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.

Kepler's Vision

Thus do the very stars cry out in their likeness to the shell of a simple form of aquatic life that there is a grand design for the unique future of the singular intellectual substance of humanity.

Solving the Wonderful Riddle of Our Fragile Vulnerable Planet

The cosmic events of Valentine's Day 2014, if properly situated, bring some home truths to those among us who are capable of stepping outside the manacles imposed upon the thinking of the commonality. The first irony that presents itself is the question of the near equivalence of meteor impacts and nuclear war. The video from Chelyabinsk could possibly have a longer lasting positive effect upon the psyche of humanity if it stirs up the passion for a mission orientation to protect not only our fair planet but moreover the unique species potential of mankind.

However, we stupidly dither here upon the world stage confronting irrational "geopolitical" conflicts which should have been eschewed centuries ago. For what was the Council of Florence orchestrated by the great Nicholas of Cusa and his collaborators but a marvelous attempt to put to bed the spurious divisions among us that the oligarchical manipulators from time immemorial have played upon. (Though the apparent failure of that movement was evident, the flank of the voyage of Christopher Columbus that Cusa set into motion did directly lead to the constitution of the United States. A constitution which Cusa seemingly foreordained in his De Pace Fidei.) We imagine to ourselves that supposedly self evident irremediable bestial irrationality of blind religious and irreligious hatred of North Korea and Iran will plummet us irrevocably into a nuclear conflagration. Of course, this is the "great game" of whatever historical guise the "empire" of moneyed families has taken on over the most recent several millennia of history. "They" would have us so affrighted that we will submit cowering to a world government using instruments of "police actions" of, among other things, drone strikes ordered by the due process of their "enlightened" cabal.

Although, if we clear our clouded consciences from this murky business underfoot by our adversary for a moment our two, what emerges is an altogether different species of problems confronting our futurity. First, we need to clarify a few issues with the aid of insights of Cusa's followers. Compare Leibniz' principle of the sufficient reason of harmonically preëstablished order of higher monads with that lugubrious and laughably bad metaphysics inherent in the standard model of entropic big bang cosmology. For it is becoming clearer more and more to those of us that are not cowed into ostrichlike mental postures that our home planet must be but a leaping stone to a far greater destiny our species naturally must perforce enjoy. 

The Ever Perplexing Manifold Irony of the Senses

Credits: ESA/Herschel/PACS & SPIRE Consortium, O. Krause, HSC, H. Linz

Upon viewing our sister galaxy Andromeda here in the infrared wavelength of radiation outside our visual sphere, one is taken by the sense of a violent whirlpool of starry material being whisked apart at some enormous speed. And then it dawns that this imagined motion is indeed quite real and quite beyond our day to day apprehension of magnitudes of speed. And yet, all is apparently quite frozen there in this telescopic frame of light years scope. So we likewise feel ourselves frozen here though our reason knows our motion relative to the universe is feverishly immense. And somewhere as we speak, scientists, tucked away in the laboratory use laser light to nearly halt all motion at the subatomic scale. Is it a wonder then that our senses are quite baffled by seeming statistical impossibilities at these infinitesimal scales that a sort of pre-established harmonic order should hold? And further since we can derive the enormous benefits of tools we have devised in exploring such paradoxes, why are we so loath to embrace the unalterable evidence that such an ordering is just and fitting? What little voice in our ear utters a jarring discourse against such good fortune? Indeed, is it not the gift of life wherein we encounter this ability of a universe undergoing unfathomable force to be leashed for the benefit of living substance?

Nicholas of Cusa and the "Chameleon Pulsar"

The apparently surprising news that measurements of pulsar PSR B0943+10 in radio wave and the x-ray scales of the electromagnetic spectrum are unpredictable from current theory should give us non entropic polemicists some cheer on this cold winter day.

An international team has made a tantalizing discovery about the way pulsars emit radiation. The emission of X-rays and radio waves by these pulsating neutron stars is able to change dramatically in seconds, simultaneously, in a way that cannot be explained with current theory. It suggests a quick change of the entire magnetosphere. In their research the team combined observations from the X-ray space telescope XMM-Newton and the radio telescope LOFAR (among others). Credit: ASTRON

For as Nicholas of Cusa demonstrated repeatedly in his development of Socratic reason, the composition of the universe is by necessity continuously evolving anew for the best possible outcome for humanity's future. Singularities, in fact, which overthrow previous limitations of our conceptual working framework (or grundlagen) of the physical mechanisms of that same universe are to not only to be expected, they are to be sought after. And if we are successfully solving such paradoxes these singularities should be cropping up with an increasing relative density over time. Thus does the ironical development of a fugue in classical composition provide us with the most immediate emotional correlative of ongoing universal creation.

Non Compos Mentis--A Sign of the Times?

Imagine a churlish gossip, once upon a time, hanging over the backyard fence while pausing in her taking in of the laundry and thus opining to her most appreciative busybody neighbor: "I hear tell that his honor at court even this day has declared that drunken lout of a husband of Mrs. Whatshername a regular nincompoop! Tsk, tsk. Ain't it the way of the world these days?"

Now, no one can claim to produce a more apt beginning for one of the finer and more useful epithets in our English lexicon than this. For who can mistake an instant understanding when this description is pronounced upon the antics of a regular nincompoop?

In fact, these times seem to have produced a downright cult of nincompoopery. And the truth is there does not appear to be any psychical sort of vaccination in the offing for the pandemic of nincompoops now plaguing even our very communication devices.

Dreams, Checks on Conscience, "Crowdsourcing"

What might seem like a mishmash of impressions has struck me just now that I think might perhaps be useful to an admittedly, shall we say, narrow audience of mine (whether internal or otherwise.)

First, earlier I had a dream which I awoke from an early evening nap. Usually, the story lines of such dreams are merely discarded as inconsequential and so instantly dissolved into the subconscious abyss. But as this one seemed to illustrate a kind of principle of dreaming, I kept it in memory:

My mother wrote a check that she gave me to take to her bank and deposit in her account. It was unstated yet understood that this was to be kept secret, for some unspoken reason, from my father. The check was for $950,000. At the same time, I was to get her some highly desirable ice cream she wanted called "futon." I went to the bank, presented the check and successfully deposited it. Now, I am a little hazy whether that same bank was also the venue for the ice cream counter. But, at any rate, the "futon" ice cream that I sought was slushy and melting and the server directed me to another venue to get some scoops that were frozen. I remember walking to another counter perhaps outside the building and getting two different scoops of this variety of ice cream. Then I awoke.

Now none of this foregoing is embellished in any way. Why I think this might be interesting, is that a principle of mind could be sought here. I had read recently several chapters of Cotton Mather's history of the biographies of the early deans of Harvard (who were at one and the same time pastors for their students.) One thing that stood out was his insistence on highlighting and praising their rather agonizing diaries of humility, doubt, and self effacing/mortification as being unfit to serve as role models for the faithful. I must admit that I had never quite run across such public and fulsome praise of this quality of conscience. It brought me back to my own childhood experience with religion in America. The church at the end of the street was a Methodist one, which I attended very seldomly. But I distinctly remember a very strong feeling of religious rejection especially in dreams at that young age. The image of God as an old man shaking his head in rejection at me has still stuck with me viscerally. But this is precisely the sort of primitive "agenbite of inwit" that Mather's "Magnalia Christi Americana" reignited in me.

Now the reason I have brought these two preceding seemingly disparate reflections together is to illustrate a function of mind which I believe is universal. Much palaver is wasted these days by academics in search of a metric for intelligence. Usually the bawdlerized version that is popular (of which the significance of, I will go into later) would be to treat of intelligence as analogous to a test of strength of the faculty of memory or perhaps the inventiveness (quirkiness ?) of imagination. But almost nothing is noted of a remarkable evidence of what I consider to be the actual mark of "genius." That is simply an unerring ability to direct or self-edit the flow of thought along a course consonant with a "humanist" philosophical standpoint. 

This is in total contradistinction to the asinine heralded opinion floating around in "cyberspace" of the much touted "wisdom of crowds." So, for instance, when Leibniz writes that he must reject out of hand any physics (in particular DesCartes' version) that stipulates the violation of the efficacy of the ontological or final cause as the principle of least action performing the most potential good-- this is precisely such an instance of the faculty of genius. And this has nothing to do with any miraculous quality of performance and functioning of the physical synapses in the human brain. It is entirely another, higher function of mind. This proceeds from what Cusa terms "filiation" with the Creator, or what I would restate as love of communing with the ongoing process of continuing perfection of universal creation. It is the attempt to bring to bear a principle in human government to allow the orchestration of beneficence for their future well being. Which is to say the complete and utter opposite of the oligarchy's ruse of the bloody shirt of "democratic rule." 

Above: Ostrakons used to democratically banish the enemies of the oligarchy.

           

                                                                                                                             Socrates.

The New Pied Pipers Unveiled

Most people attempt to flee from an amorphous indefinable anxiety that seems to hover over their daily routine. They know not what. This is a universal trait in the human psyche. What it signifies is the unfinished state of cultural warfare of two irreconcilable paradigms. It is only the rare individual who can summon up the courage for self examination in order to question the viability of a world of hidden assumptions that constitute the rationale for his or her actions.

But, were it not for a continuity of precisely such minds engaging in a supra-historical dialogue, humanity itself  would be sunk. For its very ability to rise above the apparently insoluble paradox of civilization's mortality is inextricably dependent on this sort of victorious fugal chorus.

Unfortunately, there is a countervailing rather infernal dialogue of sorts that has seemingly forever victimized the mass of our somnambulist citizens. It comes in as many varieties as there are tongues among the peopled history of the planet. Of late, for the last century or so, its innermost motif proceeds roughly along these lines:

"The new pied pipers will lead America back into the fulsome embrace of her Mother. First use their greatest vulnerability. Their lack of perception of cultural warfare. The science of behavioral manipulation.

"After the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima note the psychological retreat away from Roosevelt's promise to end the colonial methods of Empire. So, first ignite a nice little colonial war to challenge America's image as beacon of liberty against the nasty godless communists. They will send their sons who thought they learned to escape from responsibility just like their parents did in caving in to McCarthyism and the fear of the atom bomb.

"Yes escapism must be our theme. It sells and sends a population step by step into a fantasy world where they no longer care. And there is no end to useful idiots to recruit to enable this scenario."  

Toward a Universal Metric of a Culture's Evolutionary Fitness

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

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

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

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

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

Phiilip Veit

Why Your Money is Funny

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

Zeta Oph and Seeking Out Hidden Truths

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


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

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

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

Cotton Mather: Father of Astrobiology?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leonardo: Salvator Mundi

Social Media: The Tyranny of Democracy

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

HSBC: A Study in the Wages of Sin

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


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

Balaam and His Ass  Rembrandt

IMF Urges "Final Solution"

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

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

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

Why Simply Measuring the Unemployment Rate is a Farce

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


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


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


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

Kepler's Method Relevant Over Centuries

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

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

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

Debate Night or Fright Night?

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

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

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

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

Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)    Goya

The Fable of Christine Largarde and Crocodiles

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

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

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

New Opinion Poll: Who Is Uglier?

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

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

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

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

The Ignominious Nobel Peace Prize

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

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

Broadcasting "Hate Speech" to Aliens?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Legacy of Political Parties and America's Destruction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Atheism in Science is a Belief in Magic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Biophysical Cyclical Unity

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

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

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

Why Pessimism Is So Very Ugly

The other day I came across an interview on the Internet that I had the good fortune not to have chosen to watch. It was on the comical question of why the genre of science fiction has become so singularly "grungy." Think the incongruity of marvelously advanced technology coupled with a culture that is quite barbaric. (Sound familiar?) What is the message?

"Back in the day" (oh how I hate that phrase) of cold war the object of the "intelligentsia" was to prevent at all costs the rising tide of scientific optimism in the post war population. (Iron curtain "meme" and all that, you see.) So, what better way to proceed than by the newly re-minted method of doublespeak. So the CIA/MI6 project (perhaps better denominated as an excretion) called the Congress of Cultural Freedom was hatched. Freedom, you see, was the freedom of the irrational will. (Nietzsche had been given a bum rap by that "ruffian" Hitler. His philosophy needs must be rehabilitated.) Thus was modern "art" and all its ugly and pessimistic sequelae in so-called popular culture, including "science fiction" oh so "democratically" complotted against the very purpose of the experiment of the founding of the United States.

Thus we have had nearly a century's worth of a surfeit of pestilential ugliness, when what is needed is a "surcease of sorrow." I believe it is well past time to get back to the future of truthful optimism, and stand with the spirit of Beethoven's "Nicht Diese Töne," dear reader. Don't you?

The Riddle of the Inexplicable Lunacy of Religious Warfare

Now, were we (in the royal sense of "we," you understand)  to abjure as insane the practitioner of some assorted and senseless mayhem upon humanity,  then we were to be applauded as quite reasonable. Howsoever, if we were to opine that a hoary, long standing, time honored and venerable religion were guilty of the same then we were quite out of season.

How comes this, you ask?

Unfortunately, that question is out of order. It is simply tradition and may not be questioned. To do so is indicative of a rather nasty bit of bad manners in the questioner, don't you know. It were tantamount to the pulling of one's pants down and defecating in public, for instance. (Sorry for the frank language. But it needs must be said.)

So, thus, we glibly ignore the hecatombs of human immiseration and death continuously piling up ever and anon at the altars of religious fervor. And what is the object of worship of  this immemorial legacy of such inhumane insanity?

Must you ask? It is, of course, the love and worship of Money! The which, is merely a charade, a chimerical invention-- like the zero. Yet, we are enslaved and in mental fetters, as it were, and still, to this day, ready to kill or be killed at the drop of a hat, if anyone, in authority,  were to pronounce that money no longer had any value.

Alas, this is the sorry and sad state of affairs in which humanity, even at this late stage of its existence, continues to find itself. Will we ever outgrow this delusion?

That is the question.

Mind Control Research is Prima Facie Evil

"New brain research refutes results of earlier studies that cast doubts on free will August 7, 2012 by Bob Yirka in Neuroscience (Medical Xpress) -- When people find themselves having to make a decision, the assumption is that the thoughts, or voice that is the conscious mind at work, deliberate, come to a decision, and then act. This is because for most people, that’s how the whole process feels. But back in the early 1980’s, an experiment conducted by Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist with the University of California, cast doubt on this idea."

I think the appropriate question about this entire line of "research" is what would motivate anyone in attempting to prove that humanity is without free will? I cannot imagine anything other than a rather dark and sinister explanation for such a compulsion.

The Science of Interpreting Dreams

Do angels truly visit us in that sleeping state of semi-consciousness when we awaken to vivid recollection of what we were sure just moments before was as real as daylight? If we dare to imagine that there is but one unresolved waking nightmare facing humanity then interpretation of these dreams is all of a piece. This is the essence of how monotheism as far back as the Temple of Amon staked its claim as a universal lawgiver through its most famous pupil Moses.

Then, as today, it was necessary that the escape from slavery led mankind away from that most foul of beliefs. The abject belief that mere irrationality in the affairs of men shall forever immutably hold sway. So it was that our lawgiver Abraham Lincoln intoned the sentiment of the ages that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Today, the slavery that confronts us is palpable. It is that miserable, moldering tale that there are those families who are born to inherit the rule over the fate of nations. These are today's equivalent of the pagan would be gods. We must appease them, of course, because the unthinkable collapse of their monetary system sends a shiver of irrational fear up our spineless zombielike state of fecklessness. Or so we are told. This is supposed to be our collective conscience (the which makes cowards of us all) given to us as if from a heavenly choir. We must worship at its altar. The Queen is after all so charming in her way! (Even the rock stars-- those fairest children of stage-- have been knighted!) Ah--tradition!

Thus we have our innermost psyche transfixed as if by the Gorgon herself. So are our dreams being manipulated by the basest fear to submit to the attendant ills of austerity and unending wars over dwindling fixed resources. All for naught. It does not have to be this way. For we have better selves that can resolve these ills. Look to that better self dear reader... It is lurking there, even in your most fanciful of dreams.