The Current Schizophrenia Infecting Our Body Politic

 It all boils down to a lack of understanding of the potential of the human mind to solve problems in its capacity to act lovingly as a mirror of ongoing creation. If you will dear reader, permit me to explain.

Many common people in these United States smell a rat when it comes to the neo-Malthusian agenda behind the pseudoscience of climate change. While it is true as the nose on your face that pollution stinks, we need to not throw the baby out with the rather smelly bathwater. We can chew gum and walk at the same time for we are Americans, no? 

So, we being called upon to solve a problem that we require new resources to improve, not sustain, but improve our material standard of living for an increasing population base, we developed the science to create those new resources. But we dropped the ball by allowing the financial controllers to loot our nation's industrial potential. 

Who to blame? We need no scapegoats. The blame lies within... 

If you are with me so far, consider the mission of biophysics research is necessarily forced by its very subject matter to oppose neoMalthusian premises. It cannot help it even when it must conform to crass mechanistic assumptions. If we are going to save lives, rather than prevent "overpopulation," then we must discover how to do that. In essence, this is no different than creating new resources previously unknown to humanity. 

So, when we go looking for enemies rather than looking to solve problems, like the problem of a pandemic outbreak of a mutating and previously unknown corona virus, we are driven mad. It won't be the first time and hopefully not the last...

Unknown

 When the Earth is engulfed by the Sun

And Andromeda collides with the Milky Way,

Where will you be, oh progeny?

What is your domain to roam?

What lifespan, what your power be?

And communicate how?

Across what universe at length?

What questions and quests do urge you on now?

And all but forgotten antiquity

Like some artifact quaint-- 

I sit and contemplate

Here, alone.

And now like some infant 

Glimpses the unfathomable unknown.

A Partial Universal Principle Discovery

 In the mathematical analytic system developed to make possible the calculation of relative motion we have the invention of the partial differential. This is a spin off of the Leibnizian quest for the true infinity of the differential (as I have previously cited the history of this in the context of the ibn Sina, et.al. principle of the Necessary Existent, also known as a concrete universal.) Which is to say that if one could instantaneously account for all contending conditions and kinds of force impinging upon matter there would be derived a concrete universal quantum for the progress of its relative motion.

Kepler's quest for a universal ordering principle for the orderings of planetary motions was based upon placing one's purview outside the mere point in space being acted upon. His imagination took the standpoint of vicariously experiencing of the ongoing process of creation. Thus it was only in that regard that he specified the necessity of formulating the differential or derivative calculus for every portion of planetary motion. 

Now this higher framework is precisely where Leibniz adduced his truly revolutionary breakthrough by advancing a concrete universal derived from the series of probabilities developed as a sort of game theory of expansion of sums by Blaise Pascal, et al. 

So today, I was profoundly impressed to learn of an elegant hypothesis for an ordering of planetary compositions by William McDonough of the University of Maryland: magnetism. Thus it is an analogue to the principle of partial differential. That is, if we hold all other possible variables conditioned with respect to the magnetism of the star system of the partial magnetic property of that system we have the basis of a universal ordering of the cores of its planets. Wonderfully beautiful and lawful. I am certain that Kepler himself would be quite pleased!

Fig. 4

From: Terrestrial planet compositions controlled by accretion disk magnetic field

Density of the rocky solar system bodies. Uncompressed and solid densities are shown for terrestrial planets and chondrites (gray), respectively. Bulk planetary densities are shown for asteroids (blue). For 1 Ceres, its bulk density is a lower limit of its solid density, given its high ice abundance and porosity. The red line shows a fit curve for the planets (ρ=4100r−0.21). Data sources: density of planetary bodies are from Russell et al. (2012); Park et al. (2019); Sierks et al. (2011); Consolmagno et al. (2006); Macke et al. (2010); Macke et al. (2011); Britt and Consolmagno (2003); Lewis (1972); Stacey (2005); heliocentric distances of chondrite parent bodies are from Desch et al. (2018)

Some Thoughts on Issues Arising from Leibniz' Monadology

 One of the principles of Leibniz' great Monadology is the proposition that lower or simple monads have no "windows through which anything could come in or go out."  However they do possess confused perceptions of what is near to them:

7. Further, there is no way of explaining how a Monad can be altered in quality or internally changed by any other created thing; since it is impossible to change the place of anything in it or to conceive in it any internal motion which could be produced, directed, increased or diminished therein, although all this is possible in the case of compounds, in which there are changes among the parts. The Monads have no windows, through which anything could come in or go out. Accidents cannot separate themselves from substances nor go about outside of them, as the ‘sensible species’ of the Scholastics used to do. Thus neither substance nor accident can come into a Monad from outside.

Now our representations of cells is that "things," i.e. proteins, do come in and go out continuously via the cellular surface gates. And indeed that there are protein enzymatic engines of ATP supplying internal energy to all cells. So in Leibniz' Monadology the study of these changes would have to place cells and their proteins including those signaling molecules Intergrins that permit cellular communication as mere ephemera that come into and out of being, constantly being reduced and recreated as constituents of "cellular automata."

61. And compounds are in this respect analogous with [symbolisent avec] simple substances. For all is a plenum (and thus all matter is connected together) and in the plenum every motion has an effect upon distant bodies in proportion to their distance, so that each body not only is affected by those which are in contact with it and in some way feels the effect of everything that happens to them, but also is mediately affected by bodies adjoining those with which it itself is in immediate contact. Wherefore it follows that this inter-communication of things extends to any distance, however great. And consequently every body feels the effect of all that takes place in the universe, so that he who sees all might read in each what is happening everywhere, and even what has happened or shall happen, observing in the present that which is far off as well in time as in place: σύµπνοια πάντα [sympnoia panta], as Hippocrates said. But a soul can read in itself only that which is there represented distinctly; it cannot all at once unroll everything that is enfolded in it, for its complexity is infinite.

62. Thus, although each created Monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body which specially pertains to it, and of which it is the entelechy; and as this body expresses the whole universe through the connexion of all matter in the plenum, the soul also represents the whole universe in representing this body, which belongs to it in a special way.

And yet that which separates a simple lower monad absolutely from human monads is our unique ability to mirror the necessary existence of the ongoing potential of universal perfection.

   29. But it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God. And it is this in us that is called the rational soul or mind.

So as I have looked to Riemannian surface biophysical models in the past with the "poles" of branchpoints being proteins, it must be kept in mind that these are not lower living Monads but mere chemical compound constituents that come into and out of being. And therein lies the research of the division of the living from the non living. This particular connection is the most necessary aspect of progress in biophysics. For exploring these interconnected protein functions will make all advances of biophysics quest to extend our life and "health-spans" possible, in the analogous manner in which exploring the energetics of elemental constituents of matter will propel our species into space colonization.

Further, it is the division of non-monadic elements into groupings of Vernadsky's domains of inorganic, organic and noetic and their potential interactions that should inform the metatheoretical design for scientific research. For instance, in the domain of the noetic must be included the philosophic purpose for setting research agendas. Is it a requirement that we by necessity must increase the secular healthy lifespan of humanity? How is this to be achieved per capita and overall? Does the defense of society against inevitable impacts from meteors and comets figure in? 

Moreover, it is the historical quality of hypothesis that mediates future deployment of noetic resources. In this regard, these hypotheses "live" beyond their attachment to being produced by an historical person. Among these higher hypotheses, Plato's demonstration of the universality of geometrical knowledge triggered a proven truth about the necessary changes of governance for the survival of society. That is, the breakdown of the irrational barriers to advancement and perfection of knowledge imposed by arbitrary rule by oligarchical families maintained by usurious financial interests of pantheons of pagan cults.  

 

Nuclear Terror and the Illusion of Democracy

 Embedded in our collective psyches are a host of mostly unexamined truisms about the manner of "successful" functioning in the affairs of the present day. The illusion of individual freedom of choice is perhaps the among the hardest to navigate around. 

We live in a bubble of "information" provided to us by a would be elite game masters. This provides a type of security blanket to hold up this grand illusion. What is really taking place on the world stage these days is quite the opposite of freedom. While the U.S. has been deindustrialized per the dictates of the "free market," how has the purchasing power to use the cheap labor of our offshored industrial capacity been enforced? By military supremacy, a.k.a. nuclear war blackmail. 

However, it now appears that the geopolitical chessboard will be shortly toppled. In a world based upon appeals to the principle of reason, we will forego such imaginary nonsense and instead cooperate to pull humanity away from the brink of immolation. The pathway to do so is quite astonishingly clear and consistent. 

We could institute a complete revamping of global monetary affairs ordered to produce nearly illimitable opportunities for advancement beneficial to the future of our species. For instance cooperation in defeating disease, development of nuclear fusion, rebuilding and creating new cities, fresh water projects, and space colonization. Or we can persist in the falsehoods that we have been trained to subconsciously regurgitate that are leading nowhere but our own thereby well deserved, inevitable destruction.

 

Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Riemann Prime Distribution Conjecture

 Number as a physically generated causal principle is limited by a process akin but not commensurate with the expansion of the metricality of substance. 

This previous sentence may be taken as a deictic product of the poetic imagination. As such, it is not embeddable in any formal system of logical analysis.  

The condition of ironic boundedness is forever without proof, yet seemingly a potentially well ordered power capable of expansion and therefore of a type of proof. 

That proof is a living Monad and as such may not be resolved just as the Universal Principle may never be rectified as a fleeting word in the here and now. It is an impossible linguistic proposition.

Therefore, the substance of what is currently referred to as dark matter and dark energy is the poetic paradox of the unproven distribution of prime number generation as a tensor of unknown metrical curvature. Q.E. D.

Ingenuity on Sol 39
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

Social Movements Are Ephemera

 If one puts the stamp of the infinite on one's work what happens after death? Alexander revolutionized warfare and yet his conquered dominions went by the wayside. Charlemagne? Likewise.

Simon Magus used parlor tricks to ensnare the faithful. We see the like, again and again, still today. There is many a slip twixt the intention and the reality. 

We imagine perfection of forms that may never apply to reality. Is it the same with imagination of imperfections? Let us take the issue of the future to attempt to answer that question.

Will there yet be an adulthood of humanity? Perhaps such would be reckoning with the unbound internal freedom of childlike wonderment that is lost for what is passed off as "growing up?"

For what meaning will the zeroes on the ledger of your monetary worth hold after your mortal coil has gone? Perhaps they can be encoded and kept a quantum secret in the cloud as a DNA algorithm? What would Hecuba's tears or her drachmas mean to you then? 

The temple of liberty? Is it built upon the sacred property of the commonwealth or something merely ephemeral? Like the shadows cast upon the wall of the big screen TV? 

Social movements are ephemera. However, what is enduring is worth standing and fighting for. The future choice among alternative realities. That decision outlasts us all. The human mind is demonstrably unique and not subject to the mere passions of arbitrary change. There is no unveiled secret that can be kept hidden from the intention to create a future suitable for it.  

Peter's conflict with Simon Magus by Avanzino Nucci, 1620. Simon is on the right, wearing black.

A Good "Black Hole" Hypothesis

 I came across this very interesting hypothesis on the nature of "black holes" today from a theoretical physicist by the name of Igor Nikitin. The one attribute that is very important here is that this hypothesis is purely physical in that it does not embrace the absurdity of a zero dimensional point of infinite gravity as a black hole, but replaces this impossibility with an infinitesimal reality: a plank scale collapsed star. 

The problem that starting from so called first principles of deductive mathematical logic is simply that we are dealing with things that cannot exist. Points are not physical realities. So the pretension that they are is incompatible with reality. This also applies to the idea of the nothingness of the purported beginning of physical reality: the "Big Bang."

Kepler, who revolutionized astronomy, himself made this charge against the non-physical algebraicists of his day. Riemann, whose contributions to geometry made Einstein's breakthroughs possible, made very much the same point at the close of his doctoral thesis that we cannot confuse mathematical theorems for physical reality. 

But this is precisely what the glorified icons of academia have done and are continuing to do today. Nikitin may be right or not. And of course, we need to test his hypothesis rigorously. But, at the very least his hypothesis does not suffer from the outset in the same way as do so many others that accept without question the irrational premises of mathematical fictions as reality. 

My Apologies, Dear Readers

 I have removed all my links on this site as you may or may not have noticed. Sometimes the simulacrum of truth is nothing but an illusion. Truth at this point of time in this political landscape is almost non existent, unfortunately. 

I can say this that the world is careening either toward a cataclysmic series of financial collapses and war (perhaps of annihilation) or a new practically unfathomable Renaissance of space colonization and all that entails. 

As for joining a movement or trying to initiate one, at this point all I can do is put my voice out there and continue to promote the spirit of doing and bringing forth the good. 

Incomprehensible Chaos?

 

The "Butterfly Nebula" is shown in false "color reassignments" from the scheme of Hubble where "red light from hydrogen atoms as green, red light from sulfur ions (sulfur atoms with one electron removed) as red, and green light from doubly-ionized oxygen (oxygen atoms with two electrons missing) as blue.

Leibniz declared in his Monadology proposition number 68: "Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion save in appearance, somewhat as it might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming of fish in the pond, without separately distinguishing the fish themselves."

So what do we "see" in this image? Is it merely random diffusion of gaseous or plasma elements? We are given a narrative that the future effects of a butterfly's flight might determine a chaotic change in the concatenation of mechanistic chains of dependent kinetics. Yet it seems to be the case that humanity is not merely subject to such arbitrary forces. 

Such that beauty is an ongoing composition of Creation that we willfully operate on to bring about ever more order in consonance with our need to embody that ultimate higher creative power that only we may conceive being the self-aware potentially creative Monads all dwelling in the "simultaneity of eternity."

Which Poets are the True Legislators of the World?

 Shelley said that Plato was a poet in the broad sense of the word. So the ironic banning of poets from the vision of the Republic is more than interesting, is it not? Socrates was put to death by democratic means. His crime? Making the polity lose faith in the gods by the public questioning of what constituted their godliness. For if the gods were merely irrationally lustful and vindictive tyrants that would punish humanity for the Promethean hubris of creativity, how could such rule over humanity? Except, perhaps, as a rotten and misbegotten oligarchy. 

So Aristophanes, the poet, in the broader sense of that term, composed a play called The Clouds ridiculing Socrates. 

Now the issue of what true poetry is, perhaps, needs to be somewhat elucidated. Many times we are told that the ironical juxtaposition of ambiguity in a strictly metered form is poetry's sine qua non. It is overwhelmingly the case that the most highly developed music imparts in the medium of sound the substance of creative problem solving as great fugal dialogue. Now much babble has been written over the centuries about "dialectics." There are "dialogues" that cannot properly be called profound ideas regarding humanity, even though they may be quite impassioned. 

A very ironic instance of this is the French decadent school of Charles Baudelaire that praised Poe as a revolutionary purveyor of the "flowers of evil." And yet, it was just the opposite. For instance Poe roundly attacked the downright criminal protégé of the romantic poet Sir Walter Scott, the so called Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. However, you have to decode Poe to realize this, like so many of his other attacks on Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, they were not outright. This is also the case in Poe's series of satires on the subversive literary circles of his day. Such as his ripostes anent the wife of Guiseppe Mazzini, Margaret Fuller and of course his many swipes at the transcendentalist followers, (Emerson Thoreau, Longfellow, et al.) of that rather vile and disgusting literati named Thomas Carlyle who penned the evil The Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question. 

The idea of celebrating evil is nothing new to the generations of drugged up Thelemic rock groupies of drug fiend and Satanist  Aleister Crowley, of course. Mark Twain wrote a much overlooked such literary dialogue called The Mysterious Stranger. Now, it might be argued that Clemmons was merely referring to the Babylonian model of god as a ruthlessly punishing and irrational destroyer of his creatures. But that would be some very big stretching.

Perhaps the old saw that beauty is in the eye of the beholder should be applied just a bit more rigorously. For the luridly dramatic paintings of the murderer Caravaggio might be supposed to be beautiful given their meticulous execution, but are they really beautiful? Perhaps it is not so simple as a' that....

The Beheading of Saint John (1608) by Caravaggio (Saint John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta)

 

The Vision of the Creative Purpose of Humanity

The nominalist wants to define each and every term of his or her existence as though it is a logical proposition of a social contract. I never had a card that I carried declaring my membership in the political movement associated with Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. My time of some twenty years of that active  association was brought to a close some twenty plus years hence. 

In the time that I spent drumming up support for various planks of the campaigns of the International Caucus of Labor Committees, it more often than not was a hindrance to fundraising to bring up the much reviled name of the "political extremist and convicted felon" Lyndon LaRouche. So, today for myself it is rather ironic that there is a public skirmish over who is to be blessed, so to speak, with the mantle of carrying on a political organization in his name.

Today, having retired from my workaday job, I find myself at a sort of crossroad in my ripe old age. Political movements desire visibility. Therefore, even if we might sometimes disagree with some or perhaps many of the tenets of one another's professed philosophies, if we can show that society must pay respect to a person's "qualifications" that will serve us in building the "movement." Or so goes the mostly unspoken assumptions about appeals to that which society respects, willy nilly.

And yet, I distinctly recall the a document written by LaRouche on the strategy of recruitment to his movement that was polemically critical of the tactic of foregoing one's principles for the purpose of collecting "gate receipts." In fact, rereading just now his autobiography, The Power of Reason, he always considered the issue of collecting gate receipts as a tendency toward conciliation of backwardness to be just the opposite of that course he established in forming and steering his political movement. A movement he avowed he would abandon forthwith if it stopped serving that purpose. 

What is it that is desired to effect change in the required revolutionary direction in order to uplift humanity to finally defeat its age old enemy in its many guises? How to overcome the inherent weakness of past concessions to pragmatic deals of current political realities? 

What is it that is of enduring substance in this ever changing current of history? As I spoke to in the previous post, the demonstration that reason is the characteristic of all humans by Socrates was revolutionary. The Renaissance Erasmian Imitation of Christ is in this mold. Just as we must elevate our reason above the constraints of the axioms of the simple counting numbers as the basis for producing a square in order to double it (and yet a degree more for the doubling of the cube,) so must we resolve the paradox of Christ as the Prince of Peace and yet the bringer of "not peace but a sword." 

For if we would have not the peace of the grave but instead a grand design for a concert of nations to propel humanity forward into the peaceful era of space colonization, what must be routed and overcome by the metaphorical sword for that to happen? Is it not the age old shackles that imprisons those universal creative powers that give meaning to the premise that each not in a war against all, but rather each created in the image of the ever developing and living, universal Creator? 

Today in America there is a rising incidence of suicide that is lowering the life expectancy. Why? The hopelessness of the drug/radical environmentalist counterculture. It appears that getting high to escape the high tech imitation of the Roman Circus we have become eventually leads to a despairing and futile dead end. 

On the other hand, with a mission orientation for space colonization, we can expect the average human "healthspan" to significantly increase secularly with very little end in sight. We will accomplish what would seem rather miraculous today in the same way that building cities on the moon and Mars would have seemed to mortals just a few hundred years ago. 

For instance, the program of space colonization entails a scientific mission of overcoming the deleterious effects on human health of weightlessness or reduced gravity and mutagenesis from cosmic rays. Therefore, we can expect the secrets of cellular defense of microbes against radiation such as Deinococcus radiodurans to be put to use to provide our own species protection. Likewise, we will unlock the means to regeneration of tissue that we are currently homing in on in modern biophysics. 

As to the predicted baleful prognostications of diminishing natural resources, that really has cast a pessimistic pall over the outlook of our youth, the future of technological progress holds just the opposite prospect. With nuclear fusion, the concept of a plasma torch will become a reality. This means that the age old dream of transmutation of elements will no longer be the domain of crazy Hermeneutical cranks like Isaac Newton. We will unleash the never ending abundance of resources with the amount of energy dense throughput or intensity at our disposal. The increased lifespan, biophysical breakthroughs and availability of resources will make Kraft Ehricke's vision of the creation of artificial planetoids for long term human space exploration a reality. 

And what will fuel these planetoids' propulsion to the vast stretches of space that we invariably seek to explore? Fusion probably won't do the trick. Up until now we can only produce puny amounts of anti-matter in particle accelerators for the prospective matter anti matter reactions that could propel such colonizers. Ah but, it turns out that anti-matter will be available in relative abundance in many orbits of our own solar system, let alone many, many others in yet to be identified.

This then is the vision of the eternal optimism of the creative purpose of humanity. 

Antimatter Starship - Earth to Pluto in less than six months? 92% light speed? 

The Angry Astronaut

Rembrandt Philosopher Reading, 1631

All That Glitters is Not Gold, But Some Few Truths Are Necessarily Enduring

I have been justly criticized of late for not expressly "unpacking" (as the current argot goes) my thoughts so as to make them comprehensible for the uninitiated. So I have decided to explicate the revolutionary dialogue of Plato, the Meno, that stands out in human history as embodying precisely the principle of imparting profound truths to the "everyman," so to speak. Please bear with me I will enlarge upon why this theme is of fundamental importance shortly. I am hopeful you, dear reader, will take away something of lasting value from this discussion. 

The profound leap in human history that this dialogue represents cannot be underestimated. For it challenges the very underpinnings of the arbitrary and destructive rule by a monied oligarchy. This is not to say that I am merely alluding to conditions prevailing at the epoch of Plato and Socrates. To wit: if it is the case that any human can be proven to naturally possess the power to mentally reconstruct the most advanced concepts of civilization, then indeed all men are created equal. I will come back to that last statement as it seemingly contradicts the well known words of America's Declaration of Independence.

Socrates engages in a dialogue with Meno and his uneducated slave boy. The proof that the slave reconstructs comes from a breakthrough in geometrical knowledge of the Egyptians. The question is by what method can the area of a square be doubled? By nature, no one of a certain age is at a loss to comprehend the universal geometric idea of what a square is.  A corollary would stand to reason that the same would apply to a circle and so on. So Socrates proceeds to guide the slave to find the answer through drawing out the proof in the sand that the only answer that may be constructed so that there is no doubt comes from the use of the diagonal as the new side of square with the doubled area. 

Now, in doing so the slave has proved the Pythagorean theorem that nowadays every school child learns to repeat. "A squared plus B squared equals C squared." However, almost no children are walked through this Socratic proof, but instead are expected to produce the algebraic formula upon demand. I, for instance, got a scholarship to major in mathematics at the University at Buffalo without ever having been initiated into the non algebraic or synthetic geometric proof . Yet the proof is egregiously simple once it is grasped by the mind (or soul, if you will.)

This brings me back to issue of self evident proofs. Leibniz speaks about irreducible ideas that are incapable of being simplified into component parts and therefore are indeed self evident. The foremost among these are that the human soul, i.e. that our shared mental, conscious creative reason, is by its very nature indivisible. It has no parts. Can this be somehow be proven otherwise? Well, many pedantic academics, like the asses in Goya's cartoons, have tried and will continue to do so as long as they are paid for it. They have hard to comprehend theories about how intelligence is an "emergent" property of the complexity of systems of neurons in the brain, for example. For many, the ability to cleverly and convincingly retell such far fetched theories upon demand will obtain the parroting student a degree and perhaps tenure as a doctor of complexity theory at the most prestigious universities in the land. But in essence this is all so much worthless drivel based upon the logic of provably false premises, if you would but honestly look within. 

The truth is that there is a universal efficient power above the arbitrary rule of any would be oligarchy. That truth is wonderfully and beautifully intelligible. It is profoundly and ironically simple such that any human mind might partake of it. And it is embodied in the principle of the Republic. The creation of a self governing society to do the good so that humanity and its posterity will increasingly come into conformity in an ever more perfect union that is indeed inscribed in the principle that all men are created equal. 

I hope I may have somewhat clarified to some degree whatever has been heretofore cloudy, misty or murky in my many posts here in this blog, ironically named in honor of the genius of Edgar Poe's Thingumbobesquire. 

Poe's tomb in Baltimore, where I used to stroll by daily while working nearby

The Threat of the Corona Virus Versus IMF/Free Trade Economics

I am an iconoclast, not an "expert." However, I do have the power of reasoned dialogue, as should all thinking citizens of this planet. So, what I want to accomplish here in this post is to bring up some pertinent questions about the topic in its title.

What I am referring to is the discrepancy and inconsistency in the attitude of the public toward the dual issues of self preservation of society and economics. Now, many so called conservatives will pooh pooh the idea that the current pandemic is all that dangerous to necessitate extreme public health measures like quarantine and vaccination. On the other hand, the liberals will denigrate the claims (or simply ignore them altogether) that the so called Green New Deal policies will lead to the inability of society to maintain the current world population of some nearly eight billion souls on this planet, let alone increase that number considerably. 

I think that kowtowing to either false set of beliefs is frankly immoral. The problem is that the population suffers from the illusions that are imposed upon their thinking. This is nothing marvelously new. In fact, it is old as proverbial mud. The problem is that the lessons from allegories can be pretty much interpreted as it suits to reinforce the false axioms of these aforementioned belief structures. Plato's Republic features a very challenging such allegory, the "myth" of the cave. 

The question is are we being shown mere shadows projected by "puppet masters" on our current equivalent of walls of the cave in order to chain us or better immobilize us to the passivity of "chains of illusion?" 

The level of poverty in most of this planet, including pockets in the USA, if not remediated will inevitably lead to the outbreak of old and new epidemics via the vectors of lack of sanitation, including fresh water and lack of adequate nutrition. So, shutting down the borders and fiddling while the planet starves will come back to haunt the isolationists. Likewise, shutting down the use of hydrocarbons (the term "fossil fuels" has been proven incorrect and should be abandoned) means that we consign the world to increased poverty leading to the very same outcome of poverty and mass epidemics. 

I believe these outcomes based upon the deliberative dialogue of reason are unassailable. Now, I have spent some forty years or so of my adult life promoting solutions to the economics of the power of an age old establishment that controls the power of money and military  as a means to enforce the disastrous results that society currently confronts. The truth is indeed out there. However, unless you, dear reader, squarely face that you are being manipulated into an ideological straightjacket of immobility, then humanity will continue to needlessly suffer ever greater catastrophes. 

Rembrandt: Jerome

Higher Principle of Harmonic Biophysical Functions

Here is the wonderful image of the recent three dimensional map produced for the inner ear by Uppsala University researcher Hao Li, et al. at the Bio-Medical Imaging and Therapy (BMIT) 05ID-2 beamline at the Canadian Light Source, Inc. (CLSI) in Saskatoon using synchrotron radiation phase-contrast imaging (SR-PCI.) The paper can be found here.

Ear membrane and auditory nerve in the cochlea. The octave bands have been given different colors. Humans can perceive frequencies from 20 Hz (the top of the coil) to 20,000 Hz (the base of the coil). The image also shows the round window, the oval window where sound enters and the facial nerve.
CREDIT Hao Li

I have reported on the issue of Helmholtz model of hearing versus Riemann previously. Can anyone viewing the indescribable beauty of this spiral octave photo of the inner ear still argue that somehow biophysics is organized according to random genetic mutations that parallel random acausality of entropic physics assumptions? Really this beautiful image of such exquisite coherent organization should clear that up. Please see my further discussion here. 

Art, Religion, Science and Politics

Reading Plato's Republic, it is indeed an unanswered paradox that it is proposed that poets be excluded. What of the Republic of Letters? It certainly is the case that the Aristophanes play The Clouds did a "number" on Socrates. Likewise, Voltaire's' Candide pilloried Leibniz. The forms of art, poetry, drama, sculpture, architecture and music purport to have a sort of solid inviolability supported by reason. Or at least that was the case until those very forms became a source for irrational arbitrary "invention." Indeed, there is a sort of self consistency with those very forms as a "language" that provide the opportunity for the development of the truthful irony of the finite work of art versus the non finite possibility of development. Therein, perhaps, lies supernal beauty. 

Upon what ground exactly is the rationale of the critic's work founded? I have recently written for example that there is a "test" for religion. If it is unfettered and unchecked does what passes for religion devolve into a mere tool to stir the passions in obeisance to the whims of a ruling oligarchy? In America, Edgar Poe apparently gained undying enmity beyond the grave for his trenchant criticism of the ills of poetic meter. However, there is perhaps much more to that sort of criticism than meets the eye, since it is the case that his satires were always political. Even Poe's comment that the extremely popular tales of his contemporary James Cooper were in truth rather pedestrian and that Cooper was a "quietist."  This, even though Cooper was quite comfortable in exposing and justifiably denouncing the oligarchy of Venice and the contemporaneous press of his day as being a tool of would be American oligarchs. 

Today, this charge of quietism has almost no touchstone for modern audiences. However, that was far from the case at the time. For instance, take the poem of Henry Longfellow, The Three Silences of Molinos. This is a kind of paean to another New England radical, abolitionist "mystic," John Whittier. Now this Molinos was indeed, a quietest. In order to trace out all of the seemingly chaotic connections that were quite well known at that time and bring them to "light" in terms of today's touchstones for my readers it is necessary to take a detour down a somewhat arcane sort of rabbit hole. But I promise it is quite relevant to the current political and social circumstances in which we find ourselves embroiled.

Whittier wrote a sort of a paean to Master Eckhart, wherein much is made of rather mystically magical practices like the lots of Urim and Thummin that resolve into this mystical quietism:

The heaven ye seek, the hell ye fear,

Are with yourselves alone.

Now, it does appear that Nicolas of Cusa did indeed perform a study of Eckhart and by some modern critics is lumped into the category of "brethren of free spirits" such as those movements stemming from the mysticism of the Beguins, Beghards and Marguerite Porete's "Mirror of Divine Love." However, as I will show nothing could be further from the truth, as Cusa was quite the opposite of the Cathars, Bogomils, and a vast plethora of other Gnostics. If the term "free spirit" reminds the baby boomer reader of the epoch of Haight Ashbury and the "summer of love," it is no accident.

The diggers (and their devilish offspring, the ranters) were a back to the land anarchist movement at the time of the various dissenters of the English civil wars. Free love, hippie communes were explicitly modelled upon these diggers. (Can you dig it?) Indeed, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience is a sort of key for the British oligarchy to utilize to create syncretic movements as part and parcel of divide and conquer, popular people's movements. In fact, the back to the land self reliance movement of the dead poets society (perhaps as in the "Book of the Dead" or Gogol's "Dead Souls") of the New England transcendentalists was inspired by the bizarre quietus novel, Sartor Resartus of Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was the writer that Poe referred to as a bedlamist, who attempted to pervert Schiller's conception of uplifting aesthetics of the reliving of the dramatic historical crises, much as Shakespeare did likewise. And the same Carlyle who later wrote a vile tract justifying plantation slavery called "On the Negro Question."

It is sometimes claimed by the mystical cult of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood and T.S. Eliot, that Dante Alighieri and Marguerite Porete were in some ways birds of a feather. And as such are representatives of an earlier pre Renaissance era of simplicity and courtly Romanticism. This parallels the slander against Cusa's mysticism.. For it could be said that Marguerite wrote in the vernacular old French in order to uplift the common people with a national language, etc. However, nothing could be further from the truth and in no way compares to Dante's grand political design in his De Monarchia and Divine Commedia. Likewise Cusa's convening of a great council for reconciliation of faiths to bring about an end to barbaric geopolitical wars of his day. These were both real world challenges that laid the groundwork for the yet to be developed scientific statesmanship of the American System. 

I turn now to the theme I briefly brought up in my last posting on Cusa: concrete universals. In his Vision of God, Cusa furthers his claim to a scientific method that is wholly consonant with the idea of the principle of the ongoing process of perfecting human practice. Sometimes referred to as the Imago Viva Dei. I have brought up elsewhere that the Meno dialogue of Plato is analogous to an untutored child grasping profound principles of science that represent clear revolutionary historical advances. For example, the practice of the infinite "vanishing point" in drawing is elementary and easily reproduced by any grade school student. However, look at this in light of Cusa's Concrete Universal. Really the principle that no matter where you look, that infinite projective space, a concrete universal, is ever present would seem miraculous to previous untutored societies. This is the non mystical meaning of the connection of the universal mind, the maximum, non other with the sovereign and inviolable non divisible mind (or soul if you will) of the individual. 

And so, here, I need to make another downward journey into the bestiality of what motivates the control of the oligarchy and its hatred of the principle of Prometheus, the bringer of the technology of fire. Various mystery cults that promote the control of priesthoods owned by oligarchies have been with us since time immemorial before it were even possible for epic poems to be written down. The most perverted and egregious of these would have to reside here in the Americas with the death cult rituals of the Aztecs. However, it must be kept in mind that the heinous and superstitious magic of child sacrifice serves as the basis of most of these oligarchical epics including the Greek cycle of tragedies of the House of Atreus. 

So the question  is how does it make any sense that these same monstrous Aztecs who carried out such thoroughly evil rituals also had intricate knowledge of astronomical cyclic calendars? Well, the answer is it was that very actual power that necessitated esotericism. I leave this for you dear reader to follow up on, for it is my hope that that this might engender a thirst to resolve the many paradoxes that the forgoing brings to mind.

Nicholas of Cusa and the Idea of True Infinity

I recently attended a presentation on Nicolas of Cusa that addressed some of the examples he used to illustrate his  groundbreaking conception of true or absolute infinity. Upon reflection, I had a few thoughts that connect these examples with major strides forward in science and art. I think it is especially important to show that Cusa is the source of the birth of the scientific method in the Florentine Renaissance. 

The practice of generating "thought experiments" was adopted by Cusa in his Platonic dialogues. It is not arbitrary and no small moment that Einstein's seminal gedankenexperiment that developed the equally groundbreaking conception of relativity partakes of this same essential practice. 

In one example, he shows that a straight line and a circle that expands progressively to infinity are in fact indistinguishable. This great invention of Nicolas is the basis for projective geometry that was adopted and pioneered by the great artists of the Renaissance as the perspective and camera oscura with parallel lines meeting at the infinite "point." 

Albrecht Durer Woodcut 1530

The question of whether there was a substantial difference between a mere mathematical infinity and a true infinity had been the subject of treatises on philosophy especially spurred on since the time that the Islamic Renaissance of the Abbasid Caliphate reached the European Christians. Ibn Sina or Avicenna in the Eleventh Century developed a Socratic proof of God that he called the Necessary Existent. This was the existence of a true infinity.

The development that made possible modern constructive Non-Euclidean geometry likewise arises from Nicolas. Leibniz, who time and again used that principle in his writings and letters, once remarked that the Newtonian notion that an object set into motion without any further forces acting upon it would continue in a straight line was completely an arbitrary assumption. Instead it could be as easily argued that in such an imaginary case the object could continue on a curved trajectory. This is precisely the poetic truthful imagination or thought experiment of a true infinite. 

Likewise, the great work of Georg Cantor on the principle of the Transfinite is admittedly indebted to Cusa. Indeed the different gauges of mathematical transfinite numbers, for example the rational versus the transcendentals, as opposed to Absolute Infinity are acknowledged by Cantor.

Finally, consider that Riemann's universal treatment of the foundations of geometry in his habilitation thesis makes no assumptions of distinguishing the curvature of surfaces that may be of positive, negative or in the Euclidean case zero curvature. Riemann warned in that presentation that the actual measurement of this curvature in the physical sciences must be left to experimentation.  It is this germ of Nicolas of Cusa that allowed for Einstein's theory of general relativity of the curvature spacetime upon which are founded so many of the marvels of 20th century scientific progress. 

Proposal for a Global Biophysical Defense Initiative

Currently, humanity face a manifold of grave threats to it's very future. One might in fact quite rightly say that our combined responses to these threats will determine whether or not we have the intellectual and moral fitness to survive.

These threats are intermeshed and need to be treated as part and parcel of an integral solution. If I were writing of warfare, of the justified kind that Augustine so eloquently developed, I would make an analogy to a strategic flank. What is now the biggest enemy to mankind? Certainly, none among the more clear minded can fail to see that the potential of the current pandemic of COVID-19 to threaten through mutation of the SARS-Cov-2 family of viruses and other potential new pandemics arising from known or unknown sources. 

The current state of biophysical research is that we are on the cusp of being able to provide a possible defense of our species from not merely this particular pandemic but an entire series of viral threats facing our collective and shared biome. Anyone surveying the state of basic biophysical science will realize that there have been remarkable advances in the frontiers of technological breakthroughs in our ability to comprehend the processes of cellular signaling, the protein interactome, and other interrelated RNA/DNA interfaces. 

This problem in overcoming our disparate research efforts must be addressed such that we respect the sovereign rights of national self determination and yet at the same time act united as a concerted group. For instance, if it were the case that our scientists monitoring threats from space were to announce that a comet or asteroid were on course to impact the Earth in the near term, would we not almost automatically combine our current technological capabilities to prevent it from wiping out our species existence? 

And yet, we have the winds of an unthinkable nuclear war being seriously promoted even at this late date by geopolitical technocrats. We hear that a limited first strike nuclear war should be put on the agenda of the NATO pact. Of course can anyone in their right mind (excluding of course those Utopian cum Strangelovean whackos,) not foresee that this would inevitably lead to the wholesale extinction of civilization?  

What stands in the way of the adoption of such a policy of mutually assured survival? There are two main obstacles. One is the potential for the collapse of the speculative debt bubble in the near term. The second is a flare up of regional geopolitical wars mounting to a new global war in much the same way that WWI arose. 

So, it were necessary that any agreements for a sort of alliance to combat a looming and very real potential biological holocaust be integrated in a fully cognizant way with cooperation to end these two interrelated threats. We must take as the model the current cooperation in space science and nuclear fusion research. Further we must revive the spirit of the Bretton Woods in disposing of the monstrous uncollectable speculative debt burden. It is an absolute imperative that this be put on the agenda now with no time to waste. To do otherwise is to be abandoned to a perilous and preventable predetermined fate.

Proteins and Biophysical Manifolds

Today we are witnessing a welter of recently designated functional biophysical domains as "omes," mostly conventionally named after the genome. My question is whether there is a unifying principle that can help to bring these rigorously and coherently together.

We are now very much in the infancy of beginning to apprehend how the so called junk DNA transposons may operate in a regulatory manner, for instance, over the protein "interactome." I have been fascinated as a layman who has studied physical economics (as opposed to monetarism) and epistemology for many years with connection of energy dynamics in evolutionary biophysics. 

So I began to look at the powerhouse of the enzyme ATPase as the engine of cellular energy production and throughput. It struck me as remarkable that there was a rotational vector for this that changed chiral handedness depending on whether the cell's respiration was aerobic or non aerobic. So that this was an instance of the Pasteur principal that characterized life at this level.

This led me to view the rationale of Vernadsky's division of the three interacting spheres of physical, biological and human creative powers as being potentially unified around unique forms of functional organization. The transmission of particularly long lived metastable solitonic wave organizations in the inorganic domain seemed to parallel life in a sense. Further the directed quality of many anomalies in astrophysical organization as opposed to the assumptions of chaotic, stochastic entropy. In other words, is there an immanent tendency in this realm for the evolutionary development of life. Why should we suppose anything else? 

Of late, the ideas of Bernhard Riemann with respect to Non-Euclidean constructive geometry coupled with his work on shockwaves have led me to propose a pathway toward a possible unifying geometry of biophysics. Firstly, the protein acts as a singularity through which one or more biological functions operate. This to me was very strikingly similar to the Riemannian arrangement of functional space into connected surfaces of branchpoints that go through singular poles to sheets of a potential variety of functions. Thus the various "omes" mentioned above may be viewed as connected in this way. 

Secondly, I have proposed that the principle of transmission of energy in the biosphere leads under certain circumstances to evolutionary change. The revolutionary seminal work that Riemann did on pressure waves as they surpass the boundary of transmissibility leading to the well known sonic boom and Mach cone guided my thoughts here. 

A Premonition of Creative Nonlinearity

 In the midst of my post World War II era childhood, there were stark polarities. We were being molded in our schooling and through popular entertainment to act and think in certain ways. 

In the public school system during the 1950's for several decades we were subjected to batteries of multiple choice IQ type tests. Use only number two pencils was the rule (just like on voting forms) so these could be fed and read into the latest marvel of cybernetics which would sort out the brainy haves from the have nots. 

Can you cleverly group things (ah, those categories of arrangements of like or dislike) so that your placement in this brave new world can be completed? All the other lessons were perhaps really supplements to this diabolical logical analysis. Propositional set theory that could make nice percentile in batches to be printed out the worth of your supposed reasoning skill.

But where is the actual human emotional or intellectual creative value in all this? This vacuous wasteland. You are put on a Cartesian two dimensional array, a point on a line... Or if for some reason this maddening method were a little bit too much you could escape to engage in extra curricular "popularity."  

And that too was pretty much all pre arranged by Madison Avenue profiles of what sells. Psychological profiling that created a labile and controlled irrationality of feeling good. Popular entertainment's categories... 

And if somehow, after being put through the wringer you still, dear reader, might have a glimmer of a spark of real creativity, then you will welcome the search for something else. A nonlinear potential to change the falsehood of this whole forced narrative. Because it is there awaiting discovery. If you kick against the pricks. The hidden hands that control all this programmed empty and infinite void are the oligarchy. The real enemies whose power we have yet to finally extirpate from this experiment in self government we call the United States. Yet a house divided cannot stand.