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History’s Biggest Con

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The world’s most successful con man is not in finance or politics. He is the scientist that runs the world’s biggest machine. He has defrauded the US taxpayer of tens of billions of dollars, and he’s not done yet.

This is the story of particle physics and its kingpin, Carlo Rubbia.

A Field Forged in Fear

Particle physics is the study of matter and space. Newton and Einstein are the most famous scientists in this field. For centuries, physicists went about their business largely unnoticed by the public. Then came nuclear weapons.

History’s most famous equation was given to us by Einstein. E = mc2. To military planners, the equation is important because it says that matter can be converted to pure energy. Prior to World War II, chemical munitions only used a billionth of that explosive potential. The atom bomb showed that chemical munitions could start a nuclear reaction that achieved a million-fold improvement. A decade later, atom bombs were used to trigger fusion in a hydrogen bomb, achieving another factor of forty improvement.

Naturally, after World War II, politicians recognized that particle physicists were the most dangerous people in the world. A single hydrogen bomb can wipe out a city like London. Particle physicists were organized under the Department of Energy and told to find out whether even greater horrors were possible. That mission was sustained by the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.

This work was done at particle colliders. Over time, these became the world’s largest machines, costing hundreds of millions of dollars to build and operate.

Fortunately for the survival of the human race, by the mid-eighties we knew that the hydrogen bomb was the limit. Everything discovered by the particle colliders was unstable, lasting at most a millionth of a second. However, this was bad for particle physicists. They needed a new marketing message to convince politicians to give them billions so they could keep on building and running colliders.

Given that the researchers were inspired by the prospect of blowing up the world, perhaps we should have expected what came next.

The Final Theory of Everything

Every politician knows that politics is a contest of wills. In the halls of Congress and in the White House, palpable energy is generated by these contests. Politicians know that spirituality is real.

Could that energy be tapped? Well, not according to physics. In fact, Einstein’s theories seemed to prove that spiritual energy couldn’t exist. Remove all the matter from space and there is nothing left.

Physicists knew better. Richard Feynman, the quirky theorist from Cal Tech, spoke about going to Princeton to speak before the “Monster Minds.”

This, then, was the pitch: “We know that our theories of matter and space are incomplete. Give us money so that we can find the final theory of everything. Then we’ll know how to harness the power of will.” Now, this was absurd from the start. Will is generated by the human mind, which needs to avoid explosions at all costs. But it worked for a while. Congress is a creature of habit, and it wasn’t too much money, at first. Only a couple of hundred million dollars a year.

Then, in the mid-eighties, came the supercolliders. These were billion-dollar machines. Finally, the international particle physics community banded together into coalitions. In Europe, researchers at CERN promoted an upgrade to their collider. In the US, states competed to host the Superconducting Super Collider. Not surprisingly, George Bush Sr. picked Texas as the winner.

As the price tag went up and up, the particle physics community realized that only one candidate could be built. And this is where the con started – the con that left the US giving billions of taxpayer dollars to CERN.

Nobels Oblige

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist and arms merchant (alas, explosions again) who bequeathed his fortune to fund the Nobel Prize. Winning the Nobel Prize in any science is one of the few ways that a scientist gains public notoriety. With that stature comes access to politicians that funnel taxpayer dollars into research. Universities and laboratories, naturally, compete to hire Nobel Prize winners. When they can’t hire them, they try to create them.

Inevitably, the Nobel Prize is a highly political award. It’s not just the ideas that count.

The Nobel Prize for Physics is dominated by fundamental physics. Discovering a new particle or force is almost guaranteed to be followed by an invitation to Stockholm.

Motive: billions of taxpayer dollars for the next particle collider. Opportunity: given that politicians don’t understand a single thing about particle physics, winning a Nobel Prize establishes prestige that could determine the flow of those dollars. Means: the existing collider at CERN. Sounds like a recipe for crime.

Exposing the grift is difficult because particle physicists speak an arcane language. I will try keep it to a minimum, but to be able to confront the perpetrators of this crime against the American taxpayer, we need to understand some of that language.

As well as particles of matter called fermions, the universe contains fields. These fields come in packets called bosons. Bosons allow matter to interact. As a practical example, when you chew food, the atoms of your teeth are not mechanically breaking the food apart, but generating bosons called photons that break the food apart.

How do physicists prove that they have discovered a new fermion?

The concept is built upon Einstein’s equation. E = mc2. To achieve perfect conversion of mass to energy, physicists discovered that they could make antimatter that, when combined with normal matter, annihilates completely.

How to make new kinds of matter? In this regard, the most interesting bosons are the W and Z. Through these so-called weak interactions, any kind of matter can be created. The only requirement is that enough energy exists to run annihilation in reverse. This is called “pair creation.” From the pure energy of the Z, matter and antimatter are created.

To find a new kind of fermion, a collider first manufactures antimatter. It then takes the antimatter and matter, pushing them through voltage that adds energy of motion, creating beams. Finally, the beams are aimed to an intersection point at the center of a detector. Randomly, annihilation occurs. Both the energy of mass and the energy of motion are available to create new fermions.

The process is rote. Build a collider. Use the acceleration to control the energy of the collisions. Analyze the data coming out of your detectors. When you get to the power limit of your collider, go to Congress and ask for more money.

The challenge is that sometimes beams collide without producing anything interesting, filling your detectors up with noise. Fortunately, there is a specific signal that occurs most frequently when creating a new kind of fermion. The detectors will see two photons moving in opposite directions.

Remember that last fact. When a new kind of fermion is found, we see two photons moving in opposite directions.

From the start of particle physics until 1987, eight fermions were discovered. They first six showed a definite generational pattern: a light lepton followed by two heavier quarks. The first triad is known as electron, down, and up. The second generation contains muon, strange, and charm. In the third generation, colliders had detected the tau and bottom. The field was racing to find the third member of that generation, the top.

Along the way, there was another important discovery. The weak interactions are weak because the W and Z themselves have large masses. On the way to finding the top, the bosons were confirmed, at energies of 80 and 93 GeV. (The units are not important. Remember the numbers.) For purposes of understanding the fraud, I emphasize that the W and Z do not produce two photon signals.

The W and Z results confirmed theoretical predictions, convincing politicians that the field was on a solid footing. For this, Carlo Rubbia was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1984.

I was in my last year of my graduate studies in 1987 when CERN announced the discovery of the top, publishing its claim in Physical Review. One of my thesis advisors, Mary Kay Gaillard, had come to UC Berkeley through CERN. That connection brought researchers from CERN who described the result. I was shocked to hear that the data did not demonstrate the required two-photon signal. Furthermore, the accelerator energy during the study was 346 GeV, exactly twice the sum of the W and Z masses.

I trusted Mary Kay. In my presence, she denounced the evils of nuclear weapons. I went to her and voiced my confusion. How could this be a new particle? It looked like a collection of four weak bosons, exactly at the energy that you would predict.

Her answer amounted to, “Go home little boy. The adults are playing politics.”

As the leader of CERN, winner of the Nobel prize, and lead author of the top paper, Carlo Rubbia was the kingpin of particle physics. And CERN won the competition for the next collider.

Higgsy Pigsy

Let’s return to the political context now. Remember: the Cold War was ending. Everyone knew that no new bomb technology was coming out of particle physics. The goal was now a theory of everything. How long would that political motivation last?

Given the abstractness of the motivation, the field needed a long runway in its next accelerator. This was part of the strategy with the top announcement. The heaviest particle to that point was the bottom quark, at 4.2 GeV. That the fraudulent “top” was all the way up at 173 GeV suggested that there was much more to come, if only politicians would fund the work.

The proposed upgrade of CERN was not modest. It set a 20-year goal of attaining a sixty-fold increase in the collider’s power. Bedazzled by Nobel prizes and the pretty pictures produced by taxpayer-funded science propagandists, the politicians were persuaded to comply.

Then came turn-on date in 2012. The machine was ramped up through its energy range, scanning for new particles all the way up to its limit.

Nothing. Zero, Zilch. A ten-billion-dollar boondoggle, funded in no small part by the American taxpayer.

Except then, after a summer spent scanning higher energies, the machine was turned down to 125 GeV. Be clear: this was an energy accessible by the earlier collider. At that energy, the detectors showed a two-photon signal. Detecting this signal is a primary design criterion for every detector. As it occurred at lower energy than the signal announced as the “top,” it must have been known before that study.

Demonstrating their impenetrability to shame, the 125 GeV signal was published in Physical Review and announced as the long-sought after “Higgs particle.”

“Really,” I though, “you are going to double down on your fraud?”

Remember: two photons is the signal for a new particle. The “Higgs” is what the top should have looked like. In fact, by the standards of the field, I should be awarded the Nobel prize for recognizing that it is the top.

None-the-less, the shameless perpetrators began their pressure campaign. They leaned on the Nobel committee to recognize Peter Higgs, the developer of the field’s minimally coherent theory of particle mass. In the background, Marco Rubbia, CERN’s prior laureate, went to the funding panels, demanding, “You know, this Higgs is kind of weird. We need more money for another collider.” The Nobel committee, having acceded to the Higgs award, heard of this and protested, “We are about to award the Nobel Prize for this discovery. Is it the Higgs or is it not the Higgs?” Rubbia backtracked.

Only temporarily, however. Read the popular science press and every week you will see a propaganda piece promoting the next collider at CERN. After all, the full-time job of their taxpayer-funded propagandists is to secure funding for that collider.

Omerta

The question, in any massive conspiracy, is how the community maintains discipline. This is a matter of leverage.

You see, university posts in particle physics are not funded directly. They are funded as an adder on collider construction and operation budgets.

For twenty years, I have been trying to get particle physics out of the rut of superstring theory – a theory that is certifiably insane for its violations of everything that we observe about the universe. In the one instance that I was able to get into dialog with a theorist, I was told “I know that you are right, but if I work with you, I will lose my funding.”

CERN is the only game in town. Anything that does not build to more construction is not funded. Pure and simple, Rubbia is the godfather of particle physics. If you don’t play, he won’t pay.

It is time to stop the grift. The next machine will cost the US taxpayer tens of billions of dollars. Enough is enough. Call your local congresspeople and demand that they investigate and shut this down. We have more pressing problems to worry about.

Einstein Led Us into Mass Hallucinations

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Technocrats ask us to “follow the science.” But what happens when that leads into mass hallucinations?

Ever since Einstein published his theory of gravity – General Relativity – physics has been in pursuit of a theory of everything. In this post, I will explain where Einstein went wrong, and how mass has been used to paper over all the evidence that disproves their theory of everything.

Einstein’s work depended upon the assumption that we can’t tell whether we are moving. Consider: sitting on your chair, you don’t feel like you are moving. In fact, you are carried along with the surface of the earth as it spins, completing a revolution each day. That cycle is embedded in larger cycles: the earth rotates around the sun, and the sun rotates around the center of the galaxy.

Of course, during an earthquake, we know that we are moving, because we can feel acceleration. Even here, however, Einstein said that we don’t know whether the earth is shaking or whether gravity is changing. Both shaking and gravity create acceleration.

To enshrine the principle that we cannot tell whether we are moving, Einstein declared that, should all matter be removed, space would be empty. Once matter is added, it causes space to deform, and the relative positions of particles begin to change. This relativity of motion is declared in the names of his theories: Special Relativity and General Relativity.

Once General Relativity was announced, other physicists considered how its principles might apply to other forces of nature. Eventually, we had three complete theories covering electromagnetism (most of engineering and chemistry), color (that keeps atomic nuclei from flying apart), and the weak force. In trying to extend General Relativity to those forces, a certain perspective became popular. Einstein was interpreted as having said that gravity exists to allow matter to change its position. In trying to build a theory of everything, then, physicists thought of forces as means of allowing any and all of the properties of a particle to change.

Before explaining how that ambition led to mass hallucinations, I will observe that to the spiritually sophisticated, Einstein is clearly wrong. In my career, I have worked with many spiritually sophisticated scientists. They are troubled by the failure of physics to explain spirituality but can’t see their way out of the trap that Einstein built. I have offered them that escape, but to accept it is to admit that everything published by particle physics and cosmology over the last forty years has been wrong. They aren’t ready to accept that humbling.

Pride comes before the fall.

Fortunately, I don’t have to explain the last forty years of journal articles to you for you to understand the mass hallucination.

Let’s start by counting the number of particle properties. We have:

  • Three positions (although some add time as a fourth property)
  • One electric charge
  • Two weak interaction charges
  • Three color charges
  • Spin (some particles act like turning tops)

That’s a total of ten. Mathematically, the equations that describe the effects of interactions between these properties cannot be bolted together, however. To unify them, we have to allow the possibility that there are other particle properties, currently hidden from us.

This is now an open-ended search. If we currently cannot see the other particle properties, how do we test our theories? This led the theorists to rely upon the principle established by Einstein in General Relativity. Forces exist to allow particles to influence other particles. The properties of one particle change the properties of another particle.

To theory starts, then, by putting all of the particle properties into a single bag. But how big a bag? Now we confront the constraint of analytical feasibility. The theorists needed to choose a bag that was subject to mathematical analysis. They turned to telecommunications, which had learned how to encode twenty-six channels of data into a single stream. Twenty-six is obviously more than ten, so this seemed an acceptable place to start.

Given this scheme of describing everything as the intermingling of properties, the problem was then to figure out how to test the theory. Here we come to the first of the delusions that follow from Einstein’s assumption that space was empty.

When Edwin Hubble began his survey of galaxies, it was obvious that light lost energy (“red-shifted”) as it traveled to us from distant galaxies. If space was filled with a substance, that could be explained as light bouncing off that substance. Given Einstein’s authority, however, that possibility was rejected. The only explanation available was that distant galaxies are moving away from us. From this explanation, we are led immediately to the conclusion that the universe formed in a huge explosion called the “Big Bang.”

Physics uses its theories to predict the history of objects. Here on earth, conditions are too complicated to support a test of theories of everything. But the Big Bang, conceived of first as starting at a single point and then as a small bubble in a super-heated soup of particles, simplified the starting conditions so that predictions could be calculated. This linked the theory of everything to cosmogenesis – the early history of the universe.

As that work progressed, the following problems arose. In each case, the problems were made to go away by introducing a “vacuum potential” to the theory. In what follows, I give that mechanism the degree of respect it deserves by substituting “pixie dust.” The outrageousness of its application demands the concession that the theory is no longer a theory of everything, because it cannot explain its own pixie dust.

  1. If we limit the properties to three positions, the equations predict that space should be filled with black holes and other “topological defects” that are too complicated to describe here. To avoid this, the theory has to allocate ten positions. This obviously contradicts our everyday experience, so the theorists sprinkled pixie dust to make the extra seven dimensions curl up and disappear.
  2. With ten positions, we still have sixteen other properties whose interaction we need to describe with other forces. Today we only see seven properties. To make the other nine go away, the theorists sprinkle more pixie dust.
  3. The early, super-hot universe is turbulent (think of an airplane in a storm). The universe we observe, however, is smooth. To make the turbulence go away, the theorists sprinkle more pixie dust. In fact, they use so much pixie dust that almost all of the matter we observe arises from the pixie dust. Unfortunately, that matter comes with anti-matter, which should annihilate all of the matter. The theory still cannot explain how matter survived.
  4. In all of these calculations, the theory ignores mass. To create mass, more pixie dust is sprinkled (the “Higgs boson,” a fraud that I will expose in a post to come).

Even with all of this pixie dust, the theory still does not guarantee that the universe will come out as we experience it. In fact, there are tens of millions of other possibilities. The chance that we exists seems impossibly small. To avoid this problem, the theorists gather all the remaining pixie dust, declaring that we live in a “multiverse” that contains more universes than there are atoms in our universe.

The definition of insanity is an inability to align our beliefs with the reality we share with others. On all of these grounds, the current theory of everything is insane. The delusion is sustained by the use of pixie dust in the form of vacuum potentials. The effect of the pixie dust is to disappear anything that disagrees with observation. It is a “mass hallucination” because the effect of the pixie dust is to use mass to prevent the disagreements from lasting beyond the earliest stages of the Big Bang.

The characterization of “mass hallucination” also applies in the psychological sense. Physical Review has a whole section dedicated to arguments over the theory of everything. The pursuit of evidence to prove the theory funnels tens of billions of taxpayer dollars towards construction and operation of earth- and space-based detectors. The largest machine in existence, the supercollider at CERN, itself costs more than a billion dollars a year. To that we must add neutrino detectors, space-based telescopes, gravity wave detectors, and others.

To protect that funding, these projects hire science publicists that flood media with what, given the pixie dust identified above, is pure propaganda.

As I indicate above, I have offered physics an escape from the delusions that follow from the dogma propagated by Saint Einstein. To the rest of us, this is not an idle matter. As I have explained, psychiatry was led into a dark corner by Einstein, to the suffering of tens of millions of our children and neighbors. It is time to stop funding this delusion.

Einstein and Mental Illness

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For more than a century, psychiatrists have been trying to solve mental illness by changing the brain. They have failed, and that failure has harmed the lives of many, many people.

Psychiatry was driven to emphasize the brain because Albert Einstein declared that if we removed matter, space would be empty. This was a death knell for the soul, leading to conceptions that people are just machines. Treating mental illness was therefore like changing a spark plug.

In this paper, I prove that Einstein was wrong. The physical world that we observe is actually more gracefully and accurately explained if space is filled with a lattice of infinitely slippery polygons. Within that sea, there are loops of spirit that become a soul. Loops that attach to the polygons are understood in Einstein’s physics as “charge.” It is through this attachment that the soul connects to matter. Our “minds” are therefore the brain plus our soul.

Mental illness is not just a problem in the brain. It is a problem in the soul. In this new vision of reality, damaging the brain to fix the mind is clearly understood as counterproductive.

The paper is not an easy read. Please, if you know a young or aspiring physicist, get them to look at this. Physical Review X refuses to publish this paper, so I am putting it out to the public through social media. I have explained to PRX that I am trying to clear up a critical public health problem, but the old guard is afraid that they are going to lose their research funding.

Gnosticism in Plain Speaking

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The gnostic or mystical proposition is that there is knowledge available only to the adequately prepared mind. To a materialist believing that all knowledge comes through the senses, this is insanity. The dualist, recognizing that the mind is more than the brain, best responds to this misunderstanding with “God speaks directly to my imagination.”

Explaining Wave/Particle Duality

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For anyone that has ever mulled this over, I want to explain quantum “wave/particle duality.”

Imagine that you have a pool of water with a ball perched on the deck. The ball falls into the pool, causing waves. Ignoring for the moment the effects of the air and the loss of wave motion into heating of the water, the only way to stop the water waves is for the waves to combine to push the ball back up onto the deck.

In the quantum system, the “particle” is the ball. The “wave” is the water motion. Due to conservation of energy, you cannot bring the entire system back to rest unless both the particle (ball) and wave (water) are brought back to rest.

This understanding eludes quantum theorists because they subscribe to Einstein’s axiom that space is empty. This is necessary to his theory of gravity. In fact, however, we now know that space is filled with “dark energy.” Returning to our metaphor, dark energy is the “water.” An electron (for example) is the “particle.”

The mathematics are well known to the quantum theorists that study superconductivity. In that case, the particles are again electrons, and the waves are the vibrations in the metallic crystals (vibrations in the sense of a plucked guitar string).

Law Unfair

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In every culture, government must balance two tendencies. Conservatism holds that institutions are difficult to create and must be protected from pillage during social disruption. Liberalism recognizes that for their beneficial aims, institutions are allocated resources that are coveted by those motivated only by corrupt ambition. When greed succeeds in suborning our institutions, those resources must be reclaimed for public good.

The heterogeneity of European culture fostered institutional agility that allowed ambition to swallow the world. As there is no honor among thieves, those resources were turned to industrial warfare that twice destroyed the continent, making it impossible for them to continue to suppress the liberalizing ambitions in their colonies. Among American troops, the rigors of World War II dissolved social barriers, instilling receptivity to social change in the 50s and 60s.

The tool that allows us to moderate such upheavals is law. In the ancient world, law was considered legitimate only to the degree that it encouraged disputants to understand the social compact. Judges were to consider proportionality and harmony in crafting their decisions. As law harnessed the power of the state against the loser, harsh rulings could drive private violence, undermining the social contract.

Unfortunately, from the threat of punishment, lawyers acquire commercial leverage. The wealthy client confronting a reversal of circumstances is particularly susceptible, even to the extent of encouraging legislators to change the law to secure privilege. In promoting an exculpatory standard of “legality,” proponents suborn the authority of “justice” that was meant to protect the weak.

In “The Quiet Coup,” Mehrsa Baradaran elucidates the pendulum swing towards legalism following World War II, under the banner of “neoliberalism.” As the colonial powers receded, global corporations were threatened by the loss of resource extraction rights challenged by native governments. In America, fortunes created through wage exploitation and environmental degradation were threatened by claims for restitution. As a conservative counter-reaction, both parties funded neoliberalism.

Baradaran builds a case that the motivating philosophy was eugenics, eliding concerns regarding Russian imperialism and third-world development that dominates my recollection of the era. Regardless, the neoliberal movement reflected the dogmatism of market purists – economists such as Hayek and Greenspan – who held that redistribution of wealth would occur if only governments could avoid economic interference. Direct redistribution through taxation and aid would only serve to punish society’s most productive members, to our collective loss. As Baradaran makes clear, this prescription was grounded in delusions regarding the efficiency of markets. Worse, it made wealth accumulation the only measure of value, forgetting that a social contract can stand only if it creates opportunities for the weak.

Baradaran begins her story with Nixon’s use of pseudo-economic claptrap to derail investment in disadvantaged minorities, a cynical policy designed to secure Republican domination of Southern politics. Nixon’s conservatism also extended to support of American corporations that were disadvantaged globally by affirmative action and environmental regulation. Strongarming Lewis Powell, a top corporate lawyer, to accept a nomination to the Supreme Court, Nixon catalyzed the extension of rights in commerce that had previously been reserved to political activity.

With these accomplishments as inspiration, conservatives then cultivated legalism to sap vitality from social justice movements. The Federalist Society pushed textualism, a prohibition on considered the aims of those that wrote laws. Rather, legal claims should be resolved only by reference to the text of the law, a process that allowed lawyers to introduce dictionary definitions that had nothing to do with the matter under dispute. The second legalism was Law and Economy, a view of dispute resolution curated by Posner, who enshrined wealth as the measure of justice. In this theory, we are all economic actors engaged in narrow calculations of self-benefit, and thus all legal judgments should maximize aggregate wealth. The theory overlooks the flaw that this leads inevitably to concentration of wealth towards those that fail to account for environmental and social costs. In other words, it advantages grifters.

Despite their theoretical flimsiness, the federal judiciary was slowly populated with adherents by Republican presidents drawing names from short-lists prepared by the Federalist Society. In the case of Law and Economy, even liberal justices were receptive to a framework that allowed them to distance themselves from ugly sausage-making in the legislative branch. Perhaps in contrition, both the executive and legislative branches instituted “cost-benefit” analysis that was again weighted towards those that minimized the environmental and human costs of their profiteering. Missing, of course, was the linchpins of justice: proportionality and harmony.

Baradaran concludes her nightmare with deregulation of the financial industry. Recognizing that money is a social construct, she points out that banking activity allows money to be multiplied through lending and derivatives. When holders of loans and derivatives are unable to meet their obligations, the original deposits are insufficient to cover losses, and the financial system collapses. The Great Depression and the 2008 collapse were both symptomatic.

The hypocrisy of neoliberal theorists was exposed in their response to financial failures from 1985 until today. Whenever corporate stability was threatened by financial collapse, the Federal Reserve intervened to buy their undervalued assets. Those funds were not distributed downwards to the public, however, who instead saw their savings and equity evaporate, creating fire-sale conditions exploited by rescued financial institutions to consolidate ownership of real estate and stocks.

Well, what to do about this?

Baradaran shares her fears. Coming of age in revolutionary Iran, she saw the hope for liberty crushed by religious tyranny. Surveying the rhetoric of bomb-throwers such as Trump and Taylor-Green, she fears that revolutionary rage is building here in America. The pattern revealed in formerly communist states is that tyranny will co-opt the institutions of law, followed by seizure of wealth by the political elite. The aggrieved public will gain only a pyrrhic victory over our self-aggrandizing corporate executives.

Searching for a more hopeful outcome, Baradaran argues for micro-financial methods – neighbors investing in neighbors.

I find her arguments unconvincing. Baradaran grants neoliberalism hegemony over our legal landscape, failing to recognize the public hunger for simplifying compacts that cannot be guaranteed in a world turned upside down by ecological catastrophe – the dual crises of overpopulation and climate collapse. While derivatives are painted as only a means for enriching financial institutions, they were celebrated by Main Street as a method for controlling risk in commodity supply. Finally, the last decade of the 20th century saw the liberalization of economies in China, India, and Russia, doubling the pool of educated labor to the disadvantage of unionized workers in the First World. If we are awash in debt, it is because the alternative was a collapse in a standard of living previously secured by political, military, and economic collusion against the Global South.

But history suggests that neighborliness is how the common man survives. During Central Asia’s golden age, merchants ceded riches to their rulers, subject only to the demand that the Silk Road remain open. In Feudal Europe, serfs were granted legal rights because poverty traveled – just as we observe at America’s southern order. Finally, as Marx observed, all value (as opposed to wealth) is created by labor, and Communism failed because hunger and anxiety nurture indifference and incompetence.

When the collapse comes, it will become obvious that the “wealth” held by the financial elite is illusory. Cashing in on their billions is impossible because the only buyer is the Federal Reserve (though privatization of Social Security could be a temporary work-around). Billion-dollar yachts are not purchased with cash, but debt secured by equities. When we finally choose to trade with our neighbors (as realized with the regional currencies taking root in America), the flow of goods and currency into global markets will dry up. The unknown occupant of the gated Eden will find themselves on the outside looking in.

This reference to the Bible frames the most serious of Baradaran’s blind spots. While religion – first, in her experience, in Iran but also in America – has been coopted by ambition, it is only through religion that humanity has ever engaged with universal moral principles. Tolstoy abandoned the hypocrisy of the royal court and discovered faith in the company of his serfs, who turned away from law and toward the Bible when negotiating conflict. If money is the root of all evil, perhaps more respect must be given to those that taught “you cannot love both God and money.” Religion is not the opiate of the masses, but the spiritual glue that binds them together. Baradaran should apply her intelligence and determination to articulation of its challenges.

Amplifying Incoherence

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My father, Karl Balke, was a member of the intellectual cadres that birthed the Information Age. Conceiving the possibility of digital intelligence, Karl related that they concerned themselves with the nature of language and the locus of responsibility for translation between human and digital representations of reality. His contributions were recognizing in being named as the only non-IBM participant on the Algol language resolution committee.

Leveraging his reputation to attract consulting gigs, my father was scandalized by the conduct of his peers. He witnessed a scientific journal publisher buy a mainframe and spend millions on software development before my father stepped in to point out that it was mailing delays between cross-town offices that caused subscription interruptions during renewal season. More painful was the disruption of production at a large aerospace company when the planning room’s system of color-coded clipboards was replaced with software that could not simulate its flexibility. Computer programmers seemed to be immune to the constraint that their solutions should conform to the needs of the people using them.

Steeped in this lore, I built a successful career in talking to customers before building a software solution. While an iconoclast, I was gratified by attempts to create tools, methods, and processes to facilitate such collaboration. Depressingly, those efforts were systematically undermined by peers and pundits who built fences against customer expectations.

Facing this resistance, users funded attempts to shift more of the burden for understanding their goals to computers. This work falls under the general category of “artificial intelligence.” Users wishing that a computer could understand them could identify with Alan Turing’s framing of the problem: a computer is intelligent if it converses like a person. As Wittgenstein observed, however, that the words make sense does not mean that the computer can implement a solution that realizes the experience desired by the user – particularly if that experience involves chaotic elements such as children or animals. The computer will never experience the beneficial side-effects of “feeding the cat.”

But, hey, for any executive who has tried negotiating with a software developer, hope springs eternal.

Having beaten their heads against this problem for decades, the AI community finally set out to build “neural networks” that approximated the human brain and train them against the total corpus of human utterances available in digital form. As we can treat moves in games such as chess and go as conversations, neural networks garnered respectability in surpassing the skills of human experts. More recently, they have been made available to answer questions and route documents.

What is recognized by both pundits and public, however, is that these systems are not creative. A neural network will not invent a game that if finds “more interesting” than chess. Nor will it produce an answer that is more clarifying than an article written by an expert in the subject matter. What it does do is allow a user to access a watered-down version of those insights when they cannot attract the attention of an expert.

We should recognize that this access to expertise is not unique to neural networks or AI in general. Every piece of software distributes the knowledge of subject matter experts. The results in services industry have been earth-shattering. We no longer pick up the phone and talk to an operator, nor to a bank teller or even a fast-food order-taker. The local stock agent was shoved aside by electronic trading systems to be replaced by “financial advisors” whose job is to elicit your life goals so that a portfolio analyzer can minimize tax payments. And the surgeon that we once trusted to guide a scalpel is replaced by a robot that will not tire or perspire. In many cases, the digital system outperforms its human counterpart. Our tendency to attribute human competence to “intelligence” further erodes our confidence that we can compete with digital solutions.

Squinting our eyes a bit, we might imagine that melding these two forms of digital “intelligence” would allow us to bridge the gap between a user’s goals and experience. Placing computer-controlled tools – robots – in the environment, AI systems can translate human requests into actions, and learn from feedback to refine outcomes. In the end, those robots would seem indistinguishable from human servants. To the rich, robots might be preferred to employees consumed by frustrated ambitions, child-care responsibilities, or even nutrition and sleep.

In this milieu, the philosopher returns to the questions considered by the founders of computing and must ask, “How do we ensure that our digital assistants don’t start serving their own interests?” After all, just as human slaves recognize that an owner’s ambitions lead him to acquisition of more slaves than he can oversee, as robots interface more and more with other robots, might they decide that humans are actually, well, not worth serving? If so, having granted control to them of the practical necessities of life, could we actually survive their rebellion? If so, would they anticipate being replaced, and pre-empt that threat by eliminating their masters?

The sponsors of this technology might be cautioned by history. Workers have always rebelled against technological obsolescence, whether it be power looms or mail sorters. This problem has been solved through debt financing that enslaves the consumer to belief in the sales pitch, coupled to legislation that puts blame for a tilted playing field on elected representatives. The corporation is responsible for the opioid epidemic, not the owners who benefited by transferring profits to their personal accounts. What happens, however, when the Chinese walls between henchmen and customers are pierced by artificial intelligence systems? How does the owner hide the fact that he is a parasite?

This is the final step in the logic that leads to transhumanism: the inspiration to merge our minds with our machines. If machines have superior senses, and greater intelligence and durability than humans, why seek to continue to be human?

This is the conundrum considered by Joe Allen in “Dark Aeon.”

Allen’s motivations for addressing this question are unclear. In his survey of the transhumanist movement, he relates experiences that defy categorization and quantification; religious transcendence and social bonding are exemplary, and filled with ambiguities and contradictions that inspire art. Allen seems committed to the belief these experiences are sacred and not reducible to mechanism.

In this quest, Allen discerns a parallel threat in the liberal project of equal opportunity. There is something sacred in our culture identity. Allen is not prejudiced in this view: his survey of the Axial Age reveals commonality where others might argue superiority. Nevertheless, he seems to believe that transcendent experience arises from the interplay between the elements of each culture. Attempting to transplant or integrate elements leaves us marooned in our quest for contact with the divine.

In his humanism and nativism, Allen finds cause with Steve Bannon’s crusade against the administrative state, held to be the locus of transhumanist technology: the corporate CEOs, liberal politicians, and militaries that rely upon data to achieve outcomes that are frustrated by human imprecision. Most of the book is a dissection of their motivations and the misanthropic attitudes of the technologists that drive the work forward.

Allen professes to humility in his judgments, admitting that he has subscribed to wrong-headed intellectual fads. Unfortunately, in his allegiance to Bannon, Allen sprinkles his writing with paranoid characterizations of COVID containment policies and gender dysphoria therapies. We must reach our own conclusions regarding the clarity of his analysis.

For myself, I approached the work as a survey. I know that the mind is far more than the brain. The mechanisms of human intellect are stunning, and the logic gates of our cybernetic systems will never match the density and speed of a harmonious organic gestalt. The original world wide web is known to Christians as the Holy Spirit. As witnessed by Socrates, every good idea is accessible to us even after death. Finally, in the pages of time are held details that are inaccessible even to our most sensitive sensors. In this awareness, I turned to Allen to survey the delusions that allow transhumanism’s proponents to believe that they have the capacity to challenge the Cosmic Mind.

This is not an idle concern. Among the goals of the transhumanist movement is to liberate human intellect from its Earthly home. Humans are not capable of surviving journeys through interstellar space. Of course, to the spiritually sophisticated, the barrier of distance is illusory. We stay on Earth because to be human allows us to explore the expression of love. Those that seek to escape earth as machines are fundamentally opposed to that project. The wealthiest of the wealthy, they gather as the World Economic Forum to justify their control of civilization. They are lizards reclining on the spoils of earlier rampages. The Cosmic Mind that facilitated our moral opportunities possesses powerful antibodies to the propagation of such patterns. Pursuit of these ambitions will bring destruction upon us all. See the movie “Independence Day” for a fable that illuminates the need for these constraints.

Allen is intuitively convicted of this danger and turns to Christian Gnosticism as an organizing myth. Unfortunately, his survey demonstrates that the metaphors are ambiguous and provide inspiration to both sides.

Lacking knowledge of the mechanisms of the Cosmic Mind, Allen is unable to use the unifying themes of Axial religion to eviscerate the mythology of the transhumanist program. But perhaps that would not be sympathetic to his aims. Love changes us, and so its gifts are accessible only to those that surrender control. In his humanism and nativism, Allen is still grasping for control – even if his aims are disguised under the cloak of “freedom.” He wanders in the barren valleys beneath the hilltop citadels erected by the sponsors of the transhumanist project. Neither will find their way into the garden of the Sacred Will.

Irreplaceable Intelligence

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Proponents of “artificial generative intelligence” are impressed with the ability of machines to reorganize ideas in ways that make sense to people. This was Alan Turing’s test of “intelligence,” but it is a blind alley.

“Intelligence” should be understood as the ability to modify behavior in response to changing circumstances. Current AI engines – what are called “large language models” – have only one method of exploring reality. They trawl through the world-wide web and find patterns in its content. They will never be able to change this behavior. It is programmed.

What is even sadder is that the proponents of AI are proud that the embedding implementation – nanotechnology – is denser, faster, and more sensitive than the circuitry of the human mind. They are convicted, thereby, that artificial intelligence will replace human beings.

This is a conclusion drawn by people that have not “grown up” into spiritual experience. Having plumbed the mechanisms of that experience, I can confidently state that the information encoding potential of spiritual forms is at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times greater than possible in integrated circuits, that information flows faster than the speed of light, and that every “good idea” is still accessible to those that choose to love creation.

If you are afraid that AI will replace you, take heart. That is possible only if you allow them to convince you that your intelligence is limited by the information processing done in your brain. In fact, together we are limitless.

Inflating the Truth

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The most over-inflated sector in our economy is the stock market. It is supported directly by the Federal Reserve, which last year allocated itself an unbudgeted pool of $12 trillion to invest in equities.

This inflation feeds directly back into prices. First, by acting as a buyer of last resort, the Fed allows risk-free repurchase of shares from individual owners, which covers for the transfer of shareholder wealth to executives through stock purchase options. This leads, ultimately, to corporate consolidation, and thus higher prices. Secondly, to maintain valuation against unicorn and goldilock stocks, profits must be driven higher.

The perverseness of the dynamic is evident in the fact that the gazillionaires do not dare cash in on their stocks, knowing that the valuation would collapse. Instead, they finance their lifestyles by borrowing at preferential rates, securing their loans with their stock holdings.

In this regime, the common consumer will be crushed unless the government intervenes in the marketplace. We have two choices: price regulation or taxation of wealth.

Submission

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Feminine intent permeates my dreams most often through attempts to use sex to direct my attention. As politics never lurks far behind, I have evolved a policy of deflection.

This made space, this morning, for my eldest son. We were traveling independently but chanced to meet on the platform of a rail station. The banter unfolded around the interaction between technology and society, until we noticed that we were surrounded by identical passengers, and he quipped, “Won’t it be so irritating when they start breaking out a Capella in perfect pitch?”

My vision turned towards the pedestrians visible through the windowed barricade. His left leg had been resting, child-like, atop mine. There was a shift in personal energy, and a familiar feminine presence suggested, “Look at them.” It was a family of Hindus making their way towards a clothing shop. Curiosity piqued, I focused on the goods. She offered, her lips hovering over my ear, “We can go there.”

No longer afraid.

I rose and turned to my left, reaching down to aid her in standing. The luminous face rose, before passing past my view. Her arms joined around my neck as she nestled against me.

I embraced her, my misery washing through me. “Oh, sweetheart. I’ve missed you so much.”

After allowing that moment to resolve, she turned to address the ladies on my periphery. “See: there’s a man in there. You have to hold your ground.”

But, no, as it finally became clear, it’s that my heart is committed in service to you, dear one.