I think Seth Abramson has a point I missed in my last post.
A while back I realized that the GOP must be controlled by a backstage cabal that decided some time ago to put puppets into play. It became clear with Ronald Reagan, who was a third rate actor willing to learn his lines, die his hair, and wear the make up. He was good at ad-libbing along core concepts, especially with the whispering help of Nancy. He had me! He was the last Republican I voted for when I saw the damage. Yes, I was a conservative when that still had principles and values.
Bush the Elder appears a little more of his own man. George the Younger needed more help. But it was clear that Dick Chaney was there to keep things in line for both of them. Very “prudent.” But boy that man was the devil and more obvious than McNamara or Rumsfeld. Of course, none can compete with Henry Kissinger in pure, premeditated evil.
Trump seems to be an experiment gone sideways. From an acting perspective, we are now at amateur Reality TV level. The real management in Reality TV is massaging the talent ego and editing after the fact. The trouble is that works with “The Apprentice,” but is a problem in case of nuclear war and a polity addicted to social media.
Intelligence and ego-wise we have reached bottom. Trump has always had trouble with is ego: appearance is all, tallest buildings, lots of gold, fascist dictator mentality. But his lack of intelligence and morality accelerated by his dementia together with a phone running Twitter has made him really hard to handle. And it seems that his immediate handlers are also not “the best and the brightest.” The pure instincts of a conman coupled with his need for adoration still make him a dangerous demagogue with his base, who need him just as much. The danger is with terrorists on the fringe put on fire.
The Greek tragedy (or Shakespeare – choose your poison): the women most loved by him (for him love and lust are the same) are not likely to truly adore or love him. Love and lust unrequited are the greatest pain of all! But given the suffering and deaths already in play, I cannot feel compassion.
An experiment gone wrong and hopefully the end of the line, Fox News not withstanding.
Behind the Curve a fascinating study of reality-challenged beliefs
The documentary tracks how people form and maintain bizarre beliefs.
There’s a scene somewhere in the middle of a new flat Earth documentary that acts as metaphor for so much that surrounds it. Two of the central figures of Behind the Curve are visiting a spaceflight museum that pays tribute to NASA, an organization that they believe is foisting a tremendous lie on an indoctrinated and incurious public. One of them, Mark Sargent, sits in a re-entry simulator that suggests he should press “Start” to begin. He dutifully bangs away at the highlighted word “Start” on screen, but nothing happens.
He wanders away muttering even more about how NASA’s a giant fraud. Meanwhile, the camera shifts back to the display and zeroes in on a giant green “Start” button next to the seat Sargent was in.
I believe it’s not necessarily the seeing of facts that is the issue, it’s the underlying rules and patterns, the mental models that create selective attention and understanding.
Death of the calorie | 1843 Magazine – The Economist
“For more than a century we’ve counted on calories to tell us what will make us fat. Peter Wilson says it’s time to bury the world’s most misleading measure.
I always thought that digestion was extremely complex and not just dependent on the type of food we ingest, the physiology of multiple organ systems digesting, but also our microbiome and overall state. Inheritance certainly is a key factor.
“As a general rule it is true that if you eat vastly fewer calories than you burn, you’ll get slimmer (and if you consume far more, you’ll get fatter).“ But it is not that simple. “Each body processes calories differently. Even for a single individual, the time of day that you eat matters. The more we probe, the more we realise that tallying calories will do little to help us control our weight or even maintain a healthy diet: the beguiling simplicity of counting calories in and calories out is dangerously flawed.”
“The only major organisation to shift the emphasis beyond calories is one dedicated to helping its customers slim down: Weight Watchers.”
How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology – The Atlantic
“He was raised in a Montana trailer park, and home-schooled by what he now describes as a “fundamentalist cult.” At a young age, he fell in love with science, but had no way of feeding that love. He longed to break away from his roots and get a proper education.”
A German University gave Toby Spribille the opportunity he could not get in his native country.
“You’ve seen lichens before, but unlike Spribille, you may have ignored them.”
“In the [last] 150 years […] biologists have tried in vain to grow lichens in laboratories. Whenever they artificially united the fungus and the alga, the two partners would never fully recreate their natural structures. It was as if something was missing—and Spribille might have discovered it.”
“He has shown that largest and most species-rich group of lichens are not alliances between two organisms, as every scientist since Schwendener has claimed. Instead, they’re alliances between three. All this time, a second type of fungus has been hiding in plain view.”
“There’s been over 140 years of microscopy,” says Spribille. “The idea that there’s something so fundamental that people have been missing is stunning.”
Space.com: Physicists Reverse Time for Tiny Particles Inside a Quantum Computer | Space
“Time goes in one direction: forward. Little boys become old men but not vice versa; teacups shatter but never spontaneously reassemble. This cruel and immutable property of the universe, called the “arrow of time,” is fundamentally a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that systems will always tend to become more disordered over time. But recently, researchers from the U.S. and Russia have bent that arrow just a bit — at least for subatomic particles.
In the new study, published Tuesday (Mar. 12) in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers manipulated the arrow of time using a very tiny quantum computer made of two quantum particles, known as qubits, that performed calculations.
At the subatomic scale, where the odd rules of quantum mechanics hold sway, physicists describe the state of systems through a mathematical construct called a wave function. This function is an expression of all the possible states the system could be in — even, in the case of a particle, all the possible locations it could be in — and the probability of the system being in any of those states at any given time. Generally, as time passes, wave functions spread out; a particle’s possible location can be farther away if you wait an hour than if you wait 5 minutes.
Undoing the spreading of the wave function is like trying to put spilled milk back in the bottle. But that’s exactly what the researchers accomplished in this new experiment.”
Here’s How We’ll Know an AI Is Conscious
“Our conscious experiences are composed of qualia, the subjective aspects of sensation—the redness of red, the sweetness of sweet. The qualia that compose conscious experiences are irreducible, incapable of being mapped onto anything else. If I were born blind, no one, no matter how articulate, would ever be able to give me a sense of the color blood and roses share.”
“The 21st century is in dire need of a Turing test for consciousness. AI is learning how to drive cars, diagnose lung cancer, and write its own computer programs. Intelligent conversation may be only a decade or two away, and future super-AI will not live in a vacuum. It will have access to the Internet and all the writings of Chalmers and other philosophers who have asked questions about qualia and consciousness. But if tech companies beta-test AI on a local intranet, isolated from such information, they could conduct a Turing-test style interview to detect whether questions about qualia make sense to the AI.”
In the original Bladerunner, when Deckard meets his former supervisor Bryant, he tries to refuse the mission to hunt down replicants. Bryant tells him, “In this city you’re either a cop or little people.” Deckard replies “No choice,huh?” Bryant tells him, “No choice, pal!”
The story seems to be the same for voters in the US political system of today. It is less about the cops than the powerful elites representing the rich and large corporation. With the change in media (concentration into a few corporations controlling programs and message) and especially news reporting moving from an effort to gather and report on the facts to the personality hosted opinion shows – whether on Fox or CNN and MSNBC. The primary focus of these shows is to gain and hold the users’ attention by raising the emotions of their viewers by demagoguery inspired rants or experts and facts, whatever works with the respective silos. These reenforced through the deliberate and automatically curated echo chambers of social media equally dependent on fueling the emotions to keep attention.
I am not discounting the current crisis of an extremely corrupt version of fascist conservative government, which was put in place both through an unholy collaboration with the influence of an enemy power and extreme irregularities in the election process orchestrated by conservative elites. That is simply an effort to reset the balance firmly to a more conservative position. This has gone off-track by using a Reality TV personality as presidential stand-in, while using a scripted actor, who knew his lines and could take directions, worked so well in the past.
When we look at the overall policy positions of the right and left prior to Trump we see that they are not really far apart. They appear to provide choice, but actually in the end result in very little difference. Obamacare managed to retain the near monopolies in the healthcare system without real price controls and in some ways was a boon to insurance companies and pharma. It was derived from a conservative proposal. It really did not impact the fundamental issue that healthcare is not easily affordable for large segments of the population. Insurance rates mediated by the portals are still onerously high in comparison to lower incomes. Environmental efforts moderated the impacts on environments and climate change, but they were only separate from conservative approaches by a degree and totally insufficient to fundamentally address the problem.
One of the reasons the system can be manipulated is that we do not have a popular democracy. The separation of legislative and executive powers coupled with a two chamber system, where one chamber influenced by a small part of the population can overrule the other, leads to a two party system. Our approach to elections requiring large investments leads to corruption and hidden interests. And because lobbyists hedge their bets and invest in both sides, the policy positions influenced by this are only different in the way they are expressed. Fundamentally they are not that far apart – especially when we look at real policies enacted as a result of the legislative process.
For those controlling events these false alternatives are used to keep the population divided and to some extend in fear of each other.
We do see the rise of outliers like Bernie Sanders, who was forcefully shunted aside by the apparatus in the last election even at the price of allowing a person like Trump to gain the upper hand. But when we look at “centrist” positions of the leading Democrats, they are really not far from those of “moderate” Republicans. They align to create a compromise with what is good for those in power (corporate interests and billionaires,) while being tolerable to the people.
Meanwhile the Super Majority is quite united (65% – 80% on key issues) in supporting stronger measures to effectively deal with real world problems of climate change, the cost of medical care, education, and income inequality. The latter is the elephant in the room. It is really hurting the lower income classes, young people entering the work place, and an aging population trying to retire.
Alternate models are clear and effectively implemented in Europe leading to hire levels of satisfaction and stability. They are driven by parliamentary democracies. These polities are not perfect (see the current unrest in France,) but are not likely to create the conditions threatening societal chaos as modeled by Cliodynamics (History as a Science) – overcrowding of elites and income inequality. Cliodynamics currently predicts a high level of social instability around the time of the next elections.
The one hope is in the increasing activism and participation of the younger generation and the new generation of representatives that have swept into office. They are not afraid to sweep aside the “centrist rhetoric” from the “centrist establishment” and ad hominem tirades from the right. Together with the continuing voice of Bernie Sanders it will hopefully shape the conversation of the leading centrist contenders like Kamela Harris to realize that there is real opportunity in representing the true Super Majority instead of just following the “prudent” route and wishes of the powerful liberal elites.
Ars Technical: Here’s why NASA’s administrator made such a bold move Wednesday
Interesting move. In a way the Trump administration follows in Obama’s food steps, who haggled for the “Commercial Manned Flight Program” by continuing to fund the SLS, the “Senate Launch System.”
The latter pretty much looks like a massive boondoggle to create a massive rocket with replenished old, expendable technology to keep a massive number of jobs from massively lobbied companies.
It looks pretty clear that apart from the cost-plus massive and ongoing development expense (if you miss a deadline, you make more money) each flight will also be massively unaffordable.
Frustrating given the private business progress and lost opportunity for other science missions not getting funded.
“Easier said than done.” He rubbed his face. “Events are not deterministic. I am not sure, what all got them on the path to mess up that ecosystem so much.”
“Well,” she said, “there are the economic systems to consider.” She studied the monitor. “Funny, they believed in something they called ‘Capitalism.’ They first used some rare material like shells or metal as a meta value to trade goods and services.” She took a pause looking. “Then they created polities with elites and created this thing called ‘money’ literally named after the place they mined and minted it. Later they just went to printed stuff. It all was based on a belief in a mutual promise, which I guess is as good as anything.”
He laughed looking at the scape. “They believed money was absolute and a trading system based on it was ‘objective.’ First ‘Cargo Cults,’ then ‘Capitalism’ as a cult. Kind of like their religion, only no guy with a beard.”
She countered, “Actually, there was a guy with a beard and another belief system called ‘Communism.’ Marx or something. And the people from one cult fought the other. The weirdest thing is that they thought that this exchange mechanism was the sole basis for a value system in their polity. Perhaps meaningful, while things are scarce. But really stupid with technological evolution when all stuff becomes abundant.”
He squinted at the scape letting out his breath. “Interesting contradictions. In some areas they were so advanced, but they still adhered to pure materialism in their science and philosophy despite the obvious contradictions. They blew each other up with nuclear devices, so they had an understanding of the quantum world.”
“No simple answers.” She agreed, “No simple answers.