Feral Observations

Institutional Incompetence, "Conspiracy Theories" and Pol Pot

2011-07-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

Institutional incompetence defends itself by portraying all observation of its effects as "Conspiracy Theories". This defense mechanism is now, itself, an institution. Moreover it is an institution that is extraordinarily effective at protecting incompetence in all institutions (including itself).

Part of the problem is that almost all institutional incompetence derives from faulty incentive structures, so it is easy to impute to the critic the claim that such incompetence is not incompetence at all but, rather, is self-interest. The critic is hard-pressed to deny this (except insofar as such self-interest is unenlightened hence incompetent in that meta-sense) and is thence imputed to "theorize" a "conspiracy" of self-interested individuals as the basis for the maintenance of the institutionalized incompetence. Again, the critic may not have put forth nor even have thought of such a theory but he is hard-pressed to disprove that a "conspiracy" -- in some sense -- is at work so he cannot very well vigorously deny such a theory. This vulnerability of the critic is then viciously attacked. This all goes on within a subtext of the conversation so it is a rare critic that recognizes how the burden of proof has been shifted from the institutionally incompetent needing to prove that the critic has theorized a "conspiracy" (which, of course, would require defining "conspiracy") to the critic needing to prove that such a "conspiracy" (the definition of which is, after all, in the mind of the institutionally incompetent) is clearly out of the question despite the vagueness of the term multiplied by the lack of information with which to support or deny even a clear definition.

So, the institution of "Critics are crazy people." successfully defends all institutional incompetence.

While this is merely part of the problem, its effectiveness in promoting institutional incompetence leads to a rather undesirable state of affairs.

As an extreme illustration let me describe a fictional dialog between Pol Pot and a government funded "physicist" regarding the "cold fusion" debacle.

First a bit of background on this conversation between Pol Pot and a government funded "physicist":

January 26, 1990, the journal Nature rejected Oriani's empirical validation of Pons and Fleischmann's 1989 announcement of "excess heat" on the grounds that he didn't provide evidence of nuclear ash and, besides, others were having difficulties replicating the experiment. It is no exaggeration to say this rejection established the foundation for all future claims that there had been no replication of Pons and Fleischmann's announced results -- hence the summary rejection of virtually all submissions related to so-called "cold fusion": Nuclear "physcists" must be satisfied in their irrational standard of conformance to expectation before any experimental results would be published.

Then we are treated to the statement by the DoE's chairman of the panel appointed to investigate cold fusion, John Huizenga:

"Although the McKubre experiment is considered by many advocates to be the premier evidence for excess heat, no nuclear reaction products were reported."

Huizenga is not a Nobel Laureate but a co-chair who was a Nobel Laureate, Norman Ramsey had to threaten to resign if the conclusion of the panel was to cut off future research -- as was Huizenga's agenda. Ramsey managed to prevent a prohibition on future research funding -- and a recommendation that such research should focus on replication of the calorimetery, hence excess heat. That is all he was able to accomplish with his ultimatum. There was no positive recommendation that funds be put forth. Hence, no research was funded.

These two events created an environment in which it was career death for anyone to request funds for "cold fusion" research, let alone so-allocate discretionary funds.

For a complete account of the premature and enduring attack on "cold fusion" research, see "Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed" by Charles G. Beaudette.

Pol Pot: So what did you do to replicate the P&F experiment?

Government funded "physicist": I ran a duplication of their experimental protocol and got no heat or neutrons.

Pol Pot: So, that's that?

Government funded "physicist": Of course. Falsifiability is the touchstone of science and I falsified their theory of "cold fusion". My G-d man, haven't you read Karl P-pper? Karl P-pper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century!

Pol Pot: No, I must confess I haven't read Karl P-pper. Never heard of him.

Government funded "physcist": Why am I even talking to you?

Pol Pot: Maybe its because I'm holding a show trial and have my Khmer Rouge thugs over there drooling at the thought of torturing and killing you if you don't talk to me.

Government funded "physicist": Good point.

Pol Pot: OK, so getting back to reproducibility, how do you explain the discrepancy between P&F's results and your results?

Government funded "physicist": Wishful thinking by P&F? Pathological science? Inadequate calorimetry? The list of possibilities is endless. Why would you even bother asking? Its not my job to explain the falsity of their results -- merely to falsify. That I have done.
Others have tried and failed as well, and the weight of the evidence is what we scientists are interested in when falsifying claims. Absolute proof is for mathematicians.

Pol Pot: So you and the others who claim to have falsified P&F have no obligation to replicate their experimental error?

Government funded "physicist": We've got better things to do with our limited time and money.

Pol Pot: Have others tried and succeeded in replicating P&F?

Government funded "physicist": No neutrons, gamma rays, tritium, etc. At least none at the level required by fusion. Marginal levels with poor reproducibility are the recipe for pathological science.

Pol Pot: What about heat?

Government funded "physicist": Why would anyone care about measuring heat if you can't get fusion products to show up?

Pol Pot: To keep from freezing in the winter?

(Khmer Rouge thugs get restless and one asks Pol Pot politely: "Can we eat his brains now?" Pol Pot ignores the request -- waiting with bated breath for the answer to his own question.)

Government funded "physicists": No, I mean if its fusion, there have to be fusion products.

Pol Pot: Isn't heat a fusion product?

Government funded "physicist": Well, yes, but it can't be present in the absence of the other fusion products.

Pol Pot: Why not?

Government funded "physicist": Because it flies in the face of the physical theory!

Pol Pot: So even though mathematicians spend their lives exploring the full implications of a few axioms and barely make a dent in the potential theorems, and even though physicists can't claim the formal rigor of mathematical proof, you claim that it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the statement "deuterium fusion cannot occur with heat but without neutrons, gamma rays or tritium" is true?

Government funded "physicist": Well, when you twist my words around that way, I suppose I'd have to say no.

Pol Pot to Khmer Rouge as he steps back: OK guys. But don't eat his brains. It might be contagious.

Science Citation Index Bibliography of Cold Fusion aka Low Energy Nuclear Reaction

2011-05-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

Science Citation Index includes only the most reputable science journals. It is for this reason that a bibliography of "cold fusion" aka "low energy nuclear reaction" publications limited to those in Science Citation Index is necessary.

Fixing Hubbert Linearization

2010-02-03T10:02:00.000-08:00

Run this in wxMaxima:

plot2d([parametric,2-2/(%e^-(%e^-t)+1),((2*%e^(-%e^(-t)-t))/(%e^(-%e^(-t))+1)^2)/(2-2/(%e^-(%e^-t)+1)),[t,-2,5],[nticks,80]])$

Basically it fixes Hubbert Linearization by using a skewed, rather than normal distribution on the production curve. It fits the early data points a lot better.

Moreover, the lower 48 production curve is, indeed, skewed in the required way:

MMORPG and the Slaughter of the Innocents

2009-08-08T08:05:00.000-07:00

A movie titled Second Skin was just made free viewing. It's worth the time to view it.

As the author of the first (1974) Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) virtual reality game, I claim at least pundit-rights on the MMO "community" documented by this film:

A comment was made during the course of the film by one of the interviewees that MMO "addiction" is a legitimate diagnosis only if we ignore the fact that huge portions of humanity are unhappy with reality. This was the strongest point in the film. But its weakness is that these addicts represent not merely the "discontents of civilization", as Freud would have us believe, but entire demographies suffering genocide at its hands.

To many, this is merely natural selection in action. However, if we are to admit "disparate impact" of our public policies in civil rights matters, how can we ignore the fact that these policies are having a "disparate impact", not simply on the happiness, but on the very existence of entire demographies? And in the face of such brute ignorance in high places, how can we expect those so disparately impacted to react?

If I have a sense of guilt about having participated in the creation of the virtual worlds into which people escape from genocide that they themselves are coerced by the zeitgeist to deny, it is the guilt that a supplier of morphine might have on, not the field of battle, but in a world built on the slaughter of the innocents.

Arrival of the Solar Power Satellite

2009-07-29T12:09:00.000-07:00

I've been following space solar power satellite technology since O'Neill's Stewart Brand days (longer than half of you have been alive) and this is the first time it appears likely to happen in the near future:

PowerSat Corporation has filed 2 important patents. One uses the solar array to propel itself from low earth orbit to geostationary orbit. The other one turns a cloud of small geostationary solar power satellites into a huge phased array. The propulsion patent plausibly reduces launch costs by 67%. The satellite cloud microwave phasing patent, however, has a huge hidden benefit that I doubt even Powersat has fully taken into account: industrial learning curve of small launchers.

A similar argument has been made before by Autodesk founder, John Walker in "A Rocket A Day keeps the High Costs Away. Basically, if you are going to deploy a system with a large number of repetitions, the total (integral) cost is given by the formula: firstunit*(units^(1-rate))/(1-rate). To replace all fossil fuel baseload generation capacity in the US (250GW) would require 20,000 Falcon 9 HL launches (78Mdollars/15000kg or $5200/kg to geostationary transfer orbit) each orbiting 3 BrightStars (PowerSat's satellite) at nearly 5000kg each. Walk that down down an industrial learning curve at 10% per doubling, the total launch cost of a 250GW cloud would be (1-.67)*5200*3*5000*(20000^(1-.1))/(1-.1) = 212G$ or less than a dollar per installed watt of baseload electric generation capacity.

So the ability to launch small, standard modules independently has an enormous impact on the primary historic barrier to solar power satellites.

But what about the satellite itself?

Assuming 10% energy loss in transmission to the ground array, each satellite would need to generate less than 1kW/kg (around 250GW/(3*5000*200*100)kg/(1-.1)) or 5MW/satellite. This is similar to the specific power estimate arrived at in "Low Mass Solar Power Satellites Built From Terrestrial or Lunar Materials", S. D. Potter, SSI Update, Volume XX, Issue 1 (1994). Briefly, at 35% solar conversion efficiency and 1kW/m^2 solar flux most of that satellite would be in a weightless mirror that would have to be about 140m in diameter at some fraction of 350g/m^2 (5000kg/(5MW/(.35*1kW/m^2))). Weightless mirrors can be very low mass and inexpensive.

To pay for the satellite itself let's more than triple the launch cost to reflect a total installed cost of $3/W. To understand how big of a deal this is: The other near-term scalable baseload electrical sources are "clean coal" and nuclear power — both of which are, optimistically, at similar capital costs per installed watt.

Secession From Slavery To Free Scientific Society

2009-07-03T22:02:00.000-07:00

Secession from Slavery to Free Scientific Society

by James Bowery

INTRODUCTION

Secession is necessary to free society. Free society starts with mutual consent. Mutual consent implies the option not to consent. "Freedom From" compliments "Freedom To".

Secession is necessary to true social science: We can best discover causal laws by testing theories with controlled experiments. This is true of all science. Controlled experiments require separate experimental groups, treated according to different theories and comparing the measured results with predictions. In practice, human ecologies can form separate experimental groups only by upholding geographic boundaries that prevent cross-contamination between treatments – cross-contamination with its resulting confusion and confounding of results. We can argue how best to achieve this in practice, but the principle of giving experimental evidence priority over any amount of argument, debate, deliberation, peer review or judicial proceeding stands as more self-evident than anything in the Declaration of Independence.

In a free scientific society, an individual is subject to treatment only after giving informed consent.

These two pillars of social good -- truth and freedom -- stand upon the foundation of secession.

Tyranny of the majority, limited only by a vague laundry list of selectively enforced human rights -- the sine qua non of "liberal democracy" -- must submit to the right to secede or it violates truth and freedom, hence all social good.

SLAVERY

Getting right to the point that people need addressed whenever "secession" is uttered:

Abolition of slavery is support of individual secession.

Slaves want to secede from their "owners" just as others want to -- and do -- secede from societies they find objectionable. The difference between slavery and others turns solely on whether the individual's right to secede is realized. All who are denied secession are slaves: their consent is violated.

If men from Maine choose to support the right of secession of slaves by marching on South Carolina to kill unrepentant slave owners -- every last one of them -- those men from Maine in no way lose their own rights. Men retaining their humanity may differ over whether it is wisest to intervene in such a way – or to intervene at all. For example, should a government which is capable of raising taxes do so for the waging of war against slavery or, better for the purchase of slaves to be freed from their dependent owners? Eminent domain “taking” arguments aside, just men may, as well, differ over whether it is wisest to put down a rabid animal, or to treat it. The compromise upon which the United States was founded was flawed, perhaps fatally, by its incorporation of slave states.

Likewise, this in no way supports the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution or The Union. It supports only the 13th Amendment. Despite Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's pretenses to the contrary, it is still a "badge of slavery" to be forced into association with others. Likewise the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 compounded this badge of slavery born of the so-called “Civil Rights Movement”.

"Freedom From" compliments "Freedom To". Just as a person's right to vote with his feet takes precedence over a State's powers, so a body politic may leave a Federation that has overstepped its bounds.

The Federal government is a creature of its constituent States and the State is a creature of its constituent People.

The Creature is subordinate to the Creator.

Lucifer and his slavery be damned.

FREEDOM

There is no true freedom without a domain upon which men may live as they choose. The key to practical freedom is that men may choose to live among others that share their ecological beliefs. Ecological beliefs include beliefs in cause and effect on human ecologies. Note, this is more profound than merely sharing territory with those “of like mind”. Beliefs about ecological cause and effect are, by definition, at the foundation of all mutually consensual human ecologies. Indeed, such beliefs are the most general definition of religion as they inform one's practice of life in society with others. It seems, then, that theocracy, in this general sense, is inescapably at the foundation of freedom as the consensual domain over which men exercise their beliefs.

And here we find the proper difference between State and Federal powers:

The States provide the diverse domains upon which free men may make a statement with their very lives – voluntarily sacrificing themselves to their strongly held convictions. Each State protects from contamination – free from ecological sin – a domain upon which free men exercise of their free moral agency. “Racism is sin.” “Miscegenation is sin.” “Pornography is sin.” “Hate speech is sin.” “Adultery is sin.” “Gay marriage is sin.” “Homophobia is sin.” “Alcohol is sin.” “Tobacco is sin.” “Marijuana is sin.” “Littering is sin.” “Spanking children is sin.” Such Statements define the State. The Federation's sole legitimate job is to ensure the practicality of secession of individuals and joining together of mutually consenting individuals on their own ecological domains.

It is only in this proper relationship between the State and the Federation that man can find both peace and freedom:

Peace through nonviolent reallocation of State boundaries as well as supporting the assortative migration of peoples, and,

Freedom through globally maximized exercise of free moral agency.

It is only in making practical this sense of “secession” that a Federation may legitimately oppose, as slave-making, the so-called “secession” of territory that denies the right of its people to secede.

The horror that some people have of territorial exclusion is not only horror of true diversity and horror of learning the truth: it is horror of “freedom from” hence horror of freedom itself. It may preen one's moral vanity to publicly display one's emotional commitment to the dogmas of the current theocratic supremacy – State posing as Federation – but it is only with practical secession as an escape from non-consensual theocracy, that there can be true freedom.

SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY

Freedom stands in parallel with truth to uphold the ultimate social good of free scientific society: Social sciences founded on controlled experimentation conducted with informed mutual consent.

The 20th century was plagued by intellectual corruption in the social sciences – corruption universalized by making its way into liberal democratic theocracies posing as Federations. Economics, social psychology, sociology, anthropology – all of the social sciences suffer from the same intellectual handicap of all theocracies: Absence of controlled experimentation to discover causation.

It is no accident that the Protestant Reformation coincided with the emergence of the scientific method. But due to the practical difficulties of redistricting and assortative migration in the Old World, the closest the Protestant Reformation came to establishing a scientific society was the so-called “Laboratory of the States” in the frontier territories of the New World. Moreover, it is no accident that the founders of that Laboratory of the States were as much men of science as men of society. That they did not completely formalize the Laboratory of the States in terms of mutually consenting social experiments with strict border controls is a monumental loss of a historic potential that may, in part, be assigned to ignorance and, in part, to the institution of slavery.

Our present condition is very different. With the increasing world-wide understanding of the scientific method and its value in technology and engineering, we are no longer in the state of ignorance from which founders of the Laboratory of the States suffered. Moreover, with the abolition of slavery during the 1800s, the excesses of the Civil Rights movement and liberal democracy's violation of popular consent with liberalized immigration laws in the 1900s, it is more apparent than ever that abolition of slavery and secession are united by “freedom from”.

Science, as a public activity involving publication and independent replication of results, increasingly recognizes the unity of informed consent and formal statements. Informed consent cannot exist without clear understanding of what is communicated – nor can science. If people subject themselves to social experiments with informed consent, there must be a formal Statement with which they are adequately informed. This Statement corresponds to the State into which they are entering, by mutual consent, with the current members of that State. In the pre-scientific society, the Statement may be thought of as the consensual theocracy's scripture. In the scientific society, the Statement may be thought of as the experimental treatment to which the State's citizens mutually, and revocably (revocation entailing emigration), consent.

As with any laboratory, cost is an important practical matter. In the present instance we must compare the cost of such a laboratory – redistricting and assortative migrations -- not only to the existing cost of nearly 100 million people each decade migrating within the United States in a forlorn flight from government imposed “diversity”, but the risk of civil wars as well as the hijacking of central government by special interests. Even ignoring the fundamental violations of truth and freedom entailed by liberal democracy, the costs of rational redistricting of territory to minimize futile migrations, to minimize public sector rent seeking and to minimize lawless conflict, are small by comparison.

Beyond such gross reductions in cost, there are nuances that must be addressed which take us into the realm of value. What is of scientific value? The answer to this cannot be divorced from the question of human values. Nor can there be a better approximation of “scientific value” than the experiments in which people are willing to invest their lives. Can we assign equal value to all human lives in the optimization of our social laboratory? If we are to achieve a universally accepted principle in support of secession, it would seem so. Upon this definition of “equality” we can found a universal value for truth in which people may live and die according to their beliefs – and in which just war may be waged for freedom. This is the only way out of the Malthusian Trap. There is the possibility that by equally valuing life, unbridled reproductive success among some groups will threaten us with the Malthusian Trap anyway. But if we fail in this, there is more than the possibility or probability, but the near certainty of billions of deaths in universal chaos if not war.

There are the remaining practical questions of natural ecology upon which the boundaries of human ecologies must be founded. There are large questions such as atmospheric and water pollution, which can encircle the biosphere violating all ecologies – questions that cannot be left to the Laboratory of the States. Here epic hypocrisies abound: Those who profess the greatest concern about, say, artificial global warming, most impose, on unwilling nations, global panmixia, while those who profess the greatest conservatism toward central powers are most liberal in their interpretation of the global warming data. No current “leaders” are sufficiently conservative toward artificial global change in the sphere of human relations let alone the biosphere. Science tells us as much about what we don't know as it does about what we know.

CONCLUSION

This essay has primarily addressed the ideology of secession and secondarily its practicality. The practice of secession as foundation of social good must be left as an exercise to the reader knowing this:

Once the ideology of secession is accepted by moral men – men with the humanity to recognize and uphold to the maximum degree practical, the free moral agency of other men – practice will follow. Not even nuclear proliferation yielding a devolution to self-defended microstates can be as powerful as a Federation of moral men who show love to their enemies, indeed the love of the sinner, by helping them find mutually consenting others with which to freely live and thereby demonstrate the consequences of their beliefs, with minimum harm to others.

In this, commitment to free moral agency and truth, is the secession from slavery to free scientific society.

Yoda

2009-05-08T08:56:00.000-07:00

Researching a way to synthesize a rainforest ecosystem, I ran across this reference:

Yoda K.. 1978. Three-dimensional distribution of light intensity in a tropical rain forest of West Malaysia. Malayan Nature Journal 30: 161-177.

Obituary

Kyoji Yoda (1931–1996)

On 11 December 1996 professor Kyoji Yoda passed away suddenly and unexpectedly, and Japan lost a great ecologist and teacher. He certainly was one of the leading Japanese plant ecologists and, internationally, his contributions to that field of science are highly renowned. It is most unfortunate that his valuable participation was terminated by his untimely death.

Kyoji Yoda was born on 6 November 1931 in Nagano, Central Japan. Nagano is a mountainous area with a diverse natural variety: scenic landscapes, beautiful mountain forests and alpine vegetation. He lived in the Nagano Prefecture before entering Chiba University, in the Chiba Prefecture near Tokyo, in 1950. At Chiba, he studied with Professor Makoto Numata, a pioneer in Japanese plant ecology and a stimulating tutor with international scope.

Kyoji Yoda received his B.Sc. degree at Chiba in 1954 and then proceeded to the Graduate School of Osaka City University (OCU), where he studied under Professor Tatuo Kira, another eminent and internationally-oriented plant ecologist. Kira’s inspiring group formed a stimulus for Kyoji Yoda’s creative mind and his interest in applying mathematical tools to nature analysis. Here developed his strong interests in plant population biology and production ecology. Simultaneously his interest in problems concerning nature conservation, already shaped under Numata’s influence, was reinforced. In 1957 Kyoji Yoda received his M.Sc. and in 1966 his Ph.D. degree, both from OCU.

By the time he completed his Ph.D. he already held the position of lecturer at OCU, in 1974 he was promoted to associate professor, and in 1984 he succeeded Professor Kira and became full professor of plant Ecology. He remained at OCU until his retirement in 1995. Subsequently he became professor of Environmental Ecology at the University of Shiga Prefecture. He served on the editorial board of Vegetatio (nowPlant Ecology) from 1990 to 1996.

Quine's Simplification of Structural Realism

2009-01-09T09:42:00.000-08:00

After reviewing Stanford's web page on Ontic Structural Realism, it is becoming more urgent that I try persuade scholars in this area to take more seriously Quine's monumental feat of clearing away semantic underbrush with his description of relata as syntactic sugars for relations.

Quine had the beginnings of a revolution in philosophy by relying on identity-as-substitutivity which, as it turns out, is adequate to describe all of mathematics using nothing but the predicate calculus:

“Chief among the omitted frills is the name. This again is a mere convenience and is strictly redundant, for the following reasons. Think of ‘a’ as a name, and think of ‘F(a)’ as any sentence containing it. But clearly ‘F(a)’ is equivalent to ‘(∃x)( a = x & F(x))’. We see from this that ‘a’ need never occur except in the context ‘a =’. But we can as well render ‘a =’ always as a simple predicate ‘A’, thus abandoning the name ‘a’. ‘F(a)’ gives way thus to ‘(∃x)(A(x) & F(x))’, where the predicate ‘A’ is true solely of the object ‘a’.

“It may be objected that this paraphrase deprives us of an assurance of uniqueness that the name has afforded. It is understood that the name applies to only one object, whereas the predicate ‘A’ supposes no such condition. However, we lose nothing by this, since we can always stipulate by further sentences, when we wish, that ‘A’ is true of one and only one thing:

(∃x)A(x) & ~ (∃x,y)(A(x) & A(y) & ~(x=y) )”

“(This identity sign “=” here would either count as one of the simple predicates of the language or be paraphrased in terms of them.)”

I really think a lot more progress in science, mathematics and philosophy would occur if scholars of "structure" would state their arguments in Quine's syntax.

Minor Victory With Washington State's Republican Party

2008-06-02T15:21:00.000-07:00

You will find four radical resolutions at the end of this article, all of which were submitted to, and the first two of which were passed by the Washington State Republican Party 2008 Convention to become official Washington State Republican Party positions.

The status of these resolutions and their titles:

Official WSRP Position: Constitutional Declarations of War by the House of Representatives
Official WSRP Position: Repeal the 16th Amendment
Suppressed by the McCain machine: Repeal the Federal Reserve Act
Suppressed by the McCain machine: Repeal the 17th Amendment

The story behind their respective fates is illustrative of how the political process works at the state level. I'm going to go into some details that may seem self-indulgent but they are also illustrative of what it actually took to get the first two resolutions adopted as official policy by the Washington State Republican Party. Think of it as a flavor of war story. The devil is in the details...

First, my county's platform adopted a plank similar to "Constitutional Declarations of War by the House of Representatives" and elected me the Skamania County delegate to the Washington State Platform Committee. This was done with a coalition between an amazing turn out to the County Convention of committed local Ron Paul supporters with military veterans, one of which was the convention chair, and two of which were county commissioners. The moribund turnout of McCain Supporters is indicative of the apathy with which he is supported by the grassroots GOP in a county that has exceptionally high military service. Moreover, I think the McCain supporters who _did_ turn out were largely military veterans of Korea, Viet Nam and Iraq, who almost unanimously understood my argument for the declaration of war plank.

Second, at the State convention, you have to understand that Jan and I had to stay in a different location each of the 3 nights we were there and did both moves under "emergency" conditions. Our plan had been to save money by pitching a tent in a $20/night campsite within 10 minutes of the convention -- saving enough money to buy a bigger tent, new sleeping bags and air mattresses. We've camped out in tents on other Ron Paul excursions, however, when we arrived at 8:30pm after 6 hours on the road, we discovered that the reason it was so inexpensive was that the "campsite" was right next to the freeway and right beneath the brilliantly lit RV park sign advertising to freeway traffic. Jan didn't get _any_ sleep and I got just a few hours. Jan used her sleepless hours to do some chores despite being a wreck. One chore was to reserve a hotel room for us for the next 2 nights. In the morning we had to pack everything into the car again before I went to the meeting of the platform committee. We barely got out of our "campsite" by checkout time and I barely got to the platform committee meeting.

At the platform committee meeting, the chairman was prepared to fight off a coup by the grassroots organization of Ron Paul supporters where the Spokane delegation had an entirely new platform drafted and was hoping to have the committee adopt it as the working document rather than the platform that had come out of prior hearings. With only 9 Ron Paul committee members out of 40, it was a fool-hardy plan which was soundly defeated, but prior to the vote I managed to get a commitment out of the chair that the committee would entertain each of the Spokane planks as amendments to the committee's prior document. With the head of the Spokane delegation saying that is what he wanted, I thought a more-or-less "friendly" compromise had been reached and voted with the majority, although other Ron Paul members did not.

Virtually none of the Spokane platform was adopted into the platform.

With work on the platform done, work on resolutions began. We ran across several resolutions from Ron Paul supporters that had merit but were so poorly formed that even the lead of the Spokane delegation had difficulty voting for them. I then asked the chair if the Ron Paul committee members could submit a new set of well-written resolutions for their positions. He agreed, stating that the deadline was 1pm the next day. The poorly written resolutions were unanimously voted down. The chair later stated the fact that the Ron Paul delegates had been willing to compromise caused him to recommend that the committee reciprocate and pass the resolution by the Spokane delegation against USDA-mandated animal identification implants. This was obviously a very important issue for many of the Christians -- especially those who supported farmers in strict sects, such as the Mennonites, who could not in good religious conscience comply with such mandates and were therefore abandoning animal husbandry. It passed.

At the end of that Thursday, we had little to show for our efforts as Ron Paul supporters, but we did at least have some strict language calling for prosecution of employers who knowingly hired illegal aliens, physical border security, and some strong language endorsing English as the official language of the US, with proficiency requirements for citizenship. These measures drew condemnation from a self-proclaimed Ron Paul supporter -- a naturalized US citizen from Taiwan who told the committee they should examine their motives for hidden "racism" and pointing out the absence of other minority racial members. Other Ron Paul supporters tried to explain that multiculturalism at the level of law was dangerous -- that the US needed to have common language for civil operation, and immigration restriction to allow graceful assimilation.

When we adjourned I sought out the Spokane delegation, who had been working closely with the Clark delegation leadership on platform strategy, and brought up the importance of submitting re-written resolutions before the 1pm Friday deadline. The Ron Paul members agreed but seemed quite distracted. So I called the chairman and asked what the procedure was to submit resolutions. He referred me to the WSRP communications director, who then walked me to the physical door where resolutions were to be submitted by 1pm the following day. I followed up with the apparent head of the grassroots organization, informing her of the submission process and requesting that she make this a priority while offering her myself as a resource. She said she was going to get the strategic leadership of the organization together to work on resolutions and that they would contact me if they needed my help.

I then went with Jan to our new motel room and unpacked the car for Thursday night. We had a two room suite with kitchenette for only $60 which was about 20 minutes from the convention. It was nice to finally get some sleep but the expense was somewhat troubling. Once we were settled in I called again to see if there was anything I could do to help and make sure they had the details of the submission process. I was thanked and told I was not needed at that time.

The next morning, I got to the convention floor right as the color guard was presenting the flag. Waiting for the opening ceremonies to be done I then found my county's section where the other delegates were already seated, chiding me gently, "It's about time!" As activity started with the various formalities, I got on my cell phone and tried to find out what had been done to meet the 1pm deadline. I started thinking the grassroots organization had failed to produce the resolutions, despite telling me they were working on some submissions to give to the platform committee and that they would call me if they needed my help.

After more calls, with the 1pm Friday deadline drawing nearer, I discovered that, in fact, no one had actually done any work to draft the resolutions. Up until that time I had been willing to be one of the troops and follow orders as part of a coherent and effective machine for the convention process (which is really a proxy for war). But since I was getting virtually blank stares from the members of the platform committee that supposedly were redrafting and submitting the resolutions, I realized we were in trouble.

I think this is known as "the fog of war" by veterans of real military action.

That's when I left the floor of the convention with my laptop and sat down in the coffee shop to draft as many resolutions as I could in order of priority, as well as I could. I had 2 hours.

However, no one in the executive suite had any idea that they were designated to receive resolution submissions. This despite the fact that I had been instructed by the WSRP communications director in attendance at the Platform Committee meetings to submit to them. So I had to find out what their chain of command was, track down their executive authority on the floor, get him to radio up to his folks to tell them to accept resolutions and provide me with a contingency plan
in the event that communications broke down again.

I knew I had to draft a resolution on behalf of my county's support of the "Constitutional Declarations of War by the House of Representatives" plank, and there were other resolutions I had determined were of the highest priority for the convention given the fact that it was a State convention (making "Repeal of the 17th Amendment" a priority) moreover a State convention in conflict between Ron Paul supporters and John McCain supporters. To complicate matters, at 12:50 I got an instant message from a business associate that, at long last, a major business was showing serious interest in some web software we had been working on for 10 years (10 years with little interest from major companies despite the fact that we had contacts like Bill Gates' replacement at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie). I had to put him off.

Unfortunately, there was no time to submit the resolution text to Kinkos to copy them for the Platform Committee members (as a staffer at the executive office had told me I must do). So, crossing my fingers, I sent them to the WSRP communications director via email with a few minutes to spare and ran upstairs to the executive suite where he had told me to physically submit the resolutions. The floor coordinator was there and he said that I had arrived just prior to the deadline. I told him that I had emailed them to the communications director because there wasn't time to get them printed at Kinko's. He said, "As long as you have evidence you sent them before the deadline, no problem. Printing is one of the jobs of this office." Apparently his staffer who advised me hadn't realized that in addition to accepting resolutions they were also to print copies for all platform committee members.

Anyway, the 4 resolutions made it in with about 3 minutes to spare.

The platform committee meeting was delayed by the fact that the room in which we were to meet was occupied by one of the caucuses going over-time electing delegates to the national convention. After about an hour we obtained the room next door for our meeting but we didn't have a quorum. It was late Friday afternoon and people like to socialize at that time during the convention. I even had one of the more "gung-ho" Ron Paul "kids" telling me he wasn't going to show up because he was tired of the platform committee voting down his resolutions. After admonishing him to stay, he helped round up the other Ron Paul committee members. The chair of the committee was also the chair of one of the more contentious caucuses where they had multiple rounds of voting for national delegates -- so he didn't show up until nearly 2 hours after the appointed time. During this time I had a conversation with the Asian lady about Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with which she was unfamiliar, trying to explain to her the difference between "equality under the law" and having the government force others to accept you in their private lives. As a supposed "Ron Paul supporter" she had an "amazing" amount of difficulty understanding why it was that people might react with even greater hostility to minorities who used the government to pry their way into private business relationships. I finally think I got through to her when I told a little parable: "Imagine a young lady who finds a particular man quite attractive, but this man approaches her with the attitude that says 'You will have sex with me whether you like it or not because I'm so wonderful and you _should_ like to have sex with me. If you hate me for this then this merely proves you're a man hater and need to have a man like me force his way on you." That seemed to get her to empathize a little with "racists".

When the platform committee chair finally did show up, he realized there was no quorum and the odds of getting one were dwindling fast as Friday Night approached. Fortunately, the a quorum of 19 was established shortly thereafter and the chair then made a motion that each resolution be voted Yea or Nay without debate -- reading only the "NOW THEREFORE" clause aloud. It passed.

It was within that streamlined meeting that the resolution "Repeal the 16th Amendment" passed...

BY ONE VOTE.

Although the chair read and actually said he liked the resolution "Repeal the 17th Amendment", it did not pass the committee. He is a professor of history and active at the State level so it is probable his background helped him understand its value.

When I finally got out of the platform committee meeting I discovered that my previously-silenced cell phone had not even vibrated to let me know calls were coming in. When I called Jan, I discovered that she was waiting in the street with the car, unable to get into our motel room because the motel had taken all of our belongings and placed them into storage -- giving our suite to other guests. They disagreed with Jan about how many nights we had reserved. You can imagine the state Jan was in -- and after telling her I would meet her in the lobby of the adjacent hotel, I went to the head of the grassroots organization to inform her that Jan and I were going to have to go home immediately because we had lost our accommodations. She immediately said "Don't go! I have a room for you!" I called Jan back but only got her voice messaging, so I recorded that I had found us a room and that I would be there shortly. I don't know the details but grassroots coordinator thought that we could move into her family's room because they were vacating it, and then went to talk to her husband. The next thing I know he has handed me a cell phone and I'm talking to the reservation agent at their motel about getting our own room -- this one for $75/night. OK, so buying new camping equipment really wasn't that good of an idea after all.

Anyway, I scooped up Jan from the lobby of the hotel and drove her over to our new accommodations. It being Friday night and the situation being so unpleasant I went next door to check out the Indian restaurant and then called her to come over so we could have a nice dinner out on Friday night and try to forget the stress of finding affordable accommodations. This (excellent) dinner of Tandori Chicken and Lamb Curry of course was to cost another $50. It helped quite a bit but the regular coughing of the host and the subsequent gas and intestinal rumbling weren't documented on the menu. I then had to drive to the other motel to collect our belongings which included my CPAP machine -- all of which were packed in disarray -- and transport them back to our NEW accommodations.

Exhausted, we collapsed.

Next thing I know I am waking up on Saturday morning -- at 11am -- the morning of the convention almost over and one hour before motel checkout time.

This wasn't what Jan and I wanted to wake up to.

So we managed, once again, barely before checkout time, to get our things packed into our car -- now filled to the brim in disarray -- and make our way to the convention center which is adjacent to a hotel. I stopped the car in a loading zone for Jan to then drive somewhere and park while I entered the convention all to gather information before making any further decisions. Jan, understandably,
did not immediately jump out of the car and run to the drivers' side as she was still collecting herself after the chaos she'd just experience upon waking from a sound sleep. That's when a valet I shall, for lack of a better name, call "Pedro" came up to me as I was walking to the convention center and started asking me repeatedly "Excuse me, sir, may I help you?" To which I said, "I don't know how." To which he said "You can't park there." To which I said, "My wife is about to drive the car away to park it. She was just dropping me off." Whereupon Pedro quickly walked to Jan and started saying something that I couldn't hear -- but I certainly _did_ hear Jan's response! Pedro said he was going to call the police and wrote our license number down before Jan could get the car out of the loading zone.

For some reason it never crossed my mind to thank Pedro for doing jobs Americans won't do. Wait... I know why: I'm a racist. Yeah, that's the ticket!

Too bad neither Jan nor I used any racial epithets or we might have received complimentary therapy from the state under some law about "hate crimes".

So, trying to put out of my mind the idea of facing Pedro in court over a charge of your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine, I headed to the convention floor. Before arriving at the sergeant at arms, a woman came up to me that I vaguely recognized and very urgently insisted on seeing my badge, saying "You're from the Skamania delegation aren't you?" She was quite upset and started telling me how she was one of the alternates for the Skamania delegation but that there was only one delegate from Skamania currently seated on the floor of the convention -- and, of all things, that delegate was voting with the Ron Paul bloc! After a bit of clarifying conversation, it became apparent delegates leaving the floor for any time were to give their badges to an alternate, any alternate, from their county. I had not done this the prior morning while working on resolutions, nor had I done it that morning when I overslept because I thought there was only one alternate assigned to me and since she had not made it to the convention, there was no reason to hand my badge off! Moreover, the alternate confronting me thought that the other delegates, who had left for home already, were supposed to have given her one of their badges but they had not done so.

Since she was a McCain supporter and I was head of the Ron Paul grassroots effort for my county, this was rather awkward. We went up to the executive office, which had a police officer by now protecting the occupants, and told him we had a credentials problem. He then fetched an official who informed us that our delegates who had already left were "automatic" (not elected as) delegates -- because they were the county chair and representatives to the WSRP from Skamania -- and that automatic delegates could have no alternates. That's when it became even more awkward since the only time the alternate could have been seated was when I failed to give her my badge upon my absence from the floor. I explained to her that I had been under the impression from our county's officials that I had only one possible alternate and that she had not come to the convention, leaving my seat unfilled while I was not on the floor. I told her to wait in the alternates section of the floor while I located the chair of the platform committee to find out when my resolutions would be hitting the floor -- at which time I was under the impression I was obligated to give a 2 minute address to the assembly for each resolution. I had two or three hours, so I decided to seat the McCain supporter alternate for that time. We discovered the ceremony for handing off delegate status involved finding a sergeant at arms and exchanging delegate for alternate badges in his presence with him verifying our identities. I then let her have my seat on the floor to compensate her out of fairness to her as a McCain supporter. She acknowledged that I had not done anything purposely to exclude her and took her seat. I then located a sergeant at arms and told him that I had some resolutions coming later and that I may need his help in recovering my seat. He was a tough -- almost scary looking -- older Marine-type with a McCain badge, who I'll call Deathwish. We had a conversation in which I explained to Deathwish the situation and he seemed to respect my having given up my seat for a McCain delegate and was hence quite helpful whenever I needed him.

Jan and I, both getting weak from lack of food, then went off to grab a quick lunch, but I was called back before we had gotten 2 blocks from the convention center because the other Ron Paul delegate from my county was losing her ride home and wanted to know if we still had room in our back seat so she could stay for the rest of the convention. Unfortunately, our car was now packed to the gills in chaos so I had to not only tell her that she'd have to catch a ride home immediately, but that I would have to return to the floor immediately since her cell phone was my only communications with the McCain alternate, who I would have to retrieve from the floor when time for my floor address approached. Fortunately, Deathwish said he would be glad to act as a runner to retrieve my alternate when the time approached, and Jan and I were able to eat. By this time it was nearly 3:30pm and the convention was scheduled to end at 5pm so we decided to eat some canned tuna and soy lite washed down with orange juice Jan had purchased between meeting Pedro and Deathwish.

Then Jan and I returned to the floor, but this time to the Alternates section -- shared with the registered Guests like Jan. Work on the resolutions was just beginning but with barely an hour to go before time was up for the convention -- and with my "Repeal the 16th Amendment" fairly far back in the package of committee-approved resolutions. I was concerned it wouldn't be considered at all. My concerns were compounded when someone, apparently a Ron Paul delegate, moved to table the approved resolutions and proceed with the resolutions that had been rejected by the platform committee because there were a number of very valuable resolutions that needed to be considered by the floor. Another delegate, addressed by the chair of the convention as "Senator", got up in support of the motion, mentioning specifically that he wanted the floor to over-ride the platform's committee "No" vote on "Repeal the Federal Reserve Act". I couldn't see clearly but from his age and general appearance I suspect he was former US Senator Slade Gorton. That motion was defeated, but was then immediately followed by a motion to pass the entire package of resolutions that had been approved by the platform committee. I thought this might have been one way "Repeal the 16th Amendment" would be adopted as WSRP policy and, indeed, that is precisely what happened -- but not before someone rose in opposition to the motion, citing specifically, the fact that this would make "Repeal the Federal Reserve Act" official WSRP policy! So far my resolutions had been batting a thousand on the controversy scale.

Once the entire platform-committee-approved resolution package, including "Repeal the 16th Amendment", had become official WSRP policy, Deathwish approached Jan and I to inform me that my alternate was now prepared to give my seat back to me. She had had enough. I went out to the foyer and, in the presence of another sergeant at arms, exchanged badges, whereupon I retook my seat as a delegate. There was a lot of other movement on the floor. In addition to my alternate leaving, many other delegates were leaving. We were about to discover there was more going on than just people tiring at the end of the day. Wait for the other shoe to drop...

The normal floor agenda then proceeded to consider the resolutions rejected by the Platform Committee. Expecting I would have to get up in front of everyone and, looking a little like a wild frontiersman, appeal to mainstream GOP delegates. I asked a Ron Paul supporter who was running for US Congress for help in finding someone who could speak in my stead, but he insisted I would be the best to speak. I asked a few others but they agreed. So I resigned myself to having to spend 2 minutes per resolution basically doing as dramatic a reading as I could muster without rehearsing the dry WHEREAS... THEREFORE language of each. As they were down in the pack I expected to have some time -- and possibly not before the convention adjourned.

However, the first motion, again apparently by a Ron Paul supporter, was to jump to the middle of the package of rejected resolutions to reconsider "Constitutional Declarations of War by the House of Representatives". During the ensuing debate, the Convention Chairman gave my name as the author twice, the first time as "Jim Bowery" (did I know this guy from somewhere?) and the next time as "James Bowery". Incredibly, it passed!

This was when the head of the Ron Paul grassroots campaign got up and moved to suspend the rules so that the convention would _not_ adjourn until all business had been completed -- meaning all rejected resolutions had a chance to pass. This would quite possibly have meant the passage of "Repeal the Federal Reserve Act" and "Repeal the 17th Amendment".

It looked like quite a coup was in the offing, because Ron Paul supporters are known for their tenacity compared to supporters of other candidates -- tenacity that can spell the difference between success and victory when outnumbered during surrogate warfare.

Then the other shoe dropped...

The only McCain delegate to the national convention from Clark County -- a guy who looked like a young tough from "The Sopranos" with an extra helping of 'tude (no, I won't call him "Guido" because it doesn't do him justice) got up and moved for a quorum count. After all, so many delegates had left and everyone had seen it happen! The beleaguered convention chair had to admit that there had been a mass exodus and that he no longer knew if a quorum existed. Anyone with a trained eye could see that there were still far more than the required 670-odd delegates required for a quorum, but the chair's eye was not so-trained. So a lengthy counting process ensued wherein each county's chair was to report the number of delegates now seated from their county. But my chairman wasn't even there! How was I supposed to report myself? How many other counties would not be properly counted? Could these uncounted delegates bring the numbers down to the point that the a quorum did not register in the count?

This is where I made my worst mistake of the convention (although I like to comfort myself thinking it wasn't all that bad in its ultimate effect given other circumstances):

I went up to the Convention Chair and told him that although I was only a single person, that there may have been other counties lacking a present chairman, and that therefore a quorum may exist but not be fully counted. He responded that he had heard from others in similar circumstances and said he would take care of it. He then stopped the count, which had been going on for 20 minutes -- running well past 5pm -- and restarted the count using sergeants at arms instead of county Chairmen.

And, the minute the Convention Chair told the sergeant at arms to report their numbers, a mass entrance of delegates occurred -- at least equal to the mass exodus that had previously occurred.

This is what had happened:

The McCain delegates had attempted to stop reconsideration of rejected resolutions by removing themselves from the floor, thereby disestablishing the convention in a loss of quorum. Failing that they would at least make so many seated delegates weary of the monotonous parliamentary machinations that when the motion to suspend the rules to extend the convention finally came to a vote, it would be unable to achieve the required 2/3 majority.

They succeeded in this tactic and the convention was adjourned without further controversial Ron Paul resolutions being adopted as official WSRP policy.

Even so, the passage of the two radical resolutions wrapped up the convention with energized the Ron Paul supporters who had a very enjoyable time marching through the streets of Spokane with their signs chanting "Ron Paul Revolution: Legalize the Constitution".

Minor victories are necessary to maintain morale. Although the Old Media probably won't take the bait and report these radical positions of the WSRP, not even for their sensational "infotainment" value, it is still something that the Ron Paul delegates will have to encourage them as well as keep as fond memories.

THE RESOLUTIONS

Submitted by James A. Bowery, 2008 Skamania County Delegate to the Washington State Republican Party platform committee.

Constitutional Declarations of War by the House of Representatives

WHEREAS, The People must bear the burden of fighting wars, and

WHEREAS, The House of Representatives is the voice of the people, and

WHEREAS, The Founders recognized these realities by granting the House of Representatives the power to declare war, and

WHEREAS, The House is not authorized to delegate, to others, authorities granted it, and

WHEREAS, military actions in Korea, Viet Nam and now the middle east, the House authorized the use of force by the President, in effect delegating to the executive branch the House's authority to declare war, and

WHEREAS, three generations of military personnel have served their nation without the full support of The People in those military actions, now

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Republican Party should support formal declarations of war passed by the House of Representatives and repudiate "authorizations to use force" or any other delegation of war declaration powers to any other body.

********

Submitted by James A. Bowery, 2008 Skamania County Delegate to the Washington State Republican Party platform committee.

Repeal the 16th Amendment

WHEREAS, the Founders created a Federal Government which was not allowed to levy an income tax on its Citizens, and

WHEREAS, it is clear from the debates surrounding the adoption of the 16th Amendment that its original intent was not to burden average families and their small enterprises either monetarily or legally, and

WHEREAS, the reality of the income tax burden on average families and small enterprises has grown to consume a substantial portion of their financial and legal resources, and

WHEREAS, the legitimacy of the government is increasingly called into question by the incomprehensible morass of legislation that inevitably follows from attempts to put into place income tax exemptions that salvage average families and small enterprises, now

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Republican Party should support the repeal of the 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

********

Submitted by James A. Bowery, 2008 Skamania County Delegate to the Washington State Republican Party platform committee.

Repeal the Federal Reserve Act

WHEREAS, the Founders granted Congress the authority over legal tender, and

WHEREAS, Congress is not authorized to delegate, to other bodies, authorities granted it, and

WHEREAS, the Federal Reserve Act delegated, to another body, Congressional authority over legal tender, and

WHEREAS, it is clear from the debates surrounding the establishment of the Federal Reserve that Congress for intended the Federal Reserve to prevent economic crises, and

WHEREAS, the Federal Reserve failed to prevent the Great Depression, and

WHEREAS, the temptations presented by delegating, to another body, Congressional authority, responsibility and therefore accountability over legal tender, has resulted in Federal deficits so great that every child born in the United States starts with a share of national debt so large that it threatens their prospects for economic self-sufficiency, now

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Republican Party should support the repeal of the Federal Reserve Act.

********

Submitted by James A. Bowery, 2008 Skamania County Delegate to the Washington State Republican Party platform committee.

Repeal the 17th Amendment

WHEREAS, the clear intent of the Founders as expressed in the Constitution was a federation of sovereign States granting the central government specific powers, and

WHEREAS, the Founders created a Congress with a House of Representatives to represent the people and a Senate to represent the States, and

WHEREAS, the 17th Amendment removed from the States their representation in Congress, and

WHEREAS, the States are now burdened by Congress with unfunded mandates, and

WHEREAS, the central government is increasingly imposing uniform law on the States under questionable Constitutional authorization, now

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Republican Party should support the repeal of the 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Three Ideas for the Ron Paul For President Campaign

2007-08-29T17:11:00.000-07:00

The following is what I sent to the Ron Paul 2008 campaign when I signed up with their website.

Please consider three ideas:

1) Leverage your Internet power by setting up a direct competitor to freerepublic.com -- the dominant "conservative" website whose patron, Jim Robinson, is openly hostile to Ron Paul.

2) Help retarget the grassroots "banner brigades" to recruit Banner Businesses -- businesses that display Ron Paul signs. See http://wiki.ronpaulpresshub.com/index.php?title=Banner_Businesses

3) List the businesses that have raised money for your campaign in rank order by the amount of money they have raised. Their success in raising money is proof they are good at raising money so it is doubly good advertising for them.

Yeomen As Foundation of Scientific Revolution

2007-01-21T11:14:00.000-08:00

Peter Turney blogs that the heroic theory of scientific development needs to be challenged, since every case of revolutionary scientific breakthrough appears to have occurred independently more than once near the same time. My contention is that there is more to it than that. There is evidence of an independent yeoman class as the foundation of scientific revolution, frequently motivated by the very competition to be first that Turny cites as evidence of the historic inevitability of revolutionary thought. This can be found by looking at the lives of the people Peter chose as exemplars:

Copernicus:
Having left Italy at the end of his studies, he [Copernicus -- JAB] came to live and work at Frombork (Frauenburg). Some time before his return to Warmia, he had received a position at the Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross in Breslaw in Silesia in Germania 1635 map, which he would attend to for many years and only resign for health reasons shortly before his death. Through the rest of his life, he performed astronomical observations and calculations, but only as time permitted and never in a professional capacity.

Leibniz:
The Brunswicks tolerated the enormous effort Leibniz devoted to intellectual pursuits unrelated to his duties as a courtier, pursuits such as perfecting the calculus, writing about other mathematics, logic, physics, and philosophy, and keeping up a vast correspondence. He began working on the calculus in 1674; the earliest evidence of its use in his surviving notebooks is 1675. By 1677 he had a coherent system in hand...

Newton:
in 1665, the University closed down as a precaution against the Great Plague. For the next 18 months Newton worked at home on calculus, optics and the law of gravitation.

Wallace:
After the death of his brother William in 1845, Wallace left his teaching position to assume control of his brother's firm... In 1848, Wallace, together with another naturalist, Henry Walter Bates (whom he had met in Leicester), left for Brazil to collect specimens in the Amazon Rainforest... In 1855, Wallace published a paper, On the Law Which has Regulated the Introduction of Species...

Darwin:
He was the fifth of six children of wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin... In 1827, his father, unhappy at his younger son's lack of progress, shrewdly enrolled him in a Bachelor of Arts course at Christ's College, University of Cambridge to qualify as a clergyman, expecting him to get a good income as an Anglican parson.[14] However, Darwin preferred riding and shooting to studying.[15] Along with his cousin William Darwin Fox, he became engrossed in the craze at the time for the competitive collecting of beetles,[16] Fox introduced him to the Reverend John Stevens Henslow, professor of botany, for expert advice on beetles. Darwin subsequently joined Henslow's natural history course and became his favourite pupil, known to the dons as "the man who walks with Henslow"... Once exams drew near, Darwin focused on his studies and received private instruction from Henslow... he returned home to find a letter from Henslow who had recommended Darwin as a suitable (if unfinished) naturalist for the unpaid position of gentleman's companion to Robert FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle which was to leave in four weeks on an expedition to chart the coastline of South America. His father objected to the planned two-year voyage, regarding it as a waste of time, but was persuaded by his brother-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, to agree to his son's participation.

JAB: Moreover, this has not escaped the attention of public policy thinkers widely ranging from Martin Luther King Jr (in his last published words) to Charles Murray (of the right wing American Enterprise Institute), in their arguments for a citizens' dividend which places all citizens in an independent yeoman class.

First Martin Luther King, Jr.:

New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.

In 1879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote, in Progress and Poverty:

"The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously increased."
...
Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life and in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he know that he has the means to seek self-improvement.

And now the recent work of the AEI's Charles Murray:

"Murray suggests eliminating all welfare transfer programs at the federal, state, and local levels and substituting an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older. In Our Hands describes the financial feasibility of the Plan and its effects on retirement, health care, poverty, marriage and family, work, neighborhoods and civil society."

And while I'm at it I may as well post something of my own 1992 proposal for a citizen's dividend (which I called "market democracy"). And yes, I came up with it without having read King (let alone Murray who had not yet published his):

"With the exception of basic functions of government and the pay
down of debt, the government budget should be dispersed to
citizens as cash, rather than being spent in government programs
or even limited in the form of vouchers. This is "market
democracy" in which the citizens and their markets, rather than
central planning and politics, influence the selection of goods
and services to be capitalized and provided."

Removing Lewontin's Fallacy From Hamilton's Rule

2005-11-24T10:40:00.000-08:00

Lewontin's Fallacy has weakened the foundation of behavioral ecology by ignoring genetic correlation structures that allow us to accurately discern, and rationally weight the significance of, phylogenetic groups such as clans, subspecies or races.

It is my hope that providing a definition of "particle", as correlation structures of nucleotides, will clarify the application of Price's equations in W. D. Hamilton's paper Innate Social Aptitudes of Man and a bioinformatic direction will emerge for behavioral ecology. As this direction emerges many critiques of behavioral ecology theory will be exposed as semantic confusion arising from the historic definitions of heritable particles -- such as genes or alleles -- definitions that lack sufficient bioinformatic rigor.

This will be hard work. For the usual reasons, we cannot expect government-funded scientists to be very cooperative.

Behavioral ecology, by focusing on sums of differences in individual genes rather than focusing on the differences in phylogenetic correlation structure of genes, seems to be suffering from a kind of "Lewontin's Fallacy", as described by A. W. F. Edwards in his paper by that name.

The question is, how can we generalize behavioral ecology's equations to look at the correlation structures so that Hamilton's equations fall out as a special case?

Another way of asking this might be: How can we generalize the definition of "gene", or more accurately "allele", so that what we now think of as alleles are degenerate correlation structures?

In "Innate Social Aptitudes of Man" Hamilton introduces us to his concept of group selection he writes:

Consider a population consisting of a mixture of particles, and suppose we are interested in the frequency of a certain kind of particle G. Suppose the particles are grouped.

What are the most fundamental particles of all -- from which all other groups of particles are composed? The answer seems to be nucleotides rather than "genes" for not even "genes" are "atomic".

So here's an approach to our new bioinformatic sociobiology:

First, look at populations of genomes as sets of (nucleotide,locus) pairs. This is a standard way of viewing sequenced genomes within bioinformatics.

Next, find all the correlation structures that are nearly perfect across the population. Those are "alleles" in the current molecular biological sense.

From this perspective it should be obvious that there is no fundamental distinction between alleles and other correlation structures. We can't ignore the other structures just because they have a (Pearson's correlation coefficient) r<1 -- particularly where we can impute them as being due to phylogeny.

Rewriting Hamilton's Rule, as represented in Innate Social Aptitudes of Man, in terms of these correlation structure "particles" will yield identical predictions to current theory if we restrict ourselves to r~1 but very different predictions if we allow ourselves access to the lesser bioinformatic correlation structures.

I've now put forth a proposal for how one can clarify the definition of heritable "particles" which should provide more rigor to definitions of "gene" such as Richard Dawkins provided in "The Extended Phenotype":

'that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency' ... 'any hereditary information for which there is favorable or unfavorable selection bias equal to several or many times its rate of endogenous change'

...replacing phrases like "appreciable" and "several or many" with actual bioinformatically-derived numbers. Beyond that this reformulation also provides bioinformatiac numbers for correlation structures other than the allele, such as those referenced by Edwards and as are being discovered in bioinformatic projects such as the International Hapmap Project.

Top Ecological Correlations With IQ: -Blacks, +Nordics, -Binge Drinking

2005-11-23T13:52:00.000-08:00

"United States or American” and “Unclassified or not reported” as US Census “nation of origin” categories are pretty much the same category. People who don’t classify themselves could choose either of these as their “nation of origin”. This may mean we’re looking at a proxy for southern blacks so it isn’t suprising that this is the most negative ecological correlation with IQ.
“Swedish" and “Finnish” are Nordic “nations of origin” so their position as the highest positive ecological correlation with IQ matches the known (although slight*) correlation between latitude and average intelligence for Europe (Source: Greek IQ by Dienekes Pontikos) and confirms my suspicion that a big reason the motion picture industry casts blond males in negative roles is a resource competition from Jews—specifically for high IQ niches.
The negative association between alcohol binging and IQ is interesting but the explanations are not quite obvious. Are we dealing with fetal alcohol syndrome? Or is it the fact that among the highest ecological correlates of binge drinking is the presence of blacks in the State and blacks generally test at lower IQs? And could low-IQ account for binge drinking prevalence?

*I should caution that the European correlation is not statistically significant by itself (r=.15 df=19). Significance may be imputed, however, by looking at the US data, which does show this correlation at a highly significant level, and the fact that any correlation among nations may appear lower due to differences in measurement/sampling between institutions. The positive correlation with latitude may be due, as Dienekes points out regarding the higher variation in IQ with lower latitude, to a more heterogenous population present in more southerly climates.

Preservation of the Hawaiian Ethny

2005-07-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

As previously noted, Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (hereafter "Hawaiians") are the only minority group that is being killed in the Iraqi war out of proportion to their numbers in the United States census. Indeed, while other minority groups are being killed significantly below their proportions, Hawaiians are being killed more than 5 times more than their proportion. This wildly exceeds the white overkill which is 1.14 times their proportion.

This alone should raise the priority of preserving the Hawaiian ethny, but there are other intriguing features of the Hawaiians. One feature most particularly worthy of note: Herskovits, M.J. (1930). "The Anthropometry of the American Negro". New York: Columbia University Press, ranked Hawaiians as having the largest cranial capacity of any racial or geographic group. This sort of research -- ranking ethnies by brain size -- is quite taboo subsequent to WW II, but it is so due to supposed support for white supremacy. Are we supposed to believe Hawiians are "white"? A few members of the LDS might classify them so but this is hardly a case for white supremacy. Cranial capacity is a controversial biometric but, it is clearly a most fascinating one. Perhaps Herskovits even mismeasured cranial capacity due to sampling error or due to the way he calculated it. Nevertheless, Hawaiians appear at an extrema of a human biometric, as well as the social metric of wartime casualty risk, and are quite limited in their population.

There are undoubtedly many other fascinating dimensions to the Hawaiian ethny that could be describe but these alone are sufficient to raise the priority given to their recent call for greater self-determination.

Given that Hawaiians have less sovereignty than other indigenous ethnies of the United States, and those ethnies have reservations set aside for them -- albeit with limited self-determination -- it makes quite a bit of sense to set aside one or more land areas for a Hawaiian reservation. Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle supports the call for greater Hawaiian self-determination so it seems there may be an opportunity for the exploitation of the recent Supreme Court decision recognizing greater local authority over decisions concerning eminent domain, for the preservation and greater self-determination of the Hawaiian ethny.

US Whites Overkilled, Minorities Underkilled In Iraq War

2005-06-28T15:27:00.000-07:00

The numbers are in. Young white men are being killed out of proportion to their numbers in the general population in the Iraq war. Young minority men, with the notable exception of Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders, are being killed in the war less than their proportion.

Race	US Percent 20-25 Year Old Males	US Percent Iraq War Deaths
American Indian or Alaska Native	1.1%	0.9%
Asian	3.7%	2.0%
Black or African American	14%	11%
Hispanic or Latino	16%	11%
Multiple races, pending, or unknown	3.0%	1.2%
Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander	0.2%	1.1%
White	63%	72%

Hello!

2005-06-28T14:25:00.000-07:00

Hello, I'm Karl Hallowell and I'd like to thank Jim Bowery for hosting me on his site. While anyone who can type comprehensible
sentences, is qualified to blog, I bring an unusual and hopefully useful outlook.
I currently am about half way
through a PhD in math (a big "thank you" to UC Davis for supporting my academic efforts).
The general subject is mathematical physics with a narrow focus on particular quantum field theory
systems. Maybe, if there's interest, I can talk about that later.

I also have worked in IT as a coder for Hewlett Packard for a couple of years and dabbled in amateur space rocketry.
Finally, I have long participated in the Foresight Exchange, a reputation-based
betting market on future events in science, politics, business, and global events. In the process, I have become
roughly the second or third highest player on that site (depending on how you measure it and
on how well my near competitors are faring at the time). That last part qualifies me as an amateur (since I'm not
paid) futurologist, for better or worse. And I have to say, futurology is much cleaner now than in the days of chicken
entrails. So I bring experience from both academia and business, plus a few interesting hobbies.

I prefer to assume as little about reality as possible, but of course, there are
hidden and implied assumptions underlying many of my thoughts and opinions. Also, I will commit errors on occasion. So buyer beware! I probably will range over
many topics from scientific discoveries or engineering breakthroughs to the vagaries of politics, culture, and economics.
Please post feedback either as a comment (I plan to always enable comments) or email.What can I provide that interests you?

SCOTUS Eminent Domain Decision Subtly Revolutionizes Geopolitics

2005-06-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post reports that:

Cities may bulldoze people's homes to make way for shopping malls or other private development, a divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday (Kelo v. New London), giving local governments broad power to seize private property to generate tax revenue.

Aside from the fact that it is big news anytime the Federal government forgoes a chance to wrest power from localities, this particular ruling has subtle but profound geopolitical ramifications. There is a fundamental tension in geopolitics between two competing principles:

Self-determination vs
Territorial integrity

Recent geopolitical fashion, driven largely by the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, has subordinated self-determination to territorial integrity. Specifically, territorial boundaries may not be changed in service of self-determination of minority groups or even majority groups. Self-determination has been limited to mean the ability of residents of a territory, whatever their background, beliefs or preferences, to impose their will on other residents of that territory. To address the objection that this results in tyranny, a long, ambiguous and, in practice, selectively enforced list of "human rights" has been declared by the United Nations -- rights that are supposed to prevent tyranny. Part of the rhetoric for this sort of territorial integrity is the prevention of forced migrations.

By allowing eminent domain compensation to eject residents from their homes in service of other private uses, Kelo et al v. City of New London states that civil authorities may find it necessary to force the migration, with just compensation, of some of their private citizens, for the benefit of other private citizens, so long as the greater public good is served.

The logical consequence of this is that pressure will build allow changes in borders to support the self-determination of displaced peoples. If this happens, it will dramatically reshape geopolitics for the better since self-determination will no longer be an empty phrase hiding tyranny of the majority beneath a sophistic laundry-lists of so-called "human rights" -- territorial boundaries will be changed to uphold self-determination of those displaced with just compensation, as well as those who stay.

Blond Men As "Fair" Game

2005-06-19T20:37:00.000-07:00

Steve Sailer did it. He broke the silence about Hollywood's hatred of blond men in his most recent VDARE article "Blond Bad Guys—Hollywood’s Other Obsession wherein he observes:

Exactly why Hollywood hates blond men almost as much as it loves blond women is not clear.

As a heterosexual blond boomer male I can tell you a lot of reasons why:

Its War: Nordic men are good at it. Just look at what the Norwegians did to the Germans when they came for the women. Look at what the Finns did when the Russians came for their women. Going back a bit further in history, look at what the Vikings did to the rest of Europe when the Christians came for their women. And look what the Goths did when the Romans came for their women. The only way to make blond men submissive is to dishonor them and there's no better way to dishonor them than to take a weird technology that bypasses the critical faculties and projects life-like images directly to the amygdala where normal responses of outrage are short-circuited. This didn't start with Hollywood of course -- stage productions have been doing this sort of thing for a lot longer. Moreover its quite likely that it was no coincidence that Iceland adopted Christianity and outlawed Holmganga within a decade of each other. The normal response of these men to having their honor besmirched is to challenge the varlet to single combat to the death. Remove that from them and they are far less of a problem for civil authorities and far more likely to have a belly full of hate when needed for mass warfare by those same "Christian" authorities.
Its Women: When you have an essentially polygynous culture -- especially one that has a low male mortality rate due to avoidance of combat roles -- looking around for options -- for what farmers call "multiplier herds" -- what better place to look than at the women of the men you've made submissive? This has also been going on for a long time but the baby boom generation was party time for the urbane elites. Here we had an historically rural ethny, the first generation of which:
- Both:
  - With no substantial connection to their family's farming heritage and therefore critically reliant on income for subsistence necessities of food and shelter.
  - Deprived of the cradle-to-grave job security (that seduced their GI parents away from their farming heritage) and therefore unable to acquire a secure source of money.
- Subjected to the polygynist's triple dream of:
  - Sexual liberation.
  - Feminism.
  - Gay liberation (for the other guy).

There had never been a greater opportunity for erotic imperialism in the history of humanity and, given diseases like AIDS, may never be again. As always, there was just one big problem -- how to get the men who aren't yours to submit.

Moreover, during this same era there was a ramp up of ethnic-based sexual slavery in the US prison system targeting blond men. Aside from the Human Rights Watch's admission that whites are preferred target for prisoner rape it is a not-too-surprising fact that, among whites, blond men are the most targeted for sexual slavery by "minority" ethnic gangs (that are the ethnic majority in most prisons). You might say they are "fair" game. Every time a blond man sits down to sign a tax return or do anything that supplies the government with legitimacy, he signs away his honor, and very humanity, so long as the government's authority is tainted by this sort of extortive threat.

Fundamentally, what we are seeing in reactions of much of the elite to blond men is similar in character to what Steven Spielberg portrayed in "Schindler's List" where a German guard goes haywire and starts picking off captive Jews with his rifle due to his hysterical reaction to his own moral depravity.

At some point, if you are part of a machine that is committing enough short-sighted self-serving crime and you wake up to that fact, you have a choice: you can either untie your victim and let him go or you can kill him and hope no one cares nor is the wiser.

We're now to the point that if someone like me, a man whose father left a Quaker meeting to fight the Germans before Pearl Harbor, desires secession based on genetic heritage -- he is automatically and aggressively attacked as "supremacist". Its clear why this is going on. The aggressors are realizing they have committed demographic rape and are afraid to let the victim go.

Ignoring the 800lb Polygynous Ashkenazi Gorilla In the Room

2005-06-07T12:09:00.000-07:00

In Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence G. Cochran, J. Hardy and H. Harpending write:

A selective force that only affects a tiny fraction of the population can never be strong enough to cause important evolutionary change in tens of generations.

Yes it can.

Our intrepid scientists have failed to recognize the 800lb alpha gorilla in the room:

Polygamy

There is extensive evidence of Jewish polygamy, or more precisely -- polygyny, throughout history up to and even after the proscription by Rabbi Gershom circa 1000AD. Moreover the ecologically imposed monogamy of northern Europe had long since given way to socially imposed monogamy of Christianity by the time the Ashkenazim definitively appear some hundreds of years before Gershom. The reason for this change from ecological to social imposition of monogamy can be easily seen in the change from monogamy to polygyny that characterizes the transition from hunter gatherer to agricultural societies: Caloric availability of agriculture removes the ecological restraints on polygyny.

How much more does the presence of urban centers, the specialized habitat of the Ashkenazim, concentrate caloric availability and hence the ecological support for polygyny?

The answer: For elites -- at least an order of magnitude.

Grain stores for transport and trade are concentrated most in urban centers hence the opportunity for elites to benefit from caloric availability far more than even neolithic farmers such as the Bantu's displacing the Saan and other hunter gatherers with a polygynous culture. (See Destro-Bisol G, Donati F, Coia V et al: Variation of female and male lineages in Sub-Saharan populations: the importance of sociocultural factors. Mol Biol Evol 2004; 21: 1673– 1682.)

Is it known what the harem sizes tended to be prior to the Ashkenazim proscription on polygynous practices?

Is it known over what time the Ashkenazim practiced polygyny among northern Europeans?

Is it known that they actually ceased practicing de facto polygyny (we must not lightly discount routes to fertility other than marriage) when they said? Although it is easy to accuse indigenous northern Europeans of mere hysteria, a common theme in antisemitism has been concern about one-way gene flow out of the Ashkenazim while maintaining the Ashkenazim lineages. How do we verify that this was mere hysteria rather than a reaction to de facto polygyny among the Ashkenazim?

Fortunately, we don't need to engage in debate of these questions -- we can answer them with a generalization of the technique used by Michael J. Wade and Stephen M. Schuster in Estimating the Strength of Sexual Selection from Y-Chromosome and Mitochondrial DNA Diversity (Evolution, 58(7), 2004, pp. 1613–1616). The generalization revolves around the fact that we know the mutation rate for the Y-Chromosome is high enough that we have reasonable temporal resolution on when various mutations appeared. From that we can have some idea of what the reproductive harem sizes were of the Ashkenazim elites through various points of time.

There are two questions left:

Who has the most detailed collection of Ashkenazim mtDNA and Y-Chromosome data?
Are those who have this collection, themselves Ashkenazim hence in a problematic ethnic position for doing this study?

Salter's fitness taxonomy of ideologies

2005-06-05T09:14:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite books is Frank Salter's "On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration". People interested in various ideologies should look at Salter’s graphics starting on page 170 which show the “fitness portfolios” of those ideologies. I provide a tabular representation of those graphics here. The following columns are labeled S, O, E and H which stand for Self, Offspring, Ethny and Humanity respectively. The value in each column is the relative level of investment from 0 to 9, with * meaning “not quite 0”:

SOEH Ideology
1108 Radical Christianity
4105 Communism
5103 Humanism
9100 Capitalism
721* Universal Nationalism
4240 National Socialism
721* Multiculturalism for Minorities
7201 Multiculturalism for Majorities

Salter's argument is that "Universal Nationalism" is an evolutionarily stable strategy and is desirable from the basic principle that perpetuation of identity is desirable.

PS: I don’t think I agree with Salter that the ideology of multiculturalism for minorities is evolutionarily stable. Multiculturalism demands that majorities give up territories to minorities until there is some definition of "diversity" achieved within those territories. Moreover, minorities are encouraged to dispense with broader concerns until they have achieved "parity" in all territories.

In effect, under multiculturalism, these minorities are sanctioned aggressors—successful aggressors at that. They are to make disproportionate investments in their ethny by harming humanity for the higher goal of multiculturalism. I would put it at something more like:

SOEH Ideology
832- Multiculturalism for Minorities

Where ‘-’ represents “defection against” or a zero-sum game where resources are acquired from.

Likewise, I’d differ from Salter in his estimates of multiculturalism for majorities:

SOEH Ideology
51-5 Multiculturalism for Majorities

In other words, multiculturalism demands that majorities invest: as individuals like humanists, as parents like capitalists, as ethny like defectors (like minorities defect toward humanity) and as humans like communists.

An archetypical multiculturalist majoritarian is Bill Gates, who is living a reasonable lifestyle for a billionare but still relatively austere, leaving a minimum inheritance to his children, defecting against his ethny (via his public positions advocating global panmixia and H-1b visas) and giving away his entire fortune to humanity.

Trust-Inducing Aerosal Drug

2005-06-02T00:18:00.000-07:00

The BBC reports that oxytocin, a natural brain hormone, has been used via nasal spray to create trusting behavior during simulated negotiations between "investors" and "trustees" during a Swiss study. It dramatically increases investor trust but doesn't affect trustee behavior. Another researcher points out that while many may fear politicians may spray their rallies with the substance, the reality is release of the hormone by well crafted stimuli may be behind much of the current techniques used by marketing firms. Interestingly it doesn't seem to affect investors when the trustee is a computer.

They claim autism may be treated with this drug. I am highly skeptical. While this drug affects the amygdala, which is also implicated in autism, the asocial behavior of autism seems less to do with critical thinking getting in the way of social trust than to do with destruction of the amygdala's function. The amygdala is the organ that shrinks the most upon castration of adult males, and its development during adolescence is debilitated in autists. Autists seem to lack a sense of territoriality -- and they rarely if ever sire children (most are male). Oxytocin may create more problems than it solves for autists.

What I find intriguing is the possibility that groups that have lived in diaspora among others may have evolved mechanisms for manipulating oxytocin secretions to which they are relatively immune. It would make perfect sense to do so. They may have even evolved pheromonal secretions that stimulate, simulate or actually are oxytocin aerosals such as those studied by the Swiss researchers. How do various ethnic groups rate on scales of "trust" of others?

Censorship of Tokamak Fusion History

2005-01-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

There has been a serious incident of censorship on Wikipedia concerning a vital primary document about the history of fusion power research and development.

Two of the three founders of the Tokamak program have come out against the Tokamak and one of the founders circulated a letter to all of the plasma physics labs as well as to the relevant Congressmen, stating categorically that the Tokamak program was never real -- it was just a vehicle for raising funding so that other more hopeful ideas could be tried.

I scanned the original letter and presented a link to it as an aspect of the fusion power article. This is primary source material -- not original research -- from one of the foremost authorities, indeed one of the fathers of the US fusion energy program. The nothing-better-to-do-with-their-times censored it and quite honestly I just don't have the time, energy or patience to bother with a reversion war with the bottom feeders at wikipedia.