On Golden Pond or Lake of Fire?

 I was wondering if a second Biden term would bring a Lake of Fire to the world with nuclear holocaust, or a golden pond for a reelected octogenarian. Nuclear war stimulated by the Poland-Ukraine-U.S.A vs Russia conflict might incinerate the planet's civilization and neatly end massive public debt.

Wrapping up human affairs in order to get Joe Biden elected a final time may be efficient for party planners and comforting to those seven possible extra-terrestrial civilizations living in Dyson spheres around the galaxy concerned about the rising danger of lunatic human civilization. Inside the spheres they were trying not to be noticed I would think, and researchers studying 53 million stars found their hideouts.

The four M.I.T. researchers that found three stars in this galaxy about 11 billion years old-said to be heavy metal poor leftovers from the first galaxies formed after the Big Bong also noticed the stars are flying away fast in the opposite direction of younger stars drawn toward the vast left spinning black hole at the center of the galaxy named Sagitarius A- a word to the wise.

Pragmatism , Utilitarianism and Taking a Poisoned Pawn En Passant

 The war in Ukraine, from the Biden-Blinken perspective, is necessary for two or three reasons of a dubious moral character. One is that funding the government of Ukraine slows or halts ‘Russian aggression’. The second pretext for funding the war is that to not do so would set a precedent of not resisting aggression. Plainly the first two pretexts reinforce one another.

The third reason is that Russia is trying to restore the former Soviet Union territorially. Yet it was the former Soviet Union that occupied the former Russian territory. When the Soviet Union’s leadership collapsed it was quite natural that the Russian Federation would assert its right to restore its territory including Ukraine when strong enough.

A ancillary reason for funding a war in Ukraine is Polish paranoia and fear of Russia. Apparently they perceived the effort of Russia to recover its lost land taken by the Soviet Union as trying to restore the Soviet Union. Poland had a Warsaw pact puppet communist government following the end of the second world war when Soviet Armies occupied nations captured by German Nazis. Reasonably the Soviets were slow to vacate those nations and restore capitalist regimes. Communists were after all communists and apathetically oriented toward capitalism or even national socialism that fueled the Nazi war machine.

It good time, about a half century, the Soviet government withdrew its forces stationed I Eastern European nations coinciding with the end of the Cold War. I had just completed a course in Chemical war defense when the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from East Germany. The movie ‘Total Recall’ was released about that time. It was an era of uncertainty and hope. President Reagan was way ahead of the curve of peaceful change at the time. Some politicians never did catch that wave, such as Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.

One historian wrote in a text book on Russia circa 2000 that the Russian Federation had been given a bloody stump by the amputation of Russia into several nations at the end of the Cold War v 1.0 and that how the west addressed the problem was problematic. The legal firm of Clinton, Biden, Blinken and Obama decided the only acceptable way was to accept Vladimir Lenin’s internal divisions of Russia into administrative entities and apply those districts, rather than that of nations, to the post-Soviet states. Ukraine had never been an independent nation before the west decreed it so, while the Russian Federation was just recovering from being water boarded and drowned by communists for 70 years.

Russia recovered its Crimean land during the Obama administration and began its recovery of Eastern Ukraine following the election of Joe Biden. President Putin was too aware of the Biden, Blinken, Obama, Clinton lawyer’s approach to and attitude about the independence of Ukraine. It was less unbiased that the Supreme Court of the United States was in decided making the Dred Scott decision.

A neutral, unbiased court did not exist in the west for Russian to seek compensation in for the theft of Ukraine from Russia. In fact the west played on fears of the former Soviet Union returning that would seek to conquer eastern Europe that were completely false. As I mentioned earlier Russia only sought to recover lost regions of Russia and that definitely did not include formerly independent Eastern European nations. Russian leadership was not crazy though that of the west may have unbalanced an irrationally exuberant in its global expansion economically at the end of the Cold War 1.0. Perhaps Polish leadership and that of England sought to use U.S. military power as a lever for traditional European expansion into Russia. Ukraine plainly was a paradigm for European colonialism in an era when colonialism was dead. Anisotropic military power permitted carpet-bagging hegemony when the west took poisoned pawn Ukraine en passant in 1994.

Decades ago I read a good little philosophy collection edited by JJC Smart on Utilitarianism. I seem to recall a point-counterpoint dialogue between Smart and Williams in the work with Smart advocating for utilitarianism and Williams arguing for particular moral decisions instead of those based on formulas (such as the greatest good for the greatest number of people). Williams’ approach is relevant in the case of the Ukraine conflict when the Biden administration have used logical paradigms to advocate for the necessity of funding weapons for the war. Nothing is said by the administration about particular profits and investments gained by funding the conflict and splattering hundreds of thousands of human beings instead of seeking a fair, negotiated peace settlement dividing Ukraine between the principal belligerents (not including the U.S.A.), instead statements are made that a precedent would be set for not fighting against aggressions and aggressors.

There are a pair of problems with that logic. One is that there aren’t valid legal precedents for war between nations although victors and more powerful alliances may put losers and sometimes (rarely) others on trial. Instead of the phrase ‘history is written by the victors’ that is generally valid only in a totalitarian society, a more accurate cliché would be ‘war crimes trials are held by the victors’.

The other problem with the logic is that rather than legal precedents or abstract moral rules being applied to real politics and issues such as the moral right to engage in war, pragmatism and particulars rather than formulas determine the decision of a powerful nation such as the United States of America to commence or support war. Regardless of what sort of conclusion that present Ukraine war takes, the decisions by future Presidents of the united States to engage in foreign wars or to fund foreign wars will be made with particular reasons and circumstances informing the decisions rather than solely abstract philosophical and moral principles. At any rate it would be challenging to say that American leaders have always gone to war or fund foreign wars for reasons concerning abstract moral and logical circumstances. The choice to not intervene in the Rwandan genocide was made more for logistical reasons rather than those of local utilitarian values.

If there is an abstract moral consideration that ought to take priority over particular circumstances it should be the value of human life. In diplomacy one should understand that people will sacrifice their lives sometimes to put their nation back together or to have freedom from oppression. Neutral third parties with power to arbitrate should seek to create lasting peaceful and fair relations between belligerent nations rather than to throw in whole hog for one side most useful to the third party arbitrator.

Sartre writing in Being and Nothingess touched upon the subject of colonialism and colonialist attitudes and language use (addressed more fully in a later tome The Critique of Dialectical Reason). Language too, as well as signs and other semiotic symbols may become ossified. Ossified praxis in the proprietary vocabulary of colonialist dehumanizes its victims. Even history may be warped and bent to serve colonial interests. ‘News’ reported on events and political rationale emphasizes the viewpoint of colonists. The Biden administration’s failure to comprehend the Russian point of view on its historical claim to Ukraine is a typical-even an archetypal example of the ignorance and bias in language implicit structurally with adverse colonialism displacing natives. The phenomenon is so 20^th century (Sartre developed his description perhaps considering French colonial missions and wars in Indochina and Algeria) and harmful to American global interests economically and as human beings trustworthy to other human beings.

Creating peace directly and fairly with optimal economic operations for all is requisite in this era of declining ecosphere health that is a consequence of human economic practices based on natural resource exploitation (of non sustainable resources). While humans fight one another the environment continues decay. Oceans are warming, oxygen in oceans decreasing and acidification rising, not to mention excess atmospheric heating, biospheric habitat loss of mass species extinction.

Phenomena of the Edge (poem)

 

On the edge of the galaxy
time spins like a silent pinwheel
phenomena of life flare for reason
in conversant dialectics of being
arguments about oblivion
and nothingness

  Wars in theories actualize
D.N.A. helixes with conflict
gaps of logic
countercurrent tides in tomorrows
building of the unknown
with pride

  Cycles of theory
for the weary philosophy of history
arises on distant plains
where grass grows and songs flow
in every river of creation knowing
mass, energy and forms

  What is the norm
environmental, evolutionary, teleological theories
discrete and cyclical; what shapes mass social behavior
simultaneous sequences, serials and individuals
-red flowers appear one morn
in spring bloom until the last breath

  Periodic and recurrent causes
of conflict without pauses
energetic pyroclastic flows
with haute greed a glow one knows
factors with inertial needs
for power ‘til nihilism reaches death.

College Campus Protests Capriciously Harm Poor Students

 Political protests should not be allowed on college campuses if they disrupt students from attending classes in a normal atmosphere. College students are adults and like other adults not attending college their protests should be peaceable and held in places that won’t disturb business and government activity. Political protests should instead be safely held in public spaces with permits to assemble or march.

Student protests on campus are stupid. It is as stupid as it would be to for students to hold disruptive protests in front of Ford, GMC or Apple Corp every time there is some foreign event that students are emotional about that is entirely unrelated to Ford, GMC or Apple Core. Only of there is some on-campus element to protest such as janitors not cleaning bathrooms well enough to satisfy privileged students should upper class protesters even consider disrupting campus life.

College is very expensive and many students are poor. They cannot afford to have their studies interrupted without substantial harm and risk to themselves financially. In fact for many poor students attending classes on a schedule is a once in a lifetime opportunity that they can barely afford. Sometimes they need to finish their college program using a credit card to buy food. Students often don’t qualify for food stamps if they are full time students. Partisan Palestinian protesters, or any other political partisans should not target college students for victimization because they don’t like a college or some foreign political activity. They should instead let poor students attend classes without disruption so the non-protesting students can get a job and repay their student loans.

Young people may lack wisdom and be easily duped politically. Many change their political opinions as they age and become more conservative. Education though, if it of quality lasts a lifetime if it is reinforced with lifetime learning. Colleges and students should be allowed to proceed regardless of extraneous politics. When college students to choose to protest it should not be on the campuses that prepare students for a lifetime ahead. Instead they could assemble in a field someplace like Woodstock and boycott classes, as if they were a union on strike, and let strikebreakers and independents continue to work on making academic progress.

Obviously students aren’t a union and colleges aren’t employers. Even when unions strike a large business though, they are not allowed to forcibly lock it up by forming barriers to prevent non-participating workers from entering. Yet the radical Palestinian supporters have acted to prevent normal college academic and graduation procedures from taking place, and that is simply wrong.

Graduate students face even worse dangers from on-campus protesters. Grad school is very costly and the financing is not nearly as available as undergraduate work (grades 12-16). I sought financing for graduate school for a couple decades before quitting the search after contracting pneumonia while homeless in Anchorage one winter. In Houston twenty years before I had to drop out of graduate school after a semester because my student loan didn’t arrive- so all I got was debt to repay and no parchment. Graduate school is an entrepreneurial activity and like any start up small business can be terminated by unforeseen disruptive events; plague, famine, pestilence, tornadoes, hurricanes and Palestinian on-campus protesters.

The United States already has experienced a national decline in its student academic scores in comparison to other nations. Retarding college students with mass student protests- and not all protesters are students, by preventing them from peaceably going about academic activities simply shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

Rationalism, Existentialism and The Matrix

In a way rationalism, idealism and existentialism are three sides of the same coin (maybe using some Riemannian geometry). I would like to say that Rene Descartes work in writing Meditations on a Method with the cogito ergo sum ‘sound bite’ sort of approach to examining mind and reality (of subjective perceptions) with first principles (with-oneself,from oneself, for-oneself) is the foundation of rationalism. Yet one knows that reason and cogitation about objects and/or perceptions is a rational activity. Descartes simply was the first philosopher to apply disciplined rational principles to examine the phenomenon of mind at its source. Jean Paul Sartre followed Descartes's path of investigation three centuries later.

Before getting to Sartre and his tome ‘Being and Nothingness’ I should detour to a bit of sight-seeing to Bishop Berkeley and his ‘invention’ of idealism in his ‘Three Dialogues’ (of Hylas and Philonous). Berkeley named his work ‘ideaism' and that morphed into idealism. Idealism of course has a more popular application entirely unrelated to the meaning of ideaism. Idealism in the popular use refers to lofty ideals that one pursues regardless of the crude political facts of life (wherein lofty ideals are showpieces in politics rather than things actually applied). I am considering Berkeley’s ideaism here rather than the political slum of debasements of democracy that are anathema to idealists).

Berkeley seems to have applied the rationalism or existentialism of Descartes ( I should have described that relationship before that of Berkeley’s ideaism for purposes of clarity. Yet I would need to have simultaneous dual threads more suitable for a flowchart) theologically. Because I can’t use retro-causality in the human history of ideas without fiction, I can’t say that Berkeley applied Sartre’s existentialism with theological filters. If he had one might say that Berkeley examined Sartre’s existential, rational perspective of the ‘empirical world’ objectively, considering its causality Berkeley speculated that the entire experience of reality could be produced by God for the experience of human minds. 

  Berkeley’s ideaist paradigm is quite comparable to that of The Matrix. Except instead of a benevolent God creating and exciting and challenging experience for humanity to exist in; one in which their character in part serves to write some of the script of reality, evil artificial intelligence using machines and technology have made a fake world that humans are deceived in. Berkeley’s ideaist parameters converted to the usual worst case human trajectory of evil and adversity following and consistent with original sin.

Sartre’s modern rationalist paradigm described in ‘Being and Nothingness’ advanced Descartes's verificationist method of considering reality based entirely in subjective epistemology to the empirical world. Rather than re-litigating Descartes's verificationist approach to determining if one’s apparatus of thought and perception was valid or true, Sartre seems to have implicitly stipulated those parameters and taken the practical approach of describing how and what one experiences in the self-evident empirical world that provides experience and content to the perceiver. Sartre’s paradigm was named by moderns Existentialism. 

Existentialism utilizes Bishop Berkeley's adaptation of Descartes' rationalism that Berkeley had transferred to the empirical world providing immersive experience for the perceiver. Berkeley considered the complete complex of compresence (Russell’s term) of experience and speculated upon its metaphysical supports. Sartre considers the complete complex of experience with an explanatory application of mechanics; differentiating and inventorying categories of content of experience without the metaphysics of Berkeley or the metaphysical doubt of Descartes. Sartre considers the mechanics or content of objective perceptions; not the neurological, epistemological or metaphysical.

That raises one final point concerning Plato and Aristotle. Following the work of pre-Socratic predecessors like Parmenides and Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle considered the empirical world. In the day, at least outside the Jewish nation with their cosmological description given in the book of Genesis, philosophers were required to invent their own cosmologies. Some simpler cosmologies were innovated with inferences from pagans such as greater, superhuman beings (like Thor) need to exist to manufacture all of the phenomena of the Universe of experience. Philosophers and even pagan religiosity extrapolated causes from the observed phenomena of the empirical world.

Reasonable observations would see recurrent patterns and forms in nature. Plato experiencing recurrent forms and patterns in nature inferred the existence of a metaphysical library of forms, or patent office of forms, from which everything materially existing was a copy (although imperfect copies because the library or patent office office forms lasted eternally while copies in the world broke down, aged, died etc.). Aristotle began the work of classifying the kinds of forms that exist making observations of nature inventing scientific classification of biological species. He also invented formal logic and syllogisms. Followers believed that syllogistic reasoning about material objects and forms was entirely integrated and accurate. Modern investigations demonstrated that words including logic are labels applied to the existential experience. Yet of course science has also conducted empirical investigations into the mechanics of the field of objects and fields experienced (i.e. quantum mechanics).

That was the final interesting point to consider; Plato’s metaphysical inferences about the support for observed forms is comparable to string theory’s metaphysical inferences with mathematics and extra-dimensions to explain observed forms and problems in the quantum world (such as gluons, quarks, hadrons, gravity etc.). Although string theorists haven’t yet reached Aristotle’s level of classifying observed forms (as votaries of the Copenhagen Interpretation (classical quantum physics) have accomplished with the zoo of atomic and sub-atomic particles, the work so far is intriguing and stimulated a range of new metaphysical speculation concerning the nature of the Universe presented to experience experience for the mind, body and soul (perhaps a soul is the unique data comprising a human beings life).

After the Space Odyssey (a poem)

 

The blob do’ozed its way
over the black lagoon
battling zilla
the brain that wouldn’t die
a lost world was lost

  An invasion of the carrot people
with the 50 foot woman
under crabs conquering Santa Monica
-oh Monica can you surf
20, 000 leagues under the sea

  Michael Renie the world policeman
after the 2001 space odyssey
was defunded with Gort
radiating
retention of orders
the thing is
the war of the worlds
a forbin project
wasn’t on the forbidden planet
of Dr. Strangelove.

Age and Immigrant Status Verification Software

 The state of Alaska legislature is in the process of developing restriction for access to pornography sites such that age verification would be required, as well as to create a social media account. One couldn’t just become a twitter tor X user without parental consent. Besides asking age sites might want to know if a user is a citizen of the U.S.A. or works for the Chinese Ministry of State Security or whatever. Does any government really know who lives in the U.S.A. these days, and do the left care? recently read a novel centering on the concept of genetic engineering and hacking to grind out upgrades to one’s own genome under the table. There was also a more concerning idea of actors using ethnic genomic strings for triggers in manufactured, synthetic lethal viruses.

So I wondered about commercial requirements for age verification and where that might lead. Would age and identity verification include demands for D.N.A. samples, fingerprints and iris scans eventually since they can have surplus value for social tracking and compiling a D.N.A. database for the world (useful in the novel for eliminating dissidents).

Identity and age verification could evolve to that stage because it should become too easy to produce and market fake I.D. generating software. With I.D. templates for each state included in a package for a couple easy payments of $19.95 a consumer might produce thousands of fake I.D.s that would pass the computer camera upload to age verification software.

State government I.D. templates in fake I.D. generating software would let the consumer drop his real photo, the photo of what he would look like in a decade, or an artificial intelligence generated image of a qualified individual of any race. For simplicity the program might have an A.I. select matching ethnic, name, address, photo, fingerprint and other identifiers that though fictitious are credible. If the A.I. database is expanded to include state birth and death records the capacity for the A.I. to spoof I.D.s would be nearly without limit for practical purposes of deceiving commercial requirements for age verifying I.D.s

Paper dollars are difficult to counterfeit because of the physical medium. If all that were required was a photograph of a dollar counterfeiting would become unlimited and the dollar as insubstantial as those electronic entities passed by the Federal Reserve to commercial banks as zero interest loans, simply of no value though. Government should not solve one new tech problem with solutions that create a cascade of other problems that they apparently don’t foresee.