Hence likely at some time the US will finally get out of Iraq and likely at some time from Syria too. — ssu

Yes. Isolationism has been a goal of the US conservatives for a long time now. We're tired of transplanting our ideals of democracy to ungrateful foreign lands.

The MRGA crowd, sorry, I meant MAGA will likely sweep the elections here. Trump will gain dictatorial powers and align us with the Kremlin. This might prevent a world war but at a very high cost (we're sorry, Ukraine).

American troops and military aid will be withdrawn from everywhere. And then what? The secondary powers will have military control of their regions and nuclear weapons will proliferate unchecked. Then we shall see if Russia and China have plans beyond just battling us imperialists.

if the IRA had killed 1200, then you would have been totally OK with air strikes — ssu

But it isn't just bombing.

The Hamas terrorists made it as personal and offensive as they could, exactly to provoke an oversized uncontrolled retaliatory counterattack., The purpose is to draw world sympathy away from the State of Israel and to direct sympathy to the Palestinian people who endure but still support Hamas. World outrage should be mobilized primarily against Hamas' barbarous acts but then also against the massive retaliatory strikes that surely must follow. The two are inextricably connected. While the hostages are still held there should be no peace for Gaza.

Israelis tell British MPs of evidence of Hamas sexual violence

Thank you. The problem I have is the same mentioned by . Darwin tried to sell natural selection by pointing out that selective breeding of animals and plants was an established practice already. For artificial selection there is a human breeder who is selector for some trait. But natural evolution is on autopilot, it is purely a discrete non-continuous mathematical system that responds time-to-time however it can to an independent therefore unknowable environment. Artificial selection of trait or function is directed by a God-like agent. Darwinian natural law relies on a Platonic mathematical statistical intermediary that automatically relates two unlike realms without the need for a selector other than de facto survival.

I suppose examples from organic and biochemistry might be more convincing but that would be still more technical. But then again I probably still don't understand what the authors are saying.

Darwin didn't say that the term evolution can't be applied to anything else, did he? — Danno

the new ‘law of increasing functional information’ states that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity, and complexity — Gnomon

I don't get the motivation why complex natural systems would ever want to 'evolve' into anything else if they already survive as they are. This is not a given. Most existent species will never evolve into anything else. Man will never become superman.

Perhaps I'm looking at this too much in a Darwinian sense of evolution being just one possible version of natural adaptation to an unpredictably changing world. Darwin started from a simple mathematical feature of all random statistical variation of traits becoming the effective connection between genetic inheritance and the unknowable physical world. Those that are not already adapted by chance die off. Where does information come into play?

if the populace acted as one — Janus

But that can only be an ideal theoretical possibility because, like the air or the clouds, the populace is not actually a permanent existent entity. It's only a Platonic concept. Historically, revolutions that do happen only turned power over to some new (usually worse) elite.

Regarding ownership of land, I don't know whether Israel needs to justify its own existence anymore than any other state. It exists and continues to exist. — BitconnectCarlos


I don't think it need justify its existence — Ciceronianus

Yes. Israel as all other states is a fact not an opinion. Justification for facts is empty verbiage. The people of Israel are likewise a fact but they are plural and diverse, as are Jews many and diverse all over the world. Confounding these three and assigning widespread ills of the world, such as universal social or legislated or enforced oppression of the oppressed, to any or all of them indiscriminately is antisemitism, whether that be open or covert.

Dutch politics is pathetic. Ridiculous virtue signaling. — Benkei

Maybe that's in acknowledgment of the shameful oppressive colonialist history and smug not-me attitudes of your country?

Terrorism has always been a reply — Benkei

And indiscriminate bombing has always been the reply to terrorism everywhere because there is no other effective answer. The answer to bombing is either annihilation of Hamas or escalation and spreading war to the entire region with the aim to eliminate Israel.

That's where Iran comes in. What is Iran's role as an instigator for Hamas to start the next regional war?

Israel is reaping what it sowed for years — Benkei

And so is Gaza. According to reasoned third-party judgment, the terrorists and the IDF are both proceeding according to the above discussed ideals of world justice.

Why is it so hard to separate Hamas from the people of Gaza?

Should it not be up to the people of Gaza to reject terrorists ensconced in a maze of tunnels under the city? In all the world news I still don't hear anything of the sort anywhere. Apparently it was the Israeli babies' and old women's own fault that they were massacred by righteous Gaza freedom fighters.

I am talking about drawing a circle that <is> a square thus not a circle. It must be in the same two dimensional plane — PL Olcott

On the surface of the Earth, imagine drawing squares centered on the North Pole with increasing length sides until the sides coincide with the circle of the equator. As said ,what can be done is all about unstated presumptions.

How viable is an independent state in the separated plots of land that basically the PA has? — ssu

You are saying all this on your own assumption of ethnic separation as the basis for peace. If this was in your own country would you want that for yourself? For a more distanced analogy how does this work in the US or Canada with indigenous peoples who were granted lands forever, do they want separation (Some in fact do, and claim 'historical' rights.)?

According to reliable unreachable sources the rocket was made of paper mache designed to disappear by itself on impact and filled with attack propaganda butterflies that cause an international fire storm upon public release. The weapon was designed at the secret Antarctic weapons facility.

At his point in time, given the lack of investigative evidence,

Any suggestion that it's clearly one or the other only reveals the bias of the person offering the opinion. — Hanover

:100: :up:

The doppler sound indicates a passing projectile, incoming then outgoing. The time delay, if the locations of the target and video were known would give a clue to the direction of the projectile. The size of the explosion does not necessarily suggest anything. Hamas has explosives big enough if that was their intent.

What PT says makes sense to me.

The question to ask is, is this mass hysteria or mass schizophrenia, or is is there a cause - by cause I mean a reason, right or wrong - for their actions? — FreeEmotion

I am sympathetic to your views on mass hysteria but not on the psychology of terrorists. In this I think both your take and the PT article are fundamentally mistaken. Psychology is not the place to look, as any psychological survey of terrorists will show random behavioral traits. The answer lies in sociology and in social psychology, in our gut irrational responses on a group, social, and tribal level. It's in the singing, the dancing, and the killing. :fear:

systematic analysis shows that this unitary retaliatory approach to terrorism frequently not only fails to deter and discourage it but may in fact only perpetuate endless cycles of retribution

Psychology Today is a fake science journal written by journalists whose opinions are as whimsical as the requests of their editors. Where are their references to alleged systematic analysis to unitary retaliatory approach? Perhaps personal surveys of news clippings from Pravda?

Free Palestine — 180 Proof

You mean free from Hamas and other terrorist organizations. What the world does not need is more Lebanons.

I think Hamas is multi-faceted. It has a terrorist wing, at the same time it's the "authority" we have to deal with in Gaza. — Benkei

Only one facet matters

Documents exclusively obtained by NBC News show that Hamas created detailed plans to target elementary schools and a youth center in the Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Sa'ad, to "kill as many people as possible," seize hostages and quickly move them into the Gaza Strip.

That's a great mugshot. I'm going to remember it in case I'm arrested. — T Clark

or this one for the original teflon don

If Prigozhin is indeed dead, then the cause of death is quite obvious: he thought he made a deal with Putin. — Jabberwock

Prigozhin possibly had a deal with Putin which included a concession to stay out of Russian politics and foreign affairs. If he did, then he violated the terms of the deal by making sure he stayed in the public eye as a viable opposition leader both at home and abroad. Did he expect Putin to retire?

What a surprise

methane emissions degrade in the atmosphere relatively quickly, after about 12 years, and do not act cumulatively over long periods of time.

So they say that carbon dioxide is bad but methane which degrades, quickly or slowly, to carbon dioxide is not as bad?

I spent a few braincells wondering why the global temperature seemed to mimic the N. hemisphere seasons. Then i realised that the extremes of the seasonal temperature variation take place on land, and most of the land is in the N. — unenlightened

I think that point and others similar are reasons for doubt. Up to about 10 years ago I was uncommitted on global warming but the evidence kept piling on year after year until I gave in. Most importantly the Antarctic ice sheet was getting colder and thicker even after Greenland started melting. This plus that the Southern Hemisphere has longer and colder winters by a slight bit due to the Earth's orbit not being perfectly round. But sea levels and temperatures were rising globally and that was what I was watching for.

Sorry. I should have split the sentences and started a new heading. Even better, make a separate post for a philosophical rant.

Saying anything about any scientific subject at least implies an expressed or unexpressed position by the speaker and further that there exists some sort of scientific support for that position.

Pro or con.
But normally, on popularized scientific topics only the pro positions are acceptable for fear that children might believe them. For example, If I now propose a hypothetically possible case against global warming or one for a rapidly approaching ice age, rather than being ignored it will raise eyebrows and I might be accused of ignorance or ill will.

Have a look at how many locations never even get "warm" — Agree to Disagree

That is all irrelevant to your argument. To show that there is or there is no global warming you have to find data that is global not local, cover at least decades, and that also can be clearly interpreted convincingly to non-experts like us to strongly suggest one or the other alternative.

What could that be? London is too local, any specific maximum temperature reading is too prone to some special occurrence at that time and place. What can be used are the mean temperature reading taken globally by satellites and summarized graphically for non-mathematicians. Agencies with supercomputers like ECMWF or the NOAA do this. There are a number of historical global charts maintained just for discussions like ours.

All you have to do is find one great chart that supports your argument, whatever you say your argument may be.

One that I like is this one because each decade is shown in a different color, starting with the 1940's at the bottom and the 2020's at the top as I would expect from a claim of incessant global warming. The very top line is 2023



Given that El Nino is kicking in, and that last January 2022 the vulcano Hunga-Tonga blasted water crystals all over the stratosphere, and most of all because humanity is FUBAR, there is little good to hope for here. I'm worried but not yet panicked.

Reading your very helpful suggestions and some of what I can find here, in general there can be many reasons for the string of coups in Africa but none of them is that military rule is better at solving the safety and economic realities of the region or that it has the support of the general population. The same military that was there constitutionally before the coup is still the one there unconstitutionally after the coup, and the presence of international troops only emphasizes their weakness to deal with internal security issues.

My search engine is feeding me US analysis which sees foreign affairs as continued East-West conflict. Perhaps it's fair to accuse this approach of paranoia, nevertheless history has shown the effectiveness of such polarizing presumptions. Russia and China, just like the US at times, has worked hard to take advantage of fragile circumstances in third world or developing nations, whether through friendly economic exchange, loans and technical assistance, or through the supply of arms in exchange for natural resources.

Ukraine is trying to send grain and sunflower oil to Africa, Russia is bombing those export depots. Russia is Africa's main arms supplier. In the Sahel, apparently arms and military support work better.

Then there is this instant military alliance that will defend Niger in war. How did this alliance come about so quickly unless it was prearranged by a foreign power?

"Earth Just Had Its Hottest Month Ever. How Six Cities Are Coping."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/july-2023-hottest-month-record-climate-change-5e5b3097
Interesting seeing that headline in the WSJ. That would have been unthinkable 15 years ago. — RogueAI

Now count the number of states that had their record high temperature BEFORE 1970. For those who don't want to do the counting, the answer is 36.
8 states had their record high temperature between 1911 and 1929.
24 states had their record high temperature in the 1930's. The 1930's were very hot in America.
What do people think that this data means? — Agree to Disagree

The record hottest day in California was in Death Valley. The coldest in Alaska was -80 at Prospect Creek. Regardless of the authority of the source, how could this data possibly address global warming or even 'hottest month ever'?

More than 20 were killed and hundreds were wounded when government forces attempted to retake the Maidan
Don't you see a difference between a genuine popular uprising and a military coup?

I'll answer this. There were so many other things happening during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, it must have slipped right past me. I do remember the oil embargo. Maybe you can pull up some of those articles from those eras, warning of global warming. I'm curious. — jgill

Back then we experienced with our unbelieving eyes the first dog in space, the exploration of the planets, and man leaving footprints on the Moon. Yet the exploration of the oceans and of Earth beneath our feet is still incomplete to this day.

Much of what we think we know of past ice ages comes from three deep ice core samples drilled out of the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice cap. This was done to explore the geological and biological archeology of Earth, including the timescale of past ice ages.

What was seen is shocking indeed. According to the record, we appear to be living in a relatively short-period warming of a long-lasting ice age. As long as there are ice caps over the poles we could claim to be in an ice age. Or not.

The anxiety that

Scientists raised the issue of a possible pending ice age around about the mid 70's. — Agree to Disagree

recalls was quite real back then. The fear was that our balmy existence could quickly, say in a decade, revert back to its normal frozen ways except for wide swath of equatorial belt.

Such as the absolute political power and money of the American and French governments and the puppet governments serving them — Jack Rogozhin

Two evils don't cancel each other to make things right. There must be a third better way. Popular elections are an attempt to find that third way.

During the July 30 march in Niamey, organized by a movement against the French army's Operation Barkhane, demonstrators chanted pro-Russian, anti-French and pro-junta slogans. "Vive Putin," "Vive la Russie," "A bas la France," ("Down with France"), "Vive l'armée nigérienne!" ("Long live the Nigerien Army!"). Demonstrators also targeted the French embassy, denouncing the presence of the former colonial power. The attack prompted Paris to evacuate its nationals. ~~ Le Monde, August 13, 2023

The underlying geopolitical aspect of these military coups is fundamental here. Safety, economic, political, healthcare, and even personal survival issues can be marginalized when absolute political power and money rule..

I can't help thinking that Russia and China are somehow responsible for stirring up this mess.

When economic conditions worsen then people all of the sudden become aware that they have a country that is governed by politicians. Politicians are the simplest target for having caused all worsening conditions. Why didn't 'they' foresee and prevent the hot sun the drought the locusts the famine. Surely whoever calls themselves the opposition party can do better.

Given the historical role of greedy Western powers, the right opposition party must then be either the equally foreign supported Islamists or the Eastern powers. In either case, if the population sees the West as the villain then there isn't much that the West can do to change that. Whether the French stay or leave they will still be the 'oppressors' in the reductionist dichotomous politics of Africa.

How can Jenny or anyone else know Jenny's psychological state of mind? Why can't knowledge be scientific knowledge learned from a book?

if we want to do metaphysics and make a logical argument, Peirce's logic of vagueness takes us a step past the usual "something out of nothing" ontology. — apokrisis

I agree that logic is not limited to this or that logic.

The most restricted logic I can think of is Parmenides' of the purely formal unique part-less featureless simple continuous motionless timeless One. With or without extent in space, It either is (logically exists) or not, end-of-logic. The advantage of this logic is its clarity simplicity wide-ranging applicability and rigorousness.

Plato extended this pure binary logic of a One fairly successfully to the more complex logical world of the many, the Forms. Then he attempts to extend binary logic to special classes of Platonic particulars through their theorized logical participation in the Forms.

Here come binary relations of many different types of objects. The pairs range in type from related objects, to related properties along some dimension, to two completely unrelated objects. These pairs are in 'opposition' (of sorts).

But as one would suspect they are not at all alike in their logical relation. This is looser binary logic, the application has become vague and ambiguous. Apples and oranges are both same and not-same depending on their basket. Simmias is both short and tall. Short/not-short are not the same as short/shorter or not-tall/tall.

Even worse, they leave room in the middle for some silent majority of the average, and for none-of-the-above. That's an implicitly 4-valued logic masquerading as binary.

This makes all ancient logic difficult to read unless additional logical assumption are publicly made in interpretation that are both clear and acceptable to other readers.

CS Peirce extended with his sketch for a logic of vagueness.
So the "before" of both something and nothing is the third category that is simply a "vagueness" as logically defined. Peirce flipped the principle of noncontradiction to show this.

The PNC says it cannot be true both that "p is the case" and "p is not the case". Peirce says vagueness is the indeterminate state out of which such counterfactual definiteness can arise. Vagueness is that to which the PNC fails to apply in any definite fashion. — apokrisis

Aristotle simplified logic to manage his material objects. By Pierce's time logic was removed from the ancient complications, but closer to Parmenides' original implicit PNC, this time expressed with mathematical rigor. Now the problem was seen in the opposite direction -- how can logic be expanded in scope (power) to meet the needs physicists, yet remain analytically rigorous enough to be reliable. Suggestions for 3- 4- and other valued logic have always been made but mathematicians are not easily moved away from what works.

Sorry about the slow response, I got COVID after my politicians assured me that there was no such thing anymore.

Everything is self-cancelling itself towards nothing. The probability of that was so high that it the Big Bang was a story of exponential decay. Almost everything self-cancelled almost immediately. Very little was left in terms of energy density even after the first second. We are now into the asymptotic last flattening of that curve as the average density of the vacuum is a few hydrogen atoms per cubic metre and the temperature is a frigid 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. — apokrisis

You are describing what is happening after the singular spark of universal creation. I am comparing before before to after after of the physical world or much more narrowly of the material world. From nothing came everything, and from everything will come nothing, given sufficient time. Matter is mortal.

I'm concerned with the logical impossibility past either end of the sentence. The fault may well be in gap in logic rather than a gap in nature, but either way we're missing something. Once hot inflation starts we're into physical logic, but before that there is no before, no logic, there is nothing. This nothing may be unknown physics but it goes beyond a mere epistemological problem of our not knowing just yet.

we have that which never changed in its entire existence. Completely unperturbed/stable. The most objective phenomenon possible. The most consistent, the most repeatably measured as the exact same [?]regardless of time[?] — Benj96

I am caught up tracing Plato's use of 'same' in the Republic, There are 597 of them I think. For the life of me I can't see how anyone ever could understand what any of them mean, either in ancient times or since. Not even Plato, and certainly not the more logically limited Aristotle.

The second half of the Parmenides dialogue is similarly inexplicable. It was inexplicable to Plato as well, so he let a mature self-assured 'Parmenides' character dogmatically 'explain' it to a young and wide-eyed 'Aristotle' character. After the first public dramatic reading of the original, there was undoubtedly a drunken riot in the courtyard of the Academy.

change vs stasis is a unity of opposites — apokrisis

I just noticed this brilliant post in your archives Thank you! If we could only understand what any of those four words ever mean!

To be the swiftest change is to have the least notion that there was anything other that could have been done except that abrupt something. — apokrisis

Plato referred to that as 'suddenly'. Something in time but outside of time, as a quantum shift. He didn't see how change (for us, as at the smallest scale) can happen any other way.
But in real life we are a heap of complex imperceptibly slow changes that add up to make my beard grow.

to where it was originally going — apokrisis

...and where it originally came from. Which still leaves the question, is unscientific infinitesimal probability a sufficient ultimate scientific answer to how everything appears from nothing?

I only talked about the Rietdijk–Putnam argument itself and how it didn't make much sense to me. — Alkis Piskas

The Rietdijk–Putnam preceded Penrose and is seen more as a philosophical argument in the literature. Frankly, reading wiki and the SEP articles on Time and Becoming and Temporal Parts very little of it makes sense to me either.

That's probably because I am more hung up on Plato's various suggestions of space, time and change.

The Ship of Theseus makes more sense to me in terms of temporal parts, identity and change. but the notion of same time or gaps in time between events still throws me for a loop..

The galaxies you are moving towards would have come into view regardless of your motion, only at a later time as measured by your clock. Similarly, the galaxies you are moving away from will also come into view, but at a later time — Pierre-Normand

the edge of the visible universe is receding from us faster than the speed of light. Although individual galaxies are much slower than light their apparent movement adds up radially away from us. Over billions of years we would see fewer galaxies spread further apart in ever darkening space.

The moving observer effect is special because it is in the observer's present, here and now. But that present, that 'origin' is not fixed in space-time. I'll throw another log in the fire.

The Hubble space telescope orbits Earth. Let's suppose that when flying at maximum approach speed in the direction of Andromeda it sees a quickly brightening supernova star. Mission control decides to keep the telescope pointed there to record continuously for 10 days. From Earth we will not discover that supernova for another 3 days, and on the other side of the orbit, now moving away from Andromeda, Hubble will not see it for another 3 days. This is not an illusion. NASA could set this up just to make Penrose's point, showing that the universe is a weird place.

However, getting back to the description of four-dimensionalism, there are things that throw me off or, at best, make me wonder:
1) "An object's persistence through time is like its extension through space". — Alkis Piskas

In addition to the problematic objects, there is also the question of what to do with the uniqueness of observers.

What the Andromeda Paradox implies is that the observed universe apparently shifts in its entirety towards a moving observer. Which means that in the forward moving direction many more of the most distant galaxies come into possible view and we lose some distant galaxies from possible view behind us. This is all pretty absurd, yet it is demonstrably true.

Then this becomes equivalent to an observer shifting its 'present' physically measurably in space toward the direction of motion. The effect is that we can see from some future present some event that can then be prevented from causing harm in the present present after we quickly got back to where we belong.

absolute relativism, because it can be consistent with a sort of ontic structural realism where knowledge about the relations that generate observations is possible, at least in theory — Count Timothy von Icarus

Can the laws of physics about unknowable worlds be real, here meaning absolute, or must they be tentative as well?