Toward a Universal Metric of a Culture's Evolutionary Fitness

If one approaches the issue of the type of psychology of a language culture that has what Leibniz might refer to as sufficient reason of viability of development, then it were conceivable to establish the basis of a rigorous metric of that self same culture. This concept is the synthesis of a series of the work of leading thinkers, and as it were, motifs produced since especially the golden Renaissance of fifteenth century Florence.

Start with Nicholas of Cusa's principle of projective principle of qualitative evolution of scientific method. That is, that there is by necessity an open ended capacity inhering in the potential intellectual development of the human species. Further it is only through the acceptance of that principle of such potential in every unique human being's intellect (or Leibniz' thinking monad) that an adequate system of government may be established. The attempt by Riemann to establish a geometric surface function that proceeds to projective infinity through Gauss' method of conformal mapping of  a spherical unit of normal curvature is germane along these lines.

Wilhelm von Humboldt's principle of the intellectual progressivity of language groups emerges as a correlative to a society's mode of physical potential productive power or what Lyndon LaRouche refers to as relative potential population density. Gustave Fechner applied Humboldt's idea to measurable universal psychological phenomena. It is no accident then that this informed Riemann's approach to the cyclic resolvability (following again on Gauss' work on higher arithmetic) of the planet's biologic interdependence of that which Vernadsky would later denominate as the (Cantorian transfinite) cardinal relationship step function of Lithosphere to Biosphere to Noosphere.

It is only from this higher standpoint that it is admissible to adjudge the health of a psychology of such a language culture. The species of psychology required is to be found in the approach of Wolfgang Kohler toward creative discovery inherent in his theory of gestalt. Further, it is a practical mission orientation resulting from such a healthful outlook that must set the agenda of self government. In this context, was Roosevelt's program of rural electrification an outgrowth of Lincoln's emancipation proclamation which in turn led to JFK's clarion moon mission pronouncement.

On the downside, the introduction of cultural pessimism through the promotion of false irrational "freedom" traceable to such projects as the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the Smithsonian project of "Folk Culture," the British intelligence psychological warfare bureau's homegrown uptake of R&B and Rock and Roll, and finally Timothy Leary's LSD propaganda is indicative of the push back against these virtuous tendencies.

Phiilip Veit

Why Your Money is Funny

Everyone knows that massive amounts of money are being created out of thin air these days by the Federal Reserve's helicopter Ben. No, the problem is not a lack of money. The problem is that those in the City of London and Wall Street who control the banking system have been allowed to deliberately loot the real productive economy through lunatic speculation. By productive economy I mean that which sustains and increases our standard of living. Which thereby enables us to afford medical care as overhead cost (similar to education cost.) It includes the physical plant and equipment, transport infrastructure, energy, agriculture and fresh water. The very opposite type of economics that the Nobel prize winning ideologues at today's hyperinflated college campuses promote these days, i.e. "free trade," postindustrial, information age, service sector, derivative securities, consumerist swindle of a race to the bottom, junkheap economy. There is no hope for seniors, or for that matter, anyone else without scrapping this self destructive speculative economy.

Zeta Oph and Seeking Out Hidden Truths

Each morning for quite some time now I go to the often quite spectacular APOD website. Today's entry on Zeta Oph (below) struck me and provoked the following train of thought.


As the astronomer states: "Zeta Oph is 65,000 times more luminous than the Sun and would be one of the brighter stars in the sky if it weren't surrounded by obscuring dust....Its strong stellar wind precedes it, compressing and heating the dusty interstellar material and shaping the curved shock front."

A number of ideas immediately leapt to mind. They were, not necessarily in this precise order, Riemann's seminal paper on the propagation of shockwaves and my extrapolation of its principle as a driver of human history; a passage from Augustine's City of God on why the truths in Christianity must be searched for; and the "Olbers paradox” (which it turns out was actually formulated first by Johannes Kepler and that Poe in his Eureka also grappled with as well.)

Augustine was, of course, combating a form of mystery religion called Manichaenism, akin to today's followers of the statistical mathematics chaos theory known as "quants" on Wall Street. First, it must be said that the fallacious supposition of the soi disant Neo-Platonists that Socrates or Plato had some sort of secret divinations revealed only to inner elites is pure garbage. Much like the principle of the purloined letter, what is truly "hidden" from the overwhelming bulk of humanity is solely due to their terrified reluctance (and in many cases downright greed) to admit to themselves the otherwise plain truth that they are deluded by a superstitious "faith" in the inviolability of the "powers that be." This is the reason that the Republic's timeless metaphor of the cave will endure "for ever and anon."

Cotton Mather: Father of Astrobiology?

Below is an excerpt from the introduction of Cotton Mather's heretofore unpublished "Biblia Americana." Benjamin Franklin's historic achievements avowedly draw their inspiration from Mather's guiding principle that society must be so organized as to accomplish and perpetuate the most good. Among my ongoing themes within these pages has been to debunk the theoreticians of mere statistical a-causality. Upon reading Mather's treatment of the same, I am awestruck by his foresight, writing three centuries ago of what today is called the field of astrobiology. Just last week a neighboring planetary system, twelve light years distant in our galaxy was found to be in the habitable zone. It is no accident. but rather part of our very (mostly unheeded) constitution as citizens of this unique experiment in government, that we have before us such a stark set of choices. To invoke the great Augustine, evil is not and could never be equivalent to good: it is merely the deliberately willful choice to not participate in the ongoing lawful universal development of our species' unique power to discover the beauty and the good.

"The concentric Revolutions of the Planets about the Sun, proceed from a Compound Motion; a Gravitation towards the Sun, which is a constant Energy infused into Matter, by the Author of all Things; and a Projected, Transverse Impulse, in Tangents to their several Orbs, that was also Imprinted at first by the Divine Arm upon them, & will carry them around, until the End of all Things. Now, admitting, that Gravity may bee essential to Matter; and that a Transverse Impulse might likewise bee acquired by Natural Causes; yett, for all the Planets to move about the Sun, in Circular Orbs, there must bee given to each, a Determinate Impulse, & these present particular Degrees of Velocity, which they now have, in Proportion to their Distances from the Sun, & to the quantity of the Solar Matter. For, had the Velocities of the several Planets, been greater or smaller than they are, at the same Distances from the Sun, or, had their Distance from the Sun, or the quantity of the Suns Matter, & consequently his Attractive Power, been greater or smaller than they are; now with the same Velocities; They would not have Revolved in Concentric Circles, as they do, but have moved in Hyperbola’s or Parabola’s, or in Ellipses very Eccentric. And what wee thus assert about the Primary Planets, may also bee applyed unto the Secondary. Now, that all these Distances, and Motions, and Quantities of Matter, should bee so accurately & Harmoniously adjusted, in this great Variety of our System, it is above the Fortuitous Hitts, of meer, blind, material Causes; it must certainly flow, from the Disposals of that infinitely Wise and Good Being, who, as Plato saies, αεί γεωµετρει, j alwayes acts geometrically. If the Planets had moved in such Lines, as wee have described, sometimes they would have approached the Sun, as near as the Orb of Mercury, and sometimes have exorbitate{d} beyond the Distance of Saturn, & some of them, would have quite left the Sun, with{out} ever seeing him any more. Now, the very Constitution of a Planet, would have been Corrupted, & Ruined, by such a Change of Interval, between It, and the Sun; and no Animals could ever have endured such Excesses of Heat and Cold.

"Furthermore, The Æthereal Spaces are perfect{ly} Fluid; they neither do assist, nor, do they retard, the Revolutions of the Planets, which rowl thro’ those Regions, as unresisted, as if they moved in a Vacuum. They might, any of them have moved in Courses opposite unto the present, and in Planes crossing the Planes of the Ecliptic, in any kind of Angles. Now if the System had been fortuitously framed by the convening Matter of a Chaos, how should all the Planets, as well the primary as the secondary, move the Same Way, from the West to the East, & in the Same Plane too, without any considerable Variation? Here would bee Millions of Millions of Odds to an Unit, in such a Cast of a Chance; and therefore, tis to some Divine Conduct, that such a Regular Harmony must bee ascribed. Especially, if wee consid{er,} that the smallest Planets, are scituated nearest the Sun, & each other; whereas Jupiter and Saturn, that are vastly greater than the rest, & have many Satell{ites} about them, are happily placed at the extreme Regions of the System, and Immensely Distant. At so wide a Distance, they do in their Conjunctions, a little Disturb one another, by their Gravitating Powers; but if such huge Masses of Matter had been scituated much nearer to the Sun, or to one another, the Disturban{ce} in the World, must have been consider{able.}

"To pass on; Our Ear{th par}ticularly, is placed so conveniently, {that} the Creatures which inhabit it, live and {thrive} in their Habitation. The Distance fro{m}{the Sun as it now turns, most likely is} Better, than any greater or smaller Distance would have been. Tis mathematically certain, That the Heat of the Sun, is, according to the Density of the Sun-beams, and is Reciprocally Proportional to the Square of the Distance, from the Body of the Sun. By this Calculation, if the Earth should now Revolve, suppose, in the Orbit of Mercury, the whole Ocean would boil with Extremity of Heat, & bee exhal’d into Vapours, and all that growes upon the Dry Land, would bee consumed as in a Fiery Furnace. But suppose the Earth should bee carried as far off as the Orbit of Saturn; There the whole Globe would bee one Frigid Zone, the deepest Seas under the very Equator, would bee frozen to the bottom, and there would bee nothing of Animation, or Germination in these forlorn Regions of the Universe. Place the Earth yett at any other Distance, and still you alter it for the worse, proportionally to the Alteration. Tis then in a Place, which an infinitely Intelligent, & Voluntary Agent hath assign’d unto it. But if any one think, How then can any thing live in Mercury, or in Saturn? Lett him also think, That the Matter of each Planet, may have a Texture very Different, which will dispose the same to bee acted on, by greater or smaller Degrees of Heat, according to their several Scituations, & that the Lawes of Life, and Vegetation & Propagation, are the Arbitrary Pleasure of God, and may vary in every Planet, as Hee pleases, to us Incomprehensibly. Tis enough, that the Texture of Ours, is inconsistent with any other Scituation: Wee could not wear Flesh and Blood, any where else.

"Moreover; The Earth Revolves with a Double Motion: while tis carried round the Sun, in the Orbis Magnus once a Year, it perpetually wheels about its own Axis, once in a Day, in every twenty four Hours, turning all the Parts of the Equinoctial to the Rayes of the Sun. Conspicuous are the Uses of this Vertiginous Motion; this tis that successively gives Day and Night, over the Face of the whole Earth, and makes it all over Habitable; Without this Diurnal Rotation, one Hæmisphære would ly Dead, in perpetual Darkness, Frost, and Cold, and the best Part of the other, wasted with a permanent Heat wherein it must ly basking without Intermission. The Vicissitudes made by the Earths Moving about its own Center, are better, than an Exposing of the same Side alwayes unto the Sun.

"But whence came these Vicissitudes? The Earth might Annually have compassed the Sun, without such a daily Turn; as wee see the Moon ever showes the same Face unto us. Indeed, Shee does in her menstrual Orb, turn all her Globe to the Sun, and enjoy Dayes and Nights, alternately Fourteen Times as long as ours. But should the Earth bee deprived of its Diurnal Motion, one half of it, must never see any Dayes at all. Behold, that Glory of Him, that made Things, as now they are Besides; Compare the Diurnal and the An{nu}al Revolutions of the Earth, which have a {ve}ry Different Degree of Velocitie. In {ev}ery Natural Day, all Parts of the Equator {h}ave some thing more than Three of the Earths Diameters, which makes about Eleven Hundred in the Space of a Year. But within the same Space, the Center of the Earth is carried more than fifty times as far, once round the Orbis Magnus, whose Wideness wee now assume to bee Twenty Thousand Terrestrial Diameters. The Annual Motion therefore is more than Fifty Times swifter than the Diurnal. But it must bee acknowledged, That since the Earth Revolves not upon a Material, but a Geometrical Plane, their Proportions may bee varied in Innumerable Degrees, any of which might have happened as easily as the present. What was it then that præscribed this particular Proportion and Celerity to each Motion? Tis certain, That there is a Meliority in the present Constitution. Suppose the Annual Motion of the Earth, were now performed in Six Months rather than Twelve; The Seasons then, would bee Twice as short as they are, and the cold Winters would overtake us before any of our Fruits could bee Ripe. Were the Motion Retarded, the Mischief would on the other Side be as fatal; for most Countreyes would bee so parched & effæte, by the Draught of the Summers, that they could never have an Harvest of a Store sufficient for the Consumption of a Double Year.

"And then, for the Diurnal Motion of the Earth; suppose it made only Twelve Circuits in a Year; Then every Day & Night, would bee Thirty Times as long as they are Now, and not at all suited unto any Humane Affayrs. But on the other Hand, suppose it wheeled a Thousand Times about its own Center, while the Center describes one Circle about the Sun; Then an Equinoctial Day would bee but Four Hours; and such Hasty Returns of Evening would sadly confound, all our Labours, and our Journeyes, & our other Affayrs.

"Yett further; Lett the Mode of the Earths Diurnal Motion bee considered. Conceive an Imaginary Plane, which passing thro’ the Centers of the Sun, & of the Earth, extends itself on all Sides as far as the Firmament; This Plane is called, The Ecliptic; and in this, the Center of the Earth is carried without any Deviation. But then the Axis of the Earth, about which its Diurnal Rotation is made, is not erect, unto the Plane of this Ecliptic, but Inclines towards it, from the Perpendiculum, in an Angle of Twenty Three Degrees, and an Half. Now, why is the Axis of the Earth, in this Particular Posture, and not in any other? Was this, by Chance, or from Choice? Wee all know, that this Inclined Position of the Axis, which keeps alwayes the same Direction, and to construct Parallelism to itself, is the sole Cause of those grateful, and needful Vicissitudes, of the Four Seasons of the Year, and the Variation in the Length of Dayes. If wee take away the Inclination, it would absolutely undo our Northern Nations; the Sun would never come nearer us, than hee doth now, on the Tenth of March, or the Twelfth of September. But would wee rather part with the Parallelism? Suppose then, that the Axis of the Earth, keeps alwayes the same Inclination towards the Body of the Sun. This would cause indeed a Varietie of Dayes, and Nights, and Seasons, on the Earth, but then every particular Countrey, would have alwayes the same Diversity of Day and Night, and the same Constitution of Season, without any Alternation; some would alwayes have Long Nights and Short Dayes: others again perpetually Long Dayes and Short Nights: one Climate would bee sweltered with everlasting Dog-Dayes, while an eternal December blasted another. But shall the Axis rather observe no constant Inclination to any thing, but vary and waver in all Manner of Uncertainty? Truly, there could bee no Health, no Life, no Subsistence in such an Irregular System: by the surprizing Nods of the Pole, wee might bee tossed backward or forward, from January to June, yea, possibly from the January of Greenland, to the June of Abyssinia. Certainly, the present Constitution, is more Beneficial for us, than any other. Some have Imagined, that if the Poles had been erect unto the Plane of Ecliptic, all Mankind had enjoy’d a Perpetual Spring, & a very Paradise upon Earth, with all the Comforts, in the utmost Measures of Longævity. But this perpetual, and universal Spring, is a meer Poetical Fancy; & bating the Equalitie of Dayes and Nights, in all other Points tis an Impossible Imagination. To the People, who dwell near the Equator, the Spring, so much admired, would bee an Insupportable Summer: and as for the Countreyes nearer the Pole, tis not a Spring that would answer their Necessities; they must have nearer Approaches of the Sun, with longer Dayes, & a less Obliquity of his Rayes, a Summer, & an Harvest, for the Ripening of their Fruits, or else bid an eternal adieu to the very best of their Sustenance. An equal Distribution of the same yearly Heat, would no more bring our Fruits unto Maturity, than such a quantity of Fuel, gradually & successively lighted, would make Water to boil, which being all kindled at once, will do it immediately. A perpetual Equinox would render the best Parts of the Globe, no other than perpetually Desolate. And the Expectation of a Constant Serenity, from such a Position of the Sphære, this also, is but precarious: For the affections of the Atmosphære, do not proceed only from the Course of the Sun, but also from the Scituations and Exhalations of the Earth, & many other uncertain Causes. Nor are the Equinoxes of our Year, upon Experience found, more free from Tempestuous Exorbitances, than any of the other Seasons, which also dismisses the Fond Hopes of Longævity, from such a Spring, as these do talk of: Longævity, can’t bee prov’d, the Effect of meer Calm; and the Inhabitants of the Torrid Zone, are generally, both shorter-lived than other People, & inferiour to them in Strength, Stature, & courage, as well as Intellectual Capacities."

Leonardo: Salvator Mundi

Social Media: The Tyranny of Democracy

Today's worship of rock stars (and of course it goes without saying, the debauched "British" royalty) are the modern day equivalent of what Socrates was rightly accused of defaming and enticing youth to question the legitimacy of. The "democratic majority" would, I am certain, if there were the possibility of a  vote on  the Internet today, on the fate on a latter day Socrates likewise endorse a death sentence. Thus does the spirit of irrationality enforce its own timely demise. This is why it was lawful that the vaunted democracy of Athens was engulfed in the graveyard of history. Will the United States of America also be brought down and with it the aspirations of scientific and artistic wonders of societies yet undreamt of?

HSBC: A Study in the Wages of Sin

The Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation cut its teeth on financing the forced imposition of the opium trade into China, which trade the Chinese fought the Opium Wars to end. The fallout of the cover-ups of the assassinations of JFK and RFK enabled Eisenhower's "military industrial complex" to engage in a never ending series of senseless geopolitical wars starting with Viet Nam. As a result the population has become increasingly culturally pessimistic in its outlook. (Kennedy's stirring outlook for NASA's mission is now a dim memory, for example.) This has been the perfect laboratory for the promotion of the drop-out, tune-in, turn-on malaise foisted upon us via the corporate entertainment media starting with the baby boomer generation. It is of quite lawful that the very same oligarchic financial interests emanating out of the City of London are repeating their timeworn strategy to this very day.


These same interests today through their practice of manipulation of farcical partisan politics have induced a majority of our "dazed and confused" population to submit to their bestial outlook. However, these latter day plutocrats cannot avoid the wages of their own debased plots. They cannot but be destroyed for their slavish violation of natural law. The only real issue is whether any of our posterity will emerge to outlive this notorious episode of the death throes of their monetary "empire."

Balaam and His Ass  Rembrandt

IMF Urges "Final Solution"

A mere two days after drug pushing oligarch George Soros' darling Obama has een re-installed, Christine LaGarde's IMF splashes spectacular headlines worldwide trumpeting the need for a "permanent solution" to the fiscal cliff. In Greece there is 60% unemployment among young adults. Pharmacies are with life saving medicines. Heating oil companies are folding due to the vicious austerity already imposed by the technocrats of the financial oligarchy.

Trillions of dollars and Euros are being printed to shore up the illiquid books of banks like HSBC, that have been making multi-billions in easy money laundering the blood money of the drug cartels.

The drum beat will grow louder daily now from the confines of these "elite" real life monsters for the end of any pretense of mercy to the most defenseless among us. I, for one will continue to announce a resistance to this utter and mind numbing evil. May God help us.

Why Simply Measuring the Unemployment Rate is a Farce

All of this subterfuge from what should be called simply the bureau of statistics is totally beside the point. After Thomas Jefferson retired from the White House, he set up an execrable slave nail manufacture where 10 year old boys were whipped by brutal overseers if they couldn’t or wouldn’t keep up. This was “full employment” writ large.


Today our nations’ physical infrastructure is literally crumbling. We have a so called post industrial/information age/consumer economy of glamorous gadgets to wile away our hours in vacuous amusement so that we won’t dwell too much upon the decay. The percentage of the work force in prison is disgraceful.


We have allowed ourselves to be systematically looted by an irrational oligarchy. They worship the power that control over the financial system gives them. They have step by step removed the barriers of their tools in trade: the ability to create new instruments of chicanery. Glass-Steagall and Bretton Woods had to be abolished for this looting to proceed. So Arthur Burns instructed Nixon to end the mechanism of settling the imbalance of trade by removing the gold reserve from the dollar. Thus leading to currency arbitrage de-linked from our nations’ trade in physical goods. Gramm-Leach-Bliley ended the separation of depository institutions and speculative financial/insurance houses. Thus began the creation multi trillion dollars of esoteric “financial products” which in reality were nothing more than a replay of last century’s “bucket shops.” We are now nearing the fag end of this process. The speculative oligarchy’s real agenda has come to the fore. For instance, listen to their steadfast insistence on imposition of “IMF conditionalities” on Greece, et al. This, while there is an increasing crisis of spreading scarcity already of life saving medicines. This is the logic of forcing the paying off of uncollectible gambling debt known as derivative securities created out of thin air.


What is required is an orderly process of bankruptcy of the so called investment banks and an end to the illusion that we can honor their insane instruments of speculation. Banks must be brought back as depository institutions under a renewed Glass-Steagall. Further, we must establish sovereign control over credit issuance to both rebuild the wrecked physical economy and promote the development of large scale water projects here and internationally under a renewed Bretton Woods. Finally. we must return to the vision of the era of JFK’s space mission in financing manned space exploration and massively upgrading nuclear fusion research as an inexhaustible source of energy and resources through application of magneto-hydro-dynamics processing. Only with such reforms will employment numbers have any real meaning.

Kepler's Method Relevant Over Centuries

The recent NASA model regarding the asteroid belt and preconditions for life prompts us to reexamine Kepler's marvelous scientific prescience. For it was uniquely his discovery of an underlying  harmonic design for the solar system that first correctly showed that the asteroid belt was located at an an-harmonic orbital interval comparable in the musical domain with the so-called Devil's Interval. Furthermore it is entirely lawful that for the composition of physical reality to engender the conditions of continuing biophysical and noetical evolution, this type of incongruity would be a "built in" feature of the cosmos across all scales. This is precisely the contribution that Leibniz built onto Kepler's work with his concept of pre-established harmonic ordering and his polemical attack on the Newtonian's foolhardy belief in a Deus Ex Machina or God the Clockwinder.

The principle that humanity will always have the avenue to alter its behavior to conform with this ongoing process of perfectibility is the only truth for our species survival that exhibits sufficient reason in absolutely differentiating ourselves exclusively as in the domain of the Noosphere.

This illustration shows three possible scenarios for the evolution of asteroid belts. In the top panel, a Jupiter-size planet migrates through the asteroid belt, scattering material and inhibiting the formation of life on planets. The second scenario shows our solar-system model: a Jupiter-size planet that moves slightly inward but is just outside the asteroid belt. In the third illustration, a large planet does not migrate at all, creating a massive asteroid belt. Material from the hefty asteroid belt would bombard planets, possibly preventing life from evolving. 
(Credit: NASA/ESA/A. Feild, STScI)

Debate Night or Fright Night?

The stench from both parties is so overwhelming that anyone picking sides shows themselves to be either a gullible dupe or a slimy opportunist.

It was if we were being asked: "Dear voter, whose vision of hell is more persuasive? Obama's or Romney's?" The devil I know vs the one I don't? Satan love 'em both...

Bankers to voters: which do you prefer? Electric chair or gas chamber? The choice is yours. Please vote for your favorite party.

In keeping with the choices the American people have this year for President, I propose election day be moved to Halloween. (Mothers please keep your children indoors!)

Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)    Goya

The Fable of Christine Largarde and Crocodiles

When the dollar was removed from the gold reserve status (not gold standard) by the advice of Nixon's Arthur Burns in 1971, the metric that Bretton Woods had created for settling the imbalance of trade among nations ended. This created a burgeoning market in frenzied speculation (carry trade) in currencies or arbitrage. The next step toward the nightmare of control over the economy came with the repeal of the law which had reigned in speculators from controlling the whole of banking Glass-Steagall. The lunacy of decoupling currencies from real physical production reached its zenith with the spectacular blowout of derivative securities that the world continues to reel from to this day. These derivatives are in essence no different than what were once known as "bucket shops," which were judiciously outlawed.

The problem is the literally mentally ill belief that wealth is equivalent to money. Unfortunately, the vast majority of humanity is afflicted with just that very belief. If you start from the premise that what is required is an economic policy that establishes an increasing standard of living for citizens of sovereign nations as opposed to a dictatorship of a financial aristocracy then you have taken the first step along the road to sanity.

The sad truth is that the IMF (and World Bank) from its inception has been nothing but an instrument of enforcement of the ukases of speculative financial houses based in the City of London and secondarily New York. So, I fear, that for Ms. Largarde to bemoan austerity brings to mind nothing so much as the tears of a crocodile.

New Opinion Poll: Who Is Uglier?

Given the mass media's apparently insatiable appetite for instant opinion polls these days, yours truly has come up with a doozy that I believe would even out-perplex Buridan's Ass and out-riddle the legendary Sphinx. To wit: in all senses of the word both physical and metaphysical, high and low--Who is more ugly Alan Simpson or Henry Kissinger?

The Stupendously Ugly Simpson Bowles Commission Crawls Out from Under a Rock

Well folks--you knew this was coming. That hideous, reptilian visage of Alan Simpson suddenly is befouling television screens everywhere daily now. (As Goya has so piquantly remarked some people's faces belong behind their trousers.) It is quite telling that he is the anointed darling of our financial and hence media establishment. (I respectfully decline to sully these pages with that personage's image out of respect for the delicate feelings of the fairer sex. Be forewarned.)

This brings to mind the debate between Abba Lerner and Lyndon LaRouche wherein the oh so very liberal Lerner opined that if Germany had carried out the austerity of Hjalmar Schacht then "Hitler would not have been necessary." You see, giving the devil his due, so to speak, is quite clearly the equivalent to insanely attempting to collect on the worthless "gambling debts" of the City of London and Wall Street so quaintly called derivative securities at the expense of killing off the "useless eaters" and igniting WWIII.... Isn't it?

The Ignominious Nobel Peace Prize

Let us pause to quietly reflect a bit dear readers. First those fine connoisseurs of peace in Sweden give their prize to Barack Obama, who forthwith unleashes a rampage of indiscriminate terror against innocent civilians via drone bombings. Now they award their vaunted prize to the European Union which even now is forcing the sick, poor, and elderly to go without medicine in Greece in order to bail out the gambling debts of the City of London.

One would only hope that once and for all these fine gentlemen would show their true colors for all and sundry to behold in the light of day and award the next peace prize posthumously to Adolf  Hitler.

Broadcasting "Hate Speech" to Aliens?

The quixotic project of beaming tweets with the hashtag #tweetsinspace to the planetary system GJ667Cc later today apparently will be censoring what the designers call "hate speech" from their broadcast.

I quote: “It all goes,” says Kildall, the new media exhibit developer for the Exploratorium. “Even political positions I don’t agree with: ‘Vote for Romney,’ ‘Vote for Obama.’” (All except hate speech, he added. We might not want to betray our baser nature to the ETs.)

However, I would assert that urging anyone to vote for either of the evil tweedle-dee/tweedle-dum twins  Obama/Romney is indeed equivalent to "hate speech." What a polluted abomination we will be broadcasting toward these perhaps innocent life forms. I fear it will be tantamount to proof positive to any sentient aliens out there that there is no intelligent life on this planet. Alas...

The Message of the Grand Mufti of Egypt is to be Applauded

I applaud this much needed message from the Grand Mufti. It is in the spirit of the great work of ecumenical harmony of Nicholas of Cusa De Pacei Fidei. This same Cusa was instrumental in promoting the voyage of Christopher Columbus that led to the founding of the United States which enshrouds in its Constitution that very same principle.

This same spirit today cries out for a new concordance among nations and faiths in order to get on with the mission that humanity so urgently requires. This mission is the human right to meaningful work that supplies the security of food, shelter, healthcare and ultimately provides the individual an opportunity to participate in the ongoing perfection of mankind's continuing mastery over nature. This purpose being striven for by us then will give reality to the truth that we are all created in the image of the living God.---

By Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa

With the publication of yet another set of insulting cartoons against the Prophet of Islam, it is becoming increasingly obvious that we are living through dangerous times, in which the world has becoming alarmingly polarized and obstinate. The current crisis has been precipitated by a number of factors. There is no one single cause to which we can point, in the hopes that eradicating it will magically solve our problems. Rather, this is a complex matter, involving the inability of each side to understand the worldviews and commitments of the other. The particulars of the events of the past week are known to all, but the underlying causes are deeper and more intractable, and cannot simply be wished away.

To properly understand them necessarily means taking seriously the politics that obtain between Islam and the West at this point in history. It is naive to simply point to individual films, cartoons, or writings which explicitly seek to provoke and insult Muslims as the motivating cause of these conflagrations. Rather, one must keep in mind the many points of conflict between Muslims and Westerners that obtain all over the world today. One need only scratch the surface to uncover grave violations associated with the war on Iraq, regular drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan, the treatment of often innocent Muslims in Guantanamo, the demonization of Muslims by far-right European parties and the banning of their symbols by European legislatures, and the conflict that has persisted for decades in Palestine. To turn a blind eye to these serious and enduring conflicts is to remain wilfully oblivious to the underlying factors which make coexistence and rapprochement between Islam and the West so difficult.

In such a context, to then insist on igniting these simmering tensions by publishing hurtful and insulting material in a foolhardy attempt at bravado – asserting the superiority of Western freedoms over alleged Muslim closed-mindedness – verges on incitement. Of all Muslim symbols, there is perhaps none more sacred than the Prophet Muhammad himself. Muslims can barely utter his name before their conscience obliges them to pray for God to bless him and grant him peace. Hundreds of millions of Muslims revere not only the Prophet, but the very city of Medina which he made his home, and ardently aspire to visit it at their first opportunity. It is no exaggeration to say that Muslims love the Prophet more dearly than their own selves, as the Qur’an characterizes them. To imagine then, crude representations of a man so dear to them is unbearable to the vast majority of Muslims.

None of this is to condone violence of any sort. Indeed, the example of the Prophet and his Companions – the greatest sources of Muslim normativity – bear witness to their enduring the worst insults from the non-believers of his time. Not only was his message routinely rejected, but he was often chased out of town, cursed at, and physically assaulted on numerous occasions. But his example was always to endure all personal insults and attacks without retaliation of any sort. There is no doubt that, since the Prophet is our greatest example in this life, this should also be the reaction of all Muslims. As the Qur’an instrucus, “Be patient, as were the great prophets.”

The call of all Muslim leaders must be to protest these instances of hate speech in only the most peaceful manner. Violence of any sort must be condemned outright. Here it is equally important to point out that some self-appointed religious leaders have failed to act responsibly. In the tense environment that currently prevails in the Muslim world, to display these provocations and to speculate on the supposed conspiracies behind them is to act recklessly. Unfortunately, the proliferation of satellite channels and other media have opened the door to all sorts of people who have only the advancement of their own interests and popularity in mind, and not the well being of the Muslim nation, the Middle East, or the world at large.

Yet, there is room for hope, and our actions should spring from the optimism that the world’s religions –Islam no less than any other – are ultimately interested in achieving harmony between peoples and peace on earth. I have, throughout my tenure as Mufti of Egypt, called for strengthening the bonds between the world’s great faiths, as well as the civilizational cultures which currently divide us as much if not more than religious affiliations. In this context, I have been involved in a number of forums devoted to dialogue across what seem to be chasms of suspicion, building across them bridges of understanding. The great virtue of these forums are that the quickly allow each side to appreciate the other’s positions, and tensions soon evaporate amongst the goodwill on display, even if agreement takes more effort and discussion. This is a model that applies to not only religious leaders, who have been at the forefront of such initiatives. Political leaders, too, must look beyond their short-term benefits and adversarial attitudes, and media outlets must broaden their horizons and take seriously their responsibility to the outside world, not just their accountability to profit margins and the bottom line.

The Legacy of Political Parties and America's Destruction

In 1799 Aaron Burr set up a fund to build a clean water delivery system in New York City. He did this as a ruse to create a bank by inserting a clause for the incorporation of the Manhattan Company in the eleventh hour in the state assembly where he served at the time. Burr played upon the good intentions of Alexander Hamilton to deliver clean water to the city suffering from perpetual outbreaks of cholera. In a young nation that was founded upon Benjamin Franklin's impulse to carry out Cotton Mather's vision of a "society to do good," Burr had an easy go of such ruthless subterfuge. The water project was a shill to set up what is now known as the "too big to fail" JP Morgan Chase Manhattan mega conglomerate monstrosity.

Later when he was Vice President, Burr finished off his greatest nemesis Alexander Hamilton in a duel that was completely one-sided since Hamilton refused to fire. Under indictment for murder in New Jersey, Burr arrived in Washington to be feted by the enemy of Hamilton's National Bank, President Thomas Jefferson. That bank created by Hamilton to finance material improvements and manufactures was the raison d'etre of the survival of the United States. This was an ongoing object of hatred that culminated in several financial panics when its opponents gained the upper hand to crush its functioning. For example, it was the protege of Burr, Martin Van Buren of Tammany Hall who induced that exemplar of  "democracy" Andrew Jackson in tearing down the Second National Bank.

In 1837 a panic resulted as the sequelae of the Jacksonians creation of speculative land banks. Edgar Allan Poe's satiric burlesques King Pest and The Devil in the Belfry aimed at Jackson and Van Buren's treachery  were understood by his readers as salvos in a political war. The Bostonian and New York "literati" were nothing more than fronts in cultish democratic experiments for the Boston Brahmins opium running Clipper Ship magnates and the Wall St speculators. Poe and Cooper, inter alia, took on these interests in their writings and were scurrilously hounded by them as a result.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had managed to break the control of JP Morgan, et al., in instituting the Glass-Steagall law that prevented the use of bank deposits to be used for gambling in spurious "bucket shop" type schemes and by setting up Bretton Woods gold back reserve system to settle the imbalance of trade in order to secure stable currencies.

Nixon took the advice of Wall Street's Arthur Burns to end the gold reserve Bretton Woods system in 1971. This led to so-called arbitrage in international currencies thereby creating a bubble of speculation. The likes of JP Morgan were salivating for more speculative loot however. They got that when Glass-Steagall was abolished by their control over both parties in Congress and the White House in 1999.

Today, we are confronted by a crazed attempt by the Federal Reserve's Ben Bernanke to prop up the collapsed worthless trillions of dollars of speculative "derivative securities" that were the outcome of Gramm-Leach-Bliley take down of Glass-Steagall. This is nothing more that history repeating itself.

But there is a twist now. For what is being played out on the stage of the world by the Kissingerian geopolitical interests behind these sordid would-be oligarchs of high finance is far more destructive than merely a bank collapse. The world has been at a crossroads in terms of the potential threat of nuclear war. Never more so than now with the looming countdown of the launching of an Israeli strike against Iran. Meanwhile Obama and Romney parade around in pettifogging political attacks and ludicrous grovelling to curry favor with these very moneyed interests that have seen fit to step by step destroy the very principle of Hamilton's successful rescue of the nation.

Why Atheism in Science is a Belief in Magic

My dog believes in magic. When I take her for a walk in the morning her brain associates that walk with her owner's desire for her to politely defecate out of doors. When she has eaten a breakfast prior to the walk, she saunters at a leisurely pace. When she has yet to gobble up her food that morning, she hurriedly and unceremoniously poops post haste.

Now this behavior is a form of a belief in our domestic pets which is the equivalent of what Johannes Kepler so astutely derided as the algebraic method. In a world where our mentality is governed by the false belief that things happen randomly we wish that we may use a formula to predict the future. If we know the value of points in a random "space" then as things go bump in the night we can know how things will wind up down the road a piece. Because you see we started here and next to here is another here. So x + y will always equal z. We are truly dogged in our belief in this concatenation of things...

But how on earth then did we emerge out of this random soup you ask? We scientists are working on that. (Squaring the circle and alchemy were the precursors of today's chaos and string theories.) Kepler said that he was hypothesizing how the Composer continuously creates an ongoing perfection with mankind uniquely qualified to comprehend that creation. Newton infamously said Hypothesis Non Fingo. Magister Newton also said through his magical biblical eschatology that the world will end in 2060. So too the nominalist logical positivist followers of Bertrand, Lord Russell declare that the second law of thermodynamics is all there is. Progress, you see in their mystical worldview is all for naught, no matter how many lifeless dimensions there are in the "landscape," all cows are infinitesimal black dark matter nothings...

How James Fenimore Cooper Foresaw the Twin Nightmares of Obama and Romney

From Cooper's novel Home as Found, which was panned by reviewers as too caustic a political manifesto and not mere entertainment, we have the following pertinent philippic from one of its protagonists:

 '' ...I allude to the very general disposition to confine political discussions to political men. Thus, the private citizen, who should presume to discuss a political question, would be deemed fair game for all who thought differently from himself. He would be injured in his pocket, reputation, domestic happiness, if possible; for, in this respect, America is much the most intolerant nation I have ever visited. In all other countries, in which discussion is permitted at all, there is at least the appearance of fair play, whatever may be done covertly; but here, it seems to be sufficient to justify falsehood, frauds, nay, barefaced rascality, to establish that the injured party has had the audacity to meddle with public questions, not being what the public chooses to call a public man. It is scarcely necessary to say that, when such an opinion gets to be effective, it must entirely defeat the real intentions of a popular government. (...) Instances are to be seen as often as a man is found freeman enough to have an opinion independent of party. It is not for connecting himself with party that a man is denounced in this country, but for daring to connect himself with truth. Party will bear with party, but party will not bear with truth." (My emphasis added)

 Now, dear reader you might have noticed how true these very words still ring especially today. Today, when we have the wretched display nightly of a Hollywood pornographic caricature of an election (and electorate.)

For who, in their right mind, would not be able to see through the charade that both parties are "only in it for the money?" No matter with what obsequious and pious  platitudes their bald face phony rhetoric attempts to woo the gullible Internet or television watching marks with so called biblical morality on one side or women's rights on the other. The game, you see, is all of a piece.

And the game of this political sideshow, dear reader, is to fleece not only the sick and elderly, as if that were not bad enough. The game is to kowtow to the looting depredations of the cabal of high finance that rigs the economy only in its favor. What we very simply have is an illicit creation of speculative debt by an oligarchy. The power behind the creation of  that debt is more sacrosanct to both parties than the very future of our nation (and humanity.) For in reality, both damnable parties agree that pay that illicit debt we must no matter what. And so they squabble furiously in the political muck and mire devouring each other while America burns.

So, had Cooper's America actually heeded what he had accurately limned in his day, we would not be in the pickle we have been in for these many years. At the time, the popular press scolded him for his politics with the hue and cry that the public only wanted pleasure from its novelists. Yes, give the people what it wants cries our latter day would be P.T. Barnums. Ah, but that's entertainment...What you see is what you get.

On Biophysical Cyclical Unity

Today I came across a rather thought provoking theoretical piece entitled "Can Resonant Oscillations of the Earth Ionosphere Influence the Human Brain Biorhythm?"

Riemann's exploration of various biophysical cycles and their interdependence in his vastly under-published philosophical "fragments" immediately suggests itself as a model here. His injunction that the normal sense certainty of soi disant common sense breaks down at the level of the very large and very small is instructive in this regard as well. For in what usual and ordinary way of thinking would connect cellular waves at the level of DNA and cosmic ones? Recently LaRouche brought attention to the remarkable weakness of the organ known as the brain when compared to actually creative human thought. 

Thus, the universe acts upon itself, by way of human endeavor, in such a way as to create a mission orientation. For we are entering into an era of cosmic ray intensification on the Andromeda side of our galaxy.