Waterboarding

What's in a word? "Harsh interrogation techniques"-- formerly known as torture. Hmm. I guess noticing Orwellian doublespeak has become passe these days.

History and Drama

I'm just finishing up another excellent forgotten play. Cato by Addison. I was thinking what a wonderful theme it would make for an historical study on many fronts. There are several ironies about this. Firstly, this Addison was an ally of Swift in his mission to free Ireland from the yoke of an oppressive British empire policy of looting its satrapies. Second, today's Cato Institute is the complete opposite of anything resembling true patriotism. (Perhaps they should be renamed the Sempronius Institute.) Third, there is a forgotten tale to be told which is worthy of any scholar's enterprise. Diametrically opposite of the popular entertainment of today, there was a time in our country when drama was a vehicle for nation building. View in your mindseye this play actually performed at Valley Forge in the winter of our nascent Republic's own discontent. Regard the remnants of an even greater forgotten dramatist and historian Schiller-- today only known as a nameplate for many monuments and parks around the country. (I suspect that this lapse in education was probably the result of the anti German jingoism dating from WWI.) Lastly, what more appropriate vehicle could drama today be put amidst the onrushing dual calamities of suicidal economic and military policies foisted on a mesmerized and basely "entertained" US public?

Beethoven and Riemann: Polemicists against Chaos Theory

Figures that hover above their own epochs sometimes not only anticipate happy developments but also unfortunate declines. Both Beethoven and Riemann attacked in advance the absurdities of today's Chaos "Theory" on their own terms. The Grosse Fugue presents the hearer with an apparently arbitrary sequence which is "resolved" through the ensuing movements of the piece. Thus Beethoven established a high water mark for all musical composition and anticipated the Listian descent into manneristic chromatic irrationality of today. Riemann's Zeta function/prime number hypothesis inter alia, likewise provides a method (via Dirichlet's principle) for resolving with functions of apparently arbitrary disorder. How unlike the probabilistic unreason leading to today's information, string and chaos theories, et al!

What more fitting spectacle than seeing the march of doom of the so called "quants" on Wall Street today.

A NIGHT-PIECE ON DEATH.

By the blue taper's trembling light,
No more I waste the wakeful night,
Intent with endless view to pore
The schoolmen and the sages o'er:
Their books from wisdom widely stray,
Or point at best the longest way.
I'll seek a readier path, and go
Where wisdom's surely taught below.

How deep yon azure dyes the sky,
Where orbs of gold unnumber'd lie,
While through their ranks in silver pride
The nether crescent seems to glide!
The slumbering breeze forgets to breathe,
The lake is smooth and clear beneath,
Where once again the spangled show
Descends to meet our eyes below.
The grounds which on the right aspire,
In dimness from the view retire:
The left presents a place of graves,
Whose wall the silent water laves.
That steeple guides thy doubtful sight,
Among the livid gleams of night.
There pass, with melancholy state,
By all the solemn heaps of fate,
And think, as softly-sad you tread
Above the venerable dead,
'Time was, like thee they life possess'd,
And time shall be, that thou shalt rest.'

Those graves, with bending osier bound,
That nameless heave the crumbled ground,
Quick to the glancing thought disclose
Where Toil and Poverty repose.

The flat smooth stones that bear a name,
The chisel's slender help to fame,
Which, e'er our set of friends decay,
Their frequent steps may wear away,
A middle race of mortals own,
Men half-ambitious, all unknown.

The marble tombs that rise on high,
Whose dead in vaulted arches lie,
Whose pillars swell with sculptured stones,
Arms, angels, epitaphs, and bones;--
These (all the poor remains of state)
Adorn the rich, or praise the great;
Who while on earth in fame they live,
Are senseless of the fame they give.

Ha! while I gaze, pale Cynthia fades,
The bursting earth unveils the shades!
All slow, and wan, and wrapp'd with shrouds,
They rise in visionary crowds,
And all with sober accent cry,
'Think, mortal, what it is to die!'

Now from yon black and funeral yew,
That bathes the charnal-house with dew,
Methinks I hear a voice begin;
(Ye ravens, cease your croaking din,
Ye tolling clocks, no time resound
O'er the long lake and midnight ground!)
It sends a peal of hollow groans,
Thus speaking from among the bones:

'When men my scythe and darts supply,
How great a king of fears am I!
They view me like the last of things:
They make, and then they dread, my stings.
Fools! if you less provoked your fears,
No more my spectre-form appears.
Death's but a path that must be trod,
If man would ever pass to God:
A port of calms, a state of ease
From the rough rage of swelling seas.

Why, then, thy flowing sable stoles,
Deep pendent cypress, mourning poles,
Loose scarfs to fall athwart thy weeds,
Long palls, drawn hearses, cover'd steeds,
And plumes of black, that, as they tread,
Nod o'er the 'scutcheons of the dead?

Nor can the parted body know,
Nor wants the soul these forms of woe:
As men who long in prison dwell,
With lamps that glimmer round the cell,
Whene'er their suffering years are run,
Spring forth to greet the glittering sun:
Such joy, though far transcending sense,
Have pious souls at parting hence.
On earth, and in the body placed,
A few, and evil years, they waste:
But when their chains are cast aside,
See the glad scene unfolding wide,
Clap the glad wing and tower away,
And mingle with the blaze of day!'


Thomas Parnell



So it must be with all things that have such a mournful and useless appearance on this earth. Most especially the current monetary system and its apologists!

AIG Bonuses

If we as a nation are so crazy as to forgo bonuses for AIG employees whoever can we possibly get with the requisite expertise to take their place now that Bernard Madoff is going to jail? Maybe he could get a work release. (Alas.)

General Relativity, the Monadology, Harmony of the Worlds and the Degeneracy of Voltaire

When Plato's Socrates is situated declaiming on the degenerate profligacy of the wayward arts in the Republic, the perspective that must be allowed him should only be delimited to satirizing bacchantic frenzies as art that would masquerade as anything approaching truth in beauty. This perspective or weltanschauung is the Republic's myth of the cave or the island of Sancho Panza's governiate -- the make believe world of Lewis Carroll's Flatland or the false dichotomy of right brain/left brain of art versus science. It is the phony chop logic of Dr. Pangloss mock tragedy of Leibniz' genius, i.e. the eternal and continuously reenergized monadology.

Take, for example, Dante's Paradiso as a template. Did he not situate a sort of immortal dialectic or Socratic dialog on the completely relative frame of reference of the earth's moon in contradistinction to the idiocy of the Ptolemaic banality of "Mother Earth" Gaia corybantic phrensy (as in "Neoplatonic" cabbalists magic hokum)? Isn't this indeed that which Albert Einstein continued? The best of all possible worlds as opposed to the rock and rolldom's 666 Beast Aleister Crowley, is Einstein's own truly "gauge fixed" general relativity. Isn't this concept sempiternal? -- As it undergoes a continuous timely updating relative to one's own "mortal coil" in the here and now?

Image, if you will, the peculiar multifunctionality of the biophysical domain juxtaposed to the merely inorganic substrate whence it derives. The distance from that dead continuum to the plenum of the living realm is a "poetic" equivalent of the distance from the the living to the thinking self reflexive creativity of human endeavor. It is Cantor's transfinite conceptual updating of Nicholas of Cusa's non-other. Which is the refutation at once of both "cybernetics" and the degenerate Cartesian Grassmanian Wienerian fiction of "absolute entropy". (As opposed to the relative correctness of the Carnot cycle.)

This Schopenhauer-like world weariness emerges from a Mephistophelian myopia. In the make believe land where supposedly "we all agree that no one foresaw the current economic crisis" (except for modern day Epimethius LaRouche) we kowtow to feces on a canvass as art. This is the true aesthetic excresance of the misbegotten progeny of Mr. Voluntaire's misconception.

Is Our Future Happiness Subject to the Whims of Mere Chance?

When a promising, brilliant youth is struck down by what seems to be the indiscriminate scythe of our earthly scourge, it is only natural that we question whether justice is an but an illusion. Yet, if we look to the lights bequeathed us from the best minds humanity has had to offer, we may not only draw solace, but redouble our own dedication to make this brief lifespan mean more than the passing alternation of ephemeral joy and sadness.

Look in your heart at the scene, if you will, of Socrates becalming the tearful dread of his acolytes at the approach of the quickening poison which ended his journey among us. You will see there that the tyranny of the mob which sentenced him could not quench his perfect equanimity at the prospect of the beneficence of a knowable goodness that will forever spur mankind on to discover the ever elusive fruits of this creation. This future is so designed as to permit us to pass on something to our posterity of lasting and continuing goodness. If only we heed that challenge, then our contribution however passing cannot be for naught. For the great tapestry of civilization's delicate woof allures and encompasses all our best endeavors. And we may let our fairest Adonais be grieved to the requiem of this our imperfect inkling of immortality.

Riemannian approach to biophysical and physical phenomena

It becomes quite startlingly apparent when surveying recent biophysical experimentation that there inheres a plenum-like density of multi-valued biophysical phase space.

A genome-wide study of transcription in yeast redefines the concept of promoters

Genes that contain instructions for making proteins make up less than 2% of the human genome. Yet, for unknown reasons, most of our genome is transcribed into RNA. The same is true for many other organisms that are easier to study than humans. Researchers in the groups of Lars Steinmetz at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and Wolfgang Huber at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK, have now unravelled how yeast generates its transcripts and have come a step closer to understanding their function. The study, published online in Nature, redefines the concept of promoters (the start sites of transcription) contradicting the established notion that they support transcription in one direction only. The results are also representative of transcription in humans.

Investigating all transcripts produced in a yeast cell, the scientists found that most regions of the yeast genome produce several transcripts starting at the same promoter. These transcripts are interleaved and overlapping on the DNA. In contrast to what was previously thought, the vast majority of promoters seem to initiate transcription in both directions.

Not all of the produced transcripts are stable, many are degraded rapidly making it difficult to observe what they do. While some of the RNA molecules might be 'transcriptional noise' without function, other transcripts control the expression of genes and production of proteins. The act of transcription itself is also likely to play an important role in regulation of gene expression. Transcribing one stretch of DNA might either help or in other cases interfere with the transcription of a gene close by. Moreover, transcripts without a current purpose can serve as 'raw material for evolution' and acquire new functions over time.

The results shed light on the complex organisation of the yeast genome and the insights gained extend to transcription in humans. A better understanding of transcription mechanisms could find application in new technologies to tune gene regulation in the future.

The above, for example suggests "branch points" of a biophysical phase space of 2 sheeted surface of n functional dimensions. This is only one recent example. But it is quite obvious that there are a whole domain of instances wherein we find such a multi functional phase space embedded within the proteome. It is likewise becoming demonstrable that there obtains a similar ordering in many extreme regimes of the physics of the abiotic. For example, it has recently been shown that the superconductivity/permittivity band gap may coexist in certain alloys rather than being separate phases.

Transport properties of high transition temperature (high-Tc) superconductors apparently demonstrate two distinct relaxation rates in the normal state. We propose that this superficial inconsistence can be resolved with an effective carrier (quasiparticle) density n almost linear in temperature T. Experimental evidence both for and against this explanation is analyzed and we conclude that this offers a clear yet promising scenario. Band structure calculation was utilized to determine the Fermi surface topology of the cuprate superconductor versus doping. The results demonstrate that an electron-like portion of the Fermi surface exists in a wide range of doping levels even for a p-type superconductor, exemplified by La2−xSrxCuO4−δ (LSCO). Such electron-like segments have also been confirmed in recent photoemission electron spectroscopy. The Coulomb interaction between electron-like and hole-like quasiparticles then forms a bound state, similar to that of an exciton. As a result the number of charge carriers upon cooling temperature is decreased. A quantum mechanical calculation of scattering cross section demonstrates that a T2 relaxation rate is born out of an electron–hole collision process. Above the pseudogap temperature T* the normal state of high-Tc cuprates is close to a two-component Fermi liquid. It, however, assumes non-Fermi-liquid behavior below T*.

This bridging of the abiotic domain to the biotic domain represents a boundary layer whereby a kind of potential shockwave forcing curvature operates. That is, scientists may, by forcing an ordinary physical phase into an extreme configuration "mimic" a rather ordinary biophysical condition. (For instance, quasi-crystals and the Bose Einstein state also immediately come to mind.)

Now, the movement across this boundary may also be seen as a multi-sheeted Riemann surface. Photosynthesis represents one such sheet in this overarching manifold; whereas, technological intervention creating such extreme regimes would represent another higher order sheet whereby the noetic domain reorders the characteristic biophysical space. Likewise, noesis (technological creativity) may operate upon the boundary between the biophysical to noetic domains as is evident in the history of advances in agronomy and medicine, inter alia.

As I have referenced elsewhere, it is via a combination of Riemann's method that accurately predicted sonic shockwave theory, and Cantor's transfinite sequencing of nested manifolds, that this functional interplay among Vernadsky's identification of three qualitatively distinct domains comes into focus. This overview represents a long term project orientation for science.

Tilting at Windmills

Indeed, I believe you are quite right to abjure this delusory modern day jousting at windmills by the environauts. However, the solution to the current deleveraging of the multi-trillion dollar speculative derivatives bubble is neither neo-Keysnianism nor gold bug/Ron Paul phantasmagoria. Both of these mindsets hold that wealth is a material "thing." Either money for the Keynesian monetarist or some quantity of gold for the anti National Bank Jacksonian populists. These are just two sides of the same coin. The crisis we have now to overcome is due to the abandonment of the funding of our physical economy. It has broken down. Trying to save the bubble of speculation is like a doctor trying to save the cancer rather than the patient. We need to put the speculators through chapter 11 bankruptcy and set up a new credit creation mechanism not controlled by Wall Street ala the Federal Reserve. We need credit investments in infrastructure, rail, power grids, waterways, and power production, i.e. nuclear. It doesn't matter if we hoard all the gold in the world in our fallout shelters with our tinfoil hats. Investment in that which progressively improves the standard of living is what we must move into. If we don't then I'm afraid we will live to sorely regret it.

Fickle Fingers

This is a scream, although I'm exhibiting a longer middle finger for the financial traders.




"Abstract

Prenatal androgens have important organizing effects on brain development and future behavior. The second-to-fourth digit length ratio (2D:4D) has been proposed as a marker of these prenatal androgen effects, a relatively longer fourth finger indicating higher prenatal androgen exposure. 2D:4D has been shown to predict success in highly competitive sports. Yet, little is known about the effects of prenatal androgens on an economically influential class of competitive risk taking—trading in the financial world. Here, we report the findings of a study conducted in the City of London in which we sampled 2D:4D from a group of male traders engaged in what is variously called “noise” or “high-frequency” trading. We found that 2D:4D predicted the traders' long-term profitability as well as the number of years they remained in the business. 2D:4D also predicted the sensitivity of their profitability to increases both in circulating testosterone and in market volatility. Our results suggest that prenatal androgens increase risk preferences and promote more rapid visuomotor scanning and physical reflexes. The success and longevity of traders exposed to high levels of prenatal androgens further suggests that financial markets may select for biological traits rather than rational expectations."

Lucrezia Borgia: Epitome of an Historical Lesson

Diane Yvonne Ghirardo has taken a page for the method of historical investigation from Dupin's purloined letter of Poe's fable. Fiction: which is stranger and more real than the flatulent pedantry of empiricism. Ms. Ghirardo, society owes you an undying debt of gratitude (of historic proportions) for your detective work.

While history's dunces compliment one another on their oh so profound erudition like Goya's educated donkeys. Their deviltry having even pulled the wool over Shakespeare's eyes anent republican Machiavelli, they have scoured the sewers of Rome with their poison pens. But Lucrezia has cleared herself by draining the stinking fens and doing what no mere diabolic female was meant to do: the work of Ben Franklin's Mrs Dogood.

Hail to thee - most divine ladies all. Your ethereal irony has thwarted the pestilent lackeys of the creeping Hoggian ilk.

Leibniz' prophetic method

If Newton had even reformulated Kepler's laws by inversion to produce the gravity inverse square formula, it would at least be somewhat of an accomplishment. But he did not. He stole this from the Royal Society "gopher" Robert Hooke. This, of course, is in keeping with his nonsensical claim to be the inventor of the calculus.

Now, here we have arrived at the denouement of applying a wretched philosophy to our economy fully in keeping with Newton's avatar John Locke. It is quite lawful that he (Newton)wound up as the chief bean counter in Britain. For what else monetarism but an alchemical belief in the magic of the market place, fit for a predecessor of Aleister Crowley?

However, as Leibniz informs us, the world is so constructed that we can be rescued from the economic pendulum in the pit, as if by a miracle, so long as we apply our native ingenuity to do the good and throw off the mental shackles which bind us, lo these many years.

The Fed's Insane Madhatter Gambit

The problem here is the simple inability to fess up by Mr. Krugman, et al. that we have been living in a chimerical, nightmarish fairyland of post industrial/information age/consumer driven false economy for lo these many years since the 1960s. It is now come tumbling down. Alas, wheelbarrows full of greenbacks won’t put us back to the direction of a technologically vectored producer oriented economy. This sad nostrum is as old as mud and a lot more toxic. Weimar, anyone?

What went wrong?

Well, since the economics blogs are on the subject of what was done to quell speculative excess in the 1930s, the "800 lb gorilla in the room" happens to be Bretton Woods. Why? What led to derivatives (recently rightly referred to in Congressional testimony as the latest incarnation of Bucket Shop practices) engulfing the world monetary system? It was none other than the end of the system of settling imbalance of trade among nations in gold. After the Nixon administration pulled the plug on this in 1971 the scene was set for a global casino of currency speculation. One bubble after another was created and blown out. Now we are at the point of either attempting insanely to further hypothecate our economies or to return to the Bretton Woods system of stability.

Question for Paul Krugman

Mr. Krugman, would you have advocated during the collapses of the South Sea Island, the Tulip, the Mississippi Land, et al. speculative bubbles that governments should have simply printed up more such promissory notes to give the speculators proper government backing? What does this do but promote a more vicious hypothecation of the self same bubble? By the way, it is wrong to characterize this crisis as resulting from merely the latest incarnation of monetarist speculation, i.e. the housing bubble. The credit default swap derivatives the are undergoing de-leveraging are but a small proportion of the cancerous multi hundred trillion derivatives "markets." Until this insane gambling casino mentality is extirpated and replaced any attempt to prop it up is foredoomed. You can bet on that.

Honorable men ?

If you recall the congressional testimony during Oliver North Iran Contra hearings, one thing that conspicuously stood out was so many Republican "character witnesses" incessantly referring to North as an "honorable man." Yesterday it was widely reported that John McCain stood up for Barrack Obama in like manner when some woman at one of his rallies assailed Obama as an "Arab." McCain, pulling the microphone from her hands, declaimed that Obama was an honorable man, or some words to that effect. Well now, it seems that the old saw "it takes one to know one" perfectly applies in this case. McCain, after all, dumped his ailing crippled wife for a young beer heiress and then went on to choose a ex-beauty pageant Governor as his running mate. Why wouldn't such a man admire how Obama parlayed his many years long connections with the Ayers family into a successful run for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination, all the while keeping it at arms length. What was it that Roosevelt said about Joe Kennedy?

Prediction from Thingumbobesquadamus

Today, Messer George Bush will regale the nation with this needful admonition: "Remember, my fellow Americans prosperity is just around the corner." ... or words to that effect.

Dance with a corpse, anyone?

I'm afraid it is much worse than merely losing one's spectacles. The bankers' ball has admitted a number of putrefying corpses onto the dance floor. They tell us, imploringly, they are just now oh so sure that if only we will believe. Yet I'm afraid all the perfume they have applied so far hasn't done the trick. Why, the erstwhile bon-vivant suitors are perspiring off the dance floor holding their sides and retching. Such a scene is unheard of. Lack-a-day.

Way too little, way too late

While today's NY Times article exposing the SEC does a service after the fact in uncovering some of the chicanery unleashed by the pro deregulation crowd, the economic problem that has been posed from the beginning of the creation of exotic and esoteric derivative instruments of speculation goes unchallenged. However, it is the mindset that created these speculative instruments that are now "deleveraging" on a gargantuan scale that is threatening us all with a financial collapse of historic proportions. Until and unless that mindset that created this disaster is effectively exposed and replaced by a return to sound credit policies instead of attempts to bailout the malefactors at the expense of the real economy, all such analyses, however enlightening are merely the proverbial whistling past the graveyard.

As those that refuse to see

Well now, do you really think that printing up billions of dollars in bailouts will do anything other than cause a hyperinflation like the prewar Weimar mefo bill or current Zimbabwe cases? You illiterate bloggers have lost your marbles (if you ever had any.) How moronic is the true rallying cry of the Fed and Treasury: "Save the bubble, blow it up bigger than ever, that's the ticket!" There are none so blind..