American issues of Christianity, cosmology, politics, ecosphere, philosophy, contemporary history etc
9/28/23
Advice for Presidential Candidates- Write Poetry
Four Points for Avoiding Government Shutdown
I thought to write a few reasonable guidelines to avoid government shutdown when bi-partisan negotiations are at loggerheads. Here are a few principles
1) The borders need to be secured against illegal entry. That is equivalent to locking the doors of a home. The homeowners may then be able to choose who may enter the dwelling rather than home invasion specialists.
2) If a divided congress wants to decrease and increase spending the federal budget should remain unchanged. The right time to alter budget levels is when broad bipartisan support for a change in one direction is present or when a single party in control of both houses of congress was elected to do so. Democrats had the opportunity to raise taxes on the rich to fund budget increases or pay down debt if they chose to do so during the first two years of the Biden administration and did not act on the matter.
3) Federal funding should never depend on funding a foreign government. Foreign government funding such as the twenty billion dollars Democrats want for Ukraine should not be included in budget negotiations unless there is broad bi-partisan support, and even then it is questionable that any amount at all should be included in basic federal budgeting since a foreign government is not the U.S. Government. If war mongers insist some sort of special appropriations vote in Congress on a special one-time disbursements to an alien nation that has in the past employed the President’s son might be held at a later time unrelated to legislation that could shut down the U.S. Government.
4) All federal food assistance programs including school lunch programs and WIC should be funded during an emergency government shutdown. If half of the children of the U.S.A. are poor and with food funded by WIC the poverty is enough of a disadvantage without adding malnutrition to their life opportunity vectors.
9/15/23
Clogs Ode Lit (the poem)
Singularity world and will
ideal phenomena mill
bubble blown membrane
time snapping through drains
rising dreams though panes
spacing plains fulfill
Being and time needs tick quickly
short, sharp, existent and prickly
republics of thought
with castled quantum plots
rise dreams sought
-accompli
Fated verse
unknown nights
vibrating strings tight
shocka field blooms star lights
power gravity fighting worse
quantum super-position, terse.
If the Assumption is Wrong (the poem)
Around red dwarf stars shining
inputting energy strength
double Dyson spheres were built
bringing to the hilt a myth
Zillion worlds with private suns
darkest matter, unsung stars
gravity set right for spheres
good Earths loamy, near like Mars
Dark energy infusion
where upwelling currents fly
mysterious profusion
across the darkened sky
Missing matter past the prime
is a sign to empty space
dark energy excess flew
Dyson worlds new-built in place.
Upstream (the poem)
Down the river builds
rapids sand falls
atmospheric heating wills
rapids sand falls
Upstream time fills
crashes and sprawls
atmospheric heating builds
rapids sand falls
Time upstream chills
nothings land morgues
upstream time fills
silent bogged chords
Through darkness fogs log
enjambments downstream
works from the past
make a future climate scream
Upstream time calls
inexorable arithmetic
downstream time flows
sedentary broadcasts thick.
Radius of a Membrane Universe (poem)
Chords sharply rise and spring
filling in with trillions strings
the membrane drawn tight
an arrow in flight
lighting night
mass for bling
Templates wait
when time starts
comparing good parts
those of righteous hearts
with those of worldly sin and hate
one may discover when too late
Emergent mass with gravity
from massless quanta just set free
anti-matter too
a universe new
dark energy grew
balance key
What is right when wrong is so strong
politics leads to sing such songs
kill the enemy
and be truly free
each will see
the final gong.
9/14/23
Space-Time Expansion and Hubble Tension
A vector space is a mathematical paradigm. A more complex vector space is that of Hilbert Space, yet of course they are math metrics rather than space-time in-itself. Time is a meansurement locally of the rate of change of some sort of physical continuum, and obviously with relativity that changes. Scalar fields are a way of assigning a mathematical value- ‘a single number to every point in space’ and thus useful in applied physics. One cannot assign a single value to time with relativity making time values local rather than universal.
I suppose its possible that in a black hole time may experience running in reverse at some point if space-time warps inward upon itself. It is theoretically possible that time runs in different directions at and within an event horizon’s opposing surface directions. Math fields, tensors etc may describe space without in any way explain what the forces are within it. Why it is that galaxies are expanding apparently with space may be reduced or refined with explanations tat are more complete with measurements of particular particles or fields that are increasing spacing externally and if they are not, why it is that just larger clumps of mass have increased spacing. There are new results for the Hubble tension that demonstrate that theoretical astrophysicists aren’t in harmoney even with the rate of expansion. Much to learn obviously.
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-hubble-tension-universe-expansion
Dialectical Reason and Conservative Rationalism
When President Biden visited Vietnam recently and extolled his vision of a twenty-five year partnership in security and trade that reminded me of the history of Soviet and Russian relations with Vietnam during the Cold War. I wondered if the President’s outlook wasn’t somewhat one-sided and overly optimistic. Vietnam needs naval help in securing its offshore oil and fishing grounds against Chinese incursion such as the Spratly Islands. It would also like to increase domestic production to expand exports to nations besides China and India that are saturated with production as it is for domestic and foreign export (India less so presently though that may change). The U.S.A. is an obvious sales sump. Being a purchaser of products doesn’t imply any kind of allegiance from the seller when you have killed more than a million and a half citizens of the seller five decades before.
Vietnam and China are two communist countries sharing a history of border conflicts. China and India also have a history of border disputes. Russia has had very positive relations with Vietnam, China and India. They are something of a coordinator and enabler of an Eastern Eurasia economic and political synergetic surge of developing nations to the front of the first world economic stage. The west has a Pope trying flanking maneuvers in Mongolia, President Biden trying to put a wedgie in from the S.E. and President Zelenski appointing a Muslim to lead the Ukraine military that could in theory catalyze more Muslim terror in Russia from the South (though fate replied swiftly with an earthquake killing 2000 Muslims in Morocco; one of three traditional Muslim invasion routes to Europe. I am not confident that the Bidentate. method of expanding western market control over Eurasia will be effective in spite of the President’s optimism.
Jean Paul Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness after being released from capture and p.o.w. incarceration by Germany as a French conscript in the Second World War. The great philosophical tome of the 20th century was an remains quite influential in popular psychology. Most don’t develop and in-depth understanding of what its about; French rationalism following the footsteps of Rene Descartes. Sartre elaborates in a practical way on self-reliant epistemology wherein all one trust is one’s own awareness of perceptions and thought about them. Existentialism is a large word philosophy on the epistemology of existent experience of the world; considering existent perceptions and thoughts about them as well as thoughts about thoughts. The book is one-sided. It regards epistemology from the perspective on a sole individual and the content he experiences.
From Sartre’s point of view in Being and Nothingness there could be no other people in the world that are real. That is they could be regarded equally with material objects that aren’t animated as phenomena. He does describes the experience of being observed by others and how one reacts to that (e.g. ‘the look’), and his terminology is replete with terms like being-in-itself, being-for-oneself and being-for-others that describe the way an individual psychological reacts or presents himself while existing yet those descriptions all return or renormalize to the individual point of view as an existing, sentient individual. It is Sartre’s second great philosophical tome named ‘The Critique of Dialectical Reason’ that explains the way a few, or a society or civilization of individuals interact epistemologically from the ground of each phenomenally experiencing the existence of others in their own perception and cognitive field. Sartre’s Critique may have changed the world far more than Being and Nothingness, and today it is almost entirely forgotten.
French rationalism is quite conservative in its epistemology. One can rely solely on one’s own experience as being ‘real’. Descartes called the I think therefore I am (or exist) confirmation way of think a ‘first principle’. Bishop Berkeley developed his philosophy of idealism, originally called ideaism with the same founding principle. In the Three Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous Berkeley showed that content besides that of self-awareness could be created by God, an evil demi-urge, or in modern terms, a simulation by a quantum computer. It is possible that all that exists is the mind and that everything else is like a feely show from Orwell’s novel 1984 or an advanced artificial reality world-universe. The Critique of Dialectical Reason describes how individuals choose to interact, sometimes with social inertial behavior creating roles for them, in that common epistemological experience of existence.
Democrat Party ideology tends to be quite one-side in its outlook on the wold and politics. It is a very us vs. them party weltanshauung. Trump is them, Russia is them, political protesters bum-rushing an insecure capitol building are insurrectionists, Republican voters are ‘deplorables’. One is very common is the idea that some nations and organizations are ‘existential threats’. What is meant by that is either a threat to existence or an existing threat. President Biden’s Ukraine policy is an actual existential treat in that it may provoke global thermonuclear war, yet that is of course not talked about in the media. In the Democrat point of view the victory of everything they want is political inevitable. It an outlook something lie that describing kings with absolute power in his book ‘The Leviathan’.
If the epistemological criterion of Being and Nothingness is appropriate for an age of personal egoism and predatory capitalism rather than democracy, The Critique of Dialectical Reason is suitable for analysis or edification of a mass social environment. With the name and subject the Soviet Communists of Russia were interested. Since Karl Mark had adapted Hegel’s idea of an evolving world spirit coming to realize itself through history that Hegel wrote of in ‘The Phenomenology of Mind’ there had been no significant credible upgrade to the paradigm of evolving dialectical reason and dialectical materialism. Marxist philosophers were somewhat stranded standing upon the melting iceberg of Marxist dialectics that were fading in the science of the 20th century. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason personalized and shrank epistemological dialectics to that of French rationalism socially concatenated and occurring for the masses simultaneously. With the implicit French rationalist skepticism about everything perceived besides one’s own experience guiding social dialectics it became easier for some Soviet philosophers to jettison the metaphysics of dialectical materialism and move toward a more pragmatic view of social organization, individual and collective epistemology. Like the insight provide by W.V.O. Quine’s “Methods of Logic’ that taught readers of logic how to build their own system of logic from the bottom up instead of simply instructing students in a particular system of logic and how it worked, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason provided interested parties with the knowledge that collective social behavior is phenomenal, malleable and subject to change or improvement rather than necessarily being determined by evolving dialectical and material forces consistent with social Darwinism and a process of political class clash, synthesis and anti-synthesis evolution.
Sartre wrote part of The Critique of Dialectical Evolution in Moscow during several months of residence. It is entirely possible that Raisa Gorbachev- wife of President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, was familiar with the work as she was an academic philosopher. Sartre’s philosophical account of the phenomenality of social organization and the way praxis shaped it may have reinforced the paradigm for glasnost, perestroika and radical transformation of Soviet society from one of state socialism to one embracing free markets and democracy. The leap of faith into the new philosophical paradigm wherein social organization was believed to e within human power to improve rather than within the realm of dialectical material determinism was the greatest non-violent social change in mass politics that has occurred.
The late Soviets were pressured by a number of internal and external challenges to adapt, improve and move away from state socialism and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ Sartre’s avante guard philosophical work would otherwise have likely been ignored by the powerful political insiders of the Soviet Union as they would have been elsewhere other than by readers of philosophy books. Leadership of the west generally ignored The Critique. The term ‘dialectical’ was after all unfashionable after the fall of the Soviet Union. Twenty years after the fall the term existential threat became common in the discourse of Pentagon and White House spokespersons. Philosophically nothing much had changed in D.C. political circles since the end of the Cold War. Politicians were unaware of the epistemology of French rationalism developed by Sartre and the way it viewed collective social organizations phenomenally with egalitarian and equal individual experience of life differentiating itself into different roles. President Biden and other party lawyer President still regard the world empirically, sometimes with a touch of Catholic amillenialism or Protestant pre-tribulationism thrown in.
Though the social epistemology is very old and the political dialectic equally dated in the leadership of the Democrat Party, the consequences of such anachronistic viewpoints fueled with the aggressive litigant methods of a lawyer-President lead to needless political conflict along worst-case lines bilaterally. The Democrat Party leadership way of international relations seems to be of a square peg in a round hole approach with the power and ego to try to force matters its way. It is a philosophical paradigm that is closer to the mark of personal egoism and solipsism rather than pragmatic with awareness of the compound social dialectic that is the phenomenon of social reason.
Classical and Environtal Economics; Seperate and Not Equal
Classical economics developed without concern for natural resource conservation or the value and preservation of intact ecosystems. In fact exploitation of natural resources; processing them as quickly and quantitatively as possible to cash them in for market products was normal. With seven billion plus souls on Earth and finite Earth resources that custom is counterproductive to human survival in the long term on this planet. Ecological economics is cognizant of those facts and develops understanding and methods for integrating classical and environmental elements positively.
Classical economics hasn’t a capacity to recognize values beyond those of supply and demand in the market. Capitalism is blind to the values of non-market-profitable environmental conservation set-asides by government and generally cannot value non-marketable environmental services values. The field of trying to market environmental services positively, at least to governments has gotten a small start.
Classical economics with capitalism would calculate values for the last healthy natural resources of a dying world if cashed out and sold for scrap in the market, Classical economics need be upgraded to a new version integrated synthetically with environmental vision to become ecological economics. In a sense there are no limits to the potential profit resulting from the synthesis of classical economics with environment to one of ecological economics. Minimizing adding entropy to economic procedures could become a coefficient for adding value to economic products.
Nature and living ecology elements evolved to create greatly complex structures within an integrated and wholistic environment. Specific biological adaptations occurred within the complex complex of ecosystem compresence; deleting through displacement or economic use to extinction affects every other element of the ecosystem. With enough entropy, or disorganization added to an ecosystem the complete ecosystem may break down with many of its elements unable to survive independently.
Economic practices are cultural means of processing articles for life. Like invention synthetic compounding of ideas to form a new idea economic methods, knowledge and applications evolve. The idea of interacting positively with the ecosphere to conserve or build it is new. New ideas may be challenging to introduce to human economic practice. Practical applications of theory, new ideas or inspiration need occur experimentally in testable circustance generally before spreading to broad, common sense use. With the human reluctance to change from presently profitable methods (if it ain’t broke don’t fix it), expanding the economic skill set to include getting more value from the ecosystem through using it better is challenging- especially since the science is new and requires ongoing improvement just as classical economics continues to improve its knowledge base through trial and error often in real world applications.
The cult of controlling inflation as a way to govern U.S. economic well-being is a case in point of the focus of classical economics on trendy ways of continuing the flow of money through the polity in traditional courses. With more than 31 trillion dollars of public debt and decade of Federal Reserve loans of trillions of dollars of zero or low interest loans to wealthy banks that in turn could electronically mint and loan four dollars for each loaned dollar from the Federal Reserve monetary policy as a method for adjusting the inflation rate and employment rate along a Phillips Curve or post-Phillips Curve tensor is like building public policy on an ice-covered lake during an era of global warming. Conserving the environmental health or even restoring it are not large blips on the radar screen of classical economic managers as things to be concerned about.
The rate of inflation and national employment rate are at any rate dubiously reactionary to monetary policy in an era where post-Cold War the global labor supply available for U.S. corporations to outsource jobs has risen 400% Complex offshore employment, transport, health and technology factors affect the cost of products and prices available for Americans. Supply and demand elements from illegal labor domestically to sanctions and belligerence on trade relations may alter domestic price balances. Monetary policy may alter international trade balances from positive to negative. Segregating Russia from the U.S. economy affected Americans as has and will U.S. Chinese business relations in several was as U.S. investors are banned or discouraged from further Chinese partnerships for production. The international economic relations are of course quite complex concerning China and India in regard to U.S. investment and production sites for exporting products to the world and the United States. It will make a difference of most Wal-Mart products sold in the U.S.A. are made in China or India; and it will make a difference if the brick nations become more prosperous and begin to view the U.S foreign policy as that of a rival rather than just a capitalist investor taking more than 50% off the top in return for direct investment.
Ecological economic methods developed and led by the United States would become a transcendent phenomena catalyzing positive U.S. and developing nations relationships. If the U.S. eliminate poverty and creates a minimum national income with free lifetime continuing education the leadership would demonstrate a positive example to the developing nations and create some trust that the U.S.A. is more than a capitalist entity seeking to exploit or devour underdeveloped national economies.
Political candidates that comprehend even the definition of ecological economics would be a positive improvement in U.S. Presidential races. Ecosystem services is a developing field within ecological economics yet does not entail more than a fraction of its potential. Ecosystem service approaches recognize the value that ecosystem have in cash terms to human societies such as in filtering water that are lost with human developments that degrade or destroy those services. Most citizens don’t think about ecosystem services except perhaps for aesthetic/recreational values of wilderness areas. Ecosystem services are renewable naturally. When entropy with its chaos disrupts or kills those services they may be irreplaceable. Aquifers may remain uncharged or polluted so long as rivers run. The potential profitability of ecological economics political and financially surpasses that of classical economics especially in the modern world laden with great new technology and vistas on Earth and beyond.
Does the President’s Discretionary Mass Murder Power Need Oversight?
Individual citizens aren’t free to orchestrate conflicts that cause mass death; a President is. The sole Presidential requirement is to contrive plausible reasons and narratives that will play well in the media for mass murder of war. Foreign citizen-soldiers drafted to fight in wars enabled by military support and encouragement from the U.S. President that become combat casualties are murder victims too, as of course are civilian casualties.
The Ukraine war is largely a product of President Biden’s pressure to keep Russian land from Russia that was lost to communism and the illegal, non-Democratic Clinton-Yeltsin land redistribution perpetrated during the aenomic breakup of the former Soviet Union. Western war promoters in built up weapons, cash transfers, pretexts and narratives for support before for more than a decade before engaging military conflict.
Opportunities for a peaceful resolution have abounded the past 30 years by revisiting the illegal land redistribution and having the citizens of the former Soviet Union vote on it themselves. Adjustments have been made regarding land allocations given to Alaska natives since the ANILCA settlements of the Nixon administration with federal and swaps. Substantial land in Holkam Bay was given to the Tlingit Tribe fairly recently through Senator Lisa Murkowski’s efforts in the Senate. Russia deserves at least that much consideration.
Elevated from citizen to President of the United States a citizen is free to liberally arrange the deaths of foreigners if they choose to as they often have the past half century. As defender of the nation people believe the President is obligated to de frappe foreign threats such as terrorism and top terminate foreign military attacks upon the United States. When a President decides to support conflict with military assistance in foreign ventures as policy actions; especially when not obligated in some kind of treaty, the President is not ethically covered by the self-defense aspect of exoneration for a commander-in-chief fulfilling the obligations of office. The President has entered the realm of being a mass murderer or at the very minimum an accessory to mass murder.
It is somewhat interesting that ordinary citizens elected to the power of the Presidential office find it so easy to configure the deaths of tens and hundreds of thousands of people in foreign military conflicts with and without direct U.S. military action. Sending HIMARS, cluster bombs, drones, smart bombs and sundry other lethal equipment to the Ukraine military along with intelligence and operations planning etc plainly resulted in tens of thousands of Russian deaths and indirectly, by protracting the conflict far beyond its natural expiration, Ukrainian deaths. President Biden has found it very natural to act in the realm of mass murderer; as easy as breathing, and nothing has been written about that so far. Those that study ethics issues for public affairs sometimes hired by the government and corporations to approve controversial procedures have remained silent thus far (to my awareness).
If propping up the Ukrainian war is not in self defense (the President won’t even secure the southern border of the U.S. against illegal entry of potential terrorists) or an act made in a treaty obligation such as George Washington warned about, but is made in disregard of Russia’s legitimate historical claim to Crimea and Eastern Ukraine and to actualize a vision of a reduced Russia with Western hegemony that could flank China and make the world a playground for Wall Street can that exonerate the President from using mass murder to accomplish his goal that might instead have been accomplished through peaceful evolution and mutual economic cooperation?
Does the United States need to legislate controls on a President’s opportunity to act as a mass murderer after ascending to office? Should there be some sort of measure of the number of deaths a President can bring about through direct and indirect means without a declaration of war? Does the United States have any moral capacity or interest in evaluating the ethics of a President perpetrating death upon foreigners outside of wars of self-defense of the United States and cap the number permitted to be killed by Presidential discretionary, willful mass-murder?
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...
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Here and there pointillist continua build rowing the skiff clambering over the road staying in shadows until spring insouciant compact snow ...
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Alaskan officials have cut down or banned King Salmon fishing in much of Alaska because so few of the large fish are returning. The Ancho...
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Why do F-22 pilots lose consciousness and let their planes crash and burn? The air superiority fighters are designed to survive oppositio...