For Unto Us an Oligarch is Born

The rather vulgar mentality of being rich per se is but a pale imitation of your honest to goodness oligarch. Take the disgusting spectacle we endure from the cretins in the “infotainment” business gurgling and cooing over that monstrous relic of feudalism–the royal baby. He, whose thoroughly evil granddad Prince (of darkness) Phillip is wont to confess at the drop of a commoner’s hat that his most ardent desire is to be reincarnated as a deadly virus to cull the herd of the undesirables that are overpopulating his game preserves.

What kind of cult member must this otherwise normal seeming citizen in the news media be, I ask you? I think surely it must be of a zombie apocalyptic type so embraced these days. If Rip Van Winkle having been roused from his bowling match slumber these few centuries later, I’m sure he would perceive there having been no Revolution at all. King George redux and all bow down, old chap. A spot of tea?

If the People Telling Us What the "News" Is Were Merely Sane

If the people telling us what the "news" is were merely sane, we would not be expected to share their inane delight in shameless and embarrassing fawning over a relic of feudalism: a royal heir's birth. Instead we would be heralding a little noticed, yet potentially earth shattering scientific accomplishment which must have that royal extreme misanthrope chewing the rug (I mean the Queen's consort his royal heinous "I want to be reincarnated as a deadly virus to depopulate the globe" Prince (of darkness) Phillip. One billion people may have been rescued just now from the pestilential scourge of intestinal hookworm. A medical research team from the University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA has discovered an inexpensive treatment for this unnecessary plague that is insidiously and indiscriminately killing children through simple lack of sanitation in the most impoverished nations on this crisis ridden planet. These children's well being should be the subject of our paeans, for they are the proverbial "least of these" wherewith our moral fitness to survive will be adjudged, will we nil we. 

If we were not consumed by the besotted clown show daily regurgitated by a scandal mongering media, we might have noticed a salvo that nearly met its mark just yesterday in the House of Representatives: the amendment by Rep. Amash to prevent the NSA from unconstitutionally storing digital records on every American. 

And if we were not so deranged into the infantile make believe world that the love of money is a respectable career path, we would see the handwriting on the wall in the case of the merciless looting pension grab in the Detroit bankruptcy by the City of London royal financiers and their junior lapdog minions on Wall Street. Instead of woefully wringing our hands like a hapless chorus in classical Greek dramas over the "bail in" in Cyprus, we would take up arms and oppose these latter day oligarchs and end the reign of terror of a royal blot on human history and give to our modern day Caesars what they so richly deserve-- ignominious fall from power to do grievous harm to our most vulnerable citizens. 

The Erinyes of Clytaemnestra pursue Orestes. 

Beside Athena, who presides the court, sits Apollo. 

Engraving from G. Schwab's Die schönsten Sagen, 1912

The Detroit Bankruptcy and the Cyprus Bail In

If dear reader you can comprehend why these two events separated by an ocean are in essence about the same systemic monetary collapse that the world is presently in the midst of, then you are head and shoulders above the sycophantic con artists known as academic economists these days. Please support the return of the late great Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Glass Steagall legislation.

More Good News Published this Week in Biophysics Research

The quiet accumulation of more and more evidence for Bernoulli's magnificent ordering principle of  least action in the biophysical realm is lawfully astonishing. This illustration for instance encapsulates the engine of cellular reproduction's ordering in the endoplasmic reticulum:

The geometry here is obviously reminiscent of a minimal surface the study of which Karl Gauss pioneered.

Another tantalizing hint of the ubiquity of solitonic biophysical phase space is introduced in the discovery of how myelin sheaths are generated along axons.

In particular, the notion that a torque is transmitted along the assemblage that enable this generation is very much in keeping with a model of a standing solitonic wave function.

Red spot on Jupiter.

The Fundamental Difference Between Edward Snowden and Benedict Arnold

The title of this post should induce a train of thought that cuts through the current soap opera circus exhibited by our press. If you consider that it was none other than Benjamin Franklin who stated that "No tyrannical society can long exist when it cannot control the flow of information," then the point of the comparison becomes more clear.

For we certainly are living in a controlled environment of "infotainment" as nightmarishly noxious in essence as any dystopia cooked up by the adherents of the Anglo Dutch East Indies conglomerate such as Jeremy Bentham, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, or George Orwell.

But the most dangerous enemy of the great mission which established our liberty is shining a light upon the treachery which has nearly now extinguished that selected role of Franklin, Lincoln, and FDR. For since the creation of the proxy warfare we have been embroiled in by the would be Anglo Dutch elites and the creeping take down of our commitment to Eleanor Roosevelt's conception of human rights our citizenry has collectively turned and looked the other way and going along to get along.  But the time for living by the rationale of such a deal with the devil is fast subsiding dear readers.

Vernadsky, the Heliosphere, and Astrobiology

Perhaps it is possible that the very type of heliosphere surrounding a star's planetary system will be found to be another component of the habitability of one or more of its planets due to the protection afforded life forms from cosmic rays. This would extend the sort of nested evolutionary sequence of inter-relationships that Vladimir Vernadsky pioneered to heliosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, and noosphere.

This way of looking at evolution is in keeping with the true founder of modern scientific inquiry Nicholas of Cusa.

True Genius In the Arts is Always Due to Political Sensibility

It is of no small moment that Ludwig Beethoven angrily denounced Napoleon Bonaparte or that his one opera Fidelio was about the real life rescue of Marquis de LaFayette by his beloved wife Adrienne. Likewise, when Leonardo da Vinci writes of being persecuted by an unnamed adversary, it is not the raving of a paranoiac. Greatness in any field draws fire from a vicious and powerful subset of humanity that hates it.

If the recent revelations remove the mask from this would be oligarchy that has been hell bent on destroying the once great mission of the USA, so much the better. We, as a people, have been force fed all manner of ugliness in the name of democracy since the egregious cover up of the assassination of JFK. It is way past the time to retrieve our place in the history of governments of this planet.

Torsion of DNA and Solitons

The recent successful measurement of DNA supercoiling torsion should advance the hypothesis for biophysical solitons. The condition of living systems obtaining a condition of semi permanence within an unstable and fluctuating energetic landscape is remarkably analogous to the many types and phases of inorganic solitonic behaviors. The trick is to uncover and utilize such self organizing traits for technological advancement. For instance, it was also announced earlier this week that the vortical property of optical filaments has led to a breakthrough in fiber optic bandwidth. The fact that the form the lasers involved in this discovery takes are toroidal should strike long time readers of this blog as quite lawful.

Optical Votices from The Boston University Photonic Center

Mars as a Failed Precursor to Earth's Biosphere

It has been hypothesized recently based on geological samples that Mars once had an oxygen rich atmosphere some billion years before Earth. It is intriguing to imagine this as a platform for the emergence of a living biosphere on that planet that didn't take. In this way we might extend the principle of potential evolution into the development of planetary systems and their precursors as perhaps an ordered series of ongoing development.

I believe that this concept may gain traction in the infant field of astrobiology.

More Too Big To Jail Follies

James Clapper said he was being the "least untruthful" he could be in sworn testimony to Congress..... So, yes, he is admitting he perjured himself. I guess he's too big to jail just like HSBC is on drug money laundering. charges.

The Progressive Subsumption of Cellular Process by Higher Life Forms

The recent startling discovery that cilia act as antenna for cell signaling leads to a refinement of Leibniz' principle of lower and higher monads and Vernadsky's principle of evolution.

The Leibnizian concept of a lower monad not having a "window on the world" coheres precisely with this discovery. That is to say that cellular signaling via these cilia are in fact just such a window that higher monads utilize, in other words.

If you then add Vernadsky's principle of ordered development of the biosphere, it is quite striking to envision that higher life forms have subsumed these same processes within their organisms. And finally human life alone is capable of making this same principle conscious through science.
From the open access report:

TGF-β Signaling Is Associated with Endocytosis at the Pocket Region of the Primary Cilium

The New Star Chamber of George W. Obama

The American revolution was brought upon this nation as a necessary and just war against the despotic tyranny of “Great” Britain, now it appears we have adopted their Star Chamber methods in the so-called FISA court.

Why Behaviorists by Definition Are Incapable of Comprehending Human Creativity

This points out, albeit only through its striking omission from these models, the fundamental differentia specifica between all animal consciousness and the truly human creative mind. Humans are uniquely capable of creating a mission to change their practices to obtain a new plateau of capability in increasing available resources by redefining and expanding them through technological innovation. Thus breaking the fixity inherent in proceeding merely deductively from past experiences like dumb beasts. In the language of mathematical physics new singularities are envisioned in the purview of distinctly human sovereign noetic mental processes.

Why Yes, President Obama, Let's Change the Subject to Economics

The following dialogue may be thought of as mere fiction. But, in essence, it is very much the undeniable truth.

Question: Do you agree that the American people have a right to expect that our government should promote the form of economic prosperity that will ensure their children'd long term well being?

Answer: Of course. That is why I was elected by them.

Question: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt enacted legislation that prevented depository institutions from engaging in financial speculation. President Bill Clinton stated that his worst mistake was signing the law that repealed that very same Glass Steagall act. The repeal effected the ability of banks to engage in extremely dangerous forms of speculation in exotic financial instruments known as derivative securities. The collapse of this market enabled these gargantuan too big to fail institutions to obtain a massive multi-billion dollar bailout by the Treasury and Federal Reserve. The current policy continues to prop up these otherwise failed institutions. At the same time the lobbyists for these financiers are calling for ever increasing levels of austerity and bailouts. Will you Mr. President support the reintroduction of Glass Steagall as the first step in reversing the control of these interests that are causing such impoverishment and suffering of the American people?

Answer: Right now the economy is healing and we are on the road to prosperity with the policies that my administration is already pursuing. Next question.

Wound Healing Research and Implications

This excellent research described below should remind us of two great pioneers in scientific epistemology. Leibniz and Riemann. To wit: Leibniz' system of pre established harmony of lesser (biological) monads that do not have a window on the world, but may have that function for higher monads and Riemann's functional concept of a multiply connected manifold (in this case a biophysical one.)

Further reflection leads one to consider on a sort of built in quality of restorative principle that hold across and among Vernadsky's doctrine of three domains of lithosphere, biosphere and noosphere. One intriguing application of restorative in the noetic manifold, for instance, is the Gestalt concept of the human mind as a sovereign evolving creative process.

Vascular endothelial cell healing a transcellular wound. Credit: Christopher Carman (Medical Xpress)—


Endothelium, heal thyself: A fresh look at this resilient, adaptable tissue

May 16, 2013 by Bonnie Prescott in Medical research


The endothelium, the cellular layer lining the body's blood vessels, is extremely resilient. Measuring just a few hundred nanometers in thickness, this super-tenuous structure routinely withstands blood flow, hydrostatic pressure, stretch and tissue compression to create a unique and highly dynamic barrier that maintains the organization necessary to partition tissues from the body's circulatory system. In instances when the barrier must be physically breached to enable immune cells to reach various regions of the body to fight infection, the endothelium cooperates with leukocytes to create openings to provide the infection-fighting cells ready access to their targets.


By and large, these ensuing "micro-wounds" are short-lived; as soon as the cells have crossed the endothelium, these pores and gaps quickly heal, restoring the system's efficient barrier function. In cases when these gaps fail to close—and leakage occurs—the results can be devastating, leading to dramatic pathologies including sepsis and acute lung injury.


The mechanism underlying this highly intuitive capability has not been well understood. Now, a research team led by Christopher Carman, HMS assistant professor of medicine in the Center for Vascular Biology Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, using a combination of advanced fluorescence imaging and electron microscopy to monitor intracellular signaling dynamics, has amassed real-time information that shows that biomechanical signals are what sets this healing process in motion.


Described in The Journal of Cell Biology, the new findings suggest that rather than structural robustness per se, the barrier function of the endothelium relies on an enormous self-restorative capacity.


"When people talk about biomechanics, they're saying that cells are able to sense and respond to changes in force," said Carman. "In other words, it's not only hormones and chemical signals that influence cell behaviors. Cells can actually sense physical cues and thereby modulate their function."


Specifically, the new findings demonstrate that the endothelium senses an acute loss of preexisting isometric tension, and that downstream of this biomechanical signal, the ensuing recovery response generates reactive oxygen species (ROS), which are responsible for coordinating the micro-wound closure process.


Carman's previous work explored precisely how leukocytes generate vascular micro-wounds in the first place, uncovering a novel endothelial piercing activity—"invasive podosomes"—that are generated by the leukocytes. In this new paper, he hypothesized an equally active role for the endothelium in closing the pores and gaps made by the leukocytes.


To test this hypothesis, Carman's laboratory set up experimental models that mimicked acute, intense inflammation. Using dynamic time-lapse and high-resolution confocal microscopy, the investigators could see the process by which leukocytes were breaching the endothelial cell.


In the course of a 10-minute span, they observed that a single endothelial cell tolerated the passage of at least seven leukocytes directly through its body, and that within this brief period, the gaps closed, leaving no sign of the pores.


"The cell's restorative capacity was just so striking," said Carman. "But these early investigations were still inadequate to tell us how the breaches were being closed. We had to dig down to the subcellular level to understand the underlying activities and the molecular signaling mechanisms that were orchestrating these activities."


Subsequent experiments, led by co-first author Roberta Martinelli, HMS research fellow in medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess and senior scientist in the Carman laboratory, revealed that in response to micrometer-scale disruptions caused by the transmigrating leukocytes, the endothelial cells were generating unique ventral lamellipodia structures, which were then migrating to the sites of the micro-wounds to close them up.


"The ventral lamellipodia were responding to the sensation of an acute loss of preexisting isometric tension," explained Martinelli, who compares the cell to a circus tent tethered in place by strategically placed ropes and stakes.


"If you cut one of the ropes holding up the tent, two things will happen," she added. "First the part of the tent that was under tension will undergo a recoil which will lead to a relaxation, leaving one part of the tent untethered and flapping in the breeze. At the same time, the remaining sets of ropes and stakes will have to bear the extra load. In the case of the endothelial cells, this translates to a force-loading event."


Existing studies have focused almost exclusively on force loading (physical pulling or tugging on cells) as response triggers. But by using new devices, the team was able to push, prod, stretch and unstretch cells in very specific ways.


"Our experiments told us that endothelial micro-wounding is actually a tension-loss, or force-unloading, signal and that this signal cued the recovery response," added Carman. This response, he said, is fundamentally dependent on proteins, the NADPH oxidases, that can generate ROS, specifically hydrogen peroxide.


ROS are widely implicated in causing cellular, tissue and organ damage when present at excessive levels in the body. But these findings show that low levels of these molecules—when produced in discrete locations within the cell—are highly protective. "It's tempting to speculate that excess ROS causes vascular breakdown by short-circuiting the recuperative response process and creating 'white noise' that dis-coordinates and disrupts micro-wound healing," said Carman. "It appears that we've got an essential homeostatic self-repair mechanism that is completely dependent on the generation of intracellular ROS, which is the opposite of our typical thinking about ROS in cardiovascular health and disease."


"These findings suggest a new way of thinking about how to deal with pathologic breakdown of the endothelial barrier," said William Aird, HMS professor of medicine and Director of the Center for Vascular Biology Research at Beth Israel Deaconess.


"We know that a 'leaky endothelium' is a central part of the pathogenesis of a number of serious diseases, including sepsis, acute lung injury and ischemic cardiovascular diseases, as well as chronic inflammatory conditions such as diabetes and arthritis. In addition to the presence of excessive barrier insults, it now appears that leakage can result when the endothelium loses its self-restorative capacity and its dynamic reserve to heal micro-wounds," Aird said.


More information: jcb.rupress.org/co… 449.abstract Journal reference: Journal of Cell Biology Provided by Harvard Medical School

Leonardo DaVinci and Solar Flares: A Pictorial Demonstration of Creative Thought Process

Solar Flare May 12, 2013 Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA

Is It Any Wonder that the IRS is Carrying Out a Witch Hunt?

One of my ancestors fell befoul of the mass hysteria in Salem many years ago. She was not among the most unfortunate but she was incarcerated for engaging in "mischief." Now, I am not one to dismiss the use of Cabalistic magic masquerading as acceptable Euclidian mathematics in the creation and promotion of Empire by the likes of John Dee, et al. However, when citizens are directed to look under their beds, so to speak,  for "Teabagger" scoundrels and report them online as spreading "fishy" misinformation about "Obamacare" back in 2009 by the White House director of "New Media" (!), Macon Phillips, is it any wonder that supposedly "rogue" IRS agents might believe that they were only doing their civic duty by blocking "fishy" outfits from tax exemption? Indeed, when they asked for donor lists, etc. weren't they perhaps merely attempting to lure those mischievous fishy extremists so they might be enlightened by right thinking "folk"?

Remember this?--

"There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. "

Well, perhaps the stink of scandal coming from the nether realms of the White House these days is somewhat redolent of dead fish.

Oligarchic Bastardizations of Greatness Are Putrid: a Pre Mother's Day Jeremiad

Edgar Allan Poe rightly took up the cudgels against that execrable "barking dog" excuse for a human being Thomas Carlyle. The same Carlyle that took the great Friedrich Schiller and so vilely desecrated his greatness. And Baudelaire who is the epitome of putrefaction when it came to misrepresenting that very same Poe, a follower of the Schiller acolyte Alexander von Humboldt.

But do not forget that the very worst of this miserable tradition, if you can call it that, was the abortion known as Neoplatonism. A shameful concoction of superstitious phony intellectual vipers, hod carriers for all the evil cabals befouling human history. Truly, these belong in the nether reaches of the inferno.

The Indomitable Urge to Search for Life Among The Reaches of Space

It would seem that this urge to discover life forms on other planetoids parallels the one appetite we humans as a species have that is unquenchable: the intellectual. Now we are approaching a stage in our development of biophysical technology where we could envision a capability of deliberately seeding, in a manner of speaking, the cosmos with life.  The pessimistic and oligarchic Manichaen worldview shudders in abhorrence at the prospect. Yet somehow there is an ineluctable fascination that captures the imagination that spreading life throughout this universe might just so happen to be written in the very composition of the stars.

Oh, and By the Way, Designer Drugs and Bitcoin

Yes, dear readers, it seems that drug funny money isn't the sole province of the HSBC (Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation) too big to jail defenders like Attorney General Eric Holder. Now we have the tale of Bitcoin and designer drugs...How very quaint the wonderful zombie world of the empire of the mind is! Maybe helicopter Ben can start issuing Bitcoins now. He is, after all, just another bozo on the magic City of London bus.

Why Were Russian Warnings About Tsarnaev Dismissed?

Well now, something is very rotten in Chechnya Jamestown fund neocon land. There seems to be a Gordian knot of very strange bedfellows behind the extended Tsarnaev family. Remember how Al Qaeda starred as Afghanistan anti Soviet allies in the Hollywood expose Charlie Wilson played by Tom Hanks? The Tsarnaev  uncles being protected assets of anti Soviet cold war Chechen Zbigniew Brzezinski/Michael Ledeen networks certainly poses the question that the Russian warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev would have been given the cold shoulder. Likewise since both Obama his former Republican opponent John McCain are protecting associated Saudi Salafist Al Qaeda networks as "Syrian rebels" shouldn't this be something "investigative journalists" at Fox and NBC would be told to keep away from as a wacko conspiracy theory? And what of William Plotnick? My, my, so many dots here, it's like seeing spots before your eyes...

The Illusion of Mere Survival or the Survival of Mere Illusion

If, dear reader, you might, ever and anon, feel compelled to poke your head above the common herd to assess, as it were, that its general direction is perhaps nothing short of impending disaster, then you might have some inkling that apparent "best practices" are less than worthless. That is, in Darwinian parlance, your very fitness for survival is merely an illusion, from whence you know not, leading irrevocably to the doom of your "species."

But isn't this the unspoken premise of the veritable ninety nine and forty-four one hundredth percent of what is staged day in and day out for your "viewing pleasure?" I mean who can argue with that which as clear as day for all to see? For, from time immemorial, as far as we were meant to know, has it not always been thus? Like incense from a swinging censor we do attempt to sleep and dream, with a forlorn hope that there is balm in Gilead.

Otherwise you have no choice but to kick against the pricks.

Goya The Inquisition Tribunal

A Catastrophic Omission

This morning I have quite unexpectedly come across a rather salutary and risible astrophysics paper: "Felinic principle and measurement of the Hubble parameter." Of which Brahm's favorite author E.T.A. Hoffmann might have been somewhat amused with this anti-Enlightenment polemic's so called Felinic Principle, or at least his literary feline Tomcat Murr I am sure would. My only problem with this whole theory is of course that without taking into account the Boltzmann brain, just like the rather devastating refutation by Kurt Gödel of Bertrand Russell's logical symbols mess Principia Mathematica; I am afraid this whole cat and caboodle will be forever shamefully incomplete. Such a shame...but no need to cry over spilt milk one supposes.

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

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

Promissory Notes and Childish Delusions

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

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

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

Old Themes of Mental Deficits Re-emerge

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

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

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

Happy Birthday to Vladimir Vernadsky's Leibnizian Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the Essentiality of Genius?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Diplomatic Proposal

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

Reflection on Obama's Jedi Mind Meld Comment

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

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

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

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