The Misplaced Hopes of Progressives

It's difficult for me to resist writing political articles because we live in such interesting times.  So, please forgive me if I offend at least one half of my readers with this post, but I must share this insight with you nonetheless.

The Progressive Democrats who are currently wresting power from America's traditional Democratic Party are, bless their hearts, way off base. No need for me to go into particulars; you can read other people's books and columns for details. 

Here's my take on it. The Progressives are mistakenly trying to usher in a Utopian society that is not possible to achieve in this fallen world. 

It appears to me that the Progressives are mistaking earth for heaven. History proves over and over again that the Progressive ideals, such as socialist redistribution of wealth, open borders, and "free" government programs never achieves its objectives. 

Hope springs eternal, yet those who forget the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them.

Yes, the Progressive ideals are, for the most part, lovely thoughts. Yet, they are impossible to bring into reality. The reason is that human beings are too easily corrupted, and the politicians you trust today will become the dictators you fear tomorrow. Why? 

Because absolute power corrupts absolutely.

As I watch the promises pour out of the lips of the younger Progressives, I admire their egalitarian ideals. But, unfortunately, that is not the way the world works. It is the way heaven works. 

I believe the young Progressives are mistaking the hope for Utopia as something that can be achieved. It cannot. Again, the problem is not the ideals, for they are indeed heavenly. The problem is the fallen nature of humankind and the hard, sad fact that wealth and power corrupt those entrusted with ushering in Utopia. 

The older Democrats running for President who are now changing their stripes to appear more Progressive are not Progressives--they are politicians pandering to the youth vote. You young idealists are being played by the old men and women who pretend to agree with you. They do not. They only seek power and dominion over you. This is the sad the truth of the matter, and anyone who has been alive on this planet for any length of time knows it.

The Progressive ideals will quickly turn ugly as unintended consequences take over the agenda. Here's just a few off the top of my head--

I could go on. The point I am trying to make is that things don't turn out the way you hope they will. 

I used to teach college. I have a pretty good idea of your reasoning abilities. You are not smarter than the writers of the American Constitution, and neither are the politicians you trust. It's tragic. Your motives are noble, but the results are not achievable. 

No, it's not a good idea to try anyway, because civilizations do fail and governments do fall. It can happen here and then we will have the post-apocalyptic scenarios that are so popular on television and in the game worlds. Anarchy is not better than our Constitutional government; don't fool yourself.

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Below is a reprint of my article, "Live and let live is the Democratic Ideal," in case you haven't read it.

I am reprinting this column about tolerance of those with whom you disagree. "Live and Let Live" is a meme that is absolutely central to a functioning democracy. Every American citizen is entitled by the law of this land to hold and express their opinions. It is only through exchange of information and assistance that the big jobs get done. Read on for the why's and how's:

The Simple Explanation's theory of memes uses the term "meme" to stand for a belief or a tidbit of knowledge. These memes are passed around to our friends like trading cards--most of our close friends hold the same meme cards we do; that's why they are our friends. The more memes you hold in common with someone else, the more you like them. The opposite is also true--we have a difficult time relating to people who hold a different set of memes.

Here is the bottom-line of the previous Apocalyptic Visions article:

The Simple Explanation suggests that "live and let live" would be a great meta-meme for everyone to adopt. If we could appreciate the fact that each of us has a unique perspective, then perhaps we could allow each other to hold the memes that make the most sense for our lives. This is my meme chord; that is your meme chord. If I don't like your meme chord then I can talk it over with you and see if we can move our meme chords closer to one another in agreement. If neither of us is able or willing to swap memes with the other, then so be it. Either accept the other person, memes and all, or move on. Find someone else who more closely agrees with your memes. There is enough room in this world for each of us to hold our own chords, but only if "live and let live" is an overarching meme.

We are now in the midst of a social epidemic of intolerance. Intolerance is the opposite of "live and let live." When we are intolerant of others' memes, we are declaring that our memes are correct and their memes are wrong. And then we take it a step further--we refuse to "tolerate" the others' memes. We throw up resistance, we throw up roadblocks, we close our ears and refuse to listen to the other. We do not merely disagree, as reasonable people may do from time to time. When we are intolerant, we look for ways to force the other to abandon their memes and adopt ours. We shout them down because we feel we are shouting the right memes and theirs are not only wrong, they are evil and have no right to be heard. And once you declare the other "evil," it is no longer a disagreement in good faith, but a fight for the soul. "God is on our side, therefore we can do whatever it takes to crush the opposition," is a dangerous and usually delusional meme to hold. And if it entitles the holder to disregard rule of law, then it is not a democratic ideal and it has no place in American politics.

Once words can no longer be exchanged, frustration builds and violence follows. This is what we are seeing now in the U.S.  Free exchange of memes has been thwarted because of intolerance. 

Exchange of ideas is the key. You needn't agree with the other person, but you must hear them out. Because, once you agree to sit and exchange ideas and concerns, whether or not you adopt the other's ideas, the very act of hearing each other out creates a shared space that acts as a balm to soothe both your soul and theirs. When you are too angry, frustrated, or afraid to listen to the other, you perpetuate the intolerance that leads to violence. This intolerance is not helpful. 

 Maxine Waters calls followers to adopt intolerance of others' right to disagree. [cnn photo credit]

We hear a lot about the importance of "diversity" nowadays in America. True diversity can only thrive if we allow each other to "live and let live." When you seek to silence those with whom you disagree, you are not encouraging diversity; you are actually partaking in fascism. Fascism advocates the forced suppression of those who express opposing views. Disagreement, on the other hand, is not forced suppression, it is merely disagreement.  Shouting others down when they have the floor, shunning those with whom you disagree, refusing service in a restaurant to paying customers who voted for a different candidate--this is not the side of the angels, folks. This is not helping us come together to get the job done.

Unusual Fractal Flower and a Dandelion

Here's a pretty flower I saw on my walk yesterday. I've never seen this type of fractal pattern before. 

It's hard to describe--a lily pad shape with two flowers coming out is the closest I can say. Not many fractal levels, looks like 3 iterations to me.

This Euphorbia Rigida exhibits an interesting fractal pattern.

The dandylion below is a more common fractal flower. It is only one iteration deep. You see that the hundreds of smaller flowers each look like the single mother shape.

This dandelion shows a very simple fractal pattern that only goes one iteration deep--a puff-ball made of puff-balls.

You can watch my fractal broccoli demonstration to see the many levels of a broccoli.

The reason that fractals were so hard to identify as a phenomenon is that it is the pattern of smaller and larger iterations that make up a "fractal," not its particular shape or appearance. So you can look at a number of fractal objects all lined up, like the three plants above, and not recognize that they all bespeak the same operational pattern of "as above, so below."

Read the entire Simple Explanation of fractals by clicking on this link.

A Simple Explanation of How Ancient Roman Architects Used Invisibility Cloak Technology

Here's a fascinating reprint from ars Technica concerning the observed similarities between ancient Roman structures and the geometry of electromagnetic cloaking devices. My "Simple" interpretation will appear at the end of this column.

REPRINT:

Study says ancient Romans may have built “invisibility cloaks” into structures

Foundational patterns in Roman theaters resemble electromagnetic cloaking devices.

JENNIFER OUELLETTE - 5/3/2019, 11:43 AM

Roman Colosseum is an oval amphitheatre in the center of the city of Rome. French scientists suggest its structure might have helped protect it from earthquake damage.Alex Livesey/Danehouse/Getty Images)

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• SHARE OScientists are hard at work developing real-world "invisibility cloaks" thanks to a special class of exotic manmade "metamaterials." Now a team of French scientists has suggested in a recent preprint on the physics arXiv that certain ancient Roman structures, like the famous Roman Colosseum, have very similar structural patterns, which may have protected them from damage from earthquakes over the millennia.

Falling within the broader class of photonic band gap materials, a "metamaterial" is technically defined as any material whose microscopic structure can bend light in ways it doesn't normally bend. That property is called an index of refraction, i.e., the ratio between the speed of light in a vacuum and how fast the top of the light wave travels. Natural materials have a positive index of refraction; certain manmade metamaterials—first synthesized in the lab in 2000—have a negativeindex of refraction, meaning they interact with light in such a way as to bend light around even very sharp angles.That's what makes metamaterials so ideal for cloaking applications—any "invisibility cloak" must be able to bend electromagnetic waves around whatever it's supposed to be cloaking. (They are also ideal for making so-called "super lenses" capable of seeing objects at much smaller scales than is possible with natural materials, because they have significantly lower diffraction limits.) Most metamaterials consist of a highly conductive metal like gold or copper, organized in specific shapes and arranged in carefully layered periodic lattice structures. When light passes through the material, it bends around the cloaked object, rendering it "invisible." You can see anything directly behind it but never perceive the object itself.

Top view of a megastructure using periodic arrays of tall buildings as resonators to create a seismic cloaking effect. Stephane Brûlé et al.

Co-author Stephane Brûlé, a civil engineer at a Lyon-based company called Menard, demonstrated the possibility of this kind of large-scale acoustic and seismic cloaking a few years ago with colleagues from the Fresnel Institute in Marseille. The researchers drilled a periodic array of boreholes into topsoil and discovered that sound waves reflected most of their energy back toward the source when they encountered the first two rows of holes. Brûlé noticed a similar foundational structure while on holiday in Autun (a town in central France), thanks to an aerial photograph of the semicircular structure of a Gallo-Roman theater buried under a field.

When Brûlé superimposed a more detailed archaeological photograph of the theater's structure over an image of one of the invisibility cloaking metamaterials he and his Fresnel colleagues had made in the lab, the ancient theater's pillars lined up almost perfectly with the microscopic elements in the metamaterial. He discovered similar overlap with images of the foundational structure of the Roman Colosseum and other, fully enclosed amphitheaters from the same era.

"I doubt that the [Romans] intentionally designed their buildings to be earthquake resistant."

Roman engineers may not have done this deliberately; they could have just been lucky, according to Brûlé. Or they might have noticed over the centuries that certain structures were more resistant to earthquake damage than others and modified their designs accordingly. "Rigorously, we cannot say more for the moment," he told Physics World.

"The introduction of archaeological metamaterials is a fascinating idea," said Greg Gbur, a physicist at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. "I doubt that the builders of structures in that era intentionally designed their buildings to be earthquake resistant, or even that they were able to unconsciously evolve their designs over time to make them more secure—the time scales seem too short. I could imagine, however, that there might be a sort of 'natural selection' that occurred, where megastructures built with inadvertent earthquake cloaking might have survived longer than their counterparts, allowing us to see their remains now."

"There have been a few articles written in the past about the possibility of designing 'seismic cloaks' to protect buildings, but these were all focused on placing subsurface elements around an individual building to guide the waves," said Gbur. "This review illustrates how a well-designed urban area, consisting of multiple buildings, could use the buildings themselves as the elements of the cloak, using them to shield the most important or vulnerable buildings (schools, hospitals) from harm. I had my doubts about the feasibility of really designing practical seismic invisibility cloaks when the research first started coming out, but once again researchers have proven themselves more clever than I could imagine."

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A Simple Explanation of the above article is to point out the obvious fact that this "invisibility cloak" geometry is that of a torus. 

As to the question of whether or not the Roman architects knew about seismic dampening fields, we're talking about the primordial shape of things from the quantum clouds on up. Atomic clouds, magnetic fields, galactic clouds all organize their aggregates into this torus shape.

According to the Simple Explanation cosmology, the torus shape is the actual shape of the container that surrounds our universe's space/time continuum.  It is also the shape of fractal consciousness. As we are all fractal iterations of the Universal Unit of Consciousness, we know this shape deep in our soul.

My guess is that the Colosseum's architect had some sort of creative vision or direct intuition that the stadium needed to be designed "just so." It's likely the shape was conceived as somehow blessed by the architect who transcribed it as if in a dream.