Lebron James, nearing retirement, chastises Drew Breeze for Patriotism

N.B.A. star Lebron James an aging basketball star on the downward slope spared from playing ball, though collecting salary during the covid 19 era, criticized a football star; Drew Breeze of the Saints, for expressing an opinion that disrespecting the national anthem is wrong. Certainly it isn't a crime, yet it is wrong if one is an American rather than an African-American, European-American or Antarctic American.

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2894659-lakers-lebron-james-rips-drew-brees-over-comments-about-kneeling-in-nfl

For some reason uneducated athletes sometimes choose to speak out as if they were knowledgeable about sociological constructions, macro-economics, cosmology, history or philosophy as if their insights were useful or accurate when they are not. No one expects Lebron James to know what Washington crossing the Delaware or marines placing a flag on Mount Suribachi meant, yet he should at least respect those who do. A generation of athletes that never served in the military during war with dumped vast wealth should have some reserve in determining what is right and wrong about patriotism. Independent opinion and the right to express it is good as are other rights such as those of dissent generally and peaceful protest. It is better to work intelligently with an idea about what specifically need be corrected rather than to emotionally riot and shout havoc, racism and etc. When the New Orleans Saints were robbed by Los Angeles based officials of going to the Super Bowl in 2019, where was James' protest about right, wrong and justice?

https://www.neworleanssaints.com/news/turning-point-of-the-game-in-new-orleans-saints-loss-to-rams#:~:text=No%20deliberation%20required%20to%20name,in%20the%20Mercedes%2DBenz%20Superdome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oKMjTqdTYo The First Medal of Honor event recorded on video

The former best active N.B.A. player raises an interesting point about the nature of riots and other protests by the descendants of slaves that is touchy. Actually people have been fired for saying that black Americans were bred for athleticism as slaves, yet that may be true. It is just that people apparently haven't investigated the matter much and the facts of the slave owners breeding programs designed to enhance the value of their economic assets have been obscured.

 There is nothing shameful about being a member of a social group that was bred for athleticism, if that is what occurred. People have bred dogs for millennia and slavers may have wanted strong workers rather than 100 lb weakling, short intellectuals that might be smarter than the slave owners. Some athletes have participated in their own way breeding with 60,000 women for example, individually (Wilt Chamberlain) passing on athletic genes and height. Millions of young black men descended from humans bred for size and strength once upon a time in an era without many industrial jobs requiring athleticism may find social employment adaptation more challenging than comparatively, women at desk jobs have. The summer rioting season of blacks is becoming a usual event whenever even a single criminal activity by law enforcement people trying to arrest a black male occurs.

 It seems that an industry of ambulance chasers exists promoting racism whenever a black is caught on video being victimized in such a way that an obvious gross violation of civil rights occurred. Rioting and mass protests that effect business and provide new criminal records for law-breakers aren’t the way to address the problem. As the sometimes ineffective and inaccurate Southern Poverty Law Center has done for decades tracking groups that violate civil rights in an organized way (aka hate groups), there should be some plainly recognized on-line organization coordinating evidence of gross violation of the civil rights of Americans regardless of race; race should be a statistically compiled analytical finding the organization could provide. Plain legal responses by a sober organization is a much better way to bring about corrections to the Universe of law enforcement existing in thousands of departments with varying degrees of autonomy across the nation than ad hoc rioting and anti-American, anti-patriotic tweets by disgruntled aging athletes trying to seem relevant when they are not winning championships because they haven't invented a vaccine that would let them play safely without infecting others.

Culture matters concerning employment. An intellectual culture generates an increasing percent of national income while athletic laborers aren't. Human health and amateur athletics are great things provided everyone also is maximizing their intellectual development at the same time. With 9 billion people on a planet with a carrying capacity for two billion a lot of brain work and invention will be required to keep wild animals alive in a healthy ecosphere and human animals too.

Consider the human tradition of destroying the ecosphere whenever they build a new structure; that has to stop. It is a natural process that with so many billions participating in a thoughtless way endanger all life on Earth. A one-story building destroys as much ecosphere as a 100 story building on the ground. make structure resemble mountain ranges maybe and have ecosphere on the exterior? Sterile cities and vanishing ecosphere need new social thought and regulation that riots about race won't fix. James should at least invest time in ecospheric conservation; maybe join the Sierra club, as he does in attacking white quarterbacks holding the NFL career passing record.

Black Democrats Riot Across Nation Opening Prime Biden Campaign

Of note this month as Summer Solstice draws near is the rise of seasonal rioting in many American cities by mostly black Democratic voters. A white policeman apparently murdered a black man by kneeling on his throat for seven minutes that stopped the victim from breathing. Someone filmed the incident and riots immediately began with looting and burning in lieu of equal protection of the law. In this era of ubiquitous cameras and social media uploads the need for riots to serve instead of regular legal procedures isn’t too credible. In the U.S.A. each year about 250 black men are killed by policemen and about 50 policemen are killed- almost all of them are white. In a nation of 320 million citizens and a zillion gangs those numbers are not so high.

 A little more than 2.5 million Americans own more than 35% of the U.S.A.’s wealth so go ahead and blame policemen and white people generally for keeping ‘Black America down’; it was President Obama that twisted Congress’s arm to make the vast Bush tax cuts permanent accelerating the concentration of wealth.  Policemen aren’t economists- they are just people trying to keep the peace amidst tens of millions of poor Americans living collectively with less than 1% of the nation’s wealth many of whom are white people, fighting for scraps from the tables of the rich. Only Senator Bernie Sanders voted against the tax cuts- about every Democrat Primary Presidential candidate ganged up against Sanders and endorsed Joe Biden to prevent any chance of anyone being elected that would work to make America more financially egalitarian.  Ninety five percent of blacks voted for Obama; who is more racist than that?

Criminal events such as murders are not soon going to be entirely stopped, thus a mad rush to riot when a single crime occurs without any particular change in the law as an object for protesting or looting, burning and rioting is not easily justifiable. Unfortunately social media can generate emotions that can cause mass social irrational choices such as rioting to be made. Crimes occur in every occupation of society including law. If a policeman commits a crime that is recorded for social media that cannot be a justification for retribution with several million crimes through rioting.

The riots caused many to be arrested and harmed their employment prospects needlessly in the future after the economy starts to recover from Covid 19 recession. Also noteworthy is the fact that the failure of social distancing by rioters will perhaps cause hundreds of blacks to lose their lives to Covid 19. Former rioters aren’t likely to cooperate with contact-tracing work either.

There is an American tradition of public demonstrations and protest marches with deep roots i.e. the Army Vet Bonus demonstrations in D.C., those led by Dr. King and anti Vietnam War rallies. Demonstrations that are effective have actual legal or political measures they want specifically changed. Politicians in the U.S.A. aren’t inevitably the brightest bulbs and have a need to know what legislation protestors actually want done if they are to work to that end; it is not enough to say that ‘the system’ is at fault and trust that some ethereal insights will appear to politicians whom will then fix it. If the protests are about economics then particular economic remedies need be advanced if change or reform is to occur.

The United States isn’t a dictatorship that can have a single individual change everything the way he wants- or if she is a benevolent dictator (an oxymoron usually) adapt the economy to conform to the wishes of protestors. With 50 states governments and a federal government that made permanent tax cuts to low levels during the Obama era with a Democrat-controlled congress the ability to reshape the national economy is very difficult. Protestors that want to change the economy should have an idea of what and how they want economics or political economy to change and let the public know instead of breaking out unintelligent tantrum-rioting.

Many Americans besides black Democrat rioter-voters would like the economy to change too. Realistically they don’t even know what they want to change in the economic structure or if the change would get them what they want. Bringing private business to riot prone, poor black urban communities might not be simple; it isn’t like getting the government to open new free bread and fruit smoothie storefronts or provide free rent in new free public housing projects.

It is possible that business likes peaceful stable neighborhoods more than those with rampant crime, dope, whoring and poverty and homeless people living in tents defecating on sidewalks. Police too may shy away from abusing prosperous citizens able to afford personal witness on-line storage body cams and good lawyers for lawsuits, especially if the prosperous don’t have illegal guns, don’t work human smuggling, smuggle drugs or coordinate community organized crime ventures. Police also have more trouble arresting white color criminals or broadcasters violating human rights-they aren’t legal theorists- than simple, plain vanilla or chocolate burglars, muggers and other simple material felons easy to spot.

A move toward ecological economics would be good, and that could have a guaranteed minimum income, free tuition through graduate school and a free walk-in national health service for the poor. Capitalism could be reformed so no-one could invest in more than three corporations at a time or have more than 300 times the income of an average worker. If human life productivity efficiency is to be maximized everyone needs adequate capital and good health to not fall into deep, dark whirlpools and undertows of social economic evils the comfortable and aloof are often unaware of (including well-off technicians that fawn over the ideals of the rich).

Rioters of average or below average intellect with little to do with their lives that could be regarded hopefully or productively encounter average policemen that interact all day with criminals that are controlled by politicians of average intellect without a lot of good ideas for reforming capitalism or to ecological economics. Expecting miracles in economics from uncomprehending average people without the ability to reform global corporate power and the concentration of wealth in 1% of national citizens is daft. Electing neo-liberals would produce more rich neo-liberal politicians that would probably not do much for poor Democrat rioters to make meaningful economic reform inclusive of ecological sustainability and a healthy wilderness portions of flora and fauna. Wealth is built up slowly, annually; rioting is the antinomy of that. One of the greatest economic injuries the poor can experience is simply termination of work and discontinuity in the process of slowly building up their own capital. With the recent covid 19 problems perhaps millions of people may experience home mortgage problems as they did a little more than a decade ago during the housing crisis. It seems that every decade or so some crisis appears that trims home buyers to subvert their slow acquisition of capital. It is the one percenters that profit from national crisis well as Wall Street in regard to political power- racism misses the point entirely when so many white people live paycheck to paycheck themselves.

The economy in the U.S.A. today is quite complex, and millions of people of all races experience a log-rolling contest of trying to stay meaningfully employed. Balzac’s published a book in 1835 named Pere’ Goriot concerning the issue of inherited capital versus labor as a better way of building wealth. Balzac found that the advantages of inherited wealth were so great that the work of labor was comparatively inefficient. The U.S.A. today concentrates wealth because of the shape of the economy that accentuated consumerism rather than saving, and illegal immigration laborers to help expand the economy and increase of capital. I wonder if black rioters have a clue about the way economics work or of the relationships between capital, labor, national income and ecological health.

Black culture in the United States has a much higher birth rate than that of the white population that is about zero population growth. There usually is a higher savings rate when demographic growth is stable. Disparities between different cultures and the sort of economic activity they pursue are interwoven with demographic and cultural facts, labor supply and demand and the kind of quality growth versus quantity growth economics that benefit from intellectual versus physical labor. Stable societies have better situations for educating fewer children than rapidly growing and poorer cultures. It is ironic that black democrats support illegal alien immigration that directly soaks up wages and work opportunities for physical labor such as were more common for American men in the 1950s.

I think there is no simple remedy for the challenges facing American black societies yet I am fairly sure that rioting exacerbates the problems as does racism. If blacks have good scientific education and support good scholarship values then they likely would find more work opportunities with the global corporations that employ so much of the work force today. If there were 10 million Americans of the 320 million citizens who actually make or invent new materials for qualitative improvements to the economy isn’t it better to be one of the ten million rather than one of the rest that fabricate or distributes product, finance or serve the people using new material product? A culture that reinforces qualitative materials science and quiet scholarship, even at home or independently, is of greater social merit concerning economics than those experiencing social instability and chaos socially.

U.S. Lacks Enough Good Ideas for Safe Return to Work

Not enough is being invented or innovated to return Americans safely to work. Making full face masks with replacable filters and eye protections for very low cost or free would seem to be necessary, and the government appears daft about that insofar as it isn't converting any Halloween mask production lines into clear, safety mask production for Americans. In fact Central America and China could use the masks too; don't they still produce cheap stuff in China?

Americans seem sometimes to prefer to be good foes as a way of conducting themselves-for-others; they often prefer to be critics and pains-for-others these days with a generally easier life than in former decades and with a lot of surplus credit they are burning through quickly. It is as if some people prefer to have a depression and something to wine about as a glamour thing for a while if they are well off and can easily afford to survive stay-at-home orders and social distancing means spending more time on the yacht.

jobless claims exceed 40 million during Covid 19 challenge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccgckHUQdzQ

At the least the nation could use politicians with good ideas although that does seem like expecting unicorns to power Santa's sleigh next winter. This could be a time to transition the nation to ecological economics, if there were politicians that actually know what that field is an as academic discipline. Democrats have a candidate for President that actually woke up from a two-month nap at home during the covid crisis recently and there may be hope that he had an inspiration or two. President Trump doesn't know what the word ecosphere means yet he may find a way to sell it on Wall Street if it becomes rare and valuable enough.

President Trump can at least be said to put a brave, unmasked face on the covid incident though it may not be a good idea, and that is something. Inventing and innovating with Yankee ingenuity to swiftly transition to a positive sum, non-depression, ecologically beneficial new foundation for national infrastructure would be a good change and way to extricate the nation from the conundrum it finds itself developing presently because leaders and media are too daft.

Maybe war with China looks more enticing to the homo clan in the elites dinking things about. I saw a good video on how fusion bombs are made, I can see why people like that stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYuVzbIu_8o how fusion bombs work

I believe that if the United States actually became the world leader at ecological economic transition it could show too that stable and secure national boundaries to keep democracy meaningful are good and work. Even the communist nations could live with a healthy ecosphere in recovery and a solid safety net for all that is effective at delivering free universal education through graduate school in order to maximize human potential. The way economics works should evolve and adapt to a more intelligent foundation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d05jEprJxtE crash course on ecological economics

Three Piece Philosophy (video)

Sometimes people wonder about philosophy and regard it as a confusing jumble of vague ideas. I view philosophy differently than that. Actually I have a very simple view of philosophy.

Academically speaking philosophy has many divisions and areas of formal inquiry i.e. ethics, politics, metaphysics, social, cosmology, ontology, logic etc. For myself, concerning cosmology and the phenomenon of being, I have distilled a three-piece philosophical outlook.

https://youtu.be/UkNB_X7wsW4

Like the historical accumulation of science, philosophy as a body of academic material has accumulated over millennia. Reading primary philosophical texts developed over the past 2500 years or so and is therefore something of a venture in reading history. Explaining to others what Plato’s ideas were or how Plotinus used Plato’s ideas concerning a realm of forms in his Enneads (54 treatises) can be quite challenging outside the context of a course in ancient philosophy.

The ideas of ancient philosophers quite often built upon the work of their predecessors and that process continued to the present. Modern symbolic logic has its origins in the classical logic formalized by Aristotle. Learning the history of philosophy is something of an historical reading program that has a lot of abstract ideas in it rather than descriptions of battles, dynasties and social events one finds in general histories of civilization.

Philosophy as an historical body of work has a certain inert status to it. There is more to philosophy than that, for one may sort through the ideas and evaluate them as one learns and eventually classify some ideas as remaining useful and others as being more of archival value. Modern philosophy tends to be live and valid moreso than the old, yet that is just a general paradigm rather than a comprehensive one. Some of the ancient ideas remain valid and may be infused with new ideas arising from philosophers and even physicists. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason continues to be a valid thesis regarding the ties between perception, cognition and reason although contemporary quantum field theory and neurology explain matters somewhat better.

At the end of much reading of philosophy over the years one tends to develop their own outlook on things that could be regarded as a philosophical viewpoint. Though learning the history of philosophy may be time consuming and complex especially when comparing the ideas of one philosopher with others, the result of the personal evaluation of systems and addition of additional concepts from other sources can result in a very simple view. My point of view on matters of philosophy is quite simple these days.

I have two live philosophical interests in addition to one besides the history of philosophy and its content that may be viewed as a kind of large scale scaffolding that allows one to assemble their own Mt. Rushmore of most valuable thought. My two ideas are Christian faith and the convertibility of matter and energy. Those two ideas are easy to say. Each of course has great depth conceptually if one is interested in pursuing them farther.

Recently I read a book named ‘Mass’ published I believe, in 2017. It is a great book describing what mass is. The world and universe of solid objects is regarded as being made of ‘mass’, yet it is actually energy in a different form, and mass is a secondary quality of energy. The author pointed out that in Einstein’s 1905 paper on relativity he actually used the formula M=E/c2 rather than E=M/c2. The Universe as pure energy is quite a mysterious topic. Mass is actually an appearance of energy, yet isn’t energy also a secondary quality of something else unknown? The Higgs field is thought to slow subatomic particle from light speed enough to allow them to have a third dimension instead of two dimensions flattened at relativistic velocity at c. Even two dimensional particles are energy; quantum field theory advances may have much more to learn about energy for-itself and its relationship to time and space.

The enigmatic and mysterious nature of pure energy in regard to matter, space-time and being is an example of how old philosophies can be tied in to new. The neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus was considered by the early church to be pagan because he believed he could directly experience God in a mystical transcendence of matter that was named heyschasm. It is as if he could experience pure energy rather than matter and form as a kind of stream of pure good or God. Plotinus had other ideas. He wrote of his idea of Plato’s realm of forms in relation to God, whom he called ‘The One’.

To make a long story short I will skip to the realm of forms idea of Plato’s. He thought that some kind of abstract realm of forms existed from which everything that is in the material world is a copy. I would guess it is comparable to the Swiss patent office when Einstein worked there as a patent clerk having a copy of everything that was manufactured under patent in Europe in his day, except the realm of forms is more metaphysical and may exist in the mind of God. Plotinus thought the One emanated all that is from his perfect, omniscient, omnipotent being and the Intelligence presided over the realm of forms and selected what things would be made in the material world of mass and solid objects in which humans exist too.

The realm of forms could be compared to the quantum world in which all energy appears to become mass in certain forms from gluons to quarks, protons and neutrons to antiparticles and so on. If something exists it will need to be in a pre-fab form and built up from some of the 100+ elements of the periodic table according to certain physical behavioral forms. That is somewhat remarkable.

My other idea of philosophical merit is Christian faith. Christian faith occurs subjectively, phenomenally and existentially. Søren Kierkegaard is regarded as the first existentialist philosopher for good reason; he viewed Christian faith and practice as personal and apart from social structures and values; phenomenally rather than socially. Kierkegaard was himself something of a social iconoclast. Like so many German 19th century romantic philosophers that considered society somewhat mundane and inferior with people following conventions as if they were drone ants following meat trails, Kierkegaard also viewed too much of society as following spiritually dead roles through life acting in what Socrates considered to be unexamined lives; that is they were philosophically dead and for Kierkegaard perhaps, spiritually dead.

Christian faith and being occur in a world that is phenomenal. Solid objects seem solid because people are made of atomic elements that are bound in physical laws to experience particle compositions in pre-formed ways. Evolution occurs in forms that are constant though from certain perspectives and levels, changing.

There is no evidence against the existence of God anyplace in nature; ask an evolutionary biologist to show a particular physical form or material that does so and one will see vacuity of intelligent response. The best an atheist scientist could do would be to leave science altogether and act as an incompetent anti-theologian bungling some malfeasant hermeneutics or misinterpretation of Bible scripture. Even theologians are in disagreement about interpreting the beginning and end of the Universe in Biblical hermeneutics (interpretations) as some as pre-millennialist, some post-millenialists and others amillennialists, for example.

Christian phenomenology and Christianity existentially are nothing more than descriptions of a posture of Christians to the experience of life, matter and energy for those that care to consider it. Reconciling scripture with science is something that some try to do- even I have published a couple of books with my thoughts on the subject, in the Bible itself though God is recorded by history as having mentioned that what is wisdom to man is foolishness to God. Such wisdom and foolishness may include the idea of constructing cosmology about mass when energy is generic and incomprehensible for-others, as a kind of mystery that mass and human thought cannot really comprehend as secondary characteristic of energy. Time and history including natural history may occur though one knows that relativity and time, being and nothingness are phenomenal themselves with a relative duration perhaps of 13.5 billion years seems vast in one sense, from certain perspectives and might be as nothing at all from other viewpoints, or even from God’s if one could understand that.

Pro and con hermeneutics from theologians and anti-theologian scientists are interesting yet really not so much from a philosophical point of view, in the context of the history of philosophy as the third element of my own regard for the main stuff of philosophy. Simple material with M=E/c2 and Christian faith occurring phenomenally amidst much temporal and unknown physics. Augustine was himself a student of Plotinus and neo-Platonism before he became Christian. He was always looking in the right direction. What is, is. Whatever the primary quality of energy in-itself is, it seems capricious to differentiate it into categories called Universes (U1…U∞) when there is a continuum of the primary quality albeit with ample nothingness thrown in.

Pre-War Jewish Goads on Adolph Hitler

In the United States the history of the second world war is reasonably plain. Germany attacked Europe and then the United States so the U.S.A. joined the war and with the other allies beat Germany. The NAZIs were evil incarnate (like NPR) and liquidated millions of Jews, Gypsies and Homos beyond the rules of war. There is more to history than that however, so I will sketch a brief piece clarifying some of the goads that drove Hitler to such ferocity and hatred of those he regarded as corrupting the world.

Since the Jews had been kicked out of Israel by Romans they had looked for a place to call their own. They migrated to many nations fleeing their former homeland where they had crucified God and experienced disaster forever after. Most of the nations they emigrated to tolerated them for a while and then kicked them out to, sometimes at great cost to themselves as well. Leading up to the First World War Jews of Europe had sought to create their own nation even in Europe. They were the first zionists seeking respite from homelessness.

Meanwhile, in the non-Jewish sector, democracy was rising against aristocracy. Europeans also had the communist problem, and many of the leaders of the left were Jews. Leon Trotsky for example, was actually named Lev Davidovich Bronshtein- a Ukrainian Jew. Germany went to war in 1914. With American reinforcements of the allies Germany was defeated, or rather brought to an armistice that made an uneasy peace ensue with issues not being fully settled.

A Jew from Munich became a national leader in supporting the end of the German aristocracy. He spoke in the beer hall in Munich that Hitler would later lead his putch from. The left-wing revolt forced the Kaiser from office. Hitler, a veteran of the First World War whom had experienced mustard gas injury, hated the Jews for bring the armistice into being and forcing the Kaiser from office; he believed Jews were leading communism and the end of Germany so he was too happy to accept help from on high; probably deposed aristocrats via the German High Army Command. Hitler was sent to take over leadership of the Germany national democratic socialist party- the NAZI party.

Hitler's rise to power and political attitudes are marginally at least, understandable. Loud Jews in public roles were agitating against native citizen leadership and appeared in favor of communism that was a very real and growing threat of proletarian dictatorship in the east and within Germany too. When the Second War started; the concluding act of the FIrst, unfinished war, Hitler's final solution was brought into effect.

Certainly Hitler had understandable grievances against the Jews who he perceived to be attacking German national existence; and Germany had comparatively recently won its full independence from Catholic Habsburgs (though Hitler laughably was himself from Habsburg Austria). It is no wonder that Hitler fancied himself a new Caesar for the Habsburg Empire was also part of the Holy Roman Empire. 

One might ask what Jews of Thessalonica for instance, had to do with Germany. The answer preponderantly is nothing. Because a few loud, prominent Jews agitated in Germany and against the Tsar Hitler conflated or associated all Jews with the political voices of a few. That is a danger of racism; it conveys select attitudes and behaviors to all of the people of a given race.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb8xodXYYvI&list=OLAK5uy_nATU0vbGiBTOyj7_h01qIAYgw0SecrHQI&index=3

Hitler as a modern user of technology was able to selectively kill millions of innocent civilians. As an individual damaged by war and goaded to action by elites that recognized his charismatic voice Hitler was able to lead the mostly former socialist cadred of the storm troopers into a large expansion able to take over Germany by forcing political opponents into silence. After the conquest and assumption of Chancellor socialists too became downgraded and the homosexual leaders of the storm troopers purged. 

Modern broadcast media remains a powerful tool for propaganda and repression of free speech forming bad opinion against writers and others seeking to express objective, factual history and political analysis without the bias of fake-truth endemic to organized media periodically in its history.

Because of the atrocity of the holocaust Europeans tended to support the return of Jews to their own homeland where their desires for political expression and power would not require the subversion or blame for subversion of national political and social development. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

Chicoms and Wall Street Corporatism Share Repressive Concentration of Wealth and Power

Human organizations have a trait of concentrating wealth and power so far as they can; Corporatism and Chinese Communism share similar objectives of concentrating wealth and power in the hands of elites. It should be no surprise that the CHicom leadership feels free to repress democracy and independence in Hong Kong since the United States works to repress free enterprise and free speech independent of corporate will to power- even NPR is something like a Soviet era propaganda and state terror on dissidents organ.

Corporations repress free speech of employees and even the internet has corporate power burying sites they don't like in search engine listings. There isn't a meritocracy in the United States so much as a do the rich like your business system of government. The covid contact tracing is a convenient way to learn more about what all of those independent people are doing and who they know isn't it.

One might wonder why practical anti-covid measures (no I don't mean taking down old Kobe Bryant highlight videos) did not include practical remedies like make complete face mask coverings with eye protection and small replaceable filters at Halloween mask factories so people could go about life more or less normally, or why an ounce or two of bleach in a gallon of water wasn't recommended for disinfecting hands; one would think certain people have some will to keep the economy closed and people more repressed; perhaps another wave of post-covid distressed home and real estate buying will follow as after the 2008-9 financial crash.

It is alright for democracies to limit capital concentration to keep free enterprise independent. There is sometimes permissible dynamic tension between democrats and oligarchs (or communists) that is requisite for keeping a society healthy and able to adapt to external challenges; environmental or social. When the United States is such a bad example to the communists and when the media becomes repressive or even a tool of partly state funded disinformation and networking racketeering terrorism why would one expect the Chicoms to not follow the American lead to their own advantage? Networks are another opportunity for ad hoc communes with exclusive membership. One shouldn't expect them to be some Karl Marx sort of thing with rural farms, hog pens and orgies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTTWedyp37o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fjhIWJSxfw Kobe Bryant highlights

Marx apparently believed that capitalists would concentrate wealth infinitely stimulating revolution. Modern economists point out that he was basically wrong about that for technical reasons. While dictatorships may concentrate wealth absolutely in certain respects, free economies these days tend toward increasing wealth with intellectual labor and free labor. Physical labor produces a diminishing share of national income and capital has its limits too at increasing national income. It is better to have intelligent leadership well versed in ecological economic transformative goals that is able to moderate economics and utilize 100% of human abilities with good polices rather than to force gross failures to develop human potential and let circumstances dictate economic policies through blind force of evolution/crash.

Three-Piece Philosophy

Sometimes people wonder about philosophy and regard it as a confusing jumble of vague ideas. I view philosophy differently than that. Actually I have a very simple view of philosophy.

Academically speaking philosophy has many divisions and areas of formal inquiry i.e. ethics, politics, metaphysics, social, cosmology, ontology, logic etc. For myself, concerning cosmology and the phenomenon of being, I have distilled a three-piece philosophical outlook.

https://youtu.be/UkNB_X7wsW4

Like the historical accumulation of science, philosophy as a body of academic material has accumulated over millennia. Reading primary philosophical texts developed over the past 2500 years or so and is therefore something of a venture in reading history. Explaining to others what Plato’s ideas were or how Plotinus used Plato’s ideas concerning a realm of forms in his Enneads (54 treatises) can be quite challenging outside the context of a course in ancient philosophy.

The ideas of ancient philosophers quite often built upon the work of their predecessors and that process continued to the present. Modern symbolic logic has its origins in the classical logic formalized by Aristotle. Learning the history of philosophy is something of an historical reading program that has a lot of abstract ideas in it rather than descriptions of battles, dynasties and social events one finds in general histories of civilization.

Philosophy as an historical body of work has a certain inert status to it. There is more to philosophy than that, for one may sort through the ideas and evaluate them as one learns and eventually classify some ideas as remaining useful and others as being more of archival value. Modern philosophy tends to be live and valid moreso than the old, yet that is just a general paradigm rather than a comprehensive one. Some of the ancient ideas remain valid and may be infused with new ideas arising from philosophers and even physicists. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason continues to be a valid thesis regarding the ties between perception, cognition and reason although contemporary quantum field theory and neurology explain matters somewhat better.

At the end of much reading of philosophy over the years one tends to develop their own outlook on things that could be regarded as a philosophical viewpoint. Though learning the history of philosophy may be time consuming and complex especially when comparing the ideas of one philosopher with others, the result of the personal evaluation of systems and addition of additional concepts from other sources can result in a very simple view. My point of view on matters of philosophy is quite simple these days.

I have two live philosophical interests in addition to one besides the history of philosophy and its content that may be viewed as a kind of large scale scaffolding that allows one to assemble their own Mt. Rushmore of most valuable thought. My two ideas are Christian faith and the convertibility of matter and energy. Those two ideas are easy to say. Each of course has great depth conceptually if one is interested in pursuing them farther.

Recently I read a book named ‘Mass’ published I believe, in 2017. It is a great book describing what mass is. The world and universe of solid objects is regarded as being made of ‘mass’, yet it is actually energy in a different form, and mass is a secondary quality of energy. The author pointed out that in Einstein’s 1905 paper on relativity he actually used the formula M=E/c2 rather than E=M/c2. The Universe as pure energy is quite a mysterious topic. Mass is actually an appearance of energy, yet isn’t energy also a secondary quality of something else unknown? The Higgs field is thought to slow subatomic particle from light speed enough to allow them to have a third dimension instead of two dimensions flattened at relativistic velocity at c. Even two dimensional particles are energy; quantum field theory advances may have much more to learn about energy for-itself and its relationship to time and space.

The enigmatic and mysterious nature of pure energy in regard to matter, space-time and being is an example of how old philosophies can be tied in to new. The neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus was considered by the early church to be pagan because he believed he could directly experience God in a mystical transcendence of matter that was named heyschasm. It is as if he could experience pure energy rather than matter and form as a kind of stream of pure good or God. Plotinus had other ideas. He wrote of his idea of Plato’s realm of forms in relation to God, whom he called ‘The One’.

To make a long story short I will skip to the realm of forms idea of Plato’s. He thought that some kind of abstract realm of forms existed from which everything that is in the material world is a copy. I would guess it is comparable to the Swiss patent office when Einstein worked there as a patent clerk having a copy of everything that was manufactured under patent in Europe in his day, except the realm of forms is more metaphysical and may exist in the mind of God. Plotinus thought the One emanated all that is from his perfect, omniscient, omnipotent being and the Intelligence presided over the realm of forms and selected what things would be made in the material world of mass and solid objects in which humans exist too.

The realm of forms could be compared to the quantum world in which all energy appears to become mass in certain forms from gluons to quarks, protons and neutrons to antiparticles and so on. If something exists it will need to be in a pre-fab form and built up from some of the 100+ elements of the periodic table according to certain physical behavioral forms. That is somewhat remarkable.

My other idea of philosophical merit is Christian faith. Christian faith occurs subjectively, phenomenally and existentially. Søren Kierkegaard is regarded as the first existentialist philosopher for good reason; he viewed Christian faith and practice as personal and apart from social structures and values; phenomenally rather than socially. Kierkegaard was himself something of a social iconoclast. Like so many German 19th century romantic philosophers that considered society somewhat mundane and inferior with people following conventions as if they were drone ants following meat trails, Kierkegaard also viewed too much of society as following spiritually dead roles through life acting in what Socrates considered to be unexamined lives; that is they were philosophically dead and for Kierkegaard perhaps, spiritually dead.

Christian faith and being occur in a world that is phenomenal. Solid objects seem solid because people are made of atomic elements that are bound in physical laws to experience particle compositions in pre-formed ways. Evolution occurs in forms that are constant though from certain perspectives and levels, changing.

There is no evidence against the existence of God anyplace in nature; ask an evolutionary biologist to show a particular physical form or material that does so and one will see vacuity of intelligent response. The best an atheist scientist could do would be to leave science altogether and act as an incompetent anti-theologian bungling some malfeasant hermeneutics or misinterpretation of Bible scripture. Even theologians are in disagreement about interpreting the beginning and end of the Universe in Biblical hermeneutics (interpretations) as some as pre-millennialist, some post-millenialists and others amillennialists, for example.

Christian phenomenology and Christianity existentially are nothing more than descriptions of a posture of Christians to the experience of life, matter and energy for those that care to consider it. Reconciling scripture with science is something that some try to do- even I have published a couple of books with my thoughts on the subject, in the Bible itself though God is recorded by history as having mentioned that what is wisdom to man is foolishness to God. Such wisdom and foolishness may include the idea of constructing cosmology about mass when energy is generic and incomprehensible for-others, as a kind of mystery that mass and human thought cannot really comprehend as secondary characteristic of energy. Time and history including natural history may occur though one knows that relativity and time, being and nothingness are phenomenal themselves with a relative duration perhaps of 13.5 billion years seems vast in one sense, from certain perspectives and might be as nothing at all from other viewpoints, or even from God’s if one could understand that.

Pro and con hermeneutics from theologians and anti-theologian scientists are interesting yet really not so much from a philosophical point of view, in the context of the history of philosophy as the third element of my own regard for the main stuff of philosophy. Simple material with M=E/c2 and Christian faith occurring phenomenally amidst much temporal and unknown physics. Augustine was himself a student of Plotinus and neo-Platonism before he became Christian. He was always looking in the right direction. What is, is. Whatever the primary quality of energy in-itself is, it seems capricious to differentiate it into categories called Universes (U1…U∞) when there is a continuum of the primary quality albeit with ample nothingness thrown in.