My Reading list January-May 2011

My Reading list January-May 2011...

1) The Balkan Wars

2) The Persian Night; Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution-Amir Teheri

3) Age of Fracture- Daniel Rogers

4) Once Before Time: A Whole Story of the Universe- Martin Bojowald

5) Infinite Ascent- David Berlinski

6) Freefall- Joseph Stiglitz

7) Unknown Shore- Robert Ruby

8) The Constants of Nature- John D. Barrow

9) The New Vichy Europe- Theodore Dalrymple

10) The Greatest Day in History- Best

11) The Philosopher and the Druids- Freeman

12) Maya Conquistador- Restall

13) Writing Mysteries- Sue Grafton editor

14) How to Write a Damn Good Novel- Frey

15) Crude World- Peter Maass

16) Dance of the Photons- Zeilinger

17) Just Six Numbers- Martin Rees

18) The Shadow Factory- Bamford

19) The Duel- Lukacs

Will Humanity Overcome Itself and Build A Sustainable Ecological Economy?

This time of year one wonders if U.S. political leadership will arise to lead humanity to full employment and a robust ecology that are sustainable facts of biodiversity-it seems unlikely.

Instead a feminized corporate global sprawl of organismic faithless amorality seems to be flowing to all regions of the globe to replace the local human life forms and culture. Sure one can argue that there are poitical cretins that need replacing. Yet degrading humanity to an amoebic form of acquiesing yes blobs seems a way to reduce human propects for sustainable life generally.

Corporate machines producing wealth unsustainable distributed to trained minions without an incorrect brain wave in their mind politically speaking sur won't work to keep strong U.S. nationalism or civil liberties much less a vigorous non-corporate free enterprise.

One might ask if great buildings are designed by Adam Smith's invisible hand-if non-sentient anthropomorphism is expected to design a better freedom tower or a wandering hollow mountain range housing a 100 million people? If the answer is no, then why should we accept the premise that irrational anthropomorphism will best design the world's ecology?

The world's ecology does require design today as much as any office building. The health of the ocean and all its fishes requires intentional design for health, as does biodiversity, a wild habitat and enough food to provide for every single human being adequately.

N.S.A. Mission & Priorities on a Tangent

The National Security Agency has built a constellation of computer processing facilities and supported development of super-computers to process telecommunications and Internet data at a speed faster than a quadrillion calculations per second with a goal of processing a quintillion operations per second (an exaflop). The rationale is to discover terrorist communications existentially by sorting through all of the world's telecommunications. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars are spent to locate a few Arabs with boxcutters-not to design an electromagnetic off-world linear space vehicle launcher, design a super-conducting interstate highway system or model economic full employment conditions for Americans. Needless to say no amount of computer processing capacity will inform the U.S. Government how to prevent illegal entry through its national borders.

One may guess that although modern urban structures have been enfiladed as flimsy and unable to withstand significant extra-normal stress in order to save construction cost and increase proplits, and no building plans for foliage covered buildings shaped as small, tough mountain ranges are scheduled for construction, the N.S.A. is neither set to discover encrypted messages written atom by atom or time-restructuring nano-bit messages placed in Fedex envelopes that might carry messages from the frontier of seriously evil applications of science to meglomaniacal conspirators.

The N.S.A. is building over-kill into reading the planet's email and listening to cell phones in order to defeat comparatively primitive perps that might be halted by other means such as competent physical defenses and a new national construction and agronomic ecological economic infrastructure could bring.

Because much of the invasive data acquired by the N.S.A. is outsourced to private and foreign corporations the information is distributed globally as well helping to build a new Orwellian evil empire. The Government should rethink some of its priorities and intentionally invest in economic and environmentally constructive construction and computation too.

President Obama's Disapproval Rating on U.S. Issues Climbs Scrimps Above 50%

While a majority of Americans disapprove of the President's management of eight key domestic issues the unanswered question of note is what potential candidate for the Presidency in 2012 does the electorate believe would do a good job on domestic issues?

I believe the correct answer is 'no one'. No potential candidate is thought to be competent enough to make the right changes to the nation to create full employment, a balanced budget, eliminate the federal debt, restore the nation's environment and restore security privacy in the telecom/Internet era.

No candidate is believed to have a realistic ability to provide no-problem free health care for the poor and veterans, to secure the nation's borders from illegal entry or even create a practical, efficient space transportation to a moon research base.

Writing from Wasilla Alaska I can say that I am glad Sarah Palin has gone on a bus tour of the nation's history sites-perhaps she will visit New Hampshire to learn more about the shot heard around the world, or New Jersey to see where Thomas Edison invented the Internet with his sidekick Dr. Watson.

Like the vast planet Jupiter clearing out the inner solar system of debris with its gravity that might reach other, Sarah Palin may enter Republican primaries to sweep and clear her male rivals with the automatic 50% gender vote as candidate Hillary Clinton cleared the field for Barrack Obama and the black advantage. If the Republican candidates for the 2012 election continue to fail at persuading the nation that they have the intelligence and the plans to make things right, a last minute October 2011 primary entry of Stanford President Condolizza Rice may be in demand-the nation has elected Woodrow Wilson like academics before.

If the race narrows down to a basic Palin-Rice contest, former Sect. of State Rice will likely answer difficult debate questions such 'what year did Crispus Attucks C.E.O. of Crispy Creme?' best.

The National Security Agency May Simultaneously Decrease National Security

The N.S.A. following the end of the cold war was ordered to downsize it's personnel by about a third. After 9-11 it recovered and ramped up its budget considerably building new facilities, hiring new people and finding new ways to tap into fiber optic communications. Perhaps because of the Bush-Cheney crank ideas about economics and privatization the N.S.A. also outsourced much of its work surveilling foreign and domestic communications through private contractors: more than 4000 contractors.

Today the major world fiber optic cables for communications send data globally at the speed of light. Even local calls and Internet messages in Asia may pass through California. The content may be copied live to be fed into N.S.A. computers-all of it.

Because of the vast amount of data-exabytes in the surveillance-industrial complex processing require advanced artificial intelligence and sorting programs technology to find those very dangerous terrorists in some fetid foreign swamp or hanging out in a motel outside Ft. Meade-the foreign contractors scanning through the data work for not only the U.S. Government but also for more than 50 other governments providing the same services not uncommonly.

Privatizing intelligence and Medicare would tend to make select private sector corporations 'too big to fail' and distribute U.S. data to the globe for their analysis and use. Americans will have no firewalls on foreign intelligence and global corporate intelligence analysts from knowing who they call on the phone, where they shop, what they eat, and what their business plans and energy usage is.

National security should create serious boundary firewalls to intelligence to stop the contemporary Internet and telephone infrastructure of the private sector from annihilating U.S. national security. While some Americans just don't care about keeping their personal affairs private, many do, and others haven't foreseen any deleterious future consequences as a result of the hegemony of adverse global corporate intelligence activity.

The U.S. Congress has failed to adapt to build firewalls and amorphous opacity requirements into telecommunications that would prevent the Microsofts, Googles,Nices, Narus' China Unicoms and Verints from capturing data for analysis in vast data storage facilities. Internet and telephone transactions could be constructed with an innate emphemerality that would scramble electrons after use. Entire bureaucracies and corporate sectors have evolved to function as Orwell's vampires on individual civil liberty. Government should continually work to build new national defense infrastructure into technology that assaults national sovereignty at the same time as it innovates and improves technical virtuosity.

An American citizen might wonder how full employment, good wages and a healthy environment might ever be constructed when the U.S. Government has heavily invested in privatizing much of its intelligence functions to global corporations, allowed the communications data of Americans to be pervasively captured by foreign agencies and let its employment sector become controlled by foreign or transnational corporations that may in effect keep U.S. employment levels wherever they like.

A citizen should encourage the U.S. Government to invest in philosophical research and analysis about the overall effect global corporations have on U.S. economic development, signals intelligence, acquisition and security of private Internet and telecommunications data transactions. The U.S. Government should invest in social philosophy analysis so far as to consider if the weight of economic capitalization and technical advantages of global corporations are helping or harming U.S. national economic development and the actual standard of living of the citizens of the United States.

The National Security Agency should be encouraged to develop a systems analysis capacity for the conservation of data security in the high-tech telecommunications environment. While the N.S.A. presently seems to be based upon copying data from telecoms and Internet corporations and fiber optics lines and further to develop private contractors to analyze the data, it should also find technical means to scramble all private data going in to the Internet cloud or wireless and land phone networks through necessary encryption of data such that only the private citizen can put the data together meaningfully with his/her 'half' of the technology. The danger to national security and civil liberties especially in the realm of free enterprise appear to far greater from corporate and government data acquisition than from terrorist attack.

Terrorist attacks might be better defended against through increased border security (no illegal entries to the U.S.A.), better, less destructable building designs, more surveillance of biological developers and so forth.

.007% Hydrogen Fusion Conversion Efficiency Leaves Helium

.007% Hydrogen Fusion Conversion Efficiency Leaves Helium

I was interested in turning up double oh seven as a nuclear bond fusion conversion from mass efficiency rating in a book I found recently. Sure physicists know this sort of thing backwards and forwards, or extra-dimensionally and sideways with the future writing in the past, yet I am an unemployed house painter so it is new to me. Martin Reese writing in his book ‘Just Six Numbers’ published about a decade ago described a few of the constants of nature that enable the Universe to exist in the form it does.

One of the forces and derivative numerical value he selected was that of the strong force that binds atoms together and its energy efficiency rating converting mass during nuclear fusion. If the number was different it could have reshaped the course of the Universe.

We know that hydrogen is the most common element in the Universe, and the most simple-much of it ends up drawn together by gravity to form stars. Hydrogen atoms crushed together in atomic fusion-their nucleuses fused together- shrink down a little bit releasing the excess mass as heat.
There is of course an intermediate step in hydrogen fusion proceeding onward to yield helium that I’ll skip over. A helium atom ‘weighs just 99.3% as much as the two protons and neutrons that form it’-(a paraphrase from page 42 of ‘Just Six Numbers’). During the process of nuclear fusion the excess mass is .007%. The mass is given up as heat energy and thus we learn the interesting fact about the efficiency of that nuclear bond.
Helium itself is a comparatively inefficient fusion element converting mass to energy at just .001% efficiency. Compared to the hydrogen fusion that went to build up helium the energy conversion capacity of helium is quite low. The helium burning life of a star is shorter than that of hydrogen.

One must wonder if there are more efficient fusion methods that will be discovered one day-perhaps fusion of extra small dimensions together, or fusion of atoms of space to create time. Perhaps scientists will discover how to produce unlimited amounts of anti-matter through quantum teleportation of information.

Rees mentioned that the only 100% efficient conversion of matter into energy occurs when matter and anti-matter ‘fuses’ to annihilate mass and release just energy at the speed of light.

Obviously one wonders what pure energy is, and if there is pure anti-energy or anti-photons. One might think, if not a physicist, that energy could only manifest its existence in relation to mass-moving it or something, and that in an otherwise empty space-time vacuum it might effectively not exist.

The strong force bonds atomic nuclei together, and is therefore interesting to think about. Atomic orbits have the ability to carry a certain amount of energy or particles (electrons) before they must flip out to another level. Atomic nuclei have an implicitly stable structure permissible by nature.
So one wonders about the strong force-isn’t it just the actualization of a smaller particle/s? That might be quarks or strings in their actualization.
The prospects for bonding atomic nuclei together with a greater release of energy than that of hydrogen may not be good. Hydrogen is the simplest element and as the complexity of atomic structure increases so does, apparently, the inefficiency of the release of energy in nuclear fusion. I guess there would be a difficulty in making synthetic elements that would readily fuse and release much energy as the protons and neutrons consolidated. Maybe the mass of a synthetic element and its potential energy released in fusion must be enough that it is like change from a dollar-and not enough to form new bills as one might get if it were change for a five. If change is the energy and bills are larger, more stable components of atoms, there may be an implicit categorical limit to the amount of energy that can be released through a fusion process outside an extreme gravitational field.

If God were to have said ‘let there be light’ in such a context with nothing including space-time existing he could have taken a matter-anti-matter concentrate of a few hundred pounds and set it off from a safe distance I guess to provide enough space-time, mass or pure energy to form a universe’s content.

'The Shadow Factory'

James Bamford's excellent book on the National Security Agency's record of work between 1990 and 2007 or 2008 reads better than a novel. The Shadow Factory was published in 2008. I would have liked to have got to this book sooner since it has such a fine record of the trail of the 9-11 terrorists in the Unites States. It is surprising to learn that some of them lived their final days two miles away from the N.S.A. headquarters at Ft. Mead, Md. before driving over to board flight 77 at Dulles airport.

I opposed the confirmation of General Hayden to lead the N.S.A. in the blogosphere of the time, and wasn't too surprised to learn that he suppressed key evidence that would have alowed the F.B.I. , state department and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol amongst other agencies to arrest some of the hijackers and foil the plot. The General had an M.A. in history and not enough spookiness to his resume beyond air force intelligence to be able to lead the agency through some critical decisions optimally. Not the General's fault of course-just his nature, but another bad federal appointee at high level following the public's usual bad decisions about who to run for the top job since Ronald Reagan.

Anyway, the book is perhaps the best researched one might find and to the point.



http://www.nsa.gov/about/_images/pg_hi_res/nsa_aerial.jpg

Obama Administration Sees Arab Spring As Eqv. of Reagan-Gorbachev Ending of Cold War

Reportedly members of the Obama adminsitration view the Arab Spring as a great event comparable to the end of the cold war. The comparison seems rather inept. Reagan asked the Saudis to increase oil production in order to drive down the world price of oil in order to stimulate the west's economy and ruin the Soviet's economy that was reliant upon foreign oil sales for cash. That was a good idea in its time as were temporary tax cuts and deficit spending to stimulate the U.S. economy. Today the U.S.A. is paying more than a hundred bucks a barrel and the Arab Spring is forcing Americans to pay more at the pump. There economy is springing while our's is flopping-some for the administration to cheer about. Maybe the Boston Empath Club will give him the key to the city.

Perhaps the administration's people making the comparison believe the United States is like the former Soviet Union and the Moslem world is breaking it's economic power a little at a time-progressively. Osama Bin Laden and the 9-11 killers viewed the Soviet Union as one super-power they defeated (in Afghanistan) and that the U.S.A. would be the next.

In Tunisia a government fell and was replaced. In Egypt an old authoritarian President was forced out yet what will follow is hard to anticipate. In Libya we are making a war on the Libyan strong man and former terror plotter Khaddaffi through N.A.T.O. and an ad hoc insurgent army, in Yemen uprisers have about forced the government to leave-maybe the administration supports someone else perhaps from Dhamar Province to lead, in Syria the Muslim Brotherhood seeks to force the harsh Alawite Government of Assad from power-this is compared to the ending of communist authoritarianism in Eastern Europe and Russia by the administration.

I am not of the opinion that U.S. foreign policy is increasing world security. While we spend a lot on foreign military ventures we can displace a lot of potential terrorists from attacking the U.S.A. What is not evident is the opportunity cost of spending several trillion abroad in antipathetic to ecological economic and full employment abroad in military ventures still unconcluded after a decade.

For several decades analysts have predicted the eventual rise of populism to overthrow authoritarian governments in the Moslem world. With an unsustainable economic infrastructure for human and ecological development in much of the Moslem world the implicit social instability will likely lead to more liberal conditions for the waging of ad hoc jihad upon Europe, the United States and possibly Israel from democracies in North Africa and elsewhere in the Middle east. The administration may be unintentionally helping to support the Caliphate of Osama bin Laden's and Saddam Hussein's dreams with twittering pseudo-democratic innovations.

If the administration was half as enthusiastic about finding ways to defend the U.S. borders from illegal alien cheap labor migrants and creating full employment and a recovery of the nation's ecology that would be 'An American Spring' he could write home about (from Paris or wherever The President was today).

Gabriel Gifford’s Shooter Undergoing Federal Mental Makeover Before Trial

I thought I should throw in a commentary on Loughner’s four month federal chemical personality makeover now in process at the order of a federal judge. Obviously Loughner was guilty of shooting people in Arizona, yet the legal proceedings for adjudicating the process whereby the prosecution has custody of the defendant, has him psychiatrically evaluated by their own criteria, and then finds his mind incompetent to stand trial-a trial for-itself, and then orders the defendant to submit to months of chemical brain modification in order to make him conformal to court appearances and criteria for being a nice defendant seems a little dangerous for U.S. civil liberties.

The legal questions of it a crime occurred and if the person accused committed it should be separated from the question of why a defendant committed a crime. The defendant’s psychological state is a part of the curiosity of why the crime occurred. Those curious questions should be discovered if there is a reason to, after the trial determines if the defendant perpetrated the crime.

Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting spree occurred in a social environment with federally caused social stresses brought about by federal failure to prevent millions of illegal aliens from invading Arizona during Loeffner’s youth. Year after year raving radio, malicious music, myriad clumps of illegal aliens seeking work in every nook and cranny of Phoenix reduced the prospects for non-Hispanic employment.

Maybe Loughner is not a sort of Serbian shooter of an Austrian heir, yet a U.S. Congresswoman and a federal judge might have seemed blunt opponents to the unclever mind of Loughner. The real political economy of the American S.W. and of New Jersey where so many 9-11 terrorists lived when not in motels near Ft. Meade is changing. Those that are positioned to be more easily stressed by displacing economic forces may generate a percent of individuals resisting with violence the existential invasions of their mind and sometimes nation. Social classes empathic to the invading new social forces may feel especial antipathy toward the symbols of the ebbing social class such as G.E. Loughner might represent.

With the post-9-11 National Security Agency electronic surveillance upgrades and the potential for ubiquitous government eavesdropping it is more important than ever to keep psychiatric voodoo from taking legal power unto itself. Between the external linguistic and logic parameters of psychologists and the inexact target brain and associated behavior of state subjects the cause-effect relationships tend to be less credible than those of voodoo sometimes.

If Loughner’s brain was scanned with Magnetic resonance and the images made available to public scrutiny before he was given psychiatric drugs, we might at least see the prisoner’s present brain condition, blood flow and so forth. It is not possible to see how it was on the day of the shootings obviously. The condition of Loeffner’s brain at the day of trial if viewed with MR might appear different from his ‘normal’ condition. Should the state be free to modify the brain state of a defendant for trial when it differs from who he or she usually is (if a brain state may be regarded as who one is)?

What if Loughner’s brain state changes periodically from violent to non-violent modes-what if he has mood swings equivalent to p.m.s.-male urgings to detonate the opposition in which fantasies might surge into actuality-which state should he be made to conform to for trial-the meek and remorseful mode?

Legal findings of fact and conclusions of law might be held independently of the psychological condition of a defendant with less harm to public interests than a period of incarceration and chemical reconditioning of a yet non-convicted (though obviously guilty) prisoner. In at least some cases it might be better to first try the defendant and then sentence him or her to particular treatment or correction.

The danger of making political incorrectness and thought crimes psychological labels supported by law is a perennial danger to a free society. If psychiatric neurology ever became as exact an accurate as diagnosing a broken leg, and if fixing imbalance minds were as simple (it isn’t likely to be for a number of reasons) regarding psychiatry as more than a skilled voodoo sophism for generating proplits for practitioner might be reasonable. Laws need to be about real material transgressions though-not on what one thinks. Trials need to be about material facts and not about psychology or worse-psychiatric opinions that have less credibility than hear say evidence.

A time for psychiatry for convicts can arise after conviction and before sentencing where it is more appropriate. It is important to keep an effective barrier between free thought and thinking, behavior and legal boundaries. Society can ill afford to develop more legal leverage on individuals on the basis of what government shrinks think the citizens might be thinking.

Privatizing Medicare Would Present Philosophical Issues for Democracy

Fundamentally tax payers should be giving their money to the federal government rather than having the government loop the money over to Wall Street providers of Medicare services. If The Rep. Ryan plan is just a way to slave taxpayers to paying Wall Street Medicare providers from around the globe whatever they choose to deliver to Americans, taxpayers would be submitting to slipping into global government.

It is easy enough to envision U.S. citizens having their personal data stored in the Internet cloud, their pancreas examined via Internet in Bombay and their brain in China. Drugs made in Egypt might be flown be Red Army air direct to Chicago-specialized medicine tailor-made by designer docs abroad to treat a specific individual.

Privatizing Medicare is just another way to make U.S. democracy die the death of a thousand cuts, or be taken down by mirthful Wall Street C.E.O.s to the dungeon of global, corporate economic power.

It is possible to reform medical provisioning for the nation's poor and veterans within the traditional role of democratic government and taxpayers funding just necessary and compassionate government services.

Do middle American cities serve as magnets for tornados because their displacement of biota creates a rising hot-air micro-climate? Perhaps we cannot know, or do anything about global warming either in the global corporate economic shell game. Americans should be able to provide the lowest cost national public health service for the poor however, and increase government efficiency in the process, without any flummery of tax dollars to Wall Street.