The Plain and Simple Facts "Like the Old Woman's Dance"

Benjamin Franklin gave away the lightning rod in the spirit of Cotton Mather’s principle of doing good. He also told the lady as he left the convention “a constitution if you can keep it.” Alexander Hamilton established a National Bank upon Benjamin Franklin’s treatise on paper money. Aaron Burr fraudulently created what later became Chase Manhattan Bank. Aaron Burr killed Hamilton. Burr’s acolyte Martin Van Buren and his stooge Andrew Jackson destroyed the Second National Bank and caused a great depression. Today, Chase and City of London cohorts created derivatives.

Promissory Notes and Childish Delusions

The glue that binds us as a society to long term acceptance of control by the arbitrary moneyed powers that be seems to begin almost as if by magic within our very own language cultures' acceptation of very arbitrary paradigms. The mind's mysterious workings hinge upon certain deceptively simple ingrained habits that form a sort of template for thematic continuing inner dialogues. (This is, for example, why musical dialogue holds us in such sway.)

For instance, take the concept of a promise. Children in preparation for adulthood imitate in their play that pervasive currency of "civilized society," i.e., the use of money. Now anyone who has pondered even slightly on the question will admit that at best money is a useful fiction when it serve legitimate aims and at worst the means of producing great evil among us. (See the history of Hamilton's National Bank and Burr's Chase Manhattan.) All based upon a promise to pay. But then again like so many seemingly simple concepts, most of us hardly even stop to consider of what the basis for their actual truth or falsehood might consist. We instead "live our lives" and are content to "let the devil take the hindmost."

Yet every so often the illusions that so beguile us fall away and we may be able to reflect that our childish beliefs will need to be discarded if we wish to survive. We have been at such a crossroads for humanity ever since the point at which we obtained the terrible power to literally destroy ourselves through nuclear conflagration as a species. And now the promises of the "powers that be" are being exposed for what they always were...

Old Themes of Mental Deficits Re-emerge

It is no illusion and undeniable that Shakespeare had a nonpareil and astonishingly wonderful facility with the English language. Much of this was due to his inimitable dramatic genius for carrying out strategic campaigns on stage to prick the consciences of his current and future audiences. However, his age also had the advantage of certain linguistic capabilities built into the very grammar of their mode of communication which are almost completely discarded nowadays. The most salient of these being the use of the subjunctive. The gradual loss of that particular usage were in itself indicative of a consequent damning loss of the intellectual power of English speaking society to contemplate alternatives for its future. Wilhelm von Humboldt life's work in philology proceeded along these lines of inquiry, for instance.

Another such loss which I have remarked is the very connection with verbal meanings being replaced by utilitarian nominalisms. For example, in Fenimore Cooper's novel The Crater I read that his protagonist Mark pulls the "draw of a secretary" desk. Now up until that very moment of my nearly sixty years on this planet, it never once dawned upon me that a drawer is in fact a draw-er. The verbal action of drawing being erased from meaningfulness altogether. Another woeful loss of intellectual power for us that English speakers in the days of Shakespeare still had.

Another form of loss of intellectual power is evident in our supposed brain research. The rampant reductionism in the of study of brain chemistry and neurology is appalling. So it was an unexpected breath of fresh air to come across a write up of some recent research: "‘Brain waves’ challenge area-specific view of brain activity." The paper describes detection of standing waves (solitons) in the brain cortex which cannot be attributed to a specified locus. This certainly coheres with the principle of non-reductionist gestalt psychology and which hopefully will gain some traction in some otherwise dismal swamps...

Happy Birthday to Vladimir Vernadsky's Leibnizian Legacy

This week there were two remarkable discoveries reported that further establish the prescience of Vernadsky's pioneering concept of the evolution of the biosphere. Coincidentally, March 12th was his 150th birthday.

The astounding first discovery of hydrogen oxidizing microorganisms deep beneath the oceanic crust extends the principle of biospheric evolution beyond solar energetic biochemistry to lithospheric chemosynthetic life.

The second discovery furthers our understanding of circadian clock control of chloroplasts at the site of photosynthesis in plants.

The question for astrobiology is whether this circadian mechanism is necessary for life and if so can it be transmuted to other perhaps habitable exoplanets. The recent discovery of deeply buried hydrogen based life forms under the oceanic crust might exhibit an alternative biological geochemical timing mechanism. Leibniz' qualification of necessary and sufficient reason for ontological proof of potential living evolution seems perfectly applicable in this context.

The American Achilles Heel: Mobocracy or The Sorry Illusion of Democracy

How would one, if one were of such a persuasion, compel the neophyte democrat in the brave new world of America to willingly bow down and submit to his superiors just like any good subject to the throne? Well suppose we get up some sort of debonair crooners with the "bad boy" taint about them and have them constantly chased by a mob of screaming teenage boppers. Yes, just the thing. Whom the gods would destroy and all that...

Now this all must be done with the transparent and everlasting appeal to "popularity." That is the gold standard to be wielded with an ever so light of a touch. Let them believe and become enthralled by the illusion of freedom of choice. The gossamer web that binds them without so much as a shrug. "Everybody is doing the locomotion." That's entertainment...

There once was a stage here in the wilderness of our own making upon these American shores where we sold our chartered rights from our betters for the proverbial mess of pottage. And there once was a time when our leading lights, men of letters among them, pondered aloud over how best to break the chains of illusion that manacled our ambulatory American victims headlong toward their own destruction.

Once upon a midnight dreary, Poe wrote that Cooper was the leader of the "quietists" here, in this here American frontier. Now, granted that Cooper did warn against what he named as the "oligarchy" manipulating the crude American rubes. The problem wasn't that there was some fundamental argument between Poe and Cooper...they shared the same enemies. The problem was all about tactics about what was to be done to somehow prick the conscience. How to hold up the mirror to the public in a way that would prevent rank and ruthless characters such as Aaron Burr from manipulating the untutored "cowboys" to forgo their very birthright. Thus was born, for instance, the Bank of Manhattan right under the very nose of that most remarkable patriotic (though island-born) genius (and quondam Burr co-adjudicator) Alexander Hamilton. Aaron Burr, Iagolike, playing upon the naive good faith mentality of Franklin's lightning rod promotion of doing the good, managed to set up a water company in New York that through a loophole in the law that Burr created became the touchstone for all that is deservedly hated today as "Wall Street."

So Cooper edified and forewarned of the brutish methods with a tale of the treachery of the false flag Serenissima Republic of Venice, The Bravo. Poe concentrated for his part on exposing how the ruthless use the antics of the mob to disorder and disease the body politic in his many and varied peculiar tales. Today, unless the reader is "in on" the targets of these very same tales such as Andrew Jackson and Aaron Burr's protege Martin Van Buren (the bane of John Quincy Adams) they fall upon deaf ears as some Gothic and "macabre" relics of popular entertainment's forgotten lore.

Well, dear readers, that is my tale for this good night...And so to sleep.

What is the Essentiality of Genius?

One of those ideas or notions that somehow erupts upon your consciousness almost as if it needs no explanation for its raison d'être is named genius. Now Einstein, as well as Leonardo. rightfully is the "gold standard" both in the domain of reputation and the true nature of that which constitutes genius. But Leibniz is by and large unfortunately unknown to the English speaking public other than as a mere dull algebraic formula for force. As such, this is a travesty. Because Leibniz is a much more multi-faceted exemplar of my subject here. To the point--not only did he provide the fruit of his mental acuity to futurity, he also established the rationale for precisely how "all men are created equal." 

At this pass, dear reader, we are brought to a veritable whale of a paradox. For instance, why would anyone be driven to burn the midnight oil upon a perhaps utterly quixotic such quest as we now have before ourselves? Shelley would have it that we, as true citizens of eternity, are but mere vessels or aeolian harps upon the hopeful ever ascending waves of progress as Heraclitus imagined. 

But knowing that what should be the most natural disposition of mankind, i.e. genius, why in this wide world of our experience is such a preciously miserable bare quantum  actually of the stuff present and actively evolving? For is it not entirely conceivable that once we as a species are come off this wonderful orb that we were individually made all for something much, much better? And there my friends is the rub. For that beauty which can only be rightfully attributed to a universal process is indwelling and needs must be reproduced among us if we are to accomplish this stage of our unremitting and splendid yet entirely daunting mission. 

Why Accumulation and Control of "Information" is De Facto Destructive

Today, we are assured that the security of information is a goal of quantum computer research. The prevention of the capability of a "suicidal regime" to produce a hydrogen bomb and the protection of the encrypted codes that can access bank repositories from criminal enterprises of "bad actors" would be among the motivations for such research. Now, all of this presupposes a particular paranoid working model of "human nature" as the very basis of scientific epistemology.

The assumption is that governance by greed and superstition are immovably fixed features of human relations. One might liken this to the absurd axiom of Newton's followers applied at large to humanity that an object at rest remains at rest. Which  is nothing more than an apology for the prescriptions from the likes of Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham of maintaining control of human affairs by a supposed enlightened oligarchical elite (see the Panopticon or Leviathan) in perpetuity.

This is all part and parcel, for instance, of the fanatic promotion of imitation of Roman bread and circuses by Hollywoodesque "infotainment's" mawkish fawning over "the Royals" and the hundreds of billions misspent on sports stadia.financed by government largess and exorbitant usurious student loans. We have collectively been swindled far, far worse than the proverbial Essau in selling our futurity for this worse than mess of pottage.

 The difference in scientific principles at the time of the crucial potential transformation of Britain's statecraft with the Hannoverian succession between Leibniz and the Newtonians or Cartesians is still today most relevant to resolving the current twin strategic financial and geopolitical crises. The idea of fixed objects colliding with other objects in motion preserving a quantum of  entropic momentum versus a least action force of acceleration in transformation of work to improve future potential power over nature for humanity's benefit is still the crucial unresolved question.

The specious ideology of an information age, "consumer driven" rock/drugs/sex economy is nothing but an imitation of a carnival barkers freak show in essence. The accumulation of drivel by sophisticated mathematical at ever higher definition via Markov chains or Monte Carlo statistics remains nevertheless purely drivel. However, if instead we imagine a successful implementation and righting of the ship of state based upon returning to the Constitution constructed by Franklin's promise of a government set up to do the good then we on this planet will prosper.

The Subversively Ironic Joke of the Diotima Principle in Art and Science

In Shakespeare's the Merchant of Venice, Portia, like Mozart's Pamina in the Magic Flute performs a service that is emblematic of dissolving the obscurantism of superstition of symbolic magic of that particular time and era. This recurring principle reverts to all so called mystery religions from time immemorial worship of a infantile belief in the Sibyl in mythology. In every instance great artists have exposed the oligarchic use of "mind control," or perhaps better "below the belt" control.

For Shakespeare the target is the then current Cabalistic (with a capital C) Rosicrucians of the Tudor court. For Mozart it is the ritual of masonic Magick (with the obligatory ending "k.") So too did Cervantes utilize Dulcinea del Toboso as the joke against the Spanish soap opera quality in romantic fantasizing.

As I have attempted to advance from time to time in these pages a rebirth of method of anti symbolic truth seeking reverts always to the classical radical anti oligarchy philosophy embedded in Plato's method of questioning the underlying hypotheses of society's ruling assumptions. So too, properly situated, did Bernhard Riemann's Hypothesen, lead to the undermining later of Bertrand Russell's symbolic (or magical) logic by Riemann's acolyte Gödel.

Just as in Dante Alighieri's Beatrice and Beethoven's Fidelio, so too in Plato's Diotima an overturning of the oligarchy's hold over a superstitious and manipulated audience evolves. Here, as with LaRouche, from the adumbration of what Leibniz held as sufficient reason, does the categorical separation of art from science become inconsequentially meaningless.

A Diplomatic Proposal

In keeping with the recent Hollywood basketball "great dunk forward" diplomacy and to acknowledge the needless immiseration of millions of hungry children shared by our two countries, it is hereby proposed that the lovely first lady of North Korea be permitted to present the Oscars at next year's Academy Award ceremony.

Reflection on Obama's Jedi Mind Meld Comment

It has been noted in passing from time to time, that when Barack Obama forgoes his teleprompter and talks off the cuff he shows signs of, shall we charitably say, mental confusion. I have written in the past of the signs of the President's impending mental breakdown.  Of course, to be sure, Obama has at his disposal a battery of mental health professionals who can monitor and intervene.

Here is a President daily signing off on drone strikes against Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan and Yemen at the same time he and his wife display an inordinate amount of gushing fixation on Hollywood icons and sports superstars. Compare this for what its worth with North Korea's Kim Jong Un's recent public fascination with Dennis Rodman. Meanwhile, we are hurtling apace toward twin financial and geopolitical disasters... Perhaps it may have been a miscalculation by the wizards of Wall Street and The City to gamble their all on Obama, the erstwhile president of The Choom Gang.

Now we hear him stating that he isn't a dictator able to do a "Jedi mind meld" with the republicans on the sequestration. By sheer coincidence, it would seem, scientists researching murine neurology have announced that they have performed a sort mind meld between two spatially separated rats over the Internet. I believe that some reflection on the overarching metaphor of the juxtaposition of these events is perhaps in order.