes, classes and those supported by political power without intellectual merit rise to dominant intellectual culture. In a purely material culture the primary value of  positions of prestige are regarded as economic advantages and are desired for that reason by materialists.

The Biden administration has not done enough, if anything to outlaw the development of a caste system in the United States along economic lines. The increasing concentration of wealth in the United States has continued after the Obama administration strong armed congressional passage of a law to make the Bush II tax cuts permanent. Despite having control of the legislation branch of the federal government during the first two years of the Biden administration to tax increase on the most rich saw the light of day.

India is a great nation with a good future and a caste system that makes its international economic role a little suspect; that is the most rich may too easily emulate or otherwise soak up elements of a caste system that segregates society economically. In my opinion economic advantage is the primary reason for caste systems, slavery and oppression of various social classes. It is rare when individuals are economically segregated and not socially segregated too.

The U.S. Congress should pass a law or two banning caste systems or rescind most favored nation status to nations that have caste systems in order to encourage more egalitarian policies with equal economic opportunity and basic national income for all citizens as a more pragmatic application of the minimum wage ideals. Ad hoc caste systems assure that people will be poor or become poor through numerous means including forcing people out of work.

Record Global Warming on Von Biden's Watch

 Last year was one with record global warming. The administration's effort to slow or reverse atmospheric heating were plainly ineffective. The nation can look forward to another four years of ineffective or toxic leadership from Republicans and Democrats in the 2024 Presidential election if the Charybdis and Scylla pair of dinosaurs hold place as likely party nominees,

France just appointed a shiny new 34 year old queer Prime Minister. The west has such unusual political leadership that one may be confident that public affairs will be all f ' d up for the rest of the decade.

No one has good sense in politics...no not one.

https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-2023-hottest-year-record#:~:text=2023%20is%20confirmed%20as%20the,highest%20annual%20value%20in%202016

Pantheism is Wrong

 God is not the Universe. He is not the moon or stars, a forcefield or particle and waves though responsible for making them.. Consider an arm. Is an individual his arm? If the arm is lost does the individual no longer exist? If someone manufactures an electric car, is she also the car? If the car is hijacked by rabid dogs is the manufacturer also the dogs because they are in the car? Everything in the Universe passes though God is none of that.

I would say that the universe is the sole individual being containing everything else. Within its monism there is pluralism.. The pluralism emerges as stars,, galaxies, hadrons, muons, people and everything else that sentient beings may distinguish as individuals. The Universe at the start was said to occur from one unified,, individual field.. In an instant probably just at the big bang or initial field instability caused perhaps by a word from God gravity separated, then the strong force followed by the electroweak force breaking down into electromagnetism, the weak force and the Higgs field that let massless particles acquire mass.. God was not subject to the fields he issued though His omniscience remained aware of what and where everything he planned was.. Universals and particulars in the Platonic sense are more applicable to the structures of particles, language categories and classes than to the set of all sets, Godel's idea of what might be compared to the Platonic realm of forms. It would be a logical categorical error to posit God as contained within something he created.

The Icon and Axe; A Billionaire and a Destroyer Concentrating Wealth

 Joe Biden is hard to classify. His platform is to enrich his family and promise anything to anyone that will get him elected. He is a globalist for open borders, dope, abortion, low tax on the rich, a concentrate wealth pragmatist delivering mediocrity on any plank including global warming. He continued the Democrat's start-lasting-wars tradition of the 20th century. His likely opponent is a a neo eco-Luddite billionaire for the concentration of wealth. The billionaire should have one the Nobel Peace prize during his term of office and would probably end the Ukraine conflict on terms Russians could live with and get the global economy back on track working together if Democrats let him- as doubtful as that is. Mr. Trump might let global warming increase by a full half percent in fours years while Mr. Biden's failure would be somewhat less.

NFL stars are in the 5 per cent of the 1 percent economic class serving as promoters of economics concentrating wealth while moving America toward being a second world country for the majority. The very rich need deflect public attention away from interest in anything that could move move policy toward economic egalitarianism with a moderate distribution of class wealth. The masses love bread and circuses now as in imperial Rome.

Ron DeSantis may be the last chance for the nation to conserve a little stability. People do prefer excitement, AI, illegal aliens labor and defenders known as MICE (or is it ice to illegals?) so long as deficit spending financing of government continues.

Israel's Effort to Remove Hamas /Nazis from the Gaza Continues

 A portion of the member states of the U.N. would like Israel to quit its war on Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip. That in effect would be like a catch and release policy for terrorist that instead should be facing something like the Nuremberg Trials that followed the end of the Second World War. The murderous Hamas terror attack- a surprise attack on Israel 7 October 2023 was comparable to the 9-11 assault on New York and Washington D.C. Many Arab and other Muslim states support global jihad against the west through a variety of means and Israelis their first and foremost target.

When the Second World War concluded the allies sought to remove Nazis from Germany so far as possible. A dozen were hanged after being found guilty of various crimes against humanity. Some other higher ranking members were arrested and sentenced, yet the clear and present danger of Soviet Communism made the wholesale elimination of Nazis impractical although the society of Germany was ideologically cleansed. The state of Israel seeks to pacify the Gaza and Muslim militants vociferously oppose that; instead they regard the entire affair as simply a skirmish in the global war of expansion of Islam- something the Democrat party of the United States has indirectly and sometimes directly supported with its open borders policies and lax immigration enforcement.

 The Biden administration has tripled the number of immigration cases waiting to be heard in federal courts to reach a backlog of three million. It seems weak and unwilling to defend the United States’ sovereignty against the practical measure of slow invasion from illegal entry. U.S. culture is being erased and replaced by a new normal global culture increasingly influenced by those practicing the Muslim religion.

Hamas is a terror organization and like a gang its leadership is compelled to be aggressive. Some of the members of the U.N. would like Israel to quit its effort to remove HAMAS leadership that have the same attitude toward Jews as did Nazis, and let them rebuild their military power with copious donations by sympathetic Muslim states. In that regard the U.N. is comparable to those that sympathized with the Nazi Party following the Second World War, yet they are far worse than was Argentina in allowing safe haven for a few discreet Nazis. They are active propagandist and wicked perpetrators of an effort to obfuscate hatred and international conspiracy to eliminate the Jewish race in the black, unsaved, unrepentant hearts of many Dar al Harb supporting Muslims.

Raphael Lemkin invented the term “genocide” in reflecting on the Armenian Genocide of 1915. A Jewish-Polish attorney, he circulated a pamphlet to the forerunner of the U.N. named The League of nations in 1933. It was rejected. In 1944 he published a book named ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe’ . The term genocide was used at the Nuremberg trials and on 9 Dec. 1948 the U.N. made genocide officially a crime within international law. Jews in prosecuting removal of a terror organization spearhead supported by members of the U.N. presently charging Israel with attempted genocide are accomplishing a task the hypocritical, callous and disingenuous corrupt Muslim members of the U.N. supporting the action should be supporting rather than opposing.

Lemkin descried genocide as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves". That is the Arab and Palestinian policy toward Israel. The Jewish state on the contrary is simply trying to eliminate the militant leadership that is hiding behind it's own people as if they were human shields. Israelis have already shown a willingness to live with Palestinian culture as neighbors- just not aggressive war like neighbors that invade and slaughter thousands in sneak attacks.

The world will not be a safer place if Nazi like organizations are enfeofed with Muslim support on Israel’s porch fattened annually like war pigs with the fruits of Islamic weaponry and finance.

Heraclitus and the Ukraine-Russia War

 Wars in Europe indicated a failure of intelligence and adaptability in political leadership. That is not surprising in an era of marketing products and people as products. pre-Socratic philosophers were not so superficial. In an age that believes itself wise because of scientific knowledge and quite assertive about rights and litigation, arguments and eros as a matter of course it isn't a paradox that politicians have no interest in understanding an opponent's viewpoint on issues; a necessary step toward avoiding conflict.

"... men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep."- Heraclitus

Heraclitus sought the nature of what exists as a philosophical inquiry. His ideas arrived at monism and apparently he regarded pluralism as contingent being. Russian, Ukrainians want the same things concerning land- to own it, yet for politicians owning land or territory is an absolute and exclusive concern that precludes reason from the social process of adjudication.

Heraclitus stresses the unity of opposites. One of his edifying fragments providing an example of the concept is "Changing; it rests". Politicians should invoke the intelligence of changing the criterion to unify opponents in peace- the new synthesis. Heraclitus also wrote (B12) "Upon those who step into the same rivers different and again different waters flow".

Plainly peace is preferable to war and prosperity to poverty. A healthy environment is better than a sick polluted one and everyone involved loses much time when somewhat equally balanced military conflicts occur in a protracted paradigm lasting years. If reason and problem solving can end conflicts in a way that belligerents can live with that would better serve the world economy and even wholistic, non-partisan ideas of justice.

Heraclitus had several tings to say about opposites merging into the One at some level. One could take that as God creating quarks, fields, mass and virtual energy in an apparent vacuum and allowing energy and mass to take form...though temporal configurations change it, or evolve it as some prefer to say, the process is God's and that which exist is comparatively like a dream.

Russia and Ukraine could have an armistice in place and a race for the political powers to create a plan and discover finance to rebuild all areas of the conflict with a fifty mile wide D.M.Z. and free trade zone roughly divided in half between Ukraine and Russia. Ingenuity and finding ways to expedite peace and prosperity should transpire rather than to allow the visage of Mordor and Doom cloud the land.

Heraclitus said; "The road up and the road down are the same." and "The beginning and the end are common on the circumference of a circle." Those without ossified brains should be able to learn something from Heraclitus.

Heraclitus saw unity through the pluralism evident in all things; "though at variance with itself, it agrees with itself. It is a backwards turning attunement like that of the bow and the lyre". In that he could have been speaking of day and night- different phases of the diurnal solar cycle.

There is a free MOOC course available from which the quotes of Heraclitus were sourced for this post. It's here... https://www.coursera.org/learn/plato?

Ancient Philosophy: Plato & His Predecessors

Heraclitus' Fragments B1

B1 (Sextus Empiricus, Against the mathematicians, VII, 132):

"Though this Word is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all. For, though, all things come to pass in accordance with this Word, men seem as if they had no experience of them, when they make trial of words and deeds such as I set forth, dividing each thing according to its nature and showing how it truly is. But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep."

B54 (Hippolytus, Refutation of all heresies, IX, 9, 5):

The unseen harmony is better than the visible.

1/5/24

Note on Pragmatism

Pragmatism was invented by Charles Sanders Pierce. Actually he called it pragmaticism. James popularized it. It is more like dead reckoning. I am not confident one could have a doctrine of pragmatism. That would require formalizing good judgment. Consider realpolitik of the 1980s with the way the Biden administration has operated things internationally. I think its far from pragmatic and it doesn't seem to promote general global peace or prosperity. Its kind of a worst case side of things. Consider that what is good for some may be bad for others, The idea of the Democrat Party having a pragmatic doctrine is somewhat laughable- even if they like science selectively. Pierce (pronounced Purse) worked on a tri-electical paradigm for thought advancing ratiocination. I wonder if he was influenced by Marxist dialectics at all.

Imperfect Character is Universal

The question of why anything exists rather than nothing was a question that Plotinus considered in The Enneads. Why would The One order anyt...