Overcoming fatal flaw in progressivism and evolution

Overcoming fatal flaw in progressivism and evolution

Faith in progress has mostly been a positive force in human society, especially when it led to some exuberance in the 1960s. But only lately have I started to hear about “progressivism” as a kind of secular religion, though at times it becomes a religious religion. The key tenet: Even if we don’t pay to much attention to the details, we can be sure that progress in science and technology will always be the path forward to an ever better state of life. In its most extreme forms – progressivism, like sharia Islam, tries to exclude dialogue which questions its basic premises. I see more promise in a variety of spiritual progressivism, developed by Teilhard de Chardin. De Chardin describes “evolution” as a process which can take us ever onwards and upwards.

Problem number one: the trilobite (or trilobyte?). Never forget the trilobyte. Really serious students of evolutionary biology noticed long ago that evolutionary “progress” often leads to a dead end and extinction.  Detailed quantitative studies, decades ago (Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems, by R. May), showed that the natural process of evolution simply is not a reliable path upwards. To the extent that real mainstream science understood the natural process of evolution in the twentieth century – it was less a matter of guaranteed progress and more a process of guaranteed entropy, viewed as a path towards disorder eventually going to a “heat death” (or lifeless rocks in space). Current politics on earth seem much more like that, like the phenomenon of old age.  

The politics of technology are very much a key part of this story, because wrong directions (entropy) in the development of technology are central to all three of the clear threats of human extinction in sight today (which I have referred to as “H2S/NUC/AI” for short).  Faith that all new technology and all new knowledge get us closer to survival... would be comforting, but it is perhaps even more dangerous to humanity than the mindless faith that there is no such thing as climate change.

Based on life experience, I would agree with Teilhard, Jung and Verdansky that there exists something real and active out there like what they called “noosphere” or “collective mind”. (I can’t get myself to write “unconscious”, since that is misleading. When a young male full of testosterone responds very intensely to a female stimulus which he tries to ignore, it is a bit misleading to describe him as “unconscious” of the stimulus, no matter what he actually says or does about it. Unless he is really crazy.)

In fact: how could there be any hope at all for the human species, given the growing entropy and new risks and lack of the conscious response needed to solve the complex problems?

In my view... the only hope lies in the implications of a theory which most people do not understand but which I find very compelling. (In a way, this is like my post on FTL travel, where hope – i.e., a nonzero probability of success – is totally dependent on the possibility that one of the theories of physics which would allow it might be true.) In this case, the theory is that our noosphere... the noosphere of earth... is not just a product of local entropy, but is a member of a much larger species, constructed from dark matter or something more exotic, which has evolved a certain kind of specific anti-entropic trait analogous to the traits in human bodies which allow them a longer lifetime than most other species. Only by fully expressing those noosphere-level traits do we have a chance of avoiding “old age” very soon. (Some of the scary, aged, creaking zombie brains I see on TV remind me of this every day...). As a crude approximation... I see these three most fundamental... inner imperatives?... to be something like “the spirit of benevolence/love” (ala Yeshua, on the spiritual level, expressed by angels who start with “fear not...”), “the spirit of truth” (no denigration of mathematics or the scientific method, or repression of core realities of free thought and free speech, is tenable under this constraint) and rational impedance matching (RIM). RIM is the hardest for me, and very tricky. It includes sincere efforts, for example, to avoid writing so many details that it hurts people’s brains... something I have found it hard to learn... and it includes real respect for privacy, more than what progressivists like Brin can respect, and it includes not telling wild children how to build bombs which could blow up the entire earth.  (It is related to the issues of balancing sparsity and connectivity in neural networks.) It is awkward and problematic, requiring lots and lots of heavy analysis, but without it... the present entropy of low-consciousness policies is ever more worrisome. 

But these inner disciplines are not enough... besides a proper formal structure (like the US or German Constitutions of the time I write), there are certain key essential elements of “corporate culture” (as in the book by Ashkenasy et al, which I cite in my article in Bainbridge’s book on Leadership in S&T). The “legal corruption” in the US today is an example of a mid-level problem severe enough to end up in deaths of all humans on earth if it is not corrected. (No exaggeration: studying scenarios for H2S/NUC/AI... it is quite real.)

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But then:  let me conclude with some humor, as I track the political process in the US (a narrow but serious spiritual duty, in my view).

In the recent” town hall” quasidebate, a CNN reporter asked Clinton: “Do you really believe all that about a vast right-wing conspiracy out to get you?” She replied: “Don’t you. Let’s be real...”  Some people thought she may be too paranoid. I sadly worry that she may not be paranoid enough. For example, some folks without a DC background ask: “How could we trust a candidate who is under FBI investigation?” My response: “How can we trust candidates who support folks like Lamar Smith in empowering them to use the FBI as their own personal hit squad to attack rivals, and try to enforce a new rule that folks in Cheney’s obedient network dictate even to the President how to handle sensitive strategic information? How does the judgment of Cheney’s unelected cronies get to override the right of a Secretary of State to make strategic judgments?” The problem with Benghazi was that Clinton gave TOO MUCH ground to those folks. She and Sanders seem to think that the problem of corruption is all about election money and legislation... while seeming blind to the vast corruption and re-management of the actual administrative apparatus. I certainly remember the shock on the face of a new government hire saying: “I still don’t know what to do... they tell us we have to follow a certain reporting chain which is kind of extreme in not being what they told us in the law and in the Constitution. But I can see how they have re-engineered the whistleblowing function too...”

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And then...

There are lots of amusing ways to try to be in touch with the personal and also the collective unconscious.  Jung’s “synchronicity” is certainly part of that.

I was rather struck, consciously, when, after one of those Sanders/Clinton exchanges, a face appeared... “Bernie...

the greatest scam of the twentieth century.” OK, it was a commercial for a movie about Bernie Madoff, but the timing and the feeling of the face and so on... is it an authentic psychological shadow of how many people feel? TBD. And then... I realized that the new big teddy bear commercial really reflects a side or view of Trump... which has more power in the collective unconscious than many would expect. (Beautiful women all over him... big, orangeish, fluffy... leaving a question about depth of understanding...). I then wondered: are there any others like that? The New York State commercial... Clinton and that commercial project real New York values much more than Trump’s events... incredible efficiency and cleanliness and progress compared to those others... yet where are the people? Hopefully not subsumed by a threatening possible disaster like Watson. (I even posted a brief, direct comment on the site of “Watson for President.”) This is related to the people worried about “does she care about people like me?” And finally, there is also a commercial with a guy being shot at on the phone to his mother...  “please vote for my baby. He is a bit challenged, but..” Guess which candidate lines up with the commercial for Spectre, trying to take control of the world in a grossly cynical way (promoting a corporate and spiritual culture guaranteed.... to provoke more than you kind folks might ever imagine... like my recent blog post on the 900 pound gorilla, which sanitized the possible future world-line).

Minor detail... one more very small but startling (to me) bit of evidence on the time stuff I talked about before.

Best of luck. We still all very much need it.  

killer drones: reply to guy who wants to prosecute their developers

Some international discussions have raised the question: should the international community try to prosecute those who use and develop killer drones, as they contribute to the "bad AI" or "Terminator" risk to survival of our species? 

My response: 

[This suggestion] brings me back to the very severe  "damned if you do, damned if you don't" dilemmas which have left me relatively paralyzed since July 2014. 

Some of you have long been familiar with that kind of dilemma. I remember circa 1975 when I was a new assistant professor going to a conference where a guy from the State Department was looking for people to fund on "research into defining the national interest." The basic idea was... nations play hard to win sometimes, but later on often find that "winning" was actually losing and vice-versa. It would be nice to get past that. Mathematically, a person's underlying utility function U(R), representing what they like for its own sake, may be very different from the correct value of J(R), the so-called "value function" assessing how good the present situation really is when future consequences are fully accounted for. Research on how to assess J(R) more accurately... is a serious area of research. As one special case... how do we assess progress J(R) towards reducing (or raising) the probability that the human species goes extinct within the next 10,000 years or so, if we focus for now on that particular ultimate value U(R)?

And so... when you think of a specific action like this Wiesenthal Center ... the unintended consequences get to be very, very tricky in the world we now live in.

Would the idea be to prosecute all members of the "Chair force," the folks who have jobs working for places like the air force sitting in offices in rural US operating drones by wire, much like folks spending all day on the Play Station? The other day, I read that more new pilots were being trained to be chair force pilots than pilots of actual airplanes. 

What about people actually developing the next generation of drones, particularly new more autonomous drones which do not require so much chair force, and which get to be more and more similar to the aerial drones depicted in the movie Terminator III Judgement Day?

(It was an awful movie, esthetically, but still justified for folks serious about extinction to watch.

I was both turned off and amused at times by scenes which then looked like a dog fight between Hilary Clinton and Arnold Schwartzenegger...  but Hilary is older now, and I suppose Trump has taken over a lot of the image which was Schwartzenegger. The technology descriptions were brief but specific enough to be thought-provoking.) Strictly speaking, it is the autonomous drones, not drones in general, which relate to the "end game" of human extinction by wrong AI. 

Here is where it gets to be especially tricky.

What if an idealistic group works hard to find out and inform the whole world which group really is closest to the most dangerous and powerful form of drone autonomy, which could kill all humans on earth? Should they publicize that very widely and try to stop those activities somehow?

Unfortunately, there are so many power-crazed leaders and narcissists in so many nations all over the world that the effect may be to substantially accelerate the movement in that direction, even if, yes, logic says clearly it may kill all people on earth including all the descendants of those very same leaders and the people behind them. 

Many technology people aware of the dilemmas of their jobs now are putting hope into Elon Musk's new AI center, intending to "reduce the risk of AI by making all tools universally available." Again, I do not believe that universal availability of autonomous drones would make for more peace any more than universal availability of cannons did... and these things are a lot more dangerous than cannons!!!

But the dilemma goes even further. "Sterility memes" like the Watson computer system may help avert the risk of artificial intelligence, but putting the entire physical world (aka future planned internet of things) under the control of an implacable glorified voicemail system... poses a very serious risk which I have sometimes called "artificial stupidity" (AS). It may sound funny, just as H2S reminds some folks of stinky smells ... but certain types of control systems really can crash a complex nonlinear system like the web of human economy and life.    

The daily news lately reminds me ever more of the AS kind of risk...

Best of luck,

     Paul

P.S. I have also agreed with my son that "Captain America: the Winter Soldier" is worth thinking about seriously in this connection. At www.werbos.com/Mind.htm, I post slides from a talk at SPIE last year which got into some specifics, and even a few of the technical details. 

Faster Than Light Travel: Now There Is a Way Forward

Faster Than Light Travel: Now There Is a Way Forward

Many years ago, when NASA decided it should fund a blue-sky open-ended effort to look for workable concepts for faster than light (FTL) travel, Marc Millis, who ran the program, invited me to be the National Science Foundation partner. At that time, it was basically too speculative for NSF, and even for me. The goal was a worthy goal,  and one might ask: “How can we ever have any hope of finding an answer if we don’t devote at least SOME effort to thinking about the question?” At that time, however, my response to the question was: “We won’t ever have any real chance at this until and unless we make a whole lot of progress in updating our very basic understanding of basic physics. Until we do more of that, it is premature to expect any kind of specific, concrete way forward.”

But now – that has changed, at least for me. I have done a lot to update my knowledge of basic physics this past year, and, as part of that – I now see a reasonable, more concrete way forward to TRY to achieve FTL. When it comes down to political and economic constraints – I can’t guarantee that humans will ever learn to tie their shoelaces, but from an objective scientific viewpoint, I do see a way forward on FTL which is far more solid and plausible than earlier approaches (though the new approach draws heavily on previous work). Until I get to publish all the many aspects of what I have learned this past year, is it premature for me to say what it adds up to? Maybe, but I can’t be sure I will live long enough to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s as normal practice demands.

1. Space-Bending spacecraft in general versus other approaches *****************************

The most mainstream approach to achieving FTL starts with the question: “Now that Einstein has shown that space can be bent, can we bend space in a way that lets us build FTL spacecraft?”  That is the approach I will discuss here, but probably I should briefly review more of what this means.

There are other folks who like to hope for “hyperspace craft,” which assume that our cosmos has more than just the three dimensions of space and the dimension of time, linked to each other as Einstein described (3+1-D).  In fact, many very serious mainstream physicists argue strongly for superstring theories or brane theories which assume the existence of such additional dimensions. However, I view that as speculative stuff, because I see no real empirical data at all yet in science to give us any practical understanding of what those additional dimensions would really be like, if they exist at all.  Yes, that is a valid area for research, to try to get past speculation, but for a concrete way forward now I would only assume the 3+1-D dimensions that we now know well. (That also applies to concepts like exploiting the “digital universe” as in the wonderful novel Moving Mars by Greg Bear.)

To bend space in 3+1-D, one needs a mathematical model of bending space. Einstein’s General Relativity (GR) is the obvious model, but FTL is not so easy in GR. Thus it makes a lot of sense to support research which really probes GR for possible changes, possible gaps in the theory, especially the kind of gaps which might make FTL easier. It still makes a lot of sense to intensify such efforts ... but at present, it looks ever more speculative that gaps will be found. A year or two ago, there seemed to be growing hope that a model like Moffat’s model of gravity might supersede GR, even though some of the key terms look suspiciously odd. GR requires the weird concepts of dark energy and dark matter to explain some of the basic observations we made a few years ago, but Moffat’s model was predicting them without dark matter or dark energy. But new information has come in on dark matter and dark energy, and the complexities of Moffat’s model no longer seem helpful of justified. And so, the practical way forward now is to aim for space-bending spacecraft, bending space exactly in accord with what GR allows.

How mainstream can one get? In fact, the famous guys at CalTech talk both about space-bending spacecraft and about wormholes as mainstream, GR-based approaches to FTL. The spacecraft approach and the wormhole approach are somewhat related; one might even view the spacecraft approach as a step towards wormhole capabilities (just as low cost RLV may be viewed as a prerequisite to “space elevators”, for those folks who like space elevators more than RLVs).

2. A New Way Forward with space-bending spacecraft ****************************************

The word “Alcubierre” is maybe the best google search term to get into the serious literature on how to build space-bending FTL spacecraft. It all goes back to Alcubierre himself, who found a solution to the equations of GR (i.e. a state of the world allowed according to GR, a design) in which space is bent around a spacecraft enough to allow it to travel faster than light. The Alcubierre solution generated a lot of rightful excitement, but it entailed two overwhelming obstacles, which kept it from being a practical way forward for now, even for folks like me who usually support high-risk high-benefit technologies: (1) it requires the use of “exotic matter,” i.e. matter or energy whose mass/energy density is negative; and (2) it requires a huge amount of that.

There was great excitement a few years ago when a physicist at NASA published a variation of the Alcubierre solution which appeared to get (2) under control. With a new design, much less exotic matter is needed. I have not looked up the details, but I remember an email from someone involved in that saying something vaguely like: “Before, we needed a hunk of exotic matter as big as Jupiter. Now we only need something as big as the Edmonton Mall, something we could actually build.” (We could even AFFORD to build something as big as the Edmonton Mall in space, if our politicians would allow us to build the low-cost RLV which previous work at Boeing, at AF and at NASA has validated, using off-the shelf technology and data!)  That was nice – but at the time I sadly grinned: “Too bad we don’t have ANY exotic matter, not even a thimble full, let alone a Mall full.”

But now, it looks better. Maybe even much better. There is a way forward to check and even to do if the checks work. If I still had a government funding mandate, and were allowed to go international and so on... but whatever.

“Where is there ANY exotic matter?”  I did give Marc Millis a recommendation to give special priority to that question....

Folks like Puthoff funded by Marc Millis offered a possible answer: “Why not squeeze the vacuum?”  Strictly speaking, exotic matter/energy does not really require that energy density be zero in an ABSOLUTE sense. It only requires that we create a zone of energy or matter where the average energy is LESS THAN the average density of the outer space we are traveling through. Many mainstream physicists believe that ordinary outer space is already at a very high level of energy density, because of “zero point fluctuations (ZPE).” For example, even Weinberg’s authoritative book the Quantum Theory of Fields,  has section explaining and endorsing ZPE as a way to explain the Casimir effect. “Squeezing the vacuum,” they suggest, is baiscally just a matter of excluding those vacuum fluctuations from a region of space.

As it happens, I don’t believe in that mainstream Feynmann ZPE theory. The logic seems very clear to me, but, since it is heresy and since new heresy takes many years to percolate through the ever more complex and bureaucratic systems of our world, I simply posted a paper giving the logic at vixra.org this year. For those capable of logic, that should be enough, but for those who must watt for endorsements from Ginsparg or from the President of Liberty University, it is too early. The ZPE theory implies that there is a truly immense amount of energy out there in the vacuum of outer space, something like 10**120 somethings per cubic centimeter of free space.

But could there still be some vacuum energy out there in reality, at a level we could use?

That is what I find most exciting here. At an elite workshop at Princeton in May 2015, I was delighted to learn about the work of the group of Alfred Leitenstorfer, which has since been published in a number of credible places like Nature and Science and PRL. My vixra paper gives specific citations. I disagree with their conclusion that they have measured vacuum energy as large as what ZPE implies; if they lower the temperature of their measurement crystal (EOX), I predict a much lower energy density, energy density more like that of dark matter and dark energy (also discussed in the vixra paper). But that energy density is already very large and very serious!

 By combining a more general Boltzmann equation in the space of density operators, together with any variant of electroweak theory capable of explaining the existence of elementary particles, I predict a vacuum density of subquantal fluctuation of the well-established B and W fields roughly on the same order as what is needed to explain observations on dark energy. (The vixra paper cites a recent review of that data.) That is a substantial energy density; recall that dark matter is many times denser than ordinary matter.

Of course, “way forward” does not mean “yes we can.” Lots of numbers to be checked, and not lightly. For example, consider that the energy density of light now on its way out from the sun, not yet beyond Pluto, is a VERY tiny fraction of the mass-energy of our solar system, but still of some use to technology (the very basis of all earth life!). The subquantal B/W component of dark matter may likewise be “small and big at the same time.”  There is an amusing possibility that we will find that FTL is practical in a way WITHIN spiral arms, but much more difficult across Rifts. Leitenstorfer’s group appears sanguine about the possibility of “squeezing the vacuum’; lots of approaches may work, but I suspect it will take a lot of effort and reasonable creativity to find the most cost-effective way.  The EOX technology is probably one part of what it will take. But there is a way forward. (Perhaps also... or in parallel... quantum separators and coherent baryon number changers may also feed into strengthening such new technology, e.g. providing more energy... and perhaps someday I will post that last work of Schwinger, which is risky but maybe important on this path.)

Best of luck...

MQED2: New Thoughts on the Issue of How to Reformulate QED to Fit New Experiment

MQED2: New Thoughts on the Issue of How to Reformulate QED to Fit New Experiment

I must limit my typing today because of red eye due to trauma to left front side of head at parking lot of Trader Joe just a few days ago.

Last night I  revisited the issue of how to clean up the formulation of QED, as discussed in my recent posting at vixra.org, which was essentially an extended journal entry following up on one aspect of the new paper by Luda and myself published in Quantum Information Processing. That posting was based on a whole lot of analysis, much of which is robust and unavoidable. Nevertheless, we are called not only to implement the various aspects of that paper, but also to reconsider, in parallel, “does it have to be so complex?” “Could we do the work somehow, in a way which seems closer to older formulations of QED?”

At some point, a straw man equation popped into my head:

                                                                                (1)

along with the thought: “I really do not know whether this is ultimately a viable model, but analysis of why and why not, and exploration of issues such as symmetry exploitation, AND of the considerations which I tried to crystallize in this way, may lead to an alternative MQED, whether equivalent of not to MQED1 (which is not the immediate issue on this subtrack).

Most narrowly, equation 1 came from analogy to our very simple master equation model for light going through a polaroid polarizer, in my joint paper with Luda in QIP. THAT master equation was grossly time-asymmetric, expressing the traditional idea of collapse of the wave function, but in this case the Hermitian character of the interaction Hamiltonian H_I results in a time-symmetric model. Equation 1 could be thought of as an “interaction picture in density matrices”; we know that the older interaction picture for wave functions “does not exist” (e.g. our yet unpublished, unposted paper on MEWT,

“upgrade”...), but we also know that shifting from wave functions to density matrices has solved a lot of other problems, and allows the use of extended Glauber-Sudarshan mapping to disambiguate the system.  This is a different system from the usual Schrodinger equation in any case – closely related but different.

With limited time, can I even state (let alone explain) the important other considerations which fed into this?

In the stream of thought which asks: “Do we have to change so much from traditional Y dot = i H Y”, there is the ‘hope’:

“Can’t we just keep the old dynamics for free space? Isn’t the complication all connected to RESERVOIRS (as defined in quantum optics books like Walls and Milburn)?” Ah, but there is nonlinearity here. If we ground MQED on a realistic base, the free space master equations which result from that nonlinearity in the extended P mapping (analyzed long ago in my earlier papers, generally at arxiv) result in a dynamic operator H which is not Hermitian, and which implies a grossly time-asymmetric flow of information. It is essential, in order to meet what the new experiment shows, that even the “free space dynamics” be time-symmetric.  It may indeed be possible to explore the idea of using that asymmetric H as part of a larger system to compute Pr⁺ ... somehow... and somehow clean up the result... but it is important here that MQED is a statistical emergent outcome in any case, and that the cleaning up/time-symmetry (and parity symmetry, essential to the emergent fermi symmetry) which results from taking the limit as r goes to zero, allows a simpler, cleaner version at the level of MQED, the level where we do not account for the nonzero radius of the charged particles being modeled.

As a minor note... the validity of the canonical expansion which ends up with the usual Feynmann graphs (devoid of n-photon lines for n>1) depends on the “unitarity” of Y dot = i H Y, which is not powerful enough to describe these situations, or give a proper interface to the inevitable reservoirs.  We really do have to think about n-photon states explicitly.  

IN effect... the reservoir imposes one very large and clear nonlinearity, but the internal nonlinear effects also impose a nonlinear, which symmetrizes things in a way not so different from what a reservoir does. Equation 1 expresses an idea that “an actual elementary particle, ultimately ala De Broglie, acts as a reservoir for itself!”

This is all just a start to a line of thought ... well, I put in the caveats at the start. It is so incomplete right now that I type it only... to consolidate memory, and account for worst case contingencies re my health.  (Strictly speaking, I had not planned to revisit any of this, but various things happened in the past few days...)

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Added later:

1. Again, the paper at vixra has priority over the previous day’s mulling above, especially over equation 1, which may or may not lead anywhere.

2. A key point here is that any MQED, LIKE the earlier MRF and CMRF models, must obey the basic rules of a time-symmetric model. That means, to be consistent with the experimental results favoring the rules of time-symmetric models as defined in our published papers, the dynamics must be time-symmetric at all times (reservoir or no) EXCEPT at points of injection of positive-time (or negative time) free energy from the outside. Also, equation 1 does not factor trivially; that would be true of the usual [H,r] model, not this one.  HOWEVER: there is no guarantee that a model as simple as equation 1 can work in the way that MQED1 can. If we seek simplicity as in free space dynamics involving just r... well, we can deduce what may be possible...

But because that eye issue is still there I will not elaborate right now. Will just lie quietly... 

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Still later... lying quietly, thoughts pop into the mind, even though I am not at all TRYING to develop an MQED2 alternative. 

To find such an alternative... it helps to pose a very specific question, e.g. "is it possible to develop a model which qualifies as an MQED, as defined in the vixra paper, but which ALSO uses equation 1 or the usual [H,rho] dynamic equation or some other forward-time-looking dynamics in rho? Possible or not? 

An obvious approach is to focus on the same key examples which led to MQED1... simple two-level atoms, like a part of the behavior of hydrogen or helium, informed in part by Carmichael's work on resonance flourescence.

But... why?

Left eye is a little better today. Luda has very sharp pictures from this morning, and a few days ago. Not all better, but improved enough (and similar enough to pictures of "red eye" on the web) that I will not urgently run to See Clearly but will stay a few days more on recovery regime... not full bed rest but no heavy lifting, no things which create too much blood flow to the head (though some of the reports on CNN do risk that)... no eye strain, no air of the kind which might risk infection (e.g. metro), no extended bending over. Blah, but not the worst thing. Still, am sad I have to postpone reading "The Money Behind Ted Cruz"  in Bloomberg Business Week, and will totally repress the thoughts I feel I would say to Bernie Sanders if I had access (as I actually did in 2009!)...     

Option for Near-Term Economic Depression: The Gorillas They Ignored at the Debate Last Night

The Republican Candidates’ debate last night reminds me a lot of that famous short video, where a big 900 pound gorilla actually appears on screen right in the middle of a crowd of people in the middle of the screen but most people don’t even notice it. And no – I am not referring to Trump, who did not appear at all. Actually, there were a few interesting zingers, which the CNN commentators did not notice...

The biggest zinger for me was Rand Paul’s reference to a bill to “enforce transparency and accountability” over the Federal Reserve, which Cruz strongly supported. Yes, it seems clear now that Cruz is most fundamentally a puppet of the oil folks, whose biggest endorsement is from Perry of Texas, another such... but there are also folks out there who really do want to abolish the Federal Reserve. There are SOME greedy folks in the financial sector who give money to selected puppets to try to get favors which take from the middle class and give to the poor, but there are other folks in the financial sector who simply appreciate how bad it would be for all of us to have a world economic depression. Serious talk by a leading candidate aimed at abolishing the federal reserve is certainly a reasonable explanation for a lot of donors of the second kind.

Just how serious is it with the Federal Reserve?

The Federal Reserve has a lot of parallels to the National Science Foundation (NSF), where I worked for almost 30 years until almost one year ago. There are lots of pockets of excellence and honesty in the federal government, and lots of areas of the exact opposite – but on the whole I think of NSF and the FED as the two areas where the highest level of excellence has been maintained the most over the last few decades. Government OFTEN is stupid and oppressive and corrupt, but it does not have to be that way.  Ironically, a lot of the worst corruption is associated with cynical people, such as some of the Republican Congressmen swept in as part of Reagan’s coattails (with some time delay) who will say that government is terrible, and then act to make sure it becomes so. I have seen egregious tings on the Democratic side too, but a lot of the complaints sound the way it would... if Nazi Germany did a PR attack on Israel, complaining about how much military might Israel had mobilized... not mentioning their own.

Of course, I know NSF better. NSF was funding above all two areas – high risk basic research and education – which any really serious market economist knows do call for effort above and beyond what short-term market forces would provide. The great vision of Vannevar Bush, the greatest Bush by far, was to build a foundation which was “in the government but not of it,” operated as much as possible away from politics, based on the highest possible standards of excellence, like a great university, staffed in great part by university people trained to high independence and excellence. It was a vision of truly open competition, with as much transparency as possible – and full feedback to all applicants on the full truth of what happened to their proposals (to within the legitimate limits of the privacy act and respect for IP) and the most constructive possible guidance. No pork barrel additions or plus-up earmarks whatsoever. None. Many generations of NSF directors (mostly recommended by the American Physical Society APS or by “the deans”) were very strict about defending this system, about not allowing even a tiny foothold for corruption (a slippery slope), and about supporting the kind of free speech and honest dialogue essential to making it work.

I remember very clearly the time in 1988/1989 when I transitioned from a very important but very constrained job at the Department of Energy to NSF – about the same time as the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I fell like those other Germans... escaping from the Iron Curtain to the free world, back to free speech and the America I THOUGHT I was growing up in, in those old days in Philadelphia.” I remember a colleague at DOE (higher in the chain) who said to me: “Your escape gives hope to the rest of us locked up here (“lifers”) between these four white walls.” Cynics said: “You have moved from a company which was a joint venture wholly owned by the oil companies and the nucs to a smaller one jointly owned by APS and the deans. You will benefit from a better corporate culture... for now... until the oil folks get motivated to try M&A, or other stakeholders get into the game.” And so it was. At first, when a new Congressional initiative was announced on “Transparency and Accountability,” I shrugged my shoulders and thought: “so what else is new? Those are two of the most fundamental values NSF has always stood for. Sure, it’s good to reaffirm them, and we’ll do that... but I have some other work to do in that space.” But then... well... did Goebbels ever spearhead a “peace in our time” initiative? For awhile, the science societies tried to push hard against the very worst of the abuses, when it became clearer who the community was supposed to become accountable to as their new line employers... and when certain staffers appeared to micromanage the handling of selected proposals.... Chakkah Fattah, for all his failings, spearheaded a lot of the resistance, until the FBI took him down, at the urging of the same “cybersecurity expert” using it to take down Hillary Clinton with far less real justification. And no, I have no plans at all to just dump in the open all the many concrete threads and scenes of this complicated story. Still, one thread: a minor staffing problem, requiring more transfers from other agencies to fill in positions, especially program director positions formerly held by rotators from universities, a system which several Congressional staffers say they want to stop.

I was certainly not the first to retire as the New Order came in, and there are certainly others younger and more energetic than myself who may have a good chance to fully restore the great vision of Vannevar Bush.  But there are also many others who simply chose to retire even before I did. I remember asking one of them, who got hit a lot sooner and harder than I did: “Exactly what happened?” His reply: “All I can say is... I owe you SOME answer... I can say... it is not the same NSF.”

And so: last night, when Paul and Cruz announced they wanted a similar “accountability and transparency” initiative at the Fed, a giant flood of explanation and possibility and other aspects I haven’t written up yet all flooded into my mind. In a way, it was similar to the “near death” experience in Florianapolis which I mentioned in my previous blog post.  Especially since I do also know a lot about the Fed, and about what it has been doing.  

Of course, I also know about people like Sarah Palin who legitimately distrust “all those rich establishment people who are screwing us” (except for her minor “drill baby drill” connections), and would be as eager to see the heads of those rich people on a platter as were similar women at the time of the French Revolution. Understandable. Maybe even Sanders might have quiet sympathies with those feelings. Certainly I remember the Burr-Hamilton duel, and a serious threat that SOME English-oriented bankers posed to the new emerging Republic. But unconditional “racism” against bankers is as bad as unconditional “racism” against Moslems or against self-proclaimed Christians, even though all three groups do have some awful subgroups.  (Jesus himself warned about the evil folks who would come later pretending to speak in his name, but he didn’t get to speak on Fox News last night... though in one brief moment Megan Kelly did give a hint of his existence, which CNN commentators didn’t seem to notice. Now that I think of it, Ayn Rand also warned against certain phony representatives of the private sector in DC politics, and her follower Alan Greenspan is very much a part of the story of the Fed.)

There is little doubt in my mind that there is a serious risk now in American politics of candidates not only for President but for other offices (like those already capable of imposing a Dunkirk on NSF) imposing a twisted version of “accountability and transparency” on the Fed which would be “transparent” only in the sense of dumbing it down,

and accountability and accessibility only to those campaign contributors who lurk behind the likes of Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

This is a really serious risk, a risk to the entire world, because a really serious global depression could result. The fact is that the world economy is a nontrivial complex system. One might compare it to a complex aircraft (like SR-71), where ripping out the automatic controls and turning it over a gee-whiz enthusiastic two-year old unaware of the physics ... would be a way to kill the two year old himself or herself as well as crash the aircraft. The world economy is in a very delicate situation exactly right now. It could be handled better... but on balance, the US part is in better shape and at less risk than the EU or China part for now... despite things which could have killed us. The opportunity to crash it all really fast is really obvious, to those who know how it works.  No, it’s not just another play kitchen. It requires the very highest levels of insight, excellence and understanding... even to do the less-than-perfect job we see today.

Why I do think I know that, enough to feel as upset as a parent in the passenger seat as a wild kid drives next to ... lots of ways to die?

It’s not that one or two of my four degrees was in economics, or that my GRE scores in economics were about a hundred points higher than the next highest in the Harvard economics department at the time... I learned a lot when I was at DOE, and built the most accurate model ever of industrial energy demand (along with transportation and oil and gas later). The Energy Modeling Forum of Stanford validated that, and statisticians at Stanford had very good things to say about the methodology. One percent error in multiyear backcasting is ‘way better than an “R=square of 99 percent” (which should mean ten percent error in one-period forecasting, but turned out to be far worse when we tested the models then best known in that part of economics – all in the official DOE/EISA documents, details posted on my regular web page). To drive that model, I had to fully understand and use the Wharton Annual Model, which was far away the best model for understanding interactions of energy and economy, AND interactions BETWEEN different sectors of the economy. Both on that model, and on advanced “data mining” statistical methods I developed, I interacted a lot with Mark French, who moved from Wharton to the Fed. It drives me nuts at times to see how many economic policy decisions are made by people whose intuition is limited to a “scalar model,”  WHETHER KEYNESIAN OR MONETARIST, like the simple seven-equation model they taught in intermediate macroeconomics at Harvard.  From tracking real data in periods of change, I learned how important STRUCTURAL CHANGE is, and how important it is to see the whole vector picture, not just seven variables in the head. Scalar thinking is the real reason why the EU is stuck in such a mess, unable to appreciate the concrete things they could do to “have their cake and eat it too.” The Fed does not see the whole picture either, but they have seen enough of it to prevent what could have been a kind of rerun-but-worse of the Great Depression (which, recall, was followed by the Nazi revolution). Hey, folks, the Nazi Revolution would not be better even for the wild donors who think Paul and Cruz are advancing their interests!

Why don’t I show you the math here and now, instead of the background? Well, I have summarized the math in other venues. Today I am retired, and will go back to doing laundry in a few moments. A few hints on a few aspects lie at nss.org/EU.

A few bits of the other stuff first?

OK.

Luda got me to scan Pickety’s book. Yes, there is a new inequality problem. Yes, it is serious. Someday I should do a whole piece on “leisure” for example – how we ought to have more of it after the progress of automation, how the system has been waylaid in part by a kind of imperfect competition like the models of Joan Robinson but applied to the market for Congressmen, as well as to unique input-output characteristic of the oil industry when oil prices are high, how “leisure” has a strong link to key variables monitored in the “economics of happiness” and to spiritual growth, a really serious variable feeding back to the other variables (e.g. clobbering the price of oil when cultural and spiritual and political distortions force overriding our appeals for a higher price on economic grounds)... Konrad Lorenz versus Maslow.  How “reformers” who are working to clobber France’s culture should do the opposite, and assist other people.     

Luda has me watching the Netflix series “Occupied.” A powerful and stimulating series, though of course (as with Ayn Rand and the Bible) best used if examined from different perspectives. For example, do some people in the Middle East already feel “occupied”? And must greens really be so stupid? (Minimizing the probability of a fatal climate outcome calls for a strategy which understands about dynamics of transition – like our RLADP mathematics. I have to admit that I have seen left-brained greens as thick as some in that series.) But... I told my friends in the real world, on the year I worked for Senator Specter... the bandaid they need most for their brains is a better understanding of what Pareto optimum really means. Even Richard Nixon, and even I when twelve, understood how greater automation could be absorbed by a combination of things like more leisure, more education and even negative income tax (with buffers to prevent risky other things like welfare mothers with 12 children on drugs, extremes which can be handled with moderate buffers)... Pareto optimality certainly does NOT require the gradual phasing out of human existence from space first and then earth.

Though NASA was already gutted long before NSF (back when Congress set constraints for the “60 day study” leading to Ares)... another case where rah-rah political nonsense precludes serious technical success.  NASA once was really great, but does anyone in power really have the will to make it so again? I hear from lots of folks who say “yes” – but then degenerate into iron triangle efforts to throw money away, to friends on the left or friends on the right, but with no real prospect of real product in either case.

Am tempted to say something about an intelligent dream from night before last... but ... not a proper time yet. Best of luck.

Near Death Experience in Summer 1966

Near Death Experience in Summer 1966 -- and then memories of other near death experiences

From age 8 (1955) to the summer of 1966 (age 19), I was an intense militant atheist. The near death experience did not change my (conscious) beliefs, but I resolved not to be militant any more. This happened on a day when five of us decided to drive up from Cambridge., Massachusetts, to New Hampshire for hiking and swimming – and three of the five almost died. Here is the full story of that day as best I recall. (I will try to be a good, objective witness – just like that guy who wrote “A G Man’s Journal,” a book I recommended on my last post.) By the way, at age 12, I did come up with a kind of logical construct (similar to the core idea of the Upanishads), consistent with a mundane materialist view of how the cosmos actually works, and even sent a letter about it to the Vatican... which informed me this was NOT GOD and that I was hereby excommunicated for it.

The summer of 1966 was my second year at Harvard, my junior year. That summer was the only time in Cambridge when I lived in outside, rented housing. I was part of a group of five undergraduates, who rented the top story of a typical wooden house on a tree-lined side street off of Massachusetts Avenue, a few blocks north of the northernmost part of the university (the graduate/law school). The four other students included a German guy (a bit stronger and bigger than the rest of us), an Austrian, a half-Chinese economist from Chile, and an Ismaili guy Noor from Africa. Since I was in the economics department, maybe it was the half-Chinese guy who introduced me to the group? That I forget.

Probably it was the German guy who drove the car up the main highway going along the west side of one of the mountain ranges. No, not the Presidential range, but interesting enough for a day outing.

On our right, the mountains had a nice, moderate but interesting height and slope, and were mostly all tree-lined. The German looked and said: “Hey, great! See the trail on the right? Let’s stop here, and climb up there.”

Me: “Wait, that’s not a trail. That’s a rockslide. I used to climb a lot around here, and they told us ‘Never climb up a rockslide.’ It could be dangerous. Why don’t we wait for a real trail?”

The German laughed, and may have said something like: “Oh, that’s what they tell children. You were a child then.” He parked the car. He and the Austrian jumped out and almost ran up. The Chinese-Chilean guy and I (and Noor, I think) followed a bit more carefully.

After some time... did the German get about half way up, the Austrian just a little behind him? In any case, the movement of the German somehow dislodged a big boulder (even just a foot or two in diameter moving quickly is enough to kill someone), and it looked as if it would kill the Austrian. I forget how he barely survived. We below called out an urgent warning, which may have pulled his eyes away from focusing on treacherous footing just in time. It was a very, very near thing.

At that point, I decided to go by what I had been taught before. I turned around, and the Chinese-Chilean guy came with me, heading down. But again – this was not a real trail, not marked and organized, and it was all steep and stochastic in pattern.

I went first over a slight slope... which then put me in a wide area of loose dirt which, below, was all the lip of a very steep murderous cliff. Oops! I wanted to head back up (where my friend was still there, waiting), but the dirt was too loose to allow any upward motion. (In fact, a discussion with Luda this morning about the physics of walking on different kinds of ice reminded me of this story!) The dirt had the property that I would slip very slowly but inexorably down, towards the top of the cliff and over, if I did nothing. But if I tried to thrash, the rate of descent would be greater, no matter what I did. To my right was a kind of dirt wall, of no interest. To my left, it was a long,long way to the trees. It was obvious logically that my best hope, if I had any, would be to move in a way which would maximize the ratio between my leftward motion and my downward motion. I took that approach, but it was clear that I just could not get far enough soon enough to get to the zone of trees on my left. It was relatively slow, but inexorable and of course terrifying.

As I looked out... the first odd thing I noticed was... hearing... a troop of boy scouts at the base of the cliff far below. The troop master told the kind: “No, don’t move. Don’t

say anything or try to do anything. You are about to see something very important you need to remember. “ Hmm. Not so inspiring to me.

And then... in my mind... I thought: “Only a miracle could save me now. This is utterly impossible.” And then I reached out as loudly as I could with the thought:

“OK, God! I apologize for having bad-mouthed you so much all these years. Really, really sorry. If you can get me out of this now, somehow, I promise... I will not become a believer... h0ow could I DO that, logically?... but I promise I won’t bad mouth you any more.”

And, a little while later, as I did not reach the trees to my left, as I slid over the lip of the cliff as far left as I could get... there... just over the side... was an old gnarled but solid old evergreen tree, just the right size and shape for me to swing hard to the left and just barely reach another tree, and, in two or three more swings, get to an area which actually felt safe (if tangled and full of underbrush.... for which I was quite grateful). I was proud to be the kind of person who keeps promises, and was resolute about keeping this one. In my rational (symbolic?) thinking, I was not even open-minded about spiritual or paranormal things, let alone  God, until the spring of 1967, another story I have written up before many times. But perhaps this was one of the things which set the stage for what happened in 1967.

Did the boy scouts look a bit disappointed when I walked by past them? I think so...

When we were back in car, the decision was made to drive down to a safer place, Lake Winnepesaukee. I suppose we were in short pants, and didn’t mind getting them wet.

When I was slowly wading into the lake... just ahead or to my side... I suddenly saw Noor, floating inert. I ran out to him, and got him to shore. (Maybe this was the only time I actually used the Red Cross Lifesaving Certificate training I had received for its intended purpose.) I think a bit of CPR was part of it. I never heard anything more from him after that summer (except for his telephone bill one time)... until just a couple of years ago, he turned out to be one of the people on an email discussion list I briefly participated on!

And that’s all I remember from that specific day. I have many later memories of Ismailis, colleagues in economics, and so on, at Harvard and beyond, but that was quite a day. When I was 14, in the summer before my birthday, four of us in my family (father, uncle, grandfather and me) had a wild two-or-three day trip in their boat up the Delaware into the Delaware-Chesapeake canal which was just as eventful (culminating in my trip to Bryn Mawr Hospital for very acute appendicitis), but my thoughts in the hospital then were more about the nature of happiness and the purpose of life, from a utilitarian kind of viewpoint. My uncle was almost killed then, as he was standing on the deck of our disabled boat and a friendly kind girl on the bridge above decided to gift us with a big bag full of sodas in glass bottles which she dropped down from the bridge twenty or thirty feet above.... and lots of other wild stuff happened, within just two or three days. Thank God that the wild stuff was never quite so dangerous after about 1971.

Or wait... no.. as I reread this... the boy scout troop reminds me of a creature I think of as "the black dog of death" in Florianapolis. Luda says: "But he was such a NICE dog. He just wanted me to take him home and wanted the competition to get out of the way..." That year, Christopher was dragged away into what looked like certain death, by a rip current at a beach on the northeast of the Island of Santa Catarina (where we were visiting Florianapolis)... and my mind did enter one of those rare peak states where I could actually see the death in the future... and I charged out into that same current myself, in a way which for awhile appeared certain to kill us both. (It was certainly an acute moment of resolution when I knowingly took the risk.) There was a huge rock formation to our left, and a current pulling us towards deeper shark-infested water without any credible way back... trying to slow us down by scraping that rick was as frustrating as that loose dirt was in 1966... but eventually I found some purchase at the base of a
rough "chimney" style crack in the rock... and we did climb up the cliff to a stable place... and then in another climb to the flat ground at the top.

There were others on that beach. There was a very healthy guy with a kind of raft, who was looking at Luda with great interest. He held back, and 
paddled forward to try to look heroic just after we emphatically proved we were able to climb up the chimney. Climbing that chimney was NOT easy
it required a kind of brute force unnatural optimization of complex movements... and  I remember very bloody hands from it all, fortunately washed by salt water.
In general, I miss the days when we had regular trips to Brazil; my only negative reaction is... to remember not to take small children to that kind of beach. And do watch out for the black dog of death.   

  That trip to Florianapolis was our last trip to Brazil.

======================  Added Next Day

Last night, in my regular period of “meditation” or “cosmic consciousness” or “conversations with God”, I/we mainly focused on other topics, but we briefly noticed once again the limits of my everyday mundane consciousness. It is actually amusing how yesterday I initially thought: “I am glad I had no more of those immediate direct physical challenges to my physical body since 1971”... until by accident the boy scout troop of 1966 reminded me of the black dog of death in Florianapolis. But in just a brief moment last night... that was not the only omission!!

The first meeting between Luda and myself in the mundane world was in 1996, in a conference at NIST, in Gaithersburg. There have actually been several other physical scares in various adventures since then.

Most vivid in my mind was a trip to the Ukraine, first visiting Luda’s father, then Crimea and then Kiev. There were several scary memorable moments in Crimea, and I also learned a whole lot about many things on that trip. In truth, it really did include a full-scale meeting with Scythia under the wing of an honest to God Amazon woman living up to all the Greek myths. At one point I thought: “Hey, and this is where the myth of the trials of Hercules came from. It is an interesting courtship ritual. When the candidate is at least worthy of serious consideration, you do those trials. If he lives, he is OK. If not, no one ever has to worry about writing a dear John letter.” It would be a long post indeed to describe all the many things which happened even just in the week in Crimea.

Just a few snapshots: a moment of terror, as serious as Florianapolis (but without flash-aheads in time). On the day when we visited the ancient Italian fort, at the western edge of the famous (northern) silk road maintained by Genghis Khan peacefully trading with the Italians, I found myself alone at one point on a narrow trail I could not go back on, inches away on my right from a cliff which would make a great photo shot for a horror movie. Not just a smooth flat slab of rock, but a steep mass of sharp crags and ugly teeth, no possibility of climbing, slippery and wet on any path below, down above nasty whirlpools and craggy teeth in the water below far worse than anything you see in worst rapids in this area (which we have also visited but not climbed much into).   No escape to the right or back. Not clear how long I could survive just standing there, in a less than perfectly stable place. The only option: ahead, a yellowish old faded brick wall, about eight feet high, no handholds or footholds. On the other side of the wall, scary shouting. No flash-aheads in time, but a clear “voice of logic”: logic said my only hope of survival would be to climb over that wall and go to that scary sounding other side. I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel able. Common sense said it was rather questionable whether I would have any chance of doing such a thing. (I wasn’t an athlete or a hero, and already deep into middle age.) But logic said it was my only hope, and I willed to do the best I could to make it work.

At the top of that wall, maybe about 18 inches wide, I saw who was shouting on the other side. Part of me wanted to laugh at how utterly silly and unbelievable this scenario was.  There was a collection of about a dozen people in plate mail, waving halberds with angry shouts. As soon as I appeared they directed all their anger at me, and waved the halberds right at me, clearly waving me away, and threatening what they would do if I traipsed on their territory. But logic said to me: sorry, no choice. So, as politely and innocuously but resolutely as I could, I just jumped down into the very middle of them, trying to get my “feet on the ground” to get to the exit I could see on the far side of them. I had to project a clear sign of being utterly resolute and yet utterly innocuous, bowing but not bending... and getting the hell out of there as fast as I could without breaking the image. As soon as I was clear, I tried to reinforce the thought that I should be viewed by THEM as a brief mirage, a piece of impossible science fiction from another reality fading in time, something they could rejoice in utterly forgetting.

Actually, that day was a kind of medieval re-enactment, much more serious than Renaissance Fairs in the US. The people in that place had done their best to inflate themselves with the image of their being true medieval warriors (just like some of the candidates this week inflating themselves with images about their being true Christians, which is a lot more phony and silly than those warriors were), and the mental part of the task was to remember reality, to get past the commitment to be a real user of a halberd. Reality helped me some, but not as much as you might imagine. How much does reality help in US politics today, where virtual reality and TV (both “reality TV” and unreality commercials) come into it? Reality is crucial to survival, but not enough.

A lighter note in that re-enactment was a very attractive medium-sized woman doing displays of their Amazon woman heritage, a curious combination of powerful sex and violence, friendly but scary, half-naked with serious weapons. Being younger then, I certainly noticed that woman, and she certainly noticed me... but she also fully noticed the woman slightly behind me, fully dressed but obviously the full real thing of which the woman “on stage”  (not really a stage) was but a pale reflection, and also bigger and scarier, smiling quietly the way a tiger at rest with open eyes sometimes rests. The woman on stage was alive enough to see.

So... the day of one of the seven trials. Another day there was a moment more truly like a cross between Greek mythology and the scary scenes in “Out On a Limb” (a book my father loved in his last years)... when Luda doing her Artemis imitation told us that the cliff walk we just completed, along tilted loose narrow dirt trail, was just a beginning, and pointed to an overhanging cliff ahead, and told both me and Chris we were ready to start the REAL adventure. Logic said... this really did not make sense. I said “no,” and Chris said “no,” but Luda smiled, and that would NORMALLY be enough... but logic was pretty clear about this one. So when she next said: “Let’s go now,” at that instant a bolt of lining crashed out of the clear blue sky and hit towards the cliff. She was somewhat taken aback by that, but, after a brief delay, got it together and said “come on” again. And then immediately there was ANOTHER bolt of lightning, and clouds did race in very quickly covering that blue sky, and water started to fall. “Oh well, all right,” she said. “It will be interesting enough just going back on that trail in this rain.” And indeed it was. The dirt trail nine inches wide, tilted strongly towards the cliffs and whirlpools below, was already an interesting exercise in survival logic as we came  (not unlike the control problem of SR-71 design), but with mud... we went as fast as we could, with our lives at stake, but maybe halfway back found a bat cave where we sheltered awhile during the most extreme sudden downpour. Sudden shifts in weather do happen north of the Black Sea, they say, which is part of why I worry about the day when an outbreak of H2S from that sea might hit a lot of Russians in the night in Sevastapol. “Not our fault, really. It wasn’t us....!!! We even warned you....!”

We have also had a few physical moments in various trips in China, and an amusing misunderstanding with bears in Alaska where family lives were NOT really at stake much but it sure seemed that way. Even on our last walk up Mount Washington, a 65-mph wind came up, and I remember one moment in particular where I had to invoke full-scale will-to-survive-with-logic just like the wall in Crimea... and many moments where I had to operate my exhausted body like a puppet. I was ever so grateful that there was a bus down from the top, where Chris and I could buy seats because of their priority for stranded senior citizens and children (which fortunately extended to their mothers accompanying them).

All of this just a few seconds in that period last night, much more focused on other things... things like a flash to that book “A G-Man’s Journal” and comparative analysis of what happens when you don’t catch cancer before it metastasizes with an obvious link to what Obama and Sanders discussed yesterday, links to what some folks are thinking about nuclear physics and nuclear technology this week, omissions not to be blogged in in some discussions of cybersecurity and stuff which Orson Scott Card discusses, and folks linked in various ways to the Potomac Institute. All AFTER an earlier “assumption” period of lesser importance, really serving just a connection and background function. Now back to normal life, most notably life with Luda... as peaceful as it can get... though with possibilities for play in the deep snow. 

What else happened up through 1971 must wait for another day.