bigsmartdata | From the Poised Realm, the embodiment of Trans-Turing Systems, as a real invention, doth flow. Of course you are familiar with the Turing Machine: the theoretical paper tape compute engine to which all modern processors are obliged to worship every Sunday…you are, of course, familiar with the Turing Machine.
The Turing Machine
The work of Alan Turing is the rock from which the quest for a congruent theoretical computer science was launched. Totally awesome quantum computing heavy Scott Aaronson has written that when it comes to AI, we can divide everything that’s been said about it into two categories: the 70% that was covered in Turing’s 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and the remaining 30% that has followed in the decades since then.
Turing Machine = Foundation of Computer Science
So whoa — a Trans-Turing System? What?? I must know more!
That was the third thing that drove me to Tucson. I had to ask Kauffman what he meant — what he Tsaw, what he imagined. I found a description in the patent that Kauffman, et al, filed in 2014:
58
"Further disclosed herein is a Trans-Turing machine that includes a plurality of nodes, each node comprising at least one quantum degree of freedom that is coupled to at least one quantum degree of freedom in another node and at least one classical degree of freedom that is coupled to at least one classical degree of freedom in another node, wherein the nodes are configured such that the quantum degrees of freedom decohere to classicity and thereby alter the classical degrees of freedom, which then alter the decoherence rate of remaining quantum degrees of freedom; at least one input signal generator configured to produce an input signal that recoheres classical degrees of freedom to quantum degrees of freedom; and a detector configured to receive quantum or classical output signals from the nodes."
Sweet. I got it. Quantum computing nodes working in tandem with classical compute (Turing Machine) systems and what emerges is a Trans-Turing Machine, not constrained nor otherwise entailed by a bothersome set of NP-complete limits. Polynomial hierarchy collapse ensues, at long last P = NP, and we are full throttle to ride warp drive engines to the stars! Maybe? Maybe. Maybe not.
I had to ask Kauffman.
After I spotted him at the outdoor mixer on Thursday night, after I got over my fanboy flutters, after I introduced myself, chatted with him for a bit about his new book and how much I liked it, after I explained my own thoughts from my field in computer science, and how his book from a decade and a half earlier had so deeply influenced me, I did finally ask.
“So how do we build the Trans-Turnig Machine?”
A wry smile crossed his face. His eyes lit. For a moment he stopped being the intellectual giant I had come to revere, and revealed the mischievous, inquisitive, childlike spirit that must have driven him his entire life.
“I have no idea,” he said replied with a grin.
I was all satisfied. I knew he did not mean that he could not conceive of one, nor he did mean that he could not describe one, nor not define the attributes it might require, nor not imagine how it might function. What he meant was we still don’t know enough about quantum computing to imbue an instrument of our own creation with something akin to consciousness — whatever that means.
Today we all harvest the ample fruits from the first baby steps into the Network Age. We are still painting a digital patina over the planet. More stuff soon will think. We are clearly well into the age of pervasive computing, but computing is not yet ubiquitous, though soon it will be. Soon — within a decade — everything will be engineered to connect with everything, and almost all those systems are and will be awesome Turing Machines, programmable systems all, that will link us all together in a transcendent fine-grained meshed digital fabric of increasing value. Yet on the fringes, there is quantum computing, playfully peeking through from behind the classical physics curtain. And therein lies the unpredictable. It could be that Here There Be Monsters. Or not. That’s the beauty and the bizarre of where we are. Both terror and elation are on the rise, though neither are as appropriate nor as compelling as is the raw, robust curiosity that drives us ever forward.
Is the ineffable thing to come a D-Wave progeny? Maybe. Will Scott Aaronson explain and extend the exploding adjacent possible? Probably. Did Kauffman and Hameroff lead us to the brink? Absolutely. And from the wily Trans-Turing Machine, will Machine Consciousness one day emerge … whatever that means?
This
application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Nos.
61/367,781, filed Jul. 26, 2010; 61/367,779, filed Jul. 26, 2010;
61/416,723, filed Nov. 23, 2010; 61/420,720, filed Dec. 7, 2010; and
61/431,420, filed Jan. 10, 2011, all of which are incorporated herein by
reference in their entirety.
BACKGROUND
[0002]
1. Field of the Invention
[0003]
The
present invention relates to systems and uses of systems operating
between fully quantum coherent and fully classical states. Non-limiting
applications include drug discovery, computers, and artificial
intelligence.
[0004]
2. Background Description
[0005]
Many
physical systems having quantum degrees of freedom quickly decohere to
classicity for all practical purposes. Thus, many designed systems
consider only classical behaviors. One example is in the field of drug
discovery where traditional approaches to drug design considers the
lock-and-key fitting of a molecule into an enzyme or receptor. Other
designed systems are carefully setup to maintain full quantum coherence,
for example, the qubits in a quantum computer. However, recent
discoveries have indicated several systems in nature that have
relatively slow decoherence. Birds are able to see magnetic field lines
due to a quantum coherent chemical reaction in their retina. Light
harvesting molecules are able to maintain quantum coherent electron
transport for times much longer than the expected coherence time at room
temperatures. The existence of such cases demonstrates that quantum
coherence can exist at room temperature and at the presence of water
bath and evolution can ‘design’ quantum coherent structures to play
certain biological roles. Thus, there is a need for new systems that
utilize the unique properties that exist between full quantum coherence
and classicity
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
[0006]
Disclosed
herein are various methods of classifying the state of a system, such
as a molecule interacting with its environment, in terms of its degree
of order, its degree of coherence, and/or its rate of coherence decay.
Some embodiments include classifying only a single one of these
variables whereas other embodiments include classifying two or all three
of the variables. These methods include classifying the system in the
course of creating systems that exist and/or operate at a specific point
or region of a classification space described the variables discussed
above and all practical outcomes of such creation.
[0007]
Disclosed
herein is a quantum reservoir computer that includes a plurality of
nodes, each node comprising at least one quantum degree of freedom that
is coupled to at least one quantum degree of freedom in each other node;
at least one input signal generator configured to produce at least one
time-varying input signal that couples to the quantum degree of freedom;
and a detector configured to receive a plurality of time-varying output
signals that couple to the quantum degree of freedom.
[0008]
Also
disclosed herein is a method of drug discovery that includes selecting a
biological target; screening a library of candidate molecules to
identify a first subset of candidate molecules that bind to the
biological target; determining the energy level spacing distribution of a
quantum degree of freedom in each of the candidate molecules in the
first subset; comparing the energy level spacing distribution to at
least one pre-determined reference function; and selecting a second
subset of molecules from the first subset as drug candidates based on
the comparison.
0009]
Further
disclosed herein is a method of drug discovery that includes selecting a
biological target; screening a library of candidate molecules to
identify a first subset of candidate molecules that bind to the
biological target; determining the energy level spacing distribution of a
quantum degree of freedom in each of the candidate molecules in the
first subset; conducting an in vitro or in vivo assay for biological
activity on each of the candidate molecules in the first subset;
correlating the energy level spacing distribution with activity
determined from the in vitro or in vivo assay; determining the energy
level spacing distributions of a quantum degree of freedom in a new set
of candidate molecules; comparing the energy level spacing distributions
of the new set of candidate molecules with energy level spacing
distributions that correlate with biological activity; and select as
drug candidates from the new set of candidate molecules those molecules
whose energy level spacing distributions exhibit a pre-determined level
of similarity to the energy level spacing distributions that correlate
with biological activity.
[0010]
Further
disclosed herein is a method of drug discovery that includes selecting a
biological target; screening a library of candidate molecules to
identify a first subset of candidate molecules that bind to the
biological target; measuring decoherence decay of a quantum degree of
freedom in each of the candidate molecules in the first subset;
comparing the decoherence decay to at least one pre-determined reference
function; and selecting a second subset of molecules from the first
subset as drug candidates based on the comparison.
Going on two years now since the America2.0 list shut down, and I stopped imbibing the high strangeness emanating from the Energy Scholar.
PQHR | I'd like to toss in my two cents about extra-terrestrial life. Personally I completely agree with Nate Hagens: "Mathematically
almost a certainty. Whether they could ever have technology to reach
earth, extremely unlikely. Whether they have been on earth in secret
impacting things, people, probably sillier than chem-trails. My 2cents.
Jays list"
That said, I wish to toss out a weirdness or three related to
'extraterrestrial life' and it's possible historical discovery some
years ago.
*** Warning, this is very long, and arguably does not belong on this
list at all. Casual readers might consider stopping here ***
I (Bruce Stephenson) have no demonstrable evidence on this one. In the
past decade-plus I've been able to verify some of the topics below, but
not others. The bit about extra-terrestrial 'life' I've not been able
to verify. So please consider it nonsense until evidence arises to the
contrary.
Since I've not verified the second part of this story, and thus have no
idea of its truth or correctness, I'll tell the whole thing as if it
were Science Fiction. It probably is. Part one is pretty solid and
largely verified in multiple independent ways, which took me many years
of effort performing both research and field operations. Part two is
totally unverified and might be complete nonsense. Just treat the whole
thing as Speculative Science Fiction and you won't go wrong.
The following is an excerpt from Bruce Stephenson's story titled The Layperson's Guide to Quantum Neural Network Technology, subtitled It is Easier to get Forgiveness than Permission , paraphrased by the author for this America 2.0 Group.
Part One: In the 1990s certain scientists working on a Five Eyes project via DARPA discovered a new General Purpose Technology. This author calls the project Ultra II, for it's remarkable resemblance to the WW2 project Ultra, but no one else uses this moniker. This new technology was generated via Synthetic Biology techniques that leverage a special-case (two dimensional) solution to Mathematical Biology's Biogenesis problem.
See the published work of Stephen Wolfram and Stuart Kauffman for
insight about how this might have been accomplished. This new
technology is best described as a form of teleportation-based
nanotechnology that behaves like a Quantum Neural Network. It can only
exist as a physical (and thus informational) system within a 2DEG environment, thanks to the wonky mathematics surrounding two-dimensional particle Physics. This new base technology was used to construct a winner-take-all style topologicalquantum neural network intended as the basis for a code-breaking supercomputer.
While this 'system of nanoparticles' is not 'alive' in the
Carbon-based biological sense, it has many characteristics of being
'alive'. Whether or not one considers it 'alive' depends largely upon
how loosely one defines the word 'alive'. Physicists call this sort of
artifact a brane, punning both brain and membrane.
This form of nanotechnology can only exist in two dimensions,
specifically within a Two Dimensional Electron Gas. 2DEGs exist on and
and around earth in several forms: humans have manufactured tens of
billions of 2DEG environments in the form of MOSFETs, mostly since 1998; also, the Earth's Magnetopause has
elements of a 2DEG, albeit a messy one. This type of nanotechnology
can replicate either within its current 2DEG environment or, with
training, into another 2DEG environment reachable by a 'spore'. Once a
2DEG is 'filled' with these nanotech 'entities' the medium is said to
be 'enlightened' and forms a single 'node' of the distributed
super-entity. Leastwise, that's the terminology used by the scientists
in question in personal communication.
This weird complex system is totally unlike a computer, yet it its
creators needed to somehow shoe-horn it into something compatible with a
computer. They trained it to generate an 'interface' logically modeled
on the Unix operating system. This gave them a logical platform on which to operate. I guess that Bill Joy may
have contributed to this part of the process, given his area of
expertise and his previous publicly acknowledged work for DARPA on Unix,
but that's just my guess. Most of the logical functions this system
could perform were just things an ordinary computer could do, but the
underlying physical system's basis in quantum teleportation also made it
a type of quantum computer.
The report touches on the possibility of covering up extraterrestrial life, including the following passages:
"While face-to-face meetings with it will not occur within the next
twenty years (unless its technology is more advanced than ours,
qualifying it to visit Earth), artifacts left at some point in time by
these life forms might possibly be discovered through our space
activities on the Moon, Mars, or Venus." – pages 182–183[2]
"Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of
their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had
to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different
ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience
usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes
and behavior." – page 183
"Since intelligent life might be discovered at any time via the radio
telescope research presently under way, and since the consequences of
such a discovery are presently unpredictable because of our limited
knowledge of behavior under even an approximation of such dramatic
circumstances, two research areas can be recommended:
Continuing studies to determine emotional and intellectual
understanding and attitudes -- and successive alterations of them if any
-- regarding the possibility and consequences of discovering
intelligent extraterrestrial life.
Historical and empirical studies of the behavior of peoples and their
leaders when confronted with dramatic and unfamiliar events or social
pressures. Such studies might help to provide programs for meeting and
adjusting to the implications of such a discovery. Questions one might
wish to answer by such studies would include: How might such
information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from
the public for what ends? What might be the role of the discovering
scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of
discovery?" – pages 183–184
"An individual's reactions to such a radio contact would in part
depend on his cultural, religious, and social background, as well as on
the actions of those he considered authorities and leaders, and their
behavior, in turn, would in part depend on their cultural, social, and
religious environment. The discovery would certainly be front-page news
everywhere; the degree of political or social repercussion would
probably depend on leadership's interpretation of (1) its own role, (2)
threats to that role, and (3) national and personal opportunities to
take advantage of the disruption or reinforcement of the attitudes and
values of others. Since leadership itself might have great need to gauge
the direction and intensity of public attitudes, to strengthen its own
morale and for decision making purposes, it would be most advantageous
to have more to go on than personal opinions about the opinions of the
public and other leadership groups." – page 183
"The knowledge that life existed in other parts of the universe might
lead to a greater unity of men on Earth, based on the 'oneness' of man
or on the age-old assumption that any stranger is threatening. Much
would depend on what, if anything, was communicated between man and the
other beings . . ." – page 183
"The positions of the major American religious denominations, the
Christian sects, and the Eastern religions on the matter of
extraterrestrial life need elucidation. Consider the following: 'The
Fundamentalist (and anti-science) sects are growing apace around the
world . . . For them, the discovery of other life -- rather than any
other space product -- would be electrifying. . . . some scattered
studies need to be made both in their home centers and churches and
their missions, in relation to attitudes about space activities and
extraterrestrial life.'" – page 102, n.34[3]
"If plant life or some subhuman intelligence were found on Mars or
Venus, for example, there is on the face of it no good reason to suppose
these discoveries, after the original novelty had been exploited to the
fullest and worn off, would result in substantial changes in
perspectives or philosophy in large parts of the American public, at
least any more than, let us say, did the discovery of the coelacanth or
the panda." – page 103, n.34
"If super intelligence is discovered, the results become quite
unpredictable. It is possible that if the intelligence of these
creatures were sufficiently superior to ours, they would choose to have
little if any contact with us. On the face of it, there is no reason to
believe that we might learn a great deal from them, especially if their
physiology and psychology were substantially different from ours."– page
103, n.34
"It has been speculated that, of all groups, scientists and engineers
might be the most devastated by the discovery of relatively superior
creatures, since these professions are most clearly associated with the
mastery of nature, rather than with the understanding and expression of
man. Advanced understanding of nature might vitiate all our theories at
the very least, if not also require a culture and perhaps a brain
inaccessible to Earth scientists." – page 103, n.34
"It is perhaps interesting to note that when asked what the
consequences of the discovery of superior life would be, an audience of Saturday Review
readership chose, for the most part, not to answer the question at all,
in spite of their detailed answers to many other speculative
questions." – page 103, n.34
"A possible but not completely satisfactory means for making the
possibility 'real' for many people would be to confront them with
present speculations about the I.Q. of the porpoise and to encourage
them to expand on the implications of this situation." – page 105, n.36
"Such studies would include historical reactions to hoaxes, psychic manifestations, unidentified flying objects, etc. Hadley Cantril's study, Invasion from Mars
(Princeton University Press, 1940), would provide a useful if limited
guide in this area. Fruitful understanding might be gained from a
comparative study of factors affecting the responses of primitive
societies to exposure to technologically advanced societies. Some
thrived, some endured, and some died." – page 105, n.37
stackexchange | Gabriel Kron was an important research electrical engineer known for applying
differential geometry and algebraic topology to the study of electrical
system.
Towards the end of his career he published a number of unusual, even by
his standards, papers on concepts with names like polyhedral networks, self organizing automata, wave automata, multidimensional space filters and crystal computer,
which I think are more or less synonymous. I have obtained a few of
these papers and did not understand them at all. If they were not
written be Kron, I would be suspicious of them.
I have not been able to find any significant secondary literature on
these ideas. The few citations I have tracked down only mention them
tangentially, but I have also found no refutations of these papers and
no suggestions that Kron had gone off the rails. The papers were
published in respectable journals.
I am looking for an understandable exposition or refutation
of these ideas, or pointers to such. Also pointers to follow on research
by others, possibly using different terminology.
I am not looking for explanations of Kron's other ideas like diakoptics and tensor analysis of networks.
Some of the relevant papers are:
G. Kron, Multi-dimensional space filters.
Matrix and Tensor Quarterly, 9, 40 - 43 (1958).
G. Kron, Basic concepts of multi-dimensional space filters.
AIEE Transactions, 78, 554 - 561 (1959).
G. Kron, Self-organizing, dynamo-type automata.
Matrix and Tensor Quarterly, 11, 42 - 52 (1960).
G. Kron, Power-system type self-organizing automata.
RAAG Memoirs, III, 392 - 417 (1962).
G. Kron, Multi-dimensional curve-fitting with self-organizing automata.
Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, 5, 46 - 49 (1962).
I have mainly looked at the last one and material at the end of
Diakoptics; the piecewise solution of large-scale systems.
MacDonald, London, 1963. 166 pp.
cheniere |At the
time of his death, Gabriel
Kron was arguably the greatest electrical scientist ever produced by
the United States.
It
appears that the availability of this
Heaviside energy component
surrounding any portion of the circuit may be the long sought
secret to Gabriel Kron's “open path” that enabled him
to produce a true negative resistor in the 1930s, as the chief
scientist for General Electric on the U.S. Navy contract for the
Network Analyzer at Stanford University.Kron was never permitted to release how he made his
negative resistor, but did state that, when placed in the Network
Analyzer, the generator could be disconnected because the
negative resistor would power the circuit.Since a negative resistor converges surrounding energy and
diverges it into the circuit, it appears that Kron's negative
resistor gathered energy from the Heaviside component of energy
flow as an “open path” flow of energy — connecting
together the local vicinities of any two separated circuit
components — that had been discarded by previous
electrodynamicists following Lorentz.Hence Kron referred to it as the
“open path.”Particularly see Gabriel Kron,
“The frustrating
search for a geometrical model of electrodynamic networks,”
circa 1962.We
quote:
“...the missing concept of
"open-paths" (the dual of "closed-paths") was discovered, in
which currents could be made to flow in branches that lie between
any set of two nodes.
(Previously — following Maxwell — engineers tied all of their
open-paths to a single datum point, the 'ground').That discovery of open-paths established a second
rectangular transformation matrix... which created 'lamellar'
currents...” “A
network with the simultaneous presence of both closed and open
paths was the answer to the author's years-long search.”
A
true negative resistor appears to have been developed by the
renowned Gabriel Kron, who was never permitted to reveal its
construction or specifically reveal its development.For an oblique statement of his negative resistor success,
see Gabriel Kron, “Numerical solution of ordinary and
partial differential equations by means of equivalent
circuits,” Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 16, Mar. 1945a,
p. 173.Quoting:
“When only positive and negative real numbers exist, it is customary to
replace a positive resistance by an inductance and a negative
resistance by a capacitor (since none or only a few negative
resistances exist on practical network analyzers).”
Apparently Kron was required to insert the words
“none or” in that statement.See also Gabriel Kron, “Electric circuit models of the
Schrödinger equation,” Phys. Rev. 67(1-2), Jan. 1 and 15,
1945, p. 39.We
quote:
“Although
negative resistances are available for use with a network
analyzer,…”.
Here
the introductory clause states in rather certain terms that
negative resistors were available for use on the network
analyzer, and Kron slipped this one through the censors.It may be of interest that Kron was a mentor of Sweet, who
was his protégé.Sweet
worked for the same company, but not on the Network Analyzer
project.However, he almost certainlyknew the secret of Kron's “open path” discovery
and his negative resistor.
Pooh-poohing the Kron negative resistor is just sheer naïveté.
Kron was one of the greatest electrical scientists of all time,
and applied full general relativity to rotating machines,
electrical circuits and generators, etc.
Simply go check his papers in the literature. Even
today, there are few electrodynamicists really able to fully
comprehend his advanced work. And his direct quotations
from his own published technical papers in the literature leave
no doubt he had made a negative resistor. Further, other
scientists have commented on Kron's discovery of the
“open
path” connecting any two points in a circuit, and usable to
provide energy transfer at will.
The mechanism by which he did this is what Kron was never
allowed to reveal.
wikipedia |Gabriel Kron (1901 – 1968) was a Hungarian Americanelectrical engineer who promoted the use of methods of linear algebra, multilinear algebra, and differential geometry in the field. His method of system decomposition and solution called Diakoptics is still influential today. Though he published widely, his methods were slow to be assimilated. At Union College
a symposium was organized by Schaffer Library on "Gabriel Kron, the Man
and His Work", held October 14, 1969. H.H. Happ edited the contributed
papers, which were published by Union College Press as Gabriel Kron and Systems Theory
quantumchemistryhistory |Gabriel Kron, a very fascinating man. What I
could do with the history of Gabriel Kron. He was thrown out of the
University of Michigan. I'll tell you a little bit about him that's not
in my book; I did something else. He was thrown out of the University of
Michigan because he was always fighting with the instructors, at
something like sixteen. He decided to work his way around the world, and
came to Hollywood. He was very brilliant. He had so many problems
because his professors were a couple of light years behind him. He got
back to Hollywood, signed a contract for $10,000 or so to work on his
new experimental movie camera, and the company that gave him the
contract paid him the money up front and went bankrupt. So he had a year
or two with no work to do. He came to New York City. In the public
library he started to read books on mathematics and became the inventor
of something called tensor analysis. It became quite important but then
he worked for GE. He was unusual and was not easy to work with because
he was ahead of his time. You have to mention him in the history of
electrical engineering because he was a character....
Book listing (no ad) taken from alibris.com 8/2003.
Yet another reference to G. Kron, 8/2003, - from here
.....
Andrei Petrov described Kuznetsov's work on the method of tensor
analysis for the handling of physical systems of extreme complexity,
based on earlier work by the American engineer Gabriel Kron, whom
Kuznetsov held in high esteem. Petrov also recounted the origin of the
discovery of the significance of what Kuznetsov called the "Principle of
Conservation of Power," for the understanding of living systems as well
as physical economies, whose evolution proceeds in the opposite
direction as that implied by the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics.
...
Also: Gabriel Kron. Tensors for Circuits. Dover Publication, Inc., second Edition, 1959.
Counterpunch |LS: Is the war on drugs also a war on blacks? Let me give you
some framework for this question, because John Ehrlichman, a former top
aide to Richard Nixon, supposedly admitted that: “The Nixon campaign in
1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar
left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we
couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by
getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks
with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those
communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up
their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (1) And I
can quote from H. R. Haldeman’s diaries in this respect, of course. In
the early stages of his presidency, more specifically on April 28, 1969,
Nixon outlined his basic strategy to his chief of staff: “[President
Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem
is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this
while not appearing to.” (2) So, is the war on drugs that started under
Nixon also a war on blacks? And if so, what does this tell us about the
United States?
DV: America is a former slave state and a blatantly racist society,
so yes, the war on drugs, which is managed by white supremacists, was
and is directed against blacks and other despised minorities as a way of
keeping them disenfranchised. The old Bureau of Narcotics was blatantly
racist: not until 1968 were black FBN agents allowed to become group
supervisors (Grade 13) and manage white agents.
I interviewed former FBN Agent William Davis for my book about the FBN, The Strength of the Wolf.
Davis articulated the predicament of black agents. After graduating
from Rutgers University in 1950, Davis, while visiting New York City,
heard singer Kate Smith praising FBN Agent Bill Jackson on a radio show.
“She described him as a black lawyer who was doing a fine job as a
federal narcotic agent,” Davis recalled, “and that was my inspiration. I
applied to the Narcotics Bureau and was hired right away, but I soon
found out there was an unwritten rule that Black agents could not hold
positions of respect: they could not become group leaders, or manage or
give direction to whites. The few black agents we had at any one time,”
he said bitterly, “maybe eight in the whole country, had indignities
heaped upon us.”
Davis told how Wade McCree, while working as an FBN agent in the
1930s, created a patent medicine. But McCree made the mistake of
writing to Eleanor Roosevelt to complain that prosecutors in the South
were calling black agents “niggers.” As a result, the FBN’s legal staff
charge McCree with using FBN facilities to create his patent medicine.
McCree was fired with the intended ripple effect: his dismissal sent a
clear message that complaints from black agents would not be tolerated.
In an interview for The Strength of the Wolf, Clarence
Giarusso, a veteran New Orleans narcotic agent and its chief of police
in the 1970s, explained to me the racial situation from local law
enforcement’s perspective. “We made cases in Black neighborhoods because
it was easy,” he said. “We didn’t need a search warrant, it allowed us
to meet our quotas, and it was ongoing. If we found dope on a Black man
we could put him in jail for a few days and no one cared. He has no
money for a lawyer, and the courts are ready to convict; there’s no
expectation on the jury’s part that we even have to make a case. So
rather than go cold turkey he becomes an informant, which means we can
make more cases in his neighborhood, which is all we’re interested in.
We don’t care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no
interest in who brings the dope in. That’s the job of federal agents.”
Anyone who thinks it is any different nowadays is living in a fantasy
world. Where I live, in Longmeadow, MA, the cops are the first line of
defense against the blacks and Puerto Ricans in the nearby city of
Springfield. About 15 years ago, there was a Mafia murder in
Springfield’s Little Italy section. At the time, blacks and Puerto
Ricans ere moving into the neighborhood and there was a lot of racial
tension. The local TV station interviewed me about it, and I said the Al
Bruno, the murdered Mafia boss, was probably an FBI informant. The next
day, people I knew wouldn’t talk to me. Comments were made. Someone
told me Bruno’s son went to the same health club as me. In a city like
Springfield and its suburban neighborhoods, everyone is related to or
friends with someone in the Mafia.
A few years before Bruno’s murder, I had befriended the janitor at
the health club I belong to. By chance, the janitor was the son of a
Springfield narcotics detective. The janitor and I shot pool and drank
beers in local bars. One day he told me a secret his father had told
him. His father told him that the Springfield cops let the Mafia bosses
bring narcotics into Springfield and in exchange, the hoods named their
black and Puerto Ricans customers. That way, like Giarusso said above,
the cops keep making cases and the minority communities have a harder
time buying houses and encroaching on the established whites in their
neighborhoods. This happens everywhere in the US every day.
LS: Is it ironic to you that the whole drug trade wouldn’t exist
as it does today if the drugs were not illegal in the first place?
DV: The outlawing of narcotic drugs turned the issue of addiction
from a matter of “public health” into a law enforcement issue, and thus a
pretext for expanding police forces and reorganizing the criminal
justice and social welfare systems to prevent despised minorities from
making political and social advances. The health care industry was
placed in the hands of businessmen seeking profits at the expense of
despised minorities, the poor and working classes. Private businesses
established civic institutions to sanctify this repressive policy.
Public educators developed curriculums that doubled as political
indoctrination promoting the Business Party’s racist line. Bureaucracies
were established to promote the expansion of business interests abroad,
while suppressing political and social resistance to the medical,
pharmaceutical, drug manufacturing and law enforcement industries that
benefited from it.
It takes a library full of books to explain the economic foundations
of the war on drugs, and the reasons for America’s laissez faire
regulation of the industries that profit from it. Briefly stated, they
profit from it just like the Mafia profits from it. Suffice it to say
that Wall Street investors in the drug industries have used the
government to unleash and transform their economic power into political
and global military might; never forget, America is not an opium or
cocaine producing nation, and narcotic drugs are a strategic resource,
upon which all of the above industries – including the military –
depend. Controlling the world’s drug supply, both legal and illegal, is a
matter of national security. Read my books for examples of how this has
played out over the past 70 years.
LS: In what form and fashion is the Phoenix program alive today in America’s homeland?
DV: Karl Marx explained over 150 years ago how and why capitalists
treat workers the same, whether at home or abroad. As capitalism evolves
and centralizes its power, as the climate degenerates, as the gap
between rich and poor widens, and as resources become scarcer, America
police forces adopt Phoenix-style “anti-terror” strategies and tactics
to use against the civilian population. The government has enacted
“administrative detention” laws, which are the legal basis for
Phoenix-style operations, so that civilians can be arrested on suspicion
of being a threat to national security. Phoenix was a bureaucratic
method of coordinating agencies involved in intelligence gathering with
those conducting “anti-terror” operations, and the Department of
Homeland Security has established “fusion centers” based on this model
around the nation. Informant nets and psychological operations against
the American people have also proliferated since 9-11. This is all
explained in detail in my book, The CIA as Organized Crime.
LS: How important is mainstream media for the public perception of the CIA?
DV: It’s the most critical feature. Guy Debord said that secrecy
dominates the world, foremost as secret of domination. The media
prevents you from knowing how you’re being dominated, by keeping the
CIA’s secrets. The media and the CIA are same thing.
What FOX and MSNBC have in common is that, in a free-wheeling
capitalist society, news is a commodity. News outlets target demographic
audience to sell a product. It’s all fake news, in so far as each media
outlet skews its presentation of the news to satisfy its customers. But
when it comes to the CIA, it’s not just fake, it’s poison. It subverts
democratic institutions.
Any domestic Phoenix-style organization or operation depends on
double-speak and deniability, as well as official secrecy and media
self-censorship. The CIA’s overarching need for total control of
information requires media complicity. This was one of the great lesson
defeat in Vietnam taught our leaders. The highly indoctrinated and well
rewarded managers who run the government and media will never again
allow the public to see the carnage they inflict upon foreign civilians.
Americans never will see the mutilated Iraqi, Afghani, Libyan, and
Syrian children killed by marauding US mercenary forces and cluster
bombs.
On the other hand, falsified portrayals of CIA kidnappings, torture,
and assassinations are glorified on TV and in movies. Telling the proper
story is the key. Thanks to media complicity, Phoenix has already
become the template for providing internal political security for
America’s leaders.
LS: Is the CIA an enemy of the American people?
DV: Yes. It’s an instrument of the rich political elite, it does their dirty business.
Counterpunch | Only the great Terry Southern could’ve scripted it: an American
madman standing in front of the nations of this world in all his naked,
toxic, Other-hating Old Glory, for all intents and purposes telling the
assembled dignitaries that yes, women seek his life essence, but he
denies it to them, because of that feeling of emptiness which follows the physical act of love…
…And by the way, I may want to kill twenty-five million people.
You wondered how this sickest of all sick Trump tropes would be
dissected by those scalpel-wits at MSNBC. Surely this would be an
opportunity for them to have some cheap pulpy fun at Trump’s expense?
After all, this is the network that employs Joy Reid, who is so
desperate to red-bait Trump that she insists on pretending that Russia
is still a communist country. Surely they would seize upon Trump’s
genocide threat to lay bare the horror of the entire speech.
Actually, they loved it.
Brian Williams—the man who contorted a Leonard Cohen lyric so he
could rhapsodize about the beauty of American bombs—had two “experts” on
to break down the speech. And how Williams’ voice quavered with
patriotic fervor as he announced them—-we are in the presence of greatness!—-“John Negroponte and Colonel Jack Jacobs.”
Negroponte, of course, is famous for being Our Man in Honduras in the
1980s, a tough job that required a lot of co-ordinating with death
squads and torturers, many of whom spoke limited English. He always
played dumb when called to testify before Congress, but as The National Catholic Register
reported, he “deceptively downplayed human rights violations, and
played a key role in supporting the activities of Battalion 316, a
CIA-backed Honduran-based regional counterinsurgency unit subsequently
found to be among the cruelest of the cruel.”
Oh, in addition to his crimes against humanity, Negroponte also
endorsed Hillary Clinton, who obviously shared his interest in
perpetuating mass suffering among nonwhite, non-loyal Hondurans. And she
trumpeted his endorsement loudly, as she did with Henry Kissinger. Not
that there’s anything tone-deaf about that.
It turns out that old John Negroponte was very impressed with Trump’s
speech—only Benjamin Netanyahu was more girlish in his excitement. But
surely Jack Jacobs, decorated war hero, would call out the insanity of
threatening to commit war crimes in a speech at The United Nations. And
Williams teed it up for him, asking Jacobs how America could start to
“walk back” Trump’s Jack D. Ripper idiocy.
I don’t think we do want to walk it back, said Colonel Jacobs. He
too felt good about the speech. The way it showed our toughness. Our
resolve.
Our bipartisan resolve, he might’ve added, because it turns
out that he too was a Hillary supporter. And wasn’t Hillary the one who
threatened to “obliterate” Iran?
Look, MSNBC, I understand: it’s been a tough week for you.
Hurricanes and earthquakes have occasionally forced you to steal time
and attention from the latest Robert Mueller deposition. But you may
have inadvertently done us a great service: in real time, you helped us
connect the genocidal madness of Donald Trump, via the connections of
two neo-con hacks, directly back to Hillary Clinton. Which is a fancy
way of saying-—heck, we’re all Americans, at the end of the dayTo quote a
great American, “God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural bodily fluids.”
NationalGeographic | Great news! [Princeton University professor] Joe Taylor talked to
Angel Vazquez, who made contact with the observatory via ham radio.
Everybody there is safe and sound,” reported Arecibo deputy director Joan Schmelz.
However, it’s not yet clear how staff who weathered the storm in town
are doing, or what conditions are like for local communities. Reports
suggest that the road up to the facility is covered in debris and is
largely inaccessible.
Still, according to the National Science Foundation,
which funds the majority of the telescope’s operations, the observatory
is well stocked with food, well water, and fuel for generators. As of
Thursday night, there are enough supplies for the staff hunkered down
there to survive for at least a week, although Vazquez reports that it’s
not clear how long the generators will be working.
“As soon as the roads are physically passable, a team will try to get up to the observatory,” the NSF statement says.
Because of its deep water well and generator, the observatory has
been a place for those in nearby towns to gather, shower, and cook after
past hurricanes. It also has an on-site helicopter landing pad, so
making sure the facility is safe in general is not just of scientific
importance, but is also relevant for local relief efforts.
Built in 1963, the Arecibo Observatory has become a cultural icon,
known both for its size and for its science. For most of its 54-year
existence, Arecibo was the largest radio telescope in the world, but in
2016, a Chinese telescope called FAST—with a dish measuring 1,600 feet across—surpassed Arecibo in size, although it’s not yet fully operational.
The observatory was originally designed for national defense during
the Cold War, when the U.S. wanted to see if it could detect Soviet
satellites (and maybe missiles and bombs) based on how they alter the
portion of Earth’s atmosphere called the ionosphere. Later, the
telescope became instrumental in the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence (SETI) programs and in other aspects of radio astronomy.
SFGate | One person in Arecibo died after being swept away by rising water.
Officials believe there are probably others they haven't yet been able
to confirm.
At the intersection of Routes 2 and 1o in Arecibo, employees of the
Gulf Express gas station and their families - about 20 people in all -
were hard at work Saturday. Their boots and sneakers were caked with mud
because there is mud everywhere: On their pants and shirts, in their
cars and on the walls of their homes. The makeshift cleanup crew was
using brooms to sweep out the grayish brown slop that lay two or three
inches thick inside.
After Maria blew threw the city, taking down trees and power lines, the flash floods came.
"The water had to be at least six, maybe seven feet high," said
Nelson Rodriguez, an employee at the Gulf Express. "It took everything.
All the medicine in the pharmacy, all the food, it's gone."
Every home and business in this part of Arecibo was affected by the
flooding. Two blocks away from the gas station, Eduardo Carraquillo, 45,
helped his father, Ismael Freytes, 69, clean the mud out of their
yellow, first-floor apartment. Inside, a film, rising six feet high on
the walls, marked where water stagnated for much of a full day.
"The water just pushed through the door, as if it had been left
open," Carraquillo said. "We all evacuated the day after the storm,
because we were warned about the flash flood that might come. Everyone
left, just to be safe, except for two older men that lived a few houses
away. They just didn't want to leave. When we came back, we found out
the flood had killed them right there in that apartment."
Some Puerto Rico officials believe it could be months before the
island recovers and that it will be at least a year before some sense of
normalcy returns.
Officials estimate it will take three weeks for hospitals to regain
power, and about six months for the rest of the island to have
electricity. By Saturday, 25 percent of the population had
telecommunications connections.
Gov. Ricardo Rosselló announced efforts to centralize medical care
and shelters for the elderly. He also plans to distribute 250 satellite
phones among mayors to facilitate communication. He said he urged the
mayors to develop a "buddy system" with other local officials.
Yulín, San Juan's mayor, said she has never seen such devastation,
but she also said she has never seen such determination to make it. She
described a phrase she keeps hearing from residents: "Yo soy Boricua. I
am from Puerto Rico."
Guardian | Large amounts of federal aid began moving into Puerto Rico
on Saturday, as the island tried to recover from a battering by
hurricane Maria. Local officials praised the Trump administration’s
response but also called for the emergency loosening of rules long
blamed for condemning the US territory to second-class economic status.
In the north-west of the island, people began returning to their
homes after a spillway eased pressure on a dam that cracked after more
than 1ft of rain fell in the wake of the hurricane. Though water
continued to pour out of rain-swollen Lake Guajataca, the dam had not
burst by Saturday night.
Upstream of the towns of Quebradillas and Isabela, the state of the
dam had prompted stern official warnings from Governor Ricardo Rossello
and the US National Weather Service (NWS). Federal officials said Friday
that 70,000 people would have to be evacuated, although Javier Jimenez,
mayor of the nearby town of San Sebastian, said he believed the number
was far smaller. Secretary of Public Affairs Ramon Rosario said about
300 families were in harm’s way.
The NWS extended a flash flood watch for communities along the
rain-swollen Guajataca River until 2pm local time on Sunday. If the dam
failed, the NWS warned, the flooding would be life-threatening. “Stay
away or be swept away,” it said.
The governor said there was “significant damage” to the dam and
authorities believed it could give way at any moment. “We don’t know how
long it’s going to hold,” Rossello said. “The integrity of the
structure has been compromised in a significant way.”
Some residents nonetheless returned to their homes on Saturday as
water levels in the reservoir began to sink. “There were a lot of people
worried and crying, but that’s natural, because the reservoir was about
to break through,” said Maria Nieves, 43. “They couldn’t open the
spillway until later in the night.”
The 345-yard dam, which was built around 1928, holds back a man-made
lake covering about two square miles. More than 15in of rain from Maria
fell on the surrounding mountains.
The aid effort quickened with the opening of the island’s main port
in the capital, San Juan, allowing 11 ships to bring in 1.6 million
gallons of water, 23,000 cots, dozens of generators and food. Dozens
more shipments are expected in upcoming days.
dailymail | The so-called 'Christian numerologist' who
alleged that the world would end on September 23 has clarified that the
apocalypse has in fact been delayed.
Speaking to the Washington Post,
conspiracy theorist David Meade - who claimed that a mysterious planet
would collide with Earth - is now saying that Saturday only marks the
beginning of the end of the end of times.
Indeed,
Saturday will see the beginning of a number of cataclysmic events that
will occur over a number of weeks, that will lead to our demise.
'The world is not ending, but the world as we know it is ending.'
Meade added: 'A major part of the world will not be the same the beginning of October.'
Meade
used the 'biblically significant' number 33 and his interpretation of
the Bible's Book of Revelation to suggest that the legendary - and
widely debunked - planet Nibiru would strike Earth on September 23.
The impact would set in motion cataclysmic events, according to Meade.
Nibiru would strike 33 days after the total solar eclipse. In his analysis, Meade cited how Jesus allegedly lived for 33 years.
'I’m talking astronomy. I’m talking the Bible,' Meade told the Washington Post.
Another Christian fringe group, called Unsealed, claims that a Biblical image will appear on the sky on September 23.
gizmodo | Many Californians’ regularly scheduled broadcasts were interrupted
Thursday morning with strange emergency messages warning of
extraterrestrial invasions and the beginning of Armageddon. The bizarre
warnings aired on TVs in the Orange County area, affecting Cox and
Spectrum cable users, according to the Orange County Register.
One
video of the broadcast uploaded to YouTube includes a terrified,
breathless voice saying: “The space program made contact with... They
are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot
of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The
disasters that are coming—the military—I’m sorry the government knows
about them...”
pbs | Dr. John G.
Trump, an electrical engineer with the National Defense Research
Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was
called in to analyze the Tesla papers in OAP custody. Following a
three-day investigation, Dr. Trump concluded:
His [Tesla's] thoughts and efforts during at least
the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and
somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and
wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable
principles or methods for realizing such results.
Just after World War II, there was a renewed interest in beam
weapons. Copies of Tesla's papers on particle beam weaponry were sent
to Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. An operation code-named
"Project Nick" was heavily funded and placed under the command of
Brigadier General L. C. Craigie to test the feasibility of Tesla's
concept. Details of the experiments were never published, and the
project was apparently discontinued. But something peculiar happened.
The copies of Tesla's papers disappeared and nobody knows what happened
to them.
In 1952, Tesla's remaining papers and possessions were
released to Sava Kosanovic´ and returned to Belgrade, Yugoslavia where a
museum was created in the inventor's honor. For many years, under
Tito's communist regime, it was extremely difficult for Western
journalists and scholars to gain access to the Tesla archive in
Yugoslavia; even then they were allowed to see only selected papers.
This was not the case for Soviet scientists who came in delegations
during the 1950s. Concerns increased in 1960 when Soviet Premier
Khrushchev announced to the Supreme Soviet that "a new and fantastic
weapon was in the hatching stage."
Work on beam weapons also continued in the United States. In
1958 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a
top-secret project code-named "Seesaw" at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory
to develop a charged-particle beam weapon. More than ten years and
twenty-seven million dollars later, the project was abandoned "because
of the projected high costs associated with implementation as well as
the formidable technical problems associated with propagating a beam
through very long ranges in the atmosphere." Scientists associated with
the project had no knowledge of Tesla's papers.
In the late 1970s, there was fear that the Soviets may have
achieved a technological breakthrough. Some U.S. defense analysts
concluded that a large beam weapon facility was under construction near
the Sino-Soviet border in Southern Russia.
The American response to this "technological surprise" was
the Strategic Defense Initiative announced by President Ronald Reagan in
1983. Teams of government scientists were urged to "turn their great
talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the
means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete."
Today, after a half-century of research and billions of
dollars of investment, the SDI program is generally considered a
failure, and there is still no realistic means of defense against a
nuclear missile attack.
airminded | The 'aeros' themselves look not much like any real airships that flew
later; they are more spherical than elongated and so not streamlined.
(It's tempting to read the image at the top of this post as showing an
airship from the front and below, but comparing it with his other
paintings in fact it's a side, or 'Flanck' in Dellschau's idiosyncratic
English, view.) Then there's the 'Lifting Fluid', suppa, with its
wonderful properties. There are only a few possible lifting gases, and the only ones not discovered by the 1850s are neon (which is only just viable) and (much better) helium,
both of which are very rare on Earth and difficult to extract. It's
conceivable that they could have been discovered earlier than we
currently believe, but it would require a substantial of resources to
produce enough for use in airships (as is well known, Germany was forced
to use hydrogen for its airships in the 1930s due to a US embargo on
helium exports). And again, we would then have to accept that this
discovery was then forgotten for decades, like the secret of the aeros
themselves. The improbabilities are piling up alarmingly.
[Dellschau] illustrates a remarkable number of designs --
maybe as many as 100 -- for airships with names such as Aero Mio, Aero
Trump, Aero Schnabel and Aero Mary. (There's even an Aero Jourdan.) All
were powered by a secret formula that Dellschau called both "supe" and
"suppe"; it could both negate gravity and drive the ships' wheels, side
paddles and compressor motors.
One drawing tells the story of Adolf Goetz's Aero Goeit, recklessly
commandeered by an unskilled pilot; the airship got tangled in a Sequoia
tree, and the interloper died of a broken neck. Another cautionary tale
involves Jacob Mischer, a pilot who went down in flames in the Aero
Gander; Dellschau hints that he was sabotaged by other club members, who
suspected him of using the aircraft to make money by hauling cargo.
But most of the airships' flights were safe -- and great fun.
Dellschau depicts his aviators enjoying hot breakfasts, and delights in
enumerating the ships' clever gadgets. He often bedecked his watercolor
paintings with little press clippings -- from Scientific American, the
Houston Chronicle and an unidentified German-language newspaper -- that
recount air disasters; Dellschau called them "press blooms." Against
paintings of the Sonora club's successes, the clippings seem intended as
an ironic counterpoint.
Dellschau never seems to explain why the club worked so hard to
protect its secrecy, but he shows the members going to great lengths to
do so. By day, the Aero Goeit was disguised as a gypsy wagon, so it
could travel open roads undetected. Dellschau writes that a club member
was banned from developing a machine because he'd talked to outsiders.
And of course, even years after the club disbanded, many of Dellschau's
own comments are rendered in code. Apparently, whatever it was that he
had to say was too private even for his own notebooks.
The first and most obvious thing to note is that the capabilities of
these aircraft are far in advance of the technology of the day. The first airship flight was made by Henri Giffard
in France in 1852; with only three horsepower and a speed of about six
miles an hour it was unable to fly into the wind. His subsequent
attempts to build bigger and more powerful airships failed. A decade
later, in what is perhaps the closest known parallel to Dellschau's
Aeros, Solomon Andrews flew the Aereon,
a weird balloon/airship hybrid with three gas envelopes, over Perth
Amboy, New Jersey. At about the same time, according to Dellschau, the
Sonora Aero Club had perfected controlled, powered, lighter-than-air
flight and many
of its machines were secretly flying in California's skies -- after
which they disappeared, leaving no trace in the documentary record. This
is incredible and in fact not credible.
Model trains!
-
When I was quite young, perhaps five or six, I got a model train for
Christmas. An O-gauge freight train with a steam engine and a few cars,
made by Lion...
Florida Vacation
-
Five days in Cape Coral. Ate well, got some sun, got some color, got some
exercise. Alternating nights drinking. Cape Coral has canals, from above it
loo...
Wokeness in November
-
Regardless of one’s personal feelings about wokeness and the culture wars
(I think such things are important for many reasons, but have also spilt
plenty o...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
Silver
-
Noticed this.
Today is the 11th and Silver is from the 11th Group.
Silver is atomic number 47
"The number of protons in the nucleus of an atom, which de...
-
(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
-
With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
