Paul Volcker's Latest Incarnation

Many years ago yours truly had the pleasure of challenging Mr Volcker to debate the merits of his handling of the economy. He did not stop but waltzed along at DFW airport. Today's Op-Ed in the NY Slimes evinces a true characterization of his ultima ratio.
He opines thusly: "Here in the United States as elsewhere, some of the largest and proudest financial institutions — including both investment and commercial banks — have been rescued or merged with the help of massive official funds."  
I retort pointedly: Mr Volcker, in heaven's name, exactly what justifies these institutions' pride in your opinion? Now as then, I doubt I'll get a response from this august personage.

New Ice Age Aphorisms

In this new ice age, whilst engaged in a snowball fight with the neighborhood AGW believer, it's a good idea to bring one's dog along for that special something extra.

Watch the Pollsters Attempt to Change the Agenda Now That Obama's Down for the Count

Boys and girls-- here's the new game in town. And it goes like this: The media, like the son of a mother dog that we so well know it to be, will forthwith put in for its usual Mutt and Jeff routine, now that Obama has incompetently run afoul of the Families' agenda. Polls are now going to show more and more Americans are excruciatingly worried about the deficit. Of course this is pure manipulation. The Republican party is ginning up this Simple Simon brand of Joe six pack falderol a la that s-l-o-w drawling Republican version of Al Gore's best schoolmarm imitation, Phil Gramm and his kitchen table economics for kindergarteners: Mr. and Mrs. America (he twangs): the government has to pay as you go just like you and me. Ergo, the Mutt and Jeff ragtime. So John Q., you aren't ready for deathcare euthanasia a la the Obama kill your granny meme? Well here's what you are telling us now you want in this latest poll: you demand budget cuts: soto voce--read Schachtian austerity. Come on, you know you want it. After all, money rules the world don't it? Pleased to meet you, I hope you guess my name. Woo hoo hoo. Hail her royal satanic majesty. Hail Satania!

Bin Laden Embraces Green Fascism

This just in from the BBC:

A new message said to be from al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has blamed global warming on the US and other big industrial nations."All industrial nations, mainly the big ones, are responsible for the crisis of global warming," the latest tape says.

"This is a message to the whole world about those who are causing climate change, whether deliberately or not, and what we should do about that."

So now Britain's Greenpeace,  Gore's Democrats, and Osama's Al Qaida share the same bed. How cozy! It wouldn't surprise this writer in the least to see Osama nominated to the board of the IPCC.  Or better yet, the Nobel peace prize. Looks like he has come home to Mother, as in MI5, that is.

Universal Relative Motion and Potential Energy Propagation as Subsumed By Creative Imagination

If you imagine the layerings of mere rotational (and thereby chiral) motions starting from the infinitesimal and continuously amalgamating toward the transcendent velocities of galactic groups, what you come away with should not be a path of a point. That would be to miss the continuously embedded toroidal subsumption of potential energy of which that point partakes. That toroidal form as a singularly deformed sphere propagates material waves externally as allowed by the surrounding medium through which it moves. However, on its surface, there is an orbital which at its extremum represents an alternation from negative to positive surface curvature. This is the chiral (or spiral) pathway from the toroidal pole through its inner equator, which is a point connecting two horns at center then continuing along the opposite horn and through the outer equator and back to the pole. For the mathematical imagination, the velocity of this rotation goes from zero to infinity. Thus providing a model for a metastable alternation of propagation of potential energy which anneals the shock wave velocity which is ever present here as the path along the negatively curved horn with the continuation along the positively curved outer spheroidal shell. And doesn't this model suggest a more general means for the universal annealing of the psycho-physical continuum, as distinct from the merely number line mathematical one?
Because as you move onto the domain of truly human cognition as the ability to create analogous singularities via revolutionary technological innovations, it becomes apparent that there exists an unending process of a potential chiral pathway through the propagation of the adoption of these technologies by society as it is able in a spherically propagated wavelike analogous way and onto the next such breakthrough.
Therefore, without the understanding that the noetic, creative impulse of humanity subsumes all we can know about merely physical subordinated systems we go off in a puerile, masturbatory quest like some theoretical physicist Don Juan's multiverse raised to the power of one thousand and three .
This metastatic model is akin to Leibniz' concept of monad, Cusa's microcosm macrocosm principle, and Plato's unspoken resolution of the Parmenedes paradox. It is what Sancho Panza solves in the governor bridge riddle: the power of mercy. In any epoch of human history, inevitably there is crisis. Why? Because creativity cannot sit still. The technological means of society's reducing power are necessarily limited and evanescent. Every culture thereby confronts its own demons. Zeus as the oligarch who punishes Aeschylus' Prometheus the fire bearer. That is to say, the creative spark latent in each and every one of us. This is the secret of the tragedy in Shakespeare's works. The imposition of a self destructive impulse upon the governance of men that would like Cronus eat its own children is the antithesis of this model. The principle is above the here and now: as scientific and artistic creativity it is truly immortal. Either you choose to embrace it or shun it at humanity's peril. You are at once free and yet constrained, dear reader. How else would you have it?

Eat your spinach! (and drink your coffee)

Learning and memory are fundamental brain functions affected by dietary and environmental factors. Here, we show that increasing brain magnesium using a newly developed magnesium compound (magnesium-L-threonate, MgT) leads to the enhancement of learning abilities, working memory, and short- and long-term memory in rats. The pattern completion ability was also improved in aged rats. MgT-treated rats had higher density of synaptophysin-/synaptobrevin-positive puncta in DG and CA1 subregions of hippocampus that were correlated with memory improvement. Functionally, magnesium increased the number of functional presynaptic release sites, while it reduced their release probability. The resultant synaptic reconfiguration enabled selective enhancement of synaptic transmission for burst inputs. Coupled with concurrent upregulation of NR2B-containing NMDA receptors and its downstream signaling, synaptic plasticity induced by correlated inputs was enhanced. Our findings suggest that an increase in brain magnesium enhances both short-term synaptic facilitation and long-term potentiation and improves learning and memory functions.

Spices, nuts, cereals, coffee, cocoa, tea, and vegetables are rich sources of magnesium. Green leafy vegetables such as spinach are also rich in magnesium as they contain chlorophyll which is rich in magnesium. Observations of reduced dietary magnesium intake in modern Western countries as compared to earlier generations may be related to food refining and modern fertilizers which contain no magnesium.

"Conan Obama"

I must say: we are amused...

Womanizing

Shea-Porter: Send the men home and Congress could pass health care reform

 In some of her most incendiary comments to date, Democratic Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter (NH-01) claimed on Saturday that female Republican members of Congress have confided in her, in the ladies room, no less, that if they could just send the male members of Congress home they could pass health care reform by the weekend.

 Must be Shea-Porter's opinion of women is a little low. I put this question to her: If as you say quite rightly, I believe, that it's the women that provide care for their family members, why would they vote for legislation that will ration their care with an "independent expert advisory board" called IMAB? (Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls if you dare.)

And now for something entirely different...

70-year gag on Kelly death evidence (Dr. David Kelly)

Hail Britannia! The exemplar for liberal democracies everywhere.

"Why are America's teens getting so fat?"

Mayhaps they have been convinced by the mis-educators in this once great country of ours that we truly are the "consumer society." Oh, and I almost forgot, considering that lolling upon one's derrière is a weighty cause as well, the "information society."

Is President Obama Acting Fishy? (A Metaproof.)

Dear reader, you may recall some months ago -- I believe it was in August -- that the President's communications director asked Obama partisans to report to her all things (chain emails and the like) fishy in opposition to her principal's health care cause. Now, Ms. Douglas' use of  the word "fishy" in this context, I believe, was not as accidental as it first might appear. Let us pause for a moment to consider this. As many a wag thereafter immediately concluded (including yours truly, of course) she was in essence insinuating for the word "fishy" the meaning "seditious." But she couldn't just come right out and say that. Why? Because then all the old shibboleths that liberals were really fascists in sheep's clothing would come home to roost. (((I know, (sigh) I just really upset the immiscible metaphor purists here.(Ugh!))) But let's dig a bit deeper here, shall we? What was Linda (I hope I'm not being overly familiar here, after all she did come into my living room via the boob tube) referring to in her ponderously, seemingly nonchalant and ill-chosen way? (Remember, after ll, she is the so called communcations director.) What and where are these home grown chain emails she bespoke?

Let us interpolate here some reflections upon the matter of what constitutes "proof" in cases such as the one before us. Now, Mr. Leibniz pretty much coined the the concept of "sufficient reason." (If one can be said to have "coined" a concept, that is.) The exemplar of the most elegant usage of this  methodology takes us far afield from the topic that I broached above. (However, not too far, given the identity and namesake of this blog.) Recall, if you will, the so-called "Longfellow Wars" that Mr. Poe engaged in. Ah, but this does give some little piquancy  to that oft quoted bit of doggerel: "He's a poet and didn't know it because his nose is a Longfellow." (With apologies to Messers Sterne and Gogol. They of Tristram Shandy and The Nose eclat, you see.) But, I digress. Back to the issue at hand. In that series of verbal rencounters, if you will,  betwixt Edgar and Longfellow's pseudonymous defender Outis, ((((("nobody" in school boy Greek (probably plagiarized from Homer.(!))) ((I hope that's quite enough parentheses. (My Kingdom for an editor.))))))  the issue was not so much a plagiarism in the sense of a "word for word type" plagiarism, but rather, the more hard to prove and thereby more devious one of plagiarizing content.

Now, what has this to do with the by now dimly remembered issue referenced above?, the restive reader will be seeming to urge. To wit: Ms. Douglas was unconsciously practicing the principle that the great Schiller illumined in The Cranes of Ibykus. Which is to say, she is covering for an hysterical reaction (a freakout, in common parlance) by Obama's inner circle (read especially Rahm Emanuel,) to the exposure of the content of the healthcare legislation. You see earlier that year as Mr. Emanuel's brother Ezekiel was testifying on behalf of the principle of "cost containment" in healthcare, he was unceremoniously taken to task in no uncertain terms, i.e. as a fascist, by Tony Chaitkin, a LaRouche partisan. Ms. Douglas would not want to bring any attention to this, because it is de rigueur, in such circles, never  refer to LaRouche by name,thereby giving him too much credit,  rather to either pronounce the words "extremist" or in this case the rather watered down term of "fishy." Not to alienate the "Reagan Democrats" more than necessary. Remember, Sarah Palin was calling the IMAB provisions, death panels by now. Republicans in general were openly criticizing the bill as leading to rationing on the floor of the Congress. So, frankly speaking, there was no need for Ms. Douglas to be so obtuse in her warning of fishy emails, in the tradition of erstwhile usage of the term "dark forces" by Politburo types. Did she somehow want to track Mr.or Mrs. Jones surrepticious visits to certain "dark forces" websites?

Well now you see the results of this type of behavior among the Obamaites and their media hangers-on. Even the pollsters, a notoriously obfuscating bunch, are showing overwhelming popular resistance, and I use that term advisedly, to the healthcare legislation. So how does Barack react to the disastrous election of  Scott Brown in Massachusetts? Fishily. One: change the subject. Talk about  jobs, jobs, jobs. Throw Geithner under the bus. Bring Volker in as a placebo to the "populists." Two: connive in mysterious ways behind the scenes to get the budget cutting IMAB provision in no matter what. Very fishy, indeed. QED.

(Kudos to eLLUMINATI BLOG for the spectacular image above.)

Tomes of Forgotten Lore

"Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Memphis have released a new study on linguistic evolution that challenges the prominent hypothesis for why languages differ throughout the world."

 It seems as if the academic field of linguistics has long ago forgotten what philology was. Wilhelm von Humboldt described the social parameters of the development of language far more convincingly in "The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind" some 174 years ago!

OBAMA SAYS I WANT YOU (IN THE GRAVE)

I WANT YOU (IN THE GRAVE)

Behaviorists Behaving Badly

Studying animals in behavioral experiments has been a cornerstone of psychological research, but whether the observations are relevant for human behavior has been unclear. Weill Cornell Medical College researchers have identified an alteration to the DNA of a gene that imparts similar anxiety-related behavior in both humans and mice, demonstrating that laboratory animals can be accurately used to study these human behaviors.

While it is clear that humans may behave as animals behave in the grip of such emotions, what is not clear is whether behaviorists know that which irretrievably distinguishes humans from animals. Reason, i.e., the uniquely demonstrated human capacity to alter the supposed fixed laws of predator prey relationships via noesis.

More Krugman Dross

Professor Krugman opines:

“we really don’t know what it will take to rein in health costs”

I retort:

Not true, it’s quite simple: pull the plug on granny with the IMAB provision in the bill (not just her hip replacement.) Don’t know what that is? I wonder why?

Lilliputians redux

Director Oliver Stone’s upcoming Showtime documentary miniseries “Secret History of America” promises to put mass murderers such as Stalin and Hitler “in context.”

Only fools in a cave, somewhere, watching shadows on the wall, believe in earnest that left vs. right is anything other than a contrived pile of manure a la Jonathan Swift's Lilliputian fable. So, one can only hope that some little truth comes out here. Such as how Versailles' Treaty imposed uncollectable reparations, thereby allowing Hitler to be sponsored by the likes of W's grandfather. Today's ecofascism is of a piece with this history of manipulation.

The Vision of God in a Snowfall

If one walks facing the sun among the new fallen snow, glancing at the right attitude, one sees a remarkable vision and theodicy: the flakes act as prisms and glitter thousands of primary colors consecutively. Hats off to Nicholas of Cusa and Leibniz. What more proof of God does anyone deserve than this?

Googlefascism

The company in mid-December pledged on its blog "Going green at Google" that it was going to make its operations carbon-neutral and reduce greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

One big challenge for search engines is to implement a measure of quality that is not based solely on popularity. Search engines must determine both relevance (is the item pertinent to the user's query?) and quality (is the item inherently accurate, useful and understandable, independent of the query?). Current relevance measures do reasonably well. Measures of quality require better models of the concepts and relations expressed in documents and how they relate to the reality of the world, as well as models of the trustworthiness of authors. Thus, a site that claims that the Moon landings were a hoax and seems to have a coherent argument structure will be judged to be lower quality than a legitimate astronomy site, because the premises of the hoax argument are at odds with reality. Understanding and improving these models is a key challenge for the coming decade.

It is becoming obvious with this announcement and the piece from a Google bigwig in the latest Nature rag that states that they want to control the quality of information in searches in the future that this is quite the neo-fascist outfit.

(It is next to impossible, since Microsoft removed it from their code, to get a good Google logo with the o character transposed to a swastika as is meet to illustrate the principle, but as an optimist, I am sure this will be forthcoming soon.)