America's Puerto Rican Municipalities

zerohedge |  We harp on the massive, unsustainable, yet largely unnoticed, debt burdens of American cities, counties and states fairly regularly because, well, it's a frightening issue if you spend just a little time to understand the math and ultimate consequences.  Here is some of our recent posts on the topic:

• America's Pension Bomb: Illinois Is Just the Start
• Stanford Says Soaring Public Pension Costs Devastating Budgets For Education And Social Services
• Pension Consultant Offers Dire Outlook For Kentucky: Freeze Pension And Slash Benefits Or Else

Luckily, for those looking to escape the trauma of being taxed into oblivion by their failing cities/counties/states, JP Morgan has provided a comprehensive guide on which municipalities haven't the slightest hope of surviving their multi-decade debt binge and lavish public pension awards.  

If you live in any of the 'red' cities above, it just might be time to start looking for another home...

wikipedia |   Chapter 9, Title 11, United States Code is a chapter of the United States Bankruptcy Code, available exclusively to municipalities and assisting them in the restructuring of their debt. On July 18, 2013, Detroit, Michigan became the largest city in the history of the United States to file for Chapter 9 Bankruptcy protection. Jefferson County, Alabama, in 2011 and Orange County, California, in 1994 are also notable examples. "The term 'municipality' denotes a political subdivision or public agency or instrumentality of a State."^[1]

From 1937 to 2008 there were fewer than 600 municipal bankruptcies.^[2] As of June 2012 the total was around 640.^[3] In 2012 there were twelve chapter 9 bankruptcies in the United States, and five petitions have been filed in 2013.^[4] Since 2010, 61 petitions have been filed.^[5]

Previous to the creation of Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the only remedy when a municipality was unable to pay its creditors was for the creditors to pursue an action of mandamus, and compel the municipality to raise taxes.^[6] During the Great Depression, this approach proved impossible, so in 1934, the Bankruptcy Act was amended to extend to municipalities.^[7][8] The 1934 Amendment was declared unconstitutional in Ashton v. Cameron County Water District.^[9]

wikipedia |  Mandamus ("We command") is a judicial remedy in the form of an order from a superior court,^[1] to any government subordinate court, corporation, or public authority, to do (or forbear from doing) some specific act which that body is obliged under law to do (or refrain from doing), and which is in the nature of public duty, and in certain cases one of a statutory duty. It cannot be issued to compel an authority to do something against statutory provision. For example, it cannot be used to force a lower court to reject or authorize applications that have been made, but if the court refuses to rule one way or the other then a mandamus can be used to order the court to rule on the applications.

Mandamus may be a command to do an administrative action or not to take a particular action, and it is supplemented by legal rights. In the American legal system it must be a judicially enforceable and legally protected right before one suffering a grievance can ask for a mandamus. A person can be said to be aggrieved only when he is denied a legal right by someone who has a legal duty to do something and abstains from doing it.

Trump Off-Script On Bankster Bondage of Puerto Rico

nakedcapitalism  |  And speaking of Goldman, notice that Trump takes an explicit swipe at the investment bank turned Beltway heavyweight. He must be chafing at have been leashed and collared by the generals and the Goldmanites.

From Reuters:

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday while on a trip to Puerto Rico to observe hurricane recovery efforts that the island’s massive debt will have to be wiped out.
“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street and we’re going to have to wipe that out. You’re going to say goodbye to that, I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is you can wave goodbye to that,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.

CNBC picked up on the Reuters story quickly and highlighted the bleak fundamentals:

Even before the storm brought Puerto Rico to a near standstill, the government there already struggled with an economy in shambles and a default on billions of dollars of public debt.
Today, the U.S. territory has nearly $70 billion in debt, an unemployment rate 2.5 times the U.S. average, a 45 percent poverty rate, nearly insolvent pension systems and a chronically underfunded Medicaid insurance program for the poor.
Puerto Rico’s job base continues to shrink, taking its economy along with it. Since the recession ended, a lack of job prospects has sent many Puerto Ricans fleeing to the mainland, where the job market is much stronger.

However, it is unlikely that Goldman would suffer much, if at all, in a Puerto Rico bankruptcy. It might hold some bonds in its trading inventory, but its big exposure would come via funds it manages. On those, under the Volcker Rule, Goldman is limited to owning a small percentage of the equity investment in the fund (3% is the nominal amount, although there may be some tricks of the trade for increasing the exposure). 

But David Dayen has found one of the big owners of Puerto Rico debt, as reported in a new story at the Intercept. If you read the article in full, tracking down the who was behind the shell company used to hide the ultimate owners is very reminiscent of the sort of gumshoe work that Richard Smith does chasing international scammers.

Spanish Thug Life: Bankster Enforcement Of Unjust Political Bondage

nakedcapitalism  |  As reader RabidGhandi had caught, the Spanish government has already put itself in the position of using its power over the banking system to control the payments now being made by Catalonia’s government. As I read this article (and I welcome corrections and additions, since trying to understanding legal/regulatory interventions via an article translated by Google is a fraught business), Spain has used the secession threat to take control of Catalonia’s spending, taking the view that the violation of the Constitution gives it unlimited authority to intervene. From the rough English version of the El Mundo story:

The government begins to hit and where it hurts most. The Generalitat will not have free from its budget. Cristóbal Montoro has confiscated the keys of the box. From next week all the expenses destined to cover the essential public services of Catalonia will have to have the approval of Finance that will be who directly pay them. It is a question of preventing the money from being diverted to the referendum of 1-O .

This decision of exhaustive control of the Catalan accounts affects the salaries of the civil servants, the cost of the health, the education, the civil protection, the dependency and the diverse transfers in aid and subsidies to the families. In total, the approximately 1.4 billion euros per month of community funding is left to the central government, which is prepared to ensure that not a single public euro is diverted to pay for the 1-O referendum and the secessionist process…

What the Government decided this Friday is practically the application of Article 155 of the Constitution for economic purposes. It is true that the Government does not seize political competition from the Generalitat but, in fact, it binds its hands to decide on what it spends the money, since who will open the portfolio and make the appropriate payments, after strict justification by the Intervention General of the Generalitat , will be the Ministry of Finance.

And notice the mechanism for seizing control:

The central government will supervise even the approximately 250 million euros per month of own collection in Catalonia – a relatively small item, in the words of the minister – since when the Government orders financial institutions to make payments from these funds, thereof.

In this sense, Hacienda will send to the banks the text of the agreements adopted so that they are vigilant and do not allow any payment that is not justified by a certificate of the Catalan Intervention. If they detect that any of the operations may be related to the celebration of the independence consultation, they must immediately notify the Attorney General’s Office. It is a very similar method to that used to avoid criminal operations of money laundering.

In other words, Spain has mechanisms already in place by which it can require banks to step in and seize control of collections and expenditures made by parties engaging in criminal activity….and Spain’s courts have deemed the secession to be illegal. Reader Sue confirmed our reading of Spain’s ability to strangle Catalonia’s finances:

Banks cannot issue payments to Catalan public servants and Catalan institutions which depend on the Catalan Government, “Generalitat”, without previous paperwork submission and rubber stamp approval from the Spanish State bureaucracy. This has caused some anger among some Catalan public sector enterprises and contractors doing work for them when quick timely payments are of the essence. Nevertheless, right now public servants and organizations directly or indirectly linked to the Generalitat are being paid because Catalonia as of today is not a State and, (although micromanaged and surveilled and controlled by “Spain’s Ministry of Plenty”), payments reach their destination.

So what would happen if Catalonia actually secedes? Rajoy does not need to send in troops when he has banks, although he could use the belt and suspenders approach.

Spanish banks, like Santander and the cajas like Caixa/Caixabank, are licensed by the Spanish government. Spain can revoke the licenses of any Catalan banks and could also make it illegal to transfer funds in and out of Catalonia, similar to the sanctions imposed on Iran. Any bank licensed by Spain would fall into line immediately out of the threat of losing its license. It would take the cooperation of the bank regulators in other European countries for them to put similar restrictions on their banks, but given the unified EU position against separatist movements, similar rules would almost certainly be issued on an emergency basis.

As least as important, the case study of Greece 2015 shows that the ECB is perfectly happy to be the heavy as long as it has elected officials giving it political cover.

How this would play out in detail is way over my pay grade, but here are some of the things I imagine would happen:

1. No more stocking of cash in Catalonia’s ATMs
2. Cutting off merchants from electronic point of sale systems
3. Bank closures, as in at least a bank holiday and possible shuttering of banks/bank branches, with what happens to frozen Euro-denominated deposits an open question.

Notice that the measures imposed on Catalonia could be even more brutal than what was done to Greece, which merely behaved very badly in negotiations while having its banking system dependent on ECB life support. A declaration of independence is a much greater act of intransigence.

Brazilian Separatists: You Can't Hide Behind Unjust Laws to Defend Political Bondage

libertyblitzkrieg  |  While extremely significant, the Catalan independence movement is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a global drive toward political decentralization. For example, just today I came across another potential secessionist hotspot in an unexpected place, Brazil.

Bloomberg reports:

Inspired by the separatist vote in Catalonia, secessionists in three wealthy southern Brazilian states are redoubling their efforts to break away from the crisis-battered nation.

Residents of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Parana states are being called to vote in an informal plebiscite on Oct. 7 on whether they want independence. Organizers are also urging residents of the three states to sign a legislative proposal for each of their regional assemblies that would call for a formal, binding referendum. The non-profit group “The South is My Country” aims to mobilize a million voters in 900 out of the region’s 1,191 cities.

Cooler, whiter and richer than the rest of Brazil, these southern states have long nursed separatist ambitions. Rio Grande do Sul even briefly claimed independence 180 years ago. Few Brazilians expect the current movement to succeed any time soon, not least because it is prohibited by the Constitution. But the country’s deepest recession on record and a massive corruption scandal have exacerbated the region’s longstanding resentment towards the federal government in Brasilia. With just one year to go until general elections, the rekindling of separatist sentiment in the south is another indicator of the unsettled state of Brazilian politics.

Celso Deucher, the leader of The South is My Country, says the region contributes four times as much tax as it receives and suffers from a below-average level of political representation. He argues that such an unjust situation outweighs any legal concerns.
“Whenever the subject of separatism comes up, they ban it because the federal Constitution does not allow it,” he said. “But the law is not immutable.”

Rio Grande do Sul is currently immersed in a financial crisis and has lost much of its economic clout, according to Fernando Schuler, a professor of political science at Insper University in Sao Paulo. 

“There’s a huge cultural detachment between the Tropicalia Brazil and the South,” he said. “The reasons for separation are solid, justifiable, but I don’t think they are viable.” 

There are two aspects of the above story I’d like to address. First, is that, like Catalonia, the regions thinking about secession from Brazil are relatively wealthy. This is not insignificant and certainly worth thinking about when it comes to wondering what sorts of responsibility these regions should have to the former union should a peaceful breakup go forward. It’s also worth remembering that the leaders of the American revolution were also extremely wealthy. An Independence movement driven by wealthy factions doesn’t necessarily preclude the creation of a superior governing structure.

The second point relates to the fact that Brazil, like Spain, apparently provide no “exit option” for any province or region which decides it no longer wishes to be part of the nation-state. As such, this is by definition an oppressive and involuntary political relationship completely inappropriate to conscious human beings. As I explained in Monday’s post, all political associations should be voluntary and it’s absurd that people are simply born into nation-states that are assumed to be forever entities with no escape latch.

Access the Guardian Through a Raspberry Pi? Of Course...,

wikipedia |  Main article: Wolfram Language

In June 2014, Wolfram officially announced the Wolfram Language as a new general multi-paradigm programming language.^[65] The documentation for the language was pre-released in October 2013 to coincide with the bundling of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language on every Raspberry Pi computer. While the Wolfram Language has existed for over 25 years as the primary programming language used in Mathematica, it was not officially named until 2014.^[66] Wolfram's son, Christopher Wolfram, appeared on the program of SXSW giving a live-coding demonstration using Wolfram Language^[67] and has blogged about Wolfram Language for Wolfram Research.^[68]

On 8 December 2015, Wolfram published the book "An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language" to introduce people, with no knowledge of programming, to the Wolfram Language and the kind of computational thinking it allows.^[69] The release of the second edition of the book^[70] coincided with a "CEO for hire" competition during the 2017 Collision tech conference.^[71]

Both Stephen Wolfram and Christopher Wolfram were involved in helping create the alien language for the film Arrival, for which they used the Wolfram Language.<sup>[72][73][74]

An Introduction to the Wolfram Language Online</sup>

A New Kind of Science

wikipedia |  The thesis of A New Kind of Science (NKS) is twofold: that the nature of computation must be explored experimentally, and that the results of these experiments have great relevance to understanding the physical world. Since its nascent beginnings in the 1930s, computation has been primarily approached from two traditions: engineering, which seeks to build practical systems using computations; and mathematics, which seeks to prove theorems about computation. However, as recently as the 1970s, computing has been described as being at the crossroads of mathematical, engineering, and empirical traditions.^[2][3]

Wolfram introduces a third tradition that seeks to empirically investigate computation for its own sake: He argues that an entirely new method is needed to do so because traditional mathematics fails to meaningfully describe complex systems, and that there is an upper limit to complexity in all systems.^[4]

Simple programs

The basic subject of Wolfram's "new kind of science" is the study of simple abstract rules—essentially, elementary computer programs. In almost any class of a computational system, one very quickly finds instances of great complexity among its simplest cases (after a time series of multiple iterative loops, applying the same simple set of rules on itself, similar to a self-reinforcing cycle using a set of rules). This seems to be true regardless of the components of the system and the details of its setup. Systems explored in the book include, amongst others, cellular automata in one, two, and three dimensions; mobile automata; Turing machines in 1 and 2 dimensions; several varieties of substitution and network systems; primitive recursive functions; nested recursive functions; combinators; tag systems; register machines; reversal-addition. For a program to qualify as simple, there are several requirements:

1. Its operation can be completely explained by a simple graphical illustration.
2. It can be completely explained in a few sentences of human language.
3. It can be implemented in a computer language using just a few lines of code.
4. The number of its possible variations is small enough so that all of them can be computed.

Generally, simple programs tend to have a very simple abstract framework. Simple cellular automata, Turing machines, and combinators are examples of such frameworks, while more complex cellular automata do not necessarily qualify as simple programs. It is also possible to invent new frameworks, particularly to capture the operation of natural systems. The remarkable feature of simple programs is that a significant percentage of them are capable of producing great complexity. Simply enumerating all possible variations of almost any class of programs quickly leads one to examples that do unexpected and interesting things. This leads to the question: if the program is so simple, where does the complexity come from? In a sense, there is not enough room in the program's definition to directly encode all the things the program can do. Therefore, simple programs can be seen as a minimal example of emergence. A logical deduction from this phenomenon is that if the details of the program's rules have little direct relationship to its behavior, then it is very difficult to directly engineer a simple program to perform a specific behavior. An alternative approach is to try to engineer a simple overall computational framework, and then do a brute-force search through all of the possible components for the best match.

Simple programs are capable of a remarkable range of behavior. Some have been proven to be universal computers. Others exhibit properties familiar from traditional science, such as thermodynamic behavior, continuum behavior, conserved quantities, percolation, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and others. They have been used as models of traffic, material fracture, crystal growth, biological growth, and various sociological, geological, and ecological phenomena. Another feature of simple programs is that, according to the book, making them more complicated seems to have little effect on their overall complexity. A New Kind of Science argues that this is evidence that simple programs are enough to capture the essence of almost any complex system.

Mapping and mining the computational universe

In order to study simple rules and their often complex behaviour, Wolfram argues that it is necessary to systematically explore all of these computational systems and document what they do. He further argues that this study should become a new branch of science, like physics or chemistry. The basic goal of this field is to understand and characterize the computational universe using experimental methods.

The proposed new branch of scientific exploration admits many different forms of scientific production. For instance, qualitative classifications are often the results of initial forays into the computational jungle. On the other hand, explicit proofs that certain systems compute this or that function are also admissible. There are also some forms of production that are in some ways unique to this field of study. For example, the discovery of computational mechanisms that emerge in different systems but in bizarrely different forms.

Another kind of production involves the creation of programs for the analysis of computational systems. In the NKS framework, these themselves should be simple programs, and subject to the same goals and methodology. An extension of this idea is that the human mind is itself a computational system, and hence providing it with raw data in as effective a way as possible is crucial to research. Wolfram believes that programs and their analysis should be visualized as directly as possible, and exhaustively examined by the thousands or more. Since this new field concerns abstract rules, it can in principle address issues relevant to other fields of science. However, in general Wolfram's idea is that novel ideas and mechanisms can be discovered in the computational universe, where they can be represented in their simplest forms, and then other fields can choose among these discoveries for those they find relevant.

Wolfram has since expressed "A central lesson of A New Kind of Science is that there’s a lot of incredible richness out there in the computational universe. And one reason that’s important is that it means that there’s a lot of incredible stuff out there for us to 'mine' and harness for our purposes."^[5]

Stephen Wolfram

wikipedia |  As a young child, Wolfram initially struggled in school and had difficulties learning arithmetic.^[28] At the age of 12, he wrote a dictionary on physics.^[29] By 13 or 14, he had written three books on particle physics.^[30][31][32] They have not been published.

Particle physics 

Wolfram was a wunderkind. By age 15, he began research in applied quantum field theory and particle physics and published scientific papers. Topics included matter creation and annihilation, the fundamental interactions, elementary particles and their currents, hadronic and leptonic physics, and the parton model, published in professional peer-reviewed scientific journals including Nuclear Physics B, Australian Journal of Physics, Nuovo Cimento, and Physical Review D.^[33] Working independently, Wolfram published a widely cited paper on heavy quark production at age 18^[2] and nine other papers,^[18] and continued research and to publish on particle physics into his early twenties. Wolfram's work with Geoffrey C. Fox on the theory of the strong interaction is still used in experimental particle physics.^[34]

He was educated at Eton College, but left prematurely in 1976.^[35] He entered St. John's College, Oxford at age 17 but found lectures "awful",^[18] and left in 1978^[36] without graduating^[37][38] to attend the California Institute of Technology, the following year, where he received a PhD^[39] in particle physics on November 19, 1979 at age 20.^[40] Wolfram's thesis committee was composed of Richard Feynman, Peter Goldreich, Frank J. Sciulli and Steven Frautschi, and chaired by Richard D. Field.^[40][41]

A 1981 letter from Feynman to Gerald Freund giving reference for Wolfram for the MacArthur grant appears in Feynman's collective letters, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. Following his PhD, Wolfram joined the faculty at Caltech and became the youngest recipient^[42] of the MacArthur Fellowships in 1981, at age 21.^[37]

PROMESA Bishes: Obama Imposed Austerity on Puerto Rico...,

nakedcapitalism |  With that said, here’s a handy dashboard from the Puerto Rican goverment that shows the status of various systems on the island. In this post, I’m going to focus on the two systems that are in the worst shape: Power, at 5% coverage of the island, and water, where coverage differs by region: Metro, 57%; Norte, 29%; Oeste, 20%; Sur, 67%; and Este, 50%. But first, I’m going to look at one factor that differentiates the “natural” disaster of Maria in Puerto Rico from others on the mainland; then I’ll show how that factor affects the power system, and then cascades to affect the water supply. 

That one factor is, of course, finance. One difference between New Orleans (Katrina), Florida (Irma), and Texas (Harvey) on the one hand, and Puerto Rico (Maria), on the other, is that only Puerto Rico is under an austerity regime, imposed during the Obama administration. José A. Laguarta Ramírez described this regime (PROMESA) at Naked Capitalism in 2016:

The U.S. House of Representatives approved PROMESA on the evening of June 9, following a strong endorsement by President Barack Obama. The bill, which would also impose an unelected and unaccountable federal oversight board and allow court-supervised restructuring of part of the island’s $73 billion debt, now awaits consideration by the Senate…. Puerto Rico is not the only place, under the global regime of austerity capitalism to face predatory creditors and the imposition of unelected rulers —as illustrated by cases like Argentina, Greece, and post-industrial U.S. cities such as Flint, Mich.— but its century-old colonial status has made it particularly vulnerable and defenseless.

The House vote followed a concerted, carefully timed media push by the Democratic establishment, on the premise that “despite its flaws” PROMESA represents a bipartisan compromise that is, in Obama’s words, “far superior to the status quo.”

PROMESA’s oversight board, which will be staffed by San Juan and Washington insiders with the bondholders’ best interests at heart, is sure to continue to impose draconian austerity measures that have already slashed much-needed social services.

Of course! Austerity! Why did nobody think of this before? Mark Weisbrot in the New York Times:

This board, to which President Barack Obama appointed four Democrats and four Republicans, has now approved an austerity regimen that, if things go according to plan, envisions a second lost decade — in other words, no economic growth from 2005 through 2024. But the plan [reminscent of the austerity imposed on Greece] doesn’t take into account the impact of such austerity, which would add more years of decline. And there’s more: All the budget tightening over the second decade, including cuts to health care and education, would pay only about $7.9 billion of Puerto Rico’s $73 billion debt.
That means that creditors’ lawsuits, which have already been filed, could inflict additional damage and worsen the quarter-century of economic stagnation that is now in the cards. Hedge funds hold much of Puerto Rico’s debt, and since May their claims have been under consideration in a bankruptcy-like proceeding — also under the Promesa act — that does not look any more promising than the oversight board’s plan.

(One of Trump’s earlier tweets — September 25 — read: “Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble.” So it’s pleasing to see that the Democrats’ tender concern for the hedgies and vulture funds is shared across the political spectrum.)

Now let’s look at the effect of this thoroughly bipartisan austerity on the Puerto Rican power system.

Never Forget: The Owners of This People Ranch are In Charge

Guardian |  By now images of police violence against peaceful voters, old and young, were zipping across social media. Old people pulled to the ground; fleeing women hit with batons; a man jumped on down half a flight of stairs by a fully armoured riot cop . These pictures were horrifying Europe, but the thousands of people milling in the school courtyard did not look frightened or surprised.

After the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, and the Greek vote to reject austerity in June 2015, people who resist the economic and social order in Europe know that state-backed scare tactics are part of the deal.

Though brutal, the Guardia Civil actions on Sunday were calculated: in the selection of riot squads from outside areas, where casual hatred of Catalans is rife; in the targeting of old people and women; and in the pinpoint nature of the interventions, which people on the barricades thought were concentrated on middle-class areas.

There were thousands of riot cops on hand, on ships in the harbour. If Madrid had wanted to, it could have confiscated every ballot box within minutes and, for good measure, jammed the smartphone app the Catalan authorities were using to tally the results against the electoral roll. But prime minister Mariano Rajoy wanted to send a subtler message: let the most fervent separatists have their vote and get their heads broken, while scaring the rest of the population into non-participation, including any waverers.

Experience Keeps a Dear School: Puerto Rico - Aprende de Cuba...,

strategic-culture |  Most Puerto Ricans are unaware that their neo-colonialist “commonwealth” status as a US territory was cooked up by the Central Intelligence Agency to ensure that Puerto Rico remained a US military base for Cold War operations directed against Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, British Guiana/Guyana, Venezuela, Panama, Guatemala, and other countries in the Western Hemisphere.

For Washington, Puerto Rico has never been taken seriously. Its days as a major US military and intelligence “aircraft carrier” in the Caribbean are long over. Washington, via a long line of pathetic “quislings” who have served as governors of the territory, would rather Puerto Rico be seen and not heard, especially when it comes to treating the islanders as full and equal US citizens. The recent hurricanes that have hit the Caribbean have taught all the colonial vestiges in the region that they would be better off as independent states responsible for their own well-being and recovery than be treated as insignificant colonial pawns.

Luis Gutierrez Makes My Skin Crawl...,

zerohedge |  "The mayor of San Juan is a political hack," Fuentes said. "She was singing the praises of the president until her political adviser, [Rep.] Luis Gutiérrez from Chicago, got there and brought her the t-shirts and said, 'Hey you want to run for governor, if she wants to run..." at which point the CNN anchor cut him off, pointing to audio issues, and claiming he could no longer hear Fuentes, handing over the mic  to CNN's Democratic Political Commentator Maria Cardona, who unleashed a scathing critique before somehow audio returned at which point Fuentes was once again given the platform, when he again repeated that any logistical problems were the result of political posturing by the San Juan mayor at which point both the CNN anchor and and Cardona doubled down their attack, and so on. 

Let The Clinton Global Initiative Do To Puerto Rico What It Did To Haiti..,

theconservativetreehouse |  50% of the native Puerto Rican National Guard refused to report to duty when the governor called them up. •Thousands of tons of supplies and equipment, provided by FEMA, U.S. military and U.S. relief agencies, sit at ports while municipal government has no process for delivering them. •Frente Amplio (PR Teamsters Union – truck drivers) are on strike and refusing to deliver supplies. •Over 10,000 U.S. federal personnel are providing recovery and relief on the island….

 …and the priority for the Mayor of San Juan, with no power or infrastructure, is to have T-Shirts made to push a political agenda?

Funny how Anderson Cooper never asks:Where does one get a shirt like this made when Puerto Rico is under water and out of power? (rhetorical question)

Quantum Criticality in Living Systems

phys.org  |  Stuart Kauffman, from the University of Calgary, and several of his colleagues have recently published a paper on the Arxiv server titled 'Quantum Criticality at the Origins of Life'. The idea of a quantum criticality, and more generally quantum critical states, comes perhaps not surprisingly, from solid state physics. It describes unusual electronic states that are are balanced somewhere between conduction and insulation. More specifically, under certain conditions, current flow at the critical point becomes unpredictable. When it does flow, it tends to do so in avalanches that vary by several orders of magnitude in size. 

Ferroelectric metals, like iron, are one familiar example of a material that has classical critical point. Above a critical temperature of 1043 degrees K the magnetization of iron is completely lost. In the narrow range approaching this point, however, thermal fluctuations in the electron spins that underly the magnetic behavior extend over all length scales of the sample—that's the scale invariance we mentioned. In this case we have a continuous phase transition that is thermally driven, as opposed to being driven by something else like external pressure, magnetic field, or some kind of chemical influence.

Quantum criticality, on the other hand, is usually associated with stranger electronic behaviors—things like high-temperature superconductivity or so-called heavy fermion metals like CeRhIn5. One strange behavior in the case of heavy fermions, for example, is the observation of large 'effective mass'—mass up to 1000 times normal—for the conduction electrons as a consequence of their narrow electronic bands. These kinds of phenomena can only be explained in terms of the collective behavior of highly correlated electrons, as opposed to more familiar theory based on decoupled electrons. 

Experimental evidence for critical points in quantum phase transitions of materials like CeRhIn5 has only recently been found. In this case the so-called "Fermi surface," a three-dimensional map representing the collective energy states of all electrons in the material, was seen to have large instantaneous shifts at the critical points. When electrons across the entire Fermi surface are strongly coupled, unusual physics like superconductivity is possible.

The potential existence of quantum critical points in proteins is a new idea that will need some experimental evidence to back it up. Kauffman and his group eloquently describe the major differences between current flow in proteins as compared to metallic conductors. They note that in metals charges 'float' due to voltage differences. Here, an electric fields accelerate electrons while scattering on impurities dissipates their energy fixing a constant average propagation velocity.

By contrast, this kind of a mechanism would appear to be uncommon in biological systems. The authors note that charges entering a critically conducting biomolecule will be under the joint influence of the quantum Hamiltonian and the excessive decoherence caused by the environment. Currently a huge focus in Quantum biology, this kind of conductance has been seen for example, for excitons in the light-harvesting systems. As might already be apparent here, the logical flow of the paper, at least to nonspecialists, quickly devolves into the more esoteric world of quantum Hamiltonians and niche concepts like 'Anderson localization.' 

To try to catch a glimpse of what might be going on without becoming steeped in formalism I asked Luca Turin, who actually holds the patent for semiconductor structures using proteins as their active element, for his take on the paper. He notes that the question of how electrons get across proteins is one of the great unsolved problems in biophysics, and that the Kauffman paper points in a novel direction to possibly explain conduction. Quantum tunnelling (which is an essential process, for example, in the joint special ops of proteins of the respiratory chain) works fine over small distances. However, rates fall precipitously with distance. Traditional hole and electron transport mechanisms butt against the high bandgap and absence of obvious acceptor impurities. Yet at rest our body's fuel cell generates 100 amps of electron current.

 

In suggesting that biomolecules, or at least most of them, are quantum critical conductors, Kauffman and his group are claiming that their electronic properties are precisely tuned to the transition point between a metal and an insulator. An even stronger reading of this would have that there is a universal mechanism of charge transport in living matter which can exist only in highly evolved systems. To back all this up the group took a closer look at the electronic structure of a few of our standard issue proteins like myoglobin, profilin, and apolipoprotein E.

In particular, they selected NMR spectra from the Protein Data Bank and used a technique known as the extended Huckel Hamiltonion method to calculate HOMO/LUMO orbitals for the proteins. For more comments on HOMO/LUMO orbital calculations you might look at our post on Turin's experiments on electron spin changes as a potential general mechanism of anesthesia. To fully appreciate what such calculations might imply in this case, we have to toss out another fairly abstract concept, namely, Hofstadter's butterfly as seen in the picture below.

What is Life?

scribd |  Schrodinger unleashed modern molecular biology with his “What Is Life?”.[1] The order in biology must be due, not to statistical processes attributable to statistical mechanics, but due to the stability of the chemical bond. In one brilliant intuition, he said, “It will not be a periodic crystal, for these are dull. “Genes” will be an aperiodic crystal containing a microcode for the organism.” (my quotes around “genes”.) He was brilliantly right, but insufficient. 

The structure of DNA followed, the code and genes turning one another on and off in some vast genetic regulatory network. Later work, including my own,[2] showed that such networks could behave with sufficient order for ontogeny or be enormously chaotic and no life could survive that chaos.

We biologists continue to think largely in terms of classical physics and chemistry, even about the origins of life, and life itself, despite Schrodinger’s clear message that life depends upon quantum mechanics.

 

In this short article, I wish to explore current “classical physics” ideas about the origin of life then introduce the blossoming field of quantum biology and within a newly discovered state of matter, The Poised Realm, hovering reversibly between quantum and “classical” worlds that may be fundamental to life. Life may be lived in the Poised Realm, with wide implications.

The widest implications are a hope for a union of the objective and subjective poles; the latter lost since Descartes’ Res cogitans failed and Newton triumphed with classical physics and Descartes’ Res extensa. What I shall say here is highly speculative.

2 Classical Physics and Chemistry Ideas about the Origin of Life

There are four broad views about the origin of life:

1) The RNA world view, dominant in the USA.

2) The spontaneous emergence of “collectively autocatalytic set”, which might be RNA, peptides, both, or other molecular species.

3) Budding liposomes or other self-reproducing vesicles.

4) Metabolism first, with linked sets of chemical reaction cycles, which are autocatalytic in the sense that each produces an extra copy of at least one product per cycle. 

Almost all workers agree that however molecular reproduction may have occurred, it is plausibly the case that housing such a system in a liposome or similar vesicle is one way to confine reactants. Recent work suggests that a dividing liposome and reproducing molecular system will synchronize divisions, so could form a protocell, hopefully able to evolve to some extent.[3]

Psychic Dictatorship in America

wikipedia |  The "I AM" Activity was founded by Guy Ballard (pseudonym Godfre Ray King) in the early 1930s. Ballard was well-read in theosophy and its offshoots, and while hiking on Mount Shasta looking for a supposed Esoteric Brotherhood, he said that he had encountered a man who introduced himself as Saint Germain, (as indicated in a historic account in the published book Unveiled Mysteries). Saint Germain is also known as the Comte de Saint-Germain, a historical 18th-century alchemist and a regular component of theosophical religions.^[3]

The Ballards said they began talking to the Ascended Masters regularly. They founded a publishing house, Saint Germain Press, to publish their books and began training people to spread their messages across the United States. These training sessions and "Conclaves" were held throughout the United States and were open to the general public and free of charge. A front page story in a 1938 edition of the Chicago Herald and Examiner noted that the Ballards "do not take up collections or ask for funds".[9]

 Some of the original members of I AM were recruited from the ranks of William Dudley Pelley’s organization the Silver Shirts.^{[citation needed]} Meetings became limited to members only after hecklers began disrupting their open meetings.^[2][3] Over their lifetimes, the Ballard's recorded nearly 4,000 Live dictations, which they said were from the Ascended Masters.^[1] Guy Ballard, his wife Edna, and later his son Donald became the sole "Accredited Messengers" of the Ascended Masters.^[3]


 

Chapter3PsychicDictatorship | Within a period of less than a decade, America has seen the rise and growth of two remarkable movements which bear an odd resemblance to each other.

William Dudley Pelley's "Silver Shirts of America," the first of the two movements, started originally simply as a metaphysical venture, the result of a personal psychic experience, which strangely enough, occurred while residing at a mountain cottage in California.

The Ballard "Mighty I AM" movement, as we have seen, started the same way, with its originator claiming his first contact with Comte de St. Germain on the side of a mountain in California.

The recent reports of the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, under the chairmanship of Martin Dies of Texas, have given the Pelley Silver Shirt movement front-page headlines, revealing to the public that for years it has not been a "metaphysical" organization as in the beginning, but is a political body which the Dies Committee believes to be un-American in that it is included in the "Nazi-Fascist groups" engaged in "aping the methods of foreign dictators" and attempting "to bring about a radical change in the American form of government." (Associated Press Dispatch, August 31, 1939.)

This book will reveal that the Ballard cult, too, is really a political movement and that its metaphysics, among other things, is largely engaged in an effort to bring about a weird sort of government in the United States.

The Pelley organization, as a matter of fact, supplied the pattern for some of the Ballard work, and evidence supporting this will soon be given. The Ballards, however, kept out of their movement the Silver Shirts' well-known hatred of the Jew, and have denounced other "enemies" instead.

There is so much similarity between the two organizations, it is well from the standpoint of psychological study and history to bring this out.

Pelley was a writer, a most clever wielder of the pen. Back in 1917 he was in the Orient on what he states to have been Christian missionary work; and after varied experiences there, he returned in 1919 to the United States to resume his writings and newspaper career. Around this time he became interested, he says, in "Secret Service investigations," and claimed to have had "contacts with some of the biggest men in the Hoover administration."

Ballard in his later years became also a writer, claims to have spent a couple of years in the Orient, and his "Secret Service connections" and his "Government contacts" are most remarkable, as we shall find.

In 1929 Pelley wrote the article which publicized his name throughout the nation. It was the story of a personal psychic experience entitled "Seven Minutes in Eternity," in which he related how, while residing at a lonely bungalow in the Sierra Madre Mountains near Pasadena California, he suddenly one night left his physical body lying on the bed and consciously soared away into that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler is supposed to return. But Pelley did return, and he told a graphic story of his sojourn there. Later he published messages purporting to come from "Masters," who began to direct and influence his new life work.

Similarly, Messenger Ballard, shortly after the appearance of the Pelley article, wrote up his own psychic experiences, which came to him in 1930, he said, while living at a lodge at the foot of a California mountain. He, too, left his body, and great and mighty "Ascended" Masters dictated marvelous discourses to him.

The American Magazine, which had published the Pelley story, was almost swamped, we understand, with mail in regard to it. It appears that the whole country at that time was having psychic experiences, and overnight almost Pelley had a tremendous following. All the letter-writing psychics in the land, it seems, wrote in giving their own personal experiences--and called for more from the fluent and graphic Pelley.

Obligingly, the new metaphysical leader gave his readers plenty of them, as indeed has the leader of the Mighty I AM cult which followed so soon after the start of Pelleyism.

Pelley's magazine, then named "The New Liberator," was started--an artistic but rather lurid creation--and he filled it with occult articles by himself and psychic messages from great "Masters." But never were they as numerous and as notorious as the Ballard "Ascended Masters."

Gradually, Pelley's psychism took on a political coloring and flavor, and it wasn't long before he was publishing stirring ideas and plans about a "New Government" in America--as did Ballard shortly afterwards.

Political headquarters were established at Asheville, N.C. in 1932, and his "Foundation for Christian Economics" was started at about the time Ballard was assertedly receiving his religio-patriotic messages over the marvelous "Light and Sound Ray" at his home in Chicago.

At the beginning of 1933, Pelley started his now famous Silver Legion, and felt the egoic thrill of fascist rule over his legionnaires or "storm troops" organized in many parts of the country. In much the same way have the fascistic-minded leaders of the Mighty I AM cult organized their patriotic bands of Minute Men --the "storm troops" of the movement.

In the fall of 1936, after Pelley had recovered from certain adverse court decisions and indictments at Asheville, N.C., he organized his "Christian Party" and announced his candidacy for the President of the United States--an office to which it will be seen Ballard himself has felt himself peculiarly fitted!

Three and a half years later, after many vicissitudes of fortune and after some months of search for him by the Dies committee, Pelley in the early part of 1940 appeared before that committee to answer certain charges allegedly to the effect that "he is a racketeer engaged in mulcting thousands of dollars annually from his fanatical and misled followers and credulous people all over the United States and Canada and certain foreign countries." (Associated Press Dispatch , Jan. 3, 1940.)

It is not within the scope of this book to consider whether the Dies committee was or was not justified in making the above allegations concerning Pelley. We desire merely to point out the startling parallel between these two movements and to show by actual evidence that so far as the Ballard movement is concerned the Dies committee, if it had gone into the matter, could have brought out justifiably, we believe, similar charges against Saint Germain's "Mighty I AM" movement.

We shall complete the parallel between the two movements by quoting Associated Press Dispatch of February 8, 1940, giving an account of Pelley's appearance before the Dies committee:

"With a trace of wistfulness, William Dudley Pelley, leader of the Silver Shirts, told the Dies committee today that if his organization had succeeded in its purposes, he 'probably' would be in charge of the government now.

"And in that case, he continued, he 'probably' would have put into effect something resembling Adolf Hitler's policies with respect to the Jews, although he said he does not endorse Hitler's exact methods."

It is this Pelley Silver Shirt movement which Guy and Edna Ballard were particularly interested in previous to the publication of Unveiled Mysteries, and, as will be shown, they tried to build a foundation upon Pelley's organization in an effort to launch their own Mighty I AM movement.

In order to show this Silver Shirt background of the Ballard movement we shall now have to refer to a certain meeting which was held in the summer of 1934 at the Ballard home on 84th Place, Chicago.

To this meeting was invited the treasurer of the Pelley organization, some additional Pelleyites, and others interested in metaphysical and patriotic movements. It was the first regular ten-day class ever held by the Ballards, and it is important because what transpired there indicates clearly the early efforts of their invisible "Saint Germain" to lay plans for a "New Government" in America which was to be formed more of less along the line previously described by Pelley in his writings.

Hitler in California

LATimes  |  Hitler didn’t have to set foot out of Germany for his malign plans to be felt beyond the Reich’s borders — even here in Los Angeles. Through the depths of the Depression right into World War II, Nazi Germany was ginning up support in Southern California, where its agents plotted everything from attacks on National Guard armories to murdering Hollywood’s Jewish moguls and filmmakers.

USC history professor Steven J. Ross has unearthed the story of sunshine Nazism, from picnic rallies in a La Crescenta park to a compound planned for Pacific Palisades as Hitler’s White House on the Pacific. Ross’ book, “Hitler in Los Angeles, How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots against Hollywood and America,” is part thriller and all chiller, about how close the California Reich came to succeeding.

The Silver Shirts Haven't Completely Disappeared

newyorker  |  Los Angeles’s Nazis and Fascists, some of whom were taking orders directly from Hitler and Goebbels, were preparing for what they saw as an inevitable Nazi take-over of the United States. Anticipating that day, Norman and Winona Stephens bought a fifty-acre piece of land above the Pacific Palisades, and started to build a fortress that would serve as Hitler’s West Coast White House, halfway between Tokyo and Berlin. “This was going to be the equivalent of San Clemente for Nixon, or Mar-a-Lago, only more convenient,” Ross said.

Another day, Ross hiked up a fire road leading toward the Nazi ruins. He found a gap in the fence, and began to descend a steep concrete staircase. “This is a lo-o-o-ng trip down,” he said.

Inside the compound, Ross led the way to a dazzling spray-painted building, the remains of a powerhouse. Catching sight of a “Fuck Trump” tag, he said, “Quite the opposite of Nazis!” The Stephenses, who spent some seventy million dollars in today’s money on the project, installed, in addition to generators, a huge water tank, a diesel fuel tank, and a meat locker, and erected a stable. Plans included meeting rooms, twenty-two bedrooms, and a pool: a luxurious and private place for Nazis to make war plans. “They were going to have a totally self-sustaining compound,” Ross said. Lewis’s spies warned him that there were Nazis in the hills, coaching sympathizers in marksmanship, urban warfare, and hand-to-hand combat. (Members of a clandestine Storm Trooper unit insisted that their militia-training exercises were a Sportabteilung, a club devoted to hiking and drilling for parades.)

“Hitler was hoping first to conquer more of Europe, and then turn his eyes to America,” Ross said. “If Japan had not bombed Pearl Harbor, we would have remained neutral a lot longer. The thinking was, by the time America woke up it would have been too late.” 

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us

ecosophia |  Let’s start with the concept of the division of labor. One of the great distinctions between a modern industrial society and other modes of human social organization is that in the former, very few activities are taken from beginning to end by the same person. A woman in a hunter-gatherer community, as she is getting ready for the autumn tuber-digging season, chooses a piece of wood, cuts it, shapes it into a digging stick, carefully hardens the business end in hot coals, and then puts it to work getting tubers out of the ground. Once she carries the tubers back to camp, what’s more, she’s far more likely than not to take part in cleaning them, roasting them, and sharing them out to the members of the band.

A woman in a modern industrial society who wants to have potatoes for dinner, by contrast, may do no more of the total labor involved in that process than sticking a package in the microwave. Even if she has potatoes growing in a container garden out back, say, and serves up potatoes she grew, harvested, and cooked herself, odds are she didn’t make the gardening tools, the cookware, or the stove she uses. That’s division of labor: the social process by which most members of an industrial society specialize in one or another narrow economic niche, and use the money they earn from their work in that niche to buy the products of other economic niches.

Let’s say it up front: there are huge advantages to the division of labor.  It’s more efficient in almost every sense, whether you’re measuring efficiency in terms of output per person per hour, skill level per dollar invested in education, or what have you. What’s more, when it’s combined with a social structure that isn’t too rigidly deterministic, it’s at least possible for people to find their way to occupational specialties for which they’re actually suited, and in which they will be more productive than otherwise. Yet it bears recalling that every good thing has its downsides, especially when it’s pushed to extremes, and the division of labor is no exception.

Crackpot realism is one of the downsides of the division of labor. It emerges reliably whenever two conditions are in effect. The first condition is that the task of choosing goals for an activity is assigned to one group of people and the task of finding means to achieve those goals is left to a different group of people. The second condition is that the first group needs to be enough higher in social status than the second group that members of the first group need pay no attention to the concerns of the second group.

Consider, as an example, the plight of a team of engineers tasked with designing a flying car.  People have been trying to do this for more than a century now, and the results are in: it’s a really dumb idea. It so happens that a great many of the engineering features that make a good car make a bad aircraft, and vice versa; for instance, an auto engine needs to be optimized for torque rather than speed, while an aircraft engine needs to be optimized for speed rather than torque. Thus every flying car ever built—and there have been plenty of them—performed just as poorly as a car as it did as a plane, and cost so much that for the same price you could buy a good car, a good airplane, and enough fuel to keep both of them running for a good long time.

Engineers know this. Still, if you’re an engineer and you’ve been hired by some clueless tech-industry godzillionaire who wants a flying car, you probably don’t have the option of telling your employer the truth about his pet project—that is, that no matter how much of his money he plows into the project, he’s going to get a clunker of a vehicle that won’t be any good at either of its two incompatible roles—because he’ll simply fire you and hire someone who will tell him what he wants to hear. Nor do you have the option of sitting him down and getting him to face what’s behind his own unexamined desires and expectations, so that he might notice that his fixation on having a flying car is an emotionally charged hangover from age eight, when he daydreamed about having one to help him cope with the miserable, bully-ridden public school system in which he was trapped for so many wretched years. So you devote your working hours to finding the most rational, scientific, and utilitarian means to accomplish a pointless, useless, and self-defeating end. That’s crackpot realism.

You can make a great party game out of identifying crackpot realism—try it sometime—but I’ll leave that to my more enterprising readers. What I want to talk about right now is one of the most glaring examples of crackpot realism in contemporary industrial society. Yes, we’re going to talk about space travel again.

Why We Want to Change the World?

medium |  Humans have always been a social, cooperative species. According to Oren Harman of The Chronicle of Higher Education, this trait may be what’s propelled us to the top of the food chain:

“Developing the biological and cultural mechanisms that suppressed disruptive within-group competition and fostered empathy and trust, our ancestors became the sole primate.”

Ridley, and other evolutionary biologists, theorize that humans are designed to pass on their genes. However, preserving oneself is not the only way to replicate one’s genes. Per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “By behaving altruistically, an organism reduces the number of offspring it is likely to produce itself, but boosts the number that other organisms are likely to produce.”

David and Edward Wilson described the adaptive strategy behind this paradox more succinctly:

“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups”

While altruism may be a cost to the individual, it comes with the benefit of increasing the likelihood that others with the group will survive. In other words, while altruism may not help us as individuals, it may help our kinsmen. Or, as Ridley says, “Selfish genes sometimes uses selfless individuals to achieve their ends.”

The power of reciprocity

Our ancestors cooperated on important functions such as hunting, gathering, protecting the tribe, and raiding others for their resources. This cooperation is helpful to the group and to the individuals within that group, writes Christopher Bergland of Psychology Today:

“Social behaviors — including altruism — are often genetically programmed into a species to help them survive…Even if you are feeling ‘selfish’, behaving selflessly may be the wisest ‘self-serving’ thing to do.”

Bergland explains the benefit to this strategy: “Acting selflessly in the moment provides a selective advantage to the altruist in the form of some kind of return benefit.” A paper published in the Annual Review of Psychology describes these reciprocal benefits more specifically: “Signaling that one is generous can lead to benefits for the person signaling, such as being chosen as an exchange partner, friend, or mate.”

If you help a friend pay of their credit card debt, they may be more likely to help you pay off your debt in the future. If you help a friend move into a new apartment, they’ll be more likely to help you when you move. When you are known as a person who helps others, people want to be your friend. By giving, we receive.