Shaky Danny

Orange you ugly Orange you silly Orange you fat. Orange you goofy Orange you stupid Where’s my hat? Orange you hateful Orange you dummy I can see Orange you made A fool of me Beto you too thin Booker you’re too poor Kamela you’re too short Warren is a bore. They all do fine Even good old Joe Something on my mind You might want to know. This isn’t Europe It is the USA. We don’t like each other We like it that way. I don’t want to go to school. I don’t care if I am sick I want to act the fool We know he’s a prick. DNA proved Justice isn’t so. Children not my own Clown putting on a show Can’t put back What’s taken away? We can see You’re working for pay. Say what you like Land of the free Just don’t give us Sincerity

Brexit makes me proud to be an American. We may see the unification of Ireland, the separation of Scotland and, most certainly, an English depression as a consequence. England will be left as a tax haven, tourist site and source for military mercenaries.   We have all been influenced by vaudeville. But the music hall is most deeply ingrained in English culture. Looking over London’s architecture, it is apparent that they are deeply silly and proud of it. Can silliness be the explanation for their ruin? Perhaps it is the return of Boudicca.   The British were so sick of the Romans that they revolted and laid waste to Romans and their sympathizers. They were defeated attacking a Roman army. The true cause of their defeat was that the British preferred trade even under the Romans. This lesson has been lost. Maybe it is the Greeks. English take Greeks seriously. The English classical education justifies the English empire as in the history of the empires that precede it....

Historical Materialism was once all the rage. Freakonomics is historical materialism without Marx. I am giving an overview and then showing how Marx and basic questions about material conditions can enlighten. Review of Marx Wading through the invective and gossip of three or four volumes of Marx’s Capital to find the nuggets is tedious: dictatorship of the proletariat labor theory of value class struggle money isn’t capital failure of colonialism Centralization of production leads to unions. business cycle Competition drives down margins in investment and production. Profit requires disaster and  disruption. You’re welcome. Sorry if I missed any. These ideas have been absorbed into common use. Occasionally an economist makes a living inveighing against or rediscovering one. Bernanke’s bad asset class or Tom Peter’s excellence, for instance. Here is a list of some other market issues:    Winners change the rules.   Pa...

Usually historical inevitability means the king is great, the empire will last forever and I want to keep my job. The counter story, Noah, Gilgamesh or Ur, is that when you live on a delta surrounded by mountains things may change, someone building a boat in the middle of a plain may not be ridiculous and you should be nice to the hill kids. The first to directly disagree with inevitability as permanence was Adam Smith. Smith liked explanations. Smith said empires inevitably fall because they are inefficient.   He attempted to convince England to abandon empire, particularly the American colonies. Wealth of Nations , Smith’s book, is not taught despite its central place in political and economic philosophy. I think the fall of civilizations is more basic. I was in Cahokia, Illinois at the Native American trash heaps. The museum said that this town only lasted about two or three hundred years and they didn’t know why. Two or three hundred years is a decent run. How long can pe...

-Melville, why do you use those goofy words? Cervantes, enough with the flowery language. Joyce, what are you doing? Shakespeare, you can’t just make up words, speak English. Twain, does historical context justify child abuse? When you come to writers club you will receive our raw first impression. We may not get it. One of our authors wrote a lovely piece about Spellman College. I felt I was there. She fell in with an agent who had a set demographic. Watching the metamorphosis of her piece was heart breaking.   Today, just as anyone can be President, everyone can publish. This is a problem. We can’t be your editor. We can be a test audience. We are fussy about grammar, syntax, spelling and quotation marks. We like consistent point of view, linear exposition, flow, simple language and show not tell. We often don’t agree. We are here as a service. If you don’t like a ground rule, change it for your review. I prefer someone read my piece. That allows me to observe the audie...

A deficiency of blogging is that subsequent posts supersede the originals. I use this blog as a Pensieve so I don’t modify posts. Instead I have adopted the convention of revisited in the title. The prosaic explanation of dark matter is that it is composed of Neutrinos. I am a fan of the prosaic. Whatever it is there has to be a lot of it. It has to have mass. I believe it has to propagate light. Does it have the sole property of propagation? Does it propagate in cooperation with other materials?   Does it only show this ability in vacuum? Since light bends in gravity I am unable to think of a distinction between inert photons, static neutrinos and current theories. Can we create, however faint, the laser affect within vacuum? If the ether material lases it should maximize at specific frequencies, identifying the particles. Christine suggested dissipated gravity waves as an explanation of the chatter.

Ether has long been used for explaining the propagation of light. Aristotle discussed Ether. Given electromagnetic waves, the implication that light has to propagate through something seemed reasonable.   Ether went the way of phlogiston and caloric when Michelson and Morley split a light beam, then bounced the two perpendicular rays back to each other and found no difference in diffraction. If it can’t be measured then forget about it. The Dark Matter theory accounts for the difference between observed mass and the behavior of galaxies by positing an entity that exists in a vacuum yet has mass. Dark Matter seems a misnomer as it allows for the transmission of light. Exists in a vacuum, has mass and propagates light, sounds like Ether to me. Abandoning Ether leads to the wave particle duality and quantum theories.   Why is it that a child without any apparent ability of concentration or interest can intently spend their entire playground time pouring sand through a s...