29 November 2016
We must make this their Waterloo
What truly terrifies me
National Popular Vote
Trump is LYING. As usual. Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 2½ million votes. This can NEVER, EVER happen again. The National Popular Vote initiative must be a TOP PRIORITY.
«The people united will never be defeated!»
National Popular Vote does not require a constitutional amendment
«The people united will never be defeated!»
28 November 2016
Trump's Mania
«The people united will never be defeated!»
22 November 2016
Remembrance
«The people united will never be defeated!»
Resistance
The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
«The people united will never be defeated!»
20 November 2016
What REALLY scares me about Trump
¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!
«The people united will never be defeated!»
19 November 2016
Re: None dare call it ILLEGITIMATE?
~ Jean Clare Smith
On Nov 19, 2016, at 9:41 PM, David Studhalter (studhalter@gyromantic.com) <oldionus@gmail.com> wrote:
The late count of the popular vote for Clinton over Trump is now very close to 1.5 million votes, far more than the margin of victory in several modern presidential elections. OK, then. This has to be said.THIS CALLS INTO QUESTION THE LEGITIMACY OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE SYSTEM. It may be "the system," but legitimacy of republican (small-r) government derives, according to "inalienable" principles our founders clearly believed in, from THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED. Donald Trump does not have the consent of the governed. Not even close.I will say it. The presidency of Donald Trump is not legitimate. (As was not, in my view, the first term of George W. Bush's). If he governs with anything like recognition of the issue of the fact that more than half the voters chose his opponent, we can limp through this Constitutional anomaly. But if, as it appears he will, he intends to continue the radical upending of governing norms commenced by his party during the Clinton administration of the 90s,and essentially be a plutocratic autarch, then he MUST BE RESISTED, through civil disobedience and whatever procedural means are available to those of us who stand opposed to autocratic, anti-democratic governance.
None dare call it ILLEGITIMATE?
14 November 2016
PLEASE READ: NYTimes: Bernie Sanders: Where the Democrats Go From Here AND another plug for national popular vote compact
Bernie Sanders: Where the Democrats Go From Here http://nyti.ms/2epRZVl
12 November 2016
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact... the TIME IS NOW
My letter to Donald Trump
November 12, 2016
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I intend to work and fight to gain Progressive control of the Democratic Party, and to work for a time when it will be ascendant and able to defeat Republicans at every level. But Trump is not, after all, a conventional Republican. And, while it may seem quixotic and unlikely to succeed, I feel that the only reasonable thing to do RIGHT NOW is to appeal to him to do the right thing. Or at least some right things. If he does not, then I will oppose him implacably. But this is my appeal.
10 November 2016
Please support new Progressive Leadership... we must rebuild the Democratic Party from the ground up
It is abundantly clear that the Democratic Party is in need of new leadership. Deborah Wasserman-Schultz, the former chair, was forced to resign after emails showed her interfering in the primary between
Frankly put, the Democratic National Committee's last two leaders have been mired in controversy and ineptitude, and after giving away full control of the House, the Senate, and the White House to Republicans, it's time to appoint a truly strong and progressive leader to take the reins. Someone who has a finger on the pulse of the American middle class, and who has a long track record of standing up for the people in a fair, honest, and unwavering way.
Keith Ellison is that leader, and its time we show the DNC that millions of Americans agree. Please sign our petition.
That's why I signed a petition to Democratic National Committee, which says:
"Bernie Sanders has proposed that Keith Ellison be the next Chairman of the DNC. Now its time for millions of Americans to voice their agreement: sign and share today. "
Will you sign the petition too? Click here to add your name:
http://pac.petitions.moveon.org/sign/appoint-keith-ellison?source=s.fwd&r_by=16843784
Thanks!
Please sign the Petition to Eliminate Electoral College
09 November 2016
Retraction
Postmortem
03 November 2016
Trump v. Clinton ... a turning point in World History?
I really try not to hate Trump. He is damaged. But if he becomes president, it's just possible that the catastrophe will snowball from there. No mobilization on climate change. No movement towards global cooperation. No movement towards economic equity. More violence. Rinse. Repeat. Collapse of the economy and environment. Ultimately human extinction due to global climate catastrophe left unchecked till it's too late.
The possibility that Nov. 8, 2016 is a turning point, where the world chooses whether to live or die, is actually not all that unlikely.
A Victory Plan for Climate Change ::: A Call to Arms
Climate Mobilization
01 November 2016
Yet more ramblings on cosmology.
Another friend wrote some questions based on what I'd written about cosmology. So here are my answers.
1. Is it correct to hypothesize that we could use three dimensional Cartesian coordinates and investigate where the Big Bang occurred?
No. Spacetime (if it exists at all other than as a nonlocal system of energy levels, but let's leave that aside; it appearsto exist)... is not three dimensional. There is the special dimension of time, which is constrained (broken symmetry), giving us time's arrow. So set that one aside, as well. The spatial matrix is still not three dimensional. It is an open hyperbola (apparently; it could be finite, or infinite, it's almost impossible to tell), with a curvature in a dimension additional to the three dimensions of "ordinary space." Thus, just as the surface of a sphere is unbounded and uncentered but can be "mapped" onto a two dimensional matrix (like a sheet of paper) which has edges and a center, the apparent space we live in, of three dimensions, which would normally have edges and a center, actually has neither. It is either open and infinite, or recurved, so that, as in a sphere, translation in any direction will eventually return you to the same spot (except that it's trillions of light years, no exaggeration). There is no center. The Big Bang did not happen anywhere; it happened everywhere. It's just that at that time, the entirety of space was smaller than an atom. (Much smaller, actually, it was just about the Planck length, 1.6 x 10 ^-35 m or about 10^-20 times the size of a proton). Already, it is so large that from most of it (possibly 99.99... followed by a whole lot of 9's... % of it) is so far from here that light from there never has reached and never will reach here. And everywhere in the universe is the same in that respect, you can only see to the horizon determined by the speed of light... most everything that exists is beyond that, forever unseen. (Some cosmologists' theories give lower figures, such as that the observable universe is maybe 1% of the whole, but even that's pretty amazing).
If this sounds like God is in all places, you can think of it that way if you want.
Incidentally, the accelerating expansion of space itself is independent of this geometry. There is a force that acts like inverse gravity (repulsion), formerly referred to as the Cosmological Constant (except it's not constant, it's increasing), that is inherent to space itself and is directly related to the increasing entropy of the universe. This causes the expansion to accelerate, such that it will expand forever, and eventually become so attenuated, after all the black holes due to quantum effects, leak away all their mass as radiation, and all the protons decay into radiation, that it will be nothing but extremely low density, low energy radiation. In a quadrillion years, it will just be a boring region of the multiverse where nothing but stray, ultra low-frequency photons exist. Thus dieth the world, not even a whimper. Nor even a glow. But that's a long time off, and in the meantime else"where" in the multiverses, there's every reason to believe that new universes are emerging all the "time."
2. The idea of a big Attractor leads me to wonder if the Big Bang and the Attractor are the two end points of a gigantic cosmic magnet.
I believe my answer above makes fairly clear that the answer to this is also no. The Great Attractor is not certainly understood, and there is a wild theory that it's an incursion from outside this universe, but more likely it's a concentration (fluctuation) of mass in the general direction of the central region of the Laniakea Supercluster, but possibly well beyond in the same direction (again, since lateral as opposed to radial velocities of galaxies are unmeasurable, it's almost impossible to tell). Thus, on the scale of the entire universe ("Big Bang Universe" I call it, to distinguish it from the Multiverse, the current term for "all that exists"), the Great Attractor is a local phenomenon. Most of the universe not only cannot see it, but not even in principle could they be affected by it in any way. Totally different order of magnitude from the Big Bang.
Hope this makes sense. Another friend, to whom I wrote these essays, accuses me of being incomprehensible.
Some commentary on cosmology I sent to a friend
> * She asked if the "Great Attractor was what it sounded like" and was it in the picture I included in my post.
To which I replied,
Yes, although it's not a visible feature. The Great Attractor is a direction in space towards which everything in a large region including our galaxy, and the Virgo cluster BEHIND us, is being drawn. It was formerly thought to be an unusually massive region of galaxy concentration in that location (indicative of many supermassive black holes), but now there are other ideas, since the effect is so large. These range from even more massive concentrations behind that apparent point in space, possibly obscured by what's in front, to an incursion or leak in gravitational energy from outside the Big Bang universe. That suggestion is allowed by some versions of String Theory, but most cosmologists don't buy it. Most think it's an anomalous, but statistically not really outlandish, concentration of ordinary matter. Here is a version of that view:
>
> "The Great Attractor is one such structure, a diffuse concentration of matter some 400 million light-years in size located around 250 million light-years (ly) away in the direction of the southern Constellation Centaurus, about seven degrees off the plane of the Milky Way." [SolStation]
It's like the earth. It's 12000 km in diameter, but because it's spherical, even from as close as its surface, the gravitational force is even and acts as if all the mass were concentrated at a point, the center. Similarly, an enormous mass concentration approximately symmetrical in shape acts like a point source of gravitational attraction from a distance.
>
> *To which she replied:
> so it's an actual planet? or it's postulated?
> that's so massy that it attracts, gravitationally, all the mass in the galaxies around it?
> I feel as if all this you say is like 'talking around what you want to say', instead of saying it.
> Is this you? or is this all the scientific writers?
> So when you say attractor, you mean gravitationally? Or just that everything seems to moving in that direction, but it's not known why?
> Define your terms please.
And I responded:
Sorry. I have been interested in this subject since I was six years old so I speak the language and sometimes forget that others don't.
No it's not a planet. Wrong scale. We are talking about something that's 250 million light years distant and associated with the largest structures known in the universe. There are literally trillions of planets in these structures. The Great Attractor is a concentration of matter on an enormous scale that attracts galaxies tens of millions of light years distant, including our own. Yes. Gravitationally. Gravitation is the only known force that acts on these scales, although it's now believed that space itself exhibits a repulsive force analogous, but opposite, to gravity that acts to drive the expansion of space, now known to be accelerating. So, no. Convergence (big crunch) has now been ruled out. The present universe will expand forever, becoming more and more attenuated, until it essentially evaporates, tens our hundreds of trillions of years in the future.
Remember that as recently as 1920 most astronomers believed our Galaxy WAS the entire universe. We now know there are at least 300 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and undoubtedly far more than that in the (vastly larger) portion of the universe that is already beyond the horizon of ever being observable (given the accelerating expansion of all of space in the Big Bing Universe).
The reference to the gravitational force on the surface of the earth was only an analogy, to explain how something very extensive and diffuse can act as if it were a point source of gravitational energy. Thepp Great Attractor is not a "thing," per se, it's the nexus of a large region of concentrated matter.
I don't know any other way to express these concepts. There are no other terms for such large scale phenomena.
And yes I am writing this, but of course it reflects my reading in the non technical astronomical literature. Like I said, this is an interest of mine and always had been.
To your specific question: "so, from the big bang, things spread out, but now they're converging back toward a point?"
Your question reflects that you aren't realizing the scale of the observable universe. Hubble has revealed that in any direction you look, the "deep field" shows galaxies at distances of 10+ billion light years (which means we're looking at galaxies as they were when the universe, now 13.7 billion years old, was only less than four billion years old). The Laniakea Cluster, and (probably) the Great Attractor, are local phenomena on this scale, hundreds of millions of light years as opposed to quite a few billion light years distant.
The actual distance to the "Attractor" is not known, however. The assumption is that it is a concentration of matter in the densest part of our local Supercluster, but it's very difficult to say for certain that it isn't from even larger and more powerful sources of gravitational energy that are further, possibly much further, away, in the same direction.
But in any case the motion of everything around here, on a scale of tens of millions of light years to a few hundred million light years, towards the Great Attractor, is only an overlay on the continuous and accelerating expansion of space itself. As it turns out, we are living in an epoch when the universe is largely observable. We can almost see back to the time when the universe first became transparent, and we can detect the energy of the that time as the cosmic background radiation. (Only less than a million years after the Big Bang). Due to cosmic inflation, which is a whole other subject, most of the universe is and has been from near the beginning already too far away for light from those regions to ever reach here (and the same applies everywhere; observers anywhere can only see a small fraction of the universe). But that horizon will shrink as the accelerating expansion of space continues. Eventually even galaxies now visible at a few billion light years distant will be moving away from us faster than light travels (this is possible because space doesn't move, it expands). Their light will then never reach us. And this horizon will get closer and closer. In something like 10 billion years, which is a long, long time of course but less than the time the universe has already existed, and there will still be stars shining then, this horizon will essentially reach the position of a local observer. Anyone alive at that time will be able to see only their own galaxy and any local objects actually gravitationally bound to it; all other galaxies will be moving with the expansion of space faster than light from their stars could ever reach their eyes.