The US Constitution is dead. It's fertilizing the soil, pushing up the daisies. It's an ex-document. It's been dead for at least 80 years (killed by progressive socialists) , and its rotten stench is what's wrong with America now.
So, how do we make a new constitution, and what should it have in it? The previous Constitution (RIP) was written by a large group of passionate men who agreed and disagreed on principles. They had recently fought a war for independence from a great power, separating themselves forever from the motherland. They had different backgrounds and interests. What they had in common was a vision of a free and prosperous America, with a very limited federal government holding the States together and protecting them from foreign attack. The federal government was to handle foreign affairs, war (also a type of foreign affair), settle disputes between the states, and set basic standards (related to settling disputes). Oh, and deliver the mail. That's about it.
How do we get back to that limited vision of government? Is it even desirable, not to mention possible?
I believe the the US is headed for a reckoning, simply because I keep my eyes and ears open, and have some basic background in reality and history. Stein's Law will always hold true - if something can't go on forever, it must eventually stop. The US is $20 trillion dollars in debt now. The national debt doubles roughly every eight years - two presidential terms. Did you know that in 2015, debt payments took up over 7% of all federal revenues? That fiscal year, we spent $229 billion paying for old debt, and added $583 billion in new debt. Mandatory spending (medicare/aid, social security, welfare, etc.) occupied 76% of revenues. The US government spent 50% more on health care alone than it did on defense that year. And this was before the Obamacare boondoggle spending had really started.
This can't continue. Therefore, it must end. According to current projections, by 2033, debt payments will consume all federal revenues. By 2033, social security will consume all federal revenues. By 2033, health care spending will consume all federal revenues. By 2033, all other welfare programs combined will consume all federal revenues. Do the math. We're talking about mandatory spending equaling 400% of revenues. This simply can't work. But it's what we will stumble into if we don't change things now.
By now, I mean by 2020. During President Trump's first term, it will be possible to fix these problems, but the solutions will be painful. By 2024, the solutions will be excruciatingly, "Mommy make the bad man stop" painful. After then, failure mode is inevitable. None of this is new. Ross
Perot ran on a platform of fixing these problems, which were easily foreseen.
We must elect new politicians to fix this mess. We can't count on the same old ones - they've been ignoring the coming catastrophe for literally decades. But we clearly seem unable to do so. So we're going to have to shake up, or break, the political status quo.
One way is with new parties. After all, small parties have been the lifeblood of American politics since the founding. Not. For better or worse, the American system doesn't seem to admit or tolerate the existence of more than two major political parties. It's been tried.
Another way is to influence the existing parties to do better. We see how well the Republican party learned its lesson after the 2006-2008 election cycles. They've gained the majorities in both houses, as well as the Preidency, and are now using their power to do everything their base wanted them to do. President Trump has accomplished his meager goals of building a border fence and repealing Obamacare, which every Republican candidate vowed to repeal and/or replace. Train loads of illegal alien invaders are daily being repatriated to Mexico, from whence they came. Immigration by anti-civilizational Muslims (that is to say, all Muslims) has been banned, and those who came in before are being sent back to their homelands. The Tea Party wing of the Republican caucus is respected, admired, and nearly revered by the rest of the party members, as well as the donor class. Oh wait, none of that has happened. None of it is likely to happen. All of it needs to happen for America to survive as America.
That leaves few legal options. Mark Levin recommended a convention of the States to propose amendments to the Constitution. I do believe this idea is the last, best hope for a peaceful resolution to the current crises. But I have no faith that it will actually happen at all, much less in time to do any good.
You see, I understand history and basic human nature. No politician is ever going to upset an apple cart to prevent a catastrophe that can't be seen from an earthworm's eye view. Where's the money in it for them? That leaves the historic method of solving these problems.
Rivers of blood. Given the current population, make that oceans of blood.
On the other side of this ocean is a shore which we can not see. There is a shore, of course. Not all of us will reach that shore - some of us must be sacrificed to the sea. I can see a future, twenty or thity years from now, where the population of these United States is between 150-200 million souls. This future involves over a hundred million dead or displaced people, and results in a new and different America. It might possibly be a better place, but that's not guaranteed.
I can also see a future, twenty or thirty years from now, where the population is over 400 million souls, a minority of which consider themselves American. There will still be a place on world maps called America, but the America that we know and love will be dead. It will have dies by assisted suicide, as it lacked the will to live. When it is preferable to kneel before the stranger's knife than to acknowledge the existence of the stranger, is the final act murder or suicide?
We can change our Constitution now, or after veritable oceans of blood have been spilt; or we can wait for strangers to dictate how we shall live in what used to be our own lands. The only thing we can't do is continue on as we have been. That is not an option. Stein's Law always holds.
Changes, they are a' coming. Which way will the wind blow your family?
Friday, September 22, 2017
Thursday, September 14, 2017
So there I was, knee deep in Albania...
So there I was, knee deep in mud in Albania in the spring of '99 in support of the Kosovo war. (Others may have not even noticed it happening.) My team go a call to go out in support of another unit, leaving in 30 minutes. It was an overnight outing, out and back to the base area. We were honestly looking forward to spending some time out of the mud.
Interesting side note - the Tirana airport is built on flat land between the mountains and the sea, where two rivers meet. The area has been used as sheep pasture for all of recorded history, and probably long before that. Guess what happens here in the spring, when the rains come and the snow melts? Now, guess what it smells like. And how deep it is when thousands of troops walk on it for weeks on end, not to mention vehicles. This is where I learned the real reason for tracked vehicles. Over 90% of the deployed troops developed foot infections and injuries. MY boss and I personally saved one young woman's life one night near the port-a johns. Which, incidentally, didn't get emptied for three weeks, because the honey trucks couldn't drive through the mud. You couldn't dig latrines in it, either.
Anyways, we threw our rucks in the truck, along with a couple boxes of MREs and jerry cans of fuel and water, and spent the next twenty minutes getting the truck moving. (You know the mud is bad when you have to dig down so you can open the doors of a HMMWV.) We eventually got moving, and found the unit before it moved out the gate. The convoy was about an hour late, because the planners aren't the ones who have to dig the vehicles out of the mud. So, off we went into the evening light, looking to our overnight excursion.
We came back 40 days later. We hadn't packed up any cots, so we slept sitting up in the seats. (The driver got to sleep on the hood.) The body armor and helmets really helped to keep us warm at night, because we couldn't use the sleeping bags while sitting up in those cramped seats. I did mention that it was spring, right? Forty degrees and rainy.
Lessons learned - Shared misery builds strong teams. You learn to make do, or do without. What you need is really a small fraction of what you want. Bring everything every time, because you never know. Food, water, fuel, ponchos, and dry socks are necessities.
Interesting side note - the Tirana airport is built on flat land between the mountains and the sea, where two rivers meet. The area has been used as sheep pasture for all of recorded history, and probably long before that. Guess what happens here in the spring, when the rains come and the snow melts? Now, guess what it smells like. And how deep it is when thousands of troops walk on it for weeks on end, not to mention vehicles. This is where I learned the real reason for tracked vehicles. Over 90% of the deployed troops developed foot infections and injuries. MY boss and I personally saved one young woman's life one night near the port-a johns. Which, incidentally, didn't get emptied for three weeks, because the honey trucks couldn't drive through the mud. You couldn't dig latrines in it, either.
Anyways, we threw our rucks in the truck, along with a couple boxes of MREs and jerry cans of fuel and water, and spent the next twenty minutes getting the truck moving. (You know the mud is bad when you have to dig down so you can open the doors of a HMMWV.) We eventually got moving, and found the unit before it moved out the gate. The convoy was about an hour late, because the planners aren't the ones who have to dig the vehicles out of the mud. So, off we went into the evening light, looking to our overnight excursion.
We came back 40 days later. We hadn't packed up any cots, so we slept sitting up in the seats. (The driver got to sleep on the hood.) The body armor and helmets really helped to keep us warm at night, because we couldn't use the sleeping bags while sitting up in those cramped seats. I did mention that it was spring, right? Forty degrees and rainy.
Lessons learned - Shared misery builds strong teams. You learn to make do, or do without. What you need is really a small fraction of what you want. Bring everything every time, because you never know. Food, water, fuel, ponchos, and dry socks are necessities.
Whither quantum gravity?
Ah, the secular Holy Grail of science - quantum gravity. This, along with joining gravity with the other four forces into a Theory of Everything, has been sought by physicists for decades. In teaching myself about relativity and quantum mechanics, I kept running across speculations into this specialty field over and over. It asks the most fundamental questions possible - what is mass, what is matter, what are space and time, what is gravity, how does any of this happen, and so forth. Deep, deep questions without answers.
I now say, not quite so humbly, that in my learning and thought experiments that I seem to have accidentally come up with a workable theory of quantum gravity. It is a summary of what I've been thinking and writing about here on this blog, which almost nobody ever reads. (I have yet to receive a single comment here.) The trick lies in thinking differently and attempting to see clearly. Everything is part of everything else. All things are related. You can't think about gravity without accounting for everything else.
Gravity is not a force. This is nothing new. Einstein posited it in his famous papers. Gravity is not a force - it is an effect. People researching quantum gravity seem to keep forgetting this. They keep looking for gravitons. For there to be gravitons, there would have to be a force of gravity. There is no such force. So, stop thinking about gravitons, and as gravity as a an attractive force. It simply isn't.
Gravity is an effect of "curved space-time". What is this space-time, and how does it curve? It is simply another field. It does not curve or bend like a sheet of cellophane, but it does have energy gradients. The key here is that is does not have a base energy of zero. It has a perfectly enormous base energy. This is because every other field, every other force, every bit of energy, mass, and matter is subtracted from the space-time energy field (STEF). What is the base value of STEF? I have no idea - I'm not a real physicist, and I haven't done calculus since I was a freshman in college several decades ago. (I keep meaning to. I've got a calculus book in sight right now.)
The key here is that STEF is quantized. All other fields draw energy from it, but only in discreet (very tiny) chunks. This energy draw is then spread across the energy field in an inverse-square fashion, because otherwise space-time would be full of discontinuities, which clearly doesn't happen. This happens instantly, and has an infinite range. STEF is not subject to speed of light restrictions. (Neither is any other quantum field. I have no idea why scientists simply don't like to talk about it, or even admit it openly.) Let me say that again - STEF , like all quantum fields, is infinitely large and infinitely fast. Waves in energy fields, on the other hand, are restricted to light speed transmission.
So, we have a quantized field, from which all other energy is drawn, with an inverse-square energy gradient. If you think of the energy levels and gradient as a parabolic slope, we're on the right track. What is the point of STEF? What does it control? Why does it exist? All fields have a purpose. STEF's purpose is to control velocity. And, incidentally, perceived space and time.
Velocity is a spherical standing wave in STEF. The lowest energy part of the sphere lies directly in the line of velocity, and the di in energy corresponds directly to the velocity. The highest energy (higher than ambient) lies directly opposite the direction of motion. This is why particles travel in a straight line, all other things being equal. It's easier to think about in two dimensions, as a sine-like wave, lower in front, higher behind.
The height of the wave corresponds to the energy increase or decrease in emitted particles. They gain energy from initially going downhill, and lose energy with an initial uphill climb. Remember, this effect is actually spherical, and the energy loss or gain corresponds exactly to the predictions of existing physics. Note that there is no loss when a particle is emitted at ninety degrees to the direction of motion.
The slope of the wave (related to the wave length) corresponds to the dictates of relativistic motion. The cosine of the slope is the speed (relative to c), and the sine of the slope is the perceived space and time (as a fraction of a theoretical, non-moving reference). I've shown the math in other posts, but it is fairly trivial if even I can do it.
Where does gravity come in? Well, gravity is the existing slope of STEF, upon which our particle is creating a standing wave. You add (superimpose, for the afficionado) the two to get a final motion. Any slope in STEF will result in a particle's standing wave curving 'downslope' (unless it was already headed in that exact direction, of course) and gaining energy. A particle moving 'upslope' will also curve (unless it is moving exactly upslope), and lose energy in the process. Remember, all energy is quantized, so it can only be gained or lost in discrete, very tiny bits.
We call this effect "gravity". No force carrying particle needed, because it's not a force.
Please note that the theory also works with a decreasing size of the standing wave. This decrease in wave length increases the frequency, which is the same as increasing the energy of the standing wave. This property helps to explain perceived space and time differences, as well as 'relativistic mass'. Space (and thus, time) ahead of the particle (geometric center point of the standing wave) contracts, and energy increases. Note again, that at ninety degrees to the path of motion, the standing wave is at zero. There are no relativistic effects at that precise angle. And the energy increases dramatically directly behind the particle, causing photons emitted in that direction to lose large amounts of energy.
The actual energy lost or gained by an emitted photon is equal to the height of the velocity curve, divided by the wavelength of that curve. In other words, amplitude times frequency - the definition of the energy of a wave. (I just realized that part while writing this.)
Everything checks. Everything explained. No apparent holes or contradictions. Simple and elegant. Quantum gravity, QED. Tell your friends.
I now say, not quite so humbly, that in my learning and thought experiments that I seem to have accidentally come up with a workable theory of quantum gravity. It is a summary of what I've been thinking and writing about here on this blog, which almost nobody ever reads. (I have yet to receive a single comment here.) The trick lies in thinking differently and attempting to see clearly. Everything is part of everything else. All things are related. You can't think about gravity without accounting for everything else.
Gravity is not a force. This is nothing new. Einstein posited it in his famous papers. Gravity is not a force - it is an effect. People researching quantum gravity seem to keep forgetting this. They keep looking for gravitons. For there to be gravitons, there would have to be a force of gravity. There is no such force. So, stop thinking about gravitons, and as gravity as a an attractive force. It simply isn't.
Gravity is an effect of "curved space-time". What is this space-time, and how does it curve? It is simply another field. It does not curve or bend like a sheet of cellophane, but it does have energy gradients. The key here is that is does not have a base energy of zero. It has a perfectly enormous base energy. This is because every other field, every other force, every bit of energy, mass, and matter is subtracted from the space-time energy field (STEF). What is the base value of STEF? I have no idea - I'm not a real physicist, and I haven't done calculus since I was a freshman in college several decades ago. (I keep meaning to. I've got a calculus book in sight right now.)
The key here is that STEF is quantized. All other fields draw energy from it, but only in discreet (very tiny) chunks. This energy draw is then spread across the energy field in an inverse-square fashion, because otherwise space-time would be full of discontinuities, which clearly doesn't happen. This happens instantly, and has an infinite range. STEF is not subject to speed of light restrictions. (Neither is any other quantum field. I have no idea why scientists simply don't like to talk about it, or even admit it openly.) Let me say that again - STEF , like all quantum fields, is infinitely large and infinitely fast. Waves in energy fields, on the other hand, are restricted to light speed transmission.
So, we have a quantized field, from which all other energy is drawn, with an inverse-square energy gradient. If you think of the energy levels and gradient as a parabolic slope, we're on the right track. What is the point of STEF? What does it control? Why does it exist? All fields have a purpose. STEF's purpose is to control velocity. And, incidentally, perceived space and time.
Velocity is a spherical standing wave in STEF. The lowest energy part of the sphere lies directly in the line of velocity, and the di in energy corresponds directly to the velocity. The highest energy (higher than ambient) lies directly opposite the direction of motion. This is why particles travel in a straight line, all other things being equal. It's easier to think about in two dimensions, as a sine-like wave, lower in front, higher behind.
The height of the wave corresponds to the energy increase or decrease in emitted particles. They gain energy from initially going downhill, and lose energy with an initial uphill climb. Remember, this effect is actually spherical, and the energy loss or gain corresponds exactly to the predictions of existing physics. Note that there is no loss when a particle is emitted at ninety degrees to the direction of motion.
The slope of the wave (related to the wave length) corresponds to the dictates of relativistic motion. The cosine of the slope is the speed (relative to c), and the sine of the slope is the perceived space and time (as a fraction of a theoretical, non-moving reference). I've shown the math in other posts, but it is fairly trivial if even I can do it.
Where does gravity come in? Well, gravity is the existing slope of STEF, upon which our particle is creating a standing wave. You add (superimpose, for the afficionado) the two to get a final motion. Any slope in STEF will result in a particle's standing wave curving 'downslope' (unless it was already headed in that exact direction, of course) and gaining energy. A particle moving 'upslope' will also curve (unless it is moving exactly upslope), and lose energy in the process. Remember, all energy is quantized, so it can only be gained or lost in discrete, very tiny bits.
We call this effect "gravity". No force carrying particle needed, because it's not a force.
Please note that the theory also works with a decreasing size of the standing wave. This decrease in wave length increases the frequency, which is the same as increasing the energy of the standing wave. This property helps to explain perceived space and time differences, as well as 'relativistic mass'. Space (and thus, time) ahead of the particle (geometric center point of the standing wave) contracts, and energy increases. Note again, that at ninety degrees to the path of motion, the standing wave is at zero. There are no relativistic effects at that precise angle. And the energy increases dramatically directly behind the particle, causing photons emitted in that direction to lose large amounts of energy.
The actual energy lost or gained by an emitted photon is equal to the height of the velocity curve, divided by the wavelength of that curve. In other words, amplitude times frequency - the definition of the energy of a wave. (I just realized that part while writing this.)
Everything checks. Everything explained. No apparent holes or contradictions. Simple and elegant. Quantum gravity, QED. Tell your friends.
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