SANDERS now AHEAD in poll in New Hampshire

Didjuze see where a new Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce Univ. poll (not sure how reliable?) shows Bernie Sanders AHEAD of Clinton in New Hampshire for the first time.

SANDERS    44

CLINTON    37

BIDEN           9 

Here is what you always wanted to know about Ionian "speech" vis a vis human music, in a nutshell

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It's not that it's rude, exactly, among Ionians, to interrupt another's "speech," or make unnecessary noises while someone is communicating with you. More like a sign of mental illness. Virtually unheard of, so to speak. 
 

Ionians "talk" to one another by using external tympani and cord-like surfaces in their head and neck area, scraped by special appendages to produce elaborate, harmonic sounds that to human ears resemble eerie combined vocal/instrumental music. Whole paragraphs of thought can be encoded in a single "chord." An adult Ionian can "speak" continuously, in what almost sounds like a slow, discordant pavane, with a steady but free rhythm. Poetry, to them, is when speech is music; then it is both; every voicing and timbre, every tempo, every rhythm, every harmony, precisely crafted to create an artistic and emotional effect, while at the same time containing semantic content, indeed, great meaning. To Ionians, this is the highest art. 

Encountering human music, Ionians are perplexed. Sometimes it seems lovely, in an otherworldly way. But so tedious. So repetitive. So limited in scope. So meaningless. Almost like a subtrack of crude emoticons to punctuate thought. Just ba-ba ta-ta, over and over again with no coherence or content, and then it usually just comes round to where it started and stops, for no reason. So curious. Interesting, but odd. Now and then, just occasionally, really beautiful, but for the most part just weird. 

Human speech, to them, on the other hand, sounds like grunts and moans. Awful, brash noises that fail to cohere into any kind of harmonic or rhythmic pattern to indicate meaning. Learning to actually discern meaning in this raucous cacophony is difficult, although not impossible, for an Ionian to learn. Indeed, they can even learn to reproduce a reasonable approximation of it, a feat the inverse of which will almost certainly be beyond human beings, at least in the absence of technological augmentation. 

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...
Part of an occasional series of tidbits about the Ionians, a fictitious alien race I have devised to populate a "science fiction universe" I've been thinking about. 

Bernie Sanders addresses huge rally for second day in a row

​28,000 in Portland on Sunday.

LA Times: « "The reason we're doing so well in this campaign is we're telling the truth," Sanders told the L.A. crowd, which his campaign estimated at 27,500, both inside the arena and in an overflow area outside watching on giant television screens.​ »

These two rallies alone were more than the attendance at every single campaign event of every other candidate of either party to date, combined. Admittedly, it's early and a lot of them haven't even had public events, but this is still meaningful. The rally in L.A. drew a huge crowd despite having been given short notice. The event was only announced to supporters on Wednesday.

​I was there, at the Sports Arena in Exposition Park, and it was electric. Somethin's happenin' here. ​Sanders hit every point, told it straight, and laid out a completely realistic Progressive agenda for America.

Go Bernie!

Republican Party: the Party of Nonsense.

 ​

​Here's Krugman's take:

....While it's true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that's not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today's Republican Party.​

Fox Newsaganza!

​I'm glad to hear from various folks that the Clown Car clatch​ created a negative impression over all in the Fox Newsaganza last night. The thing about Trump is that he actually represents the core of fearful, hate-filled revanchists who make up the "base" of the Republican party. These people are unreachable and not much of a threat, because they are slightly less than 20% of the electorate (actually a shockingly high number, but anyway). Many of the rest who typically vote Republican in presidential elections are actually reachable with a populist message, especially if it doesn't alienate their "values." Abortion and gay rights, unfortunately, are deal breakers for some. I watched a right wing acquaintance go from agreeing with Sanders on many issues despite having voted Republican since 1980, to rejecting him over these deeply deceptive Planned Parenthood hitjob videos and his Pro-Choice stance. But on economic issues, many heartland Republicans are surprisingly open to economic populism. 30 years of failed trickle down policies have started to hurt.
 

My dream is that Trump will fail in the Republican primary process (a safe bet), but NOT just fold up his tent; instead try to be a Ross Perot. If Trump is seriously spending money and running as an independent, it almost doesn't matter who either the Republicans or Democrats nominate, the Democrat will win.

Let's Primary Schumer out of office: No Democrat he!

​​• So Schumer has aligned himself with the Right-Wing Israeli government over his own country's, and the world's best interests, and come out against the Iran Nuclear Deal. I've despised Schumer for some time, as a Wall Street shill among other rightish policy positions. But this is it. Were I a New Yorker I would support ANYONE BUT CHUCK for the Democratic senate primary. 
 
We REAL Democrats must stop allowing these Nixon Republicans (hell, he's MUCH WORSE than Nixon!) to continue to succeed in OUR party!

Open up the Democratic debate process!

I just signed the petition, "Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Give Senator Bernie Sanders a Fair Chance by Increasing Number of Sanctioned Debates."

I think this is important. Will you sign it too?

Here's the link:

http://www.change.org/p/democratic-national-committee-debbie-wasserman-schultz-give-senator-bernie-sanders-a-fair-chance-by-increasing-number-of-sanctioned-debates

Thanks,

♦ David Studhalter

 

Please visit The Gyromantic Informicon 

Bernie Sanders video

​Here is the link to the Bernie Sanders streaming video for the campaign organizing kickoff meetings July 29... an estimated 100,000 attended 3500 separate organizing meetings across the country!​

​https://berniesanders.com/video/ ​

Bernie Sanders campaign

​L. A. Residents, please visit http://www.losangelesforbernie.org/ to support Bernie Sanders ​

​ To volunteer, text " work " to 82623 or go to http://bernie.to/vol

Thank you! ​

Bernie Sanders campaign

I attended a Bernie Sanders organizational meeting at the LGBT Center in Hollywood tonight. Please consider supporting Bernie's candidacy. Text "work" to 82623 or go to http://bernie.to/vol to volunteer. 

More on the eventual emergence of an Economy of Abundance

​I wrote the following in answer to a friend who expressed understandable skepticism about my ideas on the eventual emergence of an Economy of Abundance. His objection is, to paraphrase, that people are just too cussedly mean to ever learn to really cooperate. We are talking futuristics here, so if that's not your thing, better tune out.

Human meanness is an aberration, not an innate feature. You'd better hope I'm right about that, because the distinction will literally be the difference between extinction and survival / flourishing as an advanced civilization. My guess (pure speculation) is that most of the time civilizations that reach approximately our level eventually fail. (This would be one factor accounting for the fact that the universe isn't exactly teeming with them). You might conclude the odds are against us. But, as a species (including our potential descendant offspring-species, if any), this is our one and only shot, so what choice is there but to strive for the kind of cooperative adaptation that is so obviously necessary in order to develop into an advanced spacefaring/spacedwelling civilization?

If you think long term, like Asimov and the turgid and unreadable Stapledon (and maybe Tsiolkovsky and Kardashev in the Russian take-it-seriously school of futuristics) were among the first to do (I discount Doc Smith), it's obvious that there really are no other choices. Interim solutions, such as "empires" and other such nonsense, are doomed to failure. (Not that I endorse any of these people's vision; I think all of them, in their own ways, were unaware of certain important factors or failed to really think through some of the implications).

Now, as to your ethics point [that "Love Your Neighbor" is an impossible instruction or basis for society]. You are right, if by love you mean warm, admiring feeling towards others. Nice, but not essential. And here I rely on some Eastern insight as well as Western. Love isn't really an emotion, and on its most basic level, it is nothing more than the answer to your rhetorical question. ["How would you like it if this were to happen to you?"]. That's a formulation of the Golden Rule. If you answer the Golden Rule with, "So I'd better cooperate with my neighbors so we'll all have something," that is love, and whether it comes from warmth or just cold, correct analysis and the desire to survive makes no real difference. Love in this simplest sense can be intentionally created, and it just means "have the intention to benefit another." We don't need to cherish everyone, but, as a society, we must, quite literally, socialize well-being. We must want to, enough to work to, achieve benefits for all, not just ourselves. That is love, in its most basic sense, and it is an essential component of adaptation for survival long term. Of that I am completely convinced.

This is indeed a more or less Marxist view of history. But I'm convinced it's true. Global capitalism is the grand experiment in using a system that relies, in theory, though not practice, on "enlightened self-interest." It is failing, and will drag the entire species down with it if people don't wake up and change the course of history in time. Stay tuned. No one yet knows how it will turn out. I believe, but cannot prove, that "self-interest" in this acquisitiveness-oriented sense, as an ethical basis for organization of societies of sentient beings anywhere in the universe, does not and cannot work. You call it guilt, I call it cooperation. And it's the only way. Ants probably have a better social organization than we do, but I think intelligent beings are always messy. They have to be free to think and experience. So there has to be a lot of flexibility. But at the core there has to be mutual benefit cooperation. Or else, collapse. No other road.

Years ago, when I first started to think about my million year old technological civilization of Ionus, I conceived its motto (kind of like "In God We Trust," the kinda thing they'd plaster on a public monument): 

"MORE, BETTER, FASTER."

Ultimately it all comes down to self-improvement. Humans are shitty at this, but we are better than any other animal of Earth, so we might, just might, be able to do it. You notice that the difference between the Ionian motto and the one you propose (the "Turkey" motto, if you will ["Gobble, Gobble, Gobble!"]), is that theirs emphasizes production, not consumption. Consumption takes care of itself. What humanity has to, and just might, come to realize, is that there is a tipping point in the grand historical production curve where there is so much abundance that consumption, and in particular competition for the opportunity to consume, more or less drops out of the equation, and the overall success and well being of the civilization is measured only by its success at production. Terraforming worlds. Building space habitats. Harnessing the ultimate energy sources of nature. Inventing and developing more and better space transportation. Delving into the secrets of nature and the Multiverse. Creating monumental art and beauty. You name it.

​ I am cautiously optimistic, and I'll tell you why. I think that the advantages of socialization of well-being will become so obvious, assuming we survive the Fossil Fuel Interval and reindustrialize using purely renewable resources (an obvious necessity), that the theory will become so widely accepted it'll be treated as fact. Then, over time, civilization can build institutions with checks and balances that guarantee a degree of stability. Something like this has happened many times before, but here we're talking about the first real global cooperation. What makes me optimistic is that once that is working, its advantages, I believe, will be so obvious to everyone that there will be no going back. Of course there will always be rogues and rebels, but there will also be a slow and steady progress towards a permanent economy of Abundance. And that will change everything.
​

Kepler 452b, the most Earthlike world yet discovered

​Here's what's currently available on Kepler 452b, at 1400 l.y. distance in the Kepler field of view, announced today. It's a super-Earth, but it's squarely in its 6 billion year old sunlike star's habitable zone, so some kind of life on its surface is certainly a possibility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-452b

This information comes from data processing of the data that accumulated by the Kepler mission, which ended over a year ago due to a communications failure, and which only covered a tiny fraction of the sky. ​Given its phenomenal success, I certainly hope NASA develops plans to launch more and better planet finder missions in the near future. I would go so far as to say that it's just one of the basic things a technological civilization does. It surveys its surroundings to see what else there is in its environs. We can already sample wide areas of space for eclipsing planetary systems, which gives a statistical sample of what's out there (only a small fraction of planets transit the surfaces of their stars as seen from Earth, which is necessary for really long range detection).

Post Capitalism

This article, which I found on AlterNet, on "post-capitalism," has implications for the "Economy of Abundance" argument I've been making. If information is now the key to production, and "information wants to be free," (which I think it does), then social abundance is the only reasonable long term outcome.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/end-capitalism-has-begun

Very Serious People

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ten-miles-square/2015/07/a_brief_theory_of_very_serious056712.php

I like this piece by this piece by Henry Farrell, the "Ten Miles Square" column in WaMo today, entitled "A Brief Theory of Very Serious People."

I have long thought that people like Tom Friedman, who were so very insistent, and so very, very wrong, about the Iraq war, and many other things, should long ago have lost all credibility. Perhaps now is the time.

Worth a read.

Alperowitz: "Socialsm, American Style"

​Gar Alperowitz has an interesting op-ed in the NYT today.

 Here

I have long wondered why there couldn't be public legacy of wealth. The Alaska Permanent Fund is indeed a classic example. Imagine if in 1775 someone had the foresight to set up a public trust to own and lease land, rather than just allowing it to be taken. We could have a public enterprise today that made taxes unnecessary and provided a basic living income... a floor... to every citizen.

Something like this may be the basis for the future "economy of abundance" that I'm always touting. ​

trumped

Report in TPM:  Conservatives Furious Trump Distracting from Planned Parenthood Video.

Since that particular video is grossly deceptive and is being trumped up [sorry!] to make the wholly inevitable and in fact desirable making available of fetal tissue, which would otherwise be destroyed, for vital medical research, I say, thank you, Malignant Idiot le Donald, for doing something good for once, however inadvertently. To the extent this is even true.

New Whole Earth Image

This is from a new Climate monitoring satellite at the L 1 Lagrangian point, approximately 1 million miles from Earth. Apparently, this is the first non-mosaiced Whole Earth image since the Apollo Program in the 1970s. But now there will be many more.


​

♦ David Studhalter

 

Please visit The Gyromantic Informicon 

El Niño 2015-2016?

According to reports in the L A Times, it continues to appear more and more likely that the winter of 15-16 will be an El Niño, possibly even stronger than the 1997-98 season, which was the last "very strong" El Niñ0 (although the winter spring of 04-05 brought even more rain).

One fear is that overall temperatures will be so warm that most of the precipitation, even in the mountains, will be rain, which would be bad news for California's water resource picture. The efficient functioning of water management requires that much of the water be stored as snow-pack, especially in the Sierras. Thus, even if El Niño ends, or interrupts, our years-long drought, it may not sweep away our water resource problems; indeed the flooding and other damage may make life in California more expensive and troublesome.

There is little doubt that Climate Change is having an effect, although exactly what that effect is virtually impossible to calculate.

"Sale of Fetal Body Parts" is a phony issue

Many in the "Christian Right"  are galvanized and up in arms about Planned Parenthood's "immoral" selling of "body parts and tissue" from aborted fetuses. (Based on the viral Planned Parenthood video currently a cause du jour). 
 

Look, I don't support the idea of performing abortions for the purpose of obtaining fetal tissue for research. And I don't get that Planned Parenthood does either. I don't think anyone does, outside of lunatics. But the fact remains that even though no one wants there to be abortion, there is abortion, because our society has properly determined that in general, a woman's right not to have to bear a child supersedes any societal or imagined innate interest in/of the pregnancy itself, or of the fetus to "life." (I don't care to debate that, although I suppose my position on the issue is obvious enough). 
 

And given that legal abortion happens, and that fetal tissue is of very great value for medical research, why would it not be used? Federal law already prohibits "sale" of fetal tissue, but not reimbursement of costs. —42 U.S. Code § 289g—2—prohibits the acquisition and transferring of human fetal tissue "for valuable consideration if the transfer affects interstate commerce." A definition within the code notes that "'valuable consideration' does not include reasonable reimbursement of costs associated with the transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue." People differ on whether abortion should be legal or not, but the "sale of body parts" is already illegal, and is not, in fact occurring... the now infamous viral video does not establish that it is. Even those who believe abortion should be illegal should not oppose the vital use of fetal tissue for medical research (for example, from miscarriage). It isn't pleasant to think about, but the fact is that there is no substitute for fetal tissue for some crucial life-saving research.
 

Go Bernie!

​

I agree with Joshua Holland that, strictly based on precedent, it's an unlikely, and therefore exceedingly difficult political proposition, for Sanders to get the Democratic nomination. And I also concede that crowds of like-minded, enthusiastic people do not equate to votes. But come on. Huge crowds and surging enthusiasm are an indicator of a groundswell of support, and the existence of a large segment of the Democratic party that wants something quite different from what the party has been delivering since, oh, I dunno... 1976? I reiterate what I've been saying over and over: 1) you don't get anywhere in politics by conceding defeat in advance or negotiating with yourself. In the primary process, you fight for what you want, and you support the candidate that offers what you want. 2) The effect of a candidate like Sanders can only be to influence the nominee to take his voters into account and accommodate what he's saying into the eventual agenda of the nominee. If that's Clinton, so be it. She will be a better candidate because of Sanders and the efforts of Sanders supporters now and up to such time as it becomes clear she has won. That may happen, but it's not a done deal, and either way strong support for Sanders is important right now and going forward for those who broadly agree with his policy agenda.

GO BERNIE!

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