extreme vetting of immigrants ala Grand Inquisition

Spain before 1492 had an extreme problem with certain Moslem leaders following their natural inclination to want to control everyone on earth. And so they, like Donald Trump, decided they had to take really unusual measures, reluctantly, simply in order to survive. Are there any lessons we could learn?

Well, here is an extreme measure ... half a joke, but is it really?... inspired by what Luda and I saw when we toured through Andalusia a couple of times in recent years.

Trump suggested somehow adding a kind of rough loyalty declaration. But the only people who might have troubles with faking that would be honest people, and those aren't the problem.
And it might seem mean.

And so: perhaps any adult entering the US ... in certain visa categories.. could be directed to a friendly place, where they are greeted warmly and offered a choice of two free snacks:

(1) a mug of good dark beer, and a tasty quality pork hot dog;

(2) a glass of cognac, and pork liver pate.

But anyone refusing to finish either would be sent back home at their own expense.

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Yes, that's an extreme measure, but if it is well publicized to those flying to the US in those visa categories, flybacks could be minimized. It would keep out many other fundamentalists besides just
Islamic ones, but that's the definition of an extreme measure. It may be that some Trump supporters would   want to exclude anyone as unAmerican who rejects hot dogs and beer, but the experience of Spain reminds us that there are ways to soften this a little. A curious measure of basic American values, but not as crazy as it may seem at first.

Actually, we saw a story in Spain of a woman who was killed in classic Inquisition style because she refused to eat a particular piece of ugly fatty pork thrust in her face, as part of a nation-wide test for everyone (not just immigrants). She said she was simply unable to bring herself to eat something so ugly and unhealthy, and was not again pork as such. So for her, a little pork pate would have solved the problem. In any case, this measure would be a whole lot weaker than what Spain felt it had to fall into.

But if Trump himself were a German citizen, could he pass this test? His aversion to alcohol is very, very rational... but if it is rational rather than fundamentalist or ideological, he could recognize the very strict limited nature of this one-time event. (Yet I have to admit... what if it were coca leaves
entering Peru? Would that keep me out of there? Certainly coca leaf products would.)

The most extreme jihadis follow orders saying they can do anything at all (kill innocents, cavort with prostitutes the night before the grand event, unlimited drugs of any kind)... and this would not affect people at that stage... but lying on a written declaration certainly wouldn't either! The test would reduce the probability of entry of people vulnerable to certain kinds of insane propaganda or to efforts to undermine our Constitution in other ways.

Of course, I see clearly that any true Christian or Moslem (without a rare genetic disorder
on alcohol metabolism which can be verified by DNA testing) would have no troubles with this test.
It reminds me of an entertaining experience I had in Singapore years ago:

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The fancy hotel insisted I sit at breakfast next to a rich retired businessman who came in by cruise..
on a cruise tour to "teach the word."  "That is the one commandment Jesus had for every one of us, to spread the Word." Verbus paulus replied: "Well, I read that book myself, and that isn't exactly what I remember. Didn't he and Paul say that the first thing was to open your eyes and your ears? (OK, Kerry is also right that the two great commandments came in there, another slice into the same pie.)
If all you do is talk and do not open your eyes, Yeshua himself could come right up to you,
in sandals fresh from the Sinai, look deep into your eyes and your soul, and you would just turn away
and really miss something."

The funny thing is that a few hours later, I walked into the area in front of that restaurant, and there was Yeshua (of the same family and tradition as his illustrious uncle)  in sandals, admittedly a few years since the Sinai, and he said he wanted to talk about some things. As we entered, that same old preacher man was leaving, and it happened EXACTLY as I had warned! But when we entered, he led me and a couple of other folks to the well-lit open bar area.   The old Greek guy with him ordered wine, and I ordered Guinness.   When Yeshua ordered water I felt a moment of anxiety: "Oh, does consuming alcohol bother you?" And I will never forget his smile: "Hey, no problem, no worry, I only ORDERED water. There are a few things you need to learn about water..." I would guess he would pick the cognac and pate.  Or at least porto and pate, if cognac is too expensive. (For American values, Madeira would be even better, as that's what they drank when writing the Constitution in a local Irish bar my mother's family kept the bar bills from, donated to Philadelphia historical society
when I was young.)

cracking the neural code

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00097/full?&utm_source=Email_to_authors_&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=T1_11.5e1_author&utm_campaign=Email_publication&field=&journalName=Frontiers_in_Systems_Neuroscience&id=219156

Is the brain an "Artificial Neural Network"? For years it has been almost a religious dogma that the neural network computation used by brains is radically different from what works in engineering and technology. Yet even as governments pour huge investments into brain-computer interface, it has been like recording hieroglyphics which no one could begin to read. We have now taken the "first" steps towards decoding the neural code (building on work by people like Barry Richmond of NIH), supporting a different kind of model of brain dynamics and consciousness.

Big Picture Elevator Speech to Heritage House

A few days ago, I had dinner with a group of people which included one of the folks funding the Heritage House, in real time cell phone communication with folks organizing the new era. At one point, she turned to me, and asked: “What do YOU think about our present situation?”

For a moment,  I was amused inside myself about how impossible this question was. There are SO many different life or death urgent issues requiring focused deeply informed action... but then, OK, in that situation, why not talk about where we stand right now in the big picture?

So roughly I said: “We are at a hugely difficult moment of transition in the big picture. We are debating the interactions between the economic system and the natural system of human interaction which comes from millions of years of biological evolution.   That’s still important, but it’s nothing new. What’s new, what introduces the most uncertainty and instability, is the fundamental change in human life due to two massive changes in how we organize our lives. Just as important as dollars and DNA, there are now two additional massive intelligent systems – the new IT system, and the more powerful crystallizing spiritual consciousness (not religion, but the objective spiritual reality which religions try to talk about).

“IT is not just one issue among many debated in Congress and chased by dollars. It is a massive organizing system in itself.

It will be defining what the rules really are, just as much as the Constitution does – and if we don’t get it right, soon, we are at great risk.”

“The noosphere is not new, certainly, but the crystallization of consciousness going on now is also massively important.”

“In essence, the new transitions of IT and noosphere make us like teenagers at a crucial period of life. We may grow, or our conflicts may simply kill us. There is no guarantee of survival in any level of life.” And I mentioned some of the game plans for the Internet of Things, which could paralyze and then kill us if we do not act quickly to prevent some terrible possibilities. (Guys like Lamar Smith and Tom Kahlil of OSTP have been pushing us towards disaster, but, sadly, they are not at all alone in that.)  

In another discussion by video conferencing with some lead IT people... I said: “I tell the AI people you need to build an artificial mouse before you can build a real artificial Einstein. But for this global design issue, it is even more basic. We need stable cells first, which do not dissolve into goo, before we can afford to depend  more on the designs of brains or markets. Step one is the really urgent need for deploying unbreakable operating systems, with a proper balance between privacy and law enforcement, exactly as detailed in www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf, in press.”

That paper also discussed some entertaining stuff about research for forward time cameras (FTC) and backward time telegraph (BTT), which it described as 50-50 long-term maybe-possibilities. The operating system stuff is near-term and well founded, but this NATO workshop was for futurists. After the conference, I decided to look into  the FTC and BTT stuff more carefully, as in step two of the four-step exploration I proposed (even though step one is still awaiting

the experimentalists).  I was surprised to learn that the literature on quantum ghost imaging is as shaky, at bottom, as the thermal-light entangled photons turned out to be. But I found six or seven alternative, better grounded pathways, and

there may even be an experiment in process on the first and easiest (though least powerful) of the six or seven.  That could be fun.

By the way, the odd resonance I mentioned with Donald Trump seems to be over, at least for now. Not a trace for about a week. Latin America, and folks worried about their personal freedom, and (of course) some quantum physics have taken over some airways.

And I have been reminded that there are interesting parallels between the Republican Party and Russia – both very forceful but both wrestling with incredible and incredibly important inner contradictions.

In fact, I also mentioned to the Heritage person: “The apparent conflict between science and religion is one of the basic reasons why our situation seems so hard and hopeless, not only between the West and Islam, but inside the US as well.

When the contradictions are left fallow... it is like repression in the brain... it causes chronic problems as bad as the obvious acute ones. It causes erosion of ethics and morality, as people do not know what to believe and regress to myopia and incoherence. “ So maybe it is important that the principles of objective reality and mathematics, on the one hand, and of spirit and noosphere and Pater Galacticus, are utterly consistent with each other, in one universe without any kind of dualism needed, objectively, as in www.werbos,com/Mind_in_Time.pdf. Getting the foundations right is really crucial.

Best of luck...  
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small addendum: if my resonant circuit with Trump is off, what of other resonances that were supporting him? At least one focus of thought has been shifting from the election to economics. Serious, real economics, not the plastic ideological kind.  I meant to say that earlier today... forgot.. was reminded by CNN. 

a very large technical issue people have missed

Just before the election, when I might have put more energy into supporting Hillary Clinton, I received three very distinct tides of pushback -- one from a Mormon cluster (not Romney, but there are some links), one from a Russian tone kind of cluster, and another... you would not expect.
It was one of those "small technical issues" which could kill us all, which has been swept under the rug... or, in other language, which is a serious cancer allowed to grow in the darkness under Obama (just as "the gestapo" was allowed to grow).

Lots of notice from Obama's OSTP, actually due to Tom Kahlil (s?), who has given support to a lot of the hard core transhumanist agenda, and who might have expected to expand the already dangerous misdirected efforts if Hilary had been elected. Both with Trump and with Clinton, it is really crucial what kind of people get empowered to do what kinds of things.

The notices I was receiving from all directions... involve the use of electrical stimulation of the brain
on human beings.

I do not intend to write pages and pages on that tonight... but at the end of the day, I have been shocked that people can get away with claiming to be experts on brains or on human potential who are not fully aware of the details and significance of the experiments done decades ago by James Olds senior ... showing how electrical stimulation in certain areas is like cocaine multiplied by 100.
(That's reinforcement areas. For other, more purely cognitive areas, we have only this year even begun to decode the "neural code'.... in press... and NONE of those folks even begun to know what is involved. Just BS, like the green jobs guy Obama headed to misrule his climate change group at OSTP in 2009, well known to the head of CBO... a guy Trump should really get to know.)

Just before the election, they were having... well, let me not use the precise Freudian terms.

If there is any truth at all to backwards flow of intelligence in the noosphere...  this was
a factor even in the election. It is not a small issue.

I have often mentioned the stakeholders meeting where we were urged to line up beind a new business plan for the internet of thinmgs, in which people would be converted to things by brian-computer-interface. Those are their words, not mine, and they were a major reason to retire sooner than I had planned (as did more than half the permanent NSF technical program leaders.).

But... back to family duties..

------------

A few minutes... there was also a major IEEE conference on BCI... whose organizer suddenly got multiple forms of cancer,,,,

A Great Choice Trump could pick for NASA -- or even DOD

Trump has been facing really tough choices and dilemmas in his cabinet picks. Better not to elaborate here and now. But it occurs to me that for NASA, there is a very clear winner for the kind of criteria he has been thinking of:

Why not bring back Admiral Steidle to run NASA?

Anyone who knows NASA would remember that scary no nonsense Admiral. Everyone who wants to feed hippopotami and crocodiles in the swamp would  cringe at the memory. Steidle was George W Bush's appointment to run his first (more energetic and more credible) "return to the moon" thrust,
but he inserted so much competition and strict quality standards that everyone into pork barrel waste complained, and Bush caved in to accept the Ares pork barrel project developed by lobbyists and cancelled for gross overruns a few years later. If Trump really wants to drain the swamp, and introduce competition in aerospace procurement, Steidle would be the guy. ANYONE who goes to teh usual DC social registers of politicians and lobbyists instead... would be undermining the core
of Trump's position. (Will Trump drain the swamp, or the swamp drain Trump? Steidle would be a great step to make it the former.)

The best argument against Steidle for NASA would be Steidle for DOD.

George W Bush picked Steidle because of his famous "shoot-out" at DOD between competing new fighter planes. Could one have run that shoot out better, technically? To be honest, I would ask some people at Boeing about that. If they see a pro-Lockheed bias, that would be worth considering, since Boeing has a lot to give NASA in critical technology areas. But who else is there?

What about trying to get real economic benefit form space activity? At NASA, Steidle hired John Mankins to run HR&T (technology) competition. Mankins, again, is a human with human foibles, but he was far more serious and real about trying to get real economic benefits (and real technology quality and innovation) than any of the swamp feeders we have seen lately, in so many parts of the federal government.. rising high by lies and stealing from the public. (It really did become a swamp in recent years, and it would take great skill to avoid being tied up and conned by it.)

=============================

Trump is facing at least two fundamental difficulties in staffing:

(1) The skills needed to run a complex organization like the US executive branch are very different from those needed to win an election. I remember very well the importance of balancing the PR part and the issues part in Senator Specter's office! And what my father said about balancing manufacturing and marketing in complex companies with a heavy manufacturing/technology component. (Actually, my father, Walter J. Werbos, taught some classes on marketing at Wharton, and someday I should check the time... and the "J" style percolating?).

(2) From the DC scene and the election scene, Trump has been overloaded with possibilities one might characterize as ideologues (on the same message but not heavy in admin credibility) or as
killer wimps (his terms are a bit stronger, and not to be repeated, but yes he would include Jeb Bush and probably even Mario Rubio in there). Steidle is a great example of someone just as intense as Trump wants to be in draining the swamp, for that reason not part of the lobbyists' wish list, but with strong admin capability and commitment to integrity along with the nonwimp intensity needed to make Trump's best hopes real.

As I do other things.. yet respond to feedback... I am reminded that Lowell Wood, Ed Teller's old sidekick (or lead apparatchik manager) is another person of that same type. There are kooks out there who would say that Ed Teller and Lowell Wood are litmus-test-failing liberals... but hey, I do hope someone in this machine knows or can easily find out who Ed Teller really is. If winning the struggle with the Moslem Brotherhood is really top priority, and tough honest and capable people get the priority they need (Not killer wimps popular with PR types)...  Lowell Wood could do lots of important and useful things.

As , by the way, could really serious econmists from Wharton. Too bad Larry Klein is not around so much more... but I sure remember Mark French and the Annual Model group, infinitely more real and less corrupt than some companies which won more of the big model market by telling government folks "our model can tell Congress whatever you want them to hear." (I was there in the sessions organized by Wharton's competitors, and know very concretely how that part of the swamp was fed with calculated lies. They wanted to sell their stuff to folks like what I was in the 1980's, building the main models predicting more than half the energy sectors of the US economy, back when there was more investment in strict quality control and truth.)

Crude impressions on flow of events

Last night as I went to bed I told myself: "The larger world situation is basically looking hopeless. There are a few positive loose ends, where I am waiting for other people to do things... but tomorrow I will do a certain calculation in quantum optics which I am now more confident I can do (linking to experiments in Germany and possibly New Zealand)." That was then. I still hope to do those calculations, maybe even later in this hour... but ... even if it's fuzzy... I feel called to say at least SOMETHING for now about what hit me in two assumption dreams last night and subsequent discussion. (My mind is always clearer earlier in the day.)

There have actually been many interesting and important things this past week, but also lots and lots of intensity about what I am allowed to say and what I am not allowed to say, to whom. So I will give very heavily censored account of the second assumption dream: There I was in a place much less elegant than the usual Trump assumption dreams, talking to a kind of wiry shaggy guy (supposed to be me), with two folks close to Trump sitting on the couch beside/him.  It is odd to see an image of oneself from the viewpoint of someone else, but actually I have had lots of experience with that before, veridical. (It takes getting used to.... but I have seen Trump's images of some other folks and this was not so rough.) From the first assumption dream, from others I have not mentioned in the past few days, and from the news, it is clear that Trump is in 100 binds all at once. In essence, he was interested in just one or two questions: "OK, what do YOU see coming down the pike here? It would be nice to see a hint of even half of it. What would you propose I do in this situation?"

Well, it would not be appropriate to get into specific veridical details, or even to go much beyond the evening news (CNN with a touch of France24).

Hearing about a climate denier yesterday was part of what put me to bed early. I have often discussed why the H2S problem in the future might well kill every human on earth, and of course that depresses me. If that subject is off limits, and the US cannot even do the research to calibrate the nature and extent of the threat beyond what I know (e.g. at www.werbos.com/Atacama.pdf)... well, if we all die, what's the point of other politics? To be honest, I tend to feel that a deeper understanding of quantum optics could maybe possibly be of objective spiritual value, even if the species dies, so that was part of my resolution.

But that is just one thread. I tend to agree with what Obama and Romney have said: "We can agree on SOME goals, and we can do our very best to help Trump achieve glowing success in those goals we both agree on."

Luda pointed me to a web site, greatagain.gov, soliciting ideas. After thinking about that a day, I went to it yesterday and put in a few sentences (It only allows a few lines.)  Logic said: hey, we should at LEAST be able to agree that it would be good if the US, within its existing budgets, could deploy
new access to space which can put 10 to 100 times as much mass into orbit per dollar as any of the current United Launch Alliance or SpaceX or other live projects being funded today.  Really serious national security people, who care about US defense more than they do for the graft for their friends,
should immediately see that this would be a good thing and worth serious effort. That's not a trivial topic (advanced rocket science), so I posted a new paper I have in press, and gave the link in my brief sentences (www.werbos.com/Fixing_NASA.pdf). One of the things which really depressed me was
a statement in the space community network saying that Trump will pick Congressman Spudis to lead NASA... exactly a case of the swamp draining Trump instead of the other way around; that was a major factor in how I felt going to bed yesterday.

Of course, there is also the issue of defeating the total long-term program of the Moslem Brotherhood
(a serious international network) to establish a third caliphate (more like the corrupt Abbas stuff than the stronger and more enlightened things after and even before)... to impose sharia on the entire world. Just before the elections, I was really depressed when I heard an international relations "expert" on CNN saying "Putin says he wants respect. we are trying to figure out what kind of specific little piece of graft he is asking for when he uses this code word 'respect.'" God help us.
What kind of international relations expert forgets that there are some human beings here?
It's not just guys in the 'hood who hate being dissed. And so, a certain kind of Putin-Trump axis might indeed offer chances to really defeat the Moslem Brotherhood, and that's certainly an important need of this species, both for mundane survival and for authentic spiritual growth. (But no, I am not saying we should require anyone to be "Christian" either, especially when that term has been abused to refer to things Yeshua would deeply abhor.)

I mentioned a Mormon and a Russian component in the "miracle" of Trump's incredible last minute surge. But I put in caveats that Mormons are diverse too. Can I say more about the nature of this miracle? I did observe some, and was alive in passive resonance and in watching... enough to know more, but, sorry, there are limits. Somewhere between Orson Scott Card, Babylon V and Star Wars there are hints, from people who in my view also have a bit of resonance and ability to see. Orson Scott Card seems a bit blind when he fulminates about Obama, but some people might therefore trust him more than they trust me!

Enough. Time for me to face up to some scary but basically tame equations.

How Could We Now Avoid a new Great Depression?

How Could We Now Avoid a new Great Depression?

In a previous blog post, I explained the crucial role of interest rates in driving the world economy, and cited some of my earlier work in economics on those kinds of issues. When Trump announced his plans for the economy, I was amazed that the two key elements were exactly what caused the Great Depression of the 1930’s: (1) a commitment to crack down on the Federal Reserve (much as some Republicans have cracked down on the Supreme Court and even NSF, quietly but effectively), and substantially cut back the world money supply; and (2) intense cutback on trade and new restrictions on trade, like the famous Smoot-Hawley action of the 1930’s. Many economists signed an open letter warning about the implications. Trump’s plan was discussed on CNN by one of the friends he brought together for the meeting which led to the plan, and nothing he said was reassuring at all.

So where are we now?

I will resist the many temptations to talk about related issues, like how the markets have gone up and down and how they might respond in the future, or like the essential lack of serious professional content in economics in any of the election debates. As of today, the key new event is:

A serious talk by Carl Icahn, who helped launch Trump in the first place, who reaffirmed and clarified the Trump economic policy.  He basically just said:

====================

“It is not sustainable to maintain aggregate demand by money supply and zero real interest rates. Zero real interest rates are unsustainable because they cause instability, like the possibility of real estate bubbles and things like that. Our policy will be to maintain demand by using fiscal stimulus, which is the better way.” And I was privately informed that a new head of Federal Reserve will be a bona fide serious economist, equipped to follow through.

======================

OF COURSE we should want (and work for) success here, exactly as Obama and Clinton have urged us all to do.

But: will it work, and what are the hazards?

First, it is reassuring that they really do want to maintain aggregate demand.

But to increase aggregate demand by fiscal means they must either increase spending or reduce taxes or both. Short of voodoo nonsense, that would require a big increase in the deficit – exactly what sequestration was constructed to prevent. I for one will never forget Kasich’s successful heroic effort to create a bipartisan patch to prevent the deficit bleeding which was occurring before that. If we start borrowing a whole lot more money again (with or without faith that god will magically make the numbers work for us), AND raising interest rates... we again enter territory unexplored as yet in the US, but well known in South Americn. (There is a Chilean economist, Ffrench-Davis, whose work should be required reading for any economist in the US if we really follow Icahn’s proposed path.)

So: is it hopeless?

Not entirely, but it’s a kind of “mission impossible” that would require a whole lot of flexibility and strength of mind beyond what one would normally expect possible in Washington. No, not a whole lot of narcissism; a whole lot of objective, analytic, mathematical insight.

Trump actually gave some hints of what COULD be done to make his policy viable, which I mentioned before. There are really only two big, direct options. One is a massive reversal in the growth of medical costs, even beyond the reduction in the rate of growth which Obamacare has already delivered. (Back in the real world, we all know that medical costs are still rising faster than they should, but less than they would have, due to Obama’s inability to get more than a kind of 50-50 compromise in Congress. Some lobbyists have proposed “solutions” like what certain friends-of-the-governor have done to taxpaying in Virginia: big promises of reduced costs through the magic of paying selected people in the private sector, followed by a big increase in costs due to constant efficiency plus added markups and new paperwork.) One is reduction in nonproductive tax loopholes and tax breaks – but the tax plans we have heard so far would increase them, not decrease them, and in DC “productive” often seems to be measured by how much money they give to PACs, negatively correlated with aggregate demand generated per dollar of deficit. Without a massive midcourse correction in those two areas, the Icahn policy is a prescription not for 1930’s US but 1930’s South America, maybe even worse.  

Still, I do hope it works, and that sequestration is relaxed so much that we can even reverse the horrible cutbacks in education which the US is already suffering from (in great part because of pressures on states).  Technical economics offers ways to actually measures aggregate demand per dollar of deficit source, to fine tune all this, and even a few other useful options, beyond the scope of this blog post. (Those also require automatic stabilizers, looking ahead.)

In the debates, discussing how to avoid cutting social security, Trump proposed more competition in things like defense procurement. But Trump has also proposed an INCREASE in defense spending; thus more effective competition is extremely important to the PRODUCTIVITY of that defense (and related) spending, but not to the Icahn plan as such. There is an extreme need for much more competition in that sector, and I very much hope that folks like McCain and Steidel have a voice in this. (Even I have some specifics of some importance.) It has the potential to increase economic productivity through better general technology, above and beyond the issue of maintaining aggregate demand while limiting deficit.

===================================

Icahn’s comments about interest rates remind me of important technical issues which I can only touch on briefly today.

Real interest rates serve as instructions to the world economy about whether to care for the future (zero means the future is as important to us as the present) or not (under high interest rates, the economy is instructed to get rich now even if everyone dies a few years later). Human behavior is more stable and predictable if we simply never pay attention to anything which might happen in five or ten years – until that thing eats us alive. Creatures who do not think are more predictable than creatures who do, but there is a very heavy price to be paid. Yes, with zero real interest rates we need to be more careful about the details of economic relations, to reduce the resulting craziness (like overvaluation of Trump’s property), but failure to properly value investments in the future is fundamentally harmful to growth and sustainability.

All for now.

Well.. let me note that EU and China will also be crucial re whether the world avoids a new Great Depression, but those complexities are well beyond the scope of this blog post. There is some link between the EU issues and what we posted earlier at nss.org/EU and www.werbos.com/Atacama.pdf.  For China... I only have a few reviews at Amazon now.