9/23/10

Causality, Cosmology and Christianity

Human perceptions of causal orders were evolved to respond to stimulus commensurate with the environment. I do not think that knowledge of causality is a part of the implicit natural environmental complex perceived.

Arthus Schopenhuer in his book of neo-Kantianism 'The Fourfold Roots of Reason' noted some of the ways that perception is modified by reason and he used the example of depth perception. The mind must learn to integrate that binocular vision into a three dimensional portrait and then it become automatic.

Causality such as science learns is a cumulative social process. Epistemology and perception is obviously one of the perennial philosophical concerns. Modern science simply adds more knowledge to that database. Interestingly philosophical classification and assignment of causes or relationships within a neo-monistic field of uncertain pluralistic composition extending these days into speculation about extra-dimensions even might have a paradigm sharing overlapping set characteristics with Quine's ideas on linguistic arrangements in the Dewey lectures and published as’ Ontological Relativity'.

I don't mean to say that physical cosmology is a linguistic categorization process at all, I simply point out that incompleteness in logical descriptions of event-processes in the 'material' universe make reduction to any given selected area rather arbitrary and implicitly likely to be in error or inaccuracy. Where does one decide to cut off the causes and break them up into little, separate causes? It reminds me of the particle versus wave criterion of photons for example. Everything may be a part of some larger whole or cause, and the temporal view of things as extemporaneous things-for-themselves may be just because we as human beings are standing in some place watching the experience pass relativisticly as a nominalistic phenomenon.

Causality in some ways may be equated with physical forces of nature, though I noted above that laws of nature might be just consistent measurements of particular relationships that recur invariantly (per R. Laughlin).

If the weak force is found to be associated with another force such as electro-magnetism and is then the electro-weak force, if the virtual energy of the Universe is found to be a source of gravity because of the way it is effected by mass that creates an apparent warping of space (though space is better regarding as a kind of solid), our ideas of causality may be in error, and the ideas we have regarding sequence of events differs from what the causes of certain events are.

If the tides rise and fall associated with the moon and we don't know about gravity living in the year 1000 B.C. then correlation of the movement of water with the moon would be the best we could do. I would guess that someone sometime must have postulated that the moon was attracted to the Earth by the arrival of the water locally rather than speculating along the lines of Newton on gravity. It is easy to mistake the order of events with causes of events.

The causes of the existence of the Earth were quite contentious in many regards over the centuries when theorists with opposite points of view disputed them. The mistaking of the order of events with the causality of events occurs in politics all the time especially with contemporary macro-economic analysis and public debt in the United States.

I think that Robert Laughlin mentioned about the natural world of human perception (for example we only perceive a limited range of the electro-magnetic spectrum) that at a collective level the responses to that collective or concatenated physical level of protocol are appropriate for that particular context.

Perhaps that morphs into the concepts about Deism a little regarding causality--I don't regard Deism or a disconnect of God's power or omnipotence as an especially contemporarily viable context, and alternatively, I do not mean that an implication that a collective or concatenated state of the physical universe is continuously or occasionally changed by Divine intercession. Not because of Calvinism, yet neither in distinction to it, the deterministic nature of God's creative provenance allows a simultaneous belief that God pre determined everything yet did not create and forget about the Universe.

We have fairly plain prophetic messages in the Bible that make a determinist criterion nearly the inevitable interpretation of the phenomenal universe. Yet one may also belief that the degrees of free of movement and thought are also actual. The deterministic selections of probability, as Laughlin might have written about analogously, within a given quantum state, may be free locally yet when viewed in a larger sample seem deterministic or ordered.

Why Democrats, Republicans and the Tea Party Fail Common Sense Economics

The Democratic Party of President Barrack Obama has become more dominated by anti-morality issues than of common sense economics. Some regard the Democrats as the Gay Party or the Party of Abortion,and many democrats would not vote for any party that does not regard those as essential issues.

When the democrats lost their economic issue prioritizing as shifted to anti-morality and atheism the L.B.J. and Tip O'Neil era economic competition to Republicans was lost. The economic innovations of Richard M. Nixon simply will not arise in a modern Republican who have developed globalism as a priority in order to concentrate wealth for the financial elites. Ronald Reagan's one-off/not to be repeated deficit spending and budget breaking extreme unction neo-Keynsianism has become the normal state of affairs for Lillyputian economic theorists. This is not a good situation.

When the Democrats lost morality they lost economic interest as Democrats as well and the Republican Party became the shelter for those of traditional morality, yet the financial elites could take the economic interests of the poor and middle class for granted because the morally inclined would have nowhere else to go. To vote for a Democratic President was to vote for abortion and homosexuallity-many Americans would rather let America have concentrated wealth and a vast number of poor uninsured Americans rather than vote to gay up marriage and the military.

Conversely, many Democrats would rather gay up marriage and the military than have a concern about the economic situation of the poor in the United States. Democrats as a party of anti-morality atheist middle-class feminists support the perennial revolution of illegal alien immigration with paths to citizenship because they aren't poor white or black males suffering from a perennially soft labor demand because of over-supply.

Democrats are the last to be affected by illegal immigrant labor and so just don't give a damn about stopping that flow for good. They aren't white or black males and should be Democrat Party supporters for a generation or two, they think.

The Tea Party operates with the wrong idea that cutting taxes and federal spending simultaneously will balance the budget or pay down the federal deficit. Actually to avoid a protracted losing economic scenario the U.S.A. should let the Bush tax cuts lapse, cut some federal spending and make a goal of reducing the federal debt to 8 trillion dollars instead of the present of 13.4 trillion dollars. The interest on the debt is a serious, progressive waste that soaks up capital that could be better invested elsewhere.

The economic policies of the Tea Party, The Republican Party and the Democratic Party fail common sense economics that would restore financial well being to all of the citizens of the United States from the bottom up. The willingness of ignorant prosperous citizens to accept a social philosophy that 'the poor will always be with us-so screw them' or an economic determinism making an inevitability of poverty is the result of pervasive ignorance and brain lock phenomena arising when the Occam's razor of economic intelligence indicates that one need not learn of experience of others or think much about anything beyond one's own immediate material interests.

Poverty is not a necessary condition for a democracy nor a benefit to general increase of the ecological and economic quality of life of a nation. Vestigial retro-economics-hoary, ancient classical economic thinking was brought into the 20th century via the principle of mediocrity in politics. It can and should change.

The U.S. public debt is rising more than 4 billion dollars each day (and has since 2007).

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

http://www.federalbudget.com/

9/22/10

Senate Defeats Bill to Make U.S. Openly Godless By Four Votes

The U.S. Senate Tuesday voted down a bill that would have allowed homosexuals to serve in the military openly. In a sense the Senate just had a substantial enough minority to keep the United States from becoming an openly Godless evil empire. Civil structures ought not, and need not to be in plain contradiction of Biblical truths. Society should be able to function without legislation that seems in defiance of the moral instructions of the Creator of the Universe and everything else. The truths we hold self-evident as are written in the Declaration should be consistent with God rather than in opposition to.

56 Democrats voted for a pro-homo U.S. military, 43 Republicans voted against and since the Democrats required 60 votes to avoid a filibuster the Republican dissent to depravity was enough.

I listened to an NPR reporter in Kandehar today. She was wearing a Burka and interviewing two guys in a coffee house upstairs with a view through plate glass windows of the street below. They wore starched clothes and said they wanted to be doctors. They were youths when the Taleban was evicted and fled over the border nearly a decade ago. Perhaps they avoided exploitation by the Taleban—in fact they expressed admiration for them. . It may yet be unsafe to do otherwise publicly.

The United State has foreign and domestic challenges with complex and subtle interaction solutions. Any old policy choice will not inevitably be the right one. U.S. foreign and domestic policy hasn’t a kind of papal infallibility to it (the Popes gave up that p0remise decades ago). Ecological economics and conservation of moral and boundary values are important for keeping the nation in good shape.

Schultheis said that Kandehar is known throughout Afghanistan as the homosexually inclined place. He reported a couple of jokes told about the place he had heard. Kandehar was a strong point for the Taleban when they were in power of most of Afghanistan, and of course Schultheis had reported on the dark undercurrents of homosexual pederasty of the Sunni 'religious students'.

The subtleties of Afghanistan are substantial, yet what concerns me most recently is U.S. lack of tactical recognition of Iran's Shi'a position as a nation between Pakistan and its radical Sunni I.S.I. terrorist supporting military armed with nuclear weapons on one side and Saudi Arabia as the center of Wahhabism and its 70 billion dollar most recent purchase of U.S. weapons besides perhaps owning a nuclear device or two quietly on the other. Well there is also Iraq with its invasive history as well as Afghanistan with Shi'a hating Taleban and a Pushtun majority government from which we have mostly helped exclude the non Sunni Northern Alliance from being a meaningful part.

Iran may feel that they need to develop a nuclear deterrent to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia or possible Iraq also at one time. George W. Bush At least believed Iraq was developing nuclear weapons so Iran’s rulers may have thought so too.

U.S. foreign policy since the fall of the Shah-the world's possibly last absolute monarch whom we unwisely helped put in power and then reinforced royally, has been heavily biased toward the Sunni wherein most of the worlds Muslim fundamentalist terrorists have arisen (though the Shi'a are competitive though second in a two-sect division.

The next administration may take the confusion in a different direction.

The U.S. Senate voted Tuesday against ending the policy of not permitting openly gay declarations in the U.S. military. Hopefully that the end of the ill-conceived effort to gay up the military.

The U.S. homosexual lobby seems to be unaware that it need not attack and expropriate heterosexual normal U.S. institution to achieve civil rights party. They are not African human chattel in America seeking to be free from slavery, instead they are biologically defective souls that have moved to homosexuality and seek to make that a norm by erasing heterosexuality.

Consider a military branch of its own of homosexuals. It could be named the Fagot Force, or Unisex Warriors or whatever.

The hetero males and females in mostly separate divisions for combat purposes would be on fundamentally the same biological clocks, periods of celibacy, determination to get the war done and go somewhere to rendezvous with there spouse (if they are moral). Meanwhile the Faggot Force with its own tanks and aircraft might be having sex within its own cadre at various times behind this bush or that. Sex might be traded as ways of promotions and few would complain to the civilian government about illicit sex that would become normal.

If male and female units slept together and served together in combat units all sorts of paring arrangement problems would arise, and of course jealousies would develop.

Part of the military discipline involving sexual morality probably is to prevent trained killers with access to high power weapons from just blasting a unit to death in revenge for things related to sex. Military officers of ages past were occasionally famous for dueling over honor concerning ladies in more than one nation (i.e. Russia). Issues such as adultery and cuckolding brought out the guns.

Homosexual militants just don't usually think out their methods of subverting civil rights of others politically too well. There are some soldiers that would not want to sleep with gays perhaps lusting after them. Inevitably some violence would occur and unit cohesiveness degraded. Homosexuals need only assert their own individual rights as citizens rather than ending heterosexual establishment to be camouflaged and get monetary benefits.

Another issue of concern some citizens have is that of the U.S. Government giving official sanction to sin. Homosexuality is sin and some God-fearing believers feel that if the U.S.A. becomes an officially reprobate nation pro forma it will receive divine correction. I personally agree with that concern. The right to privacy covers many sins-hence the secular genius of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’.

Social benefits should be based upon individual needs and security with the exception of families that sometimes need some breaks cause they just cannot afford to go broke even for a while. If the homosexual lobby worked to assure health care for the poor, secure borders and a good environment and economy for all citizens then they would find their own interests taken care of in a more secure environment even if they are not poofed into happy heterosexual verisimilitudes.

9/17/10

Physical Cosmology; Theology and Solid State of Uncertainty on Emergent Collective Characteristics

I am a bit remote from recollecting much of the history of Scholasticism and continental theology presently having worn out my Coppleston's History of Philosophy in Alaska a few years ago and migrated towards logic, cosmology and secular history and other topics inclusive of the New Testament. I remain a bit of a Toynbean and consider cyclic social history and low-entropy economics.I have considered buying McGee's 'The Bible Bus' on cd in order to reinforce a plain, Biblically based knowledge of old testament concepts.

I appreciate the scholastic investigation into causality, yet like the neo-Platonist method as well as a fell swoop method of inference about God's constructions that perhaps grace divulges. Yet presently reading Laughlin's 'A Different Universe-reinventing physics from the bottom down' I have derived some different ideas about group theory and of course causality.

The three persons that are one God is an interesting collective-singularity criterion for God that has an emergent characteristic itself perhaps negating the need for a causal explanation or reduction of cause and effect to one ponderous infinitely small particle that arose from nowhere. Perhaps Stephen Hawking would appreciate the collective as one nature of God concept of an omnipotent being that has no need for a point of origin in eternity. Stephen Hawking hypothesizes a universe that could arise de novo without diving help-perhaps because of quantum fluctuations of a vacuum energy assembling through attraction into a clump of mass large enough to expand through a phase transition of mass-energy repulsion (that may be something like the Hartle-Hawking Universe without a singularity in time merger into being with a dimension of space becoming a dimension of time.)

Robert Laughlin is not of course writing theology or divine mechanics contributions but just a different method of viewing solid state physics and quantum mechanics. I hence directly apply what I learn to the concepts about God and our relationship to His Universe and what it is.

I believe that when the emergent characteristics point of view of solid state physics is applied to cosmology and even teleology along with an awareness of the Galilean-Newtonian way of mechanics as of secondary importance to theology, the Plotinian concept of The One (God) may also be changed to be consistent to a collectivist unity as one without need for a causal reduction in time to one point explained.

God is not ultimately reducible to one particular point or grid coordinate with a place in time and with a first cause perhaps. Maybe modern physics is moving along with a parallel development about the causality of the Universe and the philosophical classification structure of mechanics.

Rigorous cause and effect structures of associated history such as would satisfy David Hume are not inconsistent with the divine attributes of omnipotence.Causality or observed changes in physical systems at a collective level are not invariably easy to reconcile with either quantum mechanics or divine causality.

9/15/10

Tea Party Ought to Dump Oil and Get Better, Cheaper Afghanistan Plan

A contemporary Tea Party today should advocate for a halt to fossil fuel use in transportation especially after the BP (a.k.a. British Petroleum) debacle flowing tens of millions of barrels of crude oil into U.S. waters. Motivation to stop the economically debilitating reliance on crude oil to power century old automotive vehicle concepts should be replace by more intelligent technologies for low cost, high quality personal transportation. A status quo can be hard to change in previously successful societies and often become the fin de siecle primer.

The U.S.A. imported 4,267,110,000 barrels of oil in 2009. http://www.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_a.htm

Oil prices averaging about 55-60 dollars per barrel and rising steadily creating an ongoing outflow of disposable income to foreign interests existentially.

For the United States Afghanistan is a long-range financial drain, with more than 300 billion dollars being spent so far and hundreds of billions more anticipated ahead in future years. The U.S.A. lacks a coherent leadership plan to address Afghanistan problem planning for combating terrorism, insurgents, narco-traffickers, ethnic civil conflict and multifarious concepts about how much and what form of government should exist. To cast out the devils occupying Afghanistan and then leave to allow seven worse devils to enter that house would be tragic and a stimulus to terrorism. Neither can the U.S.A. afford to spend more than a third of its present expenditure levels annually on a long-range foreign foundation. Better policy is needed to address the employment problem in Afghanistan as well as the military security needs. Washington tends to spend everything on government workers in one form or another in Afghanistan too. Even with medals and merit pay promotions government workers to commonly have a milieu exclusive of the civil interests of private citizens.

Pakistan’s regional political issues have brought their military and intelligence services to support the Taliban historically. A number of outside powers fund destabilization of Afghanistan—even Saudi Arabia has supported the Taliban financially before. The Tea Party today should form a policy to most effectively change the game toward a positive sum strategy of central Asia instead of simply funding top down government temporal slopping of the area to de frappe formation of terrorist control. A railroad project from the Russian system to Afghanistan enabling Europe and Vladivostok commercial shipment would create many jobs and a lasting business infrastructure connecting the Khyber Pass to the outside world. The U.S.A. should create a physical project of scale with international support and not just leave another dead-end bureaucratic puff of smoke like the space station, Vietnam and so forth. Transformation of existing social structures positively may require real improvements rather than bureaucratic and military spending phenomenalities.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf U.S. anti-terrorism war costs so far

Afghanistan as traditionally done well with limited government. Creating a modern superstructure of government without an underlying economic hull able to support the bureaucracy, police and military force seems implicitly unstable and unable to float for-itself. Bringing a railroad to a frontier changed things in the west with new jobs and development forming along the line, perhaps it could work in Afghanistan too. Construction, commercial and security work might be lasting changes for Afghanistan the United States could afford to help get started.

A modern Tea Party should try to develop solid ideas for stopping all illegal immigration from Mexico in order to compel Mexicans to stay in Mexico and fix their own spinning-out-of-control society developing an insurgency of narco traffickers killing thousands annually. Stopping illegal Mexican immigration will let wage values for cheap labor in the U.S.A. rise and make a demand for low-skilled, unemployed American workers .

A modern Tea Party would coordinate free health care for the poor with an improved V.A. hospital system needed the next few decades to treat the million or more Iraq and Afghanistan vets injured from sundry causes such as suffering post combat stress psych and concussion challenges.

I don’t know if many have thought of this, but Mexico’s able and injured may illegally migrate to the U.S.A. And get free health care at emergency rooms, while the poor and weak tend to remain in Mexico and suffer. If the U.S.A. sealed it border to illegal immigration from Mexico and also created a public health system for the poor, it could also begin a long process of agitating for Mexico to construct a same national health care program for its poor citizens. With illegal immigration the Mexican economy and that of the United States take worst-case development courses with poverty, low wages in each nation, drug and human trafficking and corruption. The default real economic fact is reinforcement for collectivism in corporatist and neo-socialist forms amidst corrupt patronage loops, venality and social stratification with a hard core of poverty, arrested space program material developments and non-renewable economic procedures without low-entropy calculations.

Pakistan has nuclear weapons as does India and potentially Iran one day. U.S. central Asian and subcontinent policy should be forward looking toward getting these nations to support mutual ecologically and economically practical prosperity and reinforce state security.

9/14/10

King, Ghandi, Non-Violence, Theories For Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia

On the subject of Ghandi and King--I am not certain that they were advocates of non-violence existentially so much as brilliant political revolutionaries who understood the time and circumstance they were living in politically. They were able to assert their political aspiration through civil disobediance when they could not have achieved their objectives through violence.

There is the path of action and of inaction to achieve the way of enlightenment helpful for social advancement. Sartre and some Calvinists too wrote about absolute intellectual freedom to not comply with the orders of others as being the freedom in all things to say no. That is an ideal applying to mind if not body when someone tosses one over the top ropes into the crowd, and perhaps to mind as well if scopolamine and other mind control drugs are used for coercive purposes, yet the political modification of social tensors toward non-violent and purposefully directed progressive courses may just require intellect and will. It is easy to get too subjective in these things perhaps and lose track of the more challenging situation like in Afghanistan today as well as Pakistan with the Taliban, terrorists, Al Qa'eda, Pustun issues with non-Pustuns, India, Russia and the challenges of getting a railroad built from the trans-Siberian railway to Uzbekistan and on to Kabul, Islamabad, and India in order that Afghanistan be not commercially isolated. The baksheesh to construct a quality rail line and keep terrorists from destroying it may be far less costly than sustaining foreign military through other means.

That region of the world apparently views patronage systems as normal and along tribal lines as well so bribery may be more of a norm and fact than an honest central government in Pakistan or Afghanistan usually. If these are usually crooked players then attaining non-violence generally may require a better perspective about how to bring the issues to a stable state.

Collective non-violence in trans-religious, supra-national realms with assymetric conflict and unstable governments require meta-structural, innovative methods of non-violent political transitions from supernumery logical agencies all too commonly unavailable. We might hope that government in D.C. was more intelligent and not so willing to be half of a drunken brawl in a manner of speaking, nor so trusting that the region's domestic disputants will not return to violence as soon as the police leave. Pakistan wants to secure Afghanistan with a Taliban so it can have an ally of Sunni for the north and against India as well. Constructing temporal non-violence requires some serious thought and will to achieve.

One must always chuckle a little at the 1968 Riot Commission Report of L.B.J. on the Michigan National Guard in Detroit contrasting the number of shells the national guard fired at mostly non-existent targets (thousands and thousands) vs. the few that the replacement 101st airborne used. I think it unlikely that either Ghandi or King would have transferred their methods to other places and times where it wasn't regarded for political reasons of the ruling power as right to give up exclusivity and inequality of certain rights or at least to compel other people to comply with equality socially for all of certain rights if they have 'stood up' as politicians are wont to say.

On the topic of Jesus being crucified with violence--that was the representational epitome of social conflict in a sense. God could experience for-himself the problem of evil that mankind lives with from their own actions. His atoning sacrifice is how grace is given unto those who accept Jesus as their savior. The grace is entirely donated and not merited by anyone--only faith is required.

Humanity being entirely wicked naturally just cannot be trusted in an eternal state. God has renormalized the human spin of those that rely upon his spiritual quantum reorganization unto perfect balance with the will of God. Humanity without God may suffer the most violence of all ultimately-that of being eternally bereft of God having to fend for themselves as eternal spirits in absolute oblivion.

Yet what could be done for them anyway when they have no faith and do not accept the ultimate sacrifice that God made for them? In the eternal divine economy how much should god sustain those that do not have belief in him?

9/13/10

Tax Cuts for All Except the Most Rich? In Pakistan Just 1% Pay Taxes (Maybe Graft Pays the Rest)

President Obama has resorted to blaming Republicans as an economic policy substitute for good ideas and effective implementation. He has spent political capital on attempting to gay up the military, beefing up the Afghanistan troop deployment, support for a ground zero Muslim Cultural Center/Mosque and deficit spending by the trillions. The desirability of transforming the nation to an ecological economic basis of lower entropic attrition seems beyond his concept radar screen.

There are several practical ways to tighten up the labor market and for the government to invest in new technologies and projects that would create jobs. The government has a scattergun approach to surgery though and fails to target spending adequately to effecting particular remedies.

The bad tax cut policy of both parties is a case in point. If we wish to may the United States more like Pakistan where just 1% of the people pay taxes and the number of madrassa has increase a few thousand percent as public school funding failed, if we want to have a slum lord Federal Reserve leadership to support a neo-feudal economic transition of the U.S.A. to be more like Mexico, it would be well advanced by present Obama administration policy.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68B1SH20100913

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 oc...