Traditional Quality Leadership for U.S.A. in 2016?

The United States has failed to produce substantive quality leadership in its Presidential campaigns the past several years. The desire to select race or gender candidates has taken priority over economic and ecospheric management quality. With the form-over-substance criteria the United States has entered a period of comparative economic decline and poor management of protracted wars. We not only liked Ike, the nation experienced general prosperity. Dwight D. Eisenhower had integrity and credibility.

 Former four-star Army General McKiernan is a where-are-they-now kind of leader with advanced degrees from Stanford, Harvard (we don't hold that against him) and elsewhere. McKiernan is the kind of Republican candidate that no longer stands for office, yet the Republican party certainly could use a few like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D._McKiernan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_economics

http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/eed.nsf/pages/homepage

There seems to be little prospect for a Ralph Nader with military experience and an advanced degree in environmental economics. The build-up of large public debt, outsourcing of production, perennial high unemployment, decline of the environment and so forth are simply the line-up for the way things are.

The war in Afghanistan seemed to be a consequence of the bureaucratic inertia of the Eastern elite organizational intertia in which there was no good leadership. Afghanistan has a zillion valleys and locals that fight rival valley tribes and foreigners. We should have done better by just being a supplier of goods, economic ideas and support and military equipment for locals seeking autonomy instead of seeking to foist a large central government on those people that disdain such entities. Our Syria policy might actually have worked in Afghanistan. In Syria we seek to disestablish a central government authority through support of a zillion militias while in Afghanistan we seek to fight Afghanis accustomed to local autonomy and force them into  submission to a modern, centralized state bureaucracy. After 2014 that entire structure may collapse like a phase transition to a more stable, lower energy level.

One wonders if the nation can even consider electing a Presidential candidate without a Hollywood shine and pooffiness of character acceptable to the Gay-Lesbian-Transgendered-Neutered-Bisexual foundation of the Democrat party today, or one that isn't simply sold out to global corporatism? 

Preview of Creation and Cosmos - The Literal Values of Genesis 2nd Ed

I have a new preview for the second edition of Creation and Cosmos - The Literal Values of Genesis providing a better idea of the content. Quite a few topics on contemporary cosmology are new to the second edition, and there are new ideas from a number of sources on Biblical development and history as well.

http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_75/13007000/13007143/20/preview/Preview_Creation__Cosmos_The_Literal_Values_of_Genesis_2nd_Ed.epub

http://www.lulu.com/shop/garrison-clifford-gibson/creation-and-cosmos-the-literal-values-of-genesis/ebook/product-20564034.html

Social Network Analysis to Help Infected Chimps-What About Humans?

Social network analysis technique may be used to help prevent disease communication among chimps. Obviously some will note that social network analysis among humans may be used for evil as well as good.

http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/rHXkrYcG7ec/130605104438.htm

Criminal networks may use social network to enfilade prey. Predatory capitalists may use social network analysis to identify easy pickins and political organs may use social network analysis to package the right disinformation with on-time delivery to the right e-mail address or social network user.

Chimps and humans have many similarities obviously. Each have five fingers and toes, like bananas and are ethically challenged. Humans at least have recognition of original sin although some evos are trying to erase that notion.

Chimps may not benefit from social networking sites as some humans do.That is chimps may not enjoy twittering although I doubt that an experiment to determine that has yet taken place. Chimps are more immune from the downside of social networks as well as the good. Social networks on the Internet can help for a kind of popular intellectual gridlock through the ubiquitous mass communication of ideas. Ideas can be disseminated quickly of course, and the power and intertial development of wrong or of a limited false alternative range of ideas can prevent the development of creative thought and good ideas through displacement.

image credit: http://www.publicdomainpictures.net

The Syrian War Is An International Project

The Syrian war seems something of an international project that would not have developed so far as 80,000 dead without much international support including that of the United State's Obama administration. There is something about supporting the development of avoidable foreign conflicts that appeals to some when their own military is not engaged in action. Death of civilians is sometimes  not a problem sufficient enough for an Obama administration to carefully consider a priori what consequences their support for the incipient Syrian conflict would occur. Reasonable people know the nature of the Syrian Government and regional circumstances enough to know that it would not easily relinquish power.

The United Nations has reported the probable use of chemical weapons in Syria by one side or the other in the conflict-or perhaps both, yet since the U.S. propaganda about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq turned out to be as bogus as the facts used in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution we are somewhat skeptical about the veracity and language used in media releases of casus belli for possible intervention or escalation of foreign military action in 3rd party conflicts.

The U.S. administration's logic is difficult to follow on Middle East policy. President Obama appeared to have stimulated and green lighted the Arab Spring with his Cairo speech and of course supported the Libyan revolution. American interests in repressing Al Qa'eda-a Sunni extremist organization coincided with ideas about fostering the development of democratic government in the Middle East that weren't evidently overly practical. The Saudi Royals are anything besides democratic, our friends in the Hashamite monarchy of Jordan are nice yet royal too, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt of which the President of Egypt is a member appears to be at least mildly interested in developing Shria Muslim law and so forth. Democracy is not a traditional form of Arab social organization and might require deep sociological changes before such an experiment might ensue successfully. We tend to believe that Arab democracies would slip into the  French  republic into Napoleonic leadership autocracy mode for a few generations before they reached the perfection of a Nixon or Obama administration in enforcing equal protection of the law.

If the Obama administration is concerned about destabilizing Syria and accomplishing some form of adult abortion service for that region in harmony with the partisan political action committee Planned Parenthood's agenda on a global scale or not the greater objectives of containing the Iranian Government and President Amadinijab (to cannot run for another term as Iranian Preident) and his threats on Israel may seem to be advanced with a Syrian conflict supported by Sunni wealth, visiting Al Qa'eda terrorists and financial and equipment contributions to rebels from the United States.

Russia has of course contributed military weapons to the Syrian Government while N.A.T.O. has seemed to provide support for the rebels along with the Friends of Syria organization. Russia has naval facilities in Syria that allow their vessels to have a warm water port outside the Black Sea-a concern the United States ought to keep in mind. It is an historical concern of Russia that should not be lightly disregarded as unimportant value to Russians they can bite the bullet on. Russia's other interests in support of a non Sunni Muslim presence below it's southern border may be related to its concerns about domestic Russia terrorism from the Sunni of Chechnya or elsewhere. It may also be that Russia seeks weapons sales as much as the United States for economic purposes. Perhaps the Obama administration should consider buying a few Migs to improve Russo-American relations.

It still seems to me that the best thing that could be done to reduce the Syrian conflict would be for the Obama administration to stop making statements in support of the rebels and to quit providing material assistance to the rebels. Quantifying the effects of a violent transition in the Syrian Government upon the Alawite and Hezballah of Lebanon is not easy. It is probable that some sort of new era of purging and terrorism could develop, and some sort of flight of those people  to Iran. Perhaps those people might also develop more support for the Northern alliance side of Afghanistan in a post-American military era in that nation. If the Syrian Government of Assad is driven out of office even with strong support from his own tribal group the Sunni forces of the region make look with a swell of pride toward new objectives in Afghanistan in the belief that renewed and increased terrorism might drive the minority Northern Alliance out entirely and purge Afghanistan of non-Sunni political power.

It would have been best if the Syrian war had not developed but of course the Mr. McGoo foreign policy approach seems to work for the Obama administration, and it is a foreign war without American casualties. It would still have been better to have let democracy develop through peaceful twittering without a military component. Evolution inn politics through gradual change can be better than the bullets and explosives, chemical weapons and foreign interventions of deep water internationalism.

Wall Street Virtual Bunnies Too Big to Fail (poem)

Quick like a virtual bunny
running through galaxies of political Universes
time exhaled mighty breaths
inflating fields of fantasy
called balanced budgets and e-dollars

Ships-of-state sailed over borders
eroded from below in waves of time's syncopated rhythms
crashed on shoals of semi-scientism edging forward
engines broke through bulkheads
firewalls on fire
melting steel in deep pools 
reflecting shiny precipitated prestige of power

Smoke and mirrors breezed through that subdivision's heat
stopped by nothing like snow, hail or sleet
broadcast spectra of extra dimensions
concentrated gravity like tomorrow's tornado'd pension
nothing structured to withstand the blow

Banking singularities too big to fail 
in the nest of Phoenix cuckoos of crisp design
wrote the new algorithms of Monte Carlo
harvest moons of reallocated cash
supplied on demand.

Neanderthal Oilcans Global Warming Death vs. EvoLizardFagocrats in 2016

U.S. politics leaves little to be desired in the tabloid paradigms clashing in dialectical mufsidoonisms. Backward looking Republican leadership squeezing more and more oil, SUVs and asphalt paving in wilderness and farmland run against godless atheist Democrat evolutionists with a 'nothing is real' ethos of anti-nationalism and homosexual center of effort of the ship of state.  Lizardcrats may believe love is the answer failing to realize that sin is a form of hate. Homosexuality is sin.

Neither major political party platform is very encouraging for just plain old poor, straight intellectual-athletes seeking change toward the ideal restorations of individual civil rights, ecosphere, national interest free enterprise with caps on the size of corporations, government, finance sector and with directed transition toward a fossil fuel free, no mass extinction of species America with zero involuntary unemployment.

At least the U.S.A. is no longer a good example for the world to follow on ecospheric friendly economic activity-if it ever was. The nation is stuck in the past or with its head up its a politically speaking, and shall remain in that dark place for some time I would think as the economic center of effort has shifted overseas through globalism.

A philosophical video on the Problem of Space treated as a Substance in General Relativity

A philosophical home-video on the problem of space being treated as a substance in Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.

Space is treated as a substance within General Relativity in order to model the actual cosmos. Logically thought, space is only a metaphor for the too-difficult-to-describe quanta of mass-energy comprising the physical Universe. Space in-itself is nothing at all-perhaps the ultimate contingent paradox. Space is infinite at all points, space has no location or extension, and is a volume of infinite extent without existing at all. Space ought not be regarded though as having vacuum energy. 

Instead spatial curvature in General Relativity should be refined to describe relationships of mass-energy tensors. Mass-energy relationship quantification in specific formulations ought to equal  gravitational fields of local systems in given time paradigms.

Logically mass-energy force tensors might take curved trajectories creating an appearance of spatial curvature.

Republicans Fail to Run Popular Candidates for President-Evolution of National Decline

Robert Redford starred in a film named 'The Candidate' long ago, one would think the Republican Party capable of comprehending political marketing strategy well enough to select a winner. But no, the Republican Party seems not to comprehend that Democrats run candidates with charisma and minimal qualifications economically speaking and that's good enough to win. In the meanwhile Toynbean historical cycle of national decline is overtaking the nation while no one is minding the store.

Marketing strategies for products work well for Republicans-they could rival George S. Parker in that field, yet they seem to pick the most uncharismatic candidates they can find for the White House without characteristics appealing to women. In the post-Oprah media world appearance is more valuable for getting elected than substance. Or rather, the substance is the appearance.

Voters don't want to feel saddled with an unpleasant President elected because the alternative is worse. Republicans need to pull out all the stops and use full court pressure even to have a chance at getting 50% of the vote in recent elections because they aren't running top-drawer individuals. Why not?

The answer could be that the U.S.A. just doesn't matter so much to the rich party anymore with China and Mexico being better places to invest capital for profit. Besides, the Democrat Presidents are doing the Republican's work in economics for them except for the debt, yet public debt perhaps isn't too meaningful to global capitalists networked abroad. If U.S. interests decline the value of their foreign interests shall rise.

Evolution theory has developed in politics as a buzzword for fate. Evolution political theory is a blind historical force determining political development rather than intelligent design inclusive of the well being of all U.S. citizens in the U.S.A. today. It is a convenient excuse enabling the concentration of wealth and political power in privileged elites. Political evolution theory applied as an equivalent of the oriental joss (fate) may be satisfactory for select scientific classes of epistemological extremists on the left and right with a point of view of human mind upgraded in the worst of B.F. Skinner's; The human body theory goes, is meat and mind is no more than a bio-chemical apparition within.

There is just no political demand for full employment and a balanced budget in the U.S.A.  with existentialist individual value satisfaction being the reality check on Wall Street. That is the Democrat Party does not run candidates with competence in economic realism any more. One postures and tries to fund partisan interests and lets the public debt absorb the not realistic approach to holistic national economics.

Every American needs a minimum income-there is simply a cost of living and jobs are hard to find. Even college graduates are unemployed or underemployed not uncommonly and the cost of getting good skills is very high especially with corporate permanence in the U.S.A. being decreasingly something to count on. Occasionally the nation selects a charismatic and competent individual with economic realism to be President, and that rare event seems like radical reform even if it is only moderately so. In 2016 the Republicans should actually make an effort to find an economic realist capable of generating full employment, ecological reform and moral leadership concurrent with destroying public debt in the short-term. The nation ought to step back from the brink of the 4th phase of the Toynbee cycle of decline from the universal phase.

Rectification of Names; Chess is Not a Sport

Chess is not a sport-it's a game, an intellectual game. Language has definitions within given ontological relativism of meanings. Lexicon A may or may not share some common terms with lexicon B, C etc. Lexicons are constructions and nominal rather than of a Platonic realist nature.

Chess and monopoly, tic tac toe and poker while competitive cannot be well said to be sports without Morphy'ing the meaning of sport so far as to relinquish its ordinary meaning.

We believe without bias that quadriplegics too can be champion chess players, or that even blind, quadriplegic chess players can rise to G.M. level if applying themselves with modern technology position-sounding chess boards (perhaps each piece would have a distinct pleasing sound when a hand is waved above it)for them. It would still seem an error to consider chess as an athletic instead of an intellectual activity.

Some can argue that the brain has neurochemistry that works-that it increases energy consumption with intellectual effort. That is true enough. Yet one can't regard chemical energy burning of plants as sport or  even that of an individual in a coma arising to r.e.m.sleep and increasing brain activity.

Intellectual activities are worthwhile ventures for-themselves. One would not use intellectual and athletic as synonyms, or consider Curlie, Moe and Larry as great intellectuals nor Albert Einstein a great athlete.

Philosophers assuredly do consider material things as well as abstract entities that have no material existence (if anything such could be said to exist) if that were possible. Within the greater metaphysics of monism-all things that exist would be material, spiritual or whatever other term one wanted to label everything that exists with.

The Olympics got rid of wrestling-one of the original sports, and might like to add chess one day in order that Norway could get more gold medals in areas besides sky jumping, giant downhill or shooting targets while cross country skiing. The most difficult question for the I.O.C. would be is chess a summer or a winter sport?

The Icon & the Axe, The Cross & the Switchblade, The Queers & The Rich- The Toynbee Cycle of Contemporary History

 The historian James Billington once served as the Librarian of Congress. Billington also wrote a book named The Icon and The Axe. The work of  history of the Rus from the arrival of Vikings to lead as royals at Kiev continuing through the arrival of orthodox Christianity and icons of the faithful is a portrait of the evolution of a civilization. Of course we know that Ivan the Terrible began a centuries long battle to recover land and political power lost to the Mongol invaders after Genghis Khan. Americans often lack a sense of history and fail to learn lessons of history, yet we have great world historians such as the late Brit Arnold Toynbee to help us understand the way of the world and its recurrent political cycles of evolution.

The United States experienced a manifest destiny on a lightly populated North American continent and a vigorous, healthful, rising culture of immigrants and new American-born sons and daughters of the frontiers of ingenuity, free holding pioneering, faith and invention. Democracy was a natural fit for people without an oppressive ruling class located in Europe. The American Revolution to cut away that cancer was an example for the world to follow. France and Russia would accomplish the same revolts against corrupt powers of concentrated wealth with different results.

The Russian revolution did not occur in a vacuum. Russia was faced with continental powers and even American military resistance yet overcame only to be co-opted by corrupt an oppressive ruling class leadership and bad political philosophy leading to the termination of individual free enterprise in the Soviet society. Today Russia as an emergent democratic society faces the challenge of an ad hoc global ruling class of concentrated wealth that would buy everything in Russia and repress the locals if they could. The ordinary people of the United States have already experienced their own post cold war reduction under the deregulated power of Wall Street banks, corporations outsourcing production, large scale immigration of cheap labor and bad political leadership that has failed to show any interest in ecological reform of economics or full employment for all U.S. citizens. Wealth and power is increasingly concentrated in the U.S.A. and globalism through a hoc Wall Street networking has progressively reduced individualism in economics in preference for ad hoc corporate and government collectivism.

 The Cross and the Switchblade was the title of a film with the actor Pat Boone highlighting the difficult moral choices of a New York gang member. We see that the weapon of choice had moved downscale from the war axe to the switchblade; a smaller, more concealable weapon selected for a modern urban culture. The sort of individualism that might have made Erik the Red a good Viking explorer and outlaw of Iceland had been suppressed by the N.Y.P.D.  Individualism in New York and America still flourished in the 1950s- an era before the rise of the World Wide Web and instant global stock trading.

While personal weapons have downsized, in the collective era social weapons have vastly increased in scale. Nuclear weapons, microwave cookers of mass destruction, designer biological society terminators and innumerable others have made the future of humanity dubious. As individualism has been drowned out by collective social environments and as the ecosystem has declined in health with a vast repository of insults by economic activity social irresponsibility has increased. Personal egoism developed as a Wall Street philosophy and the capitalist philosophy of Adam Smith was transformed into a Frankenstein monster running roughshod over the moderate purpose of democracy and its ability to adapt to the dense population era. The poor increased in the United States as wealth was concentrated consistent with party political theory.

 Contemporary U.S. political leadership has made this an era aptly titled The Queers and The Rich. The Obama administration made homosexual service in the military and homosexual marriage it's basic political goals along with creating a corporatist national health care infrastructure. It has failed to close Guantanamo Bay incarceration centers or prosecute 2008 Wall Street collapse actors sufficiently to put a single principle in prison. The administration has supported Federal Reserve printing of 90 billion dollars per month of free no interest loans to banks too-big-to-fail and supported development of war in Syria. These are the actions of a nation in Toynbean decline piling of vast national debt and moving into a Universal economic phase of civilization.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History

 Before the modern trends of decline in the U.S.A. Arnold Toynbee wrote his 'Study of History' detailing more than 20 civilizations that had arisen and fallen and considered the reason why. America seems to have little interest in not proceeding to it's own fall. That fall may not coincide with the apocalypse at the end of the world foretold by three or more different religious faiths. Instead the failure of U.S. political leadership may simple place the U.S.A. in receivership or get its population decimated by global warming, mass epidemic or collapse of political institutions and infrastructure.

 The major political parties essentially serve the queers and the rich. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are mutually exclusive of ends or means. Democrats are the shop stewards to the global corporatists. With the Obama administration the apostles of global homosexual marriage propping of Wall Street the Democrat Party has no leadership cognizant of ecological economic reform or an interest in full employment. It has not even built trans-continental express bicycle lanes for the unlazy or those with electric engines for their bike.

 In the age of fracture with existentialist atheism supporting an ethics of social irresponsibility well serving to concentrate wealth and power ad hoc collectivism has repressed the American ideal of individualism. De facto collectivism in the ad hoc corporatist state has little interest in rebuilding or reforming public works. It seeks tax cuts for the rich-perhaps a flat tax-and is happy to pile up vast public debt to support Defense contractors for superfluous foreign military activities.

 Contemporary collectivism with an evolutionary stamp of godless approval finds no reason to believe in meaning or ethics. Nationalism and pursuit of national interest, the conservation of the environment or restoration of democracy through reallocation of the broadcast media wavelengths to citizen podcast broadcasts locally to take away the power of concentrated wealth to concentrate mass communications power a little.

 Then there are more elections in 2014 and 2016, yet there are few capable candidates with any visions of national change.