War on Iran

 This one by Ritter is essential.  Like every one I'd had time to look at since US started the war.

https://www.youtube.com/live/OtAj89I_yjw?si=8-euKiLwuRn4VluZ

Restoring Definitive Properties

The ultimate conclusion of Quantum Physics, that properties don't exist until they are measured, makes all the preceding 'requirements' of a valid physical theory (say for example symmetry) risible.

I am with Einstein in believing this is impossible.  Einstein penned the 'EPR Paradox," but then after his death Bell created Bell's Theorem, which proves that properties are either non-local, or don't exist until they are measured, proven by endless entanglement experiments by Physicists.

Looking at the math, I suggested what we might have is a 2D universe, that might make the Bell inequalities equal.  So rather than there being hidden properties, as Einstein imagined, with more information, there is actually less information than we think there is.

To make this work, the 2-D ness of the quantum domain would have to somehow, that I couldn't explain, give rise to the 3D universe we experience.

Anyway, from the 3D perspective, a 2D universe does represent non-locality!

Well, now I have a different explanation, from a particular sampling problem I've been looking at, where you have samples of samples.  Rather than the utility of information being asymptotic, at some point the value of information will be negative, worse than presuming no information at all.

That produces both the seeming truncation effects of quantum theory, as well as Bell Theorem results.

Well what is the sampling here?  I imagine it like this.  Imagine that we 'see' only particular frames of a very high speed movie.  We are sampling the true universe.  We might or might not be in the same position in each natural bundle, if there is any such thing, or exactly the same number of frames apart, but it's easy enough to see the issue if we are always exactly in the same position, the first frame of each bundle.

Now further assume that this is not necessarily true of photos we generate.  They may actually start in some frame other than ours, so by the time we measure them, we catch them at some frame which is not in series with the starting one, offset by a particular number of frames.  That would be true of their entangled photons as well.

So that's one possible explanation of entanglement and all that.  There's another more hand waving one.  And that is to note how the standard deviation of a sample is divided by N-1 and not N as for a population.  And yet they otherwise look like identical data, the same number of objects.  That also means that number when you have just one element isn't 0...it's indeterminate and 0/0.  Basically it goes wild as you approach 1 in the sample of a sample.  It has too high of a kurtosis to be useful statistically.   Other statistical processes work like this as well.

These are both kinds of non-locality.  But kind of in reverse.  We aren't experiencing the full spacetime that exists.  Just a sample.  We jump from one frame to another with a lot in between.

There might be other ways of applying the sampling thing, I'm still working on the math of it.

The key problem with Artificial "Intelligence"

It is ludicrous to think of the current LLM based approaches as a stepping stone to General Artificial Intelligence.  But even if it were, this would not be a magic bullet to save human civilization or anything like that, except the reverse.

The Problem of Human Civilization is not "lack of intelligence."  The core of the problem is lack of wisdom, which is something altogether different and mostly orthogonal if not oppositional.  One key part of wisdom, for example, is self-restraint.  While Intelligence tells you how you can conquer the world, thereby enabling and encouraging you to do so, Wisdom tells you it would not be a good idea.

Humans developed to capability to harness natural forces, and as a result have been digging their planetary home into total disaster.  This is a problem that is most accurately diagnosed as Too Much Power with Too Little Wisdom.  Intelligence is merely a form of power...albeit a foundational one which makes most others possible.  Throwing more power into our flaming cauldron will only make the flame hotter and likely melt the vessel.

And this is before we even get into another more commonly discussed problem: Who own the AI and what is it used for?

It's clear that AI is owned by the oligarchs and pathocrats and will be used, as every tool in their hands is used, to oppress and further enslave if not murder everyone else.  The biggest first use is targeting "enemies" in protests and war through AI firms such as Palantir.  It only goes downhill from there.

Our human "intelligence" is only small part of our set of long evolved capabilities. Nervous tissue is not necessarily superior to silicon for computation or anything else, except that nervous tissue as part of evolved organisms has been trained for hundreds of millions of years.  Even our individual 'training,' being thrown into this world and having to somehow adapt to both it and our long-evolved selves, is something that cannot be replicated even by reading all the books in the world.

Both this evolution and this training can impart at least small amounts of wisdom.

Our intelligence and other capabilities have limits which effectively enforce their wiser usage, as more reckless usage is unsustainable.

Those are precisely the kinds of limits some hope to superceed with AI.  But it is those limits which also require and therefore enable a degree of wisdom.

The wiser course is to embrace limits and live within them.  Machines can help us get our dishes clean, and that's nice, but what the main course is is up to us.

To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer.*

(*Commonly attributed to Limits-to-Growth luminary Paul Ehrlich, it may actually have been penned by columnist Bill Vaughan, who was paraphrasing Agatha Christie.)

What about Artificial Wisdom?  There have been lots of attempts to get there through things like meditation, reciting phrases, reading religious books.  Of course, there is no such thing, but you could hardly do better than randomly selecting a page from Tao Te Ching every day.  It is not going to answer all of your questions, but that is in the nature of Wisdom.  It is limited, but that is exactly what is required for limited beings like us anyway.  Unlimited wisdom is something we can't process.

This post was inspired by a talk on transhumanism, which sounds abhorrent to me.

There is no need for this at all.  As Uber has proven, human drivers can be cheap because people need paid work.  Why is there such a great "need" to replace them with AI?  You don't need to go everywhere you can think of going.  Doing so is a waste of time and physical energy.  Having to pay someone for something is a way of preventing over usage.

Why Capitalism causes Imperialism

Here's the nutshell version of why capitalism causes imperialism, and I've never heard it explained more succinctly before:

https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/2031488536487006608?s=20

The full version explains more, showing how Capitalism is fundamentally antidemocratic and keeps us from producing the things we actually need, extending this argument to the environment and AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU1QdQsjGpM&t=1s

King Donald takes on Iran

 Ritter is not always right.  But compared to western mainstream media, Ritter is at least as good or better.  So this is very worth watching, and especially his denunciation of Trump and the state of our Republic.  It's all exactly how I feel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIFUDkHRNTk

Here's a later and much longer report from Ritter

It's no wonder Trump is making greater and greater threats.  If you were just listening to mainstream Western Media, you wouldn't see the need.

Jeffrey Sachs has called this war World War III.

Iran has always been a most likely candidate for when it starts, representing the most powerful resistance country to Israel.  It was the last one on the Neocon hit list given by Wesley Clark.  Libya was a pushover, Syria was a great candidate for aided sectarian takeover.  Iran is pretty much the immovable object.  One of the oldest civilizations on earth, ironically the one that once most aided if not birthed Judaism.

May this be no more harm to Iran and the end of US Imperialism instead.  

That would best be accomplished with a US turn to Communism (see next essay) which can better support a more self-sufficient society and also the transition to a more self-sufficient society.

And we were of course going to "choose" the President (largely influenced through Zionist owned media) crackpot enough to launch a major attack on Iran, since that has long been the Israeli demand (in the very person of Netanyahu).

Milkfat

Studies have failed to consistently confirm that dairy fat is bad for you, with some suggesting that it's good for you.

Article suggests that butter is probably still bad for you (it's just all saturated fat) but there's scant evidence for that either.  (I've cut out butter, but I daily consume several teaspoons of cream--which I think is healthier and tastier.  All the rest of my considerable dairy intake is non-fat.  I use olive oil for all other purposes.)

It was saturated fat from meats which is the troublesome one.  But the harm of that has probably also been overstated.

Sugar and it's disorder Metabolic Syndrome (Type II Diabetes) are leading factors in the research I have seen.  Sugar is not going to be proven healthy, except in tiny amounts promoting hydration (which is healthy).  The Sugar industry funded the research that led to blanket condemnation of saturated fats, which are typically a secondary concern.  This led to a generation of low-fat products with extra sugar and soaring diabetes.

I'd call into question the entire HDL/LDL cholesterol theory too.  Research I've seen suggests these are fairly unimportant, and insignificant for people over 65.  And yet, there's now a whole industry related to this, at least two of my senior friends with very healthy diets are statin taking statin drugs.  (I took statin drugs for 15 years while I was still working and eating very unhealthy amounts of fat and sugar and not getting enough exercise either.  In those conditions, statins could be marginally helpful overall, I believe now, but probably not others).  I see this as an example of over-medication.  Older people actually need to consume more fat (also protein and calcium) per kg of body weight for regular body maintenance because it's used less effectively.  Old people have a strong tendency to get too thin and weak because they don't bear this in mind.

People imagine heart disease as a simple accumulation of fatty stuff eaten, but that's not at all the case.  Some with the highest saturated fat intakes may have the least issues.  It seems most likely now that heart disease is some sort of regulatory failure or autoimmune disease and may be related to subclinical infections that flourish in the environment of sugar, metabolic disease, and stress, with fats being only of secondary or tertiary importance.

It's easy to find lots of correlations around the illuminated lamp pole of things you can measure easily.  Especially when there are areas like sugar and stress that are blacked out by the Sugar Industry and Capitalism.

Glyphosate

Glyphosate (the original herbicide in Roundup, now only in commercial versions) is defended here:  The actual evidence for harm to humans is thin.  It is also somewhat biodegradable.  However it is used in such vast quantities that I'd still be worried and it is destructive of all plants until degraded.