The New Normal/An Era of Nothingness

NPR has described the high state of unemployment and lackluster economic growth as 'the new normal'. I believe that technically it might better be called the new b.s.

Lucretius for one amongst middle aged investigators considered the formation of a vacuum. Aristotle before had inferred attributes of a theoretical vacuum space and of pure nothingness-he rejected its existence. I shall regard it a little more even so.

A zero-growth ecologically sustainable economy cold still have full employment. The present problem is that economic growth and national productivity is unrelated to the employment rate directly. Instead the increased profits just go to concentrated wealth management and the upper class while the government apologists for 'the new normal' of ordinary citizens being screwed by the corporate world fail to consider the infinite subtlety and beauty of constructivist economic systems and rules for free enterprise democracy that allow a myriad of formations of prosperous cultural versions of a democratic society to potentially exist.

Ideas about nothing are as challenging as ideas about things potential yet not actual. We tend to regard the concept of an empty universe and a vacuum as one with three dimensions if it did exist before any Universe ever did. It is more difficult to imagine a vacuum or empty universe without any dimensions at all.

In fact the idea of a primordial vacuum could be wrong. A vacuum has negative pressure in comparison to something else with positive pressure or mass. So before any universe ever existed, before the first virtual particle ever oozed out of nothingness, the vacuum with its unbounded infinite existence must have had neutral pressure (no pressure). The emergence of even one single dimensional virtual particle would have exerted a pejorative negative pressure upon the entire neutral vacuum universe forever increasing collaterally with the appearance of more virtual string-particles. That concatenated pejorative positive pressure on the neutral vacuum might account for the acelleration of the Universe into the extra-cosmic vacuum noticed since about 1999.

A steady-state economy can be regarded as a full employment economy with sustainable energy input that does no harm to the ecospheric viability of a continent or world. Negative internal pressure of an economy creates high unemployment, poverty and pathos. Positive external pressure degrades and destroys the viability of an an ecosphere and non-sustainable accelerates thermodynamic conversion of natural resources from a low to high entropy condition.

It is possible to have an economy that sucks with high unemployment and simultaneously concentrates wealth while devastating the ecosphere. A health steady state economy has neither of those features. It perennially increases the quality of life for all its citizens with improvements in culture and in optimizing use of renewable resources.

Bad or Good Penny?

The 2010 U.S. penny has something that looks like an acorn on its back-at the top it is inscribed ‘e pluribus unum’. ‘In many we are one’ might be regarded as a new world order zeitgeist of select financial elites. So much for free enterprise pluralism and individualism.

With luck Lincoln’s commemorative obverse is only a temporary, bad design. In some ways the Lincoln Penny’s Babylonian back suggests a new world order minting; let me explain…

I had become accustomed to the Lincoln Memorial classical building on the obverse of Lincoln’s penny established the past few decades. Then one summer day I occasioned to examine one of the strange shiny objects with the unfamiliar symbol and found that it was a transformed penny.

At first glance the art looks like a vast left-wing acorn. I guess it could be some sort of Union symbol for the 150th anniversary of the civil war to save the Union from recrudessecent global oligarchy, yet it is also implicitly a shield with a chevron-like figure at top. That sort of Army E-2 rank mosquito wing doesn’t suggest anything good.

Recently I learned something more about cuneiform-you know-those Sumerian-Babylonian writing and number symbols of 2600 B.C. with the style stick imprimtur used in mud tablets. I realized that the Army military ranking we use today for enlisted men/women and undeclared are all based on the Babylonian-Sumerian numbering cuneiform imprimatur for the number ten. It is a mosquito wing rotated 90 degrees.

The 360 degrees of a compass or circle and 60 minutes of an hour are also of Babylonian origin-yet disregard that for the time being.
The symbol for ten was rotated on its side for military purposes. One mosquito wing meant ten, two of the stripes represented twenty, three stripes thirty and so on.

The Babylonian mosquito wing also has a tiny diamond at its interior apex as if it anticipated a first sergeant’s status symbol.

Cuneiform stripes add up better as one reaches sergeant, staff, platoon sergeant etc with cuneiform coincidence of leader of respective numbers of units of ten. A squad is usually made of ten soldiers, a platoon of 40 to 60.

So what if America uses Babylonian stripes for its ranking system and as the chevron rank on the top of the acorn Lincoln penny backside you might ask-well perhaps it’s a Christian recalcitrance about Babylon the Great trading with all the nations of the world. Babylon has a bad end in the Bible, and all the nations actually cheer at her demise like the Chinese did when Al Qaeda took down the World Trade Center Towers in New York. It just seems like a bad penny with maladroit symbolism.

Maybe the military should change its ranking symbols and use something modern-numbers of catapults, space capsules, x’s and o’s, peace signs, pluses or minuses, lines, geodesic domes or atoms.

The United States’ war and political culture rebuilding for Iraq is estimated to cost about 3 trillion dollars by the time the real costs are in. The United States in its decade long Iraq policy drift began a new political policy era of global militarism as a political and economic cultural pacification device with borrowed money. It was a bad policy that made money for a contractual minority and failed to create long range stability without a counterproductive U.S. investment policy of ‘constructive’ engagement.

A Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Mike Mullins advocated openly homosexual enlistees in the military. Open tolerance of sin seems in conflict with traditional moral norms. Some Christians at least might wish that U.S. policy aspires at least toward domestic policy harmonious with the will of God expressed in the Bible. Of course every nation must fall short of the moral perfection of Jesus Christ. The United States at least should try and do the best it can.

The net effect of the bad penny and associated national moral decay in politics presents the appearance of a drift toward Babylon the Greatism described in the ‘Book of The Revelation’ with the United States as political role player of the whorl of Babylon on the global stage. In my opinion it is not an intelligent role to play.

The back of Abe Lincoln’s penny should have an image of Mary Todd. If Lincoln had not had a wife the good times of his life would have been limited to getting positive body counts and good weather for burials in Robert E. Lee’s Arlington horse pasture or kicking a rock around the White House horse and buggy lot. His speeches would have been more grim, jokes and optimism absent and his staff kept busy taking notes on his eschatological hopes for the future. Lincoln might have envisioned solar powered, glow in the dark tombstones and hot selling advertising on them with scrolling lightening writing to pay for government funeral and burial costs in a somber, inspired mood.

If Mary Todd can’t go on the back of the coin, some sort of miniature math instruction cheat sheet series might be inscribed each year to remind Americans of basic math concepts and physics formulas.

South Sudan- New Independent Nation With Current Prospects

The South Sudan could select the Chinese yuan as its new national currency for a few years and perhaps profit as the yuan rises in value and the dollar drops.

With use of the Yuan the burgeoning Chinese economic political managers might dump additional political and economic aid as a way to increase Chinese cultural currency in Northcentral Africa.

American investors have piggybacked on the Chinese economy for more than two decades and American farmers and ranchers look to export U.S. crops to cash paying customers abroad. The prospects of a U.S. led ecological economic infrastructure development of the South Sudan is hence about nil. The U.S.A. may provide South Sudan with military assistance; machine guns, explosives, concertina wire, rockets and aerial overblast protection as part of its multi-decade glorious war on Al Q'eda. Some of that multi-trillion dollar project may spill over into the South Sudan to help develop their economy. Mybe they need tax cuts for the rich as well to help provide jobs for the poor.

The South Sudan might also sell passports for a thousand dollars to those needing a dual citizenship free base and tax liberation if they show some intent to reside in the Sudan perhaps contributing to quality soup kitchens for the broke.

Supply Side Economics Have Produced Federal Debt Since 1981

Never since the era of cutting taxes and running a federal deficit was created by the Reagan administration has increased business growth brought enough additional tax revenues to pay off the deficit. Republican administrations have themselves increased federal spending at any rate treating the nation's infrastructure a little like the way the Red Army and The Fearless Leader regarded the German industrial infrastructure in 1946.

Since 1971 Republican leaders have downsized U.S. corporate employment wages and health benefits, job security and social economic egalitarianism while flooding the U.S.A. with illegal alien workers and relocating manufacturing to China over time.

President Obama through in the towel on letting Bush II era tax cuts expire in December 2010. Now the Republicans have the opportunity to repair the federal budget as did The President in December 2010 before he gave up. Walking on the supply side of the force has concentrated wealth and gutted America's immediate economic well being for those not owned by Darth.

Republicans can raise taxes on the rich and upper middle class and cut federal spending and tax dodgeholes and run a budget surplus to pay off federal debt straightaway. The instead rely on the completely discredited Laughferian supply side theories that will create more economic misery ahead for a nation already misguided by excessive Wall Street financial and trading deregulation.

Infinities & Numbers as Representations of Real Things and The Apparition of Soup Bowls

I am not a mathematician; I enjoy philosophical thought however so I have a few comments of a philosophical nature about numbers here.

I had read J.D. Barrow’s ‘The Infinite Book’ and recently added another fine book of Barrow’s to my summer reading list- ‘The Book of Nothing’. This book is quite an interesting elaboration of zero and nothing as an idea in math and philosophy as well as physics and cosmology.

Barrow described the social evolution of number systems in various civilizations such as Mayan, Babylonian and Indian. It is easy to see the correlation of abstract representations of real things that are counted to symbols that represent the things. Real substances are represented in the abstract by symbols, and the meanings or validity of the symbolic representation coincides with the accurate representation of the substances quantitatively.

I believe that relationship is the basis for much or all of mathematical validity.

Our base ten number system decimal system’s 1-9 are symbols that originated largely in India as Brahmin culture numbers as early as 300 B.C. The Indian numbering system and ideas about zero eventually made its way to Arab civilization and Europe. The point is that the symbols might be anything.

Georg Cantor’s work on infinite series is discussed in The Infinite Book. Abstract mathematical infinities seem to arise as abstract representational phenomena.

If one has a barrel of soup and subtracts no real quantity from it, that might be done and infinite number of times; one divided by zero equals infinity.

If one has a circle with ordinal measuring unit spacing on it such as whole even numbers one can insert and infinitely smaller ordinal series of numbers within it infinitely.

It is possible to insert an infinite number of differently ordered infinite series within any given infinite series or finite series or segment with differently ordered series.

Cantor’s transfinite series may be a way of representing the theoretical capacity of infinity to contain an infinite number of dissimilar, variegated ordered mathematical series representing infinity. That is something like saying that in an infinite barrel of soup there is an infinite number of ways of increasing the size of the bowls of soup served from it in unlimited quantities. Representing those bowls and serving size and numbers in structured and infinite series would be a phenomenal activity never completed if one wanted to describe every possible size combination of bowl, spoon and serving size and number issued.

If there is a finite barrel of soup the kind of infinity that can be made to describe potential servings of soup is limited however. I am not sure if the real barrel of soup could be represented by the Surreal Numbers of John Conway. I am not sure that any numbering system for infinite series could not itself be permutated infinitely. 1 could become 1A, 2 could become 2A and so on. Logicians differentiate symbols occasionally with a ‘representation (prime); 1’ and 1’’ could be the start of infinite series of representing real substances like soup.

So if one wants to subdivide the serving size of an infinite barrel of soup infinitely obviously one could with forever smaller portions. Making a Mandelbrot fractalization landscape formula representing infinitely decreasing quantum bowls of soup-perhaps shrinking down to a smaller quantum representational level as each soup bowl field is consumed might be one way of making a finite algorithm representing infinite reduction.
The use of a Mandelbrot fractal sequence as a way to model the expansion or contraction of a given form of order of structure consistently at various magnitudes obviously can suggest to some philosophical thought a potential for representing quantum mechanical structures immersed in various environments that would cause the usual model assembly to change its formations quantitatively and perhaps model it’s new characteristics as particle/waves and forces of the Universe.

The point is that one may make infinite series only in one direction-the direction of reduction, when one must confine infinities to a real barrel of soup or other finite substance.

Whole numbers, even and odd numbers, countable infinities and non-countable infinities made from real numbers; these seem to be no more than detached from real substance potential series of representation.
W.V.O. Quine’s book Elements of Logic described how to build a system of logic. Number systems seem to be sets for representing relations to real substances. Newton’s law of gravity falling off at the square root of the distance between objects seems representative of the most simple fundamental association of mathematical representation to real substance; planets etc.

Mathematics in this Universe seems to have a requirement that it conform to the being and nothingness relationships of substances of matter. It is perhaps possible to imagine a universe where the pluralism of objects of this universe and its logical, original monistic unified field were represented with a different way of being…

Perhaps the spin values of quantum particles or of quantum effects providing not obvious or consistent arithmetic assumptions in appearance and combination might be given. The way the universe at the observable level ordinarily is though, if one substance is divided in portions then numbers that represent its quantitative features must conform to meaning indicating the new number of portions.

Any arbitrary numerical series of representation could have any sort of size r dimension infinitely and would work to represent portions of the soup so long as its existential parameters coincided with the actual quantitative characteristics of the barrel of soup for instance. The series of numbers might be letters or other symbols with structured quantitative value-even with extra dimensions as subscripts within every bowl.

That’s all I had to write about infinite series and numbers here; they seem to be potential infinities rather than necessarily corresponding to real substance; potential descriptions of meanings.

J.D. Barrow’s ‘The Book of Nothing’ mentions that ‘bindu’ was an ancient Sanskrit word for nothingness as a point. I guess that sort of point is something equivalent to the notion of a tiny micro-loop or string as a fundamental quantum foundation for mass.

Of course the Brahmin of The Indus Civilization had the idea of a monistic creator issuing the Universe in various kalpas of 50 billion years or so perhaps from an infinitely small zero state in nothing before inflating another cycle of existence. In the Book of Jeremiah God says that everyone knows Him and just develops intentional forgetfulness (perhaps because of the fallen nature of mankind)-so this kind of speculation is actually good enough. Numbering and quantifying nearly infinitely small loops or strings that exist potentially or actually as some sort of a unified, monistic state of being in an apparent pluralism for forms isn’t a simple matter mathematically. It is good that scientists are working on the association of transfinite infinities in representational mathematical systems with the real world of the Universe at physics research facilities as time moves on.

Mammusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God/6 Days of Creation

The first translation of the Bible into the Massachusetts language (Natick-Algonquin) in 1661 enabled pre-Columbian ancestry Americans of New England to have an idea of the creation of the Universe by God that not even English speaking Americans would have for several hundred years when Einstein's General and Special Theories would provide theoretical physics parameters of space-time cosmology for an expanding universe.

Yes, in the first six days of the history of the Universe all things that were to be were begun. Besides, as God is infinite He could view all temporal, finite segments as already past.

As mass becomes infinitely compacted as in singularities and black holes time seems to slow down for outside observers. The opposite holds though-as in the Twins Paradox time speeds up for the insiders. What seems a day to those near the singularity might seem a thousand years to those far outside. For those in the singularity time effectively stops-itself a paradox from our human perspective.

The speed of light photons at 186,000 miles per second is regarded as the maximum possible speed of anything in the material universe. Photons have no mass size and ere emergent characteristics of an electro-magnetic field in space-time perhaps. If one were able to travel much faster than light-even infinitely faster, it would be possible to watch time unfold or travel from ahead of it. It is a contemporary cosological speculation that the universe actually experienced a faster-than-light inflationary period within the first second of its existence. It is believed possible because the laws of the physical universe were not quite yet firmed up with nothing to hinder a sudden burst of high-energy expansion of space-time.

Black holes and gravitational singularities may or may not exist, yet for an infinite Creator it is quite reasonable that he created the world in just six days. He might in fact have created this and all possible universes in infinite numbers to complete fulfillment in that six days and viewed them from the seventh day of rest in a transfinite post-temporality not described in detail in Genesis.

The Three Temptations of Christ

"Where there is no vision, the people perish."

I hadn't given much thought about the archetypal nature of the three temptations the devil presented to Christ. I enjoyed reading Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov too. Pelakin points out in 'Whose Bible Is It' that Dostoyevsky said of the temptations that "the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature".

The three temptations are about food, health and political power. Maybe those sum up the necessary challenges of life that are forced options and presented to every human being.

The devil challenges Jesus to turn stones into bread, to jump from the top of the Temple and let God protect him as if he was in The Matrix, and finally says to Jesus that he will give him ruling power over all the world if he will just worship the devil.

Perhaps sex temptations are a synthetic combination of food and health drives. Its not so difficult to understand why eukaryotic life forms have such individual and collective interaction conflicts with simple explainable foundation.

Such challenges by natural gas extractors to state governments and universities may exist already. Some future governor of Alaska may look at the north Slope gas and say 'il n'y a plus!' and plea for pervasive fracking (chtonic geo-crazing).

Fracting shale formations containing natural gas after the primary gas reserves are depleted may bring Alaska's arctic slope to evolve thousands of drill holes through the permafrost and seafloor and countless millions of gallons of toxic water to surface over time.

Economic concatenations of eukaryotic life form stimulus-response quests for energy in less than optimally intelligent ways may bring future fracking to Cook Inlet.

Jesus answers the challenge of the devil's temptations with scriptural quotes reiterating reliance upon God. The ongoing Logos actualizing the world and Universe draws the rational soul to the spirit of reason. Temptations of the Devil invariably miss the mark of the good.

Americans are challenged by food and health issues-medical care is costly, and they are perennially challenged by issues of political allegiances relating to economic opportunity. In effect they are encouraged to trade their soul(s) for political inclusion required for temporal economic prosperity.

Listening to a report on the environmentally risky process of fracting shale formations to produce natural gas in Pennsylvania I was reminded a little of the story of the devil being imprisoned a thousand years in the pit....

If a day to God equals a thousand years then a thousand years might represent 365 million human-earth years-about the time that gas was being formed in those ancient sediments to be sequestered from mankind until the present. What ancient bacteria and odd life forms or viruses might be released through the emergence of millions of gallons of contaminated waters injected deep underground to increase pressure on the gas fomenting explosive flatulence trickling up to the surface of the Earth through the pipelines from the pit?

There are a variety of better ways for human culture to radically alter its methods of designing and zoning homes, insulating and heating and cooling capture without relying on wasteful fossil fuel procedures. It isn't simply a choice between communist regulatory totalitarianism and man-in-the-wilderness libertarianism that urban corporations struggle in as modern Daniel Boones of business.

It is possible for human culture to develop a rational economic order that can be revised and updated to meet environmental challenges within a democratic context-even if the present government budget and debt ceiling negotiations and U.S. transportation and energy policies make it appear improbable.

It is written that what is loosed on Earth will be loosed in heaven (if one is saved/healthy that is). It is also written that in an infinite universe anything that has a zero probability of not occurring will occur an infinite number of times.

When Jesus replies to the Tempter with answers professing right relationship with God, humanity is afforded an example of pursuit of a spiritual, sentient way of living amidst environmental challenges rather than replying with unreflective, rash submission to domination by material vicissitudes and/or sensory stimulus response loops through least creative intellectual effort.

With that example Isaac Newton was spiritually minded and pursued knowledge and rational empirical inquiry with reason rather than just replying with a plant-like sensual water-light turn in human cultural questions, (He was the British Chancellor of the Exchequer too), empirical challenges and unknowns.

Brilliant business minds working for good overall culture may find cheaper, cleaner heating, cooling and transport methods in the U.S.A. Government leaders may discover the enlightening national interest of ecospheric economic efficiency and turn toward spiritual cultural reconstruction.

Medical care for the poor in the U.S.A. provided free at government clinics and hospitals might have kept down overall health costs. So long as the middle class and the upper class could afford the world's best medical services the working poor and unemployed poor often had inadequate medical provisioning. In recent time the rising costs of medical services and downward mobility of the American middle class the past 40 years stimulated passage of a hare-brained public health insurance bill in which the elites traded the privacy souls of Americans to global corporations in return for mandatory health insurance payments from all Americans to the global rich concentrating worldly wealth.

Power, health and food remain the perennial challenges tempting to mankind. That cornucopia of temptation adversely affects social intellect, creativity, faith and moral capacity to innovate a free and ecologically rational culture with economic security for all.