Lynching, violent and non-violent

Charles Jordan

Overwhelmed by the mob atmosphere in Atlanta after the shooting of Rayshard Brooks in a DUI arrest entanglement I try to  imagine a similar situation in the old South.  The Atlanta scenario is not much different from a lynching even if its non-violent. I imagine a crowd of white people reacting to a black man who wrongly or rightly was thought to have caused the death of a white man.  Perhaps a lone white lawyer or judge type raises the cry  “let the police handle this.”  The crowd ignores him, because they don’t need any more proof.  They know what is right.

The black man might have done nothing wrong, but was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He may have even tried to explain the misunderstanding to the crowd but the crowd found his obvious defensiveness proof of his guilt.  Eliminating him would clear the air of any misunderstanding.

As I watched the Atlanta video, I thought how human and reasonable Mr. Brooks seemed.  Surely nothing he might have done would justify  shooting him.  Yes, he was dead drunk and couldn’t admit it.  He didn’t know where he was and he had no ability to understand his position except that he was clearly concerned that anyone would find he was at fault and cause him to be rearrested while on probation for felony cruelty to children, false imprisonment, Simple Battery/Family, etc.  Human beings are complicated creatures.  Even the worst people in the world like Jeffrey Daumer can be pleasant people in a social situation.  I’m sure Hitler could be charming at a ball if you didn’t know anything about him.

A policeman has to size up a man for what he might do in a confrontation with the law.  A large man even without a gun can be dangerous, especially if he has the advantage of surprise, putting on a friendly front while desperate about his situation.  Forty minutes of small talk trying to get Mr. Brooks to admit that he had driven his car to the Wendy’s while being dead drunk -drunk enough not to be able to stay awake.  But after the amiable banter, when the policemen tried to place handcuffs on him, he struggles and as he is dragged to the ground reaches for a taser he sees, fires it at one officer, slugs the other, gets on his feet and runs away.  About 10 - 15 feet away, he turns and fires the taser again. He knows how it works.  He turns to continue fleeing and the policeman fires at him to stop him from escaping. Presumably the policeman was worried about his own safety, unsure in the rush of the moment, feeling the blow on his face as a sign he might be in danger, not trusting Mr. Brooks to act rationally, he fires three times.  

After the shooting Office Rolfe is trying to do CPR on Mr. Brooks. Somehow he is even more guilty in the press because he didn’t recover from shooting someone within 2 minutes to try to keep him from dying and asks Mr. Brooks to “hold on.” The finality of someone dying because you have shot them starts bringing you back to reality, I presume.

Now Officer Rolfe has been charged with 11 different crimes for what to him must feel like a denial of everything he was trained to do.  Sort of like the lynching mentioned above.  The district attorney must feel panicked just like the officer. A normal case where someone has been shot would presumably go through a couple of hearings before charging someone with murder.  The chief of police resigns to avoid having to discuss the situation so central to that job. What did she expect?  Did she think she wouldn’t have to face such an incident with large numbers of police with weapons trying to control a large metropolitan area covered with bars and cheap alcohol, people with guns, and thousands of human antagonisms.

But it’s hard for a human beings to be objective when they  feel that the whole of America is looking at them through the eyes of a voracious media  which still considers itself to  be the underappreciated defender of virtue rather than the untouchable dispenser of opinion.  Guilt is obvious to the media.  Only one side of the question is discussed.  Facts tend to be adjectives rather than nouns.  News remains news for many days.  News has legs rather than facts.  “If I use the word racism it sells.”  If I can connect the word “racism” to the President, it’ll sell more. 

 It’s their business model.

747 against World Trade Center. Who wins?

747 Kinetic Energy

Charles Jordan

A red glow from a melted mass was all that was left of the steel girders on which the World Trade Center was built. It had been five days since the building collapsed on September 11, 2001. There was a general disagreement as whether steel could become red hot just by falling, but one of the engineers/ physicists who had been hired to look into the horrific happening found that the kinetic energy of the steel falling from a maximum of 1350 feet down would be enough energy to melt the iron when it crashed to the ground, all those iron atoms bouncing into one another.

“Nonsense!" echoed the opinions of most people in New York City." There must have been something or someone incendiary messing with the building over the last year."

John Fulminery has been studying the age old records of heat-inducing chemicals and energy waves used by people like Isaac Newton to make alchemical changes in materials and thought these might be away to induce a change in steel from a rigid strong material to a floppy gelatinous mess.

When he suggested such a possibility, the investigators considered him to be a nutcase. There was a lot of iron at the base of the collapsed building and it was dense and red-hot.

If anything, they thought that the energy of a 747 striking the building containing a full load of gasoline should have been enough to heat the building supports to their melting point or at least weaken them enough to lead to a collapse.

But nobody could know what was in the minds of the perpetrators of this game, a single-minded group of jihadists whose world view reached back before Mohammadism to when Arabian science was at its zenith and Sufi mysticism was achieving magical transformations. 

The Motion of Sufi Dancing can generate energetic focal points which can change reality. If it can work for the human body, why not for large physical objects like airplanes. Perhaps there were complexes of motion involving the automatic pilots of the 747s which could lead to highly energetic resonances which could saw through or melt steel like butter.

Abdul Assiz had qualified to fly 747 airplanes early in their rollout into the industry.  But he quit flying with his family ask him to return to Konya as the oldest male Assiz in the family. Konya is the origin of the Whirling Dervish dancers whose connection with the loving center of the universe depends on body position and twist rate to generate a blood distribution in the head and states of ecstasy similar to drugs like LSD. It was through techniques like this that the Sufis managed to develop new ways to manipulate reality.

Assiz’s knowledge of the 747enabled these transformations of motion using the computer driven controls to enhance the energy content of the plane to levels high enough to weaken the ski steel girders and bring  down the buildings just due to the plane’s impact.

Stories of the attackers using box cutters to overwhelm the pilots were the only plausible way most people could understand how the jihadist could have succeeded, but the actual methods were more like the whirling dervishes than the criminal gangs.

Similar techniques where used to shield the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. The many-layered defense around the District of Columbia and our government were curiously quiet during this attack and never actually confronted a plane they seemingly couldn't see.

The last plane was planning to eliminate  the President and his family in the White House and it is amazing that one of the passengers had spent time in the US airbase at Incirlik,Turkey, just south of Konya. He recognized the motions of the attackers and managed to disrupt them causing the plane to dive into the ground in Pennsylvania, a heroic effort indeed.

Sufism is a way of life based on love, but any powerful method of relationships can bring energy to intent.  

Deterioration of Justice

Deterioration of Justice

Charles Jordan

January 29, 2020

It is more and more obvious that our justice system is distorted.  Enforcement of laws seems to be optional depending on the opinions of politicians and bureaucrats. Establishment of a law seems to rely on the policy preferences of single judges rather than the vote of Congress or the executive departments pronouncements. Executive orders take away the initiative of Congress due to that large group’s reluctance to do anything but fight the executive orders. Getting re-elected (staying elite) is a complicated thing. Reactionary government is bad. And it leads finally to reactionary leaders. To the have-nots outside of government, anything which will break down the delay and getting things done is a good thing.  They need change, the elites do not.  The elites lead their case with promises to help the have-nots since they represent a lot of votes, but find many reasons why the promises can not be kept.

The choice of Donald Trump as president is a case in point. He scorns the ineffective Congress as did Pres. Obama before him. President Obama was surrounded by the liberal elite who were doing quite well thank you. So he was inactive, not wanting to rock the boat. Whether Trump is visionary or just reactionary isn't clear, but he makes many people happy that something is happening in an over-the-hill country where anything goes.

Education for many an average student is a bust due to lack of motivation. “If I can’t handle the math, I’ll just stay home and mooch off my parents.”  The older elites in power are satisfied with just having power and enjoying it. Of course power requires being in control of the government, not solving the problems of the have-nots. Control requires ideological judges, friendly justice bureaucrats (FBI, CIA, DOJ), a media committed to political correctness, and a disdain for traditional verities.

Trump, with his unsocial outlook, partially due to his personal wealth, avoids fitting into a politically correct slot in the elites. Just by disturbing the status quo of the elites, he invigorates the have-nots and threatens the control of the elites.

Mind you, the word elites doesn't mean highly educated creative thinkers. It means "big guy on campus" manipulators like Bill Clinton, but with money. They drive the analysis with fear and smear. Cool headed thinking followed by constructive design and implementation is not their job.

How have the various problems that our black brethren face been addressed by our late black/white President Obama. His presidency was mostly a celebration of getting elected, of entering the elite. Pres. Trump trumpets the increase in black salaries, but he says it all wrong.

As many people have said, what we need is a redefinition of what standard-of-living means. Does the Dow Jones average define prosperity? Not if the structure drives more and more money into elite pockets. Is anyone “worth” $1 billion? I don't think so. On the other hand we are also not equal to each other. We can be equal before the law, but some will be found guilty and some innocent.  The new fixes we need to reverse some of these negative trends we face needs to be defined by laws that enable rather than disable our citizens.

Capitalism isn't perfect, but productive. Socialism is idealistic, but nonproductive. We live right now in a combination of capitalism and socialism. We just need to find a new mix to reverse the slide of assets from the middle class to the elites. I see the very poor as a separate case with more problems to solve requiring  special solutions to remove the stress which incapacitates them.

That would require a new classification of citizenry which most would find unacceptable. However, from the Greeks on, democracy never included the debilitated poor in their decisions.  In any case, serious problems require serious changes and even though things seem prosperous on Wall Street, there are serious structural problems clouding up the future of our unusual nation. A $1 trillion budget deficit is a problem. Can our first trillion dollar CEO solve it?

Charge for putting Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere?

“Time for Congress to put a price on carbon pollution?”  Barbara Boxer and Bernie Saunders  San Francisco Chronicle 1/9/2014

- A rebuttal by Charles Jordan

First of all, these two politically correct politicos aren’t talking about carbon, they are talking about carbon dioxide, not about the heavy hydrocarbons you used to hear about regarding air pollution due to incomplete burning of fossil fuels.  The theory is KISS “keep it simple stupid” and identify a simple villain, the goal of all politicians except when they need to obfuscate.

But carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.  Is water vapor a pollutant?  It is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  But it has other uses as does carbon dioxide.  Both are central to life on earth, coming together particularly in plants.  My motto is “You can’t be green without carbon dioxide!”  To state the obvious, plants need carbon dioxide to grow.  Every fall, huge amounts of carbon dioxide go back into the atmosphere when leaves decay.  Do you notice it getting warmer in the fall? 

 Still the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, percentage-wise it’s           0.04%, is very small even when seemingly large amounts of carbon dioxide are generated by burning fossil fuels.  Right now 38.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year are generated by autos, power plants, trucks, etc. serving human activity which weren’t generated before the industrial revolution.  Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? (By the way,  only 10.4 Billion tons of that is carbon.  73% or 26 billion tons is oxygen which burning fossil fuels generates for the plants.)   Whenever we compare such a number to a reference like the .01 ton mass of the human body such numbers are impressive.  But comparing to a human reference is the classical mistake humans always make.  If we use our individual selves or even the total human endeavor as the reference, we risk overestimating our place in the universe. The total mass of the atmosphere is 5.3 Million Billion tons, so that new carbon dioxide is .0000072 of the present mass of the atmosphere per year.  And the mass of the atmosphere is one millionth of the mass of the planet.  We are indeed small fry compared to the earth. The sum of all the masses of all the humans (.01 tons each) is .018 of the carbon dioxide produced per year, .132/Billion of the atmosphere, and .132/million billion of the mass of the earth.  

Scientists have used what are called proxies (ratios of various isotopes)  to estimate the carbon dioxide levels millions of years ago to compare against the large temperature swings associated with major ice ages.  These estimates indicate that carbon dioxide has been at much higher levels earlier in the history of the earth, up to a factor of 20 times today’s level, even during major ice ages.

Even though the global temperature levels are up on the plateau associated with a non-ice age, this same plateau has been reached after the 4 major ice ages covering millions of years.  The actual measured global warming, an average over 100 years is an increase of less than 1/2 degree Celsius higher than that of the little ice age we are emerging from.  And, even though the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising smoothly, the temperature swings are oscillating rapidly with no particular correlation to the rise in carbon dioxide.  In fact, the average of the temperature oscillations has not increased in the latest 15 years and the oscillations seem to be more correlated to the oscillations in the water currents (El Niño, La Niña) than with carbon dioxide.

Climate scientists have programmed global climate models , their guesses about future developments in the climate. These models are not based only on physics laws, due to the lack of relevant starting values, an incomplete set of physical processes, and the lack of a comprehensive understanding of areas of science in which they are not trained.  They admit, in addition, that the models calculations are inaccurate due to the magnitude of the problem and the power of their computers.  Computer runs on the absolutely fastest computers in the world like Blue Waters (the petascale computer at the University of Illinois) take up to a month.  Then prediction of different models differ by as much as a factor of 5.  The gloriously incompetent IPCC reports have to include as many as 30 different calculations to give an idea of the uncertainty.  In addition, due to computational limitations, the models completely ignore local events like tornados, thunderstorms, hurricanes, monsoons, etc.   Pontifications about newsworthy events like the amount of rain, number of tornados, big hurricanes, power of monsoons, are manufactured out of whole cloth, handwaving arguments on general principles after the answer has been assumed.

Should we study climate change?  Absolutely!  Should we support alternative energy sources at a reasonable level?  Yes!  Do we know what we don’t know about the effect of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? No!  Do we even know whether more CO2 drives the avg. temperature up or down? No.  There are alternative explanations based on physics ignored by the climate scientists which project cooling rather than heating as we go forward and that is a lot more scary.  Should we tax the energy companies, the automobile manufacturers, and anyone who uses energy derived from burning carbon because carbon dioxide is a pollutant and give it to alternative technologies whose energy capacity will always be also-ran?  No!

Questions

Some things to think about!

Where does oil come from? (not from dinosaurs and plants) Look it up.

Is common sense inherited? I mean, Is it encoded in your DNA?

Are we all the same at some metaphysical(spiritual) level? Certainly not at a biological level!

What does it mean to say "The economy is doing well."?

Is there a happiness gene?

If a suggested truth can't be proven, only disproven, is there actual truth or only a set of opinions?

Prove that the world outside of yourself is not just a figment of your imagination.

There are two fundamental non-linear problems, investment and climate.
1. How can you tell what the next hot stock is going to be?
2. How can you tell what the weather in 100 years is going to be? 100 days? 10 days? Would you care to bet?

Have other questions for the group? Let's hear them!

Climate Change

Climate change is real, small, and inexorable, and has little or nothing to do with CO2 which is also real, small, and has an unpredictable affect on the climate .   CO2 is not a pollutant and the more dangerous heavy hydrocarbons have already been controlled by large expenditures to clean up the air and the water. Carbon-based economy has given us our exalted standard of living and there is no reason to think it can’t continue to do that. More CO2 is generated when we burn more carbon in energy plants and cars, and most of the results of that are positive.

The only preferable alternative to carbon is nuclear power if we can get over our irrational fear that a nuclear reactor can be a nuclear bomb. Consider the worst possible scenario. A 9.0 earthquake causes a tsunami which damages an old nuclear reactor which melts down and drops its radioactive uranium into the catch basin below. The number of deaths or casualties from the incident due to any radioactivity equals zero, really, zero. Beat your breasts about whether bad things will appear later, but look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Chernobyl carefully and you'll find that that isn't to be expected.

Beat your breasts about the 30,000 people who died by drowning. Get real. Don’t be led down the garden paths by software engineers, meteorologists, and other quasi-scientific phenomenologists who choose their own causes and make them fit today’s data with the numerous adjustable constants which then fail to predict the future or the past. They try to use  “first principles,” to calculate future climate, but fail, because that approach is too difficult.  Chiefly: 1) there are too many variables causing them to ignore important physics, and 2) too much data is required all over the world simultaneously let the model know where we are starting.

There is a difference between a consensus that the climate is an area which should be studied and a consensus that the study is succeeding. In my opinion it is failing in important ways such that it is no basis for any policy decisions except to get more data. Even then there are more basic reasons why the climate can never be predicted 100 years in advance due to the nonlinear character of the process.

Suggestions: get off the knee-jerk ideological anti-carbon kick and concentrate on limiting negative side effects. Give high priority to the safest of all technologies, nuclear power, which is long-term the most reliable, and be realistic about the limited capability of wind and solar and their quality of life issues as well as environmental degradation, whether it be aesthetic or destructive  (like birds).

Anti-carbon and anti-nuclear is old-fashioned. We are not running out of oil and nuclear isn’t killing people. Get a life.

Global Meltdown

Reflections on a Video on the melting of Greenland ice on the website Vice.http://www.vice.com/video/greenland-is-melting-bonded-labor-000

That video is one of the least scientific and most misleading reports I have ever read.  The interviewer has an agenda and the scientist was no help.  Their goal seems to be  to hype the situation to promote fear which sells ad space and generates study contracts.  The sea level rise is in fact not up to global scientists'  predictions.  Extreme weather events are less frequent over the last years not more frequent, hurricanes, tornados, fires, typhoons - all less frequent.  A few have been particularly violent, but if the energy is about the same, less frequent might mean more violent. 

 Temperatures haven't changed over the last 20 years.  The only thing which indicates future problems are the computer programs and they are increasingly in error.  More and more data point toward natural causes for the small heating we have experienced (<0.5ºC in 100 years).  Their is no direct evidence that humans have caused any warming.  The suggestion that humans are involved is derived by subtracting two computer calculations both of which are demonstrably wrong. The contribution of CO2 is minimal.  The idea is that the very small CO2 effect is amplified by the important greenhouse gas which is water vapor, even harder to model.  

Now more sophisticated scientists who are really trying to analyze the process are suggesting the the feed back is negative (reducing the effect) rather than positive (increasing the effect).  The amount of ice in Greenland is increasing even subtracting the separated ice which is in the water and won't cause sea rise.  Note that the scientist would not specify the probability that Greenland would completely melt, but he would give you a map of every city that might be effected if it did.  Since CO2 is not the real villain, reducing it by 80% will do nothing but run a number of energy producers out of business and raise the gasoline prices by an unknown amount. 

 Talking about energy, the supply of oil may never reach a maximum and start down as was expected years ago.  If you want to think about something, consider the fact that we don't know where oil comes from.  Really, we don't. It probably is being replenished by high pressure transformations of carbonate rocks deep underground.  It certainly isn't buried dinosaurs and trees. There are nowhere near enough. We may be rediscovering new sources for centuries. 

 And that doesn't include nuclear fission for which there is enough uranium fuel just in the ocean for 50,000 years.  And that doesn't include nuclear fusion which will probably be delivering essentially inexhaustible amounts of energy sometime in the future, in plenty of time.

The name alternative energy is a misnomer.  It should be called boutique energy.  It can never replace fossil fuels and nuclear.  For some applications it can be convenient, but not the main ones.

It is extremely scary to think that we might be drifting into a time of political correct energy or scientific theory.  Some people have already started talking of climate science skeptics as a sort of holocaust deniers, a sort of McCarthyism. 

The US is essentially energy independent and black lung is in the history books.  Does that sound like a problem? The climate has changed and will change.  Let's just find a way to keep our greedy, poor, common senseless and inflexible people from choosing to live where they might get in trouble.  A few years back, our insurance companies paid people on the Russian River in California to rebuild on the same spot 3 or 4 floods in a row before the insurers (subsidized by the government, i.e. you and me) finally said,"either build somewhere else or build differently). Humans do contribute to misery, their own.  And it's got nothing to do with breathing out CO2.  Remember: You can't be green without CO2.