Poll: Obama is still popular abroad

Good, maybe he will renounce his citizenship and run for King of Sweden where he flim-flammed his "Peace Prize," while we are engaged in multiple wars around the world, including the latest one in Libya makes him impeachable. (We could only be so lucky...)

The Lessons of America's Lack of Mission and Loss of Aesthetic Beauty

Washington's farewell, Lincoln's Gettysburg, Eisenhower's warning, and Kennedy's mission statement taken together constitute a kind of continuum of elements of an American poetic principle. For that principle was forged out of the necessity of bringing about a revolution against the evil of the decadence of Europe's royal rot.

What is truly American in literature, music and art cannot be confined merely to what has been produced on these shores alone. In truth, from the perspective of the grand purpose set forth for America as an antidote to the cancer of the oligarchy infesting Europe, Beethoven and Schiller, for example, are heralds of what America must be as a beacon for the world. Keats was attacked mercilessly because his spirit was sensed to be too American by his sycophantic critics.

Contrast, if you will, the soldier carrying the poems of Schiller in the spirit of the sacrifice of William Tell and Jeanne d'Arc to war of liberation against Napoleon with the nightmare of the baby boomer draftee in the jungle of Viet Nam dosed with the acid rock hymns of Jimmy Hendrix or the Rolling Stones as a kind of numbing soporific. Amidst the bloodshed on the field there is another war here is for the soul of humanity...Contrast now how this higher sort of battlefield of the mind begat the pestilence of Nietzsche and Wagner's Hitler.

 What was always at stake? The destruction of the power of the idea of doing the Good for the sake of future generations. So the moral compromise made by one generation turning away from this mission is exploited so long as the power of the purse remains in the hands of the enemies of that founding principle. It is clear that we need uplifting of the soul of beauty even at this late hour. And who shall heed the call?

The Definition of Insanity Revisited

It is well known that Einstein was self evidently correct when he stated that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and again after it has proven to be a failure. Let us extend this principle to the behavior of society at large. Today we are gripped with a fanatical attempt by the powers that be to save the paper value of debt by inflicting brutal austerity on the elderly, ill, and dispossessed citizens of this planet. History is littered with enough such failed attempts to do just this that have always led to tragedy. World War II was the catastrophic result of the latest such bankers' experiment. Yet we are constantly being  told today by the press sewers that we have no choice but to impose the same policies again.

Thus, the magical belief that monetary value is sacrosanct is insanity writ large. It is high time for us to break with the past and enact reforms in the tradition going back as far in the past as the reforms of Solon of Athens and as recently as Alexander Hamilton's creation of the American system of sovereign credit. The unpayable gambling debts created out of thin air by the financial oligarchy must be repudiated and we must set a new course for our economy that is sane: credit for projects that will sustain our people in the here and now and out to the foreseeable future.

Olympians--Petraeus Inamorado

Tarpley writes: "If the US ruling elite should decide to jettison Obama, look for Petraeus’ star to rise at the expense of the “bunch of cranks” populating the current Republican field which is “the weakest since 1940,” in the words of John Weaver of the Huntsman camp."

I could not agree more with this assessment...

Flim Flam Crazy Obama

This from Ms Dowd: "Now Obama offers his own version of the split-personality presidency: Do we get Energizer Barry or Enervating Barry?...It’s still impossible to sum up what Obama’s presidency is about right now, except saving his own job."

As I have so often averred this... er... President is a con man, who cares only for how his image is doing. Nothing more nor less. He will stop at nothing to please those that pay his bills, even if it kills us...

Serious Stuff

This morning I come across something seemingly quite prodigious: The Biological Big Bang: The First Oceans of Primordial Planets at 2-8 Million Years Explain Hoyle/Wickramasinghe Cometary Panspermia

Behold! Let there be light! But there was not much here for me. For my poor reason was confounded. How comes it that all these models start out with a bang and then peter out ever and anon and yet...then mirabile dictu something fantastic haps that makes one rub one's eyes in pure amaze. Life! Zounds! 

So from the run down of the big bang into ever more disorder of space and matter we get...a wholly new never before seen higher order of stuff we call life? What? How? But this seems like some sort of sorcery. Hmm. How to save our oh so scientific law of universal entropy? Maybe we can afford an exception and still save our darling law? Yes. How about that? Maybe it's a lemma...

1. Big bang!

2. Universal entropy

2.2 Regional negative entropy (Panspermia)

2.2.1 Life 

2.2.2 Humans

Oh ho! The fever is over! The illusion called living is over at last! Thanks Maxwell! Thanks Heisenberg! Now I can rest assured. La!

(Apologies to Mr Poe, inter alia)

Game Theory and Oligarchy

It has always been my reading that among the means of suppression of natural human creativity by an oligarchic clique is to in effect bottle it up in a sort of labyrinth of "games." The writing of Pascal on the subject of why the ruler must be amused so that the horror of his own Ozymandian downfall need not be contemplated. It is ironically significant then that Pascal's work on probabilities of game playing led to Leibniz' development of a singularly powerful tool for improving human productivity: the calculus. Today we have Bill Gates, "artificial intelligence," and video games. (Oh, and Obama's quaint fixation on basketball.)

Now, it is not as if there is some "vast conspiracy" out there to capture the mind of man and rob it of a useful application. Rather, it is a worldview that produces a certain type of output. It is through the slavish acceptance of certain "common sense" axioms that we as a society are ensnared.

Such as: "money rules the world." Why? One might ask. But to ask such is to deny the certainties of one's senses. Why, it is the way of all flesh, thou dolt! It would be like denying that you are ruled by the principles of pleasure and pain. Like denying the right of Caesar, or King George, or the George Bushes...
And now dear reader enough folderol. Behold the latest very learned essay on games and artificial intelligence and tremble:

Measuring Intelligence through Games

Tom Schaul, Julian Togelius, Jürgen Schmidhuber

(Submitted on 6 Sep 2011)

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to research aimed at tackling the full problem of artificial intelligence, that is, create truly intelligent agents. This sets it apart from most AI research which aims at solving relatively narrow domains, such as character recognition, motion planning, or increasing player satisfaction in games. But how do we know when an agent is truly intelligent? A common point of reference in the AGI community is Legg and Hutter's formal definition of universal intelligence, which has the appeal of simplicity and generality but is unfortunately incomputable. Games of various kinds are commonly used as benchmarks for "narrow" AI research, as they are considered to have many important properties. We argue that many of these properties carry over to the testing of general intelligence as well. We then sketch how such testing could practically be carried out. The central part of this sketch is an extension of universal intelligence to deal with finite time, and the use of sampling of the space of games expressed in a suitably biased game description language.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Museo_del_Prado_-_Goya_-_Caprichos_-_No._39_-_Asta_su_Abuelo.jpg

My, my...Very learned, indeed...

Thoughts on Joseph Conrad

What really is at the bottom of all worthwhile literature? Take the case of one Polish ex-patriot in the heart of darkness of her majesty's Empire. To put a fine point on it, the literary tradition of combating the evils of the Empire is nowhere so evident for those that read not merely to be entertained than in the writings of Joseph Conrad. Take for instance the creation of the proverbial lone assassin zombie (derivation: see Old Man of the Mountain) in his novel The Secret Agent. Jump to Lee Harvey Oswald's curious declaration before his prearranged demise "I am a patsy." Or read his Nostromo for how an intelligence asset goes off the reservation. Then see Qaddafi's curious career starting at the royal Sandhurst academy. Now we hear of Qaddafi's loyal cooperation in the spooky practice of renditions of al Qaeda operatives. Ah, Perfide Albion.
See The Bravo by James Fenimore Cooper for the Venetian roots of today's City of London wetworks.

The Ineluctable Realities of "Political Economy" Rips Off the Mask Sometimes

So we now hear that German EU commissioner Herr Oettinger is calling for Greece to be governed by technocrats from the EU to enforce austerity. Unspeakable effrontery! Hasn't this happened to Greece a few times before? Maybe just last century?

Deconstructing Obama

In all the hoopla re Obama's jobs speech, I guess the liberal denizens of the media haven't noticed that Obama's payroll tax extension is a backdoor and rather devious attack on Social Security, Hmm? Take a deep breath and think about this for a moment, if you please. Look (grand)ma: no more Social Security!

Why The Muse Eludes Even The Well Intentioned

William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity displays a rare talent for ferreting out metaphorical irony in Keats, Shakespeare, and especially Shelley, who he fully "got." It is a downright shame though that he swallows whole hog the poppycock that Poe was some sort of peyote eating lunatic a la Aleister Crowley. In fact, Poe spent his literary life exposing just such charlatans. The idea that his verse is mere surface and just so much pretty (or noxious) noise (here Empson cynically shoves The Bells at us as proof) is fallacious.

Poe realized that the Boston Brahmin "frogpondians" were engaged in a mission to betray the purpose of America's founding. This he stated over and again in a myriad of ways throughout his works. (Empson's praise for T.S. Elliot is significant in this regard.) The mystical and mellifluous babble of these would be transcendentalists is nowhere exhibited more perfectly than from the prose of one Amos Bronson Alcott. To wit:

"Nature is quick with spirit. In eternal systole and diastole, the living tides course gladly along, incarnating organ and vessel in their mystic flow. Let her pulsations for a moment pause on their errands, and creation's self ebbs instantly into chaos and invisibility again. The visible world is the extremist wave of that spiritual flood, whose flux is life, whose reflux death, efflux thought, and conflux light. Organization is the confine of incarnation,—body the atomy of God."

Alcott's, like his admirer Thoreau's, Utopian fiascoes were part and parcel of the British sponsored anti-science irrationality imported by way of Calcutta, among other haunts of their opium trade. (Of which the Boston blue blood merchant vessels of the Lowells, et al. enjoyed their fair share as Tory sympathizers.) It is this inane type of twaddle that Poe so artfully excoriates in "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," for instance. Poe's criticism is continually aimed at routing out and ridiculing this very sort of non sense for the American reading public. This is the same sort of behaviorist and deconstructionist rot that the American Psychological Association's style book of symbolic mysticism imposes on our woe betid students today.

So what was the "hidden metaphor" in poems like Annabelle Lee, that Empson, and his ilk, couldn't appreciate? What but the very soul of beauty under attack here upon these American shores...

PBS Deletes Obama Historical Gaffe from Speech Claiming Lincoln Founded Republican Party

Obama, an illustrious Harvard professor cannot stoop to proof read the material he reads from a teleprompter. T'would be infradig.


Postscript: Mea culpa. It turns out that this may have been an ad lib by our esteemed President. Lack a day! He is loosing it.

Prince Charles Warns of Global Extinction Due to Too Much Human Consumption

Let us American patriots decode what the royal rubbish that balmy Prince Charles is spewing really means: "What we need is a global government to enforce population reduction of  genetically inferior wogs by whatever means necessary so that we of superior bloodlines may procreate as we please."

Thus the prince proves himself a fit successor to her Satanic Majesty's request.

This is the ugly face of why we fought and won the Revolutionary War. Unfortunately, most of my fellow Americans are so besotted by the very same monarchy's sponsorship of the hallucinatory Age of Aquarius that outright and pure evil is heralded as "pop culture" day after day ...

Shadows of Immortality

The poetic muse Calliope ever and anon dwells in the shadowland. Will your wit deserve to live on in writ?  If it serves an immortal purpose adequately, then yes it will. What is that? It is written even in the stones, if you know what question needs asking. Less imperfection is our willful destiny as a species. And we honor that perforce willingly or not...That irony is the soul of wit. Now we that we should be astonished that spacetime has a preferred direction rather than being blown up like a spherical balloon. Perhaps even the oh so learned professors of believing only in childish models in place of the ongoing creation will stop and ponder on higher themes, oh muse of mine.

Keynesians, Neocons, Libertarians...Oh my!

All this palaver over nothing...The problem is that monetarists whether they be neo-liberal Keynesians, free market deregulators, or libertarian followers of Ayn Rand have no inkling whatsoever that there is a science of physical economy.
The fact is that there must be a reckoning with the literally quadrillions of worthless debt that was created by financial houses like Goldman Sachs. The return to the FDR era's Glass-Steagall regulation would allow this nightmare to be reined in. We must pull the plug on the too big to fail financial houses. Without this, all this sound and fury is just a tragicomic farce...

Why I can't let this one go

Normally I take little notice of the grammatical or spelling peccadilloes of contemporaries. But sometimes the outre rears its head and I must take heed. Today's NY Times comment section displays one such case. In it appears a comment by a professed "English PhD." The following sentence is verbatim:

But we found ourselves out of sink with the era of "greed is good." 

Perhaps this is a sine of the end times for our poor, brutalized language.

More Solyndra Funnies

Let's see... According to the Bloomberg article, Taxpayers Rank Behind Solyndra Investors, George Kaiser bundled $50,000 to $100,000 for Obama's election campaign and then Solyndra gets $385 million from Obama, which the  George Kaiser Family Foundation which has a 35.7% stake in. Now that's quite a multiplier effect: 385,000,000 divided by say 75,000 is 513.333...This is even better than Goldman Sachs Mortgage  Backed Securities Ponzi scheme. Too bad that solar energy is a complete and utter fraud (like Obama.) Of course, Mr. Kaiser denies any personal stake in Solyndra...

Even Ms. Snarky Maureen Dowd Is Speaking Some Truths

"On MSNBC, the anchors were wistfully listening to old F.D.R. speeches, wishing that this president had some of that fight. But Obama can’t turn into F.D.R. for the campaign because he aspires to the class that F.D.R. was a traitor to; and he can’t turn into Harry Truman because he lacks the common touch. He has an acquired elitism."


Albeit half truths, for like Harry Truman, Obama is a property of the City of London and Wall Street (although his value is fading fast.)

"Former MI5 Chief Wants America And Britain To Talk With Al-Qaeda, Work Out “Political Settlement”"

That Perfide Albion should act so should surprise no one. Look at the  way the cousin of the Queen, George W. always walked hand in hand with the Salafist Saudis funding Al Qaeda. Look also at the way the funding for the 911 conspirators by the Saudi royalty has been covered up time and again. MI5/6 has closed the books on the spurious and risible grounds of national security on the BAE/al Yamamah arms deal investigation that provided the dough for Prince Bandar who is part and parcel of the same funding apparatus...The 911 commission's finding on the Saudi funding for the terrorists has been withheld. While all commercial flights were ordered to halt after 911 by Bush, the family of Osama bin Laden were given an exception by the self same administration and flown back to Saudi..Qui Bono?

CIA Ghostwriting Qaddafi Anti- WMD Weapons Speech?

One wonders whether by some quirk of fate that the said ghostwriter might not have been the very same individual who penned Obama's Nobel peace prize...It certainly would smack of the typical hypocrisy one might sniff out along the fetid swampy shores of the Potomac these days...

The Paradise of Celestial Visions

In Dante's immortal comedy it is fitting that he adopts the vision of a sort of relativity. For Dante the Creator has no bounds in the universe and thereby man in His image must have none either. So Dante is escorted by Beatrice to the moon and looks back to behold the blue orb of the earth. Here seven centuries later we have the reality in our hands. The paradise of this vision is to fashion humanity's purpose of continuous creative progress to no bounds.The Earth in this panorama from Saturn's eclipse is a seemingly insignificant blue dot. Yet upon that dot is playing out a hopeful comedy whose result is yet unclear. The spirit of Aeschylus would have us free Prometheus. And so we must strive.

Breaking: Qaddafi Worked for MI6 and CIA in Their Renditions of Al Qaeda

So from this we can conclude that Qaddafi believed that he had a sweetheart deal with the MI6 and CIA. After all, he is a graduate of Sandhurst, don't you know, old boy? But then again, I suppose there is no honor among thieves. (Except for W. Look at the way he has always walked hand in hand with the Salafist Saudis funding Al Qaeda. Look also at the way the funding for the 911 conspirators by the Saudi royalty has been covered up time and again. MI5/6 has closed the books on the spurious and risible grounds of national security on the BAE/al Yamamah arms deal that provided the dough for Prince Bandar who is part and parcel of the same funding apparatus...)

Black Unemployment Highest in 27 Years at 16.7%

These black unemployment figures prove that Obama is a closet neocon (unlike Clarence Thomas)... Obama is totally opposed to equal oportunity. His latest scheme the "Georgia Works" fiasco underlines this reality. It is nothing but creeping corporatist neocon crapola...Even the weasely trade union bosses like Trumka can't stomach it.

Why Monetarism Is a Disease

Here is an excerpt from a Der Spiegel interview with historian Hans -Joachim Voth. While the description of the social ills that result from the arbitrary imposition of austerity on a population by the financier oligarchy is correct, the piece also points to the inability of Europeans to break from the assumption that this is just the way things must be. To emphasize, this is why the only take down and replacement of the whole rotting carcass of the derivative securities can only originate from the United States.

SPIEGEL: Why do you think the euro was a dumb idea?

Voth: Because, at its core, it is a bad solution for a nonexistent problem -- a political object of prestige with massive economic disadvantages. Everyone thought the common currency would cause all of the structural differences in the euro-zone countries to automatically disappear. But, after 2000, the low interest rates in the euro zone artificially fuelled growth in the weaker countries and caused real estate prices to skyrocket. This kind of speculative bubble is fun while it lasts. But every party comes to an end eventually. And then comes the rude awakening: Growth slows down, and unemployment rises. Since the banks have given out too many loans, they become a brake on growth. This causes an increase in the structural divergences that were actually supposed to decrease. The euro can't survive for long without having much more redistribution between richer and poorer member countries or much more flexible economies. And neither of those things is politically feasible.

SPIEGEL: Attempts to tackle the crisis with austerity measures have met with social rejection and have triggered political crises. Is that the price that has to be paid for instituting reforms?

Voth: Over the next five years, as long as German taxpayers don't write the bond markets a golden check, there's going to be one cost-cutting program after the other in many European countries. This could be accompanied by increasing social unrest. Austerity and anarchy are closely linked. We've been able to unambiguously establish that with a minor study looking at the period between 1919 and 2009.

SPIEGEL: Are you thinking perhaps of Heinrich Brüning, Germany's chancellor between 1930 and 1932, whose rigid belt-tightening policies drove the country into recession?

Voth: Brüning's cost-cutting programs didn't trigger the global economic crisis, but they did make the effects in Germany massively worse. What we're interested in is the impact on social harmony. Jacopo Ponticelli and I didn't just focus on German history; instead, we looked at the histories of 28 European countries over the last 90 years. It is a fact that savings amounting to just one percentage point of GDP are accompanied by social unrest. And when they reach two or three percentage points, it massively increases.

SPIEGEL: And these kinds of social explosions just exacerbate the economic situation even more.

Voth: Any time a country becomes politically instable as a result of growing economic insecurity, you'll see a sudden drop in growth. This creates a snowballing effect: Pressure from the bond markets causes a reduction in government-provided social services, which leads to street demonstrations. This causes mounting insecurity, and the economy contracts -- and because the economic situation gets more dramatic, the state has to make even more cuts.

The Noxious Solyndra Affair

Solar energy is fine for plants, but for humans it is nothing but a ridiculous boondoggle. It never pays for the energy inputs without subsidies and never will. Also, contrary to the GREENSHIRTS'* baloney, it is very polluting:

"Solar power is not all sunshine. It has a dark side—particularly in developing countries, according to a new study by a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, engineering professor.

"A study by Chris Cherry, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, found that solar power heavily reliant on lead batteries has the potential to release more than 2.4 million tons of lead pollution in China and India."

*Greenshirts: same old Eugenics Nazi Malthusian crap in a new window dressing. See Prince Phillip'a ravings about being reincarnated as a deadly virus to kill off the "wogs." Also see his co-thinker (sic) Prince Bernhard's career as a Nazi SS officer.

Jonathan Swift's Floating Isle of Laputa Where Pseudoscience Is Profitable 

Libya: The Humanitarian Mask Comes Off Yet Again

So the new "government" in Libya, made up sycophants of multinational oil interests and Al Qaeda operatives, is now indiscriminately putting blacks in prison. Is this the outcome of our illustrious President's vaunted and much ballyhooed human rights mission? Where is the black congressional caucus' outrage? We already know Obama couldn't give a damn...

Men suspected of being mercenaries for Moammar Gadhafi, are held in a district sports center next to the medina, set up as provisory jail in Tripoli, Libya, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2011. 

New CNN Poll: 65% give Obama thumbs down on economy

And the remaining 35% are rumored to be clinically insane...

Sound and Fury Signifying Less than Nothing

Obama's speech before Congress on creating jobs had to be delayed...Who cares, except the news media? Americans with the least bit of savvy already know it is just another shovel ready full of the end product of the "post industrial society's" ongoing collapse.

"Mental illness rise linked to climate"

The greenshirts have collectively lost their marbles long, long ago.

Good News on the Fight Against Disease

Scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have discovered that a mysterious class of large RNAs plays a central role in embryonic development, contrary to the dogma that proteins alone are the master regulators of this process. The research, published online August 28 in the journal Nature, reveals that these RNAs orchestrate the fate of embryonic stem (ES) cells by keeping them in their fledgling state or directing them along the path to cell specialization.

Embryonic stem cells can follow one of two main routes. They can either differentiate, becoming cells of a specific lineage such as blood cells or neurons, or they can stay in a pluripotent state, duplicating themselves without losing the ability to become any cell in the body. When the researchers turned off each lincRNA in turn, they found dozens that suppress genes that are important only in specific kinds of cells. They also found dozens of lincRNAs that cause the stem cells to exit the pluripotent state.

"It's a balancing act," said Guttman. "To maintain the pluripotent state, you need to repress differentiation genes."

The researchers also uncovered a critical clue about how lincRNAs carry out their important job. Through biochemical analysis, they found that lincRNAs physically interact with key proteins involved in influencing cell fate to coordinate their responses.

"The lincRNAs appear to play an organizing role, acting as a scaffold to assemble a diverse group of proteins into functional units," said John Rinn, an author on the paper, an assistant professor at Harvard University and Medical School, and a senior associate member of the Broad Institute. "lincRNAs are like team captains, bringing together the right players to get a job done."

"By understanding how these interactions form, we may be able to engineer these RNAs to do what we want them to do," said Guttman. "This could make it possible to target key genes that are improperly regulated in disease."

Obama's Long Lost Uncle Arrested for Drunk Driving

Unlike his uncle Onyango, Barack Obama is driving the whole nation into the ditch, made drunk with power and lovesick by too much staring at his own image in the rear view mirror...

Strange Bedfellow?

Abdelhakim Behadj a.k.a. Abu Abdullah Assadaq is the commander of Tripoli Military Council. It appears that this person is none other than a high ranking Al Qaeda operative...Is NATO -- a.k.a. the war council of President Obama -- once again in the tender embrace of Al Qaeda?

Lilliputians Are At It Again

Both the admittedly Aristotelean Deus Ex Machina dreadfully pitiful argument and the premise of random point mutations a la Darwin are dead wrong. The negative entropy exhibited by human scientific progress demonstrates for anyone willing to honestly consider it that the universe is bounded  by a lawful ordering by vectored interactions among the lithosphere, biosphere, and noosphere.

Things don't just go bump in the night and somehow evolve; nor does an impotent and dead clock winding god set things into a nightmarish increasing disorder.

Libya: The Humanitarian Mask Comes Off

There are also reports of hospitals being “overwhelmed” with casualties and “dozens of decomposing bodies …piled up at one hospital in the area… One room had 21 lying on stretchers, while 20 more were left in a courtyard. It was not clear who killed the men, or when they died.”
Also, reports by Amnesty International that it has evidence that both pro-Gaddafi forces and rebels abused detainees in their care:

Guards loyal to Col Gaddafi raped child detainees at Abu Salim prison, Amnesty said. It also accused rebels of beating prisoners, including a boy conscripted by Gaddafi forces who surrendered to the rebels at Bir Tirfas.

Hmm…Interesting…So NATO’s humanitarian intervention (i.e. bombing)has led to widespread inhuman and depraved acts that always accompanies low intensity insurgencies? As the talking heads are wont to utter, who could possibly have foreseen this?

Ask Not What Is Debt? Ask What Is the Physical Economy...

While much of Mr Graeber’s work is unobjectionable and his criticism of the IMF, et al. is appreciated, the problem is that the entire field of academic “economics” itself is a fraud. It entirely leaves out of the question that there is a physical economy apart from money. And, it just so happens that that study of the improvements in that physical economy and how populations are sustained at increasing standards of living is the only way out of the current monetary crisis. Yes, debt moratoria are required, but then the question is what sorts of long term investments are necessary to pull the world away from the last 50 years of looting the world’s physical economy?

From Pizza to Stem Cells

Having burnt the roof of my mouth many times over from over eagerly chomping into too hot pizza, I naturally was struck by how quickly that burnt skin up there (or oral mucosa) heals. After reading about regenerative research on worms and lizards, I tried googling research on this topic. Alas, I lacked the proper term: oral mucosa! Now, I have it. Eureka! Bravo Sandu Pitaru, et al!

"Open Wide" for New Stem Cell Potential Tuesday, August 23, 2011 Stem cells of the oral mucosa stay young, says TAU researcher While highly potent embryonic stem cells are often the subject of ethical and safety controversy, adult-derived stem cells have other problems. As we age, our stem cells are less pliant and less able to transform into the stem cells that science needs to find breakthrough treatments for disease. An exception to this can be found in the stem cells of oral mucosa, the membrane that lines the inside of our mouths. These cells do not seem to age along with the rest of our bodies. In his lab at Tel Aviv University'sGoldschleger School of Dental Medicine,Prof. Sandu Pitaru and his graduate students Keren Marinka-Kalmany, Sandra Treves, Miri Yafee and Yossi Gafni, have successfully collected cells from oral mucosa and manipulated them into stem cells. Though taken from adult tissues, these oral stem cells are almost as easy to manipulate as embryonic stem cells, Prof. Pitaru discovered. His research, which has been published in the journal Stem Cell, opens a new door to stem cell research and potential therapies for neurodegenerative, heart,  and autoimmune diseases, as well as diabetes. The healing powers of Wolverine Dentists have long been aware of some of the unique properties of the oral mucosa, says Prof. Pitaru. "Wounds in the oral mucosa heal by regeneration, which means that the tissue reverts completely back to its original state," he says. A wound that might take weeks to heal and leave a life-long scar on the skin will be healed in a matter of days inside the mouth, regardless of the patient's age. Except for the mouth, this type of healing usually occurs only in very young organisms and lower amphibians, such as the lizards that can regenerate their tails. Prof. Pitaru set out to determine if oral mucosa could be a source for young, fetal-like stem cells with this unique healing ability. Even when obtained from an older patient, he says, these stem cells still have properties of young or primitive stem cells — which have a high capacity to be transformed into different tissues. Prof. Pitaru and his fellow researchers have already succeeded in coaxing oral mucosa stem cells into becoming other significant cells, including bone, cartilage, muscle, and even neurons. All this, says Prof. Pitaru, is derived from a miniscule biopsy of tissue, measuring 1 by 2 by 3 millimeters. "We are able to grow trillions of stem cells from this small piece of tissue," he explains. The site of the biopsy is readily accessible, and patients experience minimal discomfort and require almost no healing time. This makes the mouth a convenient site for harvesting stem cells. A safe and effective alternative Prof. Pitaru and his fellow researchers are currently in pre-clinical trials, implanting these stem cells into various tissues within small rodents. Their projects include researching the impact of the innovative cells as a treatment for chronic heart failure; neurodegenerative diseases; inflammatory autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's disease; and diabetes. These diseases are most likely to affect the elderly, and the oral mucosa stem cells would offer a more safe and effective alternative to both embryonic and adult-derived stem cells. Despite their therapeutic potential, patients would be required to take immunosuppressant therapies when being treated with implanted embryonic cells to ensure that the body does not reject the foreign cells. Once implanted, embryonic stem cells often cause tumors to form, Prof. Pitaru says. "Stem cells taken from the tissue of elderly patients have growth limitations and reduced functional capacities." Stem cells derived from the oral mucosa, however, avoid the pitfalls of their predecessors. Because they stay young, they behave as fetal cells, but there is no danger of rejection because they are taken directly from the patient. And they show no signs of developing the aggressive tumors that surround implantation of embryonic stem cells. With limited risk and high therapeutic potential, these cells could step in to fill a major medical need, Prof. Pitaru concludes. For more news about cardiac health research from Tel Aviv University, click here. Keep up with the latest AFTAU news on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/AFTAUnews.

The Pusillanimity of Academia

This item reported on today demonstrates how really truly impotent and pedantic are these supposed scientists:

"Study shows powerful corporations really do control the world's finances"

(PhysOrg.com) -- "For many years conventional wisdom has said that the whole world is controlled by the monied elite, or more recently by the huge multi-national corporations that seem to sometime control the very air we breathe. Now, new research by a team based in ETH-Zurich, Switzerland, has shown that what we’ve suspected all along, is apparently true. The team has uploaded their results onto the preprint server arXiv."

What this study studiously avoids is that there are a network of families that control world finance. They are none other than the British and Dutch royalty, which comprise the Inter Alpha group. However, that characterization is somewhat misleading, because these families are actually not based in states per se. They have always been a shadow oligarchy controlling Europe and most of the globe that knows no state boundaries, inter-marrying in a rather incestuous manner. Take Prince Phillip(who declares that he desires to be reincarnated as a virus to control population) for instance. He's Greek.

Very learned and studious

Meditation Upon Obama's Vacation

I have just Googled the perfect spa for our illustrious President to visit while at Martha's Vineyard. It is the Martha's Vineyard Community Services Adult Mental Health Services. Please Mr. President: do the honorable thing now!

The Unutterably Execrable State of Obama's "Space" Program--OR Who Spiked NASA's Coffee with LSD?

No dear reader this is not an April Fools Day prank. Would that it were...To wit:

Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists

Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report

Rotten Ideology

How Computational Complexity Will Revolutionize Philosophy

The theory of computation has had a profound influence on philosophical thinking. But computational complexity theory is about to have an even bigger effect, argues one computer scientist.


KFC 08/10/2011
2 COMMENTS


Since the 1930s, the theory of computation has profoundly influenced philosophical thinking about topics such as the theory of the mind, the nature of mathematical knowledge and the prospect of machine intelligence. In fact, it's hard to think of an idea that has had a bigger impact on philosophy.

And yet there is an even bigger philosophical revolution waiting in the wings. The theory of computing is a philosophical minnow compared to the potential of another theory that is currently dominating thinking about computation.

At least, this is the view of Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Today, he puts forward a persuasive argument that computational complexity theory will transform philosophical thinking about a range of topics such as the nature of mathematical knowledge, the foundations of quantum mechanics and the problem of artificial intelligence.

Computational complexity theory is concerned with the question of how the resources needed to solve a problem scale with some measure of the problem size, call it n. There are essentially two answers. Either the problem scales reasonably slowly, like n, n^2 or some other polynomial function of n. Or it scales unreasonably quickly, like 2^n, 10000^n or some other exponential function of n.

So while the theory of computing can tell us whether something is computable or not, computational complexity theory tells us whether it can be achieved in a few seconds or whether it'll take longer than the lifetime of the Universe.

That's hugely significant. As Aaronson puts it: "Think, for example, of the difference between reading a 400-page book and reading every possible such book, or between writing down a thousand-digit number and counting to that number."

He goes on to say that it's easy to imagine that once we know whether something is computable or not, the problem of how long it takes is merely one of engineering rather than philosophy. But he then goes on to show how the ideas behind computational complexity can extend philosophical thinking in many areas.

Take the problem of artificial intelligence and the question of whether computers can ever think like humans. Roger Penrose famously argues that they can't in his bookThe Emperor's New Mind. He says that whatever a computer can do using fixed formal rules, it will never be able to 'see' the consistency of its own rules. Humans, on the other hand, can see this consistency.

One way to measure the difference between a human and computer is with a Turing test. The idea is that if we cannot tell the difference between the responses given by a computer and a human, then there is no measurable difference.

But imagine a computer that records all conversations it hears between humans. Over time, this computer will build up a considerable database that it can use to make conversation. If it is asked a question, it looks up the question in its database and reproduces the answer given by a real human.

In this way a computer with a big enough look up table can always have a conversation that is essentially indistinguishable from one that humans would have

"So if there is a fundamental obstacle to computers passing the Turing Test, then it is not to be found in computability theory," says Aaronson.

Instead, a more fruitful way forward is to think about the computational complexity of the problem. He points out that while the database (or look up table) approach "works," it requires computational resources that grow exponentially with the length of the conversation.

Aaronson points out that this leads to a powerful new way to think about the problem of AI. He says that Penrose could say that even though the look up table approach is possible in principle, it is effectively impractical because of the huge computational resources it requires.

By this argument, the difference between humans and machines is essentially one of computational complexity.

That's an interesting new line of thought and just one of many that Aaronson explores in detail in this essay.Of course, he acknowledges the limitations of computational complexity theory. Many of the fundamental tenets of the theory, such as P ≠ NP, are unproven; and many of the ideas only apply to serial, deterministic Turing machines, rather than the messier kind of computing that occurs in nature.

But he says these criticisms do not allow philosophers (or anybody else) to arbitrarily dismiss the arguments of complexity theory. Indeed, many of these criticisms raise interesting philosophical questions in themselves.

Computational complexity theory is a relatively new discipline which builds on advances made in the 70s, 80s and 90s. And that's why it's biggest impacts are yet to come.

Aaronson points us in the direction of some of them in an essay that is thought provoking, entertaining and highly readable. If you have an hour or two to spare, it's worth a read.

If the readers of this review are not able of their own accord to comprehend the unbridgeable gulf that separates the human creative mind from any possible mechanical device they are hopelessly lost (or perhaps dead) souls.

Greenspan says print more money

With lunatics like Greenspan, Geithner, and Bernanke running the printing presses in the mistaken belief that they will save their friends' financial houses, one is reminded of nothing so much as the scene in Dr. Strangelove where Slim Pickens rides the bomb to oblivion with a roaring "Yahoo!" This is what these "masterminds" are now doing in real life, i.e. blowing up the system. So, dear friends, either we have a forced bankruptcy of these terminally insane financial houses by restoring Glass Steagall or  we go down...

Downgrade Standard and Poor's!

Anyone who believes that Standard and Poors should determine the credit worthiness of the United States is a damnable and sniveling fool. Alexander Hamilton provided the tonic for removing this sovereign Republic from the grasp of a financial oligarchy based in the City of London. His named antagonist in his reports to Congress was none other than Adam Smith. Smith's doctrine that wealth was merely the product of buying and selling to get money, and that mankind must only be concerned with the principle of pleasure and pain and not the consequences of our actions upon the future of humanity is the epitome of a slave's (or rather a subject's) mentality.  For the most part, both sides of the aisle accept (and that unthinkingly and blindly) these tenets of Adam Smith's wretched ideology. The idea that the moneyed interests rule is their unshakable conviction. This is why they cower at the likes of S&P.
The simple fact is that everything decent our nation has accomplished has been based upon the exact opposite principle. We have led the world because we have had a vision that our nation has a mission to uplift mankind and that the purpose of government is precisely to provide for the general welfare of future generations yet unborn. It is well past high time we throw off the shackles of the craven belief that "money rules the world." What is required is that our  citizens exhibit a backbone again and impose a swift end to the control of these financiers by re-enacting FDR's Glass-Steagall. Call or write your Congressman now to support Marcy Kaptur's Glass Steagall Bill H.R.1489 and Maurice Hinchey's Glass-Steagall bill H.R.2451

The Babbling of Snake Oil Salesmen

Today's spate of media establishment hand-wringing, morning-after articles supposedly analyzing the current economic crises all miss the simple fact that we are at the tail end of the chimerical post industrial/consumer society hoax. The build up over some fifty years of ruinous speculative forms of illegitimate debt, a.k.a. derivatives securities, is like a terminal cancer on our system. The Federal Reserve and Treasury's bailout mania has only worsened this monstrosity by feeding that cancer... The only solution is to cut loose this muti-trillion anti-productive succubus in a similar fashion to what FDR did. First we must re-enact Glass Steagall and let the so called financial houses on Wall Street choke on their useless gambling derivatives. Secondly the government must issue credits to be used in physically productive, high technology, long term investments. That is the only basis upon which our nation will ever return to prosperity and a decent future.

A Whiff (!) of Corruption at the IMF--Eau de Diabolique

Alack and alas!  alas. How could the unthinkable happen? The new IMF directrix appears tainted by financial scandal. Mon dieu. But her contract said this was not supposed to happen. What? Are there no clean hands in high finance these days? Oh, woe is us.

69% Say It's Likely Scientists Have Falsified Global Warming Research

I guess it’s like honest Abe said…

An Existential Dilemma for the Greenshirts

"A HOT TOPIC: RADIOACTIVE DECAY IS KEY INGREDIENT BEHIND EARTH'S HEAT, RESEARCH SHOWS"
"Nearly half of the Earth's heat comes from the radioactive decay of materials inside, according to a large international research collaboration that includes a Kansas State University physicist."

So I guess that mother earth is a really just a nuclear reactor perpetually melting down. You greenies better start figuring  a way off the planet. Oh wait, your commander in chief Obama just shut down the space program. Tsk, tsk...

Gaia and Her Incestuous Brood

The Unconstitutional "Super Congress" Council of Twelve

The so-called Venetian Republic's council of ten did the bidding of a small and criminal oligarchy and carried out political assassinations of its opponents with impunity. This Venetian sort of tyranny is what James Fenimore Cooper exposed in his novel The Bravo. If we accept this new form of "Super Congress," then we shall have an outright tyranny of twelve handpicked henchmen of Wall Street, and our true form of constitutional republic will be no more a republic than the quondam oligarchic charade known as the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia. Obama aspires to be nothing more than Il Doge, a figurehead lap dog of this brave new world.

Why Green Ideology is Truly Viral

When the head of the so-called Worldwide Fund for Nature, Prince Phillip, declares that he desires to be reincarnated as a deadly virus that could reduce human population levels to "sustainability," his royal highness only displays his own ignorance. The fact of the matter is that his brand of "thinking" is already a kind of mental disease. (Whether it be akin to a deadly fungus, virus or bacteria is beside the point.) The would be mass murderers of all terrorist stripes essentially have the same loathing for humanity disguised as religious or race hatred...But they, including Adolf Hitler, are pikers compared to the media celebrated and oh so august, aforementioned prince. For the best they have done is murder some hundred like Anders Breivik, or perhaps thousands like Al Qaeda, or even millions like Hitler. Our bonny Prince Phillip of darkness and his green legions, on the other hand, would have the death of billions. So his minions like the aptly named Al Gore and our brain dead President, indeed, will have Phillip's hell to pay if they succeed in the take down of humanity's necessary progress.

Monetarism is Voodoo Economics

Today's Mother Jones headlines this correct assessment:
Memo to Tea Party: The US Government's Budget is Not Like a Family's


Unfortunately, as expected. they get it wrong. Again. Their analogy is that not raising the debt ceiling is like not paying the rent. In other words, they have no problem in letting the financier interests walk all over us.

Both the tea party and their arguments are wrong. The federal government can issue credit, families cannot. On the other hand, the federal government can stop bailing out the gambling casino speculators that issued worthless debt known as derivative securities. This whole debt ceiling issue is bogus. The Federal Reserve issued 16 trillion dollars in so-called emergency loans in 2008 to bail out the issuers of these derivatives according to the GAO's audit. As long as we honor this lunatic speculation, there is no way out of the crisis. What is needed is a return to FDR's war against these corrupt interests. Cut them loose and reinstate Glass Steagall.

Krugman and Tinkerbell

Today Krugman writes this:

The Cult That Is Destroying America


¶Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.

¶And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.

¶No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

¶Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

¶So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

¶The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.

¶What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

¶You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.

¶And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.

¶It’s a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price.
Ha! You want to define what a cult is? Fine. The magical belief that money is wealth. And guess what? You are one of its leading propagandists. So much so that you were given their booby prize. We have allowed a small clique of financiers to loot our productive capacity year after year by succumbing to this irrational belief. No amount of magical manipulation of the money supply whether it be Keynesian or Von Misean makes one whit of difference. The only answer is to end the control of Wall Street and the City of London by re-enacting Glass Steagall, allowing the speculators to go belly up, and re-instituting a Hamiltonian use of our nation's credit to productive long term investments that are productive of physical wealth, not fictional monetary lucre.

Tit for Tat

"Probability of ET Life Arbitrarily Small, Say Astrobiologists"

Probability of Intelligence in the Mind of a Statistician is Vanishingly Small

Obama Unveiled

 Bring me your poor and I will execute them.

Two Tribes of Savages

The so called budget negotiations are nothing more than a rancorous dispute among two factions loyal to Wall Street. Americans sense this even if they are mostly desensitized by the driveling media. It is as if two tribes are warring over the right to slaughter their hapless victims: the poor, sick, and elderly. The staged clown show of Obama and Boehner signifies nothing. The malevolent London orchestrators of  the debt "crisis" pull these "leaders" puppet strings all the while. And the band plays on...

Flash: The NY Times Tells the Truth...Almost

We’re Spent

By DAVID LEONHARDT

We are living through a tremendous bust. It isn’t simply a housing bust. It’s a fizzling of the great consumer bubble that was decades in the making.

Much to my amaze, you almost spoke the truth here...The problem is that the so-called consumer economy is just the obverse side of the coin of the 1971 Nixon/Shultz floating exchange rate that unleashed the hell of global currency arbitrage. This, in turn, led to the repeal of Roosevelt's Glass-Steagall and the lunacy of derivative securities. Without returning to fixed exchange rates and Glass-Steagall, there is no return to a producer economy. Right now, Rep. Marcy Kaptur has introduced HR 1489 to do just that. But of course, this would mean that the trillions of these inventive derivative instruments would become worthless. And I am quite certain that that elephant in the room is known to the sages at the august NY Times. Why they fail to take note is certainly baffling...Or could it be a sign of their never swerving loyalty to high finance?

Press Secretary Jay Carney--"No yelling at Obama"

 I believe it is dangerous to shout at a somnambulist, especially one in impaired mental condition...

McConnell Listens to His Masters

 Face facts folks. Both Obama Dems and Repubs are on the same page. Suck up to Wall Street and get their mullah.  Everything else is just like professional wrestling: fake. The deficit was caused by trillion dollar bailouts of the disease known as derivatives--, those bailouts should be cancelled, not senior citizens' meds...

Reply to Richard Cohen's Article: A Grand Old Cult

Mr. Cohen, in as much as the right and left  cling to a worldview that believes in the magic of monetarism, as opposed to the concept of physically productive wealth that Alexander Hamilton stood for, both are blinded by their own versions of cultish, irrational ideologies...And a pox on both of your Usherlike houses!

Lunatics Running the Asylum

Biofuels sellout propagandist and quandom Rickover  biographer: Robert Zubrin

It was my distinctly, distasteful sorrow to have heard just now an interview with the Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, et al, on the Diane Rehm radio program. The subject was how we can move our nation and military to adopt so called biofuels. We might as well all fall on our collective mental swords, if this typifies the type of suicidal thinking currently prevalent in our military. The spirit of Admiral Rickover must surely be deeply offended. When it has been proven, by Mr. LaRouche, inter alia, once and for all, an ironclad law that our species must progress to ever higher levels of energy flux densities, and we willfully contravene this law, then to paraphrase Hyman Rickover: the People Perish...

The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether

Obama's Attempt to End the Space Program Will Live in Infamy

In a sane world, Obama would be impeached alone for his treacherous act of ending the manned space program, upon which the future well being of our nation and planet depends. This alone contravenes the highest principle enshrouded in our nation's founding document --We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

At the Altar of Mammon

 Senate President Stephen Sweeney went to bed furious Thursday night after reviewing the governor’s line-item veto of the state budget.

He woke up Friday morning even angrier.

"This is all about him being a bully and a punk," he said in an interview Friday.

"I wanted to punch him in his head."

Sweeney had just risked his political neck to support the governor’s pension and health reform, and his reward was a slap across the face. The governor’s budget was a brusque rejection of every Democratic move, and Sweeney couldn’t even get an audience with the governor to discuss it.

"You know who he reminds me of?" Sweeney says. "Mr. Potter from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ the mean old bastard who screws everybody."

Christie and Obama both worship at the altar of Mammon (i.e. international finance)...One on the left with George Soros, et al, and the other on the right with the Koch brothers, et al. How truly deluded must one be not to see this plain truth?

Still More Hellish Financial Chicanery

Yours truly recently quipped that the downfall of Messier Strauss Kahn was truly piquant in its irony--which is to say that the head of an insidious institution responsible for implementing murderous "conditionalities" upon hapless victims should be accused of rape. But now, it appears that our antagonist was set up after having refused to pay for prostitution. Mon dieu! But why should the illustrious head of the illustrious IMF have to lower himself to pay for a prostitute? Perhaps he felt a sort of imperial entitlement to such venalities that naturally goes with the various emoluments of his high office. But then, the devil is always in the details...

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

The Presidential seal falls off Obama's limousine. This is the second seal to attempt to vacate Obama's presence. We can only hope the third will be a charm...