vol VII: Notes

2017

Notes

Sunday 12 November 2017 - Saturday 18 November 2017

[Notebook: DB 82: Life and Death]

Sunday 12 November 2017

[page 44]

Monday 13 November 2017

On my way home realizing that Christianity is a giant load of false news and fairy stories. Now that mum is dead and gone I can really let my hair down in this issue. Christianity is both the greatest lie ever told and the greatest truth. The lie is that we do not really die. The truth is that the key to life is love your neighbour. This perverted mix is a consequence of the corrupting effect of power. Like all politicians, the Christian hierarchy seeks personal power by agreeing to do good for the people. Eternal life gives them the powerful levers of heaven and hell. Neighbourly love in fact really does good. I fell for this hook, sinker and line.

Tuesday 14 November 2017

A key to marketing is to give

[page 45]

people what they want, to create and fulfil fantasies, assisted (eg in the case of cigarettes) by a dose of addiction. The addiction to heaven I found very hard to give up, and I imagine this is true for many believers so I am pushing uphill to try to replace heavenly bliss with heaven on earth.

Sleepy now. Should not have eaten so much breakfast.: Broken Hill to Cobar is a long and dreary stretch.

Wednesday 18 November 2017

The basic political tension is between the old and the new [the young and the old]. We read that many Catholics yearn for the medieval days of Christendom. Others want the Church to go forward into the world of human rights and equality for women. I suppose the bulk sit in the middle and are not politically active, just relatively contented believers and practitioners. I am something of an intellectual extremist, seeking to totally rebuild Catholic theology on the hypothesis that god and the universe are one.

Catholicism is partly a load of codswallop. There is no evidence for the creation and the fall. Our origins are well accounted for by the scientific narrative. The only question left is is God outside the universe or is the universe divine?

We like exciting our bodies, one of the roles of sport.

We make some new assumptions about the nature of God starting from the official doctrine documented by Thomas Aquinas and translated into a more modern context by Bernard Lonergan. Thomas Aquinas: Opera Omnia, Lonergan: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding

[page 46]

Thursday 19 November 2017

Dream of studying overseas [grounded] by family reality. Seems best to move to Adelaide to be near dad and to study at Magill campus of USA. An MA/PhD will bring the last fifty years into focus.

In the kill or be killed world of war we cannot be too sensitive since the ultimate winner is brute force forcing submission.

Helpfulness - insecurity: why we help warlords. Becoming part of a gang [protection.]

The unbroken chain of forks in the road.

Friday 20 November 2017

Steiglitz: 'We have never had a president who day after day lies and is unaffected by it. Normally everybody you deal with is tethered by a sense of responsibility and truth, but not him.' Larry Elliott: Stiglitz: 'Trump has fascist tendencies'

My focus is gradually closing in on the damage caused by the theological hypothesis of the Roman Catholic Church. That it alone has the key to truth.

By macroscopic we might mean transfinite, that is a higher cardinal. My cardinal

[page 47]

is greater than the cardinals of the processes that constitute me [eg Krebs cycle, heartbeat].

Cercignani page 86: 'This assumption, according to which the coordinates and velocities of molecules take on, in an equilibrium state, all values compatible with the assigned total energy of the gas became later familiar as the ergodic hypothesis, the name given to it by Paul and Tatiana Ehrenfest.'

page 87: 'The concept of temperatures is indeed rather subtle because it does not have a direct dynamical meaning. In a more modern perspective, . . . the concept of entropy introduced by Boltzmann in kinetic theory (together with thermal energy) appears more basic (although admittedly, less intuitive) and temperature appears a restricted concept, strictly meaningful only for equilibrium [stationary] states.'

Technology advances by bringing control (and therefore order) to previously uncontrolled (transfinite) systems by a process of selection So we have selected out from the ergodic range of human activities those that are conducive to maintaining polite and constructive society. Of course we have plenty of free loaders who use rude and destructive methods to get their ways, civilization's discontents.

page 88: ' "it still has not been proved that whatever the initial state f the gas may be it must always approach the limit found by Maxwell." '

page 89: 'The possibility of expressing the entropy in terms of a distribution function, although in a certain sense not unexpected, does not cease to stand as a remarkable fact that must have produced a deep impression on Boltzmann's contemporaries.

[page 48]

I am in need of an academic makeover but I believe the idea has wings and will fly.

Saturday 21 November 2017

The basis of the theory of peace is that no castles can be built on air but all stable systems have roots leading in an unbroken line to god and the initial singularity. We give meaning to this idea by elaborating the layered structure of the universe from initial creation to the present. Yuval Levin: Taking the Long Way

The wealthy can build their castles by distorting the flow of value in the economy, making themselves richer by exploiting the labours of others. The latest to come to he surface is Mr Mugabe who has been fleecing the population of Zimbabwe for a long time. AP/Reuters: Zimbabwe's ruling party turns against Robert Mugabe, calls for him to resign ahead of march

How do we couple the theory of peace to the divine Universe? Through the rule of law, that is the divine law as revealed by science, the general drift toward increasing complexity and decreasing violence.

Human symmetry can be modelled by the symmetry of the cells in any multicellular organism, based on the possession of a common genome.

Having a dose of Thomas Aquinas 'its all straw' feeling probably arising from boredom and no new inspiration for a while, ie writing is becoming work ad I should get used to it. Thomas Aquinas - Wikiquote

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Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Dodd, J E, and G D Coughlan, The Ideas of Particle Physics: An Introduction for Scientists, Cambridge UP 1991 Jacket: 'This book is intended to bridge the gap between traditional textbooks on particle physics and the popular accounts of the subject ... Although entirely self contained, it assumes a greater familiarity with the basic physics concepts than is usually the case in popular texts. This then allows a fuller discussion of more modern developments.'  Amazon   back

Harrod, Roy F, John Maynard Keynes, Penguin Books 1972 Jacket: 'Mr Harrod has not merely written a biography of J M Keynes. He has produced a great document in the history of twentieth-century Britain; at once a study in the history of ideas, a survey of the development of economics and a portrait of the outstanding intellectual of the age.' Times Literary Supplement  Amazon   back

Keynes, John Maynard, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Macmillan 1936-1964 The classic twentieth century economics text that revealed that there are more ways to get an economy to grow than simply balancing the books.back

Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding'  Amazon   back

Tomonaga, Sin-itiro, The Story of Spin, University of Chicago Press 1997 Jacket: 'The Story of Spin, as told by Sin-itiro Tomonaga and lovingly translated by Takeshi Oka, is a brilliant and witty account of the development of modern quantum theory, which takes electron spin as a pivotal concept. Reading these twelve lectures on the fundamental aspects of physics is a joyful experience that is rare indeed.' Laurie Brown, Northwestern University.  Amazon   back

Links

AP/Reuters, Zimbabwe's ruling party turns against Robert Mugabe, calls for him to resign ahead of march, 'Zimbabwe state media is reporting that the country's ruling ZANU-PF party has called for President Robert Mugabe to resign, in the latest sign that the aging leader's authority has collapsed after an army takeover. The Herald newspaper said ZANU-PF branches in all 10 provinces had met on Friday and passed no-confidence votes in the 93-year-old Mr Mugabe. It also said that all had called for Mr Mugabe's wife Grace, 52, to resign from the party.' back

Associated Press, Nasa map pf Earth's seasons over 20 years highlights climate change, back

Azhmat Khan and Anand Gopal, The Uncounted, 'We found that one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition. It is at such a distance from official claims that, in terms of civilian deaths, this may be the least transparent war in recent American history. Our reporting, moreover, revealed a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all. While some of the civilian deaths we documented were a result of proximity to a legitimate ISIS target, many others appear to be the result simply of flawed or outdated intelligence that conflated civilians with combatants. In this system, Iraqis are considered guilty until proved innocent.' back

Doug Sosnik, What Democratic Civil war? The left already won, 'It is difficult to overstate the depth and breadth of the move to the left on social and economic policies among Democrats since Bill Clinton’s presidency. The Pew Values Survey released last month found that the percentage of Democrats and Democratic leaners who express liberal or mostly liberal political values exploded from 30 percent in 1994 to 73 percent in 2017. ' back

Emile Hokayem, Saudi Arabia Has No Idea How to Deal With Iran, back

John Keane, War and democracy - who decides?, 'The difficulty is that Australians still aren’t told the truth about why we became involved in Syria. Those decisions seem to have been made in furtherance of unstated international coalition agendas rather than on open and objective assessments of their merit. This state of affairs is made profoundly worse by the fact that the decision to go to war was an executive decision, not a decision made democratically after full and open parliamentary debate based on the best objective information available.' back

John Spencer, How the military s making it hard to remember our wars, 'The military should update its record-keeping. It should be unlawful to ever delete another combat record. Daily combat records should be tagged, stored in a searchable cloud database and attached to individual soldiers’ files — as their medical records are. That way soldiers could leave the service with complete histories of their combat experiences.' back

Katharine Viner, A mission for journalism in a time of crisis, 'Facebook has become the richest and most powerful publisher in history by replacing editors with algorithms – shattering the public square into millions of personalised news feeds, shifting entire societies away from the open terrain of genuine debate and argument, while they make billions from our valued attention.' back

Kathleen Sharp, A hunbdred years go, one Hollywood studio was a great, safe palce for a woman to work, 'Imagine a movie industry where women write half the films, where renowned female directors are the rule and where casting couches aren’t a fixture in the boss’ office. It’s not a futuristic fantasy but a world that existed 100 years ago, when Carl Laemmle’s Universal Studios made feminist history.' back

Larry Elliott, Joseph Stiglitz: 'Trump has fascist tendencies', ' “We have never had a president who day after day lies and is unaffected by it. Normally everybody you deal with is tethered by a sense of responsibility and truth, but not him. “I think the other thing you have seen with some of these fascist leaders is using ‘us versus them’ as a way of dividing society.” Stiglitz says Trump is using racism and misogyny to divide America. “To me it is deeply, deeply disturbing.” ' back

Massimo Fagioli, Was It Better Back Then, 'As an Italian European Catholic who moved to the U.S. in 2008 and has taught and written about Catholicism, I think it’s impossible to overestimate the clear influence of the Catholic medieval imagination in American Catholicism as compared to all other Catholic Churches in the world. That influence is powerful, seen not just in the architecture of college campuses but in how the U.S. church wants to be perceived by “the world” at large.' back

Paul Krugman, Everybody Hates the Trump Tax Plan, ' . . . C.E.O.s, living in the real world of business, not the imaginary world of right-wing ideologues, know that tax rates aren’t that important a factor in investment decisions. So they realize that even a huge tax cut wouldn’t lead to much more spending. And with that realization, the rationale for this tax plan, such as it is, falls apart, leaving nothing but a scheme to make the rich — especially those who rake in investment income rather than working for a living — richer at everyone else’s expense.' back

Rachel Woodlock, They're not lone wolves, they are canaries, 'In a way, these lone-wolf terrorists are more like miners' canaries. Whether it is a paranoid loner, an enraged ideologue, a jihadist or a white supremacist, they are screaming out at the top of their lungs that something is terribly, terribly wrong, but the death-price is being paid by all their innocent victims. The only way we can prevent them, is to plug the noxious gas leak — we need to stop the inequality, stop the double-standards, stop the hate! ' back

Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, The complete works of one of the most important writers in the Christian tradition. back

Thomas Aquinas - Wikiquote, Straw, 'All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.' Remarks on being requested to resume writing, after a mystical experience while saying mass on or around 6 December 1273, as quoted in A Taste of Water : Christianity through Taoist-Buddhist Eyes (1990) by Chwen Jiuan Agnes Lee and Thomas G. Hand back

Yuval Levin, Taking the Long Way, 'Their confusions stem from a shallow and emaciated notion of the human person, albeit one that masquerades as a moral ideal. This diminished idea of man tempts us to an exaggerated idea of politics and fuels our “culture wars.” It is likely now the greatest threat to liberty and progress in American life, and therefore also to what we should all seek to conserve.' back