Are the House Democrats committing suicide? Why?

If Nancy Pelosi has a high level of sanity, and if she saw the first Star Wars movie, the situation she is in now should remind her of the scene where the good guys got stuck in a garbage room, with the walls closing in, and no way out they could see except a door leading to the Imperial star troopers trying to kill them. It IS a box, and their survival depends on seeing that there IS a way out of the box. Metaphors are important to understanding the situation well enough to see the way out. (Equations are better, but life taught me long ago to translate the math into metaphors when speaking to 99% of the people of earth.) I did propose a way out a few days ago (https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2019/01/letter-sent-to-my-congressman-about-how.html), but maybe I need to explain a bit more why we need it, how it would work and why certain details are important.

I am very impressed by those CNN reporters who have asked House members on their show: when will the Democrats put something themselves on the table, a real compromise? I was deeply depressed by the confused feelings (ultimately suicidal) of some of the people who replied by saying "this is about border security" and "we can't get substantive because it would set a bad precedent." No, not quite. those are understandable thoughts, but survival depends on getting past understandable inhibitions to seeing a way out beyond them.

First, IS it about border security? Does it HAVE to be, or that a losing constraint?

Let me stry to explain with another metaphor, more useful and precise than the Star Wars metaphor here. Relations between Democrats and Republicans have become more and more like relations between Russians and Americans at the height of the Cold War. We can make lemonade out of those lemons: we can learn from the very serious and deep literature from that time on how to avoid total destruction and get better outcomes. (In those days, I took seminars from Hermann Kahn and Tom Schelling, and courses from many others aware of that literature, including advanced game theory. )

At the height of the Cold War, a guy named Henry Kissinger showed up and proposed "linkage politics." He proposed that negotiations with Russia should COMBINE several key ideas together in one negotiation. Pelosi CAN extend the agenda beyond just border security, if she so chooses. She has very good reason to do so here, since NO motion which the House could pass on border security alone would be anything but a disaster in the end.

Back at the time of Kissinger, there were lots of intense debates for and against linkage politics. In the end, there were good arguments for and good arguments against; the best choice depends on the situation. Linkage politics CAN cause breakdown due to complexity and confusion; that is why my proposal calls for just three very clear, very transparent demands ONLY to be attached to funding for the wall (and restarting the government). Even that complexity is justified ONLY when the issues in the narrow scope (here, border security) are simply not balanced enough in terms of importance to the parties. Pelosi knows full well that even a strengthened version of Trump's proposal, giving permanent relief on Dakka, would appear as caving in and embolden Trump in ways she would not like. That is why issues from OUTSIDE the realm of border security are the best hope of creating enough REAL balance.

One reason I like my little proposal for a House bill is that it puts a spotlight on Trump and the Senate, forcing them to make a very public choice. I love situations where people are asked to judge themselves, and not be judged by others. (It is a basic option in game theory, dating back in a way to the old Pari Pascal.) IF Trump hates the ideas of upholding the spirit of the Constitution (as embedded in the Muller report and public disclosure) or averting a bloodbath of the Kurds endangering our ability to limit the expansion of the worst sort of fundamentalist jihadism, then even if he vetoes the bill he will be sending a VERY strong signal to folks who previously supported him. Doing that at a time of shutdown would not embolden him at all. (Likewise the Senate of course. It is good that Pelosi is already on to THEIR bag of tricks.) But if he agrees, under the new public pressure, I doubt it would embolden Trump to create such opportunities for Pelosi again.

It's nice that so many people in DC rightly care about Daca folks. They should continue to talk about that in the future. But here and now, the threat of a new genocide of our allies in the Middle East is simply bigger and more urgent. Could it be that more people know about Muller and about ISIS than about Daca? People like the swing voters? If each side believes the advisors who say "just wait for the other guy to totally publicly cave"... well, they should know by now not to just believe whatever they wish were true.

Letter sent to my Congressman about how to end the shutdown

Urgent Need for Better Tactics in Standing Up to Trump

By now, you have have heard from hundreds of federal workers asking “Why do WE have to suffer to save us from Trump’s wall? Isn’t the cost of the shutdown more than the $5 billion for the wall?” CNN hates Trump, but they too have been repeating these concerns, especially important to your office.

Nancy Pelosi has good reasons to look ahead further, and stand up to Trump. But, like Cameron after the Brexit vote, she hasn’t been able to relax enough to look ahead more calmly and consider more creative options.

Above all, I urge you to work with Hoyer, and urge her to pass a bill immediately in the House which combines two key elements: (1) yes, $5 billion for the wall; (2) specific additional provisions which REALLY stand up to points which irritate people in the middle of the road and which mobilize new support from the people worried about Trump’s recent betrayal of US national security. Consider: if Trump or the Senate say no, you will at least be able to look at your constituents and say what this says about Trump.

(2) is very tricky. (Years ago, I got my PhD from a guy at Harvard who was the world’s expert on nations falling apart through internal conflict, and in 2009 worked for a year as a Senate staffer. How to explain a complex game in less than a page? I’d love to come in and discuss more if there is a value in that.)

What I would propose is:

(1)  Include the recent proposal that all Federal candidates and present officers MUST make their tax returns public;

(2)   Guarantee support for the Muller investigation and public release of its report;

(3)  Require concretely (with enforcement mechanism) that the Administration live up to Bolton’s recent promise not to leave Syria until ISIS is truly defeated and the Kurds are protected from genocide.

If Trump refuses these points, he signals that he does have a lot to hide, and that he has defected from the effort to defend us from the Third Caliphate movement. The genocide of the allies which have been most crucial to our struggle on the ground would be a disaster for national security. If he agrees, you save a lot of lives. If he doesn’t, he exposes himself as… someone a lot of his base might abandon, if you make the point clear.

The situation with the Third Caliphate movement is complex. I do not blame him for having made a deal, but the KIND of deal which he and Putin have made is a disaster for the future of all of humanity if it sticks. It is not the kind of win-win Pateto optimal deal which some of my old teachers (Schelling and Raiffa) studied, or which the US was founded on (Locke and Hobbes), but more like the novel 1984. PLEASE take action on this! Win or lose, we need someone (hopefully including Pelosi) to stand up NOW for these principles.

Sincerely,

Dr. Paul J. Werbos

Response to policy options for the new US Space Force and impact on saving Iceland and renewable electricity

This post tries to explain why Iceland might well turn into one big glacier in 5 to 20 years, with major freezing in other places like Britain, Ireland and Norway which depend on the Gulf Stream. But it starts with a quick evaluation of options for the new US Space Force which could be one part of how to prevent the disaster. At the end, I respond to questions from a few leading engineers about the Gulf stream problem and about access to space

COMMENTS ON SPACE FORCE OPTIONS

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

The new US Space Force, done right, could substantially improve US military capabilities, but it could also turn the idea of space solar power (SSP) from political marketing hype to a real option for safe renewable electricity all over the world, and give us some hope for a new way to save Iceland (and many other parts of Western Europe like Noway, Britain and Ireland especially) into a glacier in 5-20 years.  BUT BASED ON HISTORIC EXPERIENCE, I WORRY WHETHER IT WILL BE DONE RIGHT.  

The level of spending from these choices is much less important than HOW the money is spent. The value of product of government spending varies by orders of magnitude as a function of how it is done.

In this case, I am aware of DARPA new starts, similar to what Mitchell Clapp and Jess Sponable tried to get going, which could be more important to the real hopes of human settlement of space than everything else on Earth combined, if they get more financial and policy support than before. Trump's policy logically calls for that support, but certain DC Lobby swamp types could easily get in the way, lowering technical standards for WHATEVER short term special interest. 

If the human settlement of space is what we really care about, we will give total priority to this core issue in our response. In jargon terms.. it is about precompetitive Rd&d, medium TRL, for reentry structure technology, drawing on advanced materials but not about materials in a narrow sense, making heavy use of WPAFB reality testing.

This was brief, but an earlier blog post gets into technical details, which I used when recommending the space guard idea a few short years ago:

https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2015/06/resurrecting-us-space-program-draft.html

RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY AND SAVING ICELAND

Renewable electricity

There are people out of touch with reality who imagine that a silver bullet technology exists for “sustainable” world electricity supply. Experts in electric power know that we need diverse sources, so that well-designed markets can choose where and how much the different sources and technologies are used. By “sustainable,” I do not mean politically correct, but simply what we can sustain -- what we could rely on  and survive not only now but in the long-term future. See www.werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf for an overview of the future needs, including citations to back up the claim that space solar power could realistically supply more than $200 billion per year of electricity if and when we solve the launch cost problem.

SAVING THE GULF STREAM

www.werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf also has a section on emerging problems with ocean currents and what could be done about them. Over the past few months, I have studied these problems in much more depth, with help from Al Trujillo (author of the best selling text on oceanography) and from my son Alex (who manages a software effort to process relevant satellite data). The biggest potential risk is still in the Antarctic, threatening Chile and Peru and California in a way which could affect all humans on earth (50-50 whether we all die after I am dead of old age), but our knowledge of exactly what to expect on what schedule demands new research. There is a piece by Purkey et al in Annual Reviews which gives an overview.

BUT THE GULF STREAM SIDE OF IT LOOKS MORE AND MORE DEFINITE. IT IS ON COURSE TO TERMINATE MUCH SOONER. ONLY THE DETAILS AND TIMEFRAME ARE HARD TO QUANTIFY.

I was in Iceland most of the past two weeks, and even people in the street told me without spontaneously “without the Gulf Stream, this whole island would be nothing but one big glacier”. No farms, almost no people.  And they would not be alone. When Trump talked about how to handle millions of refugees from Norway, I did not laugh.

Al recommended a paper giving a kind of technical overview of the problem:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0263-1?WT.ec_id=NCLIMATE-201810&spMailingID=57464814&spUserID=NjI0MDk3MTMzMQS2&spJobID=1500065165&spReportId=MTUwMDA2NTE2NQS2

The big climate models do give us a warning, but does anyone believe those models? It reminds me of my first tenured job, at DOE’s Office of Energy Information Validation (OEIV), assigned to evaluate how far we can believe any of the big energy models, and what they really tell us.  To make it real, we need to understand a few key physical variables which drive the system, which could be put on a spreadsheet.

As I look for authoritative sources for what everyone already knows in this field, I ran across: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circulation

Not a bad start, but not the simple physics people need to understand.

See http://www.enviropedia.org.uk/Climate/Gulf_Stream.php for a clear statement of what the Gulf Stream really is, physically. For folks who do fluid flow modeling, it is the effect of the “mass balance” term in expanded Navier-Stokes equation, exactly balancing what they call “NADW”. In other words,  the amount of warming Gulf Stream current is mathematically the same as the amount of NADW. But what is NADW and why do I worry it will cut out in 5-20 years or so?

NADW is what is called a “thermohaline current” (THC) explained well at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation, and in Al’s textbook.

It is a massive current, driven by water in the Arctic and North Atlantic pushed deep down into the ocean by an increase in density. If there is no increase in density somewhere, no water is pushed down and the THC stops.

The Wikipedia article has a simple colorful diagram showing what drives the density of seawater: temperature and saltiness (salinity).

It turns out that there are TWO drivers of THC, physically. If either one of the drivers continues, we get some THC. The amount of THC is basically just the sum of these two drivers. In the Arctic and North Atlantic, BOTH drivers are clearly on a path to sudden termination in the near future.

Driver number one is temperature. To understand that, look at the pink line in the Wikipedia article. When water on the surface is below that line, colder than the temperature of maximum density, then warming it up makes it more dense, and then it sinks. So picture a stretch of open ocean in the North, mixing gasses with the air at night, becoming rich with oxygen. Then when the sun comes out, it warms up, becomes more dense, and sinks. That’s driver number one, which is all I really knew about a year ago.

Driver number two is local increase in saltiness, which the paper in Nature put me onto (and which Purkey discusses at length in his recent review paper).  The search term “polynya” is pretty specific. This one happens when the surface suddenly gets so cold that it starts freezing. As it freezes, freezing concentrates fresh water into the new ice, making the water next to it absorb a whole lot more salt, making it more dense. The literature on THC from Antarctica shows that this happens mainly in just two places, the Weddell and Ross seas, where two little beaches provide most of the oxygen that keeps the whole ocean alive (the main thing standing between us and mass extinctions like what happened before 5-10 times). I imagine smiling penguins looking down on us all…

But it can happen in the Arctic too, when new ice is formed.

SO HERE IS THE CUTOFF, THE NEAR-TERM RISK TO ICELAND AND WESTERN EUROPE IN GENERAL: what happens when the surface water reaches the pink line in the Wikipedia article AND when the formation of new ice discontinues?

For water as salty as the North Atlantic, I would guess that the pink line kicks in at 0 degrees C, and we are already very close to that. Because the Arctic has been warming faster than the rest of the earth, the end of new ice formation is also in sight. It is curious how oil companies fund lobbyists who try to tell us that none of this could happen, even as they invest many billions on how to exploit the coming ice-free Arctic. (And no, they are not investing so much money for something 30 years in the future). And it is ever so sad that Trump has been supporting all that -- a commitment he has maintained even as he  surrenders or sells out on the ongoing war with what he calls “radical Islam” (a bad term for a very strong and persistent reality). But then again, the world today is very complex and hard for most people to understand; I know of no government on earth which does not have a mix of positive and destructive policies.

Even well before the zero NADW cutoff is reduced, the Gulf Stream will be reduced a whole lot as we get closer to the pink line and as the amount of new ice formation is reduced. If it were all just the salinity effect, we could even say that cutting the amount of new ice formation in winter in half would send Iceland and Western Europe down to temperatures halfway between what they are used to and what you see in Siberia at the same latitude. Roughly. Roughly in more ways than one.

Space technology is one hope for sustainable geoengineering, if we move fast enough. There is a time to stop debating options and instead to explore the “technology decision tree” with higher technology readiness levels, moving as fast as we can on more than one line of options to try to become ready to save Iceland and Norway and the British Isles before it is too late.

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

Looking this over, Al Trujillo also mentions a new paper in Science:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/1113

Kump's earlier work was cited by Peter Ward in his book, Under a Green Sky. That paper by Kump actually showed more awareness of what caused a massive release of H2S poison that Ward's own book (which calls for more research into THC by people who understand the physics more than he did). I once tried to get his group an NSF grant, but even the old NSF had its fetters.

In addition to the solutions proposed in www.werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf, see https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2247441918619546

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

One leading engineer (from the Republican/industry side) asked:

Paul—

This is interesting stuff.  It brings up more questions.

So, more melting of the Greenland ice sheet causes less salinity in the North Atlantic, which can shut down the Gulf Stream, which then makes Greenland colder again, stopping melting of more ice.  How much of the Greenland ice sheet would have to melt to make this happen?  If only 10%, then the multiple-meter sea level rise predicted to result from melting 100% of Greenland’s ice can’t happen.  Maybe that’s a self-regulating good thing?

My reply:

Yes, even though the core system here is just a few variables, a few variables forming a nonlinear dynamical system can show back and forth behavior which defies simple extrapolation.

IN THE PAST, the melting of ice from Greenland was the main cause of sputtering of the Gulf Stream. It was logical to assume that this would stop when all the ice on Greenland has melted. More precisely, if the RATE of fresh melt water coming off of Greenland stays constant, the DEGREE of reduction of the Gulf Stream would not grow. Things would not grow worse, if that were the only problem.

BUT IN THE FUTURE, there is a clear phase transition coming for the two core drivers of the thermohaline currents (THC) which drive the Gulf Stream even in the absence of problems from Greenland: the temperature effect and the effect on salinity of forming new ice in the ocean itself. The physics of the temperature effect is ever so clear and ever so certain (as in the diagram in the wikipedia article I cited), and so is the role of salinity in raising water density. Only the timing is in doubt. 

I suspect you would like those people in Iceland as much as my wife and I did.  Looking in their faces, and hearing them talk about the role of the Gulf Stream in their lives... I will do what I can to reduce my guilt about not really helping them in any way I can. 

Best regards,

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

We had a lot more in-depth discussion of how to reduce launch costs, including engineers from NASA, AF, major aerospace companies and the space lobbies. Too much to post here. But in brief, the AF guys were so much further along in reality testing, without which nothing in space will be really real, whether for military or civilian or environmengal benefits. 

Shutdown must end, but how?

Am puzzled by Nancy Peloeu"s tactics. Why is she playing into Trump's hand by increasing the number of folks who will give her more of the blame?

But in truth, it is a small minority who believe that $5 billion for a wall would itsrlf be such a big difference in. Do why not immediately pass a billing in the House giving that to him but with just a few bipartisan additions of great importance:
Full protection for the Muller investigation including public release; mandatory release of tax forms; and preventing grocude of Kurds, making Bolton's recent promises mandatory . If Trump or Senate then veto or try to play games, they get the full blame.
Overemphasis on the basest among us is a huge drag on our future; without stronger leadership in the middle, folks in the middle will hate both sides, a very dangerous situation

Three signposts for cosmic mind ultraweirdism eg tunneling

My first task for today lies within the realm of Einsteinian realism (solitons), but various things reminded me of my promise to look more actively for signposts to the possibility that great Mind Idealism (a member of the ultraweird family of possible models of physics) might be true in the end. Since Cosmic Mind Idealism (CMI?) often freaks people out, either in favor or against, let me begin with an analogy which seems safer to me ... the issue of communicating with the past in a way which could actually change it, leading to various paradoxes. When I get past that, I will move on to something in Brian's domain. (See https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/search?q=Fockian+weirdism for discussion of three gtypes of theory of how the universe works -- Einstein realism, Fock space realism, and weirdism.) =================================== Past analogy Back when I attributed 70% probability of truth to Einstein realism, and therefore could not imagine that I myself am a macroscopic Schrodinger cat, an obvious question arose: what happens when we try to send a message back in time which would change a past which we clearly remember? Why did I even worry about that? Please forgive that some readers would need reminders of the background. First, I already knew that BOTH physics versions of realism, Einstein realism and Fock space realism,  REQUIRE the specific form of time-symmetric physics described in plain English at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10773-008-9719-9.pdf. I had written about that many times before; Huw Price had an even more vivid paper making the same point in favor of Einstein realism which Jack and I have cited at times (though Jack believes some additional things which do not represent Price.) Thus I knew we should be able to build a "backwards time telegraph".  So what would have happened if we had built such a backwards time telegraph, and tried to use it to give warning to ourself about a bad event we could have avoided (see www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf) or try to make money in the stock market in a way which would change the price history? When I was 70% a believer in Einstein realism, and did not think I could be a macroscopic Schrodinger cat, I believed that efforts to build and use such a system would turn it into what I called a "weirdness" generator. For example, when you try to transmit today's stock price back, your mind blurs for a moment (as Jack's may have blurred when he typed words attacking Brian for being "politically incorrect") and you type something you didn't mean which prevents the market from  changing. Or the Chinese hacker who intercepted your message, and tries to trade many billions in the past which (unlike your petty cash) would really disrupt the market... somehow ends up in a car crash or a typhoon or an earthquake, just at the right moment to prevent the change. If we assume that the Einsteinian universe is governed by Lagrange optimization, it turns out that this kind of weirdness is what the hard core PDE actually predict, as the universe "tries to reconcile tricky boundary conditions across time." (The math of this is a cousin of the math of absorbing and emitting a photon, something I was ever so familiar with long ago).  I remember wondering for a moment: based on what I see around me, I wonder whether someone from somewhere has actually built and used this kind of weirdness machine. It sure looks like it...  I remember two science fiction authors who tried to convey this idea in richer, more intuotive form. There was a short, light novel Chronoliths which did it. There were longer deeper novels by Connie Willis , a proud but gentle Irish woman Sean might love, including her thick two-volume novel Blackout and All Clear, where she first explains this "Oxford standard theory of time travel," but raises questions about whether she really believed it... at the time when I was doing the same. Yes, I "believed" it (but with 70% probability, as I now believe realism in general), but I also felt some duty to try to focus on experiences which might lead me to question it. At one point I had a list of about seven fairly compelling personal experiences which made me wonder... So now, after more experiences, and more thinking about the mechanics of quantum superposition, and reading the growing literature on macroscopic Schrodinger cats,  I have put more credence into Fock space realism. I feel little doubt that I myself am a macroscopic Schrodinger cat. (Whenever I say "meow", that is an assertion of that identity.)  The natural way to think about life from that viewpoint is Fock space realism, and almost all my efforts in physics last year were to upgrade the Fock space approach. And in life, to adapt to living in the "ocean" of 4D Fock space. And yet... I have also started to wonder whether I should go back and remember that old weirdness generator. In extremis, could it be possible to imagine that all of the things we call psychic or spiritual phenomena are actually just strong clear manifestations of "Jungian synchronicity," the action of a weirdness generator (which nonetheless would still require something like dark matter and energy to allow such manifestations as we have experienced).  Or, more simply, that "we" are not patterns of what is real in Minkowski space but of the POSSIBILITIES which the Lagrangian optimization math implicitly requires ("the shadows of a cave jointly owned by Plato and Einstein").  ============ moving on So that's all ancient history for me. I drew up a list of curious signposts, and thought about it. Now I begin to wonder about Cosmic Mind Idealism (CMI), and start collecting a similar list. There are lots of things which people attribute to great mind which are NOT on my list, because the concept of Noosphere allowed in Einsteinian or Fock space realism (with dark matter and energy assumed) easily and naturally accounts for most things people think thehy need a Great Mind for. In fact, I started this post by using the term "Great Mind Idealism", but changed it to CMI because our noosphere already is a Great Mind... Great but local. Signposts to CMI would have to be a bit more. I have a list of three in my personal notes... VERY fuzzy now... incomplete of course...  (1) "reconstruction/ extreme visualization" (2) freakouts like reaction systems depicted in Inception (3) gateways like mass tunneling I will not elaborate for many reasons, except on (3). Having just read Stanislaw Lem's novel "His Master's Voice" (which I found for free on the web, just a regular google search, nothing exotic), I noted a few interesting ideas in the book (some interesting only when used as metaphors or near misses). One concerned the possibility of  the tunneling of macroscopic objects. That really should not be possible, even though it "feels plausible," in any of the QED technologies I have ever seen, but I wonder? Could it possibly be both "illegal" (even by MQED rules) but doable nonetheless? I wonder. It turns out that GATING phenomena are very fundamental in any true intelligent system at the spatial level or higher, and therefore should be predicted to exit in any CMI cosmos. Also, in my various travels, I have found "gateways" to be a very  persistent part of my first person psychic/spiritual experience (https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2018/11/right-brain-exploration-of-life.html). So I wonder. But... for now just wonder. I am not prepafed to propose an experiment on macroscopic tunneling, and what I do next is such hard core Einstein and math it won't fit on this list, ReplyReply allForward

Report to the Watch on Xi Jinping and the Three Stooges

The noosphere of our planet is full of people asking what to make of the incredible political changes of the past two weeks. The most dramatic change was Donald Trump suddenly giving up on the fight against what he called “radical Islam” (a bad term but a serious problem), declaring it won and over, shutting down our protection of the Kurds and shutting down the US government itself, turning over the Department of Defense to a corporate lobbyist, and aligning with Erdogan, a major stooge of the Third Caliphate movement – supporting even the use of murder by Erdogan in his efforts to build a new global caliphate under himself. I found it equally sad when Putin himself a few days before made it clear he had no constraints in supporting Erdogan’s ambitions, even to the point of hurting the Ukrainian people in an unnecessary and gratuitous way, and giving a great personal insult to the same Trump who was willing to carry his water. As of now, much of my mind now insists on considering Erdogan, Putin and Trump as the Three Stooges, Erdogan being the chief Stooge. Stooge for exactly whom? Putin and Trump clearly both dramatically underestimate the people and forces behind Erdogan.

Putin and Trump clearly support the greater use (AND CENTRAL CONTROL OF) of the kind of information technology which would create a top-down system of control of human thoughts and actions, which would fit the vision in the book 1984. This is clearly the kind of cynical “multipolar world” which FSB people have been pushing for for at least ten years.  (It is curious, when I go to google image search, the 55 faces it now shows include three Russian bankers I met only once… who explained their vision to me, along with many other folks at Rhodos.) (By the way, the capital letters in parentheses were Google’s idea. I accept its emphasis.) But Erdogan’s vision is quite different; he has shown a remarkable ability to cynically manipulate others like Trump, even as Trump does the same to his base.

Erdogan’s system, supporters and vision for the future of the earth remind me a lot of what I read in McNeil, Rise of the West, discussing the First Caliphate, the Abbasids.  Moving towards a combination of very strict sharia top-down restrictions on all commoners, combined with cynical corruption, hedonism, lies and repression by folks in power with pretensions to spiritual leadership. It is dramatically different from the more enlightened second Caliphate, centered on Istanbul and Sufi disciplines, which Erdogan and his allies want to kill off. Kill, literally. France24 has had a great series on Tripoli, showing how the Moslem Brotherhood (MB) types have been killing and oppressing sufis in that area… as in Pakistan… as in India… even trying to do the same in XinJiang and Xian itself!!! (Do they covet Lop Nor as the next addition to their caliphate? Hey, I have seen their operatives in Urumqi, fiddling with elevators…) Oh, and funding and supporting allies like folks in a certain Texas Mafia (think of Cruz, Lamar Smith, Tom Delay… whom I have also seen all too close up.

I have to admit, I was somewhat reassured when the Kurds linked up with Assad and Russia, and when Putin did provide at least some local limit to the Third Caliphate. But Putin has waffled like Loki for many, many years here, and shows no sign of understanding the limits to the vision for the future, in the novel 1984 which would ultimately crush the souls of humans and result in my view in the termination of their bodily existence as well. (In technical terms, the problem is that glorifying Nash equilibrium prevents rational cooperation and even prevents efficient market design in the general case.)  His involvement in the Airport Fake Coup in Ankara makes that clear enough, as do many other things, yea unto the blood which flows from blood sacrifices in certain places in Russia itself.  The movement behind Erdogan is in many ways a serious spiritual force as well, just like the thoughts of the Unabomber (do see the great Netflix video!). The hopes of the human species… are a matter of finding a sustainable path between Scylla and Charybdis, between fire and ice, between the “ice” of misued technology which folks like Taliban rightly oppose to the death, and the “fire” of the wild chaos and oppression which unabomber types would also wreak upon the world, also crushing the humans. How to develop advanced science which we really need, without being used and abused by the Three Stooges trying to re-enact 1984? (Obviously Xi Jinping is facing these questions, and this is part of the background leading to what he must face,

And what we must face very gingerly in order to be positive and constructive.)

There have been a couple of bits of real good news in the past two weeks. One, in advanced technology, is probably not appropriate for pubic posting yet. Another was the bipartisan sentencing reform, where a spokesman for the Koch brothers spoke clearly and decisively in favor of the deep value of human potential, which I view as “God’s main bottom line on earth which we must meet or die.” That was so great to hear. CNN also says that Trump is listening more to Rand Paul, who also speaks for freedom and human potential. Great fundamental values which we should never forget.  But we should never just kowtow to them, with eyes closed and rear ends in the air; the challenge is how to make real inner freedom and diversity of thought really available to real humans all over the earth, while also supporting voluntary human connections, also a deep part of natural human brains and soul both. The sad fact is that many well-placed people employ apparatchiks who implement the diametric opposite of what their bosses think they are getting; Koch money is often allied with money from folks like what Michael Lewis depicts who want to get rid of humans altogether, channeled through groups in DC, supporting folks ala Cheney who are the most severe threat to real freedom in the US today. When I worked at DOE, I remember being bemused when the House would send orders to DOE which seemed to rotate about 20 degrees on each layer down through the hierarchy, such that the orders on the ground were to oppose 180 degrees with maximum energy what Congress asked for. But now I know much more about the “wires” from the outside which inject that kind of spin. The (very serious and very real) antiAmderican “deep state” is actually the spin coming from an antistate, which simply wlil become more oppressive if the legal one subject to oversight is weakened. And so, well-meaning followers of God from Ankara to Texas end up injecting their energy to support oppression of the human spirit, which may simply put us all in the red and terminate our enterprise, if we do not do a bit better.

And so: could Xi Jinping help us somehow to muddle through in this century and not be killed  by the Three Stooges?

In truth, I have often hoped for that.

Xi even published an article in Qiushi (sp?) before he rose to power, which discussed the need to fuse objective and subjective viewpoints, a key part of what we need to do to develop sane policy, sane cooperation, and a sustainable path between fire and ice (subjectivism fire and cold formal ice). He learned BOTH about Buddha AND about Marx, imperfect thinkers who nonetheless offered a few key seeds needed to fill in the potentially fatal gaps both in Mao thinking and Jiang Zemin thinking. It seemed like a promising base from which to develop a new synthesis. I was so happy, in visiting Guangzhou last year, to see banners saying that the communist party in that area defined itself by a series of principles which really do point beyond the barnacles of the past, and offer hope.  But in that same city, we saw the stark barriers both in geography and in food between the military caste and the others, showing that all was not quite well yet. In Qufu, we saw great leadership and understanding of the basic Confucian principle of Zhengqi (see my paper at www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf, published in Russia), but in recent years we have also seen decay to the degenerate version taught by Zu Xi (sp?) which twisted it towards extreme nepotism (the father of much of corruption in China) which Mao rightly opposed very directly… and opens the door also to the spirit of warlordism which destroyed many formerly great dynasties in China in the past.

To maintain a rapid pace of economic growth, and develop more advanced understanding of political economy as well, requires a fully scientific approach, including even the first person scientific method I discussed in the paper published in Russia. That is really just an APPLICATION of the mathematical principles of learning (well developed in the most advanced machine learning). But my probes tell me that Xi has fallen in practice to a more subjectivist approach, like a mild form of Trump’s way of thinking, making him MORE of a stooge than he should be to subjectivist forces of all kinds in china, creating unstable ad hoc accommodations rather than a real powerful unity (which REQUIRES diversity of missions and ideas, coupled together in a more intelligent framework).

This became very vivid to me a week or two ago, when the Financial Times published an excellent in-depth report on the latest Party Congress, which is more meaningful to me because of some background information I have.

Xi acknowledged that economic reform has been of central importance to the real people of China, whom the Party is supposed to serve to the utmost, keeping oil companies and the military especially in line. (They and nepotism are the greater threat to China). But then he echoed the midlevel analysts who said that the typical iron rice bowl state enterprises and historic culture were the key to that recent economic growth and to the future. Oops. That simply is not true, and shows that Xi himself has been living in a fishbowl of filtered information (a bit like Trump and the equally dangerous Texas Mafia). Paulson’s great book

https://www.amazon.com/Dealing-China-Insider-Economic-Superpower-ebook/dp/B00CO7FMDC

gives us all really essential information about reform in China; even though Paulson goes too far in the direction of Jiang Zemin and ice, and really needs balancing out, it is essential to understand what caused the great growth in China (along with the reverence for education and science) in order to achieve the kind of balance which could MAINTAIN growth but ALSO protect us from the worst possible ice. To protect the real rights of the real humans who work in factories and schools, for example, while still supporting vigorous multidirectional feedback in the university sector, like what NSF stimulated in the US until the Texas Mafia screwed it all up (hurting the US far more than most people understand as yet).

The Financial Times reported that China does have serious economists who, like real scientists, disagree but do so honorably, test theories, and are open to new theories and approaches… what could save China.

But Xi has also somehow managed to empower APPARATCHIKS, WOLF PACKS, GESTAPOS (Google chose capitals) which repressed that discussion, and made sure it was not part of the planning for the future, and of what reaches him. It was like the time when Trump thought of hiring a psychologist to run OSTP, to shield him from the best real story known in the US.  No hope that way., No wonder that other folks who read FT suddenly contributed to the movement of the world stock markets…

One major technical issue here: if places like Facebook were going unstable before Zuckerborg was hauled in before a hearing in the House, but if the use of human censors as in China leads to an unsustainable situation of central control as in China... a slippery slope... can anyone build an IT System without censors which is less unstable than the old Facebook? Is collaborative communication in depth possible, like what Xi Jinping needs? Could machine intelligence help?

Hard core Einstein realism through two eyes fused, mathematics and mysticism

A person on one of the quantum consciousness lists said: Wake up. That's what I have done. That reminds me of popular song I really liked, decades ago: "waking up is hard to do...." Deepak's post this morning is certainly more "alive" and on target than the bulk of our email exchanges have been lately. I apologize for not following up right now. I have at times wished for a thread on "brain-soul interface to neuroscience" ... but this morning, I have woken to some different realizations. Three subjects really attract my attention this morning -- the state of the world, a return to a kind of Einsteinian physics, and  the importance of doing justice to Christmas. Since this thread is called "interpretations of quantum mechanics," I suppose that the Einsteinian thoughts are speakable here, even though they are grounded in realism. Still, since spiritual connection is of interest to most of you, I should say a few words about context. I haven't seen any of you refer much to certain big but scary names, like de Chardin, Nietzsche or Marx. Even Hegel. It is sad that our world is so restrictive, ever more restrictive, in the depth of dialogue ands thought.  One of the great debates in meditation is what de Chardin discussed in his book on the Activation of Human Energy (qi? mana?). Is meditation about withdrawing from all the illusions and false connections of this world, or about reaching inside (as de Chardin and his follower JFK) to make stronger and better connections with the entire noosphere of earth? I have often leaned more towards the latter approach, and most of my recent quantum work is of that type, engaging with what physics needs next to take one REAL step forwards, a baby step, towards really assimilating what some call "retrocausality", NOT because it explains psi (it doesn't) but because humans need to master baby stuff before they are ready for heavier and more dangerous stuff. But between the withdrawal approach of ancient Hindu ascetics, an ancient thesis, and the immersion approach of de Chardin and JFK (a modern antithesis), Nietzsche had a nice little metaphor which is more of a synthesis: withdrawal and return. (Indeed, the neuroscientist Levitin has a popular book, The Organized Mind, which takes that a little further, if a bit more narrowly.) And yesterday, being tired of endlessly repeating and trying to explain baby stuff, not only here but elsewhere, I decided I should withdraw a bit and shift to longer-term, no-holds-barred no-planet-barred, efforts to look as deeply as I really can into foundations of physics. "To hell with limiting myself to what local media can understand. Reality itself deserves some attention, at the very deepest I am capable of."  Fockian realism is really the mainstream today, at its best, when it is coherent and capable of actually building devices that work, mathematical systems which are well-posed and self-consistent and do what they claim, and so on. The garden varieties of Fockian realism (the ρQED and MQED I have tried to expand people's minds to comprehend) basically portray our cosmos as a :"firehose of information," a hugely complex multiverse space squeezed into one simple time dimension, endlessly squirming and tending towards gross instability (exactly like the political and cultural systems of our world). But in the end, I doubt that could be true. As my wife once said: "Don't think of it as a firehose. Think of it as an ocean." I have found that extremely important and correct in my meditative practices as well. I COULD believe in a kind of 4D Fock space -- something which Streater and Wightman  (SERIOUS mathematical physicists) attempted but never quite got right. (The problems involved stuff like infinite norms, the kind of problem which von Neumann fixed for ordinary 1920's Hilbert space kinds of stuff, but are not the next baby step needed today.) Maybe. Very practical, good for meditation, but for physics I find myself wanting to focus instead on better fleshing out the ultraweird alternatives (NOT by empty ungrounded words) and, today, the alternative of Einsteinian realism. Einsteinian realism is what De Broglie and his part-time follower Bohm really wanted to revive. The new experimental data do at least give me renewed hope that the Einstein/deBroglie approach may work out in the end, at a deeper level, even though it WOULD require us to accept that we here are just "the shadows in Plato's cave,"  a TYPE of ontological shock I have tried to spare you since everyone here seems a bit sensitive in some ways. (Meow.) I mentioned before what de Broglie and I agreed on, in our very friendly correspondence, which I still have here in my house: it was actually the problem of explaining the spectrum of helium, NOT the EPR/Bell/CHSH experiment, which motivated the great Congress at Solvay (sp?) where they "voted out reality."  The great shock was when someone solved the Schrodinger equation over six dimensions, "two for each electron," and IT WORKED in accurate prediction, and when nothing in a mere 3+1 dimensions ever did. Einstein once said that the great success of (1920s!) QM in such predictions could be explained someday as a kind of emergent statistical relation. He, like Jack and Paul Z recently, said "Just look at that configuration space... isn't it obviously a space of possible configurations of something which is really in 3+1-D."  That was a nice conjecture, but where and how do exactly what statistics emerge? (Reminds me of a cartoon. Reporter asks a physicist: "You say your theory tells us how to build a starship. Just how do we build that starship, starting from your ideas?" Physicist: "Oh, I leave that little thing to my student as an exercise." Students beware whom you chose as your advisor if you ever want to graduate... though I did well with an ambitious advisor.) Wiener and Von Neumann tried, and failed. De Broglie also had a student who tried very hard, but failed in the end. I tried, and succeeded, but it was the hardest math I ever did. Before me, the closest were an Indian guy named Sudarshan, Wigner and Glauber. Later when I briefly met Glauber, I did have a chance to say that one of the worst mistakes I made in my life was NOT to take his course in quantum optics at Harvard; all the folks I talked to thought it was "mere engineering," not relevant to the real foundations. It was an important life lesson to learn not to take such beliefs too seroiusly. No, that was not just a digression. It is a low key introduction to one key resource: my papers at arxiv of extended glauber-sudarshan mathematics, which is the real key to making Einstein's program actually work. And this morning, thanks to "withdrawal" (to a larger world), I now see new ways to actually USE that mathematics. In a way, it begins with a "simple" question: "What is an electron?" Before Einstein, the mainstream approach, led by Lorentz (the guy with the "t", not Lorenz, who is also important), assumed that space is filled with just two kinds of "objects" -- fields, continuous functions over space, and "particles," exact perfect Grecian points. Einstein and Lorentz both agreed that Lagrangian mathematics (which already includes mathematical terms which some people INTERPRET as back action) is a proper tool for modeling such things. The Sutherland papers I have seen take the Lorentz approach, exactly. Einstein and deBroglie pushed hard for a change in visions beyond Lorentz; NOT point particles, but forces only. It is like the old Kybalion claim, that everything is vibration and energy, that particles are either "illusions" or, more precisely, vortices of force. Wheeler developed a Lorentzian electrodynamics long ago which, in my view, shows very vividly why Einstein's vision makes more sense than Lorentz's, in my view. Wheeler's (classical Lorentzian) electrodynamics works ONLY when you append a weird "renormalization" formalism as bad as its cousin in modern QED, a monstrous glob which those of us who wield Occam's Razo naturally itch to cut off. The problem is not with quantum field theory as such, but with the assumption that a charged particle like an electron is a perfect point. Once we know that E=mc**2, we know that such a charged point particle would have an infinite energy of self-repulsion. But let me say no more about the problem, but instead move on to the solution, which many of us have known IN THEORY for decades. HOW can we model the electron in a way which fits the empirical evidence, with a radius more than zero, as a stable, quantized vortex of force? There is a fairly large literature on "solitons" (physicists' fuzzy term for stable vortices of force) in physics. If you go to scholar.google.com (as any serious physicist often does), you will see thousands of citations of the terms "skyrmion" and "BPS," the two most popular soliton model in physics. (That compares with just a few dozen citations to the highest-rated physics papers either by Jack or by myself, but I do a bit better in mathematics and neural networks, and important papers often do not immediately "hit the Oprah hit parade.")   It is a huge literature, which I will not get too deep into right now.  Crudely, both types of soliton model HINT at a model of the electron as a "hedgehog" (porcupine), a little creature with "needles" (vectors) all pointing outwards from its center. Formally, that gives it a "winding number of one," crucial to its stability. But this morning I ask: do two hedgehogs on a row really add up to one big superhedgehog? I doubt it. I need to revisit things like Manton's classic book on Topological Solitons, but I really doubt that two hedgehogs, viewed at a distance, have a collective winding number of two. I need to strengthen my resolve to find a different way. What I have worried/wondered about for a long time: if there is stability WITHOUT their kind of topological charge, could boundary conditions be crucial in holding together electrons (as in holding together what passes for  civilization on this tiny planet)? But how could one ever find a mathematically tractable way to live without stability in free spac e, or even to find stability without the usual type of opological charge? Tow possible approaches. first, see what ENGINEERS like Roger Lake have done with more than one "skyrmion" in a less pure but more realistic model. Second... use my extended P map as a tool for analysis of discrete spectra in a thermodynamic cosmos. The math is all worked out only for continuous fields, but in the Einstein picture that's all that exists anyway. (Fermions and point particles are just for approximation. This is another point which Streater and Wightman got wrong, by ofllowing the crowd and not re-examining the fundamentals.) Discrete spectra of the bosonic operators gives quantization FOR THE EINSTEINIAN systems which the new P maps from.  And by heh way, it gives a bit more -- technologies far more dangerous than the baby time machines which MQED allows. But not so interedsting as the "gateway" options which Stanislaw Lem speculates about, which would be allowed under ultraweirdism.  Best of luck. May we all someday be capable of understanding, before we disintegrate into powder.  ReplyReply allForward