johganz |“But, John, are you saying we should use the Justice Department politically? With the express purpose of getting rid of someone you don’t like.” Kind
of! As Trump’s intellectual defenders love to remind us, there’s
ultimately no neutral administration of justice, everything is
political, and when you get the state apparatus in your hands you use it
beat up on your enemies and help out your friends. So, in part, these
are their rules. (If you start talking about how you are gonna apply the thought of Carl Schmitt when you administer the state, I may start to get the sense you are my enemy.)
Also,
let’s not play innocent. Historically speaking, the F.B.I. has always
been used “politically:” it was used against Reds, Nazis, Reds again,
the KKK, civil rights leaders, black power leaders, Nazis again etc. A
lot of this was abusive and terrible and you know where my political
sympathies lie, but this was because the political establishment
implicitly or explicitly viewed these groups as threats to the United
States itself. In many cases, they were not. (Yeah, yeah, I know what
you are gonna say, “but J. Edgar Hoover, blah, blah, blah”—The fact is
that Hoover lasted so long because powerful people thought he was useful
and mostly right.) But here is a case where the real deal has come
along: a bonafide domestic threat to the constitution. People these days
are willing to call everything from annoying college students to crummy
D.E.I. consultants “totalitarian threats to democracy” or whatever, but
when a big, fat threat to democracy is standing right there, suddenly
everyone is like, “Well…it’s a little complicated, isn’t it?” No, it
really isn’t. And, in this case, we don’t have to break the law or do
anything underhanded: just actually try to uphold the law for a change
and stop playing little political games around it.
A
political class that can’t defend the constitutional order and the rule
of law is worse than useless: it’s actually conspiring with its enemies.
Trump attacked the very heart of our system of government.
If the system can’t respond to that forcefully it doesn’t deserve to
exist anymore. Let’s stop pretending Trump is anything but a mobster and
a would-be tyrant. In this case, prudence demands action.
Politico | “Part
of the MAGA movement is kind of a ‘fuck you’ to the government
bureaucracy, which you can interpret as the Deep State,” said one former
Trump staffer. “People were really dissatisfied with the transition and
the outcome of the election. This is the last piece of control that
they had [while] in power.”
The
weeks after the November elections were among the more chaotic for a
Trump White House that had been defined by chaos. The West Wing was left
reeling by Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, and the president’s refusal to
concede largely froze the transition process in place.
Some
aides recalled that staff secretary Derek Lyons attempted to maintain a
semblance of order in the West Wing despite the election uncertainty.
But he departed the administration in late December, leaving the task of
preserving the needed records for the National Archives to others. The
two men atop the office hierarchy — then-White House chief of staff Mark
Meadows and Trump — took little interest in it, aides and advisers
recalled. Meanwhile, responsibility for overseeing the pack up of the
outer Oval and dining room, an area where Trump liked to work when not
in the Oval Office, was left to Trump’s assistants, Molly Michael and
Nick Luna, according to multiple former aides.
Trump, Eggleston surmised, was a victim of his own political impulses.
“[H]e denied being defeated so they didn’t really engage in a transition
process because he refused to let it happen,” he said. “So that meant
that they were in a fairly frantic situation as the inauguration day
came.”
For outgoing White Houses, there is
typically a debriefing process about classified documents, and then a
procedure to turn over government phones and computers. But for many of
the last Trump holdouts, that process came after the Capitol riot, a
stunning day of violence which triggered heightened security throughout
Washington. The security obstacles erected around the White House, aides
recalled, created more logistical hurdles for an already exhausted and
hollowed-out staff.
Sloppiness ensued in many
departments. Many staffers seemed more interested in securing copies of
“jumbos” — the giant photos that adorned the West Wing’s walls — than
sorting and packing up their files. Those who stayed focused on juggling
the operational demands of running a country with the political whims
of a president who, until just days before, was trying to cling to
power.
There was, simply, not much care for protocol.
“Compared to previous
administrations of both parties,” conceded a person familiar with the
process, “there was less of a willingness to adhere to the Presidential
Records Act.”
steady | Amid the discussion around the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago and what it
might mean for Trump and the rule of law in America, there is a detail
that I worry isn’t receiving enough attention but that points to a
dangerous reality in the United States today.
It centers on Bruce
Reinhart, the magistrate judge who signed the FBI's search warrant. As
his name became public, he has faced a withering volume of threats from
those who believe Trump should be above the law. In today’s America,
with the MAGA crowd revved up for attack, that was to be expected. But
that attacks were to be expected should not obscure the fact that they
are dangerous. Very. The possibility of their leading to violence should
not be underestimated.
Many of these threats focused on the fact
that Judge Reinhart is Jewish. It got to the point that the synagogue
where Judge Reinhart sits on the board had to cancel Shabbat services:
Antisemitism is on the rise in America, as those who track such
nefarious trends will tell you. It can be found in some form across the
political spectrum, but it has become a particular hallmark of elements
of the Republican Party, especially in the age of Trump.
In the
wake of the FBI search, the New York Young Republican Club resorted to
well-worn antisemitic tropes, for example. “Internationalist forces and
their allies intent on undermining the foundation of our Republic have
crossed the Rubicon,” read their statement, in part. The conspiracy
theory that Trump is being thwarted by a global cabal of “elites” funded
by “George Soros” in ways that will undermine traditional American
“values” represents coded language (and by "coded," I mean as subtle as a
marching band through a library) that is pushing a dangerous line of
attack. Dangerous on a personal level and dangerous for our country as a
whole.
While there are extreme fringe groups who speak bluntly
and declaratively of hating Jews, most American antisemitism is less
obvious. Republican supporters of Trump say they can’t possibly be
antisemitic because Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is Jewish, as
were many members of his administration. They say Republicans have
strong supporters in Israel, including former Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. They point to Democratic politicians who have been critical
of Israel, or others with ties to more overt antisemites.
All of this is true. But it is not an excuse for what is taking place now.
It
should be noted with emphasis that antisemitism isn’t limited to one
political party or ideology. Furthermore, the Israel issue complicates
the discussion, because criticism of Israel as a country is not
necessarily antisemitic. Many American Jews object to Israeli policy.
But there are also ways Israel is spoken of that clearly cross into
antisemitic language.
kunstler | It should be pretty obvious that the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was an
attempt to seize evidence likely to be used in former President Donald
Trump’s civil lawsuit in the Southern Florida Federal District Court
against Hillary Clinton and associated defendants in and out of
government for the defamation and racketeering operation known as
RussiaGate — AND in any future criminal proceedings that might grow out
of congressional investigations-to-come against officials past and
present in the DOJ and FBI. The idea is to tie up all those documents in
a legal dispute about declassification so they can’t be entered in any
proceeding.
Over the weekend, independent journalist Paul Sperry reported that
many of the same FBI officers involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid happen to
be subjects of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the
origins of RussiaGate. Have some of them already been hauled into grand
juries? We don’t know. But, with the Mar-a-Lago caper, it looks like the
law enforcement apparatus of the federal government is seeking to
suppress evidence of its own long-running criminal enterprise.
The parallel purpose of the raid was to find — or perhaps plant —
documents that might be used in a scheme to disqualify Mr. Trump from
running for office again. The January 6th show-trial in
Congress has failed to galvanize the country’s attention, and may have
foundered in its attempt to find grounds for a criminal referral against
the former president that would take him off the playing field. So, now
this.
Momentous legal quarrels that arise out of the Mar-a-Lago raid may
evolve into a constitutional crisis that the captive news media can use
as a smokescreen to divert the public’s attention from any balloting
shenanigans going into the November election. At least it will shove any
other issues off-stage in the run-up to the midterm. Is it a
miscalculation?
The choice of going to federal magistrate Bruce Reinhart for the
Mar-a-Lago warrant sure looks crude and desperate. Only weeks ago, he
was presiding over the Trump v Clinton lawsuit. How did that even
happen, given Mr. Reinhart’s role defending Jeffrey Epstein’s associates
— many of them Clinton-connected — in the 2007 sex-trafficking case?
And only after the spectacularly weird act of switching sides from the
federal prosecution team to Epstein’s defense team. Not to mention Mr.
Reinhart’s record of public statements denouncing Mr. Trump. There are
twenty-five other magistrates who rotate their duties in the Southern
District of Florida, why pick him?
It all shapes up as a systematic effort to obstruct justice by the US
Department of Justice. They’ve been doing it consistently since 2016 in
all matters pertaining to Mr. Trump, and it is a big reason that the
country is now viciously coming apart. This is just a continuation of
the same seditious treachery that went on with James Comey releasing his
classified interview memo concerning Mr. Trump to The New York Times
via his attorney friend from Columbia University, Daniel Richman; and
the ensuing dishonest Mueller investigation the leak provoked; and the
Crossfire Hurricane operation run by Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, and
Rod Rosenstein; and the illegal entrapment and prosecution of National
Security Advisor Michael Flynn; and the serial misrepresentations to the
FISA court; and the illegal coordinated maneuvers in impeachment #1
between Rep. Adam Schiff, ICIG Michael Atkinson, the National Security
Council, and CIA-agent Eric Ciaramella posing as a “whistleblower”; and
more recently, the mischief around the FBI’s conjured-up Gretchen
Whitmer kidnapping scheme; and the FBI’s role in turning the January 6,
2020, election protests into a riot at the US Capitol.
jonathanturley | In the cult classic, “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” the
character Scott Stuart is caught in a thick fog that causes him to
gradually shrink to the point that he lives in a doll house and fights
off the house cat. At one point, Stuart delivers a strikingly profound line: “The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet — like the closing of a gigantic circle.”
If one image sums up the incredibly shrinking stature of Attorney General Merrick Garland, it is that line in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago search.
Two years ago, I was one of many who supported Garland when
he was nominated for attorney general. While his personality seemed a
better fit for the courts than the Cabinet, he is a person with
unimpeachable integrity and ethics.
If there are now doubts, it is not about his character but his
personality in dealing with political controversies. Those concerns have
grown in the past week.
In the aftermath of the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida, much remains unclear. The inventory list confirms that there were documents marked TS (Top Secret) and SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information)
—two of the highest classification levels for materials. The former
president’s retention of such documents would appear to be a very
serious violation.
However, the status of the documents is uncertain after Trump
insisted that he declassified the material and was handling the
records in accordance with prior discussions with the FBI. While the
declassified status of these documents would not bar charges under the
cited criminal provisions, it could have a significant impact on the viability of any prosecution.
I have not assumed that the search of Mar-a-Lago was unwarranted
given that we have not seen the underlying affidavit. Yet in
another controversy, Garland seemed largely reactive and rote in dealing
with questions over bias or abuse in his department.
In his confirmation hearing, Garland repeatedly pledged that
political considerations would hold no sway with him as attorney
general. Yet, in just two years, the Justice Department has careened
from one political controversy to another without any sign that Garland
is firmly in control of the department. Last year, for example, Garland
was heavily criticized for his rapid deployment of a task force to investigate parents and others challenging school boards.
By refusing a special counsel, Garland has removed the president’s
greatest threat. Unlike the U.S. Attorney investigating Hunter Biden, a
special counsel would be expected to publish a report that would detail
the scope of the Biden family’s alleged influence peddling and foreign
contacts.
Likewise, the Justice Department is conducting a grand jury
investigation that is aggressively pursuing Trump associates and
Republican figures, including seizing the telephones of members of Congress. That investigation has bearing on the integrity and the status of Biden’s potential opponent in 2024.
The investigation also has triggered concerns over the party in
power investigating the opposing political party. It is breathtaking
that Garland would see no need for an independent or special counsel
given this country’s continued deep divisions and mistrust.
Then came the raid. While Garland said he personally approved the
operation, he did little to help mitigate the inevitable political
explosion. This country is a powder keg and the FBI has a documented history of false statements to courts and falsified evidence in support of a previous Trump investigation.
jonathanturley |Fox News is reporting
that the FBI seized boxes containing attorney-client privileged and
potentially executive privileged material during its raid Mar-a-Lago.
When the raid occurred, I noted that the legal team had likely marked
material as privileged at the residence and that the collection could
create an immediate conflict over such material. Now, sources are
telling Fox that the Justice Department not only took attorney-client
material but has refused Trump requests for a special master to review
the records.
The request for a special master would seem reasonable, particularly
given the sweeping language used in the warrant. It is hard to see what
material could not be gathered under this warrant.
Attachment B of the warrant has this provision:
“Any physical documents with classification
markings, along with any containers/boxes (including any other
contents) in which such documents are located, as well as any other
containers/boxes that are collectively stored or found together with the
aforementioned documents and containers/boxes; b.. Information,
including communications in any form, regarding the retrieval, storage,
or transmission of national defense information or classified material”
Thus, the agents could not only take an entire box if it contained a
single document with classification markings of any kind but could then
take all boxes around that box.
It is not surprising that dozens of boxes were seized.
Given that sweeping language (and the various lawsuits and
investigations facing Trump), it would seem reasonable to request a
special magistrate. That is why the reported refusal is so concerning.
What is the harm from such a review? The material is now under lock and
key. There is no approaching deadline in court or referenced grand jury.
Moreover, many have accused the Justice Department of using this
search as a pretext. While saying that they were seeking potential
national security information, critics have alleged that the real
purpose was to gather evidence that could be used against Trump in a
prosecution over his role in January 6th riot. I have noted that such a
pretext would be deeply disturbing given the documented history of
Justice Department officials misleading or lying to courts in prior
Trump-related investigations. The continuation of such subterfuge could
be disclosed in a later oversight investigation.
The use of a special master could have helped quell such claims of a
pretextual search. Conversely, the denial of such a protective measure
would fuel even greater concerns.
The refusal to take this protective measures is almost as troubling
as the sweeping language in the search warrant itself. We need to see
the affidavit that led to this search warrant. I am not going to assume
that the search was unwarranted until I see that evidence. However, in
the interim, Attorney General Merrick Garland could have allowed
accommodations for this review to assure not just the Trump team but the
public that the search was not a pretext for seeking other evidence
like January 6th-related material.
The
lawsuit names a wide cast of characters that Trump has accused for
years of orchestrating a "deep state" conspiracy against him --
including former FBI Director James Comey and other FBI officials, the retired British spy Christopher Steele and his associates, and a handful of Clinton campaign advisers.
"Under
the guise of 'opposition research,' 'data analytics,' and other
political stratagems, the Defendants nefariously sought to sway the
public's trust," says the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Florida.
"They worked together with a single, self-serving purpose: to vilify
Donald J. Trump."
Over
108 pages, the lawsuit rails against many of Trump's political
opponents and highlights the grievances that he has complained about for
years. It claims Democrats and government officials perpetrated a grab
bag of offenses, from a racketeering conspiracy to a malicious
prosecution, computer fraud and theft of secret internet data. The
lawsuit asks for more than $24 million in costs and damages.
The suit also contains some factual inaccuracies and some of the same grandiose or exaggerated false claims that Trump has made dozens of times.
The
civil suit alleges that Clinton and top Democrats hired lawyers and
researchers to fabricate information tying Trump to Russia, and then
peddled those lies to the media and to the US government, in hopes of
hobbling his chances of winning in 2016. Trump claims they were assisted
by "Clinton loyalists" at the FBI, who abused their powers to
investigate him out of political animus.
John
Podesta, the chairman of Clinton's 2016 campaign and one of the
lawsuit's defendants, tweeted that part of the suit might be a "hoot."
"Do
you think Trump filed this case with the hope of calling Vladimir Putin
as a character witness? Trump deposition ought to be a hoot," Podesta wrote.
CNN
has reached out to many of the defendants for comment. Some attorneys
for defendants named in the lawsuit were still digesting it on Thursday.
higherspace | Most visitors to this blog – and, indeed, to my academia.edu profile
– come seeking Charles Howard Hinton and his system of cubes. No
surprises there. Hinton’s biography is quite something and his work on
visualising – or, perhaps more accurately, imagining – the fourth
dimension of space was innovative, influential and almost completely out
of its time.
The purpose of this post is to update a project I began almost four years ago
and am only really now in a position to continue: the construction of a
set of Hinton’s cubes, the material demonstration models that anchored
his pedagogical enterprise.
Hinton began working with cubes early in
his career. The essay ‘On the Education of the Imagination’ (1888) may
well have been written before ‘What is the Fourth Dimension?’ was first
published in 1880. In this he describes working with a system of cubes
with his school students, and he began teaching in 1876. The system is
also based on what he termed ‘poiographs’ in a paper presented before
the Physical Society in 1878, so it seems likely to have been a
foundation stone for his project. Certainly, his proficiency with it was
advanced by 1887, when he was able to claim that he’d memorised a cubic
foot of his named cubes.
He refined the system of cubes over the course of his career. The system described in A New Era of Thought (1888),
taking up the entire second-half of that remarkable, visionary text,
described cubes with a different colour and name for each vertex, line
and face. Relying on description and line drawings it is,
unsurprisingly, fiendishly complicated. By 1904’s The Fourth Dimension
he had developed a system of ‘catalogue’ cubes and plates to enable a
more step-by-step working through of cubic training. There are also many
more and far clearer illustrations in this text, so this is the version
I’ve followed.
The first task is to paint the correct number of one inch cubes the correct colours, which are as follows:
Null
16
White
8
Yellow
8
Light yellow
4
Red
8
Pink
4
Orange
4
Ochre
2
Blue
8
Light blue
4
Green
4
Light green
2
Purple
4
Light purple
2
Brown
2
Light brown
1
I
used model paints of the kind you use to paint Airfix aeroplanes. As a
newbie to this game this process caused me more problems than you might
imagine. For example, metallic paints sound exciting in the shop –
wooh-hooh, electric pink! – but they are more liquid, don’t necessarily
look all that great on wood, and can even look largely indistinguishable
from lighter, non-metallic shades. Also, on which side do you rest a
painted cube to dry? I never discovered the answer to this gnomic poser
so my cubes are slightly messy. But hey! They’re my cubes – and they
don’t need to be perfect.
After the set of 81 coloured cubes there
are the catalogue cubes. These are coloured to distinguish vertices,
lines and faces and the fold-out colour-plate at the front of The Fourth Dimension shows how they should look.
As you can see, painting lines a fifth of
an inch proved beyond me, either freehand or using tape to mask off. In
the end I decided to print out coloured nets of the cubes onto card and
cut these out and tape them together. Again, slightly imperfect, but I
think they do the job nicely.
publicdomainreview | In April 1904, C. H. Hinton published The Fourth Dimension,
a popular maths book based on concepts he had been developing since
1880 that sought to establish an additional spatial dimension to the
three we know and love. This was not understood to be time as we’re so
used to thinking of the fourth dimension nowadays; that idea came a bit
later. Hinton was talking about an actual spatial dimension, a new
geometry, physically existing, and even possible to see and experience;
something that linked us all together and would result in a “New Era of
Thought”. (Interestingly, that very same month in a hotel room in Cairo,
Aleister Crowley talked to Egyptian Gods and proclaimed a “New Aeon”
for mankind. For those of us who amuse ourselves by charting the
subcultural backstreets of history, it seems as though a strange
synchronicity briefly connected a mystic mathematician and a
mathematical mystic — which is quite pleasing.)
The coloured cubes — known as "Tesseracts" — as depicted in the frontispiece to Hinton's The Fourth Dimension (1904) - Source.
Hinton
begins his book by briefly relating the history of higher dimensions
and non-Euclidean maths up to that point. Surprisingly, for a history of
mathematicians, it’s actually quite entertaining. Here is one tale he
tells of János Bolyai, a Hungarian mathematician who contributed
important early work on non-Euclidean geometry before joining the army:
It
is related of him that he was challenged by thirteen officers of his
garrison, a thing not unlikely to happen considering how differently he
thought from everyone else. He fought them all in succession – making it
his only condition that he should be allowed to play on his violin for
an interval between meeting each opponent. He disarmed or wounded all
his antagonists. It can be easily imagined that a temperament such as
his was not one congenial to his military superiors. He was retired in
1833.
Janos Bolyai: Appendix. Shelfmark: 545.091. Table of Figures - Source.
Mathematicians
have definitely lost their flair. The notion of duelling with violinist
mathematicians may seem absurd, but there was a growing unease about
the apparently arbitrary nature of "reality" in light of new scientific
discoveries. The discoverers appeared renegades. As the nineteenth
century progressed, the world was robbed of more and more divine power
and started looking worryingly like a ship adrift without its captain.
Science at the frontiers threatened certain strongly-held assumptions
about the universe. The puzzle of non-Euclidian geometry was even enough
of a contemporary issue to appear in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov when Ivan discusses the ineffability of God:
But
you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the
world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of
Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions
in space. Yet there have been and still are geometricians and
philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether
the whole universe, or to speak more widely, the whole of being, was
only created in Euclid’s geometry; they even dare to dream that two
parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may
meet somewhere in infinity… I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how
could I solve problems that are not of this world?
— Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamzov (1880), Part II, Book V, Chapter 3.
Well
Ivan, to quote Hinton, “it is indeed strange, the manner in which we
must begin to think about the higher world”. Hinton's solution was a
series of coloured cubes that, when mentally assembled in sequence,
could be used to visualise a hypercube in the fourth dimension of
hyperspace. He provides illustrations and gives instructions on how to
make these cubes and uses the word “tesseract” to describe the
four-dimensional object.
Diagram from Hinton's The Fourth Dimension (1904) - Source.
The
term “tesseract”, still used today, might be Hinton’s most obvious
legacy, but the genesis of the word is slightly cloudy. He first used it
in an 1888 book called A New Era of Thought and initially used
the spelling tessaract. In Greek, “τεσσάρα”, meaning “four”,
transliterates to “tessara” more accurately than “tessera”, and -act
likely comes from “ακτίνες” meaning "rays"; so Hinton’s use suggests the
four rays from each vertex exhibited in a hypercube and neatly encodes
the idea “four” into his four-dimensional polytope. However, in Latin,
“tessera” can also mean “cube”, which is a plausible starting point for
the new word. As is sometimes the case, there seems to be some confusion
over the Greek or Latin etymology, and we’ve ended up with a
bastardization. To confuse matters further, by 1904 Hinton was mostly
using “tesseract” — I say mostly because the copies of his books I’ve
seen aren’t entirely consistent with the spelling, in all likelihood due
to a mere oversight in the proof-reading. Regardless, the later
spelling won acceptance while the early version died with its first
appearance.
Diagram from Hinton's The Fourth Dimension (1904) - Source.
Hinton
also promises that when the visualisation is achieved, his cubes can
unlock hidden potential. “When the faculty is acquired — or rather when
it is brought into consciousness for it exists in everyone in imperfect
form — a new horizon opens. The mind acquires a development of power”.
It is clear from Hinton’s writing that he saw the fourth dimension as
both physically and psychically real, and that it could explain such
phenomena as ghosts, ESP, and synchronicities. In an indication of the
spatial and mystical significance he afforded it, Hinton suggested that
the soul was “a four-dimensional organism, which expresses its higher
physical being in the symmetry of the body, and gives the aims and
motives of human existence”. Letters submitted to mathematical journals
of the time indicate more than one person achieved a disastrous success
and found the process of visualising the fourth dimension profoundly
disturbing or dangerously addictive. It was rumoured that some
particularly ardent adherents of the cubes had even gone mad.
He
had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal,
non-Euclidian, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart
from ours.
alchetron |Charles Howard Hinton (1853, United Kingdom – 30 April 1907, Washington D.C., United States) was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension. He is known for coining the word "tesseract" and for his work on methods of visualising the geometry of higher dimensions.
In 1880 Hinton married Mary Ellen, daughter of Mary Everest Boole and
George Boole, the founder of mathematical logic. The couple had four
children: George (1882–1943), Eric (*1884), William (1886–1909) and
Sebastian (1887–1923) inventor of the Jungle gym. In 1883 he went
through a marriage ceremony with Maud Florence, by whom he had had twin
children, under the assumed identity of John Weldon. He was subsequently
convicted of bigamy
and spent three days in prison, losing his job at Uppingham. His father
James Hinton was a radical advocate of polygamous relationships, and
according to Charles' mother James had once remarked to her: "Christ was
the saviour of Men but I am the saviour of Women and I don't envy him a
bit." In 1887 Charles moved with Mary Ellen to Japan to work in a
mission before accepting a job as headmaster of the Victoria Public
School. In 1893 he sailed to the United States on the SS Tacoma to take up a post at Princeton University as an instructor in mathematics.
Fourth dimension
In
an 1880 article entitled "What is the Fourth Dimension?", Hinton
suggested that points moving around in three dimensions might be
imagined as successive cross-sections of a static four-dimensional
arrangement of lines passing through a three-dimensional plane, an idea
that anticipated the notion of world lines. Hinton's explorations of higher space had a moral basis:
Hinton
argues that gaining an intuitive perception of higher space required
that we rid ourselves of the ideas of right and left, up and down, that
inheres in our position as observers in a three-dimensional world.
Hinton calls the process "casting out the self", equates it with the
process of sympathizing with another person, and implies the two
processes are mutually reinforcing.
Hinton created several new words to describe elements in the fourth dimension. According to OED, he first used the word tesseract in 1888 in his book A New Era of Thought. He also invented the words kata (from the Greek for "down from") and ana
(from the Greek for "up toward") to describe the additional two
opposing fourth-dimensional directions (an additional 4th axis of motion
analogous to left-right (x), up-down (y), and forwards-backwards (z)).
Hinton's Scientific romances,
including "What is the Fourth Dimension?" and "A Plane World", were
published as a series of nine pamphlets by Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
during 1884–1886. In the introduction to "A Plane World", Hinton
referred to Abbott's recent Flatland
as having similar design but different intent. Abbott used the stories
as "a setting wherein to place his satire and his lessons. But we wish
in the first place to know the physical facts." Hinton's world existed
along the perimeter of a circle rather than on an infinite flat plane.
He extended the connection to Abbott's work with An Episode on Flatland: Or How a Plain Folk Discovered the Third Dimension (1907).
Hinton influenced P. D. Ouspensky's thinking. Many of ideas Ouspensky presents in "Tertium Organum" mention Hinton's works.
Hinton's "scientific romance," the "Unlearner" is cited by John Dewey in "Art as Experience", chapter 3.
Hinton is the main character of Carlos Atanes's play Un genio olvidado (Un rato en la vida de Charles Howard Hinton). The play was premiered on Madrid in May 2015 and published in May 2017.
Hinton is mentioned several times in Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell;
his theories regarding the fourth dimension form the basis of the
book's final chapter. His father, James Hinton, appears in chapters 4
and 10.
He is mentioned twice in Aleister Crowley's novel Moonchild. The first mention mistakenly names his father, James Hinton.
In conclusion let us remark that we have supposed two different worlds—one of sensation in the first part, one of motion in the second part. And these have been treated as distinct from one another. And especially in the first part, by this avoidance of questions of movement, an appearance of artificiality was produced, and occasionally inconsistencies, for sometimes sensations were treated as independent of actions, sometimes as connected with them. But it remains to be decided if these inconsistencies are in themselves permanent, or whether, when we remove the artificial separation, and let the world of sensation and the world of motion coalesce, the inconsistencies will not disappear, thereby showing that their origin was merely in the treatment,123not in the fact; that they came from the particular plan adopted of writing about the subject and are not inherent in the arguments themselves.
The king in the first part was supposed to have all the material problems of existence solved. There was a complete mechanism of nature. He took up the problem of the sentient life. But this problem can only artificially be separated from that of the material world. The gap between our sensations and matter can never be bridged, because they are really identical.
Let us then allow this separation to fall aside. Let us suppose the king to have all the reins of power in his own hands. Let us moreover suppose that he imparts his rays to the inhabitants so that they have each a portion of his power. And let us suppose that the inhabitants have arrived at a state of knowledge about their external world corresponding to that which we have about the world which we know.
Let us listen to a conversation between two of them.
A.The energy of the whole state of things is running down.
B.How do you prove that?
A.Whenever any motion of masses takes place a certain portion of the energy passes irrecoverably into the form of heat, and it is not possible to make so large a movement with those same masses as before, do all that is possible to obtain the energy back again from the heat into which it has passed.
B.Well, what about the heat? Energy in the form of the motions of the masses passes off into the energy of heat. But what is heat?
A.It is the motion of the finer particles of matter.
B.Well, I would put forward this proposal. We have by observation got hold of a certain principle that where any movement takes place some of the energy124goes in working on the finer particles of matter. Let us now take this principle as a universal one of motion, and apply it to the motions of the finer particles of matter themselves, which are simply movements of the same kind as the movements of the larger ones. This principle would show that these movements are only possible inasmuch as they hand over a portion of their energy to work on still finer matter.
A.Then you would have to go on to still finer matter.
B.Yes, and so on and on; but to fix our thoughts, suppose there is an ultimate fine matter which is the last worked on. Now I say that we may either suppose that this is being gradually worked on and all the energy is dissipating, or else we may put it in this way. When we regard so much energy we are apt to think that it is the cause of the next manifestation in which it shows itself. But this is really an assumption. Energy is a purely formal conception, and all that we do is to trace in the actions that go on a certain formal correspondence, which we express by saying that the energy is constant.
A.But I feel my own energy.
B.Allow me to put your feeling to one side. If we take then the conservation of energy to be merely a formal principle, may we not look for the cause of the movements in the invariable accompaniment of them, namely, in the fact that a certain portion of the energy is expended irrevocably on the finer portions of matter. If now we take this ultimate medium which suffers the expenditure of energy on it, may we not look on it as the cause, and the setter in action of all the movements that there are. By its submitting to be acted on in the way in which it does submit, it determines all the actions that go on. For what is all else than a great vibration, a swinging to and fro. When we count it as energy, we by reckoning it in a particular manner make it seem to125be indestructible, but that the energy should be indestructible would be a consequence from the supposition which we could very well make, that to produce a given series of effects the submitting to be worked on of this ultimate medium must be a minimum. If it were a minimum no movements could neutralize one another when once set going, for if they did there would be a waste of the submission of this ultimate medium.
A.But what do you suppose this ultimate medium would be?
B.That I cannot tell, but we seem to have indications. For the more fine the matter which we investigate, the more its actions seem to annihilate distance: light and electricity produce their effects with far greater rapidity than do the movements of masses. We might suppose that to this ultimate matter all parts were present in their effects, so that anything emanating from the ultimate matter would have the appearance of a system comprehending everything.
A.But you have not got any evidence of an ultimate matter.
B.No, all that we can think of is an endless series of finer and finer matter. But is that not an indication rather, not that the direction of our thoughts is false, but that there are other characteristics of this ultimate, so that when looked at under the form of matter it can only be expressed as an infinite series.
Let us omit the considerations brought forward in the preceding conversation and examine more closely the philosophy of the inhabitants of the valley in so far as it corresponds with ours.
They laid great stress on a notion ofvis viva, or what we should term energy, but said it was gradually passing away from the form of movements of large bodies to that of movements of small bodies. So that in the126course of time the whole valley would consist of nothing but an evenly extended mass of matter moving only in its small particles—and this motion of the small particles they called heat. Now they had very clearly arrived at the conviction that with every mechanical motion there was a certain transference ofvis vivato the smaller particles of matter, so that it did not appear again as mechanical motion. But they did not accept this as a principle to work by. They did not consider that the motions of the smaller particles of matter were just the same as those of the larger masses. They did not see that if a condition held universally for the movements of the visible world, it must also hold for the smaller motions which they experienced as heat. So the conclusion which they should logically have come to that there was a transference ofvis vivaon and on was not held. But the step was a very little one for them to take from regarding an invariable condition as always there to regarding it as a cause. For the causes they assigned were all purely formal relations, and only got to assume an appearance of effective causes by familiarity with them, and a throwing over them of that feeling of effectiveness which they derived from the contact which they had with the king.
They might have reasoned. This universal condition of anything happening must be the cause. Energy goes from a higher to a lower level. That which causes the difference of level is the cause, and the cause of the difference of level must be that which invariably accompanies such a transference of energy from a higher to a lower level. Now this invariable condition is the passing of a portion of the energy into the form of motions of the finer parts of matter. Hence there is an apparently endless series. But to realize the matter, suppose an ultimate medium, suppose there is a kind of matter of127infinite fineness distributed everywhere which let itself be worked on, and so determines differences and wakens the sleeping world. What are the qualities of this fine matter? We see them in the properties of the finer kind of matter which we know, such as light, electricity. The property of the finer kind of matter is in general that it tends to bring distant places together, so that a change in one part is rapidly communicated to every other part. If they followed this indication they would have supposed that the ultimate fine matter was of such a nature as to make all parts of the valley as one, so that there was no distance, and any determination of a difference of level on the part of this ultimate matter would have reference to all the conditions everywhere. It would be in immediate contact with every part, so that anything springing therefrom would present the appearance of a system having regard to the whole. Now if they had imagined such an ultimate medium doing that which to them would seem bearing rather than exerting force, suffering rather than acting, they would not have been far from a true conception of the king who directed them all. For he himself by reason of his very omnipresence could not be seen by them. There was nothing for them to distinguish him by. But they could have discovered somewhat of the means by which he acted on them, which can only be described from the appearances they present to the creatures whom the king calls into life.
But of truth they would have had another and perhaps a truer apprehension of the king in a different way. For when he acted on them so that they took one course rather than another, it was his action in themselves that they felt. If they were mere pleasure-led creatures then they were shaped outwardly, but if in their inner souls he acted and through them suffered, then they were true128personalities conscious of being true selves, the oneness of all of them lying in the king, but each spontaneous in himself and absolute will, not to be merged in any other.
Thus they had two modes of access to the king, one through their own selves where he had made them exist, one through the outer world. And in the outer world it was but a direction in which they could look. They could never behold the personality of the king, but only an infinite series of different kinds of matter, one supporting the other as it were and underlying it, but doing more also than this, for in proportion as they considered the kinds of matter that lay deeper they found that distant became near, absent, present, that time gave no longer such distinctions, but from the phenomenal side they seemed by a gradual diminution of the limitations of experience to arrive at an external presentation of that absolute which exists in the fulness of things, which they knew more immediately in themselves when they truly were.
James Hinton was an ear surgeon who was best known for The Mystery of Pain, a little book which sets forth the Panglossian thesis that "all that which we feel as painful is really giving-something that our fellows are better for, even though we cannot trace it." It gives some idea of the turn of the son Charles Hinton's mind to learn that he wrote a piece, "The Persian King," in which he attempted to use higher dimensions and infinite series to obtain a mathematically accurate model of this idea.
pureflamencobarcelona | She was born in a shack in the Somorrostro. Her father was Francisco
Amaya “El Chino”, a poor guitarist who played in taverns day and night
to earn a living. When she was only four years old she started going out
at night with her father to help him. She was just a little gypsy girl
by then. Her father played the guitar and Carmen danced and singed.
After that, they asked for money or took the coins that the audience
have thrown to the floor. At the same time, she appeared in some
theatres which lacked any prestige. José Sampere, a businessman, was the
first one in being interested on her and took her to the most known
Spanish Theatre of Barcelona. However, the problem was that she wasn’t
allowed to work legally due to her age so the officially date of birth
may not be the real one according to some researches about the artist.
Her name appeared for the first time printed in the Expo Barcelona 1929
thanks to Sebastián Gash, a sharp critic who watched her and talked
about her in the weekly newspaper Mirador: “Imagine a 14 years old gypsy
sitting in a chair on the tablao, Carmencita remained impassive,
statuary, noble with a racial elegance, inscrutable, absent, not paying
attention of what is happening around her, alone with her inspiration,
with a very hieratic actitude to allow her soul to raise until
inaccessible areas. And suddenly, a jump. And the gypsy dances.
Indescribable. Soul. Pure sole. The feeling made real. Movements of
twist in right angle, pure geometry.
In that time also Vicente Escudero watched her dancing and said that
Carmen Amaya will make a revolution in the flamenco dance because she
mixed two styles: the old female dancer and the frenetic foot tapping of
the male dancers. In 1935 she was hired by Carcellé who presented her
in the Coliseum in Madrid. That was maybe her only national recognition.
The world of cinema also noticed her. She performed a small role in La
hija de Juan Simón. Later, she worked in María de la O, along with
Pastora Imperio.
The 18th July 1936 Carmen and her family were in the Zorrilla
Theatre in Valladolid working in the company of Carcellé. In that moment
their economy was in good shape and they bought their first car. They
had to go to Lisbon to enforce a contract but the car was confiscated
and they couldn’t go there until November. After some setbacks they
embarked to America in a ship that took 15 days to cross the Atlantic.
They arrived to Buenos Aires and the triumph of Carmen Amaya and her
family went beyond expectations.
They went there just for four weeks and stayed there nine months
due to the fact that every time that Carmen performed in the theatre a
lot of people attended and the tickets were sold two months before the
show. As a proof of the popularity of the artist in the South-American
country we can find a theatre with her own name: the Theatre Amaya.
In America Carmen Amaya met a lot of famous people of her time. She
was in Hollywood a couple of times filming some movies and the cinema,
music and culture celebrities wanted to watch her dancing. The musician
Toscanini went to watch her once and said that he had never seen an
artist with that rhythm and fire before. She was constantly improvising.
Her compass was solid and she possessed a prodigious sense of the
rhythm with a rigorous tempo that was exact in all her movements. Anyone
has ever span like her, so fast and perfect. In America she met
Roosevelt, the president of the United States and in Europe she even met
the Queen of England.
She didn’t come back to Spain until 1947 and she did it as a
worldwide star. Her stay in America turned her into a professional and
famous artist. Lot of stories hard to believe were told about her as the
anecdote of the fried fish in the luxury suite of the Waldorf Astoria.
In that time her flamenco dance was the best one. She stood out not
only for her art but also for the wonderful personality that won
everyone she met. She was also very generous. It seems that during her
stay in America the dancer had a sentimental relationship with Sabicas
who declared before his death he dated Carmen for nine years and they
broke up in Mexico.
In 1952 she married the guitarist Juan Antonio Agüero, a member of
her company, a man from a distinguished family from Santander who wasn’t
gypsy. They lived an authentic love story, with an intimate wedding. In
1959 Carmen lived another exiting moment in her life when the ceremony
of the inauguration of the fountain Carmen Amaya was celebrated in the
seafront promenade in Barcelona located in the neighbourhood
Somorrostro, the same fountain and the same place she lived in as a
child years before. The last ten years of her life she was surrounded of
lots of people and almost sanctified, not only by the audience but also
by her colleagues. Her genius was instinctive, wild, far from the
academic styles. When she performed for the last time in Madrid, Carmen
Amaya was deathly sick; she had a renal failure that stopped the
elimination of toxins from her body. The doctors couldn’t find any
solution to her problem.
The sickness made worse in the filming of “Los Tarantos” in the
spring of 1963. She had to dance barefoot with an unbearable cold. She
always put on her coat when the filming stopped and they didn’t repeat
any scene. Despite these drawbacks, Carmen remained strong and began the
summer tour. However, the 8th of August while she was working in
Gandía, Carmen didn’t finish her performance. She was performing when
suddenly she said to Batista: “Andrés, let’s finish”.
That was the end of the dancer Carmen Amaya, who got inspiration
from the street, the family and the gypsy blood and revolutionized the
flamenco dance. With her way of dancing, Carmen Amaya showed that for
her the flamenco was feeling, soul and passion. Her dancer came from the
anger and the violence retained with an amazing speed and strength.
Still today she is a model of the flamenco dance.
Even if Carmen is remembered for her dance she also sang. In fact,
her father thought at first that she was better in singing than in
dancing. She had a dark and hoarse voice, typical of the gypsy sing. A
good example of her way of singing can be seen in “La reina del embrujo
gitano”. Recordings on slate records 1948-1950 collects a good sample
of her abilities as a flamenco singer, accompanied by two guitarists
from her dynasty, Paco and José Amaya, as does “En familia”.
amidwesterndoctor |I was recently sent an excellent presentation that was given by Doctor Richard Fleming.
It touches on a variety of very important topics that will be the
focus of today’s article. I have spent a great deal of time researching
these topics, and due to my own familiarity with the subject it is
clear to me Dr. Fleming is highly knowledgeable in this area and his
presentation was the result of spending an enormous amount of time in
research.
After I saw his presentation, I reached out to a few colleagues who somewhat knew Dr. Fleming
to further inquire about him. In addition to the content of his
presentation, we are of the opinion he is a credible source for the
following reasons:
•He is self-funding his work and asking for nothing in return besides help in ending the War on COVID-19. •He is both a Doctor (M.D.) and a Lawyer (J.D.). •He
is a Cardiologist and a PhD with extensive experience conducting
research for publication in scientific journals (such as the development
of a treatment protocol for heart disease) and being a reviewer for premier medical journals.
This
is a very, very unusual combination that I believe makes him uniquely
qualified to address this issue and it is incredible how much time he
has put into it. I also feel it is extremely fortunate that someone
with his background has been willing to defy his own medical community
to try to address this issue, especially given just how much he had to
have personally invested to be part of that community.
Because
this was a very long presentation, I spent a while editing to shorten
it in order to focus on the essential points. Although the edited
version below is still on the longer end, I would highly encourage you
to watch it at a speed you can follow. If you would instead like to see
the longer more complete version, it can be viewed here while his complete deposition on this subject can be viewed here.
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