Friday 29th of March 2024

the relative optimist in some of us...

mealtime

More of the same…  


Sciences versus religions…

Some scientific lunatics, like Michael Pravica to name one, think that religions and sciences go hand in hand… They don’t. Sciences and religions are philosophically unrelated to the point of opposing each others. The believers-pseudo-scientists are confused about the recipe of the cosmic pudding. 

Sciences are universally relative in their investigations, while religions are NOT universal but demand absolutes

God is an invention of our ignorance, thus religions have no relationship with reality. Some religions relate to each others through hatred of each others, mostly because they are resentful of sharing their Abrahamic origins… You know the ones: "our god is the only one". For sciences, religions are worse than weeds and pests. 

Lucky, we have many bright scientists who do not seem to push god down our throat, as they ignore the concept of god entirely in their sciences.

For example, look at Jim Al-Khalili... He is a theoretical physicist, an author and a broadcaster. He has written a few books including:

 

The World According to Physics

 


Shining a light on the most profound insights revealed by modern physics, Jim Al-Khalili invites us all to understand what this crucially important science tells us about the universe and the nature of reality itself. The book begins by introducing the fundamental concepts of space, time, energy, and matter, and then describes the three pillars of modern physics quantum theory, relativity, and thermodynamics showing how all three must come together if we are ever to have a full understanding of reality.

 


Using wonderful examples and thought-provoking analogies, Al-Khalili illuminates the physics of the extreme cosmic and quantum scales, the speculative frontiers of the field, and the physics that underpins our everyday experiences and technologies, bringing the reader up to speed with the biggest ideas in physics in just a few sittings. Physics is revealed as an intrepid human quest for ever more foundational principles that accurately explain the natural world we see around us, guided by core values such as honesty and doubt in the search for truth. The knowledge discovered by physics both empowers and humbles us, and still, physics continues to delve valiantly into the unknown
.


Jim has also written fiction which is designed to be thought provoking:

 

 

Sunfall

 


2041 and the world as we know it grinds to a halt. Our planet seems to be turning against itself — it would appear that the magnetic field, that protects life on Earth from deadly radiation from space, is failing . . . Desperate to quell the mass hysteria that would surely follow, world governments have concealed this rapidly emerging Armageddon. But a young Iranian hacktivist stumbles across the truth, and it becomes a race against time to reactivate the earth's core using beams of dark matter.

 


As a small team of brave and brilliant scientists battle to find a way of transforming theory into practice, they face a fanatical group intent on pursuing their own endgame agenda: for they believe mankind to be a plague upon this earth and will do anything, commit any crime, to ensure that the project fails... And so bring about humanity's end.


https://www.jimal-khalili.com/

Interestingly, Al Khalili who was born in Baghdad, Iraq, is generously giving the credit of the solution to a young Iranian scientist. The deadly endgame does not mention god, but one can guess that the emerging Armageddon (a stupid religiously defined adventure as the end of times) can spur the spirits of religious mobs who for too many years since Emperor Constantine have been part of the ruthless game of power and of leadership delusions. I have not read Jim's book yet, but as an amateur wordsmith/cartoonist who has done his own escapism, I can sense a possibility. It’s pessimistic, yet observed and gauged.

 

 

Humans are not born “nice”. We cry, we fight for our survival. We demand food. Lucky, our social order, which has been wonky for years and controlled by delusions, tends to give us a notion of being good in order to avoid pain through reward. It works relatively until some catastrophe faces us. It’s a question of numbers of who can lead to maintain good versus the number of ruthless bods. It is also UNCERTAIN. I think that despite this foray into catastrophe, Al Khalili is an OPTIMIST.  He trusts most humans can use their understanding abilities to learn good and reject delusions — to improve their relative future without destroying the planet.


In the trough of pessimism, there is Rod. He is not a scientist. He is a believer and he is a pessimist. He admits it himself:

You can subscribe to The Masculinist here; it’s a sophisticated discussion of manhood, culture, and Christianity. In the new one, Issue 47, Renn writes, in part:


Dreher is frequently accused, with some fairness, of being excessively gloomy. 


That’s fair, and more than fair: it’s really insightful. Renn made me reflect on the sources of my own pessimism. Might have taken two years of therapy to get to where Renn got with those grafs.


I would only add to Renn’s catalog of my own path my disgust with the Republican Party and movement conservatism during the second George W. Bush administration, when I came to terms with the Iraq War, and how we got there. As I’ve said here many times, I had to reckon with my own intellectual complicity with that project. I lost faith in the party and the movement, and came to doubt my own judgment.


You want to know why I freak out over the Christian conservatives telling themselves and the world that God spoke to them and said that Trump is going to be president after January 20, and calling them to rally to Trump’s side? I’ve never been the sort of person who says “God told me” this or that, but on the Iraq War, I was the kind of man who was morally certain that I was right, and that all those who disagreed with me were either cowards or fools. [UPDATE: This, I should clarify, is why I lost faith in my own judgment back then. It wasn’t taking the wrong side in the war, like you feel when you’ve backed the wrong political candidate, or picked the wrong horse. It was the deep certainty I had that the cause was so just that it was not possible for anyone to disagree in good faith.]


Mostly, though, Iraq deeply damaged my faith in governing elites, and in the GOP, which I thought was the realistic party, the hard-headed, unsentimental party. So, by the way, did the 2008 financial crash. Both Republicans and Democrats, across both the Clinton and G.W. Bush administrations, gave the financial industry what it wanted, and created the conditions for the crash. I don’t trust these people. Still don’t.



https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/tragic-sensibility-benedict-option-live-not-by-lies-little-way-of-ruthie-leming-pessimism/

Rod has long been confused between religious conservatism (he professes to be a Christian "in Orthodoxy") and political conservatism. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME and it seems Rod is discovering this to his chagrin. He is possibly annoyed (let’s say sinfully pessimistic) about his adopting the Republican conservatism as if this political philosophy had been full of moral fibres. There are none in there, except for the adoption of some moral tenet to look rightful and catch voters, WITHOUT APPLYING ANY OF THOSE TO THE ULTIMATE DECISIONS that usually lead to war. Politics is the art of appearing righteous, while being somewhat deceitful. We tackle this illusion daily on YD (yourdemocracy.net.au) from various (dare I say soup-kitchen philosophical) angles. 

The main angles of politics are power and MONEY. That is to say that politics is the art of trying to coat money with values — including moral values — to gain power. Politics are as ridiculous as making a set of square wheels for a submarine, but we fall for the trick.

So, Socrates died in vain because we did not pay enough attention. Jesus died in vain because we turned him into a god. That latter story has been used as the underlying legend to construct a religious fishing expedition for believers — mostly poor sods for solace and kings for control. At least, the story of Socrates was more feasible and more human. He had publicly rejected the notion of gods and the boffins of the state who had carefully cultivated their power around divine rights to rule did not like that.


Around Socrates, we have mentioned the earlier relativists such as Protagoras of Abdera in from socrates to quantum physics...

Michael Pravica, an associate Professor of Physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is also an Orthodox Christian. As a religious fanatic, he stinks as a scientist... On the 16th of December 2020 Pravica wrote "Who owns Nature?” on the Pravda (communist?) website. Reading on, one could think that Pravica was worried about “overpopulation”, yet he was worried that humans are destroying the work of god. yes we are “destroying nature”, but nature isn’t the work of god… Here is Pravica:


In my opinion, the very fact life evolved on this planet (and probably on many others) was planned from the start — calculated and fine-tuned by our Creator and on His time scale (billions of years), not just from the “accidentalism” that many incorrectly interpret as evolution.
As far as we know, we are the only species that unnaturally seeks the divine (i.e., there is no biological reason for believing in God).


This is muddled mud. Pravica even use Albert Einstein’s “belief in god” as a truth-plank  Excuse me, Albert was an agnostic at best and possibly a secret atheist, who cultivated the god-botherers for cash. In the Pravda article, Pravica goes:

 


When I was growing up in an unincorporated area of Des Plaines, Illinois, I used to walk to my high school (Maine Township High School North) before it closed and was subsequently used for filming the Breakfast Club movie.  As the crow flies, it was a short distance (less than one mile), and I was able to walk through a neighbor's yard on the edge of our "dead end" and unique neighborhood, through some open fields and through the track field on to school. 

Today, that area is all fenced off and largely developed with apartments and townhomes blocking my formerly traveled path.  What would take me 10 minutes to get to school now would require more like 1/2 hour.  And so it goes with much of my old extended suburban neighborhood.  You can't even take a walk and enjoy God's wonderful natural forested beauty without people wondering why you are in "their" neighborhood.  

 

Yes the word “god" has crept in this sauce… And not any god, but the Christian god of course, as if He (god is male) was universal… After a wandering through the thicket and bushes, Pravica gets lost in the godly thing...


God did not create the world for us to "own" it let alone destroy it.  He created it to sustain our momentary existence in this universe and to literally enjoy the fruits of His labor which He shares with all of us - not just a select few.  From a Western perspective, God owns everything (if you want to look at it that way) including His children. He and He alone decides what we will ultimately receive as an inheritance - not Bill Gates, not George Soros, not Ted Turner, not Mark Zuckerberg and not the host of other ridiculously wealthy "elites."  Monsanto did not create the miracle of life.  It only tinkered with it like Dr. Frankenstein tinkered with dead body parts to "make" something "new."  God created life.  He created the universe that produced life as an eigenstate.  We are His "intellectual" "property" if you will.

All of us have a God-given right to live on and sustain ourselves from this planet - not just the wealthy elites who are trying to steal our life-sustaining resources and control all life on Earth.
 

 

 

These are commendable feelings but god-given stuff? Says who? The monkey in us? This is where Christian scientists are idiots. They bypass EVOLUTION in one easy swoop: god’s creation. That's rubbish of course but when one is deluded with godly brain-damage, one is hooked on the teat of religious redemption.


There is no redemption in the natural world — but one can escape danger by whatever means and have second chances. This can help develop a memory of caution… Overall, there is but a will to survive despite the dangers around. The will to survive is born of chaos, in this game of chances in which the universe provides the elements and the possible patterns, themselves evolved from the big bang, if ever. The amino-acids, the enzymes, the proteins, the RNA, the DNA assemble in the evolution of organised chaos — a chaos in which molecules can become generators of similar molecules. Here, early in the soup of life, developed the wars of the proteins. This is when it became easier to duplicate by stealing others’ proteins. Not only content with this robbery, “evolution” is also a game of chance, inasmuch that speciation and variegation lead to survival of more adapted specimens, not by decided (nor godly!) improvements but by accidental eventuation that suits the prevailing environmental conditions that change according to cosmic and earthly mechanics. 

We have chosen democracy a means to give all of us an equal chance. Yes, democracy and religions are unnatural. Yet democracy, though somewhat not ideal yet, is our best defence against abuse of power. Religions are total abuse of power, that of promoting the beliefs in the illusion of a superior entity that would be our judge and redemptor. It’s senselessly crazy. The chaos of nature itself is our generator and terminator, without any moral attachment. We have personal and collective limited stylistic choices. Some of the choices we have made are changing the earthly mechanics: the destruction of nature and global warming are two of the major results. We need to stylistically improve, not nature, but our interaction with nature, by taking care of us, and by leaving nature alone… The spiders will feed of the hapless cicadas...

Sciences and religions don’t mix.


Gus Leonisky
Local rabid atheistic existentialistic preacher of sciences...

our modern socrates: alan turing...

 

 

By Alan Cowell

LONDON — His genius embraced the first visions of modern computing and produced seminal insights into what became known as “artificial intelligence.” As one of the most influential code breakers of World War II, his cryptology yielded intelligence believed to have hastened the Allied victory.

But, at his death several years later, much of his secretive wartime accomplishments remained classified, far from public view in a nation seized by the security concerns of the Cold War. Instead, by the narrow standards of his day, his reputation was sullied.

On June 7, 1954, Alan Turing, a British mathematician who has since been acknowledged as one the most innovative and powerful thinkers of the 20th century — sometimes called the progenitor of modern computing — died as a criminal, having been convicted under Victorian laws as a homosexual and forced to endure chemical castration. Britain didn’t take its first steps toward decriminalizing homosexuality until 1967.

Only in 2009 did the government apologize for his treatment.

“We’re sorry — you deserved so much better,” said Gordon Brown, then the prime minister. “Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was, under homophobic laws were treated terribly.”


And only in 2013 did Queen Elizabeth II grant Turing a royal pardon, 59 years after a housekeeper found his body at his home at Wilmslow, near Manchester, in northwest England.


A coroner determined that he had died of cyanide poisoning and that he had taken his own life “while the balance of his mind was disturbed.”

At his side lay a half-eaten apple. Biographers speculated that he had ingested the poison by dousing the apple with cyanide and eating it to disguise the toxin’s taste. Some of those who studied his personality or knew him, most notably his mother, Ethel Turing, challenged the official verdict of suicide, arguing that he had poisoned himself accidentally.

To this day Turing is recognized in his own country and among a broad society of scientists as a pillar of achievement who had fused brilliance and eccentricity, had moved comfortably in the abstruse realms of mathematics and cryptography but awkwardly in social settings, and had been brought low by the hostile society into which he was born.

“He was a national treasure, and we hounded him to his death,” said John Graham-Cumming, a computer scientist who campaigned for Turing to be pardoned.


Above all, Turing’s name is associated for many people with the top-secret wartime operations of Britain’s code-breakers at Bletchley Park, a sprawling estate north of London, where he oversaw and inspired the effort to decrypt ciphers generated by Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine, which had once seemed impenetrable. The Germans themselves regarded the codes as unbreakable.

At the time, German submarines were prowling the Atlantic, hunting Allied ships carrying vital cargo for the war effort. The convoys were critical for building military strength in Britain and eventually enabled the Allies to undertake the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944, heralding the collapse of Nazi Germany the next year.

Only by charting the submarines’ movements could Allied forces change the course of their convoys, and for that they relied on the cryptologists of Bletchley Park to decode messages betraying the Germans’ deployments.

The enduring fascination with Turing’s story inspired the 2014 movie “The Imitation Game,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. But his scientific range went far beyond the limits of cinematic drama: He laid down principles that have molded the historical record of the relationship between humans and the machines they have created to solve their problems.


Even before World War II, Turing was making breakthroughs.

Credit for the creation of the first functioning computer in 1946 went to the researchers John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly for their machine the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or Eniac, which they had developed at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II.


But Turing’s notions preceded the Eniac. He conceived what became known as the universal Turing machine, which envisioned “one machine for all possible tasks” — essentially computers as we know them today, Andrew Hodges, Turing’s biographer, wrote in a condensed version of his 1983 book, “Alan Turing: The Enigma.”


Turing’s vision, Hodges said, was that one machine could “be turned to any well-defined task by being supplied with the appropriate program.”


He added, “The universal Turing machine naturally exploits what was later seen as the ‘stored program’ concept essential to the modern computer: It embodies the crucial 20th century insight that symbols representing instructions are no different in kind from symbols representing numbers.”

Later, technology that emerged from the Manhattan Project, the United States-led effort to develop the atom bomb, also relied on Turing’s ideas.

“What had begun as a British idea was scaled up to industrial size by the Americans,” David Kaiser, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in 2012 in The London Review of Books.

Turing’s postwar work at the University of Manchester, on the first functioning British computers, was also significant: It reflected the emerging power of electronic computing in the Cold War race for nuclear supremacy. And he remained fascinated by the interplay between human thought processes and their computerized inventions. Even in 1944, Hodges wrote, Turing had spoken to a colleague about “building a brain.”


In an article published in 1950 in the academic journal Mind, Turing developed a method that came to be known as the “Turing Test,” a sort of thought experiment to determine whether a computer could pass as a human. As part of his experiment, a human interrogator would ask questions and try to figure out whether the answers had come from a computer or a human.

Many years later, on a visit to London, President Barack Obama placed Turing in a trans-Atlantic pantheon of innovation and discovery, saying, “From Newton and Darwin to Edison and Einstein, from Alan Turing to Steve Jobs, we have led the world in our commitment to science and cutting-edge research.”

Alan Mathison Turing was born in London on June 23, 1912, the second of two sons of Ethel Sara Stoney and Julius Mathison Turing, who had met in imperial India, where his father was a senior colonial administrator. After Alan’s birth they left him and his brother, John, in the care of foster parents in England while they returned to India so that Alan’s father could continue his work.

“Alan Turing’s story was not one of family or tradition but of an isolated and autonomous mind,” Hodges wrote.

In his early days, Turing’s education reflected the overwhelming social requisite of his class to secure a place at a reputable private boarding school. Alan, at age 13, enrolled at Sherborne School, in southern England, where his fascination with science raised alarms in an educational system based on the study of what were called the classics — works in Latin and ancient Greek.

“If he is to be solely a scientific specialist, he is wasting his time at a public school,” Nowell Smith, Sherborne’s headmaster, wrote to his parents, as recorded in Hodges’s book.


Nonetheless, he secured a place at King’s College in Cambridge to study mathematics, graduating in 1934 with a first class honors degree. With remarkable academic precocity he was made a fellow of the college in 1935. A year later, he published the groundbreaking paper “On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (or “decidability problem”), a reference in German to a celebrated riddle that the American logician Alonzo Church had also explained.

Both Turing and Church reached the same conclusion — a basis for computer science — that there is no single algorithm that could determine the truth or falsity of any statement in formal logic (though Turing’s thinking was more direct).

Turing completed a doctoral thesis at Princeton in 1938 before returning to Cambridge. With Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in September 1939, he joined the Bletchley Park code breakers at the Government Code and Cypher School, working in makeshift huts clustered around a mansion.

Their greatest initial challenge was figuring out the method of encryption of the German Enigma device, which was invented 20 years earlier by Arthur Scherbius, a German electrical engineer who had patented it as a civilian machine to encrypt commercial messages. The machine worked by entering letters on a typewriter-like keyboard and then encoding them through a series of rotors to a light board, which showed the coded equivalents. The machine was said to be capable of generating almost 159 quintillion permutations.

The British were helped initially by a Polish mathematician who had been studying the Enigma machine and had provided vital details after Hitler’s forces invaded Poland in 1939. But under the direction of Turing and another Cambridge-educated mathematician, W.G. Welchman, the Bletchley Park code breakers greatly expanded and accelerated those early efforts. Using a huge contraption called the Bombe, they mimicked the operations of the Enigma machine to break its codes.


“The critical factor was Turing’s brilliant mechanization of subtle logical deductions,” the biographer Hodges wrote.

In 1942, Turing was assigned to visit the United States for several months of high-level consultations on the encryption of conversations between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston S. Churchill. His wartime work earned him a high civilian award, and he was named an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

In the postwar years, Turing’s fascination with computers led him to design the Automatic Computing Engine. Although it was never built, Turing believed that “the computer would offer unlimited scope for practical progress toward embodying intelligence in an artificial form,” Hodges wrote.

In October 1948, Turing began working at Manchester University’s computing laboratory. He bought a house in nearby Wilmslow in 1950. Among his enthusiasms were his work on various scientific themes, including morphogenesis, the theory of growth and form in biology; his continued secret ties to Britain’s postwar code breakers; and long-distance running.

He was also, Hodges said, beginning to explore the homosexual identity he had hidden when he proposed marriage in 1941 to Joan Clarke, a Bletchley Park cryptanalyst. He later withdrew the offer after explaining his sexuality to her, and the two remained friends.

About 10 years later, the police were investigating a burglary at his home when he admitted to having had a physical relationship with a man named Arnold Murray. Murray told Turing that he knew the thief’s identity, and detectives, in their questioning, asked Turing about his relationship to Murray.

In March 1952, Turing and Murray were charged with “gross indecency,” and both pleaded guilty in court. Murray was given a conditional discharge, but Turing was ordered to undergo chemical castration by taking doses of the female hormone estrogen to reduce sex drive.

Two years later, the motive for his apparent suicide, at age 41, remained unclear and left many questions. At the time, Hodges wrote, known homosexuals were denied security clearances, which meant that Turing could not be involved in secret work during the Cold War, leaving him excluded and embittered. While a coroner deemed the death a suicide, the telltale apple at Turing’s side was never forensically examined.


“Eccentric, solitary, gloomy, vivacious, resigned, angry, eager, dissatisfied — these had always been his ever-varying characteristics,” Hodges wrote, “and despite the strength that he showed the world in coping with outrageous fortune, no one could safely have predicted his future course.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/obituaries/alan-turing-overlooked.html

 

 

 

But this is only one aspect of Alan Turing...

 

 

Alan Turing, the British mathematician (1912-1954), is famous for a number of breakthroughs, which altered the course of the 20th century. In 1936 he published a paper, which laid the foundation of computer science, providing the first formal concept of a computer algorithm. He next played a pivotal role in the Second World War, designing the machines which cracked the German military codes, enabling the Allies to defeat the Nazis in several crucial battles. And in the late 1940's he turned his attention to artificial intelligence and proposed a challenge, now called the Turing test, which is still important to the field today.

His contribution to mathematical biology is less famous, but was no less profound. He published just one paper (1952), but it triggered a whole new field of mathematical enquiry into pattern formation. He discovered that a system with just 2 molecules could, at least in theory, create spotty or stripy patterns if they diffused and chemically interacted in just the right way.

His mathematical equations showed that starting from uniform condition (ie. a homogeneous distribution -- no pattern) they could spontaneously self-organise their concentrations into a repetitive spatial pattern. This theory has come to be accepted as an explanation of fairly simple patterns such as zebra stripes and even the ridges on sand dunes, but in embryology it has been resisted for decades as an explanation of how structures such as fingers are formed.

Now a group of researchers from the Multicellular Systems Biology lab at the CRG, led by ICREA Research Professor James Sharpe, has provided the long sought-for data which confirms that the fingers and toes are patterned by a Turing mechanism. "It complements their recent paper (Science 338:1476, 2012), which provided evidence that Hox genes and FGF signaling modulated a hypothetical Turing system. However, at that point the Turing molecules themselves were still not identified, and so this remained as the critical unsolved piece of the puzzle. The new study completes the picture, by revealing which signaling molecules act as the Turing system" says James Sharpe, co-author of the study.

The approach taken was that of systems biology -- combining experimental work with computational modelling. In this way, the two equal-first authors of the paper were able to iterate between the empirical and the theoretical: the lab-work of Jelena Raspopovic providing experimental data for the model, and the computer simulations of Luciano Marcon making predictions to be tested back in the lab.

By screening for the expression of many different genes, they found that two signalling pathways stood out as having the required activity patterns: BMPs and WNTs. They gradually constructed the minimal possible mathematical model compatible with all the data, and found that the two signalling pathways were linked through a non-diffusible molecule -- the transcription factor Sox9. Finally, they were able to make computational predictions about the effects of inhibiting these 2 pathways -- either individually, or in combination -- which predicted how the pattern of fingers should change. Strikingly, when the same experiments were done on small pieces of limb bud tissue cultured in a petri dish the same alterations in embryonic finger pattern were observed, confirming the computational prediction.

This result answers a long-standing question in the field, but it has consequences that go beyond the development of fingers. It addresses a more general debate about how the millions of cells in our bodies are able to dynamically arrange themselves into the correct 3D structures, for example in our kidneys, hearts and other organs. It challenges the dominance of an important traditional idea called positional information, proposed by Lewis Wolpert which states that cells know what to do because they all receive information about their "coordinates" in space (a bit like longitude and latitude on a world map). Today's publication highlights instead that local self-organising mechanisms may be much more important in organogenesis than previously thought.

Arriving at the correct understanding of multicellular organization is essential if we are to develop effective strategies for regenerative medicine, and one day to possibly engineer replacement tissues for various organs. In the shorter term, these results also explain why polydactyly -- the development of extra fingers or toes -- is such a common birth defect in humans: Turing systems are mathematically known to have slightly lower precision in regulating the number of "stripes" than alternative models.

At first glance, the question of how an embryo develops seems unrelated to the problems of computing and algorithms with which Turing is more commonly associated. In reality however, they were both expressions of his interest in how complex and clever biological "machines" arise in nature. In a sense, he sought the algorithms by which life builds itself. It is fitting that this study, which has confirmed Turing's 62 year-old theory on embryology, required the development of a serious computer model. It brings together two of his major life achievements into one satisfying result.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Center for Genomic Regulation.

 

Read more: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140731145839.htm

 

 

Free Assange now!...

 

swallowing the spider to get the fly...

 

The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly


Is the covid ‘pandemic’ merely economic theatre?


by Maribel Tuff

 

Bringing together the US emergency bank lending crisis and the now massive Covid response, I’ve concluded that one of the main reasons it is happening, apart from the corporate looting, is because of a historic event, the USA’s economic collapse and the dollar’s demise, which started just weeks before this Covid operation kicked off, and has been put on hold by a world wide manufactured economic ‘freeze’.

THE END OF ‘EXTEND AND PRETEND’

A few months before Covid appeared, the Fed were busy pouring literally trillions of dollars into the US banks, to prevent inter-lending bank-runs which were starting to develop. These were the same tectonic fissures that developed prior to the 2008 crisis, where the banks became so distrustful of each other’s solvency, that they massively increased interest rates to each other to factor in the risk. If unsuppressed the lending rates would continue to rise, laying a path to bank failures and a contagion which would eventually derail the economy and undermine the dollar itself.

In September 2019 the Fed intervened in the repo. markets for four consecutive days, pumping $75 billion per day into the banks, as the inter-banking interest rate – the repo rate – peaked at a terrifying 10% [1]. If this level were allowed to contaminate regular highstreet lending, it would cause widespread debt defaults & insolvencies.

The dangers are far greater today because, unlike in 2008, Quantitive Easing (QE) has pushed the Fed to the limits of its credibility, and are forcing them into causing some serious currency debasement. If they continue with the forms of QE they are shackled to, then dollar debasement becomes a certainty in a US economy that is far more fragile & indebted generally and less able to cope.

The Fed must have known for a few years that QE was not returning the economy to economic normality, and that they were still trapped in the solvency crisis of 2008. Knowing this, the Fed were prepared for the latest crisis. They had made it possible to inject hundreds of billions of dollars into the banking system discreetly, unlike in 2008, without any additional Congressional fanfare, via the Financial Stability Oversight Council, formed in 2010.

They had given themselves almost unlimited funds and the resources of the entire government if necessary, to reassure the banks that collapse was impossible. This ‘rescue operation’ was being played out, relatively unreported except in the financial press, only weeks prior to the Covid flu appearing on the world stage. Issuing…

….. cumulative repo loans totalling more than $9 trillion to the trading houses on Wall Street that the Fed had been making from September 17 of 2019 – months before the onset of COVID-19 anywhere in the world…[2]

Unlike in 2008, this second use or continued use of mass Fed stimulus is not a new untested idea and, by using it again or continuing to use it more intensely to stabilise the banks, it would eventually lead the markets to conclude that we are locked in a never ending cycle of stimulus, which will inevitably end in hyperinflation and dollar collapse. 

 

 

That is an uncontroversial economic fact, and will be the conclusion of the Fed’s current policy. In that context, an external ‘event’ could be critical in taking the spotlight off US finance and its woes.

The Fed will not want to exit repo operations until they are absolutely certain the market can stand on its own two feet. [3], [4]

United States Overnight Repo Rate was at 0.11 on Friday January 15



But, as they well know given their experience over the past 10 years, the markets will never be able to stand on their own feet in the current economic model. Now not only companies are being kept afloat by low interests rates, the US itself is dependent and kept solvent by low interest rates.

The fed has injected or made available over 9 trillion dollars to the banks in only 6 months leading up to March 2020, that is over 40% of the USA’s GDP, prior to Covid and represents nearly a 40% increase in the USA’s national debt!

So it is becoming very obvious that we are at the end of this particular monetary road, the ‘extend and pretend’ policy is finished and there is nothing in the economic tool box that can stall the inevitable. Only an external ‘divine’ intervention could, even temporarily delay the dollar’s collapse. As an aside, I should add, although they may be affected later, this is not happening in European or Asian banks, only in US banks.

THE DIVERSION

In my opinion, the US security agencies picked a scenario off the shelf, something they have been justifiably rehearsing for years, the response to a deadly virus, which would produce the required financial shutdown, suppress bank activity, and create a world crisis big enough to eclipse the US economic crisis and produce a ‘flight to safety’ into the dollar, facilitating an economic induced coma, allowing time, a breathing space and justifying massive emergency QE injections into the US and world economy.

It could be sold as a period during which a restructuring of the world banking system could take place and perhaps reschedule debt as well as redefine the mechanisms of a new reserve currency.

This is what I think ‘The Great Reset’ really is about. It is being painted as something intricate and nefarious on every level, but it’s possibly more utilitarian than that, a necessary dialog, where the subject of that dialog is sealed from the public, justified by protecting our worried and panicky ears, and which concerns almost all western world leaders.

I’m sure a major false flag terror attack would have been discussed as an alternative to Covid, but the US is in no fit position economically to respond militarily, and without a military response to a terror attack the US would fear looking weak. Although Wars have been thought to resolve many an economic crisis, it is just as likely, in this instance, that a proxy war with Russia or a direct war with Iran would precipitate a dollar collapse, rather than create growth and a flight to ‘safety’. China would no doubt gleefully humiliate the US during such a conflict. So I speculate that major wars, as an economic solution, are off the table, at least until this crisis is resolved.

Creating a virus out of thin air is a cruel and vicious deceit, but the Fed will no doubt have claimed to its allies that it is far less painful than the total economic implosion we will face in the brewing economic collapse, where financial contagion from the US would cause most western financial institutions to become insolvent, debt would remain unpaid, trade would cease, asset values would crumble, bank machines stop, riots start, martial law be declared, and in many ill-prepared, import-dependent countries like the UK, rationing and eventually hunger would begin.

This is the threat the fed would have made to their allies, as we know for a fact they did in 2008, when asking for a united world central bank stimulus, making it appear vital to world economic survival.

They would have claimed that this time around the economic dangers are of such a magnitude that they even persuaded their foes, Russia and China, to partake in the hoax, because they are also reliant on continued banking & economic stability, and would not be willing to risk political instability at home caused by a second world economic depression.

By creating this suspension of an economic collapse, the US has cleverly turned the dominance of the dollar into a matter of international survival, effectively holding the world to ransom and blocking the baton of world reserve currency being dually transferred over to the next economic ascendant, China, and where the US has effectively engineered themselves a seat amongst the judges at their own bankruptcy hearing.

Believing this to be the case, I am less confused as to why most of the USA’s allies were so helpful and so consistent in making this Covid operation happen, and I have concluded it is their belief in the integrated nature of the financial & currency markets and the threat of economic collapse posited, as in 2008 by the Fed, that is causing their complicity.

MUTUAL SECRECY

As each irrational, destructive lockdown measure is implemented I am quite sure that our politicians, the very few that are in the know, say to each other: ‘we are lucky because “lockdowns” are as nothing, compared to the calamity that would overtake us in the event of a dollar-induced economic collapse!’ This, for me, explains their apparent insanity, lies and the internationally co-ordinated nature of their response. They too are acting out of fear, not for a virus, but for fear of anarchy and, by extension, the very real threat to their own lives that would result.

The secrecy surrounding this operation is wholly consistent, because it is in nobody’s interests to break ranks. If anyone exposes what is really happening to the US economy then it would precipitate the run on the banks, and then the dollar, that they are being told would lead to a world economic catastrophe.

To explore this hypothesis, we can look at the varying responses of the world players, and measure their reluctance or complicity in the scam, because at this turning point in history, during these shifts of power, loyalty is not guaranteed.

Japan has been strangely reluctant to take part, indicating to me their brooding irritation with US hegemony, which has been growing amongst their population for some years and expressed through the Osprey protests. It looked at one point like they were flirting with the idea of ignoring Covid altogether. Prompting the US to ‘invite’ Japan to join 5-eyes, perhaps to exert more direct control over them, via their security services?

Russia and China are reluctantly playing along for obvious economic reasons, but again we see reluctance to go full hog, despite the attraction of introducing authoritarian measures at home under the cover of Covid. Russia has even invented a non-existent vaccine for the non-existent virus, giving themselves an instant opt-out when required. Whereas China is preferring to just stop testing, and ignore the ‘crisis’ altogether, except for the odd statement about how dangerous it all is.

Non-western Africa, is not taking part at all, in Nigeria there are very few cases, probably because they are out of the loop on what is really happening, and see little evidence of a virus in their population.

Germany although physically occupied by the US, like Japan, have a confidence and independence that marks them apart from other vassal states. Having ‘found’ far fewer cases of Covid, they have tried to preserve their precious economy from any serious harm for as long as possible, demonstrating a cheekiness, consistent with their building of the Nord-stream pipeline project to Russia, ignoring the US’s repeated demands for them to stop.

In contrast, the USA’s closest, most supine of allies, & the 5 eyes states, are enthusiastically taking part, hyping the virus story to the nth degree of absurdity. Notably the UK, France and Australia, each week pushing yet another absurdly fascist response to a non-existent problem to scare their population stiff. In my view each allies’ response is calibrated to their financial dependency on the US and how ‘captured’ their leaders are to US interests.

On the political and media front, alternative media, doubtless spurred on by seeded stories and certain controlled opposition, unwittingly fans these flames by speculating on various kingpins and ideologues central to the plot, like Bill & Malinda Gates, and playing up fear stories of Marxist tyrannies, Communist takeovers, compulsory vaccines, tracking chips and various accusations against the dangers of 5G – targeted for being predominately European and Chinese technology.

The end result is a population left either paralysed by fear of the flu, or in terror of a rising ‘Marxist Fascist tyranny’ run by ‘jewish globalists’ and oligarchs. Either way, everyone is in too fearful a state to logically assess what is really going on around them.

I’m sure, in the dark bowels of Langley, Virginia, this scenario has been pre-rehearsed and stress-tested for years, and pieced together from a huge portfolio of coups and psychological terror operations from around the world.

Perhaps with lessons learned from Climate Change where, as with the weather, the common flu can easily be weaponised. In the case of Covid via a swiftly implemented ‘testing’ regime, simply testing for the common cold and producing millions of false positives, and a hysterical, totally unquestioning mainstream media.

COVID OPPORTUNISM

International Covid panic created some short term, but worryingly for the USA, short-lived ‘flight to safety’. ‘International crisis’ is the USA’s traditional and most effective tool to protect the dollar: normally US/UK media-manufactured. It was used to bolster a flagging dollar via the media-created ’Euro crisis’ or ‘Greek debt crisis’. A series of hysterical panics made ‘real’ by US and UK financial press, quickly making the USA’s economic woes old news, and reducing the world reserve holdings of the Euro in only a matter of months.

Along with the ‘flight to (dollar) safety’, Covid has offered the opportunity to freeze the USA’s banking collapse with massive injections of cash. $9 trillions was available to US banks up until March 2020, but in addition to this the Fed produced $5 trillion in economic stimulus to the wider economy and a further 5 trillions recently.

Without this ‘external threat’ – a ‘killer virus’ – this amount of stimulus would have immediately caused panic and threatened dollar credibility. However, with the virus narrative and the world-unified stimulus response to the ‘Covid pandemic’, this modest flight to (dollar) safety, along with the massive cash injections, looked justified and sensible.

It also looks to me like those in the ‘dollar economic zone’ – if there is such a thing – have gone along with their own impoverishment and have wrecked their own economies under the cover of Covid, to save themselves from a perceived greater economic catastrophe, bank contagion, on the basis of what I believe is being secretly told them by the USA, and based on what they have been witnessing in the US banking system prior to March.

It could easily be argued that we are being unwittingly drawn into a conspiracy to protect the dollar and US hegemony, under the cover of Covid, that is not in our own best long-term interests at all (currently being called the ‘great reset’).

Like Brexit and like the War on Carbon, I believe that if an operation or manufactured event seems to offer multifaceted advantages to the USA and their Corporate & military elite, then that operation has revealed its origins.

As it is the case with Covid, not only is there a freeze on the US economic collapse, but US Corporations and Internet services are benefiting massively from the ‘Covid illusion’. Something that must be getting more obvious by the day, and must be giving honest foreign leaders concerns as they see their retail sectors ravaged by Amazon and their cultural institutions replaced by Netflix, Apple TV and Amazon TV. 

And the proposed ‘salvation’ involves paying billions to US Pharma, for, at best, a very doubtful vaccine. The least-honest politicians can no doubt engineer their ‘shutdowns’ to preference US corporations, whilst acting as the viceroys of Empire.

This looting could just be a side-show to the main event of dollar ‘transition’ or collapse, or it could be amongst the main aims of ‘Operation Covid’, it is difficult to tell, but it looks like the rest of the world is being looted by US Corporations and their home grown small-to-medium-size businesses bankrupted, with vast additional profits flowing to the USA’s richest, where we see the stella rise in the wealth of America’s robber barons.

From renting taxis with Uber to replacing hotels with AirBNB flats, holding meetings on zoom, spending ‘cash free’ via Visa, MasterCard et al and the Paypal cartel, ordering food on-line with Uber eats and destroying local culture, all are being forced on a gullible world public during the Covid selective collapse. It should be dawning on everyone by now that Covid is a very, very Neoliberal Corporate virus, strangely working in the interests of a continued US Corporate neoliberal rollout against our own national geopolitical interests.

It is not only the Corporates that benefit from US ‘operations’ like Covid, the security state also demands their share of the spoils for assisting in and facilitating much of the operation. US tracking apps, social media and communication platforms are being forced, as a parasitical middle man, into every walk of our lives, taking a thin slice off everyday activities, like an America tax.

The details of the implementation of the Covid operation aside, it is possible that many inside the system regard the ‘Great Reset’ as not a conspiracy to oppress us, to exploit us and destroy our lives in a Marxist tyranny as many believe, but rather regard it as a necessary adjustment to an unbalanced economic system.

To see it like that we must believe that the current system is fundamentally flawed and that good faith solutions are being sought. I think ‘The Reset’ is seen by many honest brokers around the world as a genuine platform to resolve flaws in the current world economy, and to manage a transition from the dollar, in a controlled fashion. We should not always think the worst motives of everyone involved.

Having said that, I have no doubt that the US is busy trying to hijack the agenda to preserve its own supremacy, even during its climactic demise. The US Military industrial complex will be suspicious of any direction not determined by them, and I’m sure in Washington, Brussels and Beijing there is a battle over the measures and direction we need to take.

Like it or not, there may be very good reasons for these discussions to be held in secret, and we are left with only secondhand hints of the battles being fought over our current economic future; like Universal income, a shared international reserve currency, digital currencies or a cashless society, perhaps required through exchange controls or price fixing, to fight coming hyper-inflation?

Many US shills will be telling the world, that this is a ‘crisis of capitalism’, a crisis of western civilisation, and that we all need to preserve the US economy & dollar supremacy to save the world.

I personally believe the US has set us up during this crisis, like they did in the last in 2008, where they dumped all their bad debt on European banks to ‘share’ the crisis out. Working on the principle that: a problem shared is a problem halved, perhaps. Even if we are in this crisis because of a US collapse, and the rest of us could survive relatively unscathed. A ‘Reset’ does appear to be one route that enables a slow deflating of the economic bomb sitting under the US and which may affect the rest of us badly, if it goes off.

“ SHE SWALLOWED THE SPIDER TO CATCH THE FLY;
I DON’T KNOW WHY SHE SWALLOWED A FLY – PERHAPS SHE’LL DIE… “

I reference the nursery rhyme as a cautionary tail, because this all started with the relatively normal economic recession of 2007, which if the USA had allowed to burn through its economy, would have been resolved in only a few years, and we would be living in normal times now. But they didn’t. The world’s central banks were persuaded to take measures that caused greater long-term harm, which in turn has led, in my view, to the ‘Covid solution’, a provocation intended to temporarily justify even more of the poisonous QE and low interest rates that didn’t work before.

Whilst perhaps sold as a ‘fire-break for a more long term solution to be found, I don’t see much evidence that the ‘fire-break’ is being used well. It seems more like a pause for the always shortsighted American elites to loot as much as is possible from our states’ coffers before an economic tsunami hits.

A SELF-INFLICTED PROBLEM

I also believe the US never needed to be in this grave position it is today. Its problems are very much self inflicted. Simply taxing its wealthy and cutting its outrageous military spending would have averted a dollar crisis, leading instead to a slow drift from the dollar over a few decades as China took up the strain. But that is another story related to America’s ideological, political and philosophical bankruptcy and scleroses, that has increasingly driven them into an economic ditch over the past 45 years.

The Covid operation itself is a beautiful metaphor for the original banking crisis, which triggered the Fed to use quantitive easing (QE) – a far, far more damaging response than the original crisis itself, just as the lockdowns are far, far more damaging than this strain of flu, naturally occurring or released deliberately as a marker.

If a consensus resolution is not found quickly for the transfer or sharing of the world reserve currency, as the dollar is about to collapse, I have no doubt we will be required to ‘swallow’ a more drastic intervention than Covid to save the US economy and the dollar, each solution proving more damaging than the last …And of course, as the rhyme goes, we will eventually swallow a ‘horse’… and be ‘dead of course’.

If I am right guys, in one respect you can breathe a sigh of relief: world tyranny, forced vaccinations with harmful DNA changes, sterilisations, and mass genocide are not the main aims of this ‘operation’. They may be the end result of it, if we are not careful, but I don’t think they are the main aims.

The US is trying to stall dollar relegation using the Covid operation, and make it a major event, when previously the transition from old to new world reserve currency would have gone almost unnoticed by most of us. The British ceded the Pound’s world reserve currency status relatively quietly after WWII, under US pressure to float the pound.

It is perhaps a measure of the utility that is now offered by the world’s reserve currency, to facilitate the uncontrolled looting of the rest of the world’s economies, that it is now such a prize and so hard to surrender. Without the dollar and its world reserve status, enabling the US to print pieces of green paper in exchange for real goods, the US would certainly be bankrupt.

But that is not our fault and it is not for us in the rest of the world to save them, especially since it is their ideology that has inflicted so much harm on their own people and the rest of world.

What we are witnessing is an attempt, through foul means, by another once great Empire to postpone the inevitable. To fight off being consigned to obscurity.

So we exist in that mad time, that time of collapse and chaos before a new order asserts itself, which could last a month or 100 years.

You can view Maribel Tuff’s original comment here. The author wished to remain anonymous.

 

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2021/01/22/the-old-lady-who-swallowed-a-fly/

 

 

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driving into the city on tractors to protest ....

Farmers have fought through barricades and tear gas to enter Delhi on India's Republic Day.

Tens of thousands of them are driving into the city on tractors to protest against new market-friendly reforms.

In some places, farmers broke barricades and diverted from the route they had agreed with the police.

Tuesday's rally is the latest episode in a months-long protest, one of the longest farmers-led agitations India has ever seen. 

The government has offered to put the laws on hold, but farmers say they will settle for nothing short of a repeal. 

Farmers have been striking for two months at Delhi's borders, demanding a roll back of the new laws.

Police agreed to allow Tuesday's rally after several rounds of talks on the condition that it would not interrupt the annual Republic Day parade. 

Tuesday's rally was expected to begin from six entry points to Delhi and police barricaded all of them and gave farmers specific routes for their rally. The routes involved roads on the outskirts of the city.

But farm groups at three different borders - Singhu, Tikri and Gazipur - broke through barricades and began marching into the city, on foot and in tractors.

 

 

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https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55793731

 

 

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