Thinking first about Israel

The friend asking what would happen if US stopped arms donations was not happy that I first brought up Israel, claiming that to be disproportionate.  I replied:

Is it disproportionate to think first about Israel as a recipient of US military and diplomatic assistance?  I think not.

Israel is the #1 recipient of US military aid (donated weapons), diplomatic support (including Security Council vetos, special US negotiations such as Abraham accords, and General Assembly vetos), and as you say, "intelligence sharing."

Egypt receives the same basic annual $3.5B military aid, but doesn't get the special gifts (such as $700M restock of Iron Dome parts recently) on top of the annual donation, and Egypt has often faced repermands and suspensions.  Egypt receives the same annual donation as Israel because of agreements in the Camp David Accords, which were initiated to better protect Israel.  So, basically, the #2 recipient of donated weapons is much about Israel too.

It's fairly common understanding that the Middle East is the biggest war risk in the world (aka powderkeg).  War has never stopped there, despite paper thin "agreements" recently among US client state regimes there which generally don't represent popular feelings in Arab countries.

Weapons sales to Saudi Arabia may be larger.  They pay cash for their weapons and sell oil in US dollars even if not to USA--which also helps USA.  Saudi Arabia is allowed to buy weapons, that way it can win Sunni Islamic hearts and minds to look at places other than Israel, such as Yemen.  But it's not very successful, as Israel remains the number one shared concern of Islamic extremists around the world, as well as Arabs and muslims generally, regardless of whether Shia or Sunni.

It is also commonly believed that the Israel Lobby is the #1 most influential foreign lobby in the USA.  Politicians of all stripes have appeared before AIPAC, for example.  Junket trips and personal connections, dealmaking, and corruption are legendary.  Now it's an open question how the unmatched support that Israel gets from USA is because of shared geopolitical interests (and usefulness to US Empire) and how much is the result of unmatched lobbying prowess.  Noam Chomsky points to how useful Israel is to US Imperial Planners, and how that got a big boost in that regards in 1967 (when Israel showed the world what it can do) which hasn't worn off, and he discounts the notion of Israel wagging the US dog simply because of lobbying, instead he paints Israel as the key street fighter for the US Empire.  Low level military people I've met don't believe this and say that Israel is not so beloved, respected, or trusted by US military, and that its unmatched US support results from lobbying and paid off politicians.  I think it's a combination of both.

But one way or the other, it's not clear to me that US can ever get out of the global domination business--which it must do soon for the world to be sustainable--without dropping support for Israel.  And then the US would get dumped on by Israel's next patron.  That box is another reason why the world we know is unsustainable, the only question is how it's going to evolve or end.  Catastrophically is the best guess.

 

Israel means the threat of nuclear annihilation will never end

 A friend asks:

>What would happen, if the U.S. stopped selling or donating arms to friendly countries who need them?  Consider the ramifications from a worldwide perspective.

I replied:

Two most dangerous possibilities:

1.  A number of other countries gang up and destroy the State of Israel.

2.  Israel, fearful that #1 might happen, blows up the world.

Thus, the State of Israel is a global doomsday machine.

US Empire serves Israel, at least for the moment, because we think we are better aligned.  It's "our" doomsday machine, the doomsday machine of US Empire...at long as US Empire remains Israel's best friend.  So we send $3.5B weapons, plus more when asked, plus vetos at the Security Council and No votes in the general assembly, and many other things.

That's alignment.  For now anyway.  But also one which works against the possibility of ever reducing expenditure on, let alone eliminating, nuclear weapons.  That's more alignment, around one of the two biggest possibilities of global annihilation, and also the needs of the military industrial complex.

Could Israel exist without Israel and the US having nuclear weapons?  They seem to want not only that, but to have a regional monopoly in the middle east.

The Burden Of Proof

When assessing claims of guilt, or even brutality and monsterousness (which the Western media often throws at the Taliban, while not looking in the mirror), assessment of the truth is the most important thing.

Having seen their lies over the years, I would personally not trust anything about a enemy of the USA published in the US Media.  They're proven liars over and over and over, for example:

Bombing of the USS Maine

Gulf of Tonkin

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Assad's Chemical Attacks

Russiagate

And this is only the short list.  All of my friends are with me on the first 3 of these, but not the last two.  Because of those, and my tendency not to portray Putin or China as the Greatest Evil in the World Today, and things like that which don't look at US evils first, I am an outlier of all the people I know personally--friends and family.  I'm labeled a Putinist or Assadist or Stalinist.  I'm constantly quizzed on the latest headlines from the US War Wurlitzer before the antiwar media has had the time to debunk them, and criticized for Not Keeping Up, or being a Conspiracy Theorist (in particular for disbelieving in a conspiracy between Trump and Putin).

And these friends and family consider themselves opposed to war or harmful military actions or financial sanctions.*  They just believe a set of the Imperial lies in which I don't believe.  But they don't consider them lies, so we are back to the question of Truth.

As I see it, the central problem with Truth is that it's an impossible ideal.  Truth famously requires three parts:

The Plain Truth.

The Whole Truth.

Nothing But the Truth.

The central problem is in The Whole Truth.  That is anything which could have involved in the matters at hand.  Effectively, that means the entire universe leading up to that point.  No one can have an understanding that vast.

Secondly, the Plain Truth depends upon The Whole Truth, because without The Whole Truth, one cannot decide which of the issues involved rises to top to become the Plain Truth.

Similar issues apply to Nothing But The Truth, though it would seem easy in principle not to say anything not true...but then that itself has the same three parts.

The bottom line is that the Truth is an impossible Platonic Ideal which we will never know completely, if even partly.

Because of that fact, we routinely apply simplifications in our search for the truth.  Some trust their religious leaders, others may trust leading scientists or atheists.  At a deeper level, we apply burden of proof principles that deliberately bias the discovery of truth toward one extreme or the other.  For example, in a scientific test, we reject findings that don't reject the null hypothesis one out of twenty times, written in frequentist statistics as p < 0.05.  But that means, as I am at odds to explain to my friends who accept every "scientific" pronouncement in the their media as known fact that in a large number of cases we may fail to find relationships that actually ARE there, the problem being that the test involved failed to reach sufficient power to detect those relationships at p < 0.05.  And then there is also the possibility that when supposedly p < 0.05 is satisfied, in 1 out of 20 tests just meeting that threshold, the relationship will itself be false.  And then there are endless possibilities of bias.  The best situation is when you have more and more tests, conducted by many different people, and over and over they show p values far less than 0.05.  Which is precisely where we are with vaccines...they are widely proven to be effective and safe beyond the shadow of a doubt (very high imputable p values) with only a couple of small historical exceptions in the past 80 years.  If only everything were that simple, sadly most things aren't.  In many if not most cases it is impossible to do good blind and randomized testing, for example, and then you can't even get started on your search for truth very well and easily.

So it may matter, and usually does crucially, to decide in which direction the burden of truth should go.

For drugs, for example, it usually makes sense to put the burden of proof against the drug, because we don't want to intervene in ways that we aren't sure are helpful.  First Do No Harm.

The same First Do No Harm principle applies to foreign countries as well.  We don't want to intervene unless it is useful and helpful.

So the burden of proof should be on those alleging brutality on the part of foreign governments or their agents.  Such claims need be evaluated critically and held to high standards of veracity such as Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.  The burden of proof is on those criticizing Putin, Assad, PRC, Madero, Cuba, Iran, and yes Taliban rather than on those defending them.

(*They say that something can or should be done.  Perhaps by a global authority which has some global legitimacy in their eyes, such as the UN.  Or an NGO such as Amnesty International.)

Endless Freedom and Democracy

FAIR shows how western media is ignoring civilian deaths caused by US, assuming noble purpose, and often suggesting some way we could have held on longer.  Amnesia in service of the endless war machine.  No one should be fooled.

IMO the problems with withdrawal were caused by the failure to negotiate peace, not merely withdrawal, with the Taliban.  But no President could have done that, and if they had, the media would have framed it in even more negative terms.  Any President would have had to continue to fight forever from surrounding countries, continuing the illegal war forever, rather than accept defeat at the hands of monsters we first created* then isolated, demonized, and attacked.  And we haven't really made peace even yet, while demanding that the Taliban do so.  We want to keep the Taliban from making deals with their neighbors Russia, China, and Iran.

As horrible as the Taliban are, they killed fewer Afghans than the US.  Afghan women were by and large under similar straits under US backed warlords as the Taliban and were not calling for the US to stay.  Feminism, Freedom, and Democracy were weaponized in service of a brutal US occupation.  So it is, often, with idealism--it is weaponized to serve empire.

I am happy that Biden stood the course on withdrawal, anyway.  That it wasn't going to be perfect would of course be weaponized by the war media, like any withdrawals from endless wars.  Nor would any part of the establishment accept a true surrender--which would be a surrender to the Taliban, giving them the keys and normalization.  No, from every hill, using every means available, we will still fight on, to destroy whatever government continues to give an ear to our enemies.  I suspect that's already happening.  Meanwhile, we turn a blind eye to ourselves and a magnifying glass to our enemies, as always.  

I dream of no foreign entanglements, respect for the internal processes of other countries, and never ending healthy self-critique.  We should not interfere in the internal governing or financial processes of other countries.  Such a country turning away from empire would have the resources to draw down the impending climate disaster as well as survive.  But without that turning away from empire, neither outcome will be possible.

(*The Taliban were among the least vile elements of the Mujahadeen, which US backed in a long proxy war against Russia which was the pre-prelude to the US occupation.  The Mujahadeen were the good guys them, Freedom Fighters, while they were tearing up a progressive socialist democracy that happened to be aligned with our enemy, the USSR.  Contrary to myth, we continued to support the effort to regime-change the Afghan socialist government which lasted beyond 1991.  Somehow Feminism didn't matter to US media then.  The problem came when the resulting government, led by the relatively-least-vile element of those we supported, recognized the usefulness of recognizing their neighbors Iran/Russia/China.  So obviously it's really weaponized idealism.  The hypocrisy of the US is galling.  And we US citizens should be more concerned with extremist misogyny in and by the USA itself, in many forms, including the attack on abortion rights in the USA, as well as endless imperialism planned, produced and delivered upon the world (sanctions, coops, color revolutions, etc, against Iran/Cuba/Russia/China/Venezuela/Syria/etc)--where the suffering caused by these horrors we cause hurt mostly poor women and children and not the intended leaders--whose primary difference from the good guys that we support (inc Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Columbia) are generally that the sanctioned leaders are slightly nicer to others generally, and especially that they are nicer to our enemies (including all in that group by definition anyway).  We're incredibly sensitive to the idea that any enemy country might spend a few bucks trying to influence our elections, while blind to the fact we've run the biggest regime change and global domination racket in the world since 1945.  We blow up countries we don't like.  The US regime developed from Imperialism and hasn't shaken it since.)

The Moon Is There (Whether I Look or Not)

I have decided to focus my Amateur Physics Speculations on the one thing that bugs me the most.  The Measurement Problem.  I'm choosing the phrase this as  The Moon Is There so I do not have to engage theological speculation about G_d (whether they play dice or not, and actually I'd assume they did) and focus directly on the issue of subjectivity/objectivity which I think is the actual nexus of this problem.

It seems that whenever I've listened to a theoretical physicist long enough (albeit a small sample) they confess to me that they do not actually believe  The Copenhagen Interpretation.  Physics students must learn this as it's a key part of one of our best and most important theories.  But it's clearly nonsense, no matter how you want to put it (using G_d or not).  So each theoretical physicist who even takes such things seriously has devised one or another ways around the Measurement Problem.  Typically nowadays this involves attempting to describe the dynamics of wave function collapse, as if other than measurement may be involved, therefore moving the scene from the subjective to the objective.

The point here is to make suggestions, most of which may well be faulty.  As a crackpot conspiracy theorist, it is easy for me to produce "theories" to explain nearly anything.  Often contradictory with each other and themselves, but sometimes possibly not.  I'm hoping this "skill" might be just the thing to help solve this problem.

The Universe Has Less Information Than It Would Seem

I already posted this basic idea, and it still looks good to me.  One way or another, Quantum Theory is incomplete.  But the obvious way it could be incomplete--that there are additional hidden variable(s)--has been shown to be false by the experimental research testing the Bell-type inequalities.  But it looks to me like there's a way out of this conundrum, and that is if instead of additional local information there is actually less global information than would at first appear.  It is as if some previous world had been subjected to lossy compression to produce the present one.  What this would mean is that things are more correlated than we would expect.

One way to imagine this would as if the 3 dimensions of space were actually 2 dimensions, but somehow we see them projected as 3 dimensions.  Equivalently, the 4 dimensions of Spacetime were actually 3 dimensions.  Or maybe 3.5 dimensions ?

As weird as this might be, it's still not as weird as the Copenhagen Interpretation.

The Wave Function (and Entanglement) Isn't a Thing

Even among actual theoretical physicists who know a lot more than me, there is debate as to whether the entire universe is entangled.  This may follow from the Big Bang.  But if the entire universe is entangled, then surely the wave function has collapsed too, and these very notions are rendered very differently (and you could say, following Wittgenstein, into uselessness).

But I arrived at the idea differently.  I imagined very advanced aliens who are very tiny, fast, and invisible.  And they fiddle inside our entanglement experiments.  They could have produced what we consider the primary particles of an interaction, entangled them, and measured one of the entangled pair before the particle even begins to collide in our experiment.  So they already know what it is, even if we don't.  In fact, the wave function (if it were something real) has already collapsed.   We just don't know about it yet, and carry on as if it hadn't, and for us it behaves as if it hadn't.  For them, it has, and they interpret those experiments differently.

And so, by these arguments and others, it seems to me that neither The Wave Function nor Entanglement is a Thing.  The universe is made of Spacetime and Energy, not Probabilities.  Our best understanding of the universe may be necessarily in the form of functions of probabilities, but not the universe itself.  Likewise our assertions of entanglement relate to those things we know to be entangled but someone else may see many other things as being entangled too, it's determined by what different observers know about the universe.

But what also shows up here, in the sense of many more things being correlated than we know about, is another way the universe contains less information than at first it appears.  Things seemingly independent are actually correlated, that means there is less actual information, again.

Faulty Instruments

One way to imagine the 3 or 3.5 dimensional compression of Spacetime is this.  Suppose you are setting up to do a Bell Type experiment.  But your cross-eyed machinist has built the arm for the Q detector in the wrong plane, so it describes the angle incorrectly.  This could explain getting measurements that deviate from those predicted for hidden variables.

OK, so your machinist is better than that.  But suppose that unbeknownst to your machinist, the Z dimension is continuously expanding with time.  So then even if the apparatus is built correctly in static time, it is wrong for any event which takes time to complete.

Living in the present always, as is our nature, we don't observe any changes in spatial dimensions.  Everything we know is locked into place by electromagnetic, strong, and weak interactions.  But the particles we measure are not so locked into place.  They cannot be.  So in their terms, we measure them wrongly.

Spacetime may be not so much "expanding" as the past is "compressing."  Perhaps it's even lossy compression of the kind in which actual dimensions are converted to a mere ordering.  That could produce the sort of fractional dimension I am suggesting.

Spacetime and Things In Spacetime

Another possible redundancy in the universe is the partitioning of massy objects and spacetime itself.  Hmmn, maybe not.  As far as we know, spacetime isn't so partitioned, though it appears that way to us.  Massy objects simply have fields which appear to give them the expanse we experience.

When Time Advances, there is More Information.  Therefore there was less information in the Past than the Present.  This means there must be a limit to resolution...so that new information is created with each event...that could not have been fully predicted.  It is Spacetime itself which has Free Will.  And as it creates new information, it expands, so the past was smaller too.   Spacetime propagates its decisions through it's light cone within which every particle can move.